The Man in Lower Ten

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The Man in Lower Ten, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

CONTENTS

I I GO TO PITTSBURG

II A TORN TELEGRAM

III ACROSS THE AISLE

IV NUMBERS SEVEN AND NINE

V THE WOMAN IN THE NEXT CAR

VI THE GIRL IN BLUE

VII A FINE GOLD CHAIN

VIII THE SECOND SECTION

IX THE HALCYON BREAKFAST

X MISS WEST'S REQUEST

XI THE NAME WAS SULLIVAN

XII THE GOLD BAG

XIII FADED ROSES

XIV THE TRAP-DOOR

XV THE CINEMATOGRAPH

XVI THE SHADOW OF A GIRL

XVII AT THE FARM-HOUSE AGAIN

XVIII A NEW WORLD

XIX AT THE TABLE NEXT

XX THE NOTES AND A BARGAIN

XXI MCKNIGHT'S THEORY

XXII AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE

XXIII A NIGHT AT THE LAURELS

XXIV HIS WIFE'S FATHER

XXV AT THE STATION

XXVI ON TO RICHMOND

XXVII THE SEA, THE SAND, THE STARS

XXVIII ALISON'S STORY

XXIX IN THE DINING-ROOM

XXX FINER DETAILS

XXXI AND ONLY ONE ARM

THE MAN IN LOWER TEN

CHAPTER I

I GO TO PITTSBURG

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.
I never liked it, and since the strange case of the man in lower ten,
I have been a bit squeamish. Given a case like that, where you can
build up a network of clues that absolutely incriminate three
entirely different people, only one of whom can be guilty, and your
faith in circumstantial evidence dies of overcrowding. I never see
a shivering, white-faced wretch in the prisoners' dock that I do not
hark back with shuddering horror to the strange events on the
Pullman car Ontario, between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night
of September ninth, last.

McKnight could tell the story a great deal better than I, although
he can not spell three consecutive words correctly. But, while he
has imagination and humor, he is lazy.

"It didn't happen to me, anyhow," he protested, when I put it up to
him. "And nobody cares for second-hand thrills. Besides, you want
the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that.
I'm a lawyer."

So am I, although there have been times when my assumption in that
particular has been disputed. I am unmarried, and just old enough
to dance with the grown-up little sisters of the girls I used to
know. I am fond of outdoors, prefer horses to the aforesaid
grown-up little sisters, am without sentiment (am crossed out and
was substituted.-Ed.) and completely ruled and frequently routed by
my housekeeper, an elderly widow.

In fact, of all the men of my acquaintance, I was probably the most
prosaic, the least adventurous, the one man in a hundred who would
be likely to go without a deviation from the normal through the
orderly procession of the seasons, summer suits to winter flannels,
golf to bridge.

So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to perch on my
unsusceptible thirty-year-old chest, tie me up with a crime, ticket
me with a love affair, and start me on that sensational and not
always respectable journey that ended so surprisingly less than
three weeks later in the firm's private office. It had been the
most remarkable period of my life. I would neither give it up nor
live it again under any inducement, and yet all that I lost was
some twenty yards off my drive!

It was really McKnight's turn to make the next journey. I had a
tournament at Chevy Chase for Saturday, and a short yacht cruise
planned for Sunday, and when a man has been grinding at statute law
for a week, he needs relaxation. But McKnight begged off. It was
not the first time he had shirked that summer in order to run down
to Richmond, and I was surly about it. But this time he had a new
excuse. "I wouldn't be able to look after the business if I did
go," he said. He has a sort of wide-eyed frankness that makes one
ashamed to doubt him. "I'm always car sick crossing the mountains.
It's a fact, Lollie. See-sawing over the peaks does it. Why,
crossing the Alleghany Mountains has the Gulf Stream to Bermuda
beaten to a frazzle."

So I gave him up finally and went home to pack. He came later in
the evening with his machine, the Cannonball, to take me to the
station, and he brought the forged notes in the Bronson case.

"Guard them with your life," he warned me. "They are more precious
than honor. Sew them in your chest protector, or wherever people
keep valuables. I never keep any. I'll not be happy until I see
Gentleman Andy doing the lockstep."

He sat down on my clean collars, found my cigarettes and struck a
match on the mahogany bed post with one movement.

