Read Ebook: The Riddle and the Ring; or Won by Nerve by MacLaren Gordon

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1264 lines and 61867 words, and 26 pages

Without question, Lawrence followed him out into the great vaulted space. What was the fellow going to do? How was he going to escape carrying out his side of the bargain with any plausibility or grace? Of course, he would get out of it somehow, for he was mad--mad as a March hare.

But, in spite of this conviction, Barry felt the blood tingling in his finger tips as they walked past the news stand, past the ticket offices, and on to the deserted extremity of the enormous marble hall.

Clear of the last passer-by, the little man paused, and thrust one hand into the pocket of his inner coat. "There is one other condition," he said, drawing out a thick leather wallet. "Under no circumstances must you explain to any one where you obtained this money. You must be silent regarding every particular of our meeting here, and the terms of our bargain. I have your promise?"

"I promise," he said, in a queer, hoarse voice.

The stranger opened the leather flap, and showed the wallet crammed with crisp bank notes.

"I have your word to carry out faithfully every condition I have mentioned?" he questioned briskly, fixing Barry with a keen glance.

The latter tore his eyes from the bills, and returned the look.

"I give you--my word--of honor," he stammered.

His brain was whirling. He could not believe his senses. It was all a mad illusion--a dream from which he must soon awake. His heart, thudding loudly and unevenly, drove the blood into his face, a crimson flood. He was trembling, but not with cold. The stranger's voice seemed to come from far, far away; it had fallen to a mere whisper, which Lawrence could barely catch.

"There is a matter of another thousand dollars here for expenses," he was saying. He held out the wallet, and Barry's fingers closed around it instinctively. "That is all, I think. You know what you are to do, and I can trust to your word of honor."

Without another word, he turned and walked away.

"I want no thanks," the stranger returned impatiently, his eyes fixed on the great clock. "You can best show your gratitude by carrying out my conditions to the letter. I am pressed for time. I can wait no longer. Good-by!"

As he hurried away, Lawrence stood staring after him, as if in a dream. He saw the slim, somberly clad figure bustle past the waiting rooms and through the doors into the train shed. A moment later the announcer bellowed out the last call for a certain train, and his raucous voice aroused Barry from the trance.

He had thrust the wallet into his pocket, but now he took it out, and opened it with trembling fingers. The bills were still there--new, crisp, and yellow. His fingers touched them, and they did not crumble into dust, as he almost expected them to do. Scraps of long-forgotten fairy stories, read as a child, danced through his dazed brain, in which benefactors in strange guises gave unexpected largess to starving, freezing people. Nothing could be stranger than the appearance of the little man in black.

He laughed aloud. Then a thought came to him which swept the smile from his lips and the color from his cheeks in the twinkling of an eye: The bills were counterfeit!

With blanched face and trembling fingers, he thrust the wallet back into his pocket like a flash. What a fool he had been--what a bonehead! The bills were counterfeit, and the stranger, followed closely, no doubt, by detectives, had taken this way of getting them off his person. This accounted for the stealth, the secrecy, of the transaction. This explained everything which had been inexplicable.

With a swift-drawn breath, Lawrence looked nervously around, to meet the glance of a thin, wiry man standing in the center of the rotunda. Cold chills began to course up and down Barry's spine. What should he do if he were caught with the stuff in his pocket? If he could only escape from the station there might be a chance of throwing it away unobserved. If only he had not dropped his paper, he might, even here, tuck the incriminating wallet in its folds, and fling both carelessly into the rubbish can. What a fool he had been!

Presently the man who had been watching him turned slowly away, and walked toward one of the ticket windows. That was only a pretense, of course. Lawrence realized that perfectly, and yet, relieved of the stranger's scrutiny, he ventured to move toward the broad flight of steps leading up to that long corridor, and thence to the street.

The man did not turn, and Barry's speed increased. If he could only get out of the station it would be all right. As his foot struck the bottom step, his eyes, glancing backward, told him that the man was buying a ticket. He could scarcely see through the back of his head. Perhaps there was a slim chance, after all.

Less than a minute later he flung himself out into the icy street, with a gasp of thanksgiving. Hurrying past the long front of the building, it seemed to him that every one must be staring after him. Through his thin coat the wallet bulged horribly. How could any one fail to guess what was in it?

Under normal conditions he was not a fellow to act in this fashion, but conditions were far from normal. He was half starved, and half frozen. He had lost his job four months before, under circumstances which made it almost impossible to get another, and he was desperate. On top of this, the extraordinary situation in which he found himself was enough to make any man lose his head.

But Lawrence did not quite do that.

He was flustered, nervous, almost terrified; but through it all he clung to one idea--to get back to his miserable room he had thought never to see again. There, at least, he would have security for the moment, and a chance to pull himself together.

