Rich Crooks/Chapter 6

EVERAL things happened simultaneously and in rapid sequence.

The Cornwall brothers quarreled, and Cora, overhearing them, learned such things as caused her to flee the house. Her haste to get from under that roof caused her to remove also a little black box which had been entrusted among her things. Daniel, in constant dread of thieves, had thought they would be unlikely to search her personal effects and had had her keep it for him.

Daniel Cornwall, following the quarrel, also disappeared. When he discovered that I was the “tin-horn gambler” and the man who had shot Taggart, he thought he had caught the devil on his hook and was pretty much excited. He had sent Taggart and Quiller to try to get back that little steel box so as to avoid all delay and, if possible, obviate the need of having to let Steve Ellis get out of prison. Daniel had quarreled because he wanted to run and hide again, but Joseph, the weaker, younger and least aggressive, stubbornly refused. His conscience seemed to have been a little easier. He had been traveling in the Orient at the time and had had nothing at all to do with the affair. He was sick too, he said, and in no condition to play the fugitive, though he felt, and rightly enough I supposed, that Steve Ellis would kill him if he got the chance. Likely enough he would make the chance.

Take any sort of. strong, bold man, throw him into prison twice and he will probably come out of it desperate, dangerous, reckless. As nearly as I could gather from what I heard and what I suspected, Ellis had not only been jealous of him, but held him almost equally responsible for the things that made him, Ellis, so eager for vengeance against the brother.

So it was that Daniel Cornwall disappeared, taking Quiller with him. Quiller afterward came back to learn Cora's address, with a view toward recovering the precious box. Joseph did not know it. He advised Quiller to come to my cousin, or to me. Quiller lurked about until he got a word with Jack, but the word Jack gave him was to go to where he belonged. Quiller did not approach me, perhaps for fear that he might land in the same locality with Taggart.

I smiled over all that excitement about the little black box which, for all of its value and importance, had not been, opened in years.

But things happened rapidly.

Shortly afterward a battered body was found on the waterfront, and by clothes, papers and purse was unquestionably identified as Daniel Cornwall's. The police got their hands on Quiller and held him in jail because he could tell no satisfactory story, and whenever a millionaire is murdered the police insist on at least pretending to have the guilty party.

Joseph was badly frightened and wanted to have Steve Ellis arrested, but nobody could find him. He had come to New York and he knew the Cornwall address. About the time the body was found he had telephoned, demanding to see Cora. He swore that he would see his daughter.

Joseph wrote me that Ellis was very angry about it. He said, in effect, that since Daniel was out of the way—the papers had given the tribute of headlines to the Salt Lake millionaire—he would ignore Joseph if he would “do the right thing by the girl.” Joseph, with the moneyed man's usual viewpoint, could not understand what Ellis meant by the “right thing.” How could a man, he wrote me plaintively, do more than he had for the girl?

“I am afraid he will kill her,” the old man wrote.

His letter was not so much to give me explanations as to beg me to come to see him, and of course that meant to protect him. He was very broken up over Cora. Did I know where she was?

I did. I knew more than that. I knew what she had overheard when the Cornwalls, not suspecting that she was bending above the top of the stairs, quarreled.

She had fled in tears and anger and rage and bewilderment. She did not know where to go or what to do, but she wanted her father whom she had thought was still in prison. She tumbled into a cheap rooming-house as it seemed to fit her humiliation as well as her purse. She scorned the Cornwall money—the old fellows had not been so very generous in spending allowance—and sent for Jack Richmond.

She confided with him, and he came breathless to repeat it to me. I called on her, but she was a little afraid of me; yet she confirmed to me all that Jack had reported. She had overheard terrible things one did not know what to do.

In tears she confessed that she had trapped Jack in the restaurant with the plea of no money and brought him home. The Cornwalls had forced her to do it. She seemed at that time to owe them so much that there was nothing which she would have refused to do for them, though it made her feel ashamed to lie.

I understood. I had from the first understood all about the craft the Cornwalls thought they were using in getting in touch with me through Jack.

I am an unsympathetic person, but, having heard Cora's story, I was a little affected. She was a fine girl. I was convinced of that. I joined with Jack in urging her to go into better surroundings and to let us engage a companion for her. She refused.

However, I did oppose Jack's insistence on marrying her forthwith. My impetuous cousin and I had an exchange of remarks. I tried to impress upon him that he would be a dunce to marry her before this trouble was over. He would have been, too. He exploded ill-temperedly and said many angry things.

He wanted to marry her and have the legal right to tell the world to go hang, and to break anybody's head that interfered with her. He wanted to lynch Cornwall single-handedly. He was furious enough to tell me I might bluff some people just because I could shoot quick and straight, but he didn't want any interference from me. Did I understand?

I did—fully. I would not have had as much respect and liking for him if he had not been angry with me and said just the things he did say. There is much despicable in the man who shows common sense when in love. The ancients must have known it, for they pictured love as being blind. The fellow who calculates on whether or not a girl is trustworthy, whether or not he will have trouble on her account, is scarcely above the fellow who speculates on how much money he will make by the marriage.

Jack told me to go to the devil—that he was going to marry her at once. But he didn't. She was in no mood for marriage. She was full of troubles and inwardly tormented. She refused to marry him or to accept help from him. There was no pose about it. She was going to work and earn back something of her self-respect.

Jack was a likable fellow—though he might as well have carried his head under his arm for all the good it did him—and she no doubt loved him all the time but did not quite realize it. Or maybe she did realize it. I don't know. Anyway she refused to marry him.