CHAPTER XVIII

PEACOCK FEATHERS

As usual, Mr. Smith turned out to be right. You wouldn’t have known Raglan for the same man when he came out of that bathroom, and the transformation was completed when he had arrayed himself with scrupulous care and deliberation in an exquisitely tailored light gray suit with a fine blue stripe in it, symphonically harmonious with his socks and his cravat, brushed his hair, and settled himself at the little table where his breakfast was arrayed. I wondered as I watched his delicate approach to the chilled grapefruit whether, had I seen him first like this, I should have detected anything imitative or unreal about his well-bred English accent.

Punch had been watching these proceedings with breathless interest.

“Are the pajamas in there?” he asked, indicating the tool box. “The ones with the tear in the leg?”

Raglan nodded, indifferently enough, and then rather suddenly arrested his spoon for a thoughtful look at the boy.

“Yes,” he said, presently, turning back to his breakfast, “they’re down at the bottom, with the window shade hanger’s tools. Get them out, if you’re interested. Keep them for a souvenir. I never want to see them again.”

Punch had them out in a minute. There they were, sure enough. Lavender silk pajamas, with a big nail tear in one of the legs.

“They’re really an important souvenir,” Mr. Smith observed. “They must have been the main inspiration of the--campaign.”

“Naturally,” Raglan said. “There’s no trick about getting into any house, nor about hiding in it. But how to stay hidden for as long as may be necessary--well, the pajamas struck me as a pretty good answer. I could lie up by day almost anywhere providing I had freedom to move about at night. In a big house like this, full of guests who weren’t likely to know one another any too well, I’d be sure to have it. No one would pay any attention to a man in pajamas on his way to the bathroom. I could get all I needed to drink. I could shave, I thought, every night. I did shave, as a matter of fact, Wednesday night and Thursday night. It looked easy--a little too easy, I fancy. It was probably one of my mistakes. I’ve made several of them on this job, you know.”

“We shall have to rely upon you to tell us what they were,” said Mr. Smith politely. “The main conception was, it seems to me, quite in your best vein. Indeed I blame myself for failing to recognize your--idiom, so to speak, in the mere prima facie aspects of the case.”

The fellow was vain as a peacock, I could see. He was drinking down the old man’s compliments like wine. I ventured to lend a hand.

“You weren’t very far from it,” I reminded Mr. Smith. “The thing had a certain look to you which you kept reverting to, which made it hard for you to believe it to be the work of an amateur.”

“I failed to think clear through to the edge,” the old gentleman confessed mournfully. “I fell before the irresistible presumption which imposed on every one else; the presumption that a man wandering about the house at night in bath-slippers and pajamas must be one of the guests. And that despite the clear clue we had to the contrary, in the failure of Punch’s review of all the pajamas in the house that had been slept in, to account for the pair with a nail tear in the leg.”

This time it was Raglan’s coffee cup that halted sharply on the way to his lips.

“Punch!” he murmured, and turned another thoughtful look on the little boy.

But he was too hungry to be diverted more than momentarily from his breakfast, and Mr. Smith let him alone until he’d finished it. Then he offered him a cigar, and said, “I’d like to begin at the beginning. You came to the house ostensibly to put up window shades.”

“Ostensibly!” Raglan put in. “I worked here for two days; I must have put up hundreds of them, all over the house--practically all over the house. I couldn’t get into the old lady’s room. There was no work of any sort being done there. But the rest of the house I came to know like the palm of my hand.

“Wednesday afternoon when the old woman went around in her wheel chair, attended by her grandson, assigning rooms to the people who were coming, I was working up on this floor and I learned the names of every one who was coming and where every one was to sleep, which helped a lot.

“And a little later that afternoon,” Mr. Smith observed, “when it was time for the workmen to quit, instead of leaving the house you moved into the room you’d selected for yourself and made yourself at home.--You know, I wonder a little at your choice of a hiding-place, the top floor of the house with only one flight of stairs leading to it and only one door out of the place, once you’d got in.”

Raglan laughed--not a very nice sort of laugh, either.

“I thought of all that,” he said. “But there were compensating advantages. I found them the first time I went in there. You can hear everything that’s said in both sitting rooms, the old lady’s and her daughter’s--by some trick of construction that I didn’t figure out.”

“I know about that,” Punch volunteered. “The light comes up too. I asked grandmother why it was once, and she said grandfather had had the tops left off the window casings so that the long windows would slide all the way up.”