So he sped on, dodging through cross streets and down wide avenues, the wind whistling in his ears unheeded, the cold penetrating anew his flimsy garments. As block after block was set behind him without the expected happening, a shaky sort of confidence began to take possession of him. And when at last he ran up the steps of the dilapidated rooming house on Twenty-fourth Street, he gave a long sigh of relief.

"I'm glad I didn't throw it away, after all," he muttered, feeling for his key with fingers blue with cold. "There's just a chance it may be good."

But in his heart he felt that the chance was slim indeed.

In the absorption of the greater trouble, Lawrence had quite forgotten one of his lesser worries--his landlady. That argus-eyed female was on the watch, however, and darted up from the basement just in time to catch him in the hall.

"I s'pose you're comin' to pay me the three weeks' rent you're owin'?" she said, with sarcasm.

Lawrence winced at her tone. He was not yet hardened to that sort of a thing.

"I hope to have it for you this afternoon, Mrs. Kerr," he returned quietly.

"You hope, do you?" shrilled the woman caustically. "Well, let me tell you right here, I ain't livin' on hopes. If that money ain't paid down by three o'clock, out you go. I don't care if it is below zero. I've stood your triflin' long enough, an' if you can't pay you can beat it an' find another lodging place. I hear they're letting loafers sleep in the churches these nights. That might suit you, bein' it's free."

Barry's face flushed, and his hand strayed toward the wallet in his pocket. For a second he was sorely tempted to hand her one of those crisp twenties, and tell her to keep the change. She would never find out its worthlessness until he was safe away. He stifled the impulse, however, and, repeating briefly that she should have her money that afternoon, passed on up the stairs.

The instant his door was shut and the key turned, he jerked the wallet out and opened it with trembling fingers. As he shook out the mass of yellowbacks on the bed, the sight of them was like a stab of a knife. They looked so real it seemed impossible that they could be counterfeit.

He took up a fifty, and, carrying it to the light, examined it closely, feeling the texture and scrutinizing every little detail with care. He could see nothing wrong about it. Four months before, had such a bill been offered him at the bank, he would have accepted it without hesitation.

He took up another, which seemed equally good. He examined half a dozen without finding a single flaw, and then decided that the trouble was in himself. His judgment was no longer what it had been, and he dared not trust it.

"They look good, but they can't be," he muttered, frowning down at the beautiful bits of yellow paper strewn so carelessly over the bed. "What the mischief can I do?"

For fully ten minutes he stood there, his eyes thoughtful and his forehead wrinkled. Then, gathering the bills up, he put them all back in the wallet save one, a ten; after which he lifted the mattress, and shoved the wallet well underneath it.

"There!" he said, straightening up; "now, if I'm pinched, they won't find but one on me. I hate to take this over to the bank, but that's the only way I can be sure."

Ten minutes later he entered the big Twenty-third Street National Bank, and walked directly to one of the tellers.

"Will you kindly tell me if this is all right?" he said quietly, thrusting the ten-dollar bill through the window.

The teller picked it up, and examined it intently. Then he glanced keenly and with some suspicion at Lawrence.

The latter bore the scrutiny well, however, and the official looked the bill over carefully again, drew it through his fingers, and finally tossed it back.

"Certainly it's good," he said, rather brusquely. "What made you think it wasn't?"

For a second Barry was silent. He could not have spoken to save his life. Then he stammered something about "just wanting to make sure," and turned away, quite heedless of the impatient exclamation of the teller at having his time wasted in that manner.

Lawrence had no distinct recollection of how he got back to his room. His brain was in a whirl, and the only thing which stood out vivid and clean-cut was the realization that the money was real.

Real! Ye gods! The thought intoxicated him like champagne. He forgot the cold and wind, his thin clothes, his ravenous hunger. He gave no thought to who the donor might be, or how he had acquired those crisp yellow bills. They were his, every one of them. All he had to do was to buy clothes, to take an apartment at the St. Albans, to dine for a week at the Waldorf! He laughed aloud, and a shivering, frosty-nosed citizen turned and stared after him suspiciously as he hurried down the street.

Lawrence did not see this; nor, seeing, would he have cared. He flew through the snowy streets, and on the doorstep of his lodging house was smitten with a sudden fear for the safety of his treasure. Racing up the two flights of stairs, he darted into his room and tore up the mattress.

The wallet was safe, but what might have been made him tingle all over with a sickening sensation, for he had gone out without even locking his door.

Having turned the key, he sat down on the bed, and opened the wallet. Slowly, deliberately, and with a delicious thrill, he counted the bills. There were fifteen one hundreds, eight fifties, and an odd hundred dollars in twenties and tens.

Evidently the little man in black had been prepared for his acceptance of the extraordinary offer, and the realization brought into Lawrence's mind a swift wonder as to what it could all be about. What reason--what possible reason--could the stranger have for making those astonishing, seemingly absurd, conditions? What purpose would be accomplished by Barry's appearing at the places mentioned for the short space of a week?

Urged on by a fresh curiosity, Lawrence took up the wallet again, to examine it for some mark of identification.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet