PROFESSOR GRISWOLD TAKES THE FIELD
Barbara and Griswold stopped at the telegraph office on their way back to the executive mansion, and were met with news that the sheriff of Mingo had refused to receive Griswold's message.
"His private lines of communication with the capital are doubtless well established," said Griswold, "and Bosworth probably warned him, but it isn't of great importance. It's just as well for Appleweight and his friends, high and low, to show their hands."
When they were again on the veranda, Griswold lingered for a moment with no valid excuse for delay beyond the loveliness of the night and his keen delight in Barbara's voice and her occasional low laughter, which was so pleasant to hear that he held their talk to a light key, that he might evoke it the more. Professor Griswold's last flirtation was now so remote that he would have been hard put to say whether the long-departed goddess' name had been Evelyn or Laura. He had so thoroughly surrendered himself to the exactions of the law that love and marriage held small place in his speculations of the future. He had heard himself called a bachelor professor with the humorous tolerance of one who is pretty sure of himself, and who is not yet reduced to the cynical experiment of peering beneath the top layer of his box of strawberries to find the false bottom. He recalled the slender manuscript volume of verses in his desk at home, and he felt that it would be the easiest thing in the world to write a thousand songs to-night, beside which the soundest brief ever filed in any court would be the silliest of literary twaddle.
"You have done all that could be asked of you, Mr. Griswold, and I can not permit you to remain longer. Father will certainly be here to-morrow. I assure you that it is not like him to avoid his public obligations. His absence is the most unaccountable thing that ever happened. I have my difficulties here at home, for since my mother's death I have had the care of my young sisters, and it is not pleasant to have to deceive them."
"Oh, but your father isn't absent! He is officially present and in the saddle," laughed Griswold. "You must not admit, even to me, that he is not here in full charge of his office. And as for my leaving the field, I have not the slightest intention of going back to Virginia until the Appleweight ghost is laid, the governor of North Carolina brought to confusion, and the governor of South Carolina visibly present and thundering his edicts again, so to speak, ex cathedra. My own affairs can wait, Miss Osborne. My university may go hang; my clients may be mulcted in direst damages, but just now I am your humble servant, and I shall not leave your service until my tasks are finished. I am consulting not my duty, but my pleasure. The joy of having a hand in a little affair like this, and of being able to tell my friend Tommy Ardmore about it afterward, would be sufficient. Ardmore will never speak to me again for not inviting him to a share in the game."
He was more buoyant than she had seen him, and she liked the note of affection that crept into his tone as he spoke of his friend.
"Ardmore is the most remarkable person alive," Griswold continued. "You remember—I spoke of him this morning. He likes to play the inscrutable idiot, and he carries it off pretty well; but underneath he's really clever. The most amazing ideas take hold of him. You never could imagine what he's doing now! I met him accidentally in Atlanta the other day, and he was in pursuit of a face—a girl's face that he had seen from a car window for only an instant on a siding somewhere."
"He must have a romantic temperament," suggested Barbara.
"Quite that. His family have been trying to marry him off to some one in their own set ever since I have known him, but he's extremely difficult. One of the most remarkable things about him is his amazing democracy. He owns a palace on Fifth Avenue, but rarely occupies it, for he says it bores him. He has a camp in the Adirondacks, but I have never known him to visit it. His place in North Carolina pleases him because there he commands space, and no one can crowd him or introduce him to people he doesn't want to meet. He declares that the most interesting people don't have more than a dollar a day to spend; that the most intelligent and the best-looking girls in America clerk in shops and work in factories. A philanthropic lady in New York supplies him every Christmas with a list of names of laundry girls, who seem to appeal particularly to Ardy's compassion, though he never knew one in his life, but he admires them for the zeal with which they destroy buttonholes and develop the deckle-edge cuff; and he has twenty-dollar bills mailed to them quite mysteriously, and without any hint of who Santa Claus really is."
"But the girl he saw from the car window—did she also appeal to him altruistically?"
