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Show . $ CHAPTER XIII Continued 13 ITe glanced at the clock across the lobvy. It was just after nine. "The place will be locked up, all right, but there'll be a watchman at the door who'll let us in. That makes It all the better because we'll have the place to ourselves." She looked so pitiful as she thanked him that it was hard to refrain from kissing her then and there. He did it, however, and, guessing from the way Bhe huddled down In the corner of the seat In the taxlcab which conveyed them down town that she didn't want to be made love to, he went ou refraining re-fraining even from trying to get possession pos-session of one of her hands. The watchman was an old friend of Martin's and he let them In without comment, though not without a good deal of visible curiosity. They climbed the stairs In silence.' He led the way Into the flleroom, pulled a chain that flooded the room with a glare of cold white light, and after not more than two minutes' search, .pulled out a manila folder that had the. name "Walter "Wal-ter Whltehouse McFarland" written across the face of it. He laid It on the table, moved up a chair for her, and was on the point of withdrawing to leave her to herself when she reached out a hand and drew him back to her. "I want you to read it, too," Bhe said. "Do you mind, Martin?" Mar-tin?" He didn't wonder when the brutal headlines above these old newspaper cuttings assaulted his eyes that to the girl the thing had been a nightmare. What he marveled at was her courage in confronting It now and being willing will-ing to share It with him. He experienced experi-enced a strange Jumble of emotions z during the silent hour that it took them to read all the contents of that file. One of the earliest to assail him, and one of the most disconcerting, was a momentary disgust for his own profession. pro-fession. Here was the material that they had gathered to make up the life story of a man; a man who had lived to be fifty years, old and had devoted those years, with an extraordinary singleness sin-gleness of mind, to useful service. And yet, except for a few minor, clippings, clip-pings, a casual stickful here or there regarding papers that he'd read before learned societies, studies of chemical processes, modest announcements of discoveries, the whole content of the file concerned Itself with what might or might not have happened during a ride on the train from Chicago to California Cali-fornia ; whether or not an acquaintance acquaint-ance he had formed with a girl In an attempt to relieve her apparent distress dis-tress had resulted In a sexual intimacy. inti-macy. And, at that, the verdict of the Jury had been that it had not so resulted. re-sulted. Yet the doubt that remained In the public mind after the verdict of the Jury had been brought in had been enough to ruin the man's career, to force his resignation from the university, uni-versity, to drive him Into hiding for the last four years of his broken life. The newspapers had done It and they had done It without transgressing their own code. The story of a college col-lege professor Indicted and brought to trial under the Mann act was legitimately legit-imately entitled according to current standards to just such headlines and pictures and editorial comment as this tory had received. It made Martin feel pretty sick. Well, there was'no help for anybody any-body In thinking thoughts like that. They were diverted by a picture Included In-cluded In one of the clippings of the girl then called Clara Bowman, who had been the principal witness of the trial. She was unmistakably Claire, despite the dark hair that was piled high on top of her head. "Ithoda," he asked, "how did you know who she was? How did you know what she was saying to Forsler? We couldn't hear a sound through the glass." A smile flickered across her face, the first he'd seen there In a long while. "I forgot," she explained. "It seemed like listening to me. I can read lips, you see. Martin dear, don't you remember long ago at the Alham-bra, Alham-bra, how I saw you ask me If I didn't want to be rescued? And you asked me afterward how I knew the exact words you 6ald, and I laughed and told you It was telepathy? I lost some of It tonight, of course, when they turned their faces away. But Vhenever I could see their faces I could hear just as well as if I'd been In the room." He sat silent for a while after that, not exactly thinking, but enjoying the savor of the term of endearment she had unconsciously used. When his mind got back on the rails he took up the kink In Forsler's explanation, which