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Show THE STORY i At a publla dance Martin ; Forbes, a newspaper man, cuts In on Rhoda White's, dance with Max Lewis, whom Martin instinctively in-stinctively dislikes. He over- hears a conversation between Lewis and a woman, which he realizes concerns Rhoda. He re- calls a "blind ad" Inquiring the whereabouts of "Rhoda McFar-land" McFar-land" and senses a newspaper : etory. He believes that is Rho-t Rho-t da's real name. She refuses to i deny or admit it. However, it recalls her childhood in Call-j Call-j fornia. Her mother dead, she had been happy until misfortune befell her father. Professor Mc-Farland. Mc-Farland. Associated with the blow is her uncle, William Royce. They move to Chicago, where- her father Is enpraeed in mysterious work. Rhoda takes up stenography. Her father dies suddenly, vainly trying' to give her a message about "papers" in a trunk. Rhoda goes to live with a fellow-worker, "Babe" Jennings. Jen-nings. Martin learns that "C. J." of the "blind ad" is Charles J. Forster, uncle of Lewis. Rhoda admits her name is McFarland. i A mysterious "Claire Cleveland" ' askB Rhoda for a certain paper belonging to her which, she claims, was in McFarland's pos-I pos-I Bession. Rhoda's trunk is stolen and Bhe suspects Claire. She trails Claire to the Worcester hotel, where Forster lives. Martin Mar-tin sees Lewis check the trunk at a depot. Babe Jennings gets the trunk check and flees. CHAPTER IX Continued 9 His little gimlet eyes had been boring bor-ing right into her all the while she talked. Now, at her first pause, he barked out, "Who was this woman?" "She told me," Rhoda answered, "that her name was Claire Cleveland." A sudden suffusion of blood in his face turned it purple. He beat feebly but furiously upon his desk with a loosely clenched hand. "So you've Joined up with that blackmailing woman, wom-an, have you?" he said. "I haven't joined up with her at all," Ehoda retorted. "I've Just been telling you I think Bhe stole my trunk. She talked to me about you quite a lot at lunch after she'd come back from the telephone, that Is. She said she'd een your advertisement for me In the newspaper." He pounced upon her here with a question. "My advertisement? How did she know It was mine? It wasn't elgned. Come to that, how did you know yourself?" "A friend of mine on the paper found out for me," Ehoda said. "But I was wrong in saying that Claire knew. She said she thought it probably prob-ably was you." "Call her Claire, do you," he commented, com-mented, "when you never saw her before be-fore today?" This slip had rattled Rhoda. She'd been aware of it as It left her tongue. "She asked me to call her that," she ' explained, "and I did, though I hated to because I hated her. And the real reason I came to see you was because ihe urged me so strongly not to. I thought she must have some reason of her own for not wanting me to come. She said that you'd been the cause of ail her trouble. She said you were a terrible person that liked to get young girls." He broke in with an ugly laugh. "And on the strength of that you thought you'd come." Rhoda felt her face burning and didn't know whether her voice would obey her or not, but she answered the ill. "Come to That, How Did You Know Yourself7" neer as If it had been a real question. ques-tion. "I thought she wns lying I didn't think you were like that. I'd een you this morning when you took us to work in your car." He dismissed that explanation with a mere snort of contempt. "Well, go on," he continued. "What else did ; she tell you?" "She told me that you'd been in business, In a way, with my father, fend that you'd played some sort of trick on him. She said It was her per-aonal per-aonal opinion that you were responsible respon-sible for my father's trouble out in California." "California 1" He fairly yelped the wor4 t her. "Now I know you're lying. ly-ing. This Cleveland woman worked In my office. For a while she was my private secretary. Then I found out what sort she was and fired her. She may have known that McFarland was working for me but I don't believe it. I don't believe she ever saw him In her life. Anyhow, she didn't know he came from California. She didn't know that until you told her about it while you were working up this plan between you to blackmail me. Come across now I Tell me the whole story, and I'll let you go. But if I catch you in any .more lies you'll spend the night in Jail. And to begin with," he wound up after a long stare Into her face, "who are you, anyway?" Bewildered now by the suddenness of his attack she could only echo In amazement, "Who am I?" "Yes. Thought you'd cooked up something pretty good, did you, when you got together and swapped stories with a discharged employee of mine, faked up the red hair, and came around here pretending to be Rhoda McFarland." "I am Rhoda McFarland," she told him furiously. . "I don't know who you think I am. I don't know what you're talking about." "I don't mind telling you what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what happened to Professor