Dancing Laura, a Riverboat Story

Dancing Laura

 Chapter I

THE PLAYING OF PICKING JOE

PICKING JOE was in love with Dancing Laura, but that was not extraordinary. Most of the river men were in love with her. She was gay, she was pretty, and she was kind.

   The shanty-boat banjo-picker and violin-player loved Dancing Laura the first time he saw her, which was at Paducah Kentucky, in the shanty-boat eddy above the sawmills. She was in the next boat to his, and sat on the stern deck, listening while he played river music, with sliding notes and cadences and the rolling rhythm of Old Mississip', swinging around a long bend. 

   Her boat was a sixty-foot, hog-chained craft, all painted and shiny and gold. Clarence Pauley was her man, for she married him up the Ohio river somewhere. Pauley had fallen heir to thirty thousand dollars, and now he was coming down the river in a thousand-dollar cabin-boat, spending his money in an ecstacy that grew worse and worse.

   She was so lovely that Picking Joe looked up to her shyly, and played some of his own music, never dreaming that by any chance she would ever be very kind to him. He lived in a little, brown shanty-boat, with two rooms, a cook-stove, and a tiny heater-just an ordinary shanty boat, not much to look at, and like him in that respect.

   Picking Joe had a smooth, round face soft brown eyes, wavy brown hair, white, even teeth, and slim, limber hands and fingers. He called himself a grafter by profession, and spent most of his time playing the fiddle and the banjo, selling electric belts for a living.

   Sometimes he received a handful of change for playing in a saloon, and for a while he was second fiddle on the Cotton Blossom, a theater-boat. His music, however, lacked the screaming power of a calliope or a brass band.

   Sometimes when he played, a human could pass by within a hundred feet or so, and not know that the river music was sounding over the edge of the bank.

   Dancing Laura could hear him there in the shanty-boat eddy, however. She was hardly thirty feet from him. The music came across the quivering water and tinkled in her ears, up and down like the melody of a thrush or a mocking-bird or a warbler.

   The first time she heard the music she started up with surprise, looking around. Surprise on that smooth, oval face was beautiful to see. She walked to the rail of the big boat and saw Picking Joe in the eddy alongside. Her face was alight with enjoyment. She drew a chair to where she could watch the player picking.

   He lost a chord in his embarrassment, but caught it instantly when she nodded to him with friendly encouragement, smiling with measureless sympathy. He forgot that his trouser-knees needed patching, and that his feet were bare, his shirt buttonless, and the sleeves torn off at the elbow to clear them for action in his music. He played as he had never played before.

   She listened, and followed his music, humming or breaking into a low song. He could just hear her voice, which was not a strong voice. 

   Picking Joe did not speak to her in the Paducah river eddy. He heard about her, however. Shanty-boaters talk about other shanty-boaters. It is hard to keep a secret on Old Mississip' or its shanty-boat tributaries. There were some stories about Dancing Laura. They made Pick-

ing Joe feel sorry for her. 

   Dancing Laura had belonged to a little theatrical troupe which "disbanded" at Marietta. The manager left for Broadway between days. Those who were left behind had but little money, and Laura went to work as a waitress in a lunch-room there.

   Of course, she could not hold that job long. Clarence Pauley, dropping down the Ohio from Pittsburgh in his big shanty-boat, came roistering up-town to the restaurant, and saw Laura within, tripping up and down among the tables. She was so pretty, so foot-light, that he went in and ordered something to eat-a thick beefsteak, some one declared.

   Pauley talked to the waitress, and then paid court to her right there. He remained in Marietta a week, in spite of the fact that the town's fame rests upon intellect, second-hand book-stores, and Order of Cincinnatus pedigrees.

   Discerning Laura's reluctance, he proposed marriage, and was instantly accepted. Poor, tired girl that she was, it seemed to her that there was no haven to compare with life on the Ohio in a house-boat, fitted up with all the comforts which Pauley had lavished upon his floating sportsman's resort-gun-room, dining-room, bathroom, kitchen, ice-box, reading-room, and the like. Every room carried many pictures, and among the rest was one which he had picked up somewhere, showing Laura dancing.

   Now he brought Laura herself onto the cabin-boat ! Wasn't that a coincidence? He never noticed it, till Laura came aboard with him, as his lawfully wedded wife. Then Laura started, laughed, and made fun of him for falling in love with a picture-girl!

   So she floated down the Ohio with Clarence Pauley. For a while the fact that she had a home made up the great joy in her heart. She never before had had a home. She was born in Australia, was brought up in Seattle, danced with her mother in a show, danced alone after that. Now she was enjoying the sweet, unexacting calm.of the wide, deep river.  Pauley, however, was mean and no account. He had been just a twelve-dollar-a-week store clerk, or something, when the thirty thousand dollars fell to him. He had hungered for excitement

and gaiety and wantonness. Now he had his hour to gratify his hunger. It had been only a moment of surprising lull and the shadow of love when he married Laura.

   Then he went on down again, drinking, gambling, roistering, growing ugly, growing suspicious, growing hateful. Any one knows what that means. All the fair days, and some of the dark and stormy ones-when Pauley was on board-were spent by Laura on the stern deck of the big cabin-boat, which was called Holocaust on account of some strange whim in gilt letters on both bows and across the of Pauley's. The name was painted astern.

   "I'm burning my life out!" Pauley grinned sometimes. " I'm the boy that would give a hundred years of livin' for an hour of life!"-

   Laura had traveled too far, had lived too much to give way to the grief of disappointment. She was too wise, too patient to wrinkle her face or lose her temper when she learned what Pauley was. Just so did women have to live; all the women she had ever known had

had some such troubles. It was the will of God: God's will be done!

   So she lived and let live. She had lost illusions coming down the Ohio. It was perfectly beautiful, however, sitting out there on the stern deck, watching the deep, rolling, self-sufficient Ohio wrinkling and eddying along. People could live, people could die, people could suffer, and the river would not cease. It soothed Laura's soul to think that, after all, no matter how much she endured, it did not much matter. She was such a small atom, beside the river. What difference did it make what she suffered?

   By and by she saw the bigger phase of the matter. If it did not matter what she suffered, how could it much matter what she did? If the great river poured by, belittling the toils and agonies of humans, how much more it demeaned the little sins and the little virtues of the people. What did it matter? What did anything matter?

So now, in Paducah Eddy she heard a shanty-boater playing sweet music, music that thrilled her soul and answered the song of her heart with river tones.

   Of course, she did not say a word to Picking Joe of what she thought. He was too utterly humble in spirit, especially when he looked up from his own low place in the world to speak to her. He could not see the fire in his own eyes as she could; he could not read her soul as she could read his. She gave him no hint, not the slightest encouragement except that she sat there in plain view of him and listened to his music, note by note, tone by tone, as he drew it from the willing sheep-head and seasoned wood.

   If sometimes she had not failed to appear on the stern deck, if occasionally she had not gone up-town or remained within the large cabin-boat, Picking Joe might well have starved to death playing to her there on his own boat. She was, however, not enamored. She went her own way, except occasionally, and so Picking Joe found time to go up-town and play in

saloons, in dance-halls, and where the crowd gathered in the pool-rooms. Thus he obtained money enough to live on.

   One day, when he returned to the eddy, he found that the large boat was gone. Pauley and Dancing Laura had pulled out and floated down the river toward the Mississippi. When he learned that, Picking Joe's world grew black before his eyes, and in his heart there were leakings and poundings and a great ache.

   " She gone!" he whispered in the privacy of his own boat. "Lawse! Lawse! I neveh thought she'd go-an' now she's gone!"

   He forgot his supper, he forgot an engagement to play for a dance, till a boy came a-running. He stumbled up to the dance-hall, and played as he had never played before. There were river people there, shanty-boaters and the like. They heard dance-music to which demons might have danced; they heard interludes that made the women cry, and brought suspicious brightness to the eyes of the men; they saw tears running down the cheeks of Picking Joe as he wept while he played, nor would he tell them why he cried.

" I don' know!" he sobbed. "I jes' feel like hit to-night!"

   Fiddlers and banjo-pickers are queer river people. They live in a world apart from other people. They do things no one else would do. They are subject to strange emotions and suffer from strange ailments. They talk to themselves, and some think that the shanty-boat on which a fiddler lives is apt to be haunted, holding a spirit that is different from other river haunts.

   Picking Joe wept alone, and some people laughed at him a little that night in the Old Æolian Cave, but his music conquered for him, and in the dawn he returned shuffling to his little shanty-boat with a pocket full of silver and nickel.

   He was heart-sick, he was soul-weary, and he was tired out. That night he had suffered the full cup of his inspiration, and it seemed to him to have been a poisoned cup---not that he thought he was inspired, but that he did wonder if the last coffee had not gone against him.

Of course, he knew that it could not be the beer, the three or four glasses of beer people had brought him in their good nature. Beer never hurts any man, but perhaps the coffee-he wasn't sure. 

Anyhow, he could not endure houses and people and towns any more. He cast off the lines of his boat, pulled out with his sweeps, and let the Tennessee current

carry him out into the Ohio, swirling around and around, till he floated broad-side under the railroad-bridge and entered the mystic lower Ohio, which is subject

to the ups and downs of the vast Mississippi, fifty miles below Paducah. 

   Out there in mid-stream, with his head bowed, his heart, soul, and mind full of pictures and aches and Dancing Laura, be gave way to a grief that was his, and

which the Ohio, friendly flood that it is, tried to soothe with wavelets lapping along the side of the boat, and long swells rocking it as though he were a tired child in

a cradle.

   He picked up his fiddle and played, accompanying the music of the wavelets.

He played beautifully, sweetly, because he was thinking of Dancing Laura- and because he was Picking Joe.

CHAPTER II

THE RESCUE

WHEN Pauley came oAnd n board the Holocaust that morning in Paducah he was sick-sick of people, sick with liquor, sick of himself. He hated everybody, everything, and he despised his wife. She smiled, and he

slapped her; she cried, and so he became angry, and drove her with his fists onto the stern deck, where he locked her out.

   Then he cast off the lines of his boat and pushed out into the river, rowing with angry strength. Once clear of the eddy, he let the boat float, and went to bed on a pile of tarpaulin in the storeroom. There he soon went to sleep.

   The Holocaust drifted down the river broadside, and if luck had not been with him it would have been cut in two across the upper end of one of the railroad-bridge

piers. As it was, the boat heaved up on the bulging wave and scraped against the side. 

   Dancing Laura did not flinch when the crisis and the peril came.

   She looked death squarely in the face there, her face smiling. If she was to die at that place and in that hour, well and good. The angels that put down the things that people do and are, recorded to itve either one was willing to die, or to live, either one.

   By and by, they knew they would have something else to record along that line, something that would further disclose her frame of mind—-a fine, splendid thing to

have down beside one's name in the Book of Doom.

   Laura, of course, could not look into her future. Over it she now had no control. It was all in the power of a mean, drunken man whose ambition had been

to be drunken, wanton, and animal. The man's ambition had been realized, through the grinning assent of haggard fate.

   She sat on the chair which she kept on the stern deck and looked at the river-banks, growing lower, showing more and more the character of the Mississippi Bottoms toward which she was drifting. She calmed her mind, soothed her senses, and forgot the slight pain which the un-steady brute within had inflicted upon her. 

   "Even this is better than one-night stands and dodging Johnnies!" she told herself. "No one can be perfectly happy, and so I cannot, but this is better than anything I know of, or ever heard of. I'm not bothered here, except by him, and he isn't much. He is very small, compared

to this great river. Isn't it beautiful! And sometimes I hear music—-I—-“

   She stopped her musings, surprised. Truly, she had heard music. She had heard a river tramp musician playing. She had liked the music. She knew music, having heard lots of it, in her time. Always she had loved music -loved nothing else in the world quite so much as music, unless it was the lithesome motions which one just naturally makes to the rhythm of music.

   Now she found her ears recalling haunting strains, long, sliding notes, melodies, refrains, lilting bars, and an undertone which gradually she identified as the spirit of the river. Only a river man could have played like that!

   She laughed at herself for thinking about the quaint Picking Joe, up there in Pa-ducah Eddy—-poor, shiftless, no-account river-rat that he was. She recalled his

dumb worship, his up-staring eyes, and the music that he picked and drew from the two instruments that he played. She laughed at first, but later she began to

smile.

   Men had loved her, and some had hunted her without avail. Masterful men had tried to command her affections, and weakmen had tried to serve her who wished only to do her own part in the world. She had grown tired, escaping always escaping.

   It had seemed escape to marry a man who owned a large shanty-boat, who pressed his suit with aplomb, and who would take her down and down till they were on the Lower Mississippi, in long bends, in huge eddies, or drifting on wide, shallow crossings.

   Now she saw that men are just shallow, shiftless people who deserve less than they have, even less than she had supposed they did.

   For a woman, life was just an endurance, anyhow. At least, down the river she could rest. She need not dance till she was weary, and when she did not feel like it. She had plenty to eat, and dainty clothes to wear. It was Pauley's demand, in his sober hours, that she look well.

That she always did, and always would. 

   Pauley came up out of his stupor just before dark. He was now suffering from remorse. Laura was prevailing upon him to go to bed, and leave the tarpaulin which he had sought in his scorn. She gave him bromide and soda.

   Late in the gloom he rowed the shanty- boat into a shallow eddy and let go the anchor. Down-stream was the glow of a town. There were some lights plainly

visible, and as it was a large town, she knew that it was Cairo, in the forks of the Ohio and Mississippi.   

   The following day they drifted out into the Mississippi and swung down the long bend where the green Ohio waters slowly eddy into the yellow Mississippi flood.

   Pauley was quite sober. He was ashamed of himself and tried to make amends. Laura made no complaint. She even smiled a little when he made his advances

to her. She tidied up the boat as always. She cooked better than usual, and accepted his attentions. But despite all the sameness, there was a difference. Laura

was not the same. Pauley was puzzled because he could

not place his mind upon any fact, act, appearance, word, gesture, or anything that was different, but he saw something which he could not identify under every

act, look, word, gesture, everything, that was not the same as it had been. Laura in some way put a fear into him. It was not a fear of violence or punishment or

even of her resentment.

   He would have been very glad to have her resentful. That would have been easy to overcome. He would have been glad if she had been angry, and had stormed

and cried and said she hated him. He could have met that storm with acknowledgment of its justice, promises never to do so again, and by patience, perhaps as

long as her patience had been coming down the Ohio. He thouglt that it was because she did not look at him so much; but when she turned from looking at the Mississippi to look at him, he thought it

was because she looked at him more than usual.

   It was not in Clarence Pauley then to know, and it never could be in him to know, what had happened to Laura Loone that she should make him miss something so much. The certainty is, however, that over that long, hard day down the lower Ohio, Dancing Laura ceased to care for Clarence Pauley, or for anything, except to be glad that she was rid of caring for anything and everything.

   The new day that had come found Dancing Laura's heart perfectly free and open. She saw old Mississip', and old Mississip' welcomed her. The great river claimed her love, and never would she be untrue to the good river who would not chide her, nor abuse her, nor refuse her the plumb comfort for which so many tired people in all this world are longing.

   It was beautiful weather to be floating. The Holocaust, carried by the current, wandered down the bends and reaches sometimes near one shore, sometimes near

another. It ran into the famous Putney Bend Eddy, and Pauley anchored there. 

   He carried a great armchair out on the bow deck, and led his wife to it. They sat down there, she on his lap, and watched the sun go down that night. It was lovely,

the bright lights on the golden sand-bar and the thousand tints and hues among the long, thin clouds. He thought, because she did not resist, because she

listened, because sometimes she spoke, that all was peace again.

   The thought permitted him to think of other things. He began to grow restless, to want excitement, to see people. Accordingly, when they came to New Madrid, he pulled into the eddy there, and, after making fast, went up-town, where he met a river man he knew.

   It pleased Pauley greatly to know that he was recognized, that he had acquaintances on the Mississippi River. The soft  paw on the Mississippi is always delighted to learn that his fame has spread far, and that he is not so lonely as he sometimes feels.

   Pauley met other men he knew, and shortly he was looking through uncertain eyes at faces with four eyes and heads with six ears, and listening to men with

four or five voices. His good nature was continuous up-town, but when he returned to his boat in the eddy, it exasperated him to discover that his wife had supplied pork chops instead of beefsteąk, which he felt

she should have divined he desired.

   Besides, in his present frame of mind, the mystery of her reserve became upper most. It occurred to him that somehow d she was not giving him, her lord and master, all that he chose to expect. She was  keeping something back, something that was his due. 

   He wouldn't eat pork chops. Instead, he preferred to throw the chops at her head. The plate, however, was an ambulating one, and he could not, for the life

of him, take hold of it, though he had many hands, and there were more chops and plates than he had ever seen upon so many tables all at one time.

   He compromised on throwing the chops by taking an empty bottle from his pocket and throwing it at the numerous woman. The bottle went through a window in the dining-room cabin. That was an insult! What had she escaped being hit for? Wasn't that an insult to his superior strength and intelligence? He was sure

it was 

   "I'll fixsh yo'!" he declared. "Yo' besshu!

   All this explains the Dancing Laura which the river people came to know. Pauley remained at New Madrid five or six days. While he was there a little, brown cabin-boat pulled into the New Madrid Eddy, where all the shanty-boats tie in, and Picking Joe sat on the stern

deck of his boat playing, while Mrs.Pauley sat on the stern deck of the large boat, listening. 

   The music was worth listening to, and the soul of Picking Joe expanded with such an audience. Other shanty-boaters listened, too, naturally, and they heard tunes that they nor any one else could have

remembered hearing played.

   As if it were a crime to listen to music, some one told Clarence Pauley that his wife was listening down there to Picking Joe's selections. 

   Pauley, at first quite unable to comprehend what his informant had in mind, stared at him. Then, understanding, Pauley straightened up and went to a

hardware store, where he bought a butcher's knife with an eighteen-inch blade, the kind used for cutting round-

steaks from great, western steer-quarters. He bought a whet-stone, and gravely sharpened the new purchase.

   "A man can't sthand insults!" he said to himself. A mansh gotsher pertect hish honor! I'm a shenleman an' a

scholarsh." 

   It was funny to the spectators, seeing that sodden, maudlin wretch whetting a knife with a blade like that, talking about being a gentleman and having his revenge

upon a river fiddler whose music his wife had happened to hear. Every one knew that Pauley's wife listened, but she had never passed a word with him, as any one of a score of watchers could have testified.

   Pauley marched down the street, at three P. M., brandishing his new knife and whetstone. He did not voice his intentions, so that only his boon companions

knew what joke was in the air. They followed him, and they watched him go aboard his boat at the landing. They waited for developments. They were disappointed that he did not go aboard "Fiddling" Joe's boat. Joe was playing, but the woman was not on the stern deck. Pauley did not find her in the boat either. He ranged

back and forth, shouting and swearing. While he was storming back and forth, Mrs. Pauley appeared from up Main Street, carying two or three little packages. She had never looked prettier, and the people who were standing around, " minding their own business," stared at her wonderingly. Some of the men ogled her, and she ignored them. She tripped down the steep, silt bank, went along the gangplank on board, and then stopped,

her cheeks flushing.

   From within she heard the maudlin, angry shouts of her husband. She took a sidelong, ashamed look at the men and women gathered along the bank, and then

quite calmly she climbed the narrow stairs to the roof of the cabin, and walked aft to go down to her old place on the stern deck, there to await the passing of Pauley's storm. Pauley may have heard her footsteps

he may have felt" her presence; he may have heard something that warned him that she was there. He dashed out upon the bow of the boat, flourishing his horrid kife 

   "Where's that woman?" he shouted, and then the unspeakable tribe on the bank directed their gaze to her, and he saw and understood. He turned and followed her up the narrow stairs to the cabin roof, and there she was silhouetted against the Mississippi's mile-wide tide. 

   "I got che!" he bellowed, and dashed at her.

   She heard him shout and heard his foot-steps. She turned and faced him. She dropped the packages which she carried, her hands drawing together, but she did not stir from where she stood at the far end of the cabin roof.