"No; it was with her eye. He declared to me most solemnly that the girl winked at him!"
Griswold was aware that Miss Osborne's interest in Ardmore cooled perceptibly.
"Oh!" she said, with that delightful intonation with which a woman utterly extinguishes a sister.
"I shouldn't have told you that," said Griswold, guiltily aware of falling temperature. "He is capable of following a winking eye at a perfectly respectful distance for a hundred years, and of being entertained all the time by the joy of pursuit."
"It seems very unusual," said Barbara, with cold finality.
Griswold remembered this talk as, the next day, aboard the train bound for Turner Court House, the seat of Mingo County, South Carolina, he pondered a telegram he had received from Ardmore. He read and re-read this message, chewing cigars and scowling at the landscape, and the cause of his perturbation of spirit may be roughly summarized in these words:
On leaving the executive mansion the night before, he had studied maps in his room at the Saluda House, and carefully planned his campaign. He had talked by telephone with the prosecuting attorney of Mingo County, and found that official politely responsive. So much had gone well. Then the juxtaposition of Ardmore's estate to the border, and the possible use of the house as headquarters, struck in upon him. He would, after all, generously take Ardmore into the game, and they would uphold the honor and dignity of the great commonwealth of South Carolina together. The keys of all Ardmore's houses were, so to speak, in Griswold's pocket, and invitations were unnecessary between them; yet, at Atlanta Ardmore had made a point of asking Griswold down to help while away the tedium of Mrs. Atchison's house party, and as a matter of form Griswold had wired from Columbia, advising Ardmore of his unexpected descent.
Even in case Ardmore should still be abroad in pursuit of the winking eye, the doors of the huge house would be open to Griswold, who had entered there so often as the owner's familiar friend. These things he pondered deeply as he read and re-read Ardmore's reply to his message, a reply which was plainly enough dated at Ardsley, but which, he could not know, had really been written in caboose 0186 as it lay on a siding in the southeastern yards at Raleigh, and thence despatched to the manager at Ardsley, with instructions to forward it as a new message to Griswold at Columbia. The chilling words thus flung at him were:
Professor Henry Maine Griswold,
Saluda House, Columbia, S. C.:
I am very sorry, old man, but I can not take you in just now. Scarlet fever is epidemic among my tenants, and I could not think of exposing you to danger. As soon as the accursed plague passes I want to have you down.
ARDMORE.
An epidemic that closed the gates of Ardsley would assume the proportions of a national disaster; for even if the great house itself were quarantined, there were lodges and bungalows scattered over the domain, where a host of guests could be entertained in comfort. Griswold reflected that the very fact that he had wired from Columbia must have intimated to Ardmore that his friend was flying toward him, pursuant to the Atlanta invitation. Griswold dismissed a thousand speculations as unworthy. Ardmore had never shown the remotest trace of snobbishness, and as far as the threatened house party was concerned, Griswold knew Mrs. Atchison very well, and had been entertained at her New York house.
The patronizing tone of the thing caused Griswold to flush at every reading. If the Ardsley date-line had not been so plainly written; if the phraseology were not so characteristic, there might be room for doubt; but Ardmore—Ardmore, of all men, had slapped him in the face!
But, scarlet fever or no scarlet fever, the pursuit of Appleweight had precedence of private grievances. By the time he reached Turner Court House Griswold had dismissed the ungraciousness of Ardmore, and his jaws were set with a determination to perform the mission intrusted to him by Barbara Osborne, and to wait until later for an accounting with his unaccountable friend.
Arrived at Turner's, Griswold strode at once toward the court house. The contemptuous rejection of his message by the sheriff of Mingo had angered Griswold, but he was destined to feel even more poignant insolence when, entering the sheriff's office, a deputy, languidly posed as a letter "V" in a swivel-chair, with his feet on the mantel, took a cob pipe from his mouth and lazily answered Griswold's importunate query with:
"The sheriff ain't hyeh, seh. He's a-visitin' his folks in Tennessy."
