# Keeban (Little, Brown and Company)/Chapter 14

She nodded to Felice who admitted me and went out. Felice closed the door and, as I remained standing, Doris invited me to sit down.
"You remember me?" I asked her.
"Erasmus?" she said. "The thriller of Holbein? Certainly."
I dropped upon the seat opposite her and, as I gazed at her, she gazed at me and continued, "Also we were both at Caldon's, as well as at the Blackstone, weren't we, Mr. Fanneal?"
"You not only remember me but you know me, then."
"Certainly. Don't know me? Or what were you doing at the bank?"
"How'd you know I went to the bank?"
She smiled pleasantly—pleasantly as the Dickens. "Don't you also know me?" she repeated.
​"You're Janvier's daughter!" I blurted.
"Excellent!" she approved me and I felt like a boy in school.
She had been leaning slightly forward, not exactly tense, not at ease, either. Poised was the word for it; she'd been poised ever since I entered. Now she sat back more comfortably, being no longer in suspense about how much I knew.
"George was your friend Magellan?" I asked.
"That's what you named him."
"Felice also was present at the Feather?"
"She was the one who led you into the shed."
"I'm indebted," I acknowledged; and conversation languished.
For a second more I stared at her, as gay and piquant a little thing as ever a twenty-hour-train boasted; then, decidedly stumped as to my next step, I stared a while out the window.
Pleasant, Indiana winter scenery was skipping past us. There was clean, light snow on the fields through which stuck brown cornstalks, in those great, even patterns which so intriguingly alter as you dash past. There were frozen brooks with ice-encased willows bent over them; there were lots of agreeable looking ​farmhouses and farm people Fording to and from little crossroads towns which looked idyllic, rather, whatever the facts may be.
"Has Sinclair Lewis spoiled this sort of landscape for you?" Doris asked me suddenly, as though reading my mind.
"I'm damned if he has for me!" I said sincerely.
She brought her small hands together. "Good! Nor has he for me. Poor fellow, if he really feels as he writes, what a world he lives in! I imagine him riding through lovely country like this with shades drawn or else emitting low, melancholy moans as each habitation heaves in sight. Now I like to think of Willa Cather's people when we're whistling through tank towns."
"So do I," I said, agreeing again. "They're there; they're hearing the whistle. You meet 'em. You ever been in a tank town?"
"When I was a child, I lived in one," she told me; "when father was serving his second term in the 'long house' at Leavenworth."
She might have said his second term in the House of Congress, from the way she spoke. No shame in it at all. Yet it brought me back to business. For a minute she had been just ​a girl, mighty pretty and bright and pleasant and with tastes and distastes, both, which I liked.
She'd known about Erasmus and Holbein when we talked at the ball, you remember; now she knew about the same books I'd been reading. Likely she'd dipped into "This Freedom" too, in order to help herself decide whether, after marriage, she should drop business for the sake of the children or should keep right on to help husband.
Probably, in Chicago, she'd seen "Lightnin'" and "The Hairy Ape" and heard Galli-Curci and Chaliapin. Of course she had. A crook can't be crooking all the time; she's at the normal round most of it. But I'd never realized that till I took a little leisure to think it over. Now when you say a person's a counterfeiter, for instance, naturally you think of him or her, or both of them, crouching somewhere covertly together, printing off their money and then slipping out, with many glances around, to convert it into groceries and some of our ordinary authorized currency. But actually, very little of their time may be spent so. Most of it goes into just living,—maybe looking at movies, at dance halls or driving around; ​or at the Art Institute, a good play or two, the opera, and maybe a lecture also, according to taste. I've heard of a gerver, lately, who even made it a habit to attend Sunday-evening club talks; and he was crazy over Burton Holmes.
So here was a girl like any other I knew, only quite some little quicker and pleasanter and better looking, with nothing really strange about her except her proclivity for passing out the bank notes father gave her. She knew it was wrong, of course, so very wrong that, for it, she ought to be shut in the "long house" at Leavenworth herself, serving her own long term.
But I had not the smallest impulse to put her there; quite on the contrary. In fact, I imagined, at that moment, that I heard somebody trying to listen at the door; and, thinking it was old "Iron Age," I felt myself going definitely to her side. Nobody was going to shut this girl up in prison for ten years. I was going to do something about her; but not that. I had no idea of shifting responsibility. Not at all; I was going to see to this business myself.
I got up and opened the door, while she ​watched me. Nobody was there and I sat down again.
"I've called on you by orders, I think you ought to know," I told her.
"Government orders?" she said.
"That's it."