he had been conscious of not straightening out at the time Forster made it. . What the old man had said about the contract seemed straight enough, and squared with the facts as Martin knew them. If Khoda's father had died, as apparently he had, before com-, com-, pletlng his discovery, It was obvious that the contract was of no value. .Claire, though, apparently thought it was valuable. There .seemed to be no doubt that It was the thing she'd been trying all along to steal. It wasn't Incredible that if Forster knew she'd failed to get It (since he knew In whose hands it actually was) ho might have offered her a hundred thousand thou-sand dollars for it In pure malice, as he said. But Forster did think that it was Claire who'd stolen Khoda's trunk, and unless Rhoda's observation had been ot fault, he had held his breath By Henry Kitchen Webster Copyright by The Bobba-MorrUl Co. WNU Service while he waited to see whether she would rise to his bait or not. He knew the contract wasn't in the trunk. But didn't he believe that something else was, something that he wanted very much, something, perhaps, per-haps, he felt he couldn't be happy without? That seemed highly probable to Martin. Mar-tin. Yhy; unless there was something some-thing among her father's papers that he wanted, had he spent all those weeks advertising for Rhoda? Why had he sent his man Conley to run down the tip Babe Jennings had given him over the telephone? Why had he himself taken the trouble to lie in wait outside the studio In order to Identify Rhoda for himself and find out where she worked? The only answer Martin could see to all these questions was that Forster believed Rhoda had something he wanted. He looked up at her doubtfully, doubt-fully, torn between his impatience to examine the contents of that little trunk tonight and his reluctance, after all she'd been through today, to subject sub-ject her to any more experiences, possibly pos-sibly harrowing. To his surprise he found her looking at him, with eyes alight and a faint flush of color In her cheeks. "Martin," she asked, "will you do something for me tonight? I know it's getting late and you must be tired . . ." "I'll do anything," he said. "Rhoda dearest, you know I will. Any possible pos-sible thing that you want me to do." "What I want to do," she said, "Is to write the whole story tonight: what they did to father six years ago, Forster and Stafford and Claire, so that it can be in tomorrow's paper." The look in his face must have answered an-swered her, for'at that point she broke off to ask incredulously, "Why not? Martin, do you mean you won't even write It tomorrow?" "I can't write it," he said. "Or If I did the boss would kill it." "Why?" she asked blankly. "It isn't news. News is what happened hap-pened today. If there's a peg to hang it on you can go back. But there's only one peg 1 can think of strong enough to hold that story : if we could go before the grand jury and get Forster and Claire indicted for conspiracy. con-spiracy. But I don't believe we could get the state's attorney to listen to it. Claire couldn't testify against Forster without Incriminating herself, and he couldn't testify against her without incriminating in-criminating himself, so the fact that they hate each other doesn't do us any good. And the go-between is dead. If we ran the story without something definite like that to hang it on we'd be in for a million-dollar libel suit before be-fore night. His shooting her would make it news if she'd talk ; but she won't. She's got him as long as she keeps still." Rhoda didn't protest nor argue the matter with him, but he saw the light die in her eyes and the color fade out of her cheeks again. He struggled miserably on for a while with his pv- planatlon, but he could see it was nothing but words to her, words hardly worth listening to. She asked him at 1 last not to talk about it any more; told him she understood and said she wanted to go home. She helped to gather up the scattered scat-tered contents of the file and as he was putting It back In the drawer she patted him on the shoulder and told him not to mind. "I think there must be some other way," he told her hesitatingly, "of doing do-ing the thing we want to do; of setting set-ting your father's memory right before the world. I think I've got the beginning be-ginning of a hunch how it can be done. I'm hoping for light on it tomorrow when we go through that trunk. Rhoda dear, don't worry any more about it tonight. You're all in and you're half starved. Let's go somewhere some-where and have a good dinner." "I don't want to go to a restaurant," she