"When will he be back?" demanded Griswold, hot of heart, but maintaining the icy tone that had made him so formidable in cross-examination.
"I reckon I don't know, seh."
"Do you know your own name?" persisted Griswold sweetly.
"Go to hell, seh," replied the deputy. He reached for a match, relighted his pipe, and carefully crossed his feet on the mantel-shelf. The moment Griswold's steps died away in the outer corridor the deputy rose and busied himself so industriously with the telephone that within an hour all through the Mingo hills, and even beyond the state line, along lonely trails, across hills and through valleys, and beside cheery creeks and brooks, it was known that a strange man from Columbia was in Mingo County looking for the sheriff, and Appleweight, alias Poteet, and his men were everywhere on guard.
Griswold liked the prosecuting attorney on sight. His name was Habersham, and he was a youngster with a clear and steady gray eye. Instead of the Southern statesman's flowing prince albert, he wore a sack-coat of gray jeans, and was otherwise distinguished by a shirt of white and blue check. He grinned as Griswold bent a puzzled look upon him.
"I took your courses at the university two years ago, Professor, and I remember distinctly that you always wore a red cravat to your Wednesday lectures."
"You have done well," replied Griswold, "for I never expected to find an old student who remembered half as much of me as that. Now, as I understood you over the telephone, Appleweight was indicted for stealing a ham in this county by the last grand jury, but the sheriff has failed or refused to make the arrest. How did the grand jury come to indict if this outlaw dominates all the hill country?"
"The grand jury wanted to make a showing of virtue, and it was, of course, understood between the foreman, the leader of the gang, and the sheriff that no warrant could be served on Appleweight. I did my duty; the grand jury's act was exemplary; and there the wheels of justice are blocked. The same thing is practically true across the state line in Dilwell County, North Carolina. These men, led by Appleweight, use their intimate knowledge of the country to elude pursuers when at times the revenue men undertake a raid, and the county authorities have never seriously molested them. Now and then one of these sheriffs will make a feint of going out to look for Appleweight, but you may be sure that due notice is given before he starts. Three revenue officers have lately been killed while looking for these men, and the government is likely to take vigorous action before long."
"We may as well be frank," said Griswold in his most professional voice. "I don't want the federal authorities to take these men; it is important that they should not do so. This is an affair between the governors of the two Carolinas. It has been said that neither of them dares press the matter of arrest, but I am here in Governor Osborne's behalf to give the lie to that imputation."
"That has undoubtedly been the fact, as you know," and Habersham smiled at his old preceptor inquiringly. "Osborne once represented the Appleweights, and he undoubtedly saved the leader from the gallows. That was before Osborne ever thought of becoming governor, and he acted only within his proper rights as a lawyer. I don't recall that anything in professional ethics requires us to abandon a client because we know he's guilty. If such were the case we'd all starve to death."
"Governor Osborne has been viciously maligned," declared Griswold. "While he did at one time represent these people—no doubt thoroughly and efficiently—he holds the loftiest ideal of public service, and it was only when his official integrity was brought into question by unscrupulous enemies that he employed me as special counsel to carry this affair through to a conclusion. That accounts for my presence here, Habersham, and, with your assistance, I propose to force Governor Dangerfield's hand. Suppose all these people were arrested in Mingo County under these indictments, what would be the result—trial and acquittal?"
"Just that, in spite of any effort made to convict them."
"Well, Governor Osborne is tired of this business and wants the Appleweight scandal disposed of once and for all."
"That's strange," remarked Habersham, clearly surprised at Griswold's vigorous tone. "I called on the governor in his office at Columbia only ten days ago, and he put me off. He said he had to prepare an address to deliver before the South Carolina Political Reform Association, and he couldn't take up the Appleweight case; and I called on Bosworth, the attorney-general, and he grew furiously angry, and said I was guilty of the gravest malfeasance in not having brought those men to book long ago. When I suggested that he connive with the governor toward removing our sheriff, he declared that the governor was a coward. He seemed anxious to put the governor in a hole, though why he should take that attitude I can't make out, as it has been generally understood that Governor Osborne's personal friendliness for him secured his nomination and election to the attorney-generalship, and I have heard that he is engaged to the governor's oldest daughter."
