Hearts of Three 57

Hearts of Three 57

The latter’s eyes opened, for a second betraying the incomprehension of

the sleeper suddenly awakened, then lighting with recognition and memory

of the waking order he had left the previous night.

 

“Time to get up, sir,” the valet murmured.

 

“Which is ever an ill time,” Francis yawned with a smile.

 

He closed his eyes with a, “Let me lie a minute, Parker. If I doze,

shake me.”

 

But Parker shook him immediately.

 

“You must get up right away, sir. I think something has happened to Mrs.

Morgan. She is not in her room, and there is a queer note and a knife

here that may explain. I don’t know, sir——”

 

Francis was out of bed in a bound, staring one moment at the dagger, and

next, drawing it out, reading the note over and over as if its simple

meaning, contained in two simple words, were too abstruse for his

comprehension.

 

“Adios forever,” said the note.

 

What shocked him even more, was the dagger thrust between Leoncia’s

eyes, and, as he stared at the wound made in the thin cardboard, it came

to him that he had seen this very thing before, and he remembered back

to the lake-dwelling of the Queen when all had gazed into the golden

bowl and seen variously, and when he had seen Leoncia’s face on the

strange liquid metal with the knife thrust between the eyes. He even put

the dagger back into the cardboard wound and stared at it some more.

 

The explanation was obvious. The Queen had betrayed jealousy against

Leoncia from the first, and here, in New York, finding her rival’s

photograph on her husband’s dresser, had no more missed the true

conclusion than had she missed the pictured features with her point of

steel. But where was she? Where had she gone?——she who was the veriest

stranger that had ever entered the great city, who called the telephone

the magic of the flying speech, who thought of Wall Street as a temple,

and regarded Business as the New York man’s god. For all the world she

was as unsophisticated and innocent of a great city as had she been a

traveler from Mars. Where and how had she passed the night? Where was

she now? Was she even alive?

 

Visions of the Morgue with its unidentified dead, and of bodies drifting

out to sea on the ebb, rushed into his brain. It was Parker who steadied

him back to himself.

 

“Is there anything I can do, sir? Shall I call up the detective bureau?

Your father always——”

 

“Yes, yes,” Francis interrupted quickly. “There was one man he employed

more than all others, a young man with the Pinkertons——do you remember

his name?”

 

“Birchman, sir,” Parker answered promptly, moving away. “I shall send

for him to come at once.”

 

And thereupon, in the quest after his wife, Francis entered upon a

series of adventures that were to him, a born New Yorker, a liberal

education in conditions and phases of New York of which, up to that

time, he had been profoundly ignorant. Not alone did Birchman search,

but he had at work a score of detectives under him who fine-tooth-combed

the city, while in Chicago and Boston, he directed the activities of

similar men.

 

Between his battle with the unguessed enemy of Wall Street, and the

frequent calls he received to go here and there and everywhere, on the

spur of the moment, to identify what might possibly be his wife, Francis

led anything but a boresome existence. He forgot what regular hours of

sleep were, and grew accustomed to being dragged from luncheon or

dinner, or of being routed out of his bed, to respond to hurry calls to

come and look over new-found missing ladies. No trace of one answering

her description, who had left the city by train or steamer had been

discovered, and Birchman assiduously pursued his fine-tooth combing,

convinced that she was still in the city.

 

Thus, Francis took trips to Mattenwan and down Blackwell’s, and the

Tombs and the All-Night court knew his presence. Nor did he escape being

dragged to countless hospitals nor to the Morgue. Once, a fresh-caught

shoplifter, of whom there was no criminal record and to whom there was

no clew of identity, was brought to his notice. He had adventures with

mysterious women cornered by Birchman’s satellites in the back rooms of

Raines’ Hotels, and, on the West Side, in the Fifties, was guilty of

trespassing upon two comparatively innocent love-idyls, to the

embarrassment of all concerned including himself.

 

Perhaps his most interesting and tragic adventure was in the

ten-million-dollar mansion of Philip January, the Telluride mining king.

The strange woman, a lady slender, had wandered in upon the Januarys a

week before, ere Francis came to see her. And, as she had

heartbreakingly done for the entire week, so she heartbreakingly did for

Francis, wringing her hands, perpetually weeping, and murmuring

beseechingly: “Otho, you are wrong. On my knees I tell you you are

wrong. Otho, you, and you only, do I love. There is no one but you,

Otho. There has never been any one but you. It is all a dreadful

mistake. Believe me, Otho, believe me, or I shall die....”