In the silence all could hear the insane man's heavy footsteps and-music! Picking Joe was playing his violin, all unconscious of the impending tragedy. She heard him, too, and perhaps for the first time, noticed that he was there. She turned and glanced at him, just as he looked up. Their eyes met, and both smiled. Every witness would testify to that!

   Then Picking Joe saw Pauley lumbering toward her, his huge knife flourishing in the air. A discord rent the air, and be sprang to his feet, crying:

   " Fo' Gawd's sake, jump! He'll kill yo'l Please jump-fo' me!"

   He held up both hands toward her, and the reckless devil that was in her, the scorn that she felt for Pauley, her detestation of the crowd of fools and cowards on

the bank, seemed to stir through her. 

   With a leap, quick as the pirouetting girl, that she was, she sprang to the rail around the cabin roof, stooped for her purchase, and sprang clear over the mooring line, and fell with a splash into the eddy. There she floated, buoyed by her skirts while Pauley screamed his rage on the cabin roof.

   " I'm a comin'" Picking Joe called to her in a low voice. "I'm a comin', gal!"

   She turned and smiled they all saw it! At sight of that smile, Pauley drew back his right knife-arm and hurled his weapon at her with all his might, but it zipped into the water, point first, just beyond her skirts.

   A few seconds later, Picking Joe's boat backed out of its mooring-place, swung around as quickly as a skiff could have done, and then bore along the eddy cur-

rent in pursuit of the woman. It ran alongside of her, and he reached down and swung her up onto the bow deck of the boat, where she stood looking at her rescuer.

Picking Joe caught his breath under that calm gaze.

I'll put yo' up the bank!" he choked. 

   "Oh, don't do that! He'll think to get his gun in a minute Pull out into the big river, won't you please, Joe? I

want to go on down old Mississip'!"

   Without a word he leaned to the sweeps and pulled the boat out into the main current, and when Pauley happened at last to think of his rifle, the shots he fired

splashed futilely around them at half a mile and more.

   " Now, what next?" a shanty-boater up the bank turned and asked a man next to him, just like that.

   Then people talked and grew excited.

   The town marshal came and locked Pauley up for disorderly conduct, over night. That was all.

CHAPTER III

THE INTRUDER.

   A CERTAIN lawyer in Mendova granted divorces to river people for seventeen dollars and fifty cents.

   The river people were quite satisfied with them. With divorce papers, they were free to marry again. Sometimes they waited quite a long time before meeting a satisfactory mate; sometimes they did not wait long, as was the case of Mrs. Pauley, or, as she was better known, Dancing Laura.

   Dancing Laura took off her wet clothes in the little cabin of Fiddling Joe's shanty-boat, and put on a suit of his clothes; the suit that he had extra, for fiddling at

dances and around. It was not too large for her. It was almost a snug fit, and when she appeared in it when they were down the Bend, far beyond Pauley's angry

rifle-shots, and out of sight of other eyes, Joe blinked and looked away. He swallowed with difficulty and trembled.

   " I 'low-we'd betteh land in some'rs! he suggested. " Some shanty-bo't er some'rs, so's--- so's---" 

   "So I can find some other clothes?" she laughed. " You don't like my looks in this suit? Perhaps you're afraid I'1l

wear them out?" 

   Lawse!" He wiped his arm across his eyes. " They ain't nothin' I got yo' cayn't have, Good Gal! Hit's all yourn!"

" Good Gal" she repeated, puzzled

" Yas, um!" He turned his head away.

" Hit's what I call yo', to myse'f!"

   "Good Gal! You call me that?" she asked, smiling, looking at him curiously.

   " Jes' so!" he nodded, looking in the other direction." No 'fense!"

   " I'm to take no offense for your calling me a nickname like that!" she demanded quizzically and sharply.

" I meant no harm" he pleaded, and she laughed at him

" After your saving my life!" she exclaimed, and then she looked down the river as if she would look into the future.

   In Mendova, Dancing Laura obtained a divorce from Clarence Pauley. When she spread the paper out before her on the table in the attorney's office, she looked

at that worthy and laughed in his face.

   He was a tall, narrow-faced man. At her laugh he twisted in his chair and then flushed. Attorney Genuun needed the ınoney, and he was getting it so!

"You're not a common river woman!" he declared, with sudden discernment.

   " No"- she shook her head-" but I am going to be a river woman now. Let me introduce you to my next husband-to-be, Mr. Joseph Cartern!" He looked at her, and then shook hands with Fiddling Joe.

   " Come again!" he remarked jocularly.

"I'm obliged to you for your business!"

" There'll be no more divorces!" she told him sharply. " But there may be other matters that need your kind of law-and order!"

   With that shot she left him fumbling at the back of his chair. The two went immediately to Justice Croven and were married. All the way down to their little cabin-boat the groom kept whispering:

   " Hit ain't so! Hit ain't so! I know hit ain't so!"

   Hearing him, the bride smiled, but made no comment. She was accompanying a grown man into an unbelievable fairyland, from which he might never

emerge. Sometimes musicians are that way Dancing Laura had known of several.

   Picking Joe had about seven dollars; Laura had nearly a thousand dollars worth of jewelry and several hundred

dollars which she had saved on the way down the Ohio where the squandering Pauley had been liberal with her, and she had recognized the need of foresight and

saving for the future—-but she had not foreseen this future!

   They bought paint, things to eat, clothes, and everything to fit up the boat, inside and out. It was small compared to the Holocaust, and at first Dancing Laura

felt cramped up in the small quarters. Later she learned to love them. They picnicked down the river for weeks, sometimes stopping in one eddy for days, sometimes floating two miles, or five miles or ten miles, just as they felt like it.

   Picking Joe played for Dancing Laura. That was about all he could do for her. It choked him, trying to talk to her; he knew hardly anything that was of any

interest, except his music. She loved that music. Joe loved her. Both loved old Mississip', too

   They stopped in lonesome bends, in chutes, eddies, and on the lower ends of sandbars. Days went by without their seeing any one to talk to. She sat and laved her soul in the music, the strange, fanciful, wandering tunes of a river musician. He looked at her, looked at the

river, and found all the inspiration that he needed. He lived, in those days, upon the ecstacy of life. She found the rest which she had hoped for when she left

the drudgery of the Marietta lunch-room to trip down with Pauley.

   After a time, she knew that she could not live that way all her life. The river and the music satisfied only one side of her nature. She needed lots of people, bright lights, things stirring, things alive and doing and more than mere being. 

   At first she doubted whether Picking Joe would suffer her to go into that kind of society for which she was best fitted, the lively, daring kind which ventures far

for its satisfactions. Picking Joe could have gotten along till doomsday, with just her to listen and to smile upon him. She saw that, and it pleased her very much. Yet she watched him while she mentioned people, other men, other women, seeing his thoughts about such matters.

   He did not change his expression under her badinage nor when she teased him about other people. He smiled and looked into her face, as though he could not imagine anything ever disturbing the serenity of their existence. She was angry with herself, thinking that she could not

be contented when she had the full opportunity to be so. They could live on for years and years---and the thought was appalling!

   "I couldn't stand it!" she gasped in full realization, and from that moment she began to look about for some means of relieving the tedium which she could not escape.

   It was strange that from the beginning and for a long time she did not notice the obvious opportunity which was at their own hands. She grew nervous, fretted,

became irritable, and poor Joe trembled at her sharp words, and begged her with tears to tell him wherein she was unhappy

   How could she tell him?

   They blew into a shanty-boat town below Beef Island, at the foot of the chute. The shanty-boaters crowded around to welcome them, and nòthing would do but

they must have a dance. The largest boat was Crimly's, and they cleared the floor for a square set and round dancing. 

   There were a dozen couples there, enough for three sets. Gray-bearded men and little, black-haired old women sported up and down with the liveliest of the

fishermen and the alertest of the young vomen. But Dancing Laura was in a class by herself; no one rivaled her. She danced the way men who had seen them

say the river fairies dance. She swayed through the numbers, and flirted with her partners-heavy-footed, hard-handed weather-beaten men who toiled seven

days a week fishing or drifting, or trapping or hunting

   They were all surprised, doubtful, and leary-eyed of the fiddler whose temper was an unknown quantity. Some retreated precipitately, but others, after questioning and hesitation, gave themselves to the eyes and careless abandon of the young woman whose escapade was now known from St. Louis to The Passes.

   " Sho!" Frank Sugh asked her. "Ain't yo' skeered up? Clarence Pauley is drappin' down, lookin' fo' yo'! He 'lows he'll kill Pickin' Joe, an' eat your heart fo

supper!"

   "Is that so?" she asked, with apparent lightness. Where is he now?"

   " Up by Plum P'int, the last I knowed. He drapped clear b'low Mendova, an' then towed up, thinkin' he'd missed yo', an now he's drappin' down, lookin' fo' yo'

agin!"

   "What will he do to me?" she asked.

   "I expect he'll stab yo' to yo' heart, yas, suh!"

   "Well, let's not worry about it!" she smiled. "I love to dance!"

   "If I danced like yo' do, I'd neveh stop!" Sugh whispered with perfect conviction. "I'd dance in ev'ry op'ry house in the country, an' make myse'f rich an

then---then---"

   "Then you'd buy a whisky-still, and drink up a its product!" she sniffed scornfully Men all do that!"

   "Hit's seo! Hit's what Pauley done-an' what many anotheh man's done, too!" he admitted. "But I wouldn't. I'd-”

   " What would you do?" she demanded a little archly

Yo' ast me that? Yo'! I'll tell yo' what I'd do," he began with savage ex-pression. I'd steal_"

   "A horse and wagon, to ride the world around!" she interrupted, laughing, and, shaking loose from him, she ran to her partner for the next set, while he stared

after her till his wife caught and shook him to attention again.

   It was true about Pauley, she learned. Every one on the river was talking about the jilted husband's man-hunt. He had stopped drinking, it was said, and he carried a revolver on his hip, and watched the river banks with his glasses, seeking sight of the fugitive little boat in which

his former wife had taken flight from him.

   Clarence Pauley was almost insane, if not quite insane, now that he remembered how he had forfeited his wife's affection and constancy. He was angry to think that she had not understood that he was "only fooling" when he flourished the big butcher-knife and pursued her.

   " If she'd a waited, I'd only kissed her! I intended only to kiss her!" he told people, and that story made the witnesses of the scene in New Madrid Eddy laugh

aloud.

   They told Laura that night in the Crimly cabin all that Pauley had said, and she laughed at their warnings, and

told her friends, people who this night met her for the first time, that she would not think of such things.

   "Why, he's just talking!" she said.

   "What'd Joe do, if he should meet up with him?"

   "I don't know!" Laura answered truthfully, a little shadow crossing her face at this possibility.

   That was something that detracted from the pleasure of the dance that evening. It seemed to her as if just the dancing was all she needed; she was meeting people, and if they were crude and awkward people, they, nevertheless, filled her mind with lively thoughts, and she could laugh and flirt, dance and pirouette, fly about

and toss her toes into the air, while the people gasped and laughed and cheered.

   After midnight, the women cooked supper, and they sat down to game, fish, hot bread, cakes, and other things. They were all hungry. They were all jovial. There was not a mean thought on board. Even the women were

not jealous of the girl who was flirting with all their men, old and young, and teasing men just to make the evening gay. 

   They could no more be jealous of Picking Joe's wife than they could have been jealous of a twelve-year-old girl---that was the way they felt about it.

   After supper, they washed up the dishes and Joe played some selections of the kind one likes to listen to, but which are no good for dancing. He was in his place in the bow corner of the room, opposite the stove, sitting on a chair and screened off from the door.

   Some one came walking down the gang-plank, in one of the moments when the music was soft and low and sweet. The people who were sitting around the walls, listening, glanced toward the door. Dancing Laura started and sat rigid, her face turning white, at the sound of those foot-steps.

   The door opened and through the way sprang a man with two guns in his fists---huge forty-five caliber revolvers. Over his face was a red handkerchief, with eye- holes cut in it. Through the holes shone eyes that blazed.

    There was a big carbid light in the opposite end of the boat, which shone fairly in the man's eyes, so that he was blinded for a moment. Then, blinking and waving his revolver muzzles up and down and in perpendicular circles, he searched the faces of the gathering.

   His look fell upon Dancing Laura, and on the instant he raised his revolvers to fire. There was no mistaking his intent, and Laura leaped up and stepped forward, smiling, as she saw what the man intended.

All the spectators there had heard that women die that way on the river, when they don't care.

   Laura, however, did not step into a bullet. Instead, she stepped into a clear view of Picking Joe leaping from his chair on its elevated box and striking at the raider. Joe had started before the revolvers drew up to aim, and before Laura left her chair. He arrived before anything

tragic could happen.

   Picking Joe struck the masked man under the ear with all the force of his one hundred and fifty pounds.

   At the blow, people heard something crack, and the masked man went over on his left shoulder. He lay quivering on his side, rolling down on his face.

   The fiddler did not let him rest, but caught him up and carried him through the open door, and the people heard  loud splash without.

   Then Joe returned.

CHAPTER IV

IN MENDOVA

LAURA ran to Picking Joe and kissed him, while he stood in the bright carbid light. He looked more embarrassed than any one had ever seen him look before.

   "Oh, you brave man! You brave man!" Laura cried.

   She drew back quickly, and Joe picked up the two revolvers where they had fallen.

He let the hammer down of one that was cocked, and placed them under the chair on which he had been sitting. 

   Immediately after that they heard a cry or shout from the river, and all of them crowded out on the decks to listen. Sure enough, floating down the bend they

could hear calls and yells.

   "Lawse! What is it?" some one whispered

   The same thought had occurred to several of them. It was the cry of the lost spirit of the man who had been thrown overboard. But Joe explained quietly. 

   "He had a cork belt on, so's he could jump into the riveh an' make hisn's get-away. Now he don' know what happened!"

   "Yo' shore done hit slick, Joe!" one of the men congratulated him. "'Peahs like yo' got yo' mad up suddint! I neveh tab IQ knowed yo' all was a fightin' man, Joe

   "I'm peaceable!" Joe exclaimed. I neveh 'lowed to harm no man-"

   "If he minded hisn's own business!" Sugh grinned. "Take a still, back-settin' feller, an' when he gits a-goin'--look out! Yas, suh!"

   Any other man could have thrown out the raider with only moderate surprise to the spectators, but Picking Joe, humble, faithful, clever Picking Joe, taking a man with two guns and throwing him overboard!

   From that hour, the story of Picking Joe's exploit was carried up and down the Mississippi to become one of its treasured anecdotes and traditions. Picking

Joe and Dancing Laura entered a fixed place in river society. 

   They were people who were unafraid, the one standing up to take the bullets of her husband-that-used-to-be, and the other leaping to protect his lawful wife!

Both were entitled to every respect, and Picking Joe could play his sweet pieces and let the tears of his emotions run down his cheeks without thought of laughing comment. The brave are entitled to cry, if they want to!

   They danced on board Crimly's boat till after daybreak, and then all the merry-makers returned to sleep all day on their own house-boats. Late in the afternoon,

Picking Joe and Dancing Laura came forth, and the others showed up on the bank to talk and gossip and tell what a time they had had the previous night.

   Laura had thought of something which she could do, and Joe was contented, if only Laura was. The dancing girl had seen deeper than any other spectator the

previous night. Picking Joe would not have raised his hand except for one thing, and that was the malignant intention of the raider against the object of his affections

"Where's a good town on the lower river?" Laura asked Sugh. "I mean one where they are free spenders and have good times?"

   "Mendova!" he answered without hesitation. "They've made lots of money theh, late years, with lumber and cotton. They spend it free, too. They's up to date"

   "Mendova?" she asked doubtfully 

   "Hit's sho Mendova's the on'y live town above New Orleans!"

   "I've been in New Orleans," she said. I like that old city, but I think that Mendova is better, because it's newer.

   "Yas, um, hit's newer. Theh's any kind of game yo' want to play theh. They play the big shows an' they run  to Laidies' Aid an' Prohibition, an' conventions an' the bestest gamblin' hell in the whole country, an' fancy, dress balls. Hue-e-e !  Hit's shore got all that's going!"

   "They like music?" she asked.

   "Music! They got all kinds of bands theh, string bands, horn bands, parade bands, dancin' bands, an' talking-machine bands! Lawse! Take hit of a warm night, an' the windows is up, an' yo' can heah Mendova twenty mile down the riveh, playing talkin'-machine music!"

   Laura laughed, turning to Picking Joe:

   "We can go there, and tie up sometimes, can't we, Joe?"

   "We shore could!" he replied fondly.

   "Anywhere's yo' want to tie up!"

   "I'd hate to take any woman of mine theh!"  Sugh suggested frankly. "Especially if she was ---"

   "A dancing girl?" Laura smiled, completing his sentence to his confusion and stammering apology. 

  

   The Holocaust was tied up two miles down the bend, as they soon discovered. It had been run down the previous night and landed in at one of the small eddies.

Whether Clarence Pauley had floated down to it, or had been carried by it, or had turned upside down and drowned in his life-preserver, none knew. Pauley was no gentleman, anyhow. Mrs. Sugh voiced the general opinion:

   "Yo' take a man that's be'n 'vorced an' hisn's wife-that-used-to-be is gone an married agin, an' he ain't no more manners 'n to come rowin' an' mussin' around, an' he'd oughter be chucked ovehbo'rd, an' all I got to say is Pickin' Joe done jes right, an' was kindly, an' 'siderate, that he didn't kill 'im an' be done with it, yassuh!"

  Hubbub's whisky-boat Necter came up the river the following morning. Hubbub told of picking up Pauley ten miles down the bend, on a sandbar, walking up stream. Pauley had two empty revolver-holsters and a cork belt, Hubbub said. He was dead tired and so hoarse that he could hardly speak.

  " I 'lowed he'd boozed an' tumbled oveh-bo'd!" Hubbub said. "But I brung him up to hisn's bo't, afteh feedin' 'im. He's gittin' mean, he is!"

    When Hubbub learned what had taken place, he laughed.

   "That accounts fo' hit!" he grinned. "He was sore, an' he wouldn't talk much.

   Soon's I landed him onto his bo't, he un-moored an' drapped out an' down the riveh!"

"We want to tow up to Mendova," Dancing Laura said. "Will you take us up? How much will it cost?"

   "Jes' the gasolene, Mrs. Cartern," he said respectfully. "Bout five dollars'll more'n do hit!"

   That was the first that any one knew the Carterns were going up to Mendova.

   They tied their boat in Poplar Slough against Hawk Island, and the following day Joe and his wife went up-town to prospect around. Joe, now that his wife had dressed him up and combed his hair and kept him shaved, was a good-looking man. She walked beside him, radiating, so to speak, and people looked twice at her. Some men did not take their eyes off her as long as she was in sight.

   They stopped at the opera-house---the new one, and saw the manager. Laura talked to him about the town, and said that she could dance, and that Joe could

back space play.

   "I need a fiddler in my orchestra," Manager Crome suggested. "Let's hear you!"

   He had a violin on the top of his desk, as it happened, and Joe tuned it up and began to play. He played on and on, the manager listening, and Laura smiling as she watched the manager's face.

   "Sho! You live on the riveh!" the man exclaimed impatiently. "And you play like that!"

   Joe had been wasting himself, it appeared, on dance-halls and saloon sitting-rooms and dives. Now he found himself offered fifteen dollars a week for three or four hours' play. Dancing Laura accepted the place for him, because Joe left it to her to do the talking.

   Dancing Laura's work was more difficult. She wanted to give dancing lessons and organize children's plays for parties and schools and Sunday-schools, and such things. Manager Crome saw that this would be a good thing for him, too, and he told her which people to see—-men and women. The Blue Jays were thinking of putting on an entertainment of some kind in October, but had not definitely decided what it should be.

   "They have no one who knows just what to do," Crome explained. "Like's not you could he'p them out."