told him flatly. "I want to go home." "All right," . he agreed, and they started down the long flight of stairs in silence. But before they got within with-in range of the night watchman at the door she stopped and faced him. "I don't know why I'm so beastly," she said. "I suppose it's because I'm trying not to cry. I'll go anywhere you like, Martin." She gave him a rueful heart-twisting 'little smile ,as she said it, but she walked straight on without giving him a cliunce to kiss her. It was with a notion of giving the old watchman a tip, as he sometimes did, that he put his hand into his pocket and thus made the disgusting discovery that he was penniless. So, out on the sidewalk as they were looking up the street for a taxi, he asked Rhoda, rather diflidently, if she could lend him any money. He'd given his last dollar to the taxi driver who'd brought them here. But she told him, with a momentary flicker of anuisemeut in her tone, that she had given her last dollar to a taxi driver that aftornon. She searched her purse, however, and announced a find of six cents. "If you've got a dime," she concluded, "we can ride in the street car. And If you haven't we can walk." He hadn't a dime but denounced a walk as nonsense. They'd take a taxi round to his club and he'd ga in sad $ get some money. That was what he should have done In the first place. They didn't precisely quarrel over th!s, though she insisted on walking home and had her way. He knew she didn't mean to be unfriendly. un-friendly. She even slipped her hand within his arm as they walked along, and left it there. But, even so, she felt a million miles away. They tried to talk but gave it up, and by the time they'd got to the street door of the studio building, the silence between be-tween had become a palpable oppressive oppres-sive thing. She asked him now, in a strictly neutral voice, whether lie was coming com-ing in. "I'll go up with you to your own door, anyhow," he said, and they climbed the two long flights of stairs side by side without another word. There was a light shining through the crack under the studio door and they could hear Babe in there talking to somebody. But Rhoda had her key in her hand and she thrust it Into the lock and swung the door open without even a momentary pause for a private farewell on the landing. Martin ' stepped aside. He wouldn't go in. But in the Instant that Rhoda pushed open the door the man to whom Babe had been talking spoke, and at the sound of his voice Rhoda stopped as Pit iiti "I'll Go Up With You to Your Own Door, Anyhow," He Said. If she'd been suddenly frozen. The man's voice broke off. Babe, who sat where she could see through the doorway, door-way, said, "Here they are," and Rhoda came to life again in a surprising way. She flung herself upon Martin like a child at the sight of an ogre. Martin heard her say In a broken voice, "It's Uncle William I Martin, don't don't let him ..." Martin's arms came around her and pulled her closer still, and as he gazed over her head at Babe's astounded face, he whispered to Rhoda, "Don't you worry, darling. He can't do anything any-thing to you now. You're engaged to me." CHAPTER XIV What Was in the Trunk Rhoda's sob of assent to this perhaps per-haps unique proposal of marriage marked the end of her moment of panic. She walked into the room steadily enough, though still In the embrace of Martin's right arm, and under the now startled gaze of their rather unaccountable visitor. How he'd managed to find her despite Forster's refusal this afternoon to tell him where she lived wasn't so puzzling as the consciousness that she'd seen him somewhere, without knowing who he was, only a little while ago. Even this minor bewilderment was not what kept her rooted to the rug while Babe was stammering out a superfluous Introduction In-troduction (Babe's scrambled condition was due, of course, to wnat she'd seen through the doorway) and he, pompous pom-pous yet a little embarrassed, stood waiting, apparently, for a welcome appropriate ap-propriate to long-lost uncles. The really astonishing thing was that he wasn't an ogre at all. He wasn't much taller than Martin, and he had perfectly per-fectly normal, human-looking eyes and teeth. Why had she .ever been afraid of him? It wasn't until she heard Martin murmur again, "It's all right, darling," that she released herself from his arm, said, "How do you do, Uncle William," and went up and shook hands with him. She thought he expected to be kissed but she couldn't manage that. He said, heavily, "How do you do, my dear. I'm very glad to have found you at last. I thought this afternoon