The box from japan, p.69
The Box from Japan, page 69
“Indeed I’d like to see her—yes,” he agreed.
Whereupon Miss Kinneally led the way to the back parlor and threw open the door. The lights of the room were on full. Halsey passed embarrassedly in, and stood with his cap in his hand. The girl sat propped up in bed, her magnificent dark eyes bright and clear, one black tendril hanging over the bandage of clean white gauze that was bound tightly around her temples, hemming in the rest of her jet curls. She looked at him bewilderedly for a moment, and then smiled up at him; a dazzling, warm, radiant smile.
“How do you do, Miss Loris?” he said. “How are you feeling now? Do you—remember me?”
“Indeed I do,” she replied quietly. “I feel as though I’ve had a long restful sleep—that I could never sleep again as long as I live—but strange little hammers persist in thumping at times on the left side of my head—that is, when I move it suddenly.”
“Then don’t move it suddenly,” ordered Miss Kinneally, businesslike. And added, less brusquely: “That will all wear off by tomorrow.” She looked at the gold watch on her wrist. Then she turned toward Halsey. “I wonder if you would mind staying here for a little while, Mr. Halsey, till I run over to my quarters up the street and catch a short nap? I’ve been up more or less, you see, for two full nights on another case before I came on this one, and I confess that I’m—well—beginning to slip!”
“Certainly not,” he replied. “Suppose you just step into my room and lie down on my bed. I feel like Miss Loris here—that I’ll never sleep again—after certain considerable excitement I’ve been through tonight.” He looked down at himself ruefully, where he had inefficiently beaten away a lot of dusty dirt from the front of his clothing, as well as his knees. “Don’t I look like a person who’s been having excitement? In fact—I’ve been doing the Garage Crawl! And how!” He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew his bunch of keys. He extracted the proper key from the tangle. “Go right on in, Miss Kinneally. Get an hour’s sleep. I’ll stay right here and bore Miss—er—Loris.”
The nurse came over and accepted the proffered key without any argument. Indeed, she looked so heavy-lidded at this moment, that she resembled one who was just about to drop off—right on her very feet. “Thanks, Mr. Halsey. An hour’s catnap will make a new woman of me.” She left the room quietly, closing the door in back of her, and Halsey drew over a chair to the side of the girl with the velvet eyes.
He opened his lips to speak, but she turned her head on the pillow, very gingerly, in fact, and spoke to him first.
“Mr. Halsey—as they tell me your name is—I know pretty well what happened to me yesterday; that a strange man struck me down after I refused to believe certain statements he made at the door; and that the doctor put me into a long artificial sleep of some sort—to avoid brain concussion. But what I don’t understand is who—who is paying for the nurse and the doctor? And—”
“Please don’t worry about such things,” he said, placing his cap by the side of her bed. “I am paying for them, and reason enough that I should. Even at that, I feel guilty for having been the whole cause of your trouble. In fact, perhaps I may be able to explain.” He paused, and then with a rapt look toward her big eyes and dark ringlets, went determinedly on: “I’m the one who—who rented you this room here, am I not? And then—then your troubles began, did they not?”
She looked at him in hopeless curiosity, which he could not exactly fathom. “To rent me a room is not—well—a crime, is it? And you were very nice, in every way,” she added hastily, as though the tenor of her words was a bit unaffable. “Especially in the way—you warned me about Ulysses!”
“Gosh—yes!” he said apprehensively. “Ulysses! For heaven’s sake, Miss Lor—or Miss—”
“Hemingway,” she put in quietly, looking him squarely in the eyes. “Loris Hemingway.”
“Hemingway,” he corrected. He paused. “But there are a lot of questions, I guess, that I must ask. I’ve just come from the scene of a fairly hectic little drama—at least while it lasted!—at which spot I was told that certain information, which just about saved my worthless skin in the nick of time, came from no other than Miss Loris Hemingway, of the very house in which I live. And that’s all the information I’ve been able to obtain thus far. And—” He stopped, as he saw a question trembling eagerly on her own red lips.
“You may ask all you wish,” she said hastily. “But one question, at least, I want to ask you.” She paused. “Was this matter—whatever exactly it was—by any chance a matter concerning a man—named McCollum?”
