The Deaves Affair. Footner Hulbert
you say."
"Why, you're surrounded by spies. I expect every servant in the house is in the pay of this gang. I hadn't been in the house half an hour before they approached me."
"What did I tell you?" the old man snarled to his son. "Why don't you fire them?"
"How many times have I fired them? What good did it do? As fast as we get a new lot they're corrupted from the outside."
"Then it's been going on for some time," said Evan. "I never had any connection with Mr. Deaves until yesterday."
"How do we know that?"
"That's why you were so eager to get a job here," added the old man. "To have a better chance of spying on me."
"Never thought of such a thing. The offer came from you."
"You paid your own fare on the trolley-car, didn't you? Mine, too!"
Evan laughed in exasperation. "Well, if that's an incriminating circumstance I'm guilty!" he said.
"Don't be a fool, Papa," muttered George Deaves.
Evan went on: "If I was a member of the gang would I show my hand so clearly? Would I betray the sources of my information? I tell you Alfred told me yesterday there was good money to be made on the side in this house."
"Why didn't you tell me that yesterday?" demanded Deaves.
"I wanted to find out what was up first. I know now."
George Deaves began to look impressed.
Evan made haste to follow up his advantage. "Have up the policeman. I can tell him no more than I've told you. But the whole affair must be well aired, I suppose."
George Deaves winced. He and his father exchanged a glance. "There's no hurry," he said. "We may have been mistaken. At any rate we don't want any unnecessary publicity."
"You don't mean to say you're going to pay!" cried Evan involuntarily.
"Wouldn't you advise it?" asked the old man craftily.
"No! Fight! Call their bluff! The nervy blackguards! Oh, to give up to them would be too tame!"
"I guess he isn't one of them, George," Simeon Deaves said dryly.
George apparently agreed with him, though he made no direct acknowledgment.
Evan struck while the iron was hot. "Look here, here's a proposition for you. This thing interests me a whole lot. That letter was written by a damn clever crook, humorous too. I'd like to match my wits against his. Let me have a try at running them down. Won't cost you a cent more than my salary, and you won't have to let in any outsiders on the affair. Of course I've had no experience, but if I fail you'll be no worse off than you are now. If you go to the police it will be the newspaper sensation of the year."
Father and son looked at each other again. Evan had given them two potent reasons for listening to his proposal. But before they had time to express themselves there was an interruption.
A lady swept into the room like a northwest gale, one whose attire put the rose and the lily to shame; comely in her own person too after a somewhat hard and glassy style. Evan guessed this was Mrs. George Deaves, otherwise Maud. At the sight of her stormy brows father and son looked like two schoolboys caught in the act.
"What's going on?" she peremptorily demanded. "What are all the men servants waiting in the hall for?"
"Nothing, my dear," said George Deaves in a casual tone belied by his anxious eye. "They are merely waiting for their orders."
"My maid told me there was a policeman sitting in the housekeeper's room."
"Must be a friend of Mrs. Liffey's," her husband said with feeble humour.
"Friend nothing!" was the contemptuous reply. She marched up to her father-in-law, who silently snarled and gave ground like a cat. "You've been up to your old tricks!" she cried. "Another disgraceful street scene! I see it in both your faces. Another blackmailing letter, I suppose!"
Young Deaves unobtrusively sought to turn over the letter on his desk, but she caught the movement out of the tail of her eye, and, whirling round, snatched it up.
"Let me see that!"
Her husband looked as helpless as a sheep. He had lost his pomposity. "Happy little family!" thought Evan.
Having read it, she threw back her head and laughed in bitter chagrin. "I thought so!" she cried. "The third time this summer! When is this going to end? Where's the story?"
"My dear, what's the use?" said her husband tremblingly. "It would only anger you."
"Be quiet!" she cried. "I will see it. Where is it?" Her eye picked it out from among the papers on his desk, and she pounced on it. More harsh and bitter laughter accompanied the reading of it.
"Bought a new suit at an immigrant outfitters! I see he has it on. Got into a row with a fruit-vendor over a penny change. Rescued by a young man and taken home. Made his rescuer pay the fares on the trolley. Oh, this is rich, rich!" she cried, trembling with anger. "This is the best story yet. This will be meat and drink to the populace! And this is what they're going to send to the Social Register, to everybody I know. It's enough to make me wish I'd died before I took the name of Deaves!"
"My dear, we are not alone!" cried George Deaves in a panic.
She threw an indifferent glance at Evan. She thought he was a servant, and she was of that arrogant type which acts as if servants were something less than human. "Do you think anything can be hidden in this house?" she said. "The men-servants are listening at the door."
George Deaves had forgotten about them. He hastened to the door and sent them downstairs.
Mrs. Deaves addressed her father-in-law. "Well, if you can't control your avaricious tendencies you'll have to pay," she said. "Send to the bank and get the money so George can take it to them."
"Pay! Pay! Pay! That's all anybody asks of me!" cried the old man in a passion. "Five thousand dollars! None of you know what that means. Money to you is like the winds of Heaven that come and go. But I know what five thousand dollars is. For I have saved it up dollar by dollar at the cost of my sweat and self-denial. And will I give it up to these scoundrels, these sewer rats who threaten me? No! I'd as lief give them my blood!"
Mrs. Deaves' face turned crimson. "You'll pay!" she cried, "or I leave this house!"
"And where will you go?" sneered the old man. "Back to share your father's genteel poverty?"
"Who made him poor?" she cried. "Who robbed him?"
George Deaves, with the tail of his eye on Evan, was sweating with terror. "Maud, I beg of you – !" he whispered.
It did seem to occur to her then that she had gone too far. She glared at Evan as if defying him to judge her, and marching up to him said bluntly: "Who are you?" This woman was magnificent in her insolence if in nothing else.
Evan coolly met her eye. "I'm the young man who paid the fares," he said, smiling.
She scowled at him. Clearly she had no humour.
Evan explained further: "I have been engaged to accompany Mr. Deaves on his walks hereafter."
"Oh, locking the stable door after the horse is stolen," she sneered. "He needs a keeper." She indicated the typewritten sheets. "Then you were present at this affair?"
"I was."
"Is this story true?"
"I have not seen it."
She handed him the pages. Evan skimmed over it hastily. Since the incidents have already been related, the opening paragraph will be sufficient to convey the style of the whole:
"Our esteemed fellow-citizen, Simeon Deaves, is known as a great dandy among his friends. He has always refused to divulge the identity of the creator of the svelte garments that grace his manly form, but yesterday the secret came out. Not in the fashionable purlieus of Fifth Avenue or Madison does Mr. Deaves' tailor hang out his sign. No; it is in Greenwich Street near the Battery where the unwary immigrant makes