"Where's the Pirate?" he demanded. The Pirate is my housekeeper,
Mrs. Klopton, a very worthy woman, so labeled--and libeled--because
of a ferocious pair of eyes and what McKnight called a bucaneering
nose. I quietly closed the door into the hall.

"Keep your voice down, Richey," I said. "She is looking for the
evening paper to see if it is going to rain. She has my raincoat
and an umbrella waiting in the hall."

The collars being damaged beyond repair, he left them and went to
the window. He stood there for some time, staring at the blackness
that represented the wall of the house next door.

"It's raining now," he said over his shoulder, and closed the window
and the shutters. Something in his voice made me glance up, but he
was watching me, his hands idly in his pockets.

"Who lives next door?" he inquired in a perfunctory tone, after a
pause. I was packing my razor.

"House is empty," I returned absently. "If the landlord would put
it in some sort of shape---"

"Did you put those notes in your pocket?" he broke in.

"Yes." I was impatient. "Along with my certificates of registration,
baptism and vaccination. Whoever wants them will have to steal my
coat to get them."

"Well, I would move them, if I were you. Somebody in the next house
was confoundedly anxious to see where you put them. Somebody right
at that window opposite."

I scoffed at the idea, but nevertheless I moved the papers, putting
them in my traveling-bag, well down at the bottom. McKnight watched
me uneasily.

"I have a hunch that you are going to have trouble," he said, as I
locked the alligator bag. "Darned if I like starting anything
important on Friday."

"You have a congenital dislike to start anything on any old day," I
retorted, still sore from my lost Saturday. "And if you knew the
owner of that house as I do you would know that if there was any one
at that window he is paying rent for the privilege."

Mrs. Klopton rapped at the door and spoke discreetly from the hall.

"Did Mr. McKnight bring the evening paper?" she inquired.

"Sorry, but I didn't, Mrs. Klopton," McKnight called. "The Cubs
won, three to nothing." He listened, grinning, as she moved away
with little irritated rustles of her black silk gown.

I finished my packing, changed my collar and was ready to go. Then
very cautiously we put out the light and opened the shutters. The
window across was merely a deeper black in the darkness. It was
closed and dirty. And yet, probably owing to Richey's suggestion,
I had an uneasy sensation of eyes staring across at me. The next
moment we were at the door, poised for flight.

"We'll have to run for it," I said in a whisper. "She's down there
with a package of some sort, sandwiches probably. And she's
threatened me with overshoes for a month. Ready now!"

I had a kaleidoscopic view of Mrs. Klopton in the lower hall,
holding out an armful of such traveling impedimenta as she deemed
essential, while beside her, Euphemia, the colored housemaid,
grinned over a white-wrapped box.

"Awfully sorry-no time-back Sunday," I panted over my shoulder.
Then the door closed and the car was moving away.

McKnight bent forward and stared at the facade of the empty house
next door as we passed. It was black, staring, mysterious, as empty
buildings are apt to be.

"I'd like to hold a post-mortem on that corpse of a house," he said
thoughtfully. "By George, I've a notion to get out and take a look."

"Somebody after the brass pipes," I scoffed. "House has been empty
for a year."

With one hand on the steering wheel McKnight held out the other for
my cigarette case. "Perhaps," he said; "but I don't see what she
would want with brass pipe."

"A woman!" I laughed outright. "You have been looking too hard at
the picture in the back of your watch, that's all. There's an
experiment like that: if you stare long enough--"

But McKnight was growing sulky: he sat looking rigidly ahead, and
he did not speak again until he brought the Cannonball to a stop
at the station. Even then it was only a perfunctory remark. He
went through the gate with me, and with five minutes to spare, we
lounged and smoked in the train shed. My mind had slid away from
my surroundings and had wandered to a polo pony that I couldn't
afford and intended to buy anyhow. Then McKnight shook off his
taciturnity.

"For heaven's sake, don't look so martyred," he burst out; "I know
you've done all the traveling this summer. I know you're missing a
game to-morrow. But don't be a patient mother; confound it, I have
to go to Richmond on Sunday. I--I want to see a girl."

"Oh, don't mind me," I observed politely. "Personally, I wouldn't
change places with you. What's her name--North? South?"

"West," he snapped. "Don't try to be funny. And all I have to say,
Blakeley, is that if you ever fall in love I hope you make an
egregious ass of yourself."

In view of what followed, this came rather close to prophecy.