   He called up Archy Falldy, who was secretary, to see what had been done, and Archie was only too glad to have a talk with Mrs. Cartern. She went to see Falldy alone, while Joe went shopping.

   The two met on their boat two or three hours later, and Laura was as happy as a bird. 

   "Oh, I've got something to do! Right away, too!" she laughed. "Now we'll stay." She staged a little play for the Blue Jays, and the original intention of having it only one night had to be increased to include a full week's run. Laura's share was eight hundred dollars, and the

compliments of every one. Her success brought her more work than she could attend to, more opportunities than she knew what to do with.

   She had given up, when she married Clarence Pauley; she had drifted into marrying Picking Joe-and he proved to be just the husband for her. He worshiped her with increasing faith, perfectly content when she rewarded him with her smile and called him Joey in a voice that had more music in it for his ears than ever he had drawn from his violin or picked out of his banjo. Of course, she had him in the orchestras of the playlets which she staged, and at times she took him with her to the social events which her good name and vivacity won her. If he played at them he knew what to do; if he was just a guest, he was dumb and remote and uncomfortable

   He could not talk, he did not know what to do, but he endured, and found joy of life in watching the object of his adoration, all a-sparkle with jewels that

increased in number and with raiment that transcended anything he had ever seen in bird-feathers or on butterfly wings-the only things he could compare her to.

   Some of the people she met could not quite get over the fact that she lived on a shanty-boat in Poplar Slough. In the first place, shanty-boaters were people

beyond the pale of up-the-bank life. In the second place, river people lacked in everything that goes to make culture, refinement and worldly interests. The

women, perforce, must be homely and-well-and-ignorant

   Yet here was Laura Cartern, prettier than most women, brighter than most people, better company than any but the most experienced, frankly a business woman, but perfectly delightful in a conversation, wearing jewels that were real expensive, and flawless

   Not one word could any one say against Laura, except but ---which damnable word some did use. However, Mendova was not so overly particular. When one is quite obese, and used to run a entire boarding-house in her husband's log-camp, when the husband was getting his start in life cutting over Government Quarters, it is not possible to draw the lines too strictly, especially as regards a young and beautiful shanty-boater who knows everything, especially certain horrid things.

   It was Mrs. Grond who caught Laura Cartern's first and last defensive shaft.

   Mrs. Grond, when she learned that Laura was a shanty-boat woman and lived in Poplar Slough, tied to Hawk Island, had been shocked. Mrs. Grond

was wife of the cut-over lands specialist Doqueen Grond, and by force of her wealth and social strategy, had become a kind of court of last resort, in the Society of the Shells.

   This society gave a ball in February, and those left off the invitation list fell to a bad second rank in Mendova. Mrs. Grond determined to leave Mrs. Cartern

off this invitation list, and gave the order. Her real reason was that Old Pop Grond was flirting with her outrageously. 

   Not that flirting with Dancing Laura was unusual or unique, or even that flirtations in Mendova were of extraordinary importance, but Mrs. Grond was indignant, for Laura was everything that Mrs. Grond was not---including undignified.

   " She is too undignified!" Mrs. Grond declared, and it seemed as though the very merriest of Shell balls would fail in its promise, for Laura was meant to

start and keep things going at such entertainments.

   Of course, Laura heard. Who does not hear that they are left out, and whyi

   Laura learned on the instant that Mrs.Grond had declared against her, and that --- with this declaration Laura must inevitably sink to the social status of a social

secretary, or the wife of the caterer, or something like that.

   Laura did not receive an invitation from the committee. But in transcribing the invitations from list to envelopes, the card to the Doqueen Gronds was merely addressed to:

MR. DOQUEEN GROND

Admit One.

   The secretary made this blunder, and the pride of Mrs. Grond was so deeply injured at being left out that she promptly was taken sick, and when the invitation

came, belated and in proper form, she would not go.

   Moreover, Laura was there. She did not receive an invitation direct, for by some oversight of Mrs. Grond, Picking Joe was down as soloist on the violin,

and as the artist of the evening, his wife must necessarily be one of the guests despite the fact that he was a paid musician. He was paid one hundred dollars

for the night, and was worth it, every one agreed who heard the haunting melodies of the Mississippi's caving banks, rushing tide, singing sandbars, and whirling cyclones rendered that night from among the palms.

   That night, the shanty-boat lady established herself, so that it did not at all matter whether Mrs. Grond was sick or well.

CHAPTER V.

PEARLS OF PRICE.

THE fashionable season closed in Mendova when the Mississippi River spring tide reached the thirty-five-foot mark on the waterfront. The flood, overflowing Hawk Island, compelled the shanty-boaters in the floating town to seek new berths for their boats, and some of them tripped away into the back water, and some dropped down the river, and some worked up into the swamps, out of the way of wind and waves. 

   Among the rest, Picking Joe and Dancing Laura tripped down to the mouth of White River and towed up to the pearling settlement of houseboats, below Newport. There they determined to spend the summer. Both were glad to be out of the crowd, and living the simple shanty-boat life again. Laura was satisfied, and Joe was happy, because she was contented. All he asked in life was that the beautiful girl who had come to share his life should be happy, comfortable, and satisfied.

   There was no money problem on the boat. Joe had never known anything about keeping money or earning money. Laura attended to all that. She had cleared more than three thousand dollars that winter, and they had not spent on living half what Picking Joe took in because he could play in a way that reached the hearts of his audience. He played when she told him to, and he would have played to a blank wall, or to a crowded auditorium, or to see a dog howl, if she had ordered him to.  If Laura contented herself to retreat to a shanty-boat town, she was not content to let go of all the strings which she

had caught hold of during the winter season. Far from it! She wrote letters and received letters, a dozen or a score in every weekly mail that came down in the steamboat.

   Moreover, visitors came. There was a young engineer on the relief corp, during the spring tide, who met her in the shanty-boat town, when he was seeking an oarsman. He came to call on her, and he took her out on the gasoline rescue boat to bring away people who were sitting on the roofs of their houses, waiting for succor. These little trips in the busy boat were a delight to her, and novel.Picking Joe was not jealous of Laura's admirers. He understood that they, like him, appreciated this beautiful and talented soul that had become his wife.

Meanwhile he was busy playing for the local opera or as a soloist, with his repertoire of Mississippi River music.

   Thus was Mendova's judgment approved and confirmed.

   CHAPTER VI.

MURDER!

ATTORNEY GENUUN was one of the men whom Laura Cartern met. He had given her a paper purporting to be a divorce from Clarence Pauley. At first he held aloof from her, though she rapidly advanced in the society of which he was a member by right of birth and manners.

   Genuun, however, became reconciled to her presence in society when he fell under her charm of manner---that is, under the spell of her quite reckless flirting.

   Her smiles might not affect the coldness of his heart, but did give him a feeling of distinction, and he craved distinction, success, fame, because he needed them all

in his profession to earn him money 

   He swallowed a certain amount of pride when he took to writing out Mississippi River shanty-boat divorce papers at the standardized rate of seventeen dollars

and fifty cents per divorce. Now one of his clients had come to the city of Mendova and appeared in his circle of friends and acquaintances. He was not without

uneasiness on that score.

   He would think about the matter when he was in his offices, and when he was unoccupied. He felt that she knew the divorce he had granted was a humbug, but he wondered what would happen if it should come out somehow. Would she not sometime tell about it?

   He thought probably she would not. Still, he was not sure but that she might inadvertently betray herself in some way. There were scores of divorce papers such

as she had on the Mississippi, all of recent date, and all signed by Attorney Genuun.

   His first one of the kind had seemed a good joke, and he had laughed about it. Others came on rapidly, and he had a monopoly of that business. It was good business, worth his office rent at least.

   While the shanty-boaters remained on the river, there was no possible harm, but in Mendova, one of his social equals---that was another matter.

   He never thought of Mrs. Cartern without thinking of her anomalous position, through his own malpractice. In time, however, he let the matter slip into the background of his thoughts. She was gracious to him, and gave him rather neat opportunities for advertising himself in a

genteel way. She cast him for the part of attorney in any of the plays that she put on within his circle.

   He was a fine-appearing man, and he looked the part well. He carried himself with aplomb, and sometimes they edited the plays to make his part more forceful,

more impressive. She never referred to their previous transaction. It was as if she had forgotten it and preferred to have it forgotten. If she had mentioned it, he

would have been glad quietly to obtain for her a real divorce.

   He did not neglect calling upon Dancing Laura whenever occasion offered.

   He took part in three or four of her playlets the first winter, and these took him to her private office on several occasions.

   Two or three times he rehearsed in her inner rooms. More than once he accompaniéd her from the Hill down to Main Street and uptown to the ferry at Poplar

Slough, where she crossed to the cabin-boat on the opposite bank.

   Other men had nearly equal privileges. He resented some of the men, and none more so than Picking Joe. It seemed to him as more than wastefulness that Pick-

ing Joe should be her husband. Of course, he could not comprehend that Picking Joe was the only kind of man who would suit such a place as her husband must

occupy 

   Joe had absolute faith in his wife, and it was justified. She was a playful flirt and no more. Some of the men who hung around were flattered when they were bantered on their intimacy with Dancing

Laura. It gave them a kind of distinction around town, but in their hearts they were ashamed of themselves if they did not instantly resent the base insinuations.

   "You're careless with those pearls---if they are real!" Genuun told her one night when they drove in a hack to the Hawk Island ferry. Suppose some river-rat should know that you had them?"

   "I'm a river-rat," she told him half seriously. "They do not harm their own"

   "But they are immensely valuable! Are they American pearls?"

   "Joe and I found them ourselves in a little bayou east of White River last summer," she told him, holding them out to look at the larger ones down by her chin.

   "Real!" he protested. "Why, they're worth a fortune! You must be careful of them!"

   She laughed at him, and told Joe what he had said a little later.

   "They's wuth a heap!" 

   "You don't want me to sell them" she asked.

   "I wish we had a thousand of them, to hang around yo' neck, gal!" he exclaimed. "Don' yo' know what I think,

Good Gal?"

   "I know you are a dear!" She kissed him. 

   People who had supposed Laura's pearls were imitations now learned in gossip around that they were genuine pearls worth fifty thousand dollars or so on a

shanty-boat woman's neck! It was astonishing, and it did not harm the interest people took in the dancing visitant who was so capable a manager. She managed

little plays, and she managed men and women and events.

   One thing happened which she did not manage.

She was downtown one December afternoon. It was cold and frosty and raw, with a white, dull sun shining out of the southwest. As she walked she saw on the opposite side of the street a stooped, shapeless kind of a man, shambling along, all dressed in rags and with

rubber boots full of holes

   And yet he was someone she had known at some previous time. She looked twice at him, puzzled, and then she saw him look her way, straighten up,

and stop where he stood.

   She recognized him then and turned away feeling sick at heart.

   It was Clarence Pauley, and he had run through his thirty thousand dollars inheritance, and this was all that was left of him---a river tramp. She was not sure

that he recognized her, for after a questioning stare, he slumped forward and ambled on unsteadily

She needed all her furs at that moment, for a chill horror overcame her. It was not that Clarence Pauley frightened her---not in the least. But she had married Clarence Pauley when he was a bright-looking, well-appearing, rollicking young man with many good features. He had gone down "Whisky River," and there

he was-sodden. All that was left of a man was there across the street.

   When she found Joe in her studio on her return, she was very glad. She kept everybody waiting while she took him to their favorite window, where they could

look down to the Mississippi River and talk. She told him whom she had seen, and whispered in his ear that never for a second would she regret coming to Joe.

   "But I'm sorry for him, Joe! He's all gone to pieces. He's not even mean or desperate any more---just a slouch, and no 'count. I'm sorry for him!"

   "Them that pulls down whisky enough gits thataway!" He shook his head. "Hit's ornery stuff, whisky is!"

   "And I'm proud of my man who doesn't touch a drop!" she whispered, and then, with a little pang, she asked:

"And, Joey, you trust me, don't you? You know--- "

   "All I know's yo' told me!" he declared. "I'm not much account, Good what Gal! I'm jes' a po'r feller, off the river, Pickin' Joe! I ain't no rights, havin' a

lady like yo' is-"

   "Joey! Joey! Don't!" She buried her face against his neck. "I'm dreadful, Joey--- but you know---you know that I'm not wicked?"

   "I know hit!" he acknowledged. But if yo' was mean, an' I died, I'd sit down around the gates o' hell, gal, an' me'in yo'd go to it together Yassuh, they ain't no heaven 'thout yo's into hit!"

   After a time he left her, and walked downtown. He had nothing to do that night. His wife had on a full dress rehearsal of a play for the Pirogues. She probably would not come down to the boat that night, for the weather was threatening.

   Besides, there was something nameless in the wind. She had seen Clarence Pauley. People had worried her a little about her pearls. Mendova harbored some pretty desperate men, as the records showed. If they should learn about that string of pearls and how careless

she was with them-there was no telling what might happen.

   The rehearsal lasted long that night, and it was after twelve o'clock when most of the players started for home in their carriages, automobiles, and with their escorts. Mrs. Cartern admitted that she was hungry, and a party of seven rode downtown to the Savoy for oysters.

They heard the oysters opened and a little later they were served, according to the taste of the diners.

Attorney Genuun, Manager Crome of the opera house, Treton Moyle, Mrs. Moyle, Archie Falldy, Miss Danso were of the party. Genuun drank a glass of wine with Manager Crome. Miss Danso dared smoke a cigarette with Mrs. Moyle. That was the kind of a party it was. It did not last long till considerably after 1 o'clock, and then they all drove home in Crome's automobile.  They stopped first at the Murlow Apartments to let Mrs. Cartern go home.

   Genuun accompanied her to the entrance, and she let herself in with a key, but just as she was entering, Hombre the writer and Havelin the artist came along

"Hello!" the greeting passed around, and as every one had something to say the four returned to the automobile and stood there talking.

   Hombre said: "They've put on four extra policemen

tonight. The police commissioners say there must be a stop put to the burglaries and entering that has been going on in town. All the river-rats---

   "Now, Mr. Hombre!" Mrs. Cartern warned him severely. "I'm a river-rat!"

   "Oh, shucks!" Hombre exclaimed. "You know what I mean!"

   "Certainly-river-rats!" to her, saying: "All alone in that studio!" 
   There was a laugh, and Genuun turned

   "You, yourself, ought to be cautious!

   "Oh, no one’ll hurt me!" she protested. 

   "No, of course not---but your pearls--- jewelry!" The attorney persisted. "Think what a haul they would be!"

   "I refuse to be frightened!" she laughed. "Now, good night, every one!" She turned and ran gaily into the building, and Hombre and Havelin followed

leisurely. The automobile pulled away. It left the attorney at his door and the others at theirs.

   The storm that had threatened did not materialize. Instead, it had turned off quite warm, and in the morning the sun was up balmy and springlike, after the

manner of Mississippi Bottom late fall days.

   Miss Trude, Mrs. Cartern's secretary accountant, and office manager, came to the studio next morning and opened the three offices as usual.

   Mrs. Cartern had not appeared, nor did she appear from the inner rooms before Miss Trude went out to lunch. 

   When Miss Trude returned she found the police in charge of the studio, and learned that Dancing Laura had been murdered and robbed during the night!

A passer-by on Drool Street, happening to glance up at the rear window which looked toward the Mississippi, had seen a long, slim arm and extended hand sticking out from the window of the studio. Straining to see more, he discovered the woman's dead face. He ran to a telephone, called the police headquarters, and the motorcycle cops learned that it was true.

Dancing Laura had been murdered!

CHAPTER VII

PICKING JOE GETS THE TRUTH.

PICKING JOE, sitting alone on his cabin-boat in Poplar Slough, took out his banjo and began to play.

He played for hours. He did not know what time it was. He did not care. It was laggard time, however, for Laura was away and she would not return that night. 

   Still, she might return, at that!

   It was like one of his old, lonesome river nights, when he had no one to love and nothing but his music to enjoy. Now all his music was played to Laura, because she liked music and was kind to him and wanted him to play. He would have preferred to live down a lonely bend

with her, him playing to her, but she liked to see him playing to crowds-which was all right, for it brought in more money in a night than he had ever made in months in the olden days.

   Along in the night, sometime, he turned into the bed and went to sleep, to dream of sunny weather and warm breezes, and a fairy-girl who came to minister to his wants. The fairy was Laura, and she was no lovelier in his dreams than she was in reality. 

He was sleeping when he felt the boat rocking. That was unusual in the narrow waters of Poplar Slough. He awakened, and listened, wondering if a motorboat had passed up or down the slough, making waves. He heard no motorboat, but he felt something.

   He recognized the motion. His boat was swinging loose. It was no longer tied to the bank. He started up and looked out of the window, and there was a light

far away across wide waters, as shown by the long reflection---a government light in a river bend, for a certainty.

   "I must be dreamin' " he told himself. He seized his automatic pistol, and crept aft to look at the stern. No one was there. He crept to the bow, and no one was on the bow deck. He looked on the cabin roof, and that was bare, save for the two sweeps which he had placed

up there when they tied in for the winter.

   " Ain't this yeah plumb ridiculous!" he said to himself.

He found that the lines of his boat dangled from the bow and stern, and when he pulled them in, he found what

had happened. Some one had cast the loops off the stakes and let him go adrift.

   It was an old river trick, and Picking Joe laughed.

   A man as happy in life as he was could not be angry with any one.. He put down his sweeps, set them in the pins, and rowed across the current till he came into an

eddy below a sand-bar. He did not know just where he was, but he calculated that he was fifteen or twenty miles below Mendova. He anchored, and after a look

at the east, where dawn was just appearing, he turned in to sleep again.

   It was after ten o'clock when at last he awakened; then he cooked breakfast and kept his eye on the river for a chance to tow up-stream to Mendova. It was of course, impossible for him to row up with his sweeps. If he floated downstream, it would be a long way to any

one who would tow him up.

   "I hope Laura ain't come down this mornin'!" he said to himself. 

   About three o'clock in the afternoon he saw a motor-boat com as ing down the river, but he did not recognize it. He went out to the bow deck, and when the boat

came rounding the sand-bar he waved his hat to make certain they came in to him. The launch came plowing alongside and stopped.

   Howdy, gentlemen!" he greeted them. "I lowed like's not yo'all'd do me a favor. I want a tow up to Poplar Slough. Somebody cut me loose last night, an' I was asleep, an' hyar I be! Ain't that plumb ridiculous? An old

riveh man, cut loose, an' floatin' down!" " What time was that?" one of the men asked sharply.

"I don't know. I played my banjo till 'long ag'in' midnight, I expect, an' then I went to bed. Next I knowed, I was

rockin' down a crossin'---this un out theh dad blast who tied me loose!"

   "We'll give you a tow up, Cartern."

   "Sho! Yo' gem'men!"

   "Yes---we just came down looking for you. They were wondering where yo' was."

   "Hit mus' of be'n my wife, wonderin' Yo' know, suh, Dancin' Laura. She's my wife."

   "Yes, we know," one of the men replied, and the three men in the motor-boat looked at one another.

   "Yo' all's a policeman?" Joe asked, as they made fast, while he pulled up the anchor.

   "Yes, Joe."

   "Now want that womanlike? Worriet about me down old Mississip' ! Course, she didn't know if somebody'd come in an' hit me a clip on the haid. But, shucks!

Nobody'd hurt old Pickin' Joe!'"

   They started the motor, and as it was a strong launch and engine, they rapidly towed the light houseboat up the eddy, and on their way to Mendova.

   "Did you see Dancing Laura yesterday?" one of the men asked.  "Yassuh. I was theh into the studia 1

'long about four o'clock in the evenin'."

  "Me'n her had a nice, long talk. Yo know, she's powerful busy now'days."
  "What'd she talk about, Joe?"

  "Lawse! Kind of foolish talk-yo' know---I don't know what that gal sees to like in me, boys. I ain' no 'count."

The men were embarrassed, but Joe was looking at the river. His mind was upon Laura.

   "Was she worried about anything?" one asked casually. "About you?"