McFarland six years ago, when he got on a train here In Chicago to go back to the coast, ne'd been east to read a paper pa-per before the Oil Chemists' institute, and he found a young girl on the train across the aisle from him crying because be-cause she'd had her pocketbook stolen after she'd got on the train. "He was sorry for her and paid her fare, pullman and all, so they wouldn't put her off the train. According to his story that was all he did. And she promised him her friends would pay him back the money as soon as she got to the coast. But what she did was to make a complaint before the district attorney out there that he'd taken advantage of her. "He claimed it was a frame-up, and when It went to trial the jury acquitted him, although he couldn't show any reason why anyone should want to frame him that way and no one else could, either. And the scandal scan-dal of the trial cost him his job at the university. "So he came back here and told me his story, and I believed him and gave him a job. He felt disgraced about it. He was like a man hiding out from the police; didn't want anybody to know who he was or what he was doing. do-ing. Well, I could see how he felt so I never told a soul anything about It. I even paid him his wages In cash every week. "Claire Cleveland couldn't have found out anything about him, even If she'd tried to. He never came near my office nor where I lived. He worked at a place I fixed up for him, and I used to go around there once a week to see how he was getting on and to pay him his money. I'm dead sure he never told his daughter anything any-thing about that California mess. She was nothing but a kid. He'd have kept it from her If he'd been telling everybody else in sight. And If you want to know who I think you really are, I don't mind telling you that either. I believe you're the one person per-son alive today who really knows whether Walter McFarland was telling the truth or not." Until he'd finished she hadn't seen what he was driving at. And when she did she could do nothing but stare at him, confounded by the mere mon-strousness mon-strousness of his mistake. To complete com-plete her discomfiture she found she was beginning to cry. "You can cry, can you? Well, It worked with him but It won't with me. So you may as well . . ." He broke off there and what had Interrupted him both made her blink away her tears and checked their coming. com-ing. A sort of little trap-door in the front of Napoleon had silently fallen forward and revealed, as he reached toward It, a telephone instrument Inside. Forster seemed rather startled by the message he was getting. "What's that?" he barked. "Who does he say he is? All right," after listening for a minute. "I'll see him. but not in here. Have him shown up to the library. I'll see him there. And find DeGraw and tell him I want him." He put the telephone back and clicked the little trap-door shut upon It. Then he pressed an electric button but-ton on his desk. "I'm going to leave you here for a while," he said to Rhoda, "to think things over, and you'd hetter think straight, if you can. I'm g'oing to get this Cleveland woman. I've got her now, as far as that goes. But I've got nothing personal against you. And If you can make up your mind, by the time I come back, to come through clean and tell me the whole conspiracy, I'll let you go." His ring had been answered while he was speaking, not by Conley, but by a sort of overgrown page In livery He helped the old man to his feet and conducted him to the door Rhoda had come in by. Rhoda sank back In her chair. What possessed her mind was the story Forster For-ster had been telling her about the girl he'd preposterously taken her to be. Did he really believe that? Was there a scrap of genuine doubt In his mind that she was Walter McFarland's daughter? Wasn't the whole thing a bluff to put her on the defensive and frighten her into doing, eventually, whatever it was that he wanted her to do? It would have been a rather satisfactory sat-isfactory explanation If ahe could By Henry KitcMl Webster Copyright by The Bobbs-Merrill Co, TVNU Servlcs whole-heartedly have adopted it, if for no other reason than that it brought him out in a clearer, less ambiguous am-biguous light. But she found she couldn't adopt it. He wasn't a much better actor than she was. His manner while he had been trying to convince her that he had been led by nothing but disinterested benevolence In trying to find her had been sleek and shy, utterly unconvincing. uncon-vincing. But some of the things he'd told her she knew to be true. Her father fa-ther had been paid every week regularly, regu-larly, through the whole four years they'd lived at the hotel, in cash. Forster For-ster wouldn't have known that unless he'd paid him himself, or it wasn't likely that he would. What he'd said about her father's feeling disgraced and having lived practically in hiding was confirmed, too, by innumerable memories of his having cautioned her not to talk to people, nor answer their questions, nor make friends with them. Claire Cleveland, somehow, had found