The trip west was without incident. I played bridge with a
furniture dealer from Grand Rapids, a sales agent for a Pittsburg
iron firm and a young professor from an eastern college. I won
three rubbers out of four, finished what cigarettes McKnight had
left me, and went to bed at one o'clock. It was growing cooler,
and the rain had ceased. Once, toward morning, I wakened with a
start, for no apparent reason, and sat bolt upright. I had an
uneasy feeling that some one had been looking at me, the same
sensation I had experienced earlier in the evening at the window.
But I could feel the bag with the notes, between me and the
window, and with my arm thrown over it for security, I lapsed
again into slumber. Later, when I tried to piece together the
fragments of that journey, I remembered that my coat, which had
been folded and placed beyond my restless tossing, had been rescued
in the morning from a heterogeneous jumble of blankets, evening
papers and cravat, had been shaken out with profanity and donned
with wrath. At the time, nothing occurred to me but the necessity
of writing to the Pullman Company and asking them if they ever
traveled in their own cars. I even formulated some of the letter.

"If they are built to scale, why not take a man of ordinary stature
as your unit?" I wrote mentally. "I can not fold together like
the traveling cup with which I drink your abominable water."

I was more cheerful after I had had a cup of coffee in the Union
Station. It was too early to attend to business, and I lounged in
the restaurant and hid behind the morning papers. As I had expected,
they had got hold of my visit and its object. On the first page was
a staring announcement that the forged papers in the Bronson case
had been brought to Pittsburg. Underneath, a telegram from
Washington stated that Lawrence Blakeley, of Blakeley and McKnight,
had left for Pittsburg the night before, and that, owing to the
approaching trial of the Bronson case and the illness of John
Gilmore, the Pittsburg millionaire, who was the chief witness for
the prosecution, it was supposed that the visit was intimately
concerned with the trial.

I looked around apprehensively. There were no reporters yet in
sight, and thankful to have escaped notice I paid for my breakfast
and left. At the cab-stand I chose the least dilapidated hansom
I could find, and giving the driver the address of the Gilmore
residence, in the East end, I got in.

I was just in time. As the cab turned and rolled off, a slim young
man in a straw hat separated himself from a little group of men and
hurried toward us.

"Hey! Wait a minute there!" he called, breaking into a trot.

But the cabby did not hear, or perhaps did not care to. We jogged
comfortably along, to my relief, leaving the young man far behind.
I avoid reporters on principle, having learned long ago that I am
an easy mark for a clever interviewer.

It was perhaps nine o'clock when I left the station. Our way was
along the boulevard which hugged the side of one of the city's great
hills. Far below, to the left, lay the railroad tracks and the
seventy times seven looming stacks of the mills. The white mist of
the river, the grays and blacks of the smoke blended into a
half-revealing haze, dotted here and there with fire. It was
unlovely, tremendous. Whistler might have painted it with its
pathos, its majesty, but he would have missed what made it
infinitely suggestive--the rattle and roar of iron on iron, the
rumble of wheels, the throbbing beat, against the ears, of fire
and heat and brawn welding prosperity.

Something of this I voiced to the grim old millionaire who was
responsible for at least part of it. He was propped up in bed
in his East end home, listening to the market reports read by a
nurse, and he smiled a little at my enthusiasm.

"I can't see much beauty in it myself," he said. "But it's our
badge of prosperity. The full dinner pail here means a nose that
looks like a flue. Pittsburg without smoke wouldn't be Pittsburg,
any more than New York without prohibition would be New York.
Sit down for a few minutes, Mr. Blakeley. Now, Miss Gardner,
Westinghouse Electric."

The nurse resumed her reading in a monotonous voice. She read
literally and without understanding, using initials and
abbreviations as they came. But the shrewd old man followed her
easily. Once, however, he stopped her.

"D-o is ditto," he said gently, "not do."

As the nurse droned along, I found myself looking curiously at a
photograph in a silver frame on the bed-side table. It was the
picture of a girl in white, with her hands clasped loosely before
her. Against the dark background her figure stood out slim and
young. Perhaps it was the rather grim environment, possibly it was
my mood, but although as a general thing photographs of young girls
make no appeal to me, this one did. I found my eyes straying back
to it. By a little finesse I even made out the name written across
the corner, "Alison."

Mr. Gilmore lay back among his pillows and listened to the nurse's
listless voice. But he was watching me from under his heavy eyebrows,
for when the reading was over, and we were alone, he indicated the
picture with a gesture.

