“See here, my friend,” cried Mr. Magee, “your grief has turned your head. You won’t put me out to-night, or to-morrow. I’m here to stay. You’re welcome to do the same, if you like. But you stay — with me. I know you are a man of courage — but it would take at least ten men of courage to put me out of Baldpate Inn.”
They stood eying each other for a moment. Bland’s thin lips twisted into a sneer. “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll settle all that in the morning.” His tone took on a more friendly aspect “I’m going to pick out a downy couch in one of these rooms,” he said, “and lay me down to sleep. Say, I could greet a blanket like a long-lost friend.”
Mr. Magee proffered some of the covers that Quimby had given him, and accompanied Mr. Bland to suite ten, across the hall. He explained the matter of “stale air”, and assisted in the opening of windows. The conversation was mostly facetious, and Mr. Bland’s last remark concerned the fickleness of woman. With a brisk good night, Mr. Magee returned to number seven.
But he made no move toward the chilly brass bed in the inner room. Instead he sat a long time by the fire. He reflected on the events of his first few hours in that supposedly uninhabited solitude where he was to be alone with his thoughts. He pondered the way and manner of the flippant young man who posed as a lovelorn haberdasher, and under whose flippancy there was certainly an air of hostility. Who was Andy Rutter, down in Reuton? What did the young man mean when he asked if he should “close up shop”? Who was the “he” from whom came the orders? and most important of all, what was in the package now resting in the great safe?
Mr. Magee smiled. Was this the stuff of which solitude was made? He recalled the ludicrous literary tale he had invented to balance the moving fiction of Arabella, and his smile grew broader. His imagination, at least, was in a healthy state. He looked at his watch. A quarter of twelve. Probably they were having supper at the Plaza now, and Helen Faulkner was listening to the banalities of young Williams. He settled in his seat to think of Miss Faulkner. He thought of her for ten seconds; then stepped to the window.
The moon had risen, and the snowy roofs of Upper Asquewan Falls sparkled in the lime-light of the heavens. Under one of those roofs was the girl of the station — weeping no more, he hoped. Certainly she had eyes that held even the least susceptible — to which class Mr. Magee prided himself he belonged. He wished he might see her again; might talk to her without interruption from that impossible “mamma.”
Mr. Magee turned back into the room. His fire was but red glowing ashes. He threw off his dressing-gown, and began to unlace his shoes.
“There has been too much crude melodrama in my novels,” he reflected. “It’s so easy to write. But I’m going to get away from all that up here. I’m going—”
Mr. Magee paused, with one shoe poised in his hand. For from below came the sharp crack of a pistol, followed by the crash of breaking glass.
Chapter III
Blondes and Suffragettes
Mr. Magee slipped into his dressing gown, seized a candle, and like the boy in the nursery rhyme with one shoe off and one shoe on, ran into the hall. All was silent and dark below. He descended to the landing, and stood there, holding the candle high above his head. It threw a dim light as far as the bottom of the stairs, but quickly lost the battle with the shadows that lay beyond.
“Hello,” the voice of Bland, the haberdasher, came out of the blackness. “The Goddess of Liberty, as I live! What’s your next imitation?”
“There seems to be something doing,” said Mr. Magee.
Mr. Bland came into the light, partially disrobed, his revolver in his hand.
“Somebody trying to get in by the front door,” he explained. “I shot at him to scare him away. Probably one of your novelists.”
“Or Arabella,” remarked Mr. Magee, coming down.
“No,” answered Bland. “I distinctly saw a derby hat.”
With Mr. Magee descended the yellow candlelight, and brushing aside the shadows of the hotel office, it revealed a mattress lying on the floor close to the clerk’s desk, behind which stood the safe. On the mattress was the bedding Magee had presented to the haberdasher, hastily thrown back by the lovelorn one on rising.
“You prefer to sleep down here,” Mr. Magee commented.
“Near the letters of Arabella — yes,” replied Bland. His keen eyes met Magee’s. There was a challenge in them.
Mr. Magee turned, and the yellow light of the candle flickered wanly over the great front door Even as he looked at it, the door was pushed open, and a queer figure of a man stood framed against a background of glittering snow. Mr. Bland’s arm flew up.
“Don’t shoot,” cried Magee.
“No, please don’t,” urged the man in the doorway. A beard, a pair of round owlish spectacles, and two ridiculous ear-muffs, left only a suggestion of face here and there. He closed the door and stepped into the room. “I have every right here, I assure you, even though my arrival is somewhat unconventional. See — I have the key.” He held up a large brass key that was the counterpart of the one Hal Bentley had bestowed upon Mr. Magee in that club on far-off Forty-fourth Street.
“Keys to burn,” muttered Mr. Bland sourly.
“I bear no ill will with regard to the shooting,” went on the newcomer. He took off his derby hat and ruefully regarded a hole through the crown. His bald head seemed singularly frank and naked above a face of so many disguises. “It is only natural that men alone on a mountain should defend themselves from invaders at two in the morning. My escape was narrow, but there is no ill will.”
He blinked about him, his breath a white cloud in the cold room.
“Life, young gentlemen,” he remarked, setting down his bag and leaning a green umbrella against it, “has its surprises even at sixty-two. Last night I was ensconced by my own library fire, preparing a paper on the Pagan Renaissance. To-night I am on Baldpate Mountain, with a perforation in my hat.”
Mr. Bland shivered. “I’m going back to bed,” he said in disgust.
“First,” went on the gentleman with the perforated derby, “permit me to introduce myself. I am Professor Thaddeus Bolton, and I hold the Chair of Comparative Literature in a big eastern university.”
Mr. Magee took the mittened hand of the professor.
“Glad to see you, I’m sure,” he said. “My name is Magee. This is Mr. Bland — he is impetuous but estimable. I trust you will forgive his first salute. What’s a bullet among gentlemen? It seems to me that as explanations may be lengthy and this room is very cold, we would do well to go up to my room, where there is a fire.”
“Delighted,” cried the old man. “A fire. I long to see one. Let us go to your room, by all means.”
Mr. Bland sulkily stalked to his mattress and secured a gaily colored bed quilt, which he wound about his thin form.
“This is positively the last experience meeting I attend to-night,” he growled.
They ascended to number seven. Mr. Magee piled fresh logs on the fire; Mr. Bland saw to it that the door was not tightly closed. The professor removed, along with other impedimenta, his ear tabs, which were connected by a rubber cord. He waved them like frisky detached ears before him.
“An old man’s weakness,” he remarked. “Foolish, they may seem to you. But I assure you I found them useful companions in climbing Baldpate Mountain at this hour.”
He sat down in the largest chair suite seven owned, and from its depths smiled benignly at the two young men.
“But I am not here to apologize for my apparel, am I? Hardly. You are saying to yourselves ‘Why is he here?’ Yes, that is the question that disturbs you. What has brought this domesticated college professor scampering from the Pagan Renaissance to Baldpate Inn? For answer, I must ask you to go back with me a week’s time, and gaze at a picture from the rather dreary academic kaleidoscope that is my life.