He nodded.
She looked puzzled: “I don’t understand what connection you would have with that. Or with him. However—” She sighed. “Mr, Halsey, I understood Mr. McCollum’s farm was to be investigated tonight. Do you, by any chance, happen to know whether my brother was located there—at this man’s farm?”
“No, he was not,” he said quietly. “I’m pretty much at sea about a lot of things. But so far as I understand matters, this man himself—McCollum you call him—his name is really something else—doesn’t have any idea of where Clifford Hemingway is.”
She sighed again, despairingly, forlornly. “Always blocked—at every turn. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.” She stirred uneasily on the bed. “Mr. Halsey, there is a bit of a confession due from me, I guess. I—” She paused. “I will have to admit that I came to Number 810½ Tower Court today—oh no, no—it was yesterday, wasn’t it?—yes—yesterday—well, I came here yesterday originally with the intention of merely making some exhaustive inquiries about each and every person who lives here, but when I found a room-to-rent sign in the transom above the front door, I had an opening that provided me with the opportunity of doing very much more than that—of personally investigating all the people here—sub rosa—as a tenant myself. So whatever blame you think is attached to yourself for that assault, just because you rented me a room—well—I brought it upon my own head. So you see you owe me no apologies.”
He looked down at her studiedly. She did not know, of course, that he had rented her a $10 room—at $4. And when she did— He spoke: “Miss Hemingway, you’ve been out of the scheme of things for a long time, haven’t you?” She nodded, but very gingerly. “And you don’t know much about what’s going on, while you’ve been out, do you? But Clifford Hemingway is—as I understand it—your brother. Where is he now? Or rather, just where is he—well—supposed to be? I gather that you yourself do not know.”
She shook her head emphatically, and then gave a sharp cry as the motion started the hammering inside. “No, I do not know—and I cannot find out—and I’m afraid—”
“Tell me about it,” he said firmly. “And careful—with that head of yours!” He paused. “Your brother happens to be involved in my own fortunes in a certain odd way—a way which you could hardly know about since he doesn’t know about it either—and if you’ll explain I’ll tell you facts—well—certain facts, anyway, which will be of interest to you.” He paused again. “I rather think we’re going to have to do a lot of exchanging of information.” He paused again, undecidedly. “Miss Hemingway, your family was involved—as I understand it—in some silly scandal once—which caused your brother to enter Wisconsin University without handing in prerequisite credits from his last college—and to take entrance examinations. Something that must have hurt him more or less at whatever previous university he attended. In fact, an uncle of his out West—Abner Hemingway is the name—told an uncle of mine, at one time, that the scandal, or whatever the thing was, was a foolish affair that had once rocked a whole world with laughter, and that for that reason he, Abner Hemingway, who I daresay you know as well as I, has—or had!—a very fine record as an ethnologist, had been very sparing of the facts about his own family connections which he gave to the publishers of Who’s Who. Now I don’t want to inquire into anything that is silly or giddy—or salacious—or—well, just generally asinine—because it touches you, also a Hemingway as well as your brother and your uncle. But I have had occasion myself, Miss Lor—Miss Hemingway, I mean—to be trying to get on your brother’s track, and I, and others as well, have been utterly balked, because of having not a single lead on earth, either through the records at Wisconsin-U or through Abner Hemingway’s affairs at Sheridan, Wyoming, or the paragraph about him in Who’s Who, to whoever Clifford Hemingway’s people—or connections—were.”
“What were you trying to locate him—for?” the girl asked hurriedly. She looked at him questioningly.
“Something,” he said reassuringly—and he realized that here was one frail human being who had seen no Chicago newspapers for more than 24 hours, “merely connected with—some stock ownership. A financial matter. Serious for me, though. That—was all.”
“Oh!” she said, obviously much relieved. She was silent again for a moment. But once more she looked at him puzzledly: “But—Uncle Abner, out in Wyoming—you say you could not get anything from him?”
“Hardly,” Halsey replied. “For your uncle died, under somewhat dramatic circumstances, in New Guinea, the latter part of last week, and it is a matter of a couple of shares of stock which your brother has inherited from him, inherited out-and-out, with no strings whatever attached.” He leaned over, still somewhat at sea. “I take it that you not only do not know of your uncle’s death, but I gather somehow as well that you hardly even knew him, or he you?”