"I keep it there to remind myself that I am an old man," he said.
"That is my granddaughter, Alison West."

I expressed the customary polite surprise, at which, finding me
responsive, he told me his age with a chuckle of pride. More
surprise, this time genuine. From that we went to what he ate for
breakfast and did not eat for luncheon, and then to his reserve
power, which at sixty-five becomes a matter for thought. And so,
in a wide circle, back to where we started, the picture.

"Father was a rascal," John Gilmore said, picking up the frame.
"The happiest day of my life was when I knew he was safely dead in
bed and not hanged. If the child had looked like him, I--well, she
doesn't. She's a Gilmore, every inch. Supposed to look like me."

"Very noticeably," I agreed soberly.

I had produced the notes by that time, and replacing the picture Mr.
Gilmore gathered his spectacles from beside it. He went over the
four notes methodically, examining each carefully and putting it
down before he picked up the next. Then he leaned back and took off
his glasses.

"They're not so bad," he said thoughtfully. "Not so bad. But I
never saw them before. That's my unofficial signature. I am
inclined to think--" he was speaking partly to himself--"to think
that he has got hold of a letter of mine, probably to Alison.
Bronson was a friend of her rapscallion of a father."

I took Mr. Gilmore's deposition and put it into my traveling-bag
with the forged notes. When I saw them again, almost three weeks
later, they were unrecognizable, a mass of charred paper on a copper
ashtray. In the interval other and bigger things had happened: the
Bronson forgery case had shrunk beside the greater and more imminent
mystery of the man in lower ten. And Alison West had come into the
story and into my life.

CHAPTER II

A TORN TELEGRAM

I lunched alone at the Gilmore house, and went back to the city at
once. The sun had lifted the mists, and a fresh summer wind had
cleared away the smoke pall. The boulevard was full of cars flying
countryward for the Saturday half-holiday, toward golf and tennis,
green fields and babbling girls. I gritted my teeth and thought of
McKnight at Richmond, visiting the lady with the geographical name.
And then, for the first time, I associated John Gilmore's granddaughter
with the "West" that McKnight had irritably flung at me.

I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight's vision at the window
of the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer
the notes to my pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the
situation later. Only the other day McKnight put this very thing up
to me.

"I warned you," he reminded me. "I told you there were queer things
coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your
revolver."

"It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in
Africa," I retorted. "If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had
kept my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque
for revolver), the result would have been the same. And the next
time you want a little excitement with every variety of thrill
thrown in, I can put you by way of it. You begin by getting the
wrong berth in a Pullman car, and end--"

"Oh, I know how it ends," he finished shortly. "Don't you suppose
the whole thing's written on my spinal marrow?"

But I am wandering again. That is the difficulty with the
unprofessional story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can't keep
in the wind; he drops his characters overboard when he hasn't any
further use for them and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and
the frying-pan and all the other small essentials, and, if he carries
a love affair, he mutters a fervent "Allah be praised" when he lands
them, drenched with adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end
of the final chapter.

I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged
eternally. I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some
ties at a haberdasher's. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no
premonition of what was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened
to me; friends of mine had sometimes sailed the high seas of
adventure or skirted the coasts of chance, but all of the shipwrecks
had occurred after a woman passenger had been taken on. "Ergo," I
had always said "no women!" I repeated it to myself that evening
almost savagely, when I found my thoughts straying back to the
picture of John Gilmore's granddaughter. I even argued as I ate my
solitary dinner at a downtown restaurant.

"Haven't you troubles enough," I reflected, "without looking for
more? Hasn't Bad News gone lame, with a matinee race booked for
next week? Otherwise aren't you comfortable? Isn't your house in
order? Do you want to sell a pony in order to have the library
done over in mission or the drawing-room in gold? Do you want
somebody to count the empty cigarette boxes lying around every
morning?"

Lay it to the long idle afternoon, to the new environment, to
anything you like, but I began to think that perhaps I did. I
was confoundedly lonely. For the first time in my life its even
course began to waver: the needle registered warning marks on the
matrimonial seismograph, lines vague enough, but lines.

