“Stop walking the floor, Nick! You get on my nerves. The night your uncle collapsed, with his head on a book on the desk in the library, there were charred embers of letters on the hearth. Mrs. Pat told the doctor that Mark had seemed troubled all day; that he had said that he had received a letter which Nick must have at once, he would tell her about it later. There wasn’t any ‘later’ for him. No trace of the trouble-letter either. Had he burned it by mistake with the others?”
“I can’t believe it. There were several books on horses and racing on his desk—evidently he had been looking them over. It doesn’t seem probable that he would leave them to burn a lot of old letters. But apparently he did. We’ve been through everything in this house and at Seven Chimneys. When I found the concealed drawer in the library desk, I went blind with excitement for a minute—it was empty. Looks as if I would step out and the Kentuckian would step in.”
He thrust his hands hard into the pockets of his coat. “I can’t believe it, B.D. It isn’t so much the money I mind losing—do you suppose the Court will make me refund what I’ve spent—it is turning this place on which I’ve grown up over to that—that—”
“Take it easy, Nick. We’re not washed up yet, though the fact that there is no record of Rousseau’s birth in the South American village, where he says he thought he was born, helps his story. You know and I know that Jed Langdon hasn’t gone abroad for his health, he’s on the trail of something. Talked with Mrs. Pat since the long-lost son came?”
Nicholas Hoyt kept his eyes on the pipe he was carefully filling. “Only over the phone. I don’t want to see her. She might at least have waited until Rousseau had proved his claim before she fell on his neck and championed him and his racer.”
“You’re not quite fair to Mrs. Pat, Nick.”
“Not fair! Well, I’ll be darned, B.D. You’re not falling for the Pretender, are you?”
“No, but Jed and I told Mrs. Pat to take him in.”
“What!”
“Don’t shout. Angry as she was because of your objection to her marriage with Curt Newsome, Mrs. Pat came to me with Rousseau’s letter in which he asked if he might come to Seven Chimneys and bring Iron Man to enter in the Charity Races. The letter was a masterpiece. He knew of the breach between you and your step-aunt, that your black Fortune was the favorite in the coming races.”
“Was all that in the letter?”
“Not a word. I read between the lines. Mrs. Pat was so furious with you that she was all for inviting him, and Langdon and I were jubilant. To have the long-lost son where we could watch him was our meat. Of course we didn’t let Mrs. Pat know that. We encouraged her to think that she had overruled our objections. Poor soul!”
Nicholas wheeled from his contemplation of the fire. “What’s the matter with her? Why the sob stuff?”
“Because, fool that she’s been, I’m sorry for her. She’s coming out fast from the make-believe world she created for herself. The Lord and she only know—and neither of them is telling—why she invited the Carter woman to Seven Chimneys; perhaps because she had once lived here she thought she would boost her socially.”
“Estelle and Curt Newsome are playing round together, I hear. Even if you did encourage her, Mrs. Pat handed me a rotten deal when she took Rousseau in; in spite of that. I hate to see her hurt. She was on the level every minute with Uncle Mark.”
“What can she expect? She tempted a young jockey, who was music-mad, with promises of leisure to study, the best violin masters, just as his winning streak broke—he’d been hanging up victories—and she had him.”
“But what can Curt see in Estelle? She was an affected little thing when, as a girl, she lived here; she had a way though, one after another we boys rushed her and dropped her.”
“Curt is flattered by the attention—and apparent admiration—of the type of woman he never before has seen except in expensive cars or on top of a swanky four in hand at the races, miles removed from him socially. Besides, don’t forget that he is married to a woman years his senior and that Estelle is young and seductive.”
“Perhaps you’re right, but why is she, who has been everywhere, seen everything, encouraging Curt Newsome, who has nothing behind him?”
“She is bored. She is adrift spiritually; she grabs any new experience. Compare her cold, skeptical, worldy-wise eyes with the deep, responsive eyes of Sandra Duval. The first girl cares for nothing, believes nothing; the second has been brought up with spiritual standards which keep her steadily, confidently moving forward in our torn, shaken, slowly rebuilding world. Can’t understand why, in this cosmetic age, some beautician doesn’t begin to preach the cultivation of the soul as an aid to beauty. Here I am philosophizing again, when we were talking about Curtis Newsome.”
“Always liked him, but when Mrs. Mark Hoyt married her late husband’s jock, I went berserk. I’ve been a crab, I know.”
“You would have cooled off long before this, Nick, if the arrival of Rousseau hadn’t been fresh brush on the fire. Great Scott, how Mrs. Pat raged at you when she came with his letter! Why your uncle married Marte Patten—than whom there are worse but also more attractive women—I never could understand.”
“I can. He was lonely and she talked his language, had driven his horses in shows, had grown up on a breeding farm. After his first wife died, he cared for nothing but his stables, his books, and me, and after college I was sent to New York to you to learn the ropes of high finance that I might know how to take care of the millions I was to inherit. Millions! Magic millions! Now you see them and now you don’t. The last few years have shrunk them to half. If Rousseau wins, they will do the vanishing act for me.”
He answered the ring of the telephone. “Nicholas Hoyt speaking … Hulloa, Peg! … Can’t tomorrow.… Of course I want to be a good egg, but just remember that I’m a son of toil.… No, it’s not a joke.… Can’t. Can’t dance all night, sleep in the office, and impress my clients with the fact that I’m a wizard of finance, can I? … After the races, gal. After the races. I’ll be seeing you.”
He laid the instrument on its stand. “You’ve heard that one about an ill wind, haven’t you, B.D.? If Rousseau wins, I won’t have quite so many phone calls to answer. Nick Hoyt setting out to conquer the world, with his knapsack on his shoulder, will not be in demand.”
Damon rose, ran his hands through his white hair till it resembled nothing so much as an electrified brush.
“But you’ll still have your share of our business. Rousseau won’t win. He can’t. He’s a fraud. I know he’s a fraud. Something will trip him. For heaven’s sake, don’t lose your sense of humor. Don’t lose your courage, Nick.”
Nicholas Hoyt disciplined an infectious laugh. “My sense of humor is functioning all right. Where’d you get the idea that I was losing courage, B.D.? I’ve got to win for the honor of the family, can’t have a man like Rousseau representing the Hoyts. I’ll win on three counts.”
Damon forcibly and not too tenderly removed the white cat who was scaling his leg with indigging claws.
“Three counts! Where do you get three? The estate, and the Charity Race—”
“And Sandra Duval. Philippe Rousseau is quite mad about her, isn’t he?”
There was a smile in Nicholas Hoyt’s eyes but a sudden tightening of his jaw.
“So am I.”
CHAPTER X
In the stillness of the old living room the red sparks singing up chimney sounded like nothing so much as a swarm of bees. Damon stood as if taking root. His eyes under shaggy brows bored into the eyes of the younger man. Nicholas could feel the hard beating of the pulse in his own throat, the twitch of a nerve in his cheek.
“Mean that, Nick?”
“Yes. The day I met her at the station I thought her the gayest, most gallant girl I ever had met, and yet her eyes showed that her heart recently had been torn up by the roots. Having been unable to get that way about a girl or woman since my in-again-out-again college days, it’s a queer break
that I should fall for one who turns frosty whenever I speak to her, whose hostility can’t be mistaken.”
“It’s one of those things that’s just too good to be true, Nick. That you should want to marry Jim Duval’s daughter—it’s serious, you do want to marry her, don’t you?”
Nicholas’ face went a dark red even as he laughed. “Now I’ll say, ‘Take it easy,’ B.D. I do want to marry her, but isn’t it the limit that I should meet the one girl I want just as I stand a chance of losing almost everything I have in the world?”
“And such a girl! Sandra Duval has an old-fashioned tenderness which is as unexpected in youth these days as an extra dividend from one’s investments. You haven’t lost your fortune yet, remember. Wait till the Court decides that. Think I’ll invite myself to dinner at Seven Chimneys tonight. Want to see who is there, what’s going on. I miss Jed’s reports. Rousseau may have one or two allies on the job, I wouldn’t put it past him. If ever there was an establishment infernally designed for conspirators it is the one presided over by Mrs. Pat Newsome. The servants hop in and out like fleas.”
“We made sure that Rousseau heard of the ad for a social secretary we inserted in the papers. If he sent a woman after the position, she didn’t get it. Why should he plant any one in the house if he is so confident that that diary is sure-fire evidence?”
“Perhaps it isn’t because of the estate only; Rousseau has two irons in the fire, hasn’t he? Your Fortune has ninety-nine in a hundred chances of winning those twenty-five grand stakes, hasn’t he? Well, twenty-five grand would come in handy for the claimant to the Hoyt estate just now. You know as well as I that he turned everything he owned but Iron Man into cash to finance this fight, and then you ask why there should be a spy in camp. Heaven is your home, Nick, better go back, you’re too unsuspicious for this mundane world.”
Nicholas laughed and linked his arm in Damon’s.
“Don’t waste breath calling me names. Come on to the stables. Let’s do a little sleuthing.”
Under a brilliant blue sky, cloudless, but already flushing slightly from the ardent rays of the slanting sun, they followed the perennial-bordered stepping stones. Against an opal-tinted horizon, purple hills were as sharply defined as paper cut-outs. Pastures were beginning to turn rusty; the air was full of scent baked from the box hedge by sunshine.
Two men, smoking on a bench outside the stables, jumped to their feet and touched their caps; two freckle-faced exercise boys, shooting crap, scuttled out of sight as Damon and Hoyt entered the building. They passed the tack room, hung with saddles and harnesses. Nicholas’ brows met as he noted through the glass doors of a cabinet an array of gold-lettered rosettes, blue, red, yellow, and gleaming silver cups. Would the green and white, his colors, bring in another trophy, or would Rousseau’s orange and black be victorious?
Five horses left their hay and walked to their gates. Nicholas patted the nose of sleek black Curtain Call. After he had given each an apple from the barrel which stood near, four of them turned away, but a black stallion remained at the gate. Fortune.
Nicholas looked up into the great fiery eyes. How could he doubt the outcome of the race with this horse in the field? His proud neck shone like satin; his nostrils were distended, his ears thrust forward; muscles stood out like intricate cording along his slender legs. He stamped his fore foot in the straw and whinnied softly as his owner rubbed his soft nozzle. Nicholas turned quickly to the man who had come up behind him.
“What was that, Parsons?”
The hawk-faced man with pompadoured white hair looked nervously over his shoulder; the slim jockey with him touched his cap.
“Who was what, Mr. Hoyt?”
“The man who just slipped out.”
Damon laid his square-tipped fingers on his partner’s shoulder. “You are having an attack of curvature of the brain, boy. There was no one here when we came in.”
“Oh yes, there was. Come clean, Parsons.”
The trainer grinned. “It was this way, that Kentuckian from Seven Chimneys dropped in. Slick, I calls that guy, with a line what wouldn’t deceive nobody. He asks, wouldn’t I show him Fortune who, he’d heard, was the favorite for the coming big race. He said, ‘Of course you know I own Iron Man who’s second in the betting. Thought I’d like to size up the two. No harm in that, is there?’
“Sure, there’s no harm, says I, and—”
“Great Scott, is Rousseau hanging round this place?”
“Hold on, B.D. Let Parsons finish. Did you show our champion?”
The trainer’s head seemed in imminent danger of being split from the wideness of his grin; the jockey chuckled.
“Not the one he was expectin’ to see. I put Curtain Call through his paces; he’s black too. That man Rousseau thinks he’s the champeen.”
“Good boy! But don’t let that man, any man, come into the place again when I am not here; get that straight, Parsons. Understand me?”
“Sure, I get you, sir.”
Damon was hanging over the door of Fortune’s stall. “Look at the bloom on his coat! He has filled out in the right places, Nick. Have his gate manners improved, Sharp?”
“Not too much, sir. He needs more schooling. He gets unstrung by the track band and he’s choosey.”
“He’ll get over it. Don’t let any one from Seven Chimneys sniff around here again. I’m afraid of some of them. ‘When a thing has happened, even a fool can see it.’ That isn’t original, so you needn’t make a note of it for my biography, Nick.”
Nicholas Hoyt repeated to the grooms the instructions as to visitors as they left the stable. He went on a few paces and stopped.