“That is quite correct,” she admitted. “I never met my uncle. Or even corresponded with him. My brother called on him once—when he was in the West. To my uncle I was just an abstraction, I guess, back East.”
“You must have been,” agreed Halsey, “considering that he left what small estate he had to your brother.”
“Well—he liked boys,” the girl replied. “And I presume he thought that I’d be getting married some day—and wouldn’t need any inheritances.” She was silent. “So this far-away uncle of mine has died. And in New Guinea?”
“Yes. All the metropolitan papers last Sunday carried the story of his death. Cannibals got him. A tribe called the Ogwali. And you didn’t see the story?”
“No,” she replied, apparently stunned a bit by this information, even though it did involve someone more or less unknown to her personally. And she added, in explanation: “For my home is in Eden, Illinois, Mr. Halsey, a place so small that it has no Sunday papers, much less a daily paper. The stub railroad line that Eden is on, which connects to the larger railroad line, fifty miles away, doesn’t even have a Sunday train! Twice a week we get our world news, and no oftener. And then only in the Gentryville Bugle, a paper printed further up the line. Of course,” she appended, “our radios catch the news broadcasts sent out from the big city stations, both here and at St. Louis, but I’ll have to confess I rely on the Wednesday and Saturday Bugles, and when I tune in I tune in on all the music I can get. My brother, you know, has a blind spot for music; it bores him, even pains him. And I inherited his share, I guess, of love for music.”
“I see. Well, your Saturday Bugle would have been printed too early to have had that story about Abner Hemingway’s death, which took place Friday, Australian time, or early Saturday, United States time. So that’s that. And, as I say, Abner Hemingway left your brother a couple of shares of a certain stock. And because of that I’ve found it advisable to get in touch with your brother. Very simple, after all, is it not?”
She was silent. She looked down at the counterpane of the bed for a long while before she spoke. Then she looked up. “Mr. Halsey, my brother is named Clifford Hemingway only because of his having legally taken that name, just after he became of age, in a small county court in Nebraska, exactly as his uncle Abner, twenty-five years or more ago, also took his name, also in some county court some place, I don’t just know where. I myself merely gave my name in as Hemingway tonight, to the officer who called here, to conform to my brother’s legal—and therefore rightful—name.”
“And why did—did your brother change his name?” asked Halsey helplessly. “What—what was his right name—if you don’t mind telling me?”
“No,” she said, “I think I ought to tell you—since you’re involved with him in a matter of—of possible stock ownership.” She paused, uncertainly. Then spoke. “His name—his right name—is John Hangless III; and he is the grandson and only living male descendant of the most notorious character in criminal history, John Hangless, the—”
“The Man,” Halsey ended “Who Couldn’t Be Hanged?”
CHAPTER LV
A Story of Ancient Coins
A wave of intense pain swept over the girl’s face at Halsey’s words.
“Even you know—of the Man They Couldn’t Hang?” she said sadly. “But who—does not? The entire world—has heard of him. People who speak every language—have heard of him—in their own tongue. It all happened years—years before even our own father—John Hangless II—died. But the ignominy of it has been crystallized for all time to come, in a dozen horrible ways. In a biographical novel called The Man They Could Not Hang, published originally, so I understand, in the 1880’s, in cloth, and then, during the subsequent years, in cheaper and yet cheaper imprints, and finally in millions of copies of paper editions, on sale even today at every railroad station and magazine rack in America. A popular song was written called They Can’t Hang Me Because I’m Him that Can’t be Hung, the sheet music for which lies today in thousands of dusty music cabinets—in collections of famous ballads—and which song, Mr. Halsey, lies in probably hundreds of thousands of equally dusty phonograph record cabinets, graven for all time to come on the surfaces of ebonite discs. Unfortunate—yes—that the rhyme and meter of that song should be just tricksy enough to preserve it always; and even I, musical the way I am, have to admit that its melody is something that catches the ear immediately—that lingers with one always. It is as famous, that song, they say, as some other song called The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, and that other old favorite, After the Ball. And in addition to all these things, Mr. Halsey, the case of John Hangless I was even crystallized in—”
“In a play,” put in Halsey, sympathetically.