   "No, suh. No, not to amount to any-thing 'course-"

   " 'Course what?"

   "A friend of hern talked about somebody mout took her pearls"

   "Yes?"

   "Yassuh, Mr. Genuun, the lawyer feller, yo' know."

   "He called on her-you knew that?"

   "Yas, suh-real friendly. Hit's nice of people, them proud up-the-bankers, bein nice to Laura. Hit's company fo' her

when she gits to wantin' friends around."

   "And you don't mind?"

   "No, suh. If she's happy-"

The men were silent for a time. Then 

   "Was she worried about the pearls-

   "No-well, yo' see how hit is. I expect when she asted yo' fellers to find me, she feared-she 'lowed-"

   "What?" one asked, as Joe hesitated, embarrassed.

   "Yo' know, I wa'nt her first husband.

   Her first man was Clarence Pauley. He's on the riveh now. She seen him uptown yestehd'y. I did, too, but hit were on'y jes' happen so. We met, up theh on Main

Street, an' he 'pologized to me, an' showed he was friendly."

   "Apologized---showed he was friendly?"

   “Yas, suh."

   "For what---why---of course there had been trouble?"

   "Yas, suh. Up in New Madrid Eddy he chased her ovehbo'd with a knife when he was crazy drunk. Then I rowed out into my bo't an' we tripped down together. He was real mad. I expect that's what she thought of-Clarence mout be mean, an' try to kill me ag'in. But

shucks! He-'"

   "Again?"

   "Yas, suh. Hit weren't much. Up theh in Beef Island Chute, one time, he come down an' lowed to shoot her an' me. We knowed hit. But I got a neck an' hip holt onto him, an' throwed him ovehbo'd, so's he wouldn't hurt us. They was ten-twelve theh, fellers, an' women, too. I expect she was worried thataway. But she needn't to. He come to me an'pologized. Hit were yistehd'y."

   "What did he say?" а young man asked.

   "Jes' that he hadn't no hawd feelin's no mo'. He 'lowed he'd kind of brace up, an' stop *drinkin', but shucks! He

never would. Course he wouldn't! I give him some money-"

   "Much?"

   "Why---I---yas, suh. Yo' see, my wife thought enough of him to marry him wunst."

   "And you gave him?"

   "Twenty dollar, suh. He -- he 'mos' cried, suh. I told him hit weren't no count. I told him Laura had two, three

thousand dollars, an' I give him anotheh twenty. I got lots, gem'men. Hit don't take much money, livin' onto a shanty-boat."

   "Yo' told him that!"

   " Yas, suh."

   The men looked at each other, and the younger one openly made notes on folded sheets of writing-paper. They arrived in Poplar Slough and landed at the ferry-

boat. An automobile was waiting there, and around it were gathered several men and boys, but the three men hurried Joe into the machine.

   "Hit's real friendly, takin' me right to her!" he said to them. "I 'low she's worriet, right smart."

   When they arrived at the studio there was a crowd that filled Cypress Street in front of it and on the Drool Street

side as well. Picking Joe looked at the crowd in wonderment, but the police there pressed the crowd back while the three men hurried Joe into the hallway

and the up to the third floor. There were many people in the offices, but Joe was taken back through the hallway to the first of the two rooms.

   Inside was a whispering group which started to their feet as Joe and the three men entered. Without a pause they pushed him into the rear room, empty and just as it was found that noon.

   Joe was half-way across the floor before he noticed anything. Then his eyes, searching to right and left, fell upon the still figure by the window. 

   Laura sat there by the window in her night-gown and a heavy blue bathrobe.

   One bare arm stuck far out the window.

   Her head rested on the sill, and her face was turned out, toward the river 

   "Laura!" Joe whispered. "Laura! Fo' Gawd's sake, Laura!"

   He staggered, stepped toward, and then his knees gave way. He reached the cold figure, however, crawling on his hands and knees. He began to cry, to moan, and

then, straightening up on his feet, he stood rigid for a moment, after which he fell over on his back, striking the thick rug with his head. 

   "He didn't do it!" one of the detectives remarked. " But he gave us a clue!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE PEARL CHUNK

DANCING LAURA CARTERN had been murdered in cold blood.

   She had been struck on the head with some heavy instrument, and an examination of the objects in the room indicated that this instrument was a heavy, almost solid bronze statuette, about nine inches high, and a copy of one of the many statues of Venus.

   The pedestal was round, and when it was examined closely, one rim of the pedestal was discovered to be bent in, and there was a blood-stain on it. Whoever had struck the blow had placed the Venus back on its stand, and

there was a segment of a circle there, where the stain from the statuette had stained the polished wood. Moreover, the statuette rocked on its stand because of the bulge in the rim.

   What had taken place no one could say, of course. But Laura had been in bed. There was a dent in the pillow where she had laid upon the low divan which served as an emergency bed. There was no sign of a struggle there. Part way to the door, however, was a crumpled handkerchief. Beside the window, near the rigid figure, was a horn stool, out from the wall on its side, and appearing quite as though a second person had sat upon it. The murderer, perhaps, had overturned it when he struck the fatal blow on top of her head when she turned to look out the window.

The garments which she had discarded upon retiring were hanging in a recess, arranged to be a closet, or thrown over three different chairs. Her stockings, thin, plain mauve-colored silk, were on the floor. Garters hung from her corset, which was under the window that was nearest the corner of the room looking out on Drool Street. One of the garter-clasps was missing, however. It had been pulled off with a jerk.

   On the rug under the library table in the middle of the room were three rings, stickpin, and a bar-pin, all jewels. In a drawer of the library table were three bank-books, showing deposits amounting to several thousand dollars, but it was known that Laura always had from five to fifteen hundred dollars in cash, and the broken garter elastic was readily associated with the hasty work of the murderer, when he seized the billfold with its belt-loops through a ring garter, and partly supported by the corset-straps. 

What had happened?

   There were no signs of violence on the doors. There was no indication that the woman had had opportunity to struggle against her fate. Hombre and Havelin had heard nothing, but both agreed that they left the front door in the entrance locked. The janitor found the door unlocked when he stirred out just at daybreak---unlocked and open. 

   The motorcycle cops who came in response to the first alarm found that the door to the offices was locked, and that door to the first room from the hall was unlocked. In that room was the divan bed, which stood against the outer wall between the two windows, and served by day as a cushioned seat. The handkerchief which she had carried to bed with her was near that unlocked door. 

   Without doubt, the murderer had made his way to the door, been admitted---the key was inside the door-lock---and they had gone to the rear window and there sat down, she on the floor, her arm resting on the low window-sill, the other on the low horn stool.

   What person could go to Dancing Laura's room after midnight and be admitted without question? Picking Joe, her husband, of course. The first search was made for him, and when he was found to be no longer at his mooring place in Poplar Slough, the police felt that they had a direct clue.

   Dern Preel and Wem Poter, detectives, and Jurlen Colme, one of the Mendova Juvelin's reporters, first sought Picking Joe, and they went down the river after him. But Picking Joe eliminated himself as the midnight raider.

The scene that met his gaze in the room was a thunderbolt of horror, and he came out of his stupor begging for his violin. Clearly, he did not know what had happened. He could answer no question, and when they brought him his banjo and his violin, he dragged the bow over the strings in terrible discords.

   "I cayn't find hit, Laura!" he whispered. "Jes' d'rectly, I'll find hit!"

    He sat there, trying to find the strain of music that she wanted, as he thought, and he spent his days thereafter in that labor of love. It made a good story, and it was good evidence that he had not killed the woman. Even the detectives suggested that they had broken the news to him rather abruptly. However, the river fiddler had suggested a clue. Her former husband had been in town the day before, apologizing for trying to kill the couple up Beef Island way. The detectives did not know him by sight, but they knew his name. The city resorts were dragged from swell gambling den to low black-and-tan dive.

   In Poplar Slough they learned that Clarence Pauley had been seen around town the previous afternoon, and that he crossed the Hawk Island ferry about ten o'clock

   "He had a hog-pen onto a jon-bo't," Bill Azure, the ferryman, said. "I don't know if he drapped out immejet, er if he's up the slough."

   The jon-boat was not up the slough anywhere. Clarence Pauley had disap-

peared up or down the river. Warning was sent from Cairo to New Orleans to watch out for Clarence Pauley in a hog pen on a jon-boat.

   Robbery was the motive, of course. The string of matchless pink pearls had disappeared. A number of pieces of diamond jewelry were gone. No one knew how much money had been taken. Not all was taken, however. The detectives found a gold mesh-bag containing nearly a hundred dollars. It was under her hat, in a hat-box.

   The police determined that Dancing Laura had been killed by her former husband. He had already tried to kill both Laura and Picking Joe. It was clear that he had cut Joe loose in his houseboat and let him drift down the river, perhaps with some idea of killing him, too, or stealing the house-boat in place of the dirty little craft in which he had lived for months,

like a dog in a kennel "She wouldn't have let him in!" Colme exclaimed.

   "There's no telling what a woman would do for the first man she loved!"

Poter answered. "He's the man to find next.

   When it seemed as though the police had studied every phase of the matter and when the rooms seemed to have been examined to the utmost, an undertaker was called in and the marks of the tragedy were removed. Very little had to be done---astonishingly little, considering how much had been done. The statuette and the table on which it rested, the garments, and the body out of the way, and the place was almost exactly what it had been before.

   Yet, no one knowing what had taken place could enter those two rooms without feeling the deep mystery there. The detectives returned again and again, and the reporters returned day after day, while the sensation lasted. Nearly a week passed, and the story held its place on the first page

   Then everything seemed to have been written. Fiddling Joe was maudlin in the asylum; the body was in its grave; far and wide sheriffs, detective agencies, police were on the lookout for the missing Clarence Pauley. The owner of the Murlow Apartments consulted with Attorney Genuun regarding the things belonging to the dead woman in the offices and rooms. Genuun, naturally, had become the attorney to settle up the affairs of the estate.

   He advised that they be removed to a storage warehouse, to await the discovery of her relatives, if she had any, or for plans which were being made to turn the estate over for the support of poor Joe, whose condition awakened deep pity.

   "Of course, you had better notify the police what you are going to do," the attorney said. "They may wish to make some further examination, or take photographs, or something of that kind."

   Accordingly, the police were notified and a permit was granted by the State Attorney's office to remove the goods and chattels. Colme, the Javelin reporter, learned that the permit had been granted and he could not resist going to the apartment once more. It had been his first great story, and he had covered it well. 

   He had done everything he could think of, trying to trace the murderer. He went to the apartment and found that the packers had already arrived, and he stood in the rooms while the furniture was wrapped in burlap and while the window was left till the last, perhaps not entirely by chance. Then one of the two men gingerly took down the curtains there, and as they did so Colme saw something fall to the floor cut of the folds where the tassel restraining-cord had caught it.

   Colme picked up the little object and turned it over in his fingers. It was the shape of a crooked collar-button, but was of pure, wine colored pearl. At first glance, Colme did not see any significance in the thing, but when he looked at the now bare window from which the men had turned when they had gathered the draperies, he saw in his mind's eye the tragedy which had taken place there. The woman had been sitting by the window; her caller had been sitting on the chair. As she turned toward the river he raised his right arm and struck her on the head with the statuette, now marked exhibit No. I. 

   As he recalled his imagination's picture of that scene, it seemed to him as though he saw a little streak of light fly from the descending arm and strike into the folds of the curtain. It was, perhaps,a foolish thought, or vision, but Colme was a good reporter, and as he looked at the piece of misshapen pearl in his hand he knew that what he fancied was possible. 

    He put the find into his pocket, stood around while the last of the things were removed, and then he saw two old scrub- women come in with their brushes and pails and soap. All this made a good article for the paper to print the following day. Yet he did not say a word about the pearl chunk. He had other things in mind for that.

   He carried the pearl-chunk, first of all, to a jeweler on Main Street. The jeweler said in answer to a question:

   "Yes, that looks like real pearl---one of the odd-shaped slugs that turn up

sometimes. I don't know where it came from, though. It isn't a White River or St. Francis pearl. They run from whites to pinks and some a little darker, but not that color. I never saw that color before.

   Do you know where it came from?" " I was just wondering I picked it up," Colme answered. " Pearls aren't all alike then?"

   "Oh my, no! They are all colors---" Some colors from some places, some from another?"

"Yes, that's about the size of it."

   "I wonder if any one could tell where a pearl like that came from?

   "Pearl buyers know where a pearl comes from by the feel of it," the jeweler replied. "I can tell St. Francis and other Arkansas pearls myself

"I never knew that before!" Colme smiled. "Live and learn; much obliged to you!"

   Colme caught his breath when he was out on the street again. He had struclk a trail. He did not know which way it led, nor where it came from. He had a great pearl of strange shape, and some one might tell him where it was grown---some pearl buyer.

   Pearl buyers came through Mendova on their way to Newport, Big Bay, Marked Tree, and other in-swamp frontier towns. Colme watched the news items from the pearl towns, and thus he obtained the names of more than a dozen pearl buyers. Through jewelers' magazines he learned the names of others, and he wrote to every one of them, asking if they knew where wine-colored pearls came from, and who handled them.

   Four answers returned to him within four days, and all declared that wine colored pearls came from Cedar River Iowa, and two offered gems of that color. One afternoon, a week later, the office-boy brought a card to Colme from the visitors' room of the Javelin office. He read

JULES HERMAL

Pearls

   "I received your letter," Hermal explained, "and as I was passing this way, I thought I would stop in and see you. I am interested in all pearls, and have had some wine-colored ones."

   "This one?" Colme asked. The pearl man looked at the collar- button and turned it over in his hands.

   "The bottom was smoothed off by some one-perhaps cut flat, as you see,"

he showed one. “ That is from Cedar River, or one of its tributaries. It has a fine color, indeed."

   "Who---where could I find who sold it -bought it?"

   "There are several manufacturers who make up baroque sets, of course. Did you wish to match this one?"

   "I will tell you, in confidence, what I have in mind," the reporter said. "This pearl is connected, perhaps, with a murder . The victim is in her grave, but the villain is still at large. It is not certain, but this may have been his."

   "I understand. Now, I will tell you what I shall do. One of my friends is a color specialist. I will ask him---may I take this?"

   "Why---I---',

   "I am going to meet him at Newport."

   "Then I'll go with you! May I?" 

   "Good idea! Certainly."

In five minutes Colme had explained the situation to his city editor, and he was on his way to Newport. But the color specialist was not there. He had gone to Marked Tree, and there the two found him. He was Dulan Wrill.

   "Yes," he said of the pearl, "that is from Cedar River. It was probably cut and matched by Coleman, of St. Louis. He is a great hand to make up collar and cuff sets, and sell them to the trade."

   Without hesitation, Colme went to St Louis, and Coleman smiled when he saw the button.

"Yes, I cut that," he smiled. "Let me see."

   He turned to his books, and after searching a while, stopped at an item; 

 One doz, sets-Drume, Mendova.

   "There it is---I sold it to Drume. I remember, because that was the first time I ever sold him, and I picked a good selection."

Drume---Mendova?" Colme asked, and then he thanked the specialist.

   Drume was the leading jeweler in Mendova. He sold to the very highest class of customers. It was through him that Mrs. Cartern had had her pearls bored and strung. Half the engagement rings in town had been purchased there.

   And Drume hated newspapers, hated reporters, hated publicity; he would not even testify as a gem expert in court, nor had he reported to the police when one night some thief broke a window and carried away a tray full of rings. If penny-weighters ever stole in his store, or any one ever tried to switch gems on him, he never complained.

   "I might as well ask the public fountain for alms as to ask that man for information!" Colme thought to himself, as he returned to Mendova with the pearl and the meager satisfaction that the trail led into the store of a sphinx.

   At Paducah, the train-boy brought through an armful of newspapers, and voiced the news:

   "Mendova murderer caught!" 

   "What!" Colme exclaimed, buying a copy of the Javelin, which had been printed that morning. Sure enough, the three-column headline read: FUGITIVE RUN DOWN

Police Find Clarence Pauley, Wanted for the murder of Mrs. Cartern. River Rat, Formerly the Woman's Husband, Had Been in Hiding for Nearly a Month, Tied in Watchie River. Denies Guilt, But He Was in Mendova Day Before and Night of the Murder---Identified positively by Attorney Genuun, Executor of the Estate.

    Colme read the long account through, and regretted that he had not been on Polvin who had written the account, he recognized. Polvin was a good man at gathering facts, but he mixed them all up in a jumbled mess. Besides, he did not know the story of Mrs. Cartern very well, and he made several stupid blunders in speaking about it--- said the body was found on the floor, for instance, and that it was "partly dressed," and that there were "signs of a terrific struggle."

   "She was sitting by the window, she was in her night gown and bathrobe, and she did not have even a struggle for her life!" Colme swore wrathfully

   The big story had broken while he was away! He had lost a good chance to spread himself. His little wine-colored pearl button, leading into the sphinx, looked very small indeed in the light of the capture of Clarence Pauley, former husband of Dancing Laura, and accused of her murder in the Murlow Apartments.

   When he arrived, late in the afternoon, he found that the story was no longer his. Polvin had been working on the case, and he had done it secretly. It was through his questioning of river people that he learned that Pauley was down in Watchie River, where he pretended to be trapping and fishing.

   Associating with shanty-boaters along Poplar Slough, Polvin had won their friendship long before, and now he was on intimate terms with them, his beat of covering river news giving him the chance to know the river people. Polvin tipped the police and scored the big story of the day.

   "Next time you go to sleuthing, wish you wouldn't spend so much money

chasing wild geese!" the city editor grumbled over the bill of expenses, and Colme could not have had two worse rebukes.

   He was now just an onlooker of his own story. There was no doubt in the minds of the police that Pauley had done the job. He denied it, naturally, but he had two hundred dollars in cash, and his story of how he came by it was most wildly improbable.

   "A feller come an' said I should cut loose Fiddlin' Joe's bo't, an' if I do it that I'd git three hundred, an' I done hit, an' he met me an' give me the otheh two hundred, like a gentleman, and the way he 'greed to, yassuh. And he told

me to git out."

   "But who was this man?"

   "I don't know."

   "What did he look like?"

   "Hit were night, an' I didn't see him."

   "Where was it?"

   "On Poplar Slough, to my bo't. He were into a skiff."

   "What time?"

   "Six-seven o'clock, afteh dark. Next time, to'd mornin'."

   "And between times, where were you?"

   "Waitin' fo' Fiddlin' Joe to git tired of scrapin', an' go to sleeping ep, an' I could cut 'im loose."

   Was the man a big one or a small one?"

   " Hit were dark, suh."

   " Had you been drinking?"

   A little, suh---I wan't drunk!"

   "What kind of a voice did he have?"

   "Mumbly, like he had too big a chaw of tobac' in his mouth."

"Who did you see when you were uptown

   "Why---my wife, all dressed up to kill!"

   "And you wanted some of the money?

   "No, suh. No, suh, what she'd earned was hern. Lawse! But she were purty"

   "And her pearls?

   "I don't know, suh."

   "Why didn't you come to Mendova when you learned she was killed?"

   "I didn't know hit, suh, till the detectors tol' me

 "What time did you start down the river?"

   "Soon's I cut Joe's bo't loose."

   "What time was that?"

   "Long in the mornin', suh-two-three o'clock. I give him lots of time to git to sleep. He was a riveh man. Yo' cayn't trick 'em careless, suh."

   "Clarence Pauley! You are lying. You murdered Dancing Laura, your former wife, because she would not give you money-blackmail!" 

"No, suh! I told the Gawd's truth, suh!"

   These were the official notes of the questioning. Out of them it was shown that about the time the murderer made his getaway. Clarence had pulled down the river in his jon-boat, and thereafter he remained hidden in a swamp for weeks, and yet with plenty of money on his person!

CHAPTER IX.