the secret out. She'd spoken with perfect confidence of the laboratory labora-tory where her father had worked. Had she really worked for him there evenings, as she said she had? It was possible, but It didn't seem very likely. At any rate. It was flatly unbelievable un-believable that he would have confided to her at those times, as she said he had, the story of his California disaster. dis-aster. And yet It was clear that she knew about that. She'd spoken of the trial and the sensation that it created. There'd been hardly anything else In the papers at the time, she said at least In the San Francisco papers. Rhoda sat erect and held her breath. Why, why hadn't she caught that slip at the time? All It meant, all It could possibly mean, was that it had been in the San Francisco papers pa-pers that Claire had read about it. She'd been In San Francisco, then, during the trial. She hadn't said so. She hadn't meant to give that away. She'd pretended that It was from Walter Wal-ter McFarland's own Hps that she'd heard this story, long afterward, here In Chicago. Of course! Claire Cleveland Cleve-land was the girl on the train. She recalled her first impression of Claire, her momentary belief that she couldn't be the woman because she looked rather nice, and young not much over twenty. Six years ago she could have looked convincingly like an Innocent young girl crying forlornly for-lornly over the loss of her ticket and her money and the propect that they'd put her off the train. She had something some-thing of that look left even now. Martin Mar-tin had described her as looking younger than her voice sounded. Why hadn't her voice given her away to Walter McFarland? Of course it was hard to tell where' the truth left off and where the lies began. Claire's professed hatred of Forster was true, though as yet specifically spe-cifically unaccounted for. She had tried to convince Rhoda, though with a suspicious insistence upon her own lack of knowledge, that Forster was the person primarily responsible for the plot against her father. That felt like the truth though It obviously wasn't. Forster had stopped being frightened and had burst into a rage of pure relief when she had told him that Claire had said that. That disposed of the possibility that he could be the man who had compelled, com-pelled, or persuaded, or coldly hired, Claire. And yet he couldn't be left out of the pattern altogether. He had advertised ad-vertised for Rhoda McFarland and no one but an Idiot could doubt after seeing him and hearing him talk, that he had done so in the furtherance of some mean purpose of his own. Claire, who had once been his private secretary, secre-tary, and Max Lewis, who was his nephew, knew, or thought they knew, what that purpose was, and had tried -X--x--r;-s-i i - to forestall him by finding her first. It was her father's papers Claire had tried to get a chance to rummage through, and at her own mention to Forster of the theft of those papers he had started. There must be something among those papers that he wanted pretty badly; something that had nothing to do with the California episode, but with the work he had done here in Chicago. Was there, or did Forster believe there was, among her father's papers some precious secret formula? Was that what with his dying breath he'd tried to tell her about? And was that what Claire and Max had been trying to steal so that they could sell It to Forster on their own terms? Was the conspiracy to ruin her father at the university an entirely unrelated thing except for the coincidence of Claire's connection with it? What should she do when Forster came back to question her further? Stick to the truth, which she wouldn't be able to make him believe? If he were honestly convinced that she was an impostor and a confederate of the Cleveland woman, she was in for a pretty bad time when he came back. If only she'd thought of telephoning to Martin before coming up here. Her thoughtful gaze came suddenly Into focus upon the bust of Napoleon. If she could find the way to open that little trap door she might be able to reach Martin. Babe would be at home by now, and she might be able to get word to him. That was the thing to try, anyhow. It must have been some sort of electrical elec-trical connection that opened the little trap door. She went over and sat down in his chair and looked about. It wouldn't do to press the wrong button. but-ton. She studied Napoleon Intently. He had several buttons but none of them looked as If they pushed In. She was guiltily restless, sitting In that chair. She couldn't help vamder-Ing vamder-Ing whether some one mightn't silently silent-ly have entered the room from one of those two doors behind her. She could almost feel the gaze of a pair of eyes boring Into her back, and at last, half Involuntarily, she started to turn and see. As she did so her knee came In contact with the Inner face of one of the pedestals to the desk and th little trap door fell forward. She had found the telephone button by pure accident. Heartened by this bit of good luck, she picked up the telephone and. speaking as softly as she could, asked for an outside line and gave the studio number. The Iul held. Babe's voice answered almost Instantly. She asked If Babe knew wuere Martin was, and gave a gasp of relief on being told that he was right there In the studio. Buy why was he so long about coming? com-ing? Why didn't he hurry? From where she sat In Forster's chair she faced the principal door, the one she had come In by. She was still waiting for Martin's voice to come over the phone when she saw this door being quietly pushed open. The man who came in was Max Lewis. His , look of astonishment when he saw her sitting In hl3 uncle's chair would have been ludicrous If It had not been followed fol-lowed so quickly by a glare of anger. "You're here, are you?" he said huskily. He added, "Put up that phone!" and snatching the door shut behind him he bore furiously down upon her to enforce his command. She didn't obey him. She clung to the Instrument and tried to say, in the hope that Martin was near enough to hear, "I'm at Forster's at the Worcester Wor-cester hotel." But before her tight throat could utter the words, Max had got the telephone away from her, and one of his thick beefy hands was over her mouth, his thumb and forefinger fore-finger pinching her nostrils together so that she couldn't breathe at all. CHAPTER X 1 The Ogre He held her so until he had replaced re-placed the telephone in Napoleon's chest and shut the little trap door upon it Then he released her, saying as he did so, "You can yell if you like but it won't do you any good, in this room." He was still standing over her so that she couldn't get up out of the heavy chair. "What I ought to do," he concluded, glowering down upon her, "is to wring your neck." It came to her that down Inside he himself was frightened; bewildered, anyhow, like a bull with a lot of darts In his shoulders, gazing about the ring not knowing exactly who his enemy wns. If she could just keep out of his way. Anyhow, It was plain he didn't quite know what he wanted to do with her. She scrubbed her lips vigorously with her handkerchief before she spoke. "I wish you'd sit down where I can see you," she said. "What harm do you think I've done you?" "What did you come here for?" he asked. "Unless to make trouble for me," she supposed he meant. "You mean," He Was Almost Inarticulate With Fury, but Finally Managed to Stutter. she said, "you're afraid I've come to tell your uncle that I think you stole my three hundred dollars and my trunk." He was almost Inarticulate with fury, but finally he managed to stutter, stut-ter, "Never mind about that. What did you come here for?" She decided to evade that. "Your uncle sent for me," she told him. If she'd been a practiced deceiver she'd have stopped there. Not being one, she felt that the explanation sounded rather bare and added to It, "I don't know how he found out where I lived? Did you tell him? Because of course you did find out from Babe." He sat down in the chair that she had sat In during the talk with Forster. "No," he said, "I didn't tell him, but I happen to know how he found out. I guess I'm beginning to catch on to some things, too," he went on, still eyeing her Intently. "She's quite some girl, that Babe Jennings. How long have you known her?" "Quite a while," Rhoda told him. "Got sort of an Idea she's a friend of yours?" "No," Rhoda answered, "I know she Is." He gave a short laugh. "Did you know," he asked, "that she left for New York this afternoon." She smiled as she shook her head. "Well," he asserted, "I saw her off on that train, myself." The lie was so childish that Rhoda almost laughed as she said, "That's very interesting." "Don't you believe It?" "No." Her skepticism didn't seem to Irritate Irri-tate him. He stared at her thoughtfully thought-fully a few seconds and then said, "Well, maybe I've got you all wrong. I thought you and she were teamed up In this business. Now I've got a notion that she's burned you Just like she did me." "How did she burn you?" Rhoda asked. "Never mind nbout that. That's my end of it. Say, what kind of a trunk was it you lost? Because she took a trunk with her. I helped her check It" "What sort of trunk was it that you checked?" Rhoda asked him. It didn't seem possible that even he would be fool enough to fall Into that trap. He did give his answer a little uneasily. un-easily. "Why, I didn't notice It especially," espe-cially," he said. "It was sort of a square leather trunk." She snt for a while In puzzled silence. How could he have hoped she would believe a story like that? Why hadn't he seemed more disappointed disap-pointed thnt she didn't believe It? Was It possible that he really thought Babe had token a train to New York? "When did all this happen?" she asked at last. "What time did the train leave?" "Five-thirty." "What did she do? Call yon up and ask you to see her off?" The question startled her a little as she asked It. It made her think of the anonymous telephone message that had come to Claire Cleveland Just as Claire had locked her in the bath-roow. bath-roow. (TO BB CONTINUED.) |