“Yes, a play which toured America at one time in a score of companies, a play just melodramatic enough to serve as an alternate performance for hundreds of old-time Uncle Tom’s Cabin companies. Yet a play of powerful characterization and atmosphere, for it even toured America in a successful revival, only a few years back, with a very high-class English company playing it, and a distinguished English actor named Archibald Jessems both producing it and playing the lead in it. The play, of course, like the book, ended in its last scene with the commutation of John Hangless’ sentence to imprisonment for life in the penitentiary.”
“Where he ultimately died?” Halsey said sadly.
“Ah!” she cried impulsively, putting out one dainty hand in the turbulence of her emotions, clenching its little fingers together, the while the sleeve of her blue silken nightgown fell away revealing the soft white slender arm. “And that—that,” she declared vehemently, “is the horrid thing about—about the Hangless notoriety. That—and the very unforgettable name Hangless itself! For who is there in the entire English-speaking world, Mr. Halsey, who would ever forget that strange name Hangless, if they once heard it; who could ever disconnect it, in their mind, from the fact that its owner himself was hangless, unhangable, was one ‘who could not be hanged’? Who—but I was just about to tell you of the cruel angle of the whole thing: that the novels—the phonograph records—the explanatory words printed on the old sheet music—the play—none of those things, Mr. Halsey, none of them, give the finalé of John Hangless’ life—that he was exonerated while in prison, completely so, about six years after he commenced his life sentence, and that he was quietly discharged. In a rather unfair manner, though, so it always seemed to our family, since the governor of the State felt that the very necessity of a pardon, in such a distressing case, created a considerable blot on the fair name of Ohio, and John Hangless’ discharge was suppressed, at the actual time it took place. Had it not been, the story might have been printed nationally, far and wide, in every newspaper. But when it did finally come out, it was—”
“Cold news?” put in Halsey, nodding.
“Yes, just what you term it—cold news, and it did not get a hundredth of the space it would have gotten before. But, as I say, none of the novels, songs, phonograph records—anything—tell about John Hangless’ exoneration, nor that it was so complete that the State of Ohio even granted him $25,000 compensation for his terrible ordeal and false imprisonment. They do not tell how he ultimately died peaceably and honorably, in his wife’s arms, nor tell how he is buried, alongside her, today, in a little country graveyard—down in Eden, Illinois.”
Halsey could only stare more or less helplessly at the girl. At length he found himself able to comment.
“And so—he did not die—in prison? Well I’ll be— What were the facts, Miss Hemingway? Or—what on earth shall I call you?”
“I am known as Loris Hangless down in Eden, Illinois,” she said quietly. “But suppose you just continue to call me Hemingway. The name Hangless seems rather horrid—repellent, maybe—to an outsider. Clifford is known only as John Hangless III, down there. Not a person in the town knows that he has a legally adopted name for use in the outside world. You see, Mr. Halsey, there is no opprobrium, you may rest assured, attached to our name—in our little town. For John Hangless I, out of that $25,000 which the State of Ohio gave him, established a library for this little town to which he went to live. He donated, for it, what was then the tremendous sum of $10,000. Two great bronze plates were cast—they cost $1200 alone, I understand—each plate is six feet high and four feet wide and is an exact enlarged replica, in relief, of one of the two closely typewritten pages comprising the entire pardon document, the second plate even portraying the governor’s signature and the seal of the State of Ohio with its sun rising back of three pointed hills. These two plates, comprising as they do the text of the actual pardon document rendered in the strange case of John Hangless, set forth completely the entire facts of the whole affair and the indisputable data on which the exoneration was based. Those plates sit, right today, in the quaint brickwork at the front of that little library, one on each side of its low steps, and every child who can read down there knows that John Hangless, one of the early settlers, was cleared entirely and conclusively of a crime that was wrongfully riveted to him. I, Mr. Halsey, am an orphan; and, as you deduced today—no, that was yesterday, wasn’t it?—am just a seamstress—in a little town that has no factories, no mills, nor ordinary ways of earning one’s living. But there isn’t a name in that town which stands as high as that of Loris Hangless.”