“I no longer wonder at your choice of it as a hiding-place,” Mr. Smith remarked dryly.

He took the staggering revelation, though, a good deal more calmly than I did. Heavens, how much did the man know! What was there that he didn’t know! I began to understand the basis for the fellow’s extraordinary complacency in confessing the details of his crime before three witnesses. Mr. Smith did nothing to disturb it.

“When was it you stole the imitation necklace from Mrs. Corbin’s safe?” he asked. “Wednesday night?”

Raglan shook his head. “I hadn’t a chance. I’d planned to, but the old woman wouldn’t quiet down; kept ringing for her nurse, and quarreling with her; wanted more dope than the nurse would give her, evidently. So I had to wait. I got my chance the next day. Just the time the lad here thought. I don’t know how he figured it out. The servants were all at lunch, I knew, and the family out on the veranda waiting for the guests to come. It was a close connection but I figured the safe wouldn’t give me any trouble, and it didn’t. I didn’t waste any time about it though.

“I got the necklace, dropped it in my pocket, shut the safe and came out into the hall. Everything was all right and I had a clear out, down the servants’ stairs. I had my case with me and anybody I might have met would have thought I’d come back that morning to finish up.

“I stood there with my hand in my pocket, feeling of the necklace. I hadn’t taken time to examine it. It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt that it was all right. But it did now. The feel of it was just a shade off, enough to make me suspicious.

“Just then I heard someone coming up the main stairs, so I went up instead of down. Back to that damned box room. There I turned my torch on the thing and saw at once that I’d been done. So I settled down to think it out.

“The old lady had been done, too, some time or other. That was plain enough. There was no doubt about her thinking this was the right string. There wasn’t any doubt, either, when I thought it over, that by taking the phony string I’d played straight into somebody’s hands. Whoever had made the substitution had nothing more to worry about now. I was the goat and I didn’t like it.

“Of course, if the real necklace had actually been stolen and disposed of there was no help for it. But there was almost as good a chance that it had been borrowed--pawned perhaps.

“That seemed more likely the more I thought about it. Whoever had pawned it must have been sweating blood over what would happen when the old woman gave the necklace to the girl. They’d have one good laugh over the boob who’d stolen the imitation necklace, and think no more about it.

“Well, then, why not put the phony string back in the old woman’s room? It might not do anything more than take the laugh off me. But it might, you see, do duty as a decoy for the real one. Besides, it would make everybody think that some fool amateur had taken the thing, lost his nerve and brought it back. Head off a lot of prying around.

“That night I started out in my pajamas, had a bath and shaved in the nearest bathroom, went down-stairs and put the necklace back. I’d have put it back in the safe, but the nurse was sleeping there that night, so I didn’t chance it. I went back up-stairs feeling pretty good. And then I got a devil of a jolt.”

Punch grinned. “When I came up-stairs after you,” he asked, “and turned on the light in the billiard room?”

“My God!” murmured Raglan after a long stare at him.

“You see,” said Punch, “I saw the pajamas going across in the moonlight. That’s how I knew about the tear in the leg. There are lots of nails sticking out in the trunk closet. I might have thought of that. But when you went up-stairs I couldn’t think why anybody should, or rather, why anybody who slept up-stairs should have come down, so I followed up to see. Well, I didn’t see anything or hear anything, so I came back. I was sort of scared myself.”

The first look of bewilderment in Raglan’s face had deepened into one of sour disgust. Mr. Smith set about restoring his complacency.

“Well, your plan worked,” he commented. “The imitation necklace served to decoy the real one back just as you meant it to.

“If you remember,” he added, turning to me, “it was the curiously imaginative quality of this stroke which gave the whole affair to my mind the look--what you will perhaps allow me to call the style--we were speaking of. I should have recognized his handiwork from that alone.”

Raglan beamed again and took a dainty draught or two of his cigar.

“Oh, there was nothing to it really,” he said, with a falsely deprecatory air that made me want to hit him. “It needed a bit of luck to put it through, but I had it right enough, and I knew I had it too.

“I heard our young friend Applebury getting his instructions, the first thing yesterday morning, to go to the bank and get the real necklace. I knew it would be somewhere in this house before night.

“I didn’t know where it would be. It might turn out to be in any one of four places. The girl might have it, or her mother, or her grandmother--though I doubted if they’d trust it again to that Noah’s Ark of a safe.

“But it struck me that the best chance of all was Applebury. He’d put up his money for it, and he’d hang on to it if he could. So I decided to try his room first.