“Go on, B.D. Just remembered something I want to tell Eddie Sharp. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
He turned back. He had made light of it, but the fact that Rousseau was hanging round Stone House stables had startled him. If only Jed were here. Had he gone abroad in pursuit of a clue? There were clues enough here to keep him busy if B.D.’s suggestion that the Kentuckian had allies under the roof of Seven Chimneys was true.
Sharp, in a chair precariously tipped against the wall, looked up from a newspaper as Nicholas entered the tack room. The chair came down on all fours and catapulted him to his feet.
“Cricky, Mr. Nicholas, what’s up? You look like you’d got your mind set to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel. Caught some one red-handed meddling with colts?”
“Nothing wrong with the horses, Eddie. I—I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“It’s that Rousseau guy who’s bothering you. Think I don’t know? Next time he comes sidling round these stables, we’ll give him the works.”
“Has he been here before today? Why haven’t you told me?”
Sharp scratched a thatch of black hair; his round eyes protruded. “I’ve spilled the beans now. Before he went away, Mr. Langdon told Parsons if any one from Seven Chimneys came here, to tell nobody, ‘specially not you, and that we were to treat him same’s we would any other visitor, but someone was to keep an eye on him every minute. Mr. Langdon said he was working for you, sir.”
“He is. Take orders from him. Has Rousseau been here many times?”
“Twice. I’ve never seen him. Parson told me that he was asking a lot of questions about me, said how he’d like to talk with me. I’m not even passing the time with any one like him, if he does think he’ll be boss here some day, so I’ve kept out of his way. He’s never asked before today to see Fortune. Mr. Langdon may be right in letting him come, but I don’t think so. He doesn’t do anything, Parsons tells me, but come in and walk around and be terrible smiling to everybody, but he makes the grooms and swipes nervous. They know he’s the owner of Iron Man and they whisper about dopes and bombs and kidnapping; they’re so kinder worked up the horses feel it.”
“Come out, let’s look them over again.”
Five sleek, shining heads appeared simultaneously over five gates, five pairs of great liquid eyes rolled in his direction as Nicholas approache
d the stalls. Big black Fortune poked his nose into his master’s outstretched hand. Ping-Pong, an old hunter in the next stall, whinnied a greeting.
Sharp grinned. “Those two are stable mates, all right. We’ll have to take Ping-Pong alone when we go to the races to keep the champion from getting lonesome.”
“We’ll take him. All right, boys, get back to your eats.”
One of the colts whinnied and the others answered. In the tack room Nicholas stopped.
“If Rousseau comes here again, keep out of his way, Eddie.”
“Sure, I’ll keep out of his way, though I don’t see what he’d find out talking to me.”
“Iron Man’s his horse, isn’t he? With a strange jockey up on Fortune, our black stallion’s chance of winning wouldn’t be so good. So watch out that he doesn’t tempt you before race-day.”
“You mean to drink, Mr. Nicholas? I wouldn’t have to wait for him. Mr. Huckins asked me once, but I told him that I wasn’t drinking before the races.”
“Huckins! Well, I’ll be—” Nicholas broke off to remind crisply: “You know what winning this race means to me, Sharp? It isn’t the money only; it means a reputation for Stone House stables. I am depending upon you.”
“You’re depending on the right fella. I’d—I’d die for you.”
“I’d much rather you would live and ride for me, Eddie Sharp. I’m trusting you to the limit. Good-night!”
When he entered the library, Damon was standing with hands clasped behind him looking up at the Puritan who stared back at him with painted, lacklustre eyes.
Nicholas filled and lighted his pipe. His eyes followed his partner’s.
“Old chap looks as if he could bite nails, doesn’t he?”
“He does. Great Scott, I wish the Stone House phantom would get on the job and give Rousseau the fright of his life. If he’s the light-weight I believe him to be, he might be scared into coming across with the truth.”
Nicholas’ answer was drowned in the clatter of the tongs as he poked the fire.
“What are you mumbling about, Nick? I believe you’re laughing at me. How can you laugh when the trial of that case is getting nearer and nearer and we haven’t a scrap of paper with which to fight that diary?”
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