IN PURSUIT OF THE PAPERS

WHEN the police examined the jon-boat in which Pauley had lived, they made one interesting discovery. The jon-boat was eighteen feet long, four feet wide in the middle, tapering to three feet width at each end, where the bow and stern sloped up to bow and stern boards. Over the stern was an A-shaped hut, with bunk, supplies, and bedding in it. The hut was nearly ten feet long, and in the bow was a seat and oar-locks, so that the river navigator could row whither he pleased.

   In a little more than two years the heir of thirty thousand dollars had sunk from the sixty-foot Holocaust to this little " hog-pen," and the change in the two boats was hardly greater than in the appearance of Clarence Pauley in ready money and the river-rat Clarence Pauley.

   One was sleek, daring, swaggering; the other was a stooped, whiskery, unclean wretch.

   But through all the vicissitudes of his descent, he had kept just two things one was a plain gold ring, which he wore on his little finger; the other was the wedding certificate showing that at one time he had been the husband of Dancing Laura.

   The great hour in Pauley's life, judged by the remnants in the jon-boat, had not been when he received his heritage, but that other hour when he married Dancing Laura.

   In spite of the tragic connection, the Polvin reported the certificate as a humorous thing. When Colme read that reference, he wanted to go break Polvin's head. Polvin had no idea of the fitness of things, and the copy

editor had let it go through and into the paper because he could think of no quick way to take the lightness out of the paragraph referred to the wedding. All that day people around Mendova laughed about the murderer who had

saved the wedding certificate which, by custom, belonged to the woman. He, not the woman, had preserved it!

   The detectives were of the opinion that the wedding certificate, a sheet of linen paper, engraved with gold and the blanks filled in with black India ink, was good evidence---an important link in the " chain" they talked about having welded from the studio victim to the river rat in his jon-boat

Their insistence on this point caused Colme, who was in the background now.

to ponder over that feature of the case. The wedding certificate was there, an exhibit in the State's case, but Colme asked himself wonderingly " Where is the divorce?"

   For a time he did not realize what question he had asked, but the next minute he sat up and asked the question as though he meant it:

   " Where are the divorce papers?"

   That was the question. He had heard that she was divorced before the tragedy. He knew that she was a remarried woman, so to speak. During his own handling of the case, when he had mentioned the former husband, he had accepted the fact of the divorce without question.     

   It occurred to him that here was an interesting matter, and he looked into it himself. He went first to see Clarence Pauley, and Pauley, who was in the jail corridor with other prisoners, readily acepted the fact of the divorce without question. Pauley had shaved, put on a new suit of clothes, new shoes, and had grown a bit pale in the jail. He was coming up out of the life he had been living. The reporter walked to one side to talk with him.

   The fact that he was accused of murder stiffened his backbone. The case was serious.    No one believed his protestations of innocence. He was frightened, and some of his people back in Pennsylvania had come to his rescue, to the extent of hiring a lawyer and supplying him with funds.

   "Where did Mrs. Pauley get her divorce from you?" Colme asked 

   "You a reporter?"

   "Yes-and I tell you now, I believe you told the truth and I want to prove it.
 "God! Stranger, I---you're the first friend that's seen me!" Pauley shook his head. Nobody said that to me before. I've been down, and I've been no good---I went to pieces, and was a river-rat in a nest, looked like one, acted like one, talked like one---but I never killed Laura, so help me!"

   " Where did she obtain her divorce---in what State? In what court?"

   " Why, I never asked. She had a lawyer, went to him. All the river people do, when they want divorce."

   " Who was that?"

   " Fellow name of Genuun-_"

   “ What!"

   "Genuun. He kind of looked after shanty-boaters' lawing. They pay well, you know."

   "I see. You know she obtained a divorce? They served papers on you?"

   "It was done by advertising?"

   "Like as not. I don't know law."

   "But you heard she was divorced?"

   "Oh, yes, here in Mendova. She married here, I heard. I tried to meet up with them. I---that's how they kind of got me. I was crazy drunk.    Always when I was drinking I wanted to kill

her. When I came on the shanty-boat, Picking Joe threw me overboard, or I'd shot her. I've thanked God he did it, ever since. I went bad, but I let up liquor after that. I used ---

   "Coke?"

   "Yes-I doped. It didn't make me ugly. I wanted to forget. But I stopped on Main Street that night she was killed. I didn't know it, but that was the day"

   "You saved the wedding certificate?"

   "Yes, sir, in oiled silk. She gave me this ring, but they won't let me have the certificate. I kept it because --- " You liked her, then?"

" God! If I'd only left liquor alone!"

   It was a cry of despair.

   Colme left the prisoner, who was growing strong in his wretchedness. Walking up Main Street, Colme came to the siough where the Cartern house-boat was moored in care of the ferryman. This boat had been searched from top to bottom, and everything that might mean

anything had been carried to the court, but it was not seeing the boat Colme wanted; it was the thoughts he collected as he walked along.

   One thing became very clear; if it could not be shown that Laura Pauley had obtained a legal divorce from Clarence Pauley, her connection with Picking Joe Cartern was extra-legal, and

Pauley was naturally her heir if no relatives of hers showed up. Attorney Genuun was the shanty-boaters' attorney? That was news, in a

way, but now that he thought of it, Genuun had appeared in a number of store-boat, theater-boat, and similar cases. He was executor of Dancing Laura's estate and guardian of Picking

Joe. In all that had been printed, no

mention had been made that Genuun was the attorney through whom Laura had obtained her divorce.

   Colme went to the Chancery Court and, with the clerk, searched the records for any mention of Pauley vs. Pauley, or any case in which the Pauley matter had figured. There was no record. But when Colme asked a shanty-boat man in Poplar Slough where Mrs. Pauley obtained her divorce the answer was:

   "Hyar in Mendova, suh."

   "Where was she married?"

   "Right yeah, too, suh, soon's she had 'vorce.

   "Who by?"

   "Justice of Peace Croven, suh. Gen'ly, he marries us chanty-boaters."

   Sure enough, in the justice' books was the record, plain as day. They were united in holy wedlock on October 14. 

   " Do you remember that couple?" Colme asked.

   Croven took off his spectacles, wiped them, looked at the names. 

   "Why-fo' Gawd's sake! I did marry them, didn't ! Theh I be'n readin' about that murder, an' astin' where did I see that woman-no!

   "I reckleck now!" the justice remarked, after considering a minute 

   " Yassuh, she were a pretty piece o' beef, yassuh. She come with that Fiddlin' Joe, an' showed their 'vorce papers, an' I hitched 'em up-"

   "Their divorce papers?"

   " Yassuh. Attorney Gen" Justice Croven stopped short and swallowed hard. "They had to have 'vorce papers, most of them shanty boaters. I---I was real putucklar about that I ---"

"Where were they granted? I mean the Pauley divorce?"

   "Why---why---I fo'get, suh, I---perhaps yo' betteh talk to Attorney Genuun, suh. He-I 'low he handled the correspondence, suh. She were---I b'lieve she were a non-resident, suh. I forgit what State she was from, but, course, she vorced in her home State, suh!"

   "Thank you," Colme told the justice, turning away. He left the office, a small room such as an attorney would use. He did not slam the door, but walked away from it quite briskly---to return on his tiptoes and listen.  

   Croven was talking into the telephone

   "Hello! Hello-that yo', Mr. Genuun? Yassuh. This is Justice Croven, suh. That reporter feller, Colme, of the Javelin, was jes' yeah, suh. He asted about my marryin' Dancin' Laura an' Fiddlin'-Pickin' Joe. I told him she

got her 'vorce off yonder, in her own State some'rs. Yassuh. I jes' 'lowed yo betteh know, suh. I'd plumb fo'got hit, suh. Oh, that's all right, suh-perfessional court'sy, yo' know. Yassuh- good-by!'"

   Colme tiptoed away. He had heard something that startled him more than anything he had heard in a long time.

   Yet he knew that this was the kind of a lawyer Genuun was---tricky, unscrupulous, making easy money.

   No wonder the divorce papers haven't added up!" Colme smiled to himself.

   "I wonder where the detectives found them? I wonder which one got them out of sight? This is a new lead, all right.

   I'll just keep mum and keep busy."

 CHAPTER X.

GENUUN'S " CERTIFICATES."

THE State's case was perfect in theory.

   Clarence Pauley had proved himself a very capable criminal. He had tried to kill his wife at New Madrid; again he had tried to kil her at the shanty-boat dance. On both occasions, Picking Joe, the fiddler and banjo picker had saved her.  Pauley, with the insane cleverness of a determined murderer, had planned his next venture very carefully. He had come to town and searched out the lay of the land. The detectives had discovered a dozen witnesses who could place Pauley at certain hours down to later than nine o'clock on the night of the murder.

   After that hour, the fates had printed the evidence in the indelible ink of cir-

cumstances. The cunning Pauley had feared, with reason, the interference of Picking Joe, who twice had saved Dancing Laura from his hate. So now Pauley, in the dark of the night, had lurked in Poplar Slough, while Picking Joe was played on his violin. At last, the river musician had retired to bed. Then, while he slept, Pauley had cast the ropes off their stakes and let the houseboat drift silently down and out into the Mississippi River.

   Picking Joe was clear and away now. He could not interpose his strong arm to save his wife!

   All that tale of the mysterious stranger who talked in the dark---who paid him

to do these things---whom none produced and none could produce---was part and parcel of the murderer's ingenious plan.

   The way was now clear for the consummation of his purpose. He went through the streets, now practically deserted, to the studio. He entered and climbed to the third floor. He knocked, and when he spoke softly, and in terms of old, he had awakened in his former wife's heart some memory, some pity, perhaps; some excuse for her to let him in. 

   She had admitted him.

   He had gone with her to the window, to look out at the Mississippi flowing by, a wide, glowing torrent in the night.

   They had talked of what things only the murderer could tell.

   Perhaps he had urged her to return to him? Perhaps he had begged for money? Perhaps he had apologized to her for his misdeeds---and then with the statuette lifted stealthily and with malice from its stand, just as she turned to look at the river again, he struck her with full force and killed her.

   The escape was as stealthily bold and successful as the approach.

   This was the case as the detectives and State's attorney had built it together. They were all proud of it. They indicated its fine points to Colme, who now came and asked about the case from which he had been beaten, but in which he still claimed a deep interest.

   They did not know where the divorce papers were. The State's attorney was, for the instant, nonplused by the suggestion that if they were-not produced the accused man was heir of the murdered woman. 

   He saw the point and it puzzled him, but he brushed it aside easily.

   "His inheritance will do him a lot of good, when the trap springs under his

feet!" the attorney remarked grimly.
   Colme talked with all the detectives

and bicycle policemen who were on the case in the beginning. He discussed it with other reporters who had covered it.

   He so far covered his resentment as to ask his rival Polvin how it was coming on, and getting some inside details in that way. 

   He returned to the scene of the murder, which, despite the scrubbing given

the floor, the new paint on the wood-work, the new paper on the wall, was

still for rent.

   The landlord could not see why a murder in an apartment as fine as that one should keep hanging to the place.

   He had even been obliged to let the fashionable photographer on the top floor go, because his customers refused to come to the building.

   Standing there by the window where the woman had been struck down, Colme looked at the far river, and then down into the yard beneath. There were high fences on both sides and a blank brick wall at the end of this yard. The yard was grown full of weeds, and there was considerable rubbish in two corners.

   "I'd like to look through that yard," Colme thought to himself, and he easily obtained permission to go into it. It was so seldom entered that the door was swelled fast in the cellar, and he opened it with difficulty, the landlord explaining that it hadn't been opened in months.

   The janitor's bell, ringing, called that worthy back, and Colme had the yard

to himself. He went first to the ground directly under the window. Weeds grew

there in plenty, and on the ground under them, when he had parted them, was a little chamois bag, containing a thousand dollars' worth of gems and jewels. 

   With these in his pocket, Colme looked back and forth, and far and wide, and over against the fence, in some more weeds, hanging upon them, was a square of oiled silk, sewed up like a bag. When he lifted the flap and looked within, he found a heavy piece of parchment. He drew that out, and there was a paper which "By these presents"declared. Laura Loone divorced from Clarence Pauley and permitted to resume her own name.

   It was signed, with a large flourish, by Colweld Genuun. It was dated Mendova, October 14. 

   "Now, that's a devil of a thing!" Colme said to himself, putting the paper into the case and drawing out another which proved to be the wedding certificate of Laura to Joe, under the hand and seal of Justice Croven. He looked around, but found nothing more. Accordingly, he left the premises, and went back to the office to write up the little fire which had brought him

to that neighborhood.

    He needed time to think, time to arrange the things that he had learned in some kind of order. They did not fit in with the other things he knew. The string of pearls was gone, and money was missing, and the crookedness of a

lawyer was revealed. They did not prove or disprove the guilt of Clarence Pauley. 

   Pauley declared he had never seen the studio, never been anywhere near it, and had seen his former wife only for an instant on Main Street. She had looked so beautiful, so well dressed in her furs, so rich and splendid that his heart had not allowed him to go and speak to her.

   " I knew she'd be afraid, after the way I'd done before, and besides, I looked like a bum, and I was a bum, and she was a lady. I didn't want her to be ashamed, talking to me there before all the folks."

   "So you went late that night?" the detective shot home.

   "No, sir; but-"

   "But what?"

   "I did what that man asked me to I needed the money."

   "That's why you killed her?"

   "I didn't kill her! All I did was cut Joe's boat loose!"

   Colme, through his friendship with the police and the attorneys, had free access to the papers. He examined everything. He carried away with him memories and notes of what the papers said. He put the facts together up and down.

   There was no faked witnesses---no one who swore to seeing Pauley going to or from the Murlow Apartments. A witness like that was badly needed, but he was not forthcoming. Of course, he might be forthcoming. Some smart yellow man, some one out of the slums---Colme shivered as he realized that the detectives were working to find such a witness, and how well such a witness would be rewarded.

   Colme went to see Attorney Genuun two days later. He found the man in his office.

   "I wondered if you knew anything about the Pauley divorce papers?" Colme

explained. "You see, if they don't show up, the estate belongs to Pauley. The wedding before Justice Croven becomes illegal unless the divorce is interposed doesn't it?"

   "If they are not of record, yes," Genuun answered, his face growing pale

   Colme thought why that was. The reporter was approaching the illegal work of the attorney, and that had in it the promise of a sensation.

   "You haven't found any such papers in the effects of Mrs. Pauley?"

   "No. I have been searching for them. I have considered that phase of the matter."

   " Suppose Pauley is convicted. Does that prevent his inheriting her estate?"

" Certainly. A man cannot profit by his crimes.

   "Well, there isn't much danger of a conviction. The detectives haven't been able to get him within a mile of the Murlow Apartments. They can't find a soul that met him, going or coming.

   "Is that so? Is that so?" Genuun half whispered. "Will he escape, do you think? His record? His previous attempts to kill her? His flight? With all those things against him?"

   "You can see for yourself. No one saw him going or coming, and the shanty-boaters say he quit drinking, and that he hadn't said anything but friendly things about his former wife for months.

   "Only when he was drinking was he angry at her."

   "But he had been drinking here, hadn't he? The detectives---"

   "No-that's how they got a lot of witnesses that remembered him. He was a river-rat, and he wouldn't take anything but soft stuff. Off the river and refused whisky!"

   "But---but he mustn't escape!"

   "Of course, if he does, the estate---how large is it?"

   "Why, quite large -several thousand dollars."

   Colme left the office, but returned as if because of an afterthought.

   "Judge Croven said you handled Mrs. Pauley's divorce case?"

   "He lies-he's mistaken."

   "Didn't you pass on the papers?

   "They were in some other State?

   "Oh, that may be. I've forgotten. I do not remember. I have so much-

so many matters."

   "Wouldn't your books show where she obtained her divorce-in what place

and who her attorneys were?"

   "I have no time to discuss such matters. I think not. I do not recall---

   "You appeared in a number of Mrs. Cartern's productions-plays?"

   "Oh, yes-of course, I knew her."

   "She came to you before she was married to Joe?"

   "Yes---I---my memory is---I did not become acquainted with her till she came here to live. Then---I---but I am busy to-day."

   "Thank you very much, Mr. Genuun. You have helped me a good deal."

   "You---you are investigating-the---something?"

   "Yes---the Pauley divorce. It makes an interesting chapter in the story."

   "Yes--- yes --- well, good day!"

   "Good day!"

   Colme took himself away.

   "Well, that smooth one is slipping on ice, all right!" Colme thought. "She must have had those papers and the gem-bag in her hand when the blow fell. She was just fumbling with them, the way women do, or anybody, to keep their hands busy. We were a brilliant lot, not looking into that yard before. Call

us crime investigators! Pooh!"

   He was on a new trail now, gathering material for a story which would swing on the murder, now a cold one, and bring out a new sensation --- an entirely different matter. 

   This business of granting divorces was something new, and it would go, if it

could be tied up right with the murder mystery.

   Colme went down to Poplar Slough and talked to the shanty-boaters there.

Heretofore he had despised them. He had despised Polvin for associating with them. Polvin had obtained little items of news out of them, funny notes for " River Drift" columns. He now discovered that these shanty-boaters had a new viewpoint, and they told him things about Mendova he had never known before.

   And four days before the trial of Pauley was to begin, Colme found two more of Genuun's divorces, which had cost the lady in the case seventeen dollars and fifty cents each. She showed them proudly, as Colme sat in her boat, talking to her third husband.

   "Hit's all reg'lar!" she said. " An' hyar's the 'stif'cates!"

   There were two divorces and three wedding certificates, all properly sealed

and filled in.

   "Mr. Genuun has nicer divorces 'n any otheh lawyer on the riveh!" The

river woman shook her head. "Hisn's is printed in red an' gold, an' on thick papers, but some of them otheh's ain't no 'count. They ain't nothin' but writin'. I seen lots of 'em, an' they's all shredded up an' don't stand no hard

handlin' at all. Yo' has to use them papers a heap, an' they's carried aroun' a lot, course, from one bo't to anoth an' so on. Yo' need real substantial 'vorces on old Mississip'"

   "That's so!" Colme agreed. "I suppose Mr. Genuun has lots of divorce business?"

   "Oh, yes! I know six---seven ladies always goes to him. He 'vorced Bet Halbrune last week, an' I expect two-three'll stop in this fall trip, an' 'vorce, seein's they '"low to change their man, an git married agin."

   Colme obtained the names of several of Genuun's divorcees, and the following afternoon he turned a story in to the city editor relating to Dancing Laura's divorce. It included the divorce paper.

CHAPTER XI.

"LOOK HOW THINGS BREAK."

THE story of Genuun's divorce business was not printed immediately.

   Another story broke in the Cartern murder case which led the city editor to hold up Colme's curious narrative. It was Colme who handled the new sensation, which led to holding the Genuun divorce matters up.

   Polvin was still handling the paragraphs which now were all he could make out of the matter, even though the trial was but four days hence. One of the detectives, Dern Preel, called Colme up on the telephone and asked him to call around to headquarters. 

   This was not ten minutes after Colme explained his story of the divorce to his city editor. Some instinct led him to return to the city editor from the telephone and say:

   " Preel has called me up about something in the Cartern case---I don't know what. Perhaps that other story had better be kept down-stairs."

That meant he didn't want the story set up on the machines, and the city editor agreed. Colme went to headquarters and found Preel and Poter waiting for him. They were obviously in a state of mind, jubilant but nervous. "Say, Colme, what have you been doing on that Cartern story?" Preel asked.

   "Keeping my ears open." 

   "You've been going the rounds-now, say, old man, we've a big story for you, but we want an even break---see?"

   "What makes you think I've been working?'"

   "You've been talking to Genuun. You've hunted him out of his hole! He's let go of what he knew!"

   "That so? That's interesting," Colme smiled. How much did he tell?"

   "He told how he met Pauley on Drool Street, at about 3 o'clock that morning, perhaps a little later."

   "What was he doing there?"

   "Nerves insomnia---couldn't sleep. He took a long walk that night. You know he was with the little party after the rehearsal of the play that night. He took a walk, the way he did many times ---I've seen him around thataway myself.

   Well, he met Pauley, corner of Drool and Burl that's three blocks north, you know, of Cypress.

