The Paternoster Ruby | Page 4

over the head with a heavy iron candlestick; find it lying there by him.
Think of all that wheat--and them ships crunching through the ice. Say,
it's pretty tough, ain't it? He was--but would you rather make an
examination first? Or shall I go on?"
I smiled at the man's air of vast importance, which discriminated not at
all between grave matters and light. With his queer "hum's" and
"haw's," his funny little exclamatory noises and quick, jerky manner of
speech, he reminded me of a jolly diminutive priest who had just dined
well. Never was mortal freer of affectation. And his cheerfulness? It
was as expansive and as volatile as ether. His buoyancy was a perpetual,
never-failing tonic for doubt and discouragement, and I have yet to
witness him confronted with a situation that could in the least dash his
spirits.
He awaited my reply to his question with an air which suggested that
nothing less important than the well-being of his very existence was at
stake.
"Tell me what you have learned," returned I. Things usually acquire a
more comprehensible aspect when you have a few facts by which to
measure and weigh them, and I wanted to hear Stodger's story.
"Yip!" he cried cheerily. "Might as well sit here as anywhere else;
nobody to disturb us."
Weighted as he was with surplus flesh, his agility was amazing. He
wheeled round and plumped down on an oak bench, not unlike a church
pew, which stood against the panelled stairway beyond the newel. As I

followed I drew my overcoat closer about me, for the hall was cold and
dismal.
"This fellow Burke--Alexander Stilwell; queer chap. Close-mouthed?
Say!"--he squared around and tapped my chest with an impressive
forefinger--"a clam 's real noisy compared with him. Fact. Watched me
steady all the time I--you know--looked at the body."
Stodger stopped abruptly, with the manner of one to whom has
occurred a sudden brilliant idea. He thumped one fat knee with a pudgy
hand, and whispered with suppressed eagerness:
"By jinks, Swift! I have it! I 'll get Burke--Alexander Stilwell. Let him
talk--in there"--with a violent gesture toward the opposite side of the
hall--"library. What say? There's a--you know--alcove--curtains. I 'll
hide behind 'em and listen; if he don't tell the story just like he did to
me, why, we 'll call the turn on him. See?"
For various reasons I thought the idea not a bad one, and said so.
Stodger was off up the stairs like a shot. He went nimbly round the
prostrate figure on the landing without so much as a look toward it, and
disappeared.
He and another man appeared, after a while, at the back of the hall,
having evidently availed themselves of a rear stairway.
I surveyed the private secretary with much interest, and must even now
confess, after no inconsiderable study of the human face, that I have
never since beheld one that was so utterly baffling.
He was a slender man of medium height, and of an age that might have
been anything between twenty and fifty; his eyes, hair, brows, and
lashes were all of a uniform shade of pale yellow--excepting that the
eyes had a greenish tint--while his face and thin, nervous hands wore a
dead, unwholesome pallor.
The effect was extraordinary. The ageless face looked as if it did not
know how to conform to or mirror any inward emotion; and

furthermore, one was never precisely positive whether or not the pale
eyes were following one, for they somehow, in their uncertain
fixedness, suggested the idea that they were windows behind which the
real eyes were incessantly vigilant. So it was when Stodger introduced
him; I could not tell whether he was watching me or my colleague--or,
in truth, whether he was watching either of us.
"Mr. Burke, Mr. Swift," said Stodger, with a grand air--"Mr. Alexander
Stilwell Burke." Then, in a hoarse aside to me:
"Little matter I want to look after; just 'tend to it while you two are
talking."
CHAPTER II
THE PRIVATE SECRETARY
Stodger at once left us together, having, I surmised, his own method of
getting into the curtained alcove of which he had spoken. In order that
he should have ample time to reach it, I held Burke with a question or
two in the hall.
"Mr. Burke," said I, "who besides yourself and Mr. Page was in the
house last night?"
He replied promptly, but with a deliberate precision, as if he were
making a weighty confidential communication, and wanted to be
exceedingly careful to convey an exact interpretation of his thoughts.
I might now add that this cautious, reflective manner characterized all
his speech, and in time it grew extremely aggravating.
"A young man named Maillot," he said; "Royal Maillot."
"And who is