My alligator bag lay at my feet, still locked. While I waited for
my coffee I leaned back and surveyed the people incuriously. There
were the usual couples intent on each other: my new state of mind
made me regard them with tolerance. But at the next table, where
a man and woman dined together, a different atmosphere prevailed.
My attention was first caught by the woman's face. She had been
speaking earnestly across the table, her profile turned to me. I
had noticed casually her earnest manner, her somber clothes, and the
great mass of odd, bronze-colored hair on her neck. But suddenly
she glanced toward me and the utter hopelessness--almost tragedy
--of her expression struck me with a shock. She half closed her
eyes and drew a long breath, then she turned again to the man across
the table.

Neither one was eating. He sat low in his chair, his chin on his
chest, ugly folds of thick flesh protruding over his collar. He
was probably fifty, bald, grotesque, sullen, and yet not without
a suggestion of power. But he had been drinking; as I looked, he
raised an unsteady hand and summoned a waiter with a wine list.

The young woman bent across the table and spoke again quickly. She
had unconsciously raised her voice. Not beautiful, in her
earnestness and stress she rather interested me. I had an idle
inclination to advise the waiter to remove the bottled temptation
from the table. I wonder what would have happened if I had? Suppose
Harrington had not been intoxicated when he entered the Pullman car
Ontario that night!

For they were about to make a journey, I gathered, and the young
woman wished to go alone. I drank three cups of coffee, which
accounted for my wakefulness later, and shamelessly watched the
tableau before me. The woman's protest evidently went for nothing:
across the table the man grunted monosyllabic replies and grew more
and more lowering and sullen. Once, during a brief unexpected
pianissimo in the music, her voice came to me sharply:

"If I could only see him in time!" she was saying. "Oh, it's
terrible!"

In spite of my interest I would have forgotten the whole incident
at once, erased it from my mind as one does the inessentials and
clutterings of memory, had I not met them again, later that evening,
in the Pennsylvania station. The situation between them had not
visibly altered: the same dogged determination showed in the man's
face, but the young woman--daughter or wife? I wondered--had
drawn down her veil and I could only suspect what white misery lay
beneath.

I bought my berth after waiting in a line of some eight or ten
people. When, step by step, I had almost reached the window, a
tall woman whom I had not noticed before spoke to me from my elbow.
She had a ticket and money in her hand.

"Will you try to get me a lower when you buy yours?" she asked. "I
have traveled for three nights in uppers."

I consented, of course; beyond that I hardly noticed the woman. I
had a vague impression of height and a certain amount of stateliness,
but the crowd was pushing behind me, and some one was standing on
my foot. I got two lowers easily, and, turning with the change and
berths, held out the tickets.

"Which will you have?" I asked. "Lower eleven or lower ten?"

"It makes no difference," she said. "Thank you very much indeed."

At random I gave her lower eleven, and called a porter to help her
with her luggage. I followed them leisurely to the train shed, and
ten minutes more saw us under way.

I looked into my car, but it presented the peculiarly unattractive
appearance common to sleepers. The berths were made up; the center
aisle was a path between walls of dingy, breeze-repelling curtains,
while the two seats at each end of the car were piled high with
suitcases and umbrellas. The perspiring porter was trying to be six
places at once: somebody has said that Pullman porters are black so
they won't show the dirt, but they certainly show the heat.

Nine-fifteen was an outrageous hour to go to bed, especially since
I sleep little or not at all on the train, so I made my way to the
smoker and passed the time until nearly eleven with cigarettes and
a magazine. The car was very close. It was a warm night, and
before turning in I stood a short time in the vestibule. The train
had been stopping at frequent intervals, and, finding the brakeman
there, I asked the trouble.

It seemed that there was a hot-box on the next car, and that not
only were we late, but we were delaying the second section, just
behind. I was beginning to feel pleasantly drowsy, and the air was
growing cooler as we got into the mountains. I said good night to
the brakeman and went back to my berth. To my surprise, lower ten
was already occupied--a suit-case projected from beneath, a pair
of shoes stood on the floor, and from behind the curtains came the
heavy, unmistakable breathing of deep sleep. I hunted out the
porter and together we investigated.

"Are you asleep, sir?" asked the porter, leaning over deferentially.
No answer forthcoming, he opened the curtains and looked in. Yes,
the intruder was asleep--very much asleep--and an overwhelming
odor of whisky proclaimed that he would probably remain asleep
until morning. I was irritated. The car was full, and I was not
disposed to take an upper in order to allow this drunken interloper
to sleep comfortably in my berth.

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