She feigned a shudder, prettily. "My soul!" she said. "What I've told you! Now you'll arrest us all, I suppose!"
I laughed, for I felt mighty good. There was no denying it; I felt as happy as ever I had in my life; happier on some counts; on others, of course, there was my knowledge of her character and the chances she was running. But the chances only made it more exciting for me to like her.
Obviously, I'd let her see she'd hooked me; she could feel me on the line. Yet she hadn't me in the net—not quite.
"I'd gladly arrest George," I said. "And lock him up for life."
"Why?"
"Because you care about him."
"Oh, do I?"
And then, for no more reason than that—but you'd have understood it, had you heard her ​voice—I felt better yet. I switched the subject back to business.
"I've accumulated some hand baggage," I mentioned.
"Yes. Don't you want it?"
"That part's all right," I said. "But what to do with it? It's not a gift, I take it."
"No."
"I see. You expect a search. Meanwhile I'm to have the bag and then give it back to you."
She nodded; and there she proved she knew I was not in the net; for instead of asking any thing final, one way or the other, she merely suggested, "Think it over a while, won't you?"
I promised and got up; for she'd put in that a hint of dismissal. Then I remembered Dibley. After being in her compartment all this time, I had to bring to him something more tellable than our talk so far.
"George is in on this game with you?" I asked.
"Why do you want to know?"
"I want to," I said; and she told me, "No; we're just going on together."
"He has a lay of his own, then?"
​She avoided direct answer to that. "Well, he's still a young man," she said. "He hasn't retired; so naturally you'd suppose so, wouldn't you?"
"All right. Now as well as I can guess, old "Iron Age"—you know who I mean?"
She nodded.
I went on. "He's aboard because George is. He knows him; but he doesn't know you. I'm here to find out about you. What shall I tell him?"
"That we're getting off at Cleveland, please."
"What?" I said. "Are you?"
"Yes."
"And you want me to tell him that?"
"If you'll be so good."
I waited with my hand on the knob. "I'll see you again."
"Oh, please do!" she invited; and, feeling flushed and mighty good, I stepped into the corridor and drifted to the rear.
My new baggage was still under my seat in my Pullman but George was lost to sight. I wouldn't have put it past Dibley to have locked him up somewhere but that didn't seem to be the case when I encountered old "Iron Age" In the door of the smoking room of one ​of the last Pullmans. Rather, he encountered me, reaching out and dragging me in behind the curtains.
"Now what have you found out?" he went after me with his delightful tact.
"She's a charming girl," I assured him. "I called at her compartment, as you suggested, and pretended we had mutual acquaintances and got away with it."
"You probably did not," said Dibley, to take me down from the hang-over of satisfaction which he detected on me.
"She let you in because you look easy. What did she tell you?"
"She's a low opinion of Sin Lewis."
"Who?" said Dibley.
"But she's keen on Miss Cather."
"Who?"
Sin Lewis, so put to him, seemed to suggest somebody, possibly one of similar name who was on Dib's list for rum-running or using the mails to defraud; but Cather wasn't on his cards at all.
"They write books," I explained. "We started talking about books." I thought it just as well to use the truth as long as possible.
"Books!" he jeered me.
​I remained polite. "How would you have started?" I asked courteously. "Something like this? 'Good afternoon, Miss Wellington or whatever your real name is. I suspect you're a crook but for the moment don't place you. Now if you'll just tell me——'"
"Drop it," said Dib, not agreeably.
I obliged.
"Now forget the start," he told me. "What did you get to?"
"Oh," I said. "I found one thing out you want to know. They're getting off at Cleveland."
"What makes you think so?"
"She told me so."
Old "Iron Age" gazed fixedly out of the window with the thought in his head (if his expression meant anything) of pulling the cord to stop the train if we happened to be passing an institution for the feeble-minded; but all was farm scenery, so I was safe.
"Thank you so much," he said to me feelingly. "It was always possible that they would try to escape at Cleveland; so it is of some advantage to know they're going on."
He released me after a few more words and I went to my section. I had his permission to ​continue my acquaintance with Miss Wellington; but it was plain that he wasn't depending much on me. He was taking to telegrams, scratching off any number of yellow sheets to go from the next stop.
It reminded me that, in my preoccupation at keeping Doris in sight after I found she was leaving the city, I hadn't 'phoned my office. I had thought I'd wire; but now I decided not to.
I didn't want Dibley to have any chance to oversee the fact that this trip was a last inspiration of mine. I immersed myself, ostensibly, in cost estimates of our new can and bottling plant which I happened to have in my pocket, while I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into this game I'd entered with Cleopatra Doris Janvier.