“I made another of my mistakes then. I didn’t realize that there was any one left alive in the world who’d be such a fool as to try to guard a thing by sleeping with it under his pillow. I thought he’d either hide it seriously, or else attach it somehow to his person; put it on around his neck. That would have been the simplest thing.

“I chose the other alternative first, since it wouldn’t involve giving him a tap on the head. I began a search of the room. I began with the bureau, and found it wasn’t there. Then I heard some one coming, and slid into the bay window, behind one of the curtains. There was an amateur thief on the job it seemed, in pajamas just as I was.

“I watched him pretty close through a crack between the curtain and the wall. It was possible, of course, that he’d get the thing. He was a rank amateur all right. He hadn’t rummaged more than a second or two over the bureau top before he hit something with his hand and moved it with a rattle.

“Applebury waked up, and I never wanted to laugh more, when I couldn’t afford to, than I did then. Because he slid his hand straight under his pillow and showed me where the thing was. Then he said, ‘Who’s there?’ Another fool thing to do. It was his cousin, Grant, as I suppose you know. Grant said he’d come in for cigarettes, took them, and went away.

“I stayed where I was of course, and waited for things to quiet down. They didn’t for quite a while. Grant was ramming around in the next room, trying to dress without making a light. I was afraid he’d waken everybody on the floor. He didn’t, though, and at last I heard him go down the stairs.

“But the house didn’t quiet down perfectly even then. Every little while I’d hear a sound. Something was going on, and I couldn’t make out what it was. Of course I stayed right where I was by the window. I hadn’t stirred out of my tracks. I had stood there so long I felt as if I’d grown to the rug. Applebury was sound asleep again. No need waiting any longer for him.

“Then I happened to look out the window, and saw Grant and the girl making a get-away. Well, that was made to order for me, or so it looked anyhow. I might have known it looked too good to be true.

“It involved a change in my plan, of course. I had meant to shave and go back to the box room and wait till the time of the wedding this afternoon. I knew there’d be hundreds of people here, with a special train coming down from town and all that. Then I’d put on these clothes that I’m wearing now, come down-stairs, and be one of the guests. I even thought of staying for the ceremony and picking up a ride back to town.

“It was a pretty sort of idea, the sort that looks good when you think of it, although on general principles the sooner you can get away after you’ve got what you’ve come for, the better.

“Now, of course, there was no question about it. The girl had gone and there wouldn’t be any wedding, and with the necklace gone, on top of that, there would be one hell of a commotion.

“The thing for me to do was to get out. There’d be no question in anybody’s mind but that the elopers had the necklace. Applebury would think his cousin had come back and got it. If I ever saw anything that looked like plain sailing, I saw it then.

“I got the necklace without any trouble, and went back to the box room to dress in those filthy working clothes you found me in. These I’ve got on are too damned light colored and conspicuous for a get-away of that sort.

“Then I came back to the head of the stairs and stopped short. Somebody was doing a regular sentry go in the hall below, back and forth, back and forth. I thought he’d get tired of it pretty soon and I’d hear a door shut somewhere and know the coast was clear. But I didn’t. I don’t know who it was nor what he was doing it for, but he kept it up until daylight. So I had to go back and hide again.”

He must have read something in our faces, for he turned once more to Punch.

“Don’t tell me _that_ was you too!” he snapped.

Punch nodded. “I wasn’t waiting for you, though,” he said. “I didn’t have my rifle or anything.”

“Oh, my God!” cried Raglan, with as deep a concentration of bitterness as I’ve ever heard in human voice.

“Well, I know now,” he went on after a while, addressing Mr. Smith, “what my real mistake was. And I swear to God I’ll never make it again. I’ll never tackle another job where there are any damned boys on the premises.”

“You know, that, I believe,” said Mr. Smith, “is a perfectly sound idea.”

But Raglan was past being wooed back into a good humor.

“I’m sick of this damned country anyhow,” he declared. “The profession’s being ruined by a lot of young hop-heads, hooligans, stick-up boys who shoot first and try to think afterward and find they haven’t brains enough. It’s no place for a gentleman, that’s the trouble with this country. I’m going abroad again.”

“After you’ve served out your sentence for this affair, I suppose you mean,” said Mr. Smith.

“Served out my sentence!” Raglan laughed. “I’ll go by the next boat. You’re going to take me down-stairs now, aren’t you, and see me out through the front door? And if you’re wise, you’ll send for a car to take me back to town.”