that I must expect a long search, but this evening just after dinner I saw you in the lobby of the Worcester hotel and heard this young man call you Rhoda. There was enough of your mother's look about you so that 1 called up the. telephone number I had heard you give him . . ." (Yes, that was who it was, of course. The man who'd been looking at the telephone tele-phone directory when she and Martin Mar-tin were calling up Babe to tell her they were all right.) "So I took the liberty of coining here and waiting for you, late as it was. I felt it was important that I see you at once." "I'm glad you did," Rhoda told him, not in the manner in which one says something polite but as if she really meant It. She dimly remembered something about him and thought she had an idea. "You're a lawyer, aren't you?" she asked. He seemed a little surprised at the question but answered stiffly, "Yes, that is my profession." "Well then," said Rhoda, "you're Just the person we want. You see, Martin and I . . ." She broke off there to- remedy an omission by Introducing Intro-ducing the two men in due form. After they'd shaken hands, a strictly noncommittal non-committal ceremony on both sides, Rhoda went on. "You see, Martin and I have just found out what really happened hap-pened to my father before his trial, I mean that made him leave the university." uni-versity." Uncle William's reception of this statement was not encouraging. He began to look a little more like the ogre Rhoda remembered. "That is not a matter for discussion," he boomed. "Certainly not now." But Rhoda was no longer a little girl of twelve. "It's got to be discussed," dis-cussed," she contradicted him crisply, "and now is the best time to do it. Martin's a reporter but he says the paper can't print the true story, even though we know it's true, unless we have Mr. Forster indicted." "Forster indicted!" Uncle William exploded. "C. J. Forster? Perfect nonsense! What has Forster to do with it?" "It won't seem so much like nonsense," non-sense," Rhoda said, "when you know what he's got to with it. Tell him, Martin." Uncle William's attitude and gesture showed that he meant to protest, but before he could speak Martin cut in. "Forster admitted to Rhoda and me this evening that the whole case against her father was a frame-up. The woman was planted on the train and instructed to pretend she'd lost her ticket In order to trick Professor McFarland Into paying her fare. He fell for the trick but he didn't fall for her. She admits that herself. But she went ahead, under Instructions, and perjured herself on the stand. Forster's motive was to force Professor Pro-fessor McFarland's resignation from the university so that he'd come to work'for him, which is what happened. Forster never paid the woman the money he promised her. And It was her quarrel with him that enabled us to find out about it. That's the bones of the story. It would take an hour to give you all the details, but we've got them and we'll furnish you with them whenever you like now or later." Rhoda's gaze from the time Martin had begun speaking had been fixed upon her uncle's face. She'd seen him wilt ; she'd have said he actually sagged and spread a little, like a partly part-ly deflated balloon tire. But before her lover had finished speaking he managed somehow to pump himself up again. He said now, In his booming voice, "I don't want the details at this or at any time. There's no possible good to be gained by raking up that old story. And it could do harm in more ways than one. The scandal hurt the university uni-versity at the time. It's forgotten now, and president of the board of trustees, which I happen to be, I should be unwilling to see It revived." "Revived 1" Rhoda blazed at him. "We aren't going to revive it; we're going to kill it. We're going to prove that it wasn't true." "You're going to attempt to prove that it wasn't, true," Uncle William answered, "and that, my dear child, is a very difficult thing. Your father is dead. Technically there Is no stain on his character, since the jury acquitted ac-quitted him. Any attempt to go beyond be-yond that, even if there were no other aspects of the affair to be considered, would be most unwise." Rhoda, turning desperately away from him, saw a harbor and went to it, in Babe's arms. She heard what William Wil-liam Royce went on saying, but with no other emotion than a passionate wish that he would stop talking. "Your father wrote to me shortly before be-fore his death requesting me to take care of you and look after your interests. in-terests. I couldn't find you at that time. The management of the hotel