 

And through it all, the Wall Street battle went on against the

undiscoverable and powerful enemy who had launched what Francis and

Bascom could not avoid acknowledging was a catastrophic,

war-to-the-death raid on his fortune.

 

“If only we can avoid throwing Tampico Petroleum into the whirlpool,”

Bascom prayed.

 

“I look to Tampico Petroleum to save me,” Francis replied. “When every

security I can lay hand to has been engulfed, then, throwing in Tampico

Petroleum will be like the eruption of a new army upon a losing field.”

 

“And suppose your unknown foe is powerful enough to swallow down that

final, splendid asset and clamor for more?” Bascom queried.

 

Francis shrugged his shoulders.

 

“Then I shall be broke. But my father went broke half a dozen times

before he won out. Also was he born broke. I should worry about a little

thing like that.”

 

For a time, in the Solano hacienda, events had been moving slowly. In

fact, following upon the rescue of Leoncia by Henry along his

dynamite-sown trail, there had been no events. Not even had Yi Poon

appeared with a perfectly fresh and entirely brand new secret to sell.

Nothing had happened, save that Leoncia drooped and was apathetic, that

neither Enrico nor Henry, her full brother, nor her Solano brothers who

were not her brothers at all, could cheer her.

 

But, while Leoncia drooped, Henry and the tall sons of Enrico worried

and perplexed themselves about the treasure in the Valley of the Lost

Souls, into which Torres was even then dynamiting his way. One thing

they did know, namely, that the Torres’ expedition had sent Augustino

and Vicente back to San Antonio to get two more mule-loads of dynamite.

 

It was Henry, after conferring with Enrico and obtaining his permission,

who broached the matter to Leoncia.

 

“Sweet sister,” had been his way, “we’re going to go up and see what the

scoundrel Torres and his gang are doing. We do know, thanks to you,

their objective. The dynamite is to blow an entrance into the Valley. We

know where the Lady Who Dreams sank her treasure when her house burned.

Torres does not know this. The idea is that we can follow them into the

Valley, when they have drained the Maya caves, and have as good a

chance, if not a better chance than they in getting possession of that

marvelous chest of gems. And the very tip of the point is that we’d like

to take you along on the expedition. I fancy, if we managed to get the

treasure ourselves, that you wouldn’t mind repeating that journey down

the subterranean river.”

 

But Leoncia shook her head wearily.

 

“No,” she said, after further urging. “I never want to see the Valley of

the Lost Souls again, nor ever to hear it mentioned. There is where I

lost Francis to that woman.”

 

“It was all a mistake, darling sister. But who was to know? I did not.

You did not. Nor did Francis. He played the man’s part fairly and

squarely. Not knowing that you and I were brother and sister, believing

that we were truly betrothed——as we were at the time——he refrained from

trying to win you from me, and he rendered further temptation impossible

and saved the lives of all of us by marrying the Queen.”

 

“I miss you and Francis singing your everlasting ‘Back to back against

the mainmast,’” she murmured sadly and irrelevantly.

 

Quiet tears welled into her eyes and brimmed over as she turned away,

passed down the steps of the veranda, crossed the grounds, and aimlessly

descended the hill. For the twentieth time since she had last seen

Francis she pursued the same course, covering the same ground from the

time she first espied him rowing to the beach from the _Angelique_,

through her dragging him into the jungle to save him from her irate

menfolk, to the moment, with drawn revolver, when she had kissed him and

urged him into the boat and away. This had been his first visit.

 

Next, she covered every detail of his second visit from the moment,

coming from behind the rock after her swim in the lagoon, she had gazed

upon him leaning against the rock as he scribbled his first note to her,

through her startled flight into the jungle, the bite on her knee of the

labarri (which she had mistaken for a deadly viperine), to her recoiling

collision against Francis and her faint on the sand. And, under her

parasol, she sat down on the very spot where she had fainted and come

to, to find him preparing to suck the poison from the wound which he had

already excoriated. As she remembered back, she realized that it had

been the pain of the excoriation which brought her to her senses.

 

Deep she was in the sweet recollections of how she had slapped his cheek

even as his lips approached her knee, blushed with her face hidden in

her hands, laughed because her foot had been made asleep by his

too-efficient tourniquet, turned white with anger when he reminded her