“Punch,” said Mr. Smith, “go find your Uncle Alexander.”

Punch was gone in a flash.

Something else flashed too. Raglan saw it before I did and stiffened in his chair. Old Mr. Smith, with a steady hand, was pointing his automatic pistol straight at his head.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Raglan.

“I don’t intend to be,” said Mr. Smith.

“Then listen,” said the thief. “Do you think I’ve been in this house four days without knowing what’s been going on in it? I know enough queer things about this family to put it on the blink for the next twenty years. I tell you what I’ll do unless you let me go, and let me go damn quick. _I’ll confess._ Just ask the women, any one of them, how they’ll like that. I know what I’m talking about.”

Any notion I may have had that I’d found in Raglan an example of that romantic type endeared to the popular mind by scores of detective stories, a gentleman who has taken to a life of crime, but remains a gentleman none the less, had been dissipated during the past two minutes. The fellow, for all his airs, was nothing but a shabby-minded rascal. He had told us his story partly out of vanity, no doubt, but in the pretty confident hope that we could be blackmailed into letting him go free. I’ll confess to the pusillanimous notion that perhaps we’d better.

I couldn’t tell what Mr. Smith thought. He said, with a perfectly expressionless face, “You don’t know the Corbin family as well as you think you do.” But, after all, this committed him to nothing, and he was interrupted before he could go any further.

It was a thump rather than a knock that we heard at the door just then. I guessed who it was, gathered up my crutches, and went and opened it. There sat old Mrs. Corbin in her wheel chair, unattended. She must have run herself up in the elevator.

“You’ve taxed my curiosity beyond what it would bear,” she announced grimly. “I hope what you’ve got for me, in here, is worth my coming up to look at.”

It was an immense relief to me that she had come, and even more that she’d arrived on the scene ahead of her son. It was, after all, for her to decide what was to be done with our disgusting captive.

She turned a long stare upon him, and evidently saw him, despite his fine feathers, for exactly what he was, for, without a word of enlightenment either from Mr. Smith or from me, she said, “So this is the thief Punch has been thinking about for the whole of the past week? I’m glad he’s been brought to light.”

“Raglan is well up to the top of his class as a gem thief,” Mr. Smith now explained. “I’ve known him and his exploits for years. But since Punch caught him and we took the necklace away from him he seems to have turned his thoughts from burglary to blackmail.”

“Blackmail, eh?” the old woman echoed, with a sardonic grin. “Well, you may tell him there’s nothing in it. It’s never worth while paying money to a blackmailer, since no one with decency enough to stay bought overnight will offer his silence for sale.”

“Exactly,” Mr. Smith agreed. “Raglan has been hidden,” he went on, “most of the time since Wednesday, in the trunk closet on this floor. It appears that this room has certain acoustical peculiarities....”

“Been eavesdropping, has he--on me and Victoria? Well, he’s welcome to tell his story to any one he can get to listen. I don’t like to look at him. Can’t he be tied up and put out of sight somewhere till he can be taken to jail?”

Alec’s arrival just then answered the question. Punch, who came back with him, had told him enough of the story to obviate the need of further explanations.

Raglan was looking venomous by now. He was evidently under a heavy temptation to free his mind. But Alexander Corbin had a way with him which, to one constitutionally averse to violence, must have been overpowering. He didn’t take the trouble to tie the rascal; merely ordered him to stick his hands as deep as he could in his trousers pockets and walked him off at the muzzle of his revolver.

“Have some of the men take him to the lock-up in the village,” Mrs. Corbin told Alec, “and come back as soon as you’ve disposed of him. You’ll find us in my sitting-room down-stairs.”

Punch was for following his uncle and the prisoner, but the old lady called him back.

“I shall want you,” she said. Then she asked what time it was.

I wouldn’t have believed my watch, had not Mr. Smith’s majestic time-piece confirmed the fact that it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Heavens, what a day! It had begun for me when Judy whispered my name through the window just before dawn, a bare five hours ago. Already it seemed a week. And there were people in this house now, plenty of them, just waking up and thinking lazily about breakfast; people to whom it still figured as the wedding day of Judith Corbin and Bruce Applebury!

I must have uttered some sort of consternated exclamation, for old Mrs. Corbin nodded at me with a grim smile. “This is only the beginning of it,” she said. “Go down and have breakfast, both of you, and then come up at ten o’clock to my sitting-room. I’m an old woman--worse than old--and I can’t put things off. I must settle them now, while I can. Take me down to my room, Punch.”