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  “Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and the colonel?” he asked bluntly.

  The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and went on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.

  “I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door,” she said, and a childlike smile played about her lips. “Do you know, Mr. McPherson, I can’t just figure you. I can’t just see how you get into this. Where are your credentials, anyway?”

  Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.

  “It’s this way,” he said, “I’m something of an adventurer myself. I fly the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose to have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off him.”

  Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice. “I’ve got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He’s going to help me get you if you do not drop it.”

  Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not to be defeated without a struggle.

  “You lie,” she cried, half springing from her chair. “Frank has never—”

  “Oh yes, Frank has,” answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter; “I will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown.”

  Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from a bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table and wiped her eyes.

  “All right! All right!” she said, bracing herself, “I’ll drop it. If you’ve dug up Frank Robson you’ve got me. He’ll do anything you say for a piece of money.”

  For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the woman’s eyes.

  “I wish I was a man,” she said. “I get whipped at everything I tackle because I’m a woman. I’m getting past my money-making days in the theatre and I thought the colonel was fair game.”

  “He is,” answered Sam dispassionately, “but you see I beat you to it. He’s mine.”

  Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.

  “Look here,” he said, “you’ve done a good piece of work. You should have won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying to marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They had everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the world. You have none of these things. How did you do it?

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I’m not going to see you trimmed. I’ve got ten thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You sign this paper and then put the roll in your purse.”

  “That’s square,” said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming back into her eyes.

  Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had him and a waiter sign as witnesses.

  Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.

  “What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?” she asked.

  Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.

  “Because I like you and I admire your skill,” he said, “and anyway I did not have you beaten until right now.”

  They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going through the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed women with assured airs serving Sam’s mind to make a contrast for the woman who sat with him.

  “I presume you are right about women,” he said musingly, “it must be a stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook.”

  “Winning! We don’t win.” The lips of the actress drew back showing her white teeth. “No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting game for herself.”

  Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.

  “Woman can’t stand alone,” she went on, “she is a sentimental fool. She reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why, even when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat of a man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth while to a woman, sells her out.”

  Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.

  “Let’s not misunderstand each other,” he said quietly, “do not blame Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him.”

  A puzzled look came into the woman’s eyes and a flush rose in her cheeks.

  “You grafter!” she sneered.

  Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.

  “What’s the use being sore?” he asked. “It’s simple enough. You staked against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven’t you?”

  Luella reached for her purse.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ll look. Haven’t you decided to steal it back yet?”

  Sam laughed.

  “I’m coming to that,” he said, “don’t hurry me.”

  For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking again.

  “Look here!” he said, “I’m no Frank Robson and I do not like giving a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can’t see you running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your hands.

  “Give it to me,” he urged; “let me invest it for you. I’m a winner. I’ll double it for you in a year.”

  The actress stared past Sam’s shoulder to where a group of young men sat about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her and laughed.

  “As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel’s wife, looked to me,” he said. “I had to make you get out of my flower bed.”

  A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll of bills.

  “I’m a sport,” she said, “and I’m going to lay a bet on the best horse I ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance.”

  Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse, threw the roll on the table.

  “Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that,” she said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. “You ought to beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me.”

  The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the Arms Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It was an agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any money she might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.

  The colonel’s daughter glanced from the paper to Sam’s face.

  “I thought so,” she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. “But I do not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for it?”

  “The paper,” Sam answered, “puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand dollars for it.”

  Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on the desk and sat down.

  “Do you get your half?” she asked.

  “I get it all,” answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair launched into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the restaurant she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the puzzled look still in her eyes.

  Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what had been in his mind to say to her.

  “The woman will not bother
the colonel any more,” he declared; “if that paper won’t hold her something else will. She respects me and she is afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave me the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it for her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it now. Make the check for twenty thousand.”

  Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it across the table.

  “I cannot say that I understand yet,” she confessed. “Did you also fall in love with her?”

  Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “I like ability and good brains and that woman has them. She isn’t a good woman, but nothing in her life has made her want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and now she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That’s what she was after the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to make him give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because somewhere there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all the good and the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell her out for a few dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I saw her and I bluffed my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a woman, even in such an affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want to do the square thing by her. That’s why I asked you to make that check for twenty thousand.”

  Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was thinking how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.

  “And what about the colonel?” she asked. “What will he think of all this?”

  Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.

  “We’ll have to agree not to consider him,” he said. “We really did that you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss London’s putting the finishing touches on the job.”

  And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five hundred dollars into his hand.

  “That’s not to invest for me,” she said, “that’s for yourself. By the agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars.”

  With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in her room looking at her.

  “What did you tell the colonel?” he asked.

  “I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I could die in his arms.”

  Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.

  “He began to beg off and make excuses,” she went on, “and then I brought out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I might have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he has in six months.”

  Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the money she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her again and when, through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty thousand dollars she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it in the hands of a trust company for her and forgot the incident. Years later he heard that she was running a fashionable dressmaking establishment in a western city.

  And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do in the way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade against women that lasted the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER V

  SUE RAINEY HAD long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable size of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where young men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in the down-town clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons playing Kelly pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. “She’ll end by being an old maid,” they declared, and shook their heads at the thought of so good a connection dangling loosely in the air just without their reach. From time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose from the group that contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of books, candy, flowers and invitations to theatres, charged down upon her, only to have the youthful ardour of his attack cooled by her prolonged attitude of indifference. When she was twenty-one, a young English cavalry officer, who came to Chicago to ride in the horse show had, for some weeks, been seen much in her company and a report of their engagement had been whispered through the town and talked of about the nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The rumour proved to be without foundation, the attraction to the cavalry officer having been a certain brand of rare old wine the colonel had stored in his cellar and a feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old gun maker, rather than the colonel’s quiet little daughter.

  After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during the days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the gun company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were camped on her trail reached Sam’s ears. They would be in at the office to see and talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam that his daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded young women should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three of them had formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they had met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were “squaring themselves with the colonel.” Not a difficult thing to do, Sam thought, as he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners of all without prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped about, and calling them damned upstarts.

  For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and although, after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he had been pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic, travelled much, rode, shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a woman of brains, but, until the incident of the colonel and Luella London threw them for the moment into the same enterprise and started him thinking of her with real interest, he had seen and talked with her for but brief passing moments brought about by their mutual interest in the affairs of her father.

  After Janet Eberly’s sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It was in Colonel Tom’s office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her sitting at the colonel’s desk and staring out of the window at a broad expanse of flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped rope, caught his attention and standing by the window looking at the minute figure clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the absurdity of human endeavour.

  The colonel’s daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck by the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly. In a moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty of her life and character.

  The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might be a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a kind of relief for the aching sense of loss for
his dead comrade by heaping praises upon her life.

  When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole having put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the pole and thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick clutch at the air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue Rainey’s hand.

  He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting explanation. There were tears in Sue Rainey’s eyes.

  “I wish I had known her,” she said and drew her hand from between his fingers. “I wish you had known me better that I also might have known your Janet. They are rare — such women. They are worth much to know. Most women like most men—”

  She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her. For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might at any moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged through him disconcerting and engulfing him.

  “I have been doing you an injustice,” said Sue Rainey, looking at the floor. “I have thought of you as something different from what you are. There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression.”

  Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed and explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.

  “What was the story you heard?” he asked.

  “It was a story a young man told at our house,” she explained hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness. “It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up and given you. Why did you take the money?”

  Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had delight in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life in the city.

  One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm, he had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the lake. He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and had taken them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the merits of his scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard and Sam, springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.