   "Pauley was going right along up Drool, toward Poplar Slough. Genuun kept on down Burl toward Main.

   Genuun never thought of it, he says, till he happened over to the jail and saw Pauley in the corridor---he went over on one of his shanty-boat cases. Never had seen Pauley before, and never saw him again till this morning. Soon as he saw Pauley he recognized him. It shook him

all up."

   "Where do I come in that?" Colme asked.

   "Why, he mentioned your coming in to see him in the case---asked who you were, and all that. Said you asked some impudent questions."

   "Is that so! What did you say?'"

    "Oh, we said you meant all right. Told him Polvin was covering the Cartern story for the Javelin now but that you had it first along."

   "That's so."

   "Yes, it's so, but there's something more, too. We---well, we happened to remember her arm sticking out the window up there--- Gawd That was a devil of a sight from the street! Poter and me went up there to look in the yard. Happened to think of it, we did. How in blazes we missed that we couldn't imagine! Well, you'd been there---that's all. You thought of that, too. We knew you'd play square with us, anyhow-but we're---well, we've worked like the devil on this case. You know that. We don't

want to fall down and get the ha-ha. If you ----we've given you some good stories!"

   "That's right, boys. I don't forget those things. I've something down at hand. Now that Genuun is showing his hand, I can talk---I'll give it to you straight. You meet me there in fifteen minutes, will you?"

   "Sure thing. I knew you had something on!"

   The two detectives, the city editor, and the reporter, Colme, went into the consulting-room, closed and locked the doors, and there Colme told of what he had done.

   He brought out, first of all, the collar button of wine-colored, natural-grown pearl. He described where he found it, and then he told of his search in the yard. He showed the detectives what he found there. Then he traced the story of the Genuun divorces. He told of his talk with Genuun, and went into details about the conversation with Genuun, in

which it was suggested that Pauley would inherit the estate if he was acquitted.

   "I told him you hadn't been able to get Pauley within a mile of the Murlow Apartments, and he looked surprised," Colme said.

   "That's right, too. And he had the stuff all the time! Of course, he didn't want to appear as a witness about that, unless he had to!" Poter explained 

   "Naturally, he didn't want the man who killed his friend to get the money, either!"

   "Naturally, but who would get it? Colme asked

   "Why---why" The detectives and city editor gazed at Colme.

   "He's executor, you know," Colme continued. 

   "He'd have to report to court --- " Preel suggested. 

   "For how many years?"

   "As long as he lived! That's so!"

   Then the divorce business-"

   "Let's see that collar-button!" Preel asked.

Colme told them of his tracing the collar-button clear around to the Mendova jeweler, Drume.

   "Been to see him?" Preel asked.

   "I've been trying to find some way to approach him," Colme admitted

   "But you know he orders reporters out of his place!"

   "Yes, and he's smart with detectives, too," Poter grimaced. 

   "That button was in the right-hand curtain?" Preel asked. 

  "Yes."

  "Of course, it might have been some other caller!"

   "Yes.”

   "Anyhow, Pauley must have done the murder! We got the case cinched on him now. Genuun fixed that for fair!"

   Preel and Poter were positive. The city editor approved. Colme knew that the chain of evidence was now perfect against the river tramp. Nothing could save him from hanging.

   They now sat in silence for some time, revolving the matter from their own view-points. The Javelin was assured of another big score in the Cartern case, for the detectives promised that the new evidence would come to the Javelin first.

   They all agreed that the divorce, the collar-button, and other matters should be held over a day or two, or even until after the trial, or till during the trial according to the way things broke.

   "You write the appearance of Genuun in the case," the city editor told Colme so that reporter came back into his own again, and he came back with a smash. 

   He spread the coming of Genuun as the central witness over two solid columns, and some heading. He described Genuun as one of the city's most eminent attorneys, but inclined to be slightly absent-minded, deeply observant, but not inclined to connect casual street observations with significant news events of the day. 

   He proved a perfect alibi for Genuun, who thus stepped in at the eleventh hour with the missing link of evidence. He showed how Genuun, in a casual conversation, suddenly discovered how important it was that a witness be found to show that Pauley was near the Murlow Apartments on the night of the crime, and then, the attorney happening to see the accused in the jail corridor, instantly recognized him as the fellow who hurried along Burl Street back to Poplar Slough.

   The dread effects of insomnia were dwelt upon, to show what was upon the mind of the attorney as he strolled the midnight streets

Colme did not leave out the fact that Genuun was in the party and was almost the last one who saw and talked to her that fatal night:

   Mr. Genuun will testify at the trial that on the night of the tragedy, there in front of the apartments over which the shadow of tragedy already rested, he repeatedly urged Mrs. Cartern against the folly, of having so many priceless jewels in her possession, tempting violence of the reckless and the greedy.

   It was apparently a frank and complete account of the appearance of the new witness. It was certain to awaken the interest of the city to the utmost.

   After the manner of the Javelin, the name Jurlen Colme was written under the head of the story. Colme awaited with grim interest the

effect of it upon the attorney and Justice Croven. Those two knew that under all that thin film of news, comment, rehash, and furbishing up was a black pit of information which Colme, for some reason, did not choose to reveal. 

   Sure enough, before ten o'clock on the following morning Croven was seen to hurry out of his office, around into Main  Street, and straight for the Combey Building, in which Genuun had his offices. What passed in that office was not known to the shadows on watch, but it was a long conference, and when Croven returned to his office, he was wiping the sweat from his forehead.

   When Genuun appeared, some time later, he was pale and blue-lipped. The ace of the divorce and marriage-fee business was breaking upon them both. That was clear to the watchers, who felt little sympathy for the two. 

   Genuun started up the street, stopped uncertainly and turned down again. It was time for lunch, and he paused before a restaurant; but he was not hungry. Wrapped in his own thoughts, he went for a walk, a long, aimless stroll upon which he met acquaintances, but he did not recognize them, he was so deeply engrossed in his own cogitations.

   He wandered about for more than two hours, his head bowed and his fingers clasping and unclasping behind his long back.

   Preel was on his trail. Why he was following Genuun, Preel would have found it hard to explain. It was just that the man had suddenly become so important in the Cartern case; but also, there was the shadow upon him of the illegitimate divorce papers. Genuun was

a new kind of crook, and Preel, having professional interest in crooks, was getting a line on him.

   Genuun walked and walked, and turned into Drool Street, strolled toward Cypress, and suddenly stopped, looked up, and stared. Preel, half a block away, apparently indifferent, saw that the man was looking up at the Murlow Apartments. He was staring at the Cartern studio floor; looking at the window in which Dancing Laura had met her death.

   It was shocking to a man of his sensibilities to find himself thus at the scene of the terrible crime in which his near friend had met her death. Genuun drew his forearm across his forehead, and then ambled on, with his head bowed and his gait listless, his feet dragging on the side-walk.

   Preel traced out Genuun's course on the city map

   He had left Main Street and crossed the city to the south; then he turned up and crossed Drool Street on his way east; then he went north, crossing Cypress Street; then he came back westward and crossed Drool Street; turned south and crossed Cypress Street in the opposite direction; then he turned east and crossed Drool Street again; but before reaching Cypress Street toward the north, he turned back west, and upon reaching Drool Street, two blocks south of Cypress, he turned north, and thus came along by the high board fence that was along the Drool-east-side of the Murlow Apartment yard.

   Genuun was one of thousands of people who had come and stopped to look up at that next-to-the-corner window from which, all one morning, a tense, beautiful, white, but cold arm had reached out over space. Colme and Poter followed up the matter of the wine-colored natural pearl collar-button. The button was a real gem. The head was perfect, the stem almost perfect, and the base was oval, though a little rough. The bottom had been ground off.

   The two detectives and the reporter went over and over the trail as Colme had traced it. Always they returned at last to the Drume jewelry store, whose proprietor never would talk, and whose clerks took their cue from him-tight-lipped, supercilious todies. Poter and Colme tried Drume. They took one of the bar-pins which came from the chamois bag and asked Drume if he could identify it. 

   Drume looked it over and returned it without a word. He turned his back on the investigators. There were three clerks and a floorwalker in the store.

   The four smiled, and the cheeks of Poter and Colme turned red, despite their familiarity with such. treatment from such people.

They turned to leave the store, but as they passed by the showcases, Colme caught the detective's arm. In a case among scarf-pins, penknives, sleeve elastics, and other men's jewelry and articles, were two sets of cuff and collar buttons They were wine-colored; they were of pearl.  The two looked at them, sitting on their heels to study them. Poter straight-ened up and turned to speak to the back of Drume, but Colme checked him.

   " There's a better way!" Colme whispered. "When a man covers a crook he's guilty of misdemeanor, if the crook is a misdemeanant; he's up against felony. Come on!"

   The two then left the store. One of the clerks had overheard, however, and before they had gone half a block they were overtaken.

   "Mr. Drume said he would like to speak to you."

   "We'll wait here for him---two minutes!"

   Colme drew out his watch. 

    The clerk returned on the run, and in less than two minutes Drume was there, a little nervous and perturbed.

   "Gentlemen---I---you said something about hiding crime?"

   "Yes. When you refuse to answer questions put by a police officer you render yourself liable in case you defeat the aims of justice," Poter answered grimly. 

   "But---how---what do I know about any crime?"

   "You know about that bar-pin?"

   "You know about that bar-pin I showed you, and a good deal more. We are going to the State's attorney to apply for a writ against you and your employees. You will be taken to the office, and the examination will require some time, yes, quite a while!"

   Drume blinked. No one had ever dared talk that way to him before, but he did not know what was in the air.

   "Of course, gentlemen, if I can be of help."

   "You will answer our questions?" Poter asked.

   "Why those of--- of authorities. Newspaper reporters-" Drume looked the contempt in his heart for Colme. 

  "Oh, well, come on, Colme! We'll have to"

   "Of course, as a matter of courtesy!" 

   Drumé made haste to say. "If he is helping the authorities!"

   "That's what he is doing; Mr. Drume, let me introduce you to Mr. Colme!"

   Drume acknowledged the introduction with a duck of his head. They returned to the store, and Drume took them into his private office

   "Now, Mr. Drume," Poter said, to whom did you sell the set to which this collar-button belonged?"

   Drume took the gem and turned it over in his fingers. He called to his bookkeeper, who brought a card-index, and from this the merchant took out a card:

   Wine Pearl Set No. 3

   Purchased of Coleman

   Sold 4-.......Colweld Genuun. $40

   "How do you know that's the set?" Colme asked when he could breathe.

   "All the other collar-buttons were manufactured. This one, you will observe, is natural. The stem, head, and base are one. It is the only one like it that I ever saw. The others had either the head or the base mounted. This one was only ground on the bottom."

   "Thank you, Mr. Drume!" Poter acknowledged. "That is what we wanted to know."

   "But what---why"

   "We do not know yet ourselves. But this helps us very much."

   Then the two left the store, the floor-walker opening it and bowing low to them as they departed. In silence they walked up Main Street. They walked clear to the end of the sidewalk, where they came to the road that led up into the cotton-bottoms.

   "What do .you make of it?" Colme asked in a whisper.

   "It doesn't prove a thing!" Poter declared.     "But---but it looks as suspicious as ..."

   "What do you suspect?"

   "He was there to see her --- that's pretty clear

   "Yes. Perhaps in rehearsing, some-time, the button blew off"

   "How did it get out of his collar?" "Well, if he wears separate cuffs, he

   "That's a weak point, of course."

   "How into that curtain?"

   "Well, if he wears separate cuffs he might use it to fasten his cuff to his shirt-sleeve. Then it might fly out-"

   "I---no---pretty far-fetched!"

   "Now, we'll find out what next---what Genuun's got to say, eh?" Poter suggested, exulting. "This is some trace, anyhow! I like this detective business. Look how things break, eh?" 

CHAPTER XII

TO PROTECT HIS REPUTATION.

ATTORNEY GENUUN sat in his office alone.

   It was a large corner room with two windows on his right. He faced a wall that was banked with book-shelves on which were ten thousand laws and a million interpretations. 

   On his left  was a large office safe, and a file for papers---fireproof. 

   A plain, inornate office, it was not bare, but it was grim. One chair besides the one he occupied was beyond his desk.

   On the desk were trays, and a few legal envelopes. Behind him was the door leading to the outer office. Between the safe and the paper file was a hall entrance, marked " Private."

   If he turned his head, to look out of the window his eye fell upon the Mississippi, less than four blocks distant over low business buildings. He could not help but turn his eyes that way to take covert glances at the great, meandering stream.

   The surface of the river was perfectly bare. It reflected the white clouds and the blue of the sky, but gave them both a tawny background. It was an effect seen in some pearls. The surface is of one color, the reflections of other colors,

and in the depths is another hue or shade.

   Genuun, looking at the river, saw the suggestion of pearls' luster. He thought of pearls. He had repeatedly warned Dancing Laura against the temptation which she carelessly placed before vicious people. She had laughed at his warning; wantonly she had dared wear them, dared show them to the base as well as to the superior world.

   Now, all day long and all night long, his mind dwelt upon that string of White River pearls, pink, matched, and of great value. When he was awake, he could not forget them; when he found fitful sleep, he dreamed about them.

Other people might recall the countenance of Dancing Laura; others still might remember her lightness of foot, her gaiety of manner; the ears of some still rang to the tender, vibrant music of her voice.

   Genuun could think only of the pearls. 

   He reverted from the pearls to other

matters that were pressing him. With difficulty he tried to center his mind upon these things. There was the subject of the shanty-boat divorces. It was important, dire in its threat---but if he directed his mind to it, shortly he would be thinking of pearls again. The activities of Colme compelled his attention. Colme had gone to Croven and that fool had showed the record of the wedding. Then he had been compelled to explain about the divorce papers. This had forced a lie, and a retreat to a second line of entrenchments Genuun had determined that Pauley must be convicted. The fact that Colme had brought up the question of the estate showed that countless minds were working upon the subject of the mysterious murder, and the ramifications of the case.

   It seemed as though a hundred things hinged upon it. Genuun had no sooner read of the murder in the newspapers and seen the vast to-do about it, than he felt walls building up around him, hedging him in. He had been obliged to become executor, because no other lawyer was in position to take it. As her friend, he had to do that much for the dead.

He had kept out of the way a good deal, had covered his acts methodically according to his long custom. If it had not been for the accursed divorce business, he felt that he would have been well outside the whole affair. But that had dragged him in.

   He remembered very well the first time

Mrs. Cartern had asked him if he would not take part in one of her productions.

   He had declined.

   "But you must!" she had laughed at him. "Really, you know, you cannot refuse me anything ! This is such an appropriate part for you to play, you know. Consulting attorney in a divorce case-"

   He had accepted against his will. He had no more been able to escape her than any other man. Yet while she had lived he had come to no harm. She had paid him well in return for the work that he did. Through her he had been

advertised quite within the proprieties, and he had found himself with a growing clientele of the right kind. As he looked back, he saw that she had increased his income threefold in less than three years. Still, he had not made enough.

   He had always sat with his back to the door, for he liked to look at his collection of law-books. It was nearly complete. Gathering it had been his pride, and he had spent a very large proportion of his income on it, keeping it up with current decisions and laws.

   Now, however, he divided his sidelong glances between the river and the door. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, pulled

the heavy desk around, brought the revolving bookcase, chairs, and wastepaper basket into proper relations. Then he sat facing the door, with the windows on his left and a view up instead of down the river.

   As it happened, he had no clients just then to keep him busy. He had turned to his authorities for everything relating to the Cartern estate; had marked every citation bearing upon the subject, which was greatly complicated, as he knew better than any one else. He had neglected no point, and he was prepared for the

exposure of his own malpractice.

   When Colme's interview with him was over, he experienced a sensation of relief. The subject was coming to a head, and he could foresee its natural course. He did not flinch from the disbarment proceedings which might be brought in the natural course of events. He opened the Javelin each morning with a grim sense of impending exposure. 

   The failure of the reporter to reveal that phase of the murder case more and more perturbed Genuun. He had gone to the authorities with his version of seeing Pauley on Drool Street, at Burl.

   That had been a step that seemed positively necessary for him to take. If his word should be questioned by the attorney for the defence, he had a witness in reserve to show that he had been within two blocks of Drool Street on

Burl, at shortly before three o'clock on that fatal morning. Policeman Abner had seen him pass by, and had greeted him.

   "Abner never told, either!" Genuun nodded with satisfaction. "But he'll tell when I give him the word. He knew about my insomnia."

   And now, the day before the trial, Genuun waited the event with forced calm, going over and over in his mind everything that he knew, and arranging everything in perfect order, some of it where it was instantly available through

any cross-examination, and some of it in the depths of a mind used to concealment and diversion, whence it could not be dragged by any suggestion that he could foresee. 

   "I was a fool!" he told himself. If I'd been willing to wait for practice, in stead of taking up that seventeen dollars and fifty cents divorce business. I was a fool!"

   Through all the case he could see one place where he could not come through satisfactorily to himself. That was the fact that he had given Laura Pauley a fake divorce.

   He felt that she had tricked him, somehow, for she had proclaimed herself a river woman, and it didn't matter much about the divorces of river women. They always went tripping on down the Mississippi River. If they came back, it was after another divorce.

   Dancing Laura had not done that. She had returned to Mendova and settled down as a social fixture. She had become conspicuous, then prominent, then important, and finally she had got herself murdered.

   "I never knew them to make such a spread about murders before," Genuun told himsèlf. If it had been any ordinary woman, it would have blown over in a day or two. I don't see what they want to keep it up for, this sensationalism. It's just a plain case-revenge by a first husband. Such cases occur on the river every little while, and the papers don't print more than half,a column or so about them, and then they forget to tell what happened afterward. Anything to make a sensation!"

   Genuun easily made a case out against the newspapers. They had made a great how-de-do about his appearing as a witness. Of course, he had to do that--- but, really, he was only one of a number of links of the chain. How could they

blame him? Pauley was no good---
The telephone-bell rang, and Genuun took down the receiver 

   "Hello?" he answered.

"Hello! This is Drume, the jeweler. Is this Mr. Genuun?"

   "Yes, Drume."

   "I see you have lost that pearl collar-button you bought here last year. I suppose some one stole it. Anyhow, I thought you would like to know that Detective Poter and that Javelin reporter Colme have found it. They are probably looking up some burglar or sneak thief or pickpocket."

   "They have that pearl collar-button, you say?" Genuun asked.

   "Yes, I thought you would like to know."

   "Thank you." 

   "Good-by!"

   Genuun hung up. He caught hold of the ledge of his desk and held it with all his strength. The world, it seemed to him, was falling from under him. He needed to steady himself; needed to

think; needed to direct his mind upon that new fact.

   "It's nothing!" he said to himself. 

   "They just picked it up somewhere. Some thief probably found it or something. It has no significance. It doesn't prove anything whatever. I was a fool to play with those river divorce affairs.

   "It was a good joke, those divorces. People will feel that way about it-shanty-boaters, you know. Divorces and weddings on the Mississippi are a joke.

   "They haven't even got the divorce paper that I granted!"

   He laughed a hackly kind of chuckle.

   "I've searched all through her papers for it, but I can't find it. I'd 'a' found it,  if any one. If that fiddling fool hadn't gone crazy, they might have learned something I might have---it's all right!

   "Now, that collar-button. I wondered about that. So they've got it? Well, well, they are going over everything with a fine-toothed comb. Any ordinary woman like her gets a lot of notoriety getting killed up that way! 

   "I wish---I wonder if they're going to keep that dark, about my divorce business? It's malpractice, of course, but river women! It'll make a big laugh. I can stand a year or two suspension. I need a rest, anyhow. That would be a real help, suspended for a year, two

years. I'll throw myself on the mercy of the court---young lawyer, poor, a certain social position to maintain, and all that. If it comes out---well, I was a fool about those divorces ! If it wasn't for them---oh, well, it was a joke that's it---a joke!"