where you had lived informed me that you had gone to live with friends In Denver. I assumed you were in good hands and there seemed to be nothing noth-ing more for me to do in the matter until I saw recently in a San Francisco Fran-cisco paper an advertisement for your whereabouts. Seeing that, I came to the conclusion that a certain contract which your father had enclosed with his letter might have a value for you, and that you ought to be found." "Good lord !" Martin exclaimed. "Do you mean to say you've got the contract con-tract that everybody has been trying to steal? Did you see Forster this afternoon and tell him you had it?" "I refer," said Uncle William majestically, ma-jestically, "to a contract which my late brother-in-law entered into with C. J. Forster. I was speaking to my niece. I cannot see that it concerns you in any way." "Everything that concerns Rhoda concerns me," Martin told him. "She and I are engaged to be married." "Humph !" snorted Uncle William. He was a perfectly terrible person. Martin didn't wonder that poor Rhoda had changed her name and hidden herself her-self away from him like a frightened little rabbit. Martin could see him now majestically pausing before he hurled a thunderbolt. "If," he said, "your matrimonial intentions in-tentions toward my niece are In any way predicated upon your knowledge of the existence of that contract, I think it only right to tell you that it Is of small value and doubtful validity." "That's what Forster told us this evening," Martin observed. "He said he had told you that it wasn't worth a nickel." "I'll have no more of this impertinence," im-pertinence," Uncle William roared. "You can't marry my niece. She's still a minor, and I shall never consent con-sent . . ." "Look here," Martin Interrupted him, "we don't like each other at all, but there's no good in our quarreling unless we have something to quarrel about And unless you're Rhoda's legal guardian I can't see that we have. Are you?' "I'm her natural guardian," said Uncle William. "Not her legal one, then," Martin observed. But as he turned to Rhoda he saw a panic awake once more in her eyes. "We won't have any more of this tonight," he went on. "Rhoda's had a terrible day, and she's come clear to the end of It. I'm going to ask Babe to put her to be bed at once. I'll go back with you to your hotel and put you abreast of the situation." This was a Napoleonic move. Babe came into action instantly. Before he finished speaking she was leading Rhoda toward the little stairway that went up to the loft where their bedrooms bed-rooms were. Martin followed along to the foot of the stairs. "She's not to get up in the morning," he told Babe as if he were a doctor giving a nurse Instructions about an unconscious patient, " at least not until late. I'll come around some time after ten with the documents docu-ments and we'll go down to the baggage bag-gage master and get her trunk." Then, ceasing to treat Rhoda as If she were unconscious, he kissed her and she heard him murmur, his lips so close to her ear that it tickled, "Don't you worry, darling. The hunch Is coming along all right. You leave Uncle William to me." Evidently Martin was the right sort of person to leave him to. Her last glimpse from the balcony was of her uncle, smoldering and fuming like Vesuvius getting ready for an eruption erup-tion but going out just the same through the door Martin held open, obedient after all. When Rhoda really waked up the next morning rather '8 long process after an unusually solid night's sleep she felt very adult and sensible. She didn't precisely regret her childish terror of the night before, since It had brought out once more what a peach Martin was. She didn't bplicve he liked her the less for it, either. He was like that. He understood things. But her line with him when he came this morning to take her d'vn to the station and get the trunk must be one of sturdy common sense. Above all she must let him see instantly that she took their pretended engagement as a brilliantly clever maneuver for outflanking out-flanking Cncle William and nothing else. It would be terrible if he were left to think for a single minute that sh thought that he meant it s-trlouslv (TO BE CONTINUED.) When Travel Was. Cheap Travel by foot in the early 1800s certainly was inexpensive if the 300-mile 300-mile journey of Elisha Barrell of Hartford, Washington county, New York is taken as a criterion.. Barrell Bar-rell in 1S26 walked from Gouverneur to his home in 10 days at an expense of $2.42. This was exclusive of liquor he bought en route. One overnight stop cost him only 18 cents. |