Part 103

“Why do you come to tell me now?”

“Because for more than one year now I say to mineself, 'Carl Heinzman, you vas one dirty scoundrel. You vas dishonest; a sneak; a thief'; I don't like to call myself names like dose. It iss all righdt to be smart; but to be a thief!”

“Why didn't you pull out?” asked Orde.

“I couldn't!” cried Heinzman piteously. “How could I? He haf me cold. I paid Stanford five hundred dollars for his vote on the charter; and Joseph Newmark, he know dot; he can PROVE it. He tell me if I don't do what he say, he put me in jail. Think of dot! All my friends go back on me; all my money gone; maybe my daughter Mina go back on me, too. How could I?”

“Well, he can still put you in prison,” said Orde.

“Vot I care?” cried Heinzman, throwing up both his arms. “You and your wife are my friends. She save my Mina. DU LIEBER GOTT! If my daughter had died, vot good iss friends and money? Vot good iss anything? I don't vant to live! And ven I sit dere by her always something ask me: 'Vy you do dot to the peoples dot safe your Mina?' And ven she look at me, her eyes say it; and in the night everything cry out at me; and I get sick, and I can't stand it no longer, and I don't care if he send me to prison or to hell, no more.”

His excitement died. He sat listless, his eyes vacant, his hands between his knees.

“Vell, I go,” he said at last.

“Have you that note?” asked Orde.

“Joseph Newmark, he keeps it most times,” replied Heinzman, “but now it is at my office for the foreclosure. I vill not foreclose; he can send me to the penitentiary.”

“Telephone Lambert in the morning to give it to me. No; here. Write an order in this notebook.”

Heinzman wrote the required order.

“I go,” said he, suddenly weary.

Orde accompanied him down the street. The German was again light-headed with the fever, mumbling about his daughter, the notes, Carroll, the voices that had driven him to righteousness. By some manoeuvring Orde succeeded in slipping him through the improvised quarantine without discovery. Then the riverman with slow and thoughtful steps returned to where the lamp in the study still marked off with the spaced replenishments from its oil reservoir the early morning hours.

XLVI

Morning found Orde still seated in the library chair. His head was sunk forward on his chest; his hands were extended listless, palms up, along the arms of the chair; his eyes were vacant and troubled. Hardly once in the long hours had he shifted by a hair's breadth his position. His body was suspended in an absolute inaction while his spirit battered at the walls of an impasse. For, strangely enough, Orde did not once, even for a single instant, give a thought to the business aspects of the situation--what it meant to him and his prospects or what he could do about it. Hurt to the soul he stared at the wreck of a friendship. Nothing will more deeply sicken the heart of a naturally loyal man than to discover baseless his faith in some one he has thoroughly trusted.

Orde had liked Newmark. He had admired heartily his clearness of vision, his financial skill, his knowledge of business intricacies, his imperturbable coolness, all the abilities that had brought him to success. With a man of Orde's temperament, to admire is to like; and to like is to invest with all good qualities. He had constructed his ideal of a friend, with Newmark as a basis; and now that this, which had seemed to him as solid a reality as a brick block, had dissolved into nothing, he found himself in the necessity of refashioning his whole world. He was not angry at Newmark. But he was grieved down to the depths of his being.

When the full sun shone into the library, he aroused himself to change his clothes. Then, carrying those he had just discarded, he slipped out of the house and down the street. Duke, the black and white setter dog, begged to follow him. Orde welcomed the animal's company. He paused only long enough to telephone from the office telling Carroll he would be out of town all day. Then he set out at a long swinging gait over the hills. By the time the sun grew hot, he was some miles from the village and in the high beech woods. There he sat down, his back to a monster tree. All day long he gazed steadily on the shifting shadows and splotches of sunlight; on the patches of blue sky, the dazzling white clouds that sailed across them; on the waving, whispering frond that over-arched him, and the deep cool shadows beneath. The woods creatures soon became accustomed to his presence. Squirrels of the several varieties that abounded in the Michigan forests scampered madly after each other in spirals around the tree trunks, or bounded across the ground in long undulating leaps. Birds flashed and called and disappeared mysteriously. A chewink, brave in his black and white and tan uniform, scratched mightily with great two-footed swoops that threw the vegetable mould over Orde's very feet. Blazoned butterflies--the yellow and black turnus, the dark troilus, the shade-loving nymphalis--flickered in and out of the patches of sunlight. Orde paid them no attention. The noon heat poured down through the forest isles like an incense. Overhead swung the sun, and down the slope until the long shafts of its light lifted wand-like across the tree trunks.

At this hint of evening Orde shook himself and arose. He was little nearer the readjustment he sought than he had been the previous night.

He reached home a little before six o'clock. To his surprise he found Taylor awaiting him. The lawyer had written nothing as to his return.

“I had things pretty well in shape,” he said, after the first greetings had been exchanged, “and it would do no good to stay away any longer.”

“Then the trouble is over?” asked Orde.

“I wouldn't say that,” replied Taylor; “but you can rest easy as to the title to your lands. The investigation had no real basis to it. There may have been some small individual cases of false entry; but nothing on which to ground a real attack.”

“When can I borrow on it?”

“Not for a year or two, I should say. There's an awful lot of red-tape to unwind, as there always is in such cases.”

“Oh,” said Orde in some disappointment.

Taylor hesitated, removed his eye-glasses, wiped them carefully, and replaced them. He glanced at Orde sidelong through his keen, shrewd eyes.

“I have something more to tell you; something that will be painful,” said he.