   Then he tried again to remember about the collar-button. He thought, just as a matter of curiosity, that he would call up Poter or Colme and ask them where they found it---who had it?

   On second thought, he didn't call them up.

Instead, following a clammy chill that settled upon his soul, he went to the Smull sporting goods store and purchased an automatic pistol of forty-five caliber, with a box of cartridges.

   " I need it to protect my reputation!" he told himself with grim humor.

CHAPTER XIII

CONVINCING THE DETECTIVES.

THE case of the People versus Clarence Pauley, charged with murder in the first degree, was to be opened on Thursday in the Trial Term.

   There was a great crowd waiting for the doors to open, many of them, as the reporters wrote, representing the height of fashion and beauty.    Friends of the murdered woman were there in numbers. They rapidly filled the seats, and as the hour of ten o'clock approached, waited

with increasing nervousness.

   The court officers were all in their places. Amid a murmuring, Clarence Pauley was brought in, and at sight of him there was surprise and low exclamations. He was not the stooped, hang dog, cringing murderer they had looked to see. Instead, he stood erect and was quite good-looking, but pale and nervous.

   The crier made his announcement, and the judge came stalking in in his black gown according to the solemnity of the murder case in his charge.

   Thereupon, the State's attorney rose in his place, and in a clear voice declared that the State was not ready to proceed with its case, and that, with the consent of the attorneys for the defence, the State desired to have the case put over the term.

   "Oh!" some woman's disappointment broke the stillness.

   A short laugh, rapped down sharply, ensued. The attorneys for the defence consented immediately, and in five minutes the great case was disposed of for the time being, and not six people in the whole court-room knew what was in the air.

   The court proceeded to the case of a vender of cocaine, and the spectators, in mute astonishment, took their departure.Many of the leading citizens felt as if they had obtained seats for a grand opera, only to have a talking-machine turned upon them.

   Policeman Abner had talked. That was what had happened to the case of the People vs. Clarence Pauley. Policeman Abner was a tall, thick-set, thickheaded patrolman who paced the Mendova streets.

   When Attorney Genuun appeared in the Cartern murder case, declaring that he had met Pauley at Drool and Burl Streets, Abner recalled that he had seen Genuun on that night. Anxious to corroborate the new witness, Abner told

Preel at headquarters about the meeting.

   Preel was surprised. He immediately called Poter, and the two questioned Abner. The policeman said it was about three o'clock in the morning, perhaps nearer two o'clock. Genuun was going toward Drool Street, and he had turned down Drool Street, toward Cypress

   "What did you do?" Preel asked.

   "I stood there a while, and then walked toward Drool, too."

   "You could see Drool Street?"

   "Yes."

   "Did you see any one cross Burl Street?"

   "No." 

   "Then you didn't see Genuun meet anybody?""

   " No, I didn't happen to."

   "You were looking toward Drool Street all the time?"

   "Oh, yes. I watched Genuun go. You see, I knew he didn't sleep very well and took those long night walks.

   "I'd seen him before."

   "Did you go to Drool Street?"

   "Genuun walked up Drool Street?"

   "Yes, I saw him---no---he went down Drool Street." 

   "Toward Cypress?"

   "Yes, that's the way." 

  "Much obliged, Abner! Keep this under your hat, will you?"

   "All right, boys. Anything I can do -- any time!"

   " Well, you've done something now, all right." Abner left the two, going home." 

   When they turned up Burl Street and reached the corner of Drool, the two detectives looked in all directions. There was a slight down grade from the east, where Abner said he had stood. There was not a tree or post for three blocks,

and there was a large arc light at the corner.

   "He said he came right down Burl, toward Main Street, and crossed here and kept on toward Main," Preel said to Poter.
   "Only he didn't; he must have forgotten. He went toward Cypress---at about three o'clock in the morning!"

   "Would she let him in, without making a row?"

   "Well, would she?"

   "They knew each other---those divorce papers. "He warned her, too, about the pearls.

They all heard him! He was thinking about it."

   "That collar-button---"

   "We're slipping in pretty deep. Tomorrow's the trial of Pauley! They fixed him before the grand jury, all right."

   " Yes---we did it!"

   "That's right! How about it?"

   "Well---we'd better see the State attorney p. d. q.!"

   They immediately went to the attorney's house, and when he heard what they had learned, he immediately called up the counsel for the defence and asked him if he would be willing to put the trial over.

   "We have a line favorable to your client which we wish to investigate thoroughly," it was explained. Details were agreed upon, but, of course, nothing was made known about

it. When this was done, Colme was called by Preel, and he met the detectives a few minutes after eight o'clock and heard the latest discovery.

   "Then Genuun lied about Pauley? Colme asked.

   "That's the look of it now."

   "Why?"

   "Well, why?"

   "We'd better sound around now, and see about that night. We haven't asked people about Genuun's movements!"

   Preel suggested. "Where'll we begin?"

   "North Main Street?" suggested Colme.

" What! Up there?"

  "Sure! Didn't Pauley say a man hired him to cut Picking Joe's boat loose? Wasn't that a game to have Joe accused? But it fell through?"

   "That's right."

   Bill Azure, the Hawk Island ferryman, remembered that someone had borrowed one of his skiffs that night, without asking, but he left a quarter on the seat.

Then a shanty-boater of the name of Jonya, who lived in Poplar Slough and worked in the stave factory, remembered seeing Genuun on North Main Street after dark, but before seven o'clock, the day before the murder morning

"I know him 'cause he 'vorced my wife so's I could marry her," the shanty-boater explained, involving his meaning a trifle.

   When they went to work in earnest on Pauley's story, the detectives and Colme rapidly made headway. They even found a witness who met Genuun at 4.15 A.M., hurrying up Cypress Street, away from Drool.

   "I noticed paricular" this man said,

"because one cuff was down on his hand, clear of his coat-sleeve."

   " Which hand?"

   " The right!

   The trial of Clarence Pauley was put over to 10:05 A.M. on Thursday. The evening paper printed the fact in a special noon edition. Genuun came out of his office at 12 o'clock, and stopped to buy that extra edition of a newsboy. Then he crossed Main Street to a restaurant and ordered lunch. He read the reporter's account of the postponement, and then stared straight toward the street window,

seeing nothing for a long time.  

   The shadow, at another table, read his lips.

"What for?  What for?" Genuun whispered over and over again.

   Genuun nibbled at his lunch. He drank cup after cup of strong, black coffee. When he paid his check he went into the barroom through the restaurant entrance. There he bought a stiff horn of brandy.

   He left the saloon and returned to his office, stumbling over his dragging feet.

   His face was a pasty yellow. Standing by the elevator were detectives Preel and Poter, and at sight of them, Genuun threw his head up, as though he was breathing.

   "Good day, gentlemen!" he greeted them in a hollow voice."

   "Good day!" Preel replied, entering the elevator with him." 

   They rode up to Genuun's floor and the detectives left the elevator with him. 

   He turned and gave them a searching Iook, faces, frames, feet, and back to their eyes again

   "You are going with me?" he asked.

   "Yes, Mr. Genuun. We wish to talk to you.

   "What about?"

   "We want to know something more about your---about your meeting Pauley that morning."

   "Oh, that's it! I made a mistake in what I told you. I thought about it afterward. I said I went on down Burl Street to Main, but I forgot that I turned up Drool Street toward Cypress. I didn't turn down to Main till I arrived at Tupelo-that's next below Cypress It was just before I reached Tupelo that I met him."

   "Is that so! Why, that clears up---" Poter began.

calmly Preel interposed.

   "Clears up what?" Genuun asked 

   "Everything but the collar-button,"

   " The---the collar-button?" Genuun asked. 

   " Yes. A wine-colored collar-button-pearl. It came from Cedar River in Iowa, and belonged to a collar-and-cuff set. Here it is!"

   Genuun's life hinged on that minute there in the hallway. He knew and looked it. He quivered and then drew himself together. Color came to his cheeks as he turned the button over in his fingers. He got away with it, too, if he had only known it.

    "Where did you get that?" he asked.

   It fell out of the curtain on the right hand side of the window where the corpse was found."

   "So that's where it went to !" He gave a short exclamation that sounded like a laugh to the two detectives. "I used to rehearse in that room.  She was some drill-master, all right! Well, come on in!"

   He turned and led the way into the outer  office. The detectives glanced at each other wonderingly. When Genuun crossed to the far side of the office to hang his coat and hat in the closet in the corner, behind his stenographer's

desk, Poter motioned with his lips that it was the divorce case that worried him.

   So it seemed. Genuun had cleared himself. There was nothing in what the detectives knew that could not be explained away by what they themselves had learned. Insomnia covered the night walk. The rehearsals covered the found

collar-button. The explanation of the Drool Street meeting with Pauley fitted with Abner's story. 

   There was not one thing that connected Genuun with the murder, now---not definitely. There remained the divorce cases, and possible suspension from the bar for a year or two-and the joke would be on the shanty-boaters, at

that !

   Genuun stepped around the stenographer's desk, and, with a light smile, he nodded to the detectives.

   "Just a minute, please!"

   Then they all three entered the inner office. Genuun carried a chair in to suppiement the two already there. He sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and leaned back. The two detectives did not lean back. They sat nervously on the edges of their chairs.

   "So you boys have been trying to connect me with the murder?" Genuun smiled contemptuously at them. " Well, don't lose that collar-button---I think a lot of that !"

   "You see for yourself Preel defended. "You were out the morning--- Abner seen you headed that way. Then your story didn't hitch with what we knowed. You didn't go straight down

Burl, the way you said."

   "Well, it won't be murder you'll get me on! Genuun lifted his chin.

   "No? Just them divorces is all?"

   Genuun's eyes half-closed and he glanced from Preel to Poter and back to Preel. It was some time before he spoke.

   Then he uttered that short, laughing sound as he said:

   "So you're on to that? Weli, one thing at a time, boys. Let it go till after the trial-I mean of Pauley. That's the best way, don't you think? Then, of course---"

   "Sounds reasonable," Preel admitted, and added frankly: "We wa'n't looking them divorces up, Mr. Genuun. We knowed about it, but it was the murder. We wanted to get that case straightened out. You see how it is---murder mysteries and murder mysteries, and people asks what is detectives for, anyhow? To graft on blind tigers? That makes us sore."

   "I don't wonder!" Genuun smiled.

"It would make any one sore."

   When the detectives left the office they were more at sea than ever.

   "It's Pauley ! We got to get him !" Poter declared.

   "That's right---but look how easy we connected Genuun up with it ! Now we could connect Abner the same way, and anybody around there. Where are those pearls---the string of pink ones?"

CHAPTER XIV.

ON SECOND THOUGHTS.

POTER and Preel met Colme at the entrance to the Javelin building.

   They told the reporter what they had run up against. The three of them went to a little café and had some Gulf oysters while they talked everything all over again. When they were through, Colme shook his head.

   "Then it's Pauley, after all?"

   "It must be; what Genuun's scared of is the divorces. That was crooked--- but" Preel laughed. "I bet those river women would make him wish he was dead if they heard of it."

   It's the string of pearls that bothers me now," Colme suggested. "If Pauley has them?”

They weren't on his shanty-boat---have you a good description of those?" Why, pink, and about eighteen on that skiff-shack of his."

   "Then where is it? By the way the pearls'

grains?"

   "Light or dark pink? Rose or ---"

   "There were forty-eight of them."

   " She and Joe found them over near White River, somewhere."

   "Who bored them?"' Colme asked.

   "Why, Drume, probably."

   "Let's find out!"

   The three learned that Drume had bored them. Drume said so. He added, too, that they were worth upward of fifty thousand dollars.

   "Where could they be sold, no questions asked?" Colme asked.

   Why---some fence."

   "But is there a pearl fence anywhere?"

   "I wouldn't know how to find one," Drume declared. "They were stolen when Mrs. Cartern was murdered."

    "They have not been found yet, so far as known."

   "Mr. Genùun, the executor---has he reported on the estate yet?" Drume asked. 

   "What! He might have found them?" The three investigators were caught by surprise.

   "He might. He mentioned to me that he had made a thorough search. I was wondering if in some way I could legitimately obtain those pearls. They are not at all well known in the trade. The string would sell at practically full

value, and the purchaser would not know that they were well, what they are."

   "Jewelers know pearls?" Colme asked.

   "Oh, yes---there are pearls more famous that most men---pearls and other precious stones. If those pink pearls had been through the regular channels of the trade, they would have become famous."

   "I see," Colme nodded.

   They obtained some details about the boring and stringing of the pearls. Drume told them how difficult the knack of making the knots was to acquire, for instance---and then they made their departure. They went to the State's Attorney, who was considerably perturbed by the course events were taking.

   "They can prove as much against Genuun as we can against Pauley!" he complained. "They'll shoot our case full of holes!"

   The detectives could not help that and Colme sat studying the matter with persistent alertness.

   The big story now was yet to be sprung. If Pauley did not kill the woman, it would make a great story, indeed. He wondered if they had not

been switched off by a mere midnight burglar or two? 

   The suggestion about the pearls being

beautiful and having a fame, or a right to a fame of their own, which Drume had made, appealed to him. Away down in his heart Colme had ambitions. He longed to be a great man, a person of piace and figure in the social firmament, talked about over the tea-tables and

known to people on the streets.

   The thought that even pearls might have to wait long for their legitimate reputations had been suggested by the talk with Drume. Colme even had the whimsical fancy that perhaps the greatest mountain of all had waited millions

of years for its true place in the world-perhaps a lesser giant was even then sitting upon the throne of preeminence, while a greater, patient mountain waited for eventual justice.

   A man's fancies range far when there is no limit. Anything might have happened to those pearls. He wondered if he could have overlooked them in the yard of the Murlow Apartments? If a thief possessed them, where would he venture to sell them? When would he

try to put them on the market? When would the pearls come up from obscurity? In the public library there were files of two of the jewelers' weekly trade journals. Colme, leaving nothing undone, turned every page of these jourals, beginning at the week before the murder had been done ,and reading through to the latest issue.

   Every week there were items about large pearls being found in the Wabash, Upper Mississippi, Ohio River, and down in Bastern Texas where a new field had been opened up in the Caddo Lake and Conch River neighborhoods. One of the largest was from Mendova itself! Not a word had been heard about it by local newspaper men, and yet a shanty-boater had come into Mendova, met a pearl buyer in the Gobolo Hotel, and sold an

Old River pearl for three thousand four hundred dollars---a magnificent gem from a niggerhead mussel just across the river.

   One of the great sensations of the month had reverberated through the jewel trade, and Mendova had been the quake center. Colme, alert newspaper man that he was, had not heard about it!

   He felt a little silly and resolved to keep better track. However, he felt disconcerted when he

looked along the shelf of trade journals.

The lumber trade, cut-over lands, concrete, rivers and harbors, millinery (he thought of wild-bird feathers!), and swamp-land problems were all represented by their weeklies and monthlies. There were sensations of which the daily newspapers never heard!

   Colme had found nothing in the jewelry journals to help him, but he saw that

if the forty-eight-pearl pink string should appear in the legitimate market, it would

likely find mention. He wondered how much the jewelry trade papers paid for items. He believed that he might add to his income, writing about local subjects for the specialist papers. His eyes were opened to a new opportunity, and

he saw a dozen things he had never noticed before. With the idea of writing for trade

journals in mind, he began to go from jewelry store to jewelry store, asking about pearls, which were the Mendova claim to fame in the jewelry trade.

  He picked up nineteen items in eight stores,

including pawn-shops. He wrote out a batch of news items and sent them to a weekly jeweler's journal, and awaited results, by hunting up pearls out of the Arkansas Bottoms across the Mississippi.

   The buyers were genial, talkative men. They talked about everybody's business, except their own. One so far departed from his rule, however, as to say:

   "I had a letter from a lawyer name of Genuun, asking about selling pearls. Know him? What is he---pearl fancier?"

   " What !" Colme breathed.

   "Oh, he's beat me to it. I put off coming out here a few days. He's pulled out for New York, and I've lost a trade, perhaps."
 Colme blinked. "Probably you have---wouldn't be surprised if you had !" Colme managed to say. " He's fond of pearls ---has a cuff-link and button set of wine-colored ones, I believe."

   "Yes? One of Coleman's, probably He's a St. Louis manufacturer of novelties. Does he do a little trading in pearls on the side?

   "Not that I know of," Colme answered, seeing that the man was giving him information for the purpose of obtaining information

   Colme hurried to Detectives Preel and Poter as soon as he could. He astonished them as much as he had been, when he told them the things the pearl buyer had remarked.

   "Genuun gone?" the two exclaimed.

   "Lord!"

   They verified the fact, but they learned over the wire from Genuun's office that he would return that night. He had been gone five days and they hadn't known it !

   "We're sleuthing, we are!" Preel grimaced his disgust. "Let a man make his getaway as easy as that and never know it!"

   However, Genuun came in on the ßve-forty-seven train, suit-case in hand and walked briskly through the exit he glanced nervously at the three men who stood there watching him so frankly. 

   He made the most of it, however.

   "How are you, boys?" he greeted.

   "Anything new? I've been in Chicago a few days. Had some business to attend to. Any idea yet where Mrs. Cartern came from? Who her people are?'"

   "Not yet." Preel shook his head

   "She was just a butterfly with no fixed home, I reckon."

   "So it looks. Her estate would fix someone pretty well! S'long!"

   "Chicago!" Preel and Poter and Colme demanded of one another.

   "What do you know about that? He went to New York!"

   "He came back by Chicago, perhaps," Colme suggested, and then they went to consult the conductor. 

   Genuun had come on a ticket by way of Louisville, Cincinnati, Cleveland, from New York.

   "Well, then he's lied," Preel sniffed angrily. "What'd he want to tell that lie for, where he has been !" Colme exclaimed. 

   "Probably it's none of our business where he has been!"

   "Probably it is our business, if he lied!"

   They worked now on Pauley's story that he had been hired to cut Picking Joe's boat loose from the bank of Poplar Slough. Pauley could give them no help in that line, more than what he had told.

   Some of the facts fitted very well with what he told. Picking Joe had drifted down the river that night, and Pauley went with them to the slough and showed them where he had waited, hidden in the brush, listening to the music, while he

heard the tower clocks striking the hours till half after twelve, or one o'clock, he couldn't remember which. There was the identical gallon-jug upon which he claimed to have sat, rolled deep in the soft silt.

   "We're just going ahead and proving alibis for every one !" Preel suggested his disgust. "That's the kind of sleuthin' we're doing!"

   On Saturday---the trial was to begin on Tuesday---Colme, with considerable eagerness, looked at the jewelers' journals in the library to see if his items had been printed. He found that there were ten inches of space, which would be two dollars and fifty cents at twenty-five cents an inch. He forgot all about that, however, when he discovered in the Maiden Lane items a paragraph that made his thoughts stumble:

   On Monday the Ricklesteins purchased a pink

pearl necklace from Wilbur Preen, executor of

the estate of Mrs. Laurel, a Mississippi River

theater-boat actress and proprietor. The neck-

lace contains forty-eight pearls, ranging in

weight from 172 to 2014 grains. Price, private.

It is understood that this is the first appearance

of these pearls in trade, Mrs. Laurel having

collected them herself from local pearlers in the

Arkansas Bottoms. The pearls are perfect.

Colme tore the paper from its rack and raced away with it at full speed. The librarian viewed with hostile expression the noisy and precipitate departure. She could not follow him, as he hunted down Preel and Poter, who were found at last in the State's Attorney's office,

going over the evidence in the Pauley case.

   "Now we've got him!" Preel exulted.

   "He had the pearls all the time!"

   "He may have found them among her

effects," the attorney suggested, by way

of looking at the case from the other man's side.

   "That's so!" the detectives admitted reluctantly"

   "Well, we'd better keep this dark," the attorney suggested. Genuun's a crook. If he doesn't report that necklace among the effects of the estate-"

    "Is it Genuun?" Colme interrupted.

   "We don't even free know that yet!"

   "We'll have to find out," the attorney said. "I'll send a man to Ricklestein's !  We can't let either of you go now with the case breaking the way it is !"

