The Price | Page 5

at another time and under other conditions. From
establishing Griswold's identity for his fellow passenger, he slipped by
easy stages into the story of the proletary's ups and downs, climaxing it
with a vivid little word-painting of the farewell supper at Chaudière's.
"To hear him talk, you would size him up for a bloody-minded nihilist
of the thirty-third degree, ready and honing to sweep the existing order
of things into the farthest hence," he added. "But in reality he is one of
the finest fellows in the world, gone a fraction morbid over the
economic side of the social problem. He has a heart of gold, as I
happen to know. He used to spend a good bit of his time in the
backwater, and you know what the backwater of a big city will do to a
man."
"I couldn't hold my job if I didn't," was the reply.
"That means that you know only half of it," Bainbridge asserted with
cheerful dogmatism. "You're thinking of the crooks it turns out, 'which
it is your nature to.' But Griswold wasn't looking for the crooks; he was

eternally and everlastingly breaking his heart over the sodden miseries.
One night he stumbled into a cellar somewhere down in the East Side
lower levels, looking for a fellow he had been trying to find work for; a
crippled 'longshoreman. When he got into the place he found the man
stiff and cold, the woman with the death rattle in her throat, and a
two-year-old baby creeping back and forth between the dead father and
the dying mother--starvation, you know, straight from the shoulder.
They say it doesn't happen; but it does."
"Of course it does!" growled the listener. "I know."
"We all know; and most of us drop a little something into the hat and
pass on. But Griswold isn't built that way. He jumped into the breach
like a man and tried to save the mother. It was too late, and when the
woman died he took the child to his own eight-by-ten attic and nursed
and fed it until the missionary people took it off his hands. He did that,
mind you, when he was living on two meals a day, himself; and I'm
putting it up that he went shy on one of them to buy milk for that kid."
"Holy Smoke!--and he calls himself an anarchist?" was the gruff
comment. "It's a howling pity