"He is a contemptible hound," replied Griswold with feeling, "and at the proper time we shall deal with him; but it is of more importance just now to make Appleweight a prisoner in North Carolina. If he's arrested over there, that lets us out; and if the North Carolina authorities won't arrest their own criminals we'll go over into Dilwell County and show them how to be good. The man's got to be locked up, and he'd look much better in a North Carolina jail, under all the circumstances."
"That's good in theory, but how do you justify it in law?"
"Oh, that's the merest matter of formulæ! My dear Habersham, all the usual processes of law go down before emergencies!"
The airiness of Griswold's tone caused the prosecutor to laugh, for this was not the sober associate professor of admiralty whose lectures he had sat under at the University of Virginia, but a different person, whose new attitude toward the law and its enforcement shocked him immeasurably.
"You seem to be going in for pretty loose interpretations, and if that plaster bust of John Marshall up there falls from the shelf, you need not be surprised," and Habersham still laughed. "I might be impudent and cite you against yourself!"
"That would constitute contempt of court, and I can not just now spare your services long enough for you to serve a jail sentence. Go on now, and tell me what you have done and what you propose."
"Well, as I told you over the telephone, we hear a great deal about Appleweight and his crowd, but we never hear much of their enemies, who are, nevertheless, of the same general stock, and equally determined when aroused. Ten of these men I have quietly called to meet at my farm out here a few miles from town, on Thursday night. They come from different points over the country, and we'll have a small but grim posse that will be ready for business. You may not know it, but the Appleweights are most religious. Appleweight himself boasts that he never misses church on Sunday. He goes also to the mid-week service on Thursday night, so I have learned, and thereby hangs our opportunity. Mount Nebo Church lies off here toward the north. It's a lonely point in itself, though it's the spiritual center and rendezvous for a wide area. If Appleweight can be taken at all, that's the place, and I'm willing to make the trial. Whether to stampede the church and make a fight, or seize him alone as he approaches the place, is a question for discussion with the boys I have engaged to go into the game. How does it strike you?"
"First rate. Ten good men ought to be enough; but if it comes down to numbers, the state militia can be brought into use. The South Carolina National Guard is in camp, and we can have a regiment quick enough, if I ask it."
Habersham whistled.
"Osborne is certainly up and doing!" he exclaimed, chuckling. "I suppose he has tossed a quarter, and decided it's better to be good than to be senator. By the way, that was a curious story in the newspapers about Dangerfield and Osborne having a row at New Orleans. I wonder just what passed between them?"
Griswold was conscious that Habersham glanced at him a little curiously, with a look that implied something that half formed itself on the prosecuting attorney's lips.
"I know nothing beyond what I read in the newspapers at the time. Some political row, I fancy."
"I suppose Governor Osborne hasn't discussed it with you since his return to Columbia?" asked Habersham carelessly. The shadow of a smile flitted across his face but vanished quickly as though before a returning consciousness of the fact that he was facing Henry Maine Griswold, who was first of all a gentleman, and not less a scholar and a man of the world, who was not to be trifled with.
"No," replied Griswold, a little shortly. "I was appealed to in rather an unusual way in this matter of Appleweight. It is quite out of my line as a legal proposition, but there are other considerations of which I may not speak."
"Pardon me," murmured Habersham; but he asked: "What was Governor Osborne doing when you left Columbia?"
"When I left Columbia," remarked Griswold, and it was he that smiled now, "to the best of my knowledge and belief the governor of South Carolina was deeply absorbed in knitting a necktie, the color of which was, I think, the orange of a Blue Ridge autumn sunset. And now, if you will kindly give me pen and paper, I will communicate the Appleweight situation and our prospects to my honored chief."