   "I'd go!" Colme volunteered.

   "You're a witness, too!'"

   "Yes, but you won't need me before the end of the week. The jury will take three or four days!"

   "That's so. Well, go to it ! You're appointed special investigator!"

   So Colme went to New York, and he not only proved that it was Attorney Genuun who had been there, but Ricklestein immediately returned with Colme to Mendova, bringing the forty-eight pearl necklace with him. Ricklestein

was kept in the background. No one was allowed to see him or know about the discovery of the pearl necklace. 

   The trial of Clarence Pauley went on before the jury, precisely as though nothing could possibly happen to intervene for the accused. Pauley, growing paler, whiter, more and more frightened, saw the evidence piling up against him. His attempts to kill the woman who was

at last murdered were described in detail.

There were three shanty-boat witnesses who described the attack at New Madrid, and the woman's flight with Picking Joe. There were five witnesses who described the raid on the shanty-boat and the defeat of Pauley by Picking

Joe.

   "Hit were Pauley! one swore." The

handkerchief fell off'n hisn's face, an' hit

were him. We all seen him. We all knowed him !"

   Then came the direct evidence and the tightening coils of the circumstantial

evidence, bringing Pauley closer and

closer to the scene of the crime. Last

of all these witnesses, Attorney Genuun

was put upon the stand, to weld the final

link.

   "Mr. Genuun, you remember the night of December 9?"

   "Yes, sir."

   "You were with Mrs. Cartern and several others on that night?"

   "Yes, sir."

   "What doing?"

   "Rehearsing for a play---The

Brothers." 

   "Yes, sir. I was Attorney Crund."

   "After the rehearsal, you went with Mrs. Cartern, Manager Crome, and others to a midnight supper?"

   "Yes, sir."

   "Now tell us what happened after that."

   "We drove in an automobile to the Murlow Apartments. Mrs. Cartern left the car there. She started up-stairs, but returned to talk with us when Mr. Hombre, the writer, and Mr. Havelin,

the artist, happened along. After a few minutes she went up-stairs, followed immediately by the two men, Hombre and Havelin."

   There was something sinister in that testimony. All eyes turned and glanced

at the writer and artist, who had already

testified. They flushed and turned pale a moment later.

   "In your conversation, what did you suggest to Mrs. Cartern?"

   "Why---I warned her not to wear her pearls so conspicously."

   "Why did you do that?"

   "I was afraid- -for her sake. I feared an attack by thieves."

   "What did she reply?"

   "She laughed."

   "Now, Mr. Genuun, after leaving the Murlow Apartments?"

   "I was left at my apartment. I retired, but I was unable to sleep. I dressed myself in an old suit, left the apartment to walk and try to compose my nerves for sleep. I walked around for some time, and entered Burl Street, up-town on the hill, and passed Policeman Abner before

reaching Drool Street. I turned up, down Drool Street toward-toward Cypress. I was on the west side of the street. Some distance down Drool I met a man. It was the defendant."

   "He was doing what?"

   "Hurrying along-"

   "Up the street?"

   "Yes, sir-north."

   "What time was that?"

   "Nearly three o'clock."

   "Where did you leave Drool Street?

   "Tupelo, I think---next to Cypress to

the north."

   "Then where?"

   "To Main, along Main, up to Poplar

Slough. Then---"

   "Why did you go to Poplar Slough?"

   "I wanted to see if---if---" The witness stopped in confusion. He gathered himself and looked at his straining hands. When he looked up, he continued, in a voice so low that it was

nearly a whisper: "I wanted to see if there were many shanty-boats in."

   "Eh? You---"

   "Yes. I have been interested in shanty-boats. I have considerable practice from them."

   It was well done, and frankly. The prosecuting attorney saw that Genuun had let him come right up to the Mississippi River divorces. The attorney's future was at the mercy of the State-

disbarment or at least suspension was in it for the lawyer.

   "Then you returned home?"

   "I returned home!" Genuun answered gratefully

   The State's case was all in against Pauley. The accused had been connected up before and after the murder. It was left to the imagination of the jurors what he had done in the interval between when Pauley was seen in the cafés and on the streets, after looking at his wife in her beautiful furs, and before Genuun had met him on Drool Street.

   The attorneys for the defence proceeded to the cross-examination of Genuun. Attorney Bruel was a large, smooth-shaven, drawling-voiced fellow-member of Genuun at the bar.

   "Now, let us go over this midnight stroll of yours," he began, smiling. "You say that you couldn't sleep. What thing did you have on your mind that you couldn't sleep?"

   Every one in court smiled. Bruel was taking the opportunity to banter his friend a little. Genuun's smile was a little belated, but he smiled.

   "Nothing in particular," he replied.

   "Were you fearful that the police

were not attending to their duties, patrolling the streets?"

    "Why---no."
   "Did you try any doors of the houses of your friends to see if they were locked?"

   "Wha---wha---oh, of course not !" Genuun's voice lifted hoarsely.

   "Did you meet any of your friends, the shanty-boaters?"

   "What! What did---"

   "I did not know Pauley" Genuun gasped.

"Oh, I see. Pauley was no friend of yours. I see. Now ah, you had never seen Pauley, up to that I recall."

   "No, not---that---not that I recall"

   "Not that you recall. Now, as a matter of fact, didn't you have a conversation with this defendant here---one that you---um---m---choose to forget?"

   There was a sensational silence. Every one knew that Pauley would testify later, trying to save his own neck. They wondered what old Bruel was driving at? He was having fun with Genuun, as what attorney does not, when a confrère is on the witness-stand, wriggling like a common unprofessional person.

   "I have talked to many shanty-boat-ers," Genuun shook his head doubtfully.

   "I do not recall any conversation with Pauley."

   "Well, all right. You were rather solicitous about Mrs. Cartern, were you not, Mr. Genuun?"  Again there was a broad smile around the room. There had been talk about them. Bruel was making the well-known attorney bachelor think of his sins, if he had any.

   "Why---I---"

   "Now, Mr. Genuun, let us come to the point. Were you or were you not solicitous about Mrs. Cartern, the beautiful dancing river-girl?"

   Genuun gritted his teeth and rolled his eyes, and many laughed. Genuun might be a damaging witness for the  defence, but he was going to explain things, to Bruel's amusement, anyhow.
   "I---we were friendly."

   "Friendly! Friendly!" Bruel retorted, as though "friendly" were too mild a term by far. " Only friendly! You were on good terms?"

   "Yes, sir!"

   "You saw her often?"

   "Yes, sir!"

   "You remarked to her that you feared for the safety of her pearls and other jewelry?"

   "Yes, sir!"

   "Once?"

   “Several times, sir."

   "Then you were thinking about her pearls when you were on that small-hour somnolent, or somnambulent or insomniac stroll of yours?" Bruel demanded, as though it were the most important question in the world.

   Genuun's fingers closed on the arms of the witness-chair and he leaned forward, blinking. Bruel stared into the witness's eyes with an expression of perfect grimness. The spectators all knew that Bruel was having fun with the attorney witness. Genuun was the most embarrassed man in the world.

"I---I couldn't sleep!" Genuun whispered. "I couldn't sleep !"

   "Couldn't sleep for thinking about Dancing Laura and her beautiful pearls ---jewels!" Bruel turned away to pick up a pad of notes, shaking his head with mock sadness. "Well, now, so you saw Pauley on Drool Street, coming away

from the general direction of where?"

   "I saw him! I saw him!" Genuun repeated.

   "What !" Bruel exclaimed, turning

and looking up quickly, with a flash in his eyes

   "I saw him!" Genuun repeatedly doggedly.

   Bruel looked at him. For more than thirty years Bruel had been examining witnesses. For two long minutes he gazed at Genuun, who sat there, leaning forward, his back bowed, his face looking up, his hands holding fast to the chair-arms.

   Bruel looked from Genuun to Clarence Pauley, who was listening breathlessly to the testimony which would, or would not, send him to the gallows.

   "I didn't! I didn't do it!" Pauley was whispering unconsciously.

   "Now, look here, Genuun!" Bruel said sharply. "We want the truth of this thing. A man's life hangs on the result of this trial. We must get at the truth of it. You realize that? You know what an oath is?"

   Two or three men burst out laughing. There was something ridiculous in asking a lawyer if he knew what an oath was.

   But Bruel was not smiling and the witness did not smile.

   "Now, Genuun, look at that man sitting there the accused, Clarence Pauley. Do you positively identify him as the man you met on Drool Street on that fatal morning?"

   No one laughed now. Attorney Bruel was standing on his tiptoes, and every person in the audience was sitting forward on their benches, listening for the reply of the witness.

For a minute Genuun did not reply to this question.

   "Answer me. Answer before the thone of God!" Bruel thundered. 

   "I---I don't---I think so," Genuun whisoered.

   "Speak up! Was the man you met on Drool Street, Clarence Pauley?" Sure? Is there a doubt in your heart?"

   "I---I think so. I am not sure,"

   "Not Sure?" Bruel asked softly. 

   "No, sir," Genuun answered, leaning back with relief.

   "Now, Genuun, you are the executor of the estate of Laura Cartern?"

   "Yes, sir."

   "You are the guardian of the now incompetent Picking Joe Cartern?"

   "Yes"

   "You are familiar with the legal aspects of this case?"

   "Yes, sir."

   "The estate is large?"

   "Why---yes."

   "How large?"

   Genuun looked at the floor as he leaned forward again. The prosecuting attorney, the two detectives, Colme, the reporter, all looked at Bruel, wondering. If Bruel was fishing, he was using good bait !

   "I do not know exactly," Genuun parried

   "Well approximately?"

   "Forty fifty-sixty thousand dollars."

   "What!" Bruel exclaimed, really surprised.

   "Yes---about sixty thousand dollars."

   "What in?"

   "Mostly jewels."

   "And the pearl necklace is missing?"

   "No. I found that. It was sewed in the lining of a corset. I sold it for fifty thousand dollars to Mr. Ricklestein, who sits there in the audience."

   "By Gawd !" Preel whispered to Colme and Poter. "What do you make of that? What's Bruel driving at?"

   The two shook their heads. Bruel was bringing out secrets. He was cutting up the case of the prosecution, making it uncertain whether Clarence Pauley had been seen anywhere near the apartments where the murder had been committed.

   Bruel returned to the attack.

   "Now, Mr. Genuun, do you know for certain that the man you met on Drool Street was Clarence Pauley or some one else?"

   "I---no, I am not certain."

   "You think it may not have been Pauley?"

   "Yes, sir."

   "Then it was not Pauley?"

   "I don't know---I think not---perhaps."

   "Thinking it over, you believe it was not?"

   "I---yes, probably not him."

   "That is all!"

CHAPTER XV.

PERJURY AND---

ATTORNEY BRUEL, for the defence, had shot a hole through and through the State's case

against Clarence Pauley. It was not, however, a fatal blow. If any one was on Drool Street on that night, not positively shown to be someone else, Pauley was in danger. Genuun had seen someone. It might still be Pauley, not posi-

tively identified. 

Bruel's bearing together toward his fellow-attorney was no longer teasing and bantering.

   "Who is the heir or heiress of this estate left by Ms. Cartern?"

   "I object ---immaterial, irrelevant, and---" the prosecuting attorney interrupted.

   "It is material, relevant, and consequential," Bruel declared with emphasis.

   "This witness has damaged our case very much. We must show that he has wrongly testified; we must go further than that; we must show that he had an object in so damaging our case. He has but one refuge. He can refuse to

answer on the ground that it is testimony against himself!"

   "Admitted," the court said, and all turned to see what Genuun would do.

   Genuun was accused of perjury. He was, for the instant, on trial. No one knew that better than he did.

   "Who is heir of this estate?" Bruel asked grimly.

   "It is a question."

   "Propound the question, then."

   "If Picking Joe was her legal husband, he is the heir."

   "But if he is not?"

   "I am taking for granted there are no other heirs."

   "But if he is not the heir?"

   "Then Pauley is the heir."

   "He is divorced!"

   "The---the divorce might not have

been legal."

   "You have your doubts?"

   "I have found no divorce papers

   "Then, if Pauley is convicted of murdering her?"

  "There is no known heir," Genuun whispered.

  "In that case?"

  "The State

  "Yes---go on!" Bruel thundered 

  "I would remain---a long time---as executor."

Genuun was abject as he made the confession. He slumped down in his chair and stared without seeing.

   "Then you admit you had an object in testifying that you saw Pauley on Drool Street that morning?"

   "Yes."

   "You did not see him?"

   "You did not see any one?"

   "No-only Abner on Burl Street. I

met no one, saw no one on Drool or Tupelo Street."

   "That is all."

Genuun looked at the prosecuting attorney, the glance of dog whose mistress has whipped it, to see if the master is going to wield the lash.

   "Excused," the State said.

   Genuun, shaken and palsied, crept up and out of the witness-chair. Only the mercy of the State could save him from prosecution for perjury. Only the mercy of the State Bar Association could save him from disbarment for the apparent malpractice.

   Genuun shuffled across the floor and slumped into his seat among the lawyers who looked away from him. Colme watching him, caught an expression in his eyes that was of haunting terror.

   The reporter saw, as every one in the court-room saw, that Pauley could not be convicted. More than this, reporter, detective, and prosecuting attorney, with all that mass of unrevealed and, by the public, unsuspected evidence which could a now be turned against Genuun, realized that Genuun had saved himself from prosecution on the charge of murder. No case that would hold could be

made out against him. Circumstantial evidence had been struck a hard blow, as every attorney realized. They all made note of that near approach to the conviction of the man who was now so far without the coils of the evidence.

Clarence Pauley was still suspect. It did not seem as though he ever could be freed from suspicion. Only an eyewitness could convict him now.

   After examining a number of witnesses to show Pauley's recent good behavior Bruel let the case for the defence rest. The court charged the jury. He enlarge upon the matter of "reasonable doubt," and practically declared that in this case there was such a doubt.

   Without leaving their seats, a very unusual thing in a murder case in Mendova, the jury acquitted Pauley, who broke down and sobbed at the verdict.

   Genuun immediately left the court-room. Colme, Preel, and Poter followed him through the cloak-room and down the stairs. On the courthouse steps, the disgraced attorney looked back at them, and turned paler than he had been before.

   He seemed fairly to shrivel up They take disgrace hard, when they're caught ---that kind of society pushers do!"

   Preel grinned. "Who do you bet killed her-Pauley or a burglar?"

   "I think Pauley did it!" Poter declared. If that necklace hadn't turned up, I would have bet the thief made his getaway with it. Pauley didn't care so much about stealing as he did about

making his revenge certain."

   "Well, how did he do it?"

   "He just went there and knocked."

She let him in for old-time's sake. She

wasn't afraid of anything, you know.

They went to the window, to look at the

river and talk. She had the chamois

jewel-bag in her hand, and the divorce packet. She swung 'em around, the way a woman will, you know. He hit her, and she let them drop. The bag fell straight ---the oiled silk bag skipped and skidded on the air, and went off to the fence."

   "That's the way of it, don't you think, Colme?"

   "I don't know." Colme shook his head. "Will they push Genuun for those fake divorces?"

   "Huh ! He'll resign his job as executor and pull his freight for pastures new, and they'll let him go."

   They were walking up Main Street, and they saw Genuun enter the office building, looking back as he did so. They went on to the Javelin office, where Colme entered, while the detectives kept on up the street, nonplused by the turn of events.

   There they all would have left the case.

Genuun had played his game and won.

His confession had served to save him.

It was all up to Genuun what he should do.

When he entered the ofice building, as the detectives had seen, he had glanced back. He saw the two detectives and Colme, half a block back. That determined him. He caught the elevator up to his office and entered. His stenographer had asked special permission to

attend the trial, and he had given it. She had not yet returned. He entered his office, retired to the inner room, and sat down at his desk,

opened up his fountain-pen, and began to write. He had been turning this way and that for a long while, longer than any one knew. Now he stopped dodging and twisting. He went straight to the point, without circumscribing:

   To WHOM IT CONCERNS:

I, this day, in my normal health and in full

possession of my faculties, do declare that I and I alone, am responsible for the death of Mrs. Laura Cartern, alias Pauley, and to make my peace with God, I do say that the divorce by

me, granted fraudulently and for hire, was and

is null and void, so that at the time of her

death she was the wife of said Clarence Pauley,

and not of Joseph Cartern, as believed and according to the wedding certificate not found

among her effects, but verifiable by the records

in the court of Justice Croven, by whom the said illegal wedding ceremony was performed.

I went to the Murlow apartments instead of

turning down Tupelo Street as I testified. I

found the front door carelessly unlocked. I

climbed to her studio floor and knocked. She

asked:

   "Who is it?"

   "Attorney Genuun," I replied

   "This is a strange hour to make a call!" she

answered, but opened the door.

   "I came to discuss the question of your divorce," I told her, and she laughed, asking:

   "Why?"

   "It is fraudulent !" I told her, for I had worried much about it and other divorces of the kind in which I was implicated 

   We went to the rehearsing-room, and she sat

down on the floor and I sat on the horn stool.

As I passed the stand, I picked up the statuette.

I was greatly exercised. That day I had heard

Pauley had come to town. I saw him. I did

not know what he might do. He might dis-

cover the fraudulent divorce and I would be

ruined. I tried to get rid of him that night,

having him untie Picking Joe's boat, and then

go into hiding.

   Now I wanted her to let me obtain a real

divorce for her somewhere---Reno---anywhere.

She would not. She laughed at me. If it was

discovered, I urged her, it would ruin my reputation. 
   "It wouldn't do a thing to mine!" she

laughed frivolously.

   She would take nothing seriously. She sat

there, playing with her chamois bag and making fun of me. I grew angry. I flourished the

statuette, and she laughed at my worries and

my fears. I threw the statuette down like a

hammer, urging her in a low voice. I misjudged

the distance, and the whole weight landed on her head. I did not mean to hit her. I am a

gentleman. I did not know she was dead. I

put the statuette on the table and returned

downstairs the way I had come.

   The next I knew I heard that she was mur

dered. I was astounded, for I did not mean to

kill her. But I had taken her pearls and money

and jewels intending to make her let me get

her a divorce before I would give them back.

I am not a thief.

   I returned home. When I knew she was dead,

I realized the predicament in which I might

find myself. As executor, however, I thought

I had covered my tracks. I see now that there was no escape.

   I am face to face with disgrace, the gallows

even.

   I make this confession of my own free will.

Signed

COLWELD GENUUN 

   The attorney laid his pen down on the

desk with a sigh that was half a sob as

he finished writing, and read the confession through carefully. He started to fold it to put it in an envelope, then decided to leave it open on the desk. He picked up his pen, replaced the cap and returned it meticulously to his pocket; and all the while his thoughts were rac-

ing chaotically, fear being uppermost in them.

   Genuun did not know, he could not know, that he had escaped the coils that he had seen tightening around him. He had slipped through them all. The law would exact nothing of him.

   He prepared for the final act. He drew from its place in his drawer the automatic pistol which he had purchased as the detectives drew closer. He slipped back the safety catch, and

hesitated. Suppose the thing should go

wrong suppose he bungled?

   The thought brought an icy perspiration out on Genuun's forehead, and he glanced wildly around the room. He must try the wicked weapon first. But no, the sound of a shot would be an infinitely worse mistake, since it would

mean in all probability his discovery.

He snatched up a rug from the floor,

muffed the pistol in it, pressed it against

his head and pulled the trigger.

AN hour later his stenographer came

hurrying in breathlessly, and, with her

mouth pursed to offer excuses for her

tardiness, she discovered him lying prostrate on the floor. Her screams brought other tenants, and police headquarters sent Preel and Poter.  Colme, called from his trial story, ran to the scene.

   The three gathered around the sheet of

foolscap, containing the confession, and

read it through.

" There!" Preel declared triumphantly,

seeking vindication for his failure. "I knew he did it, and that he couldn't get away!"

THE END (For next short-story gem click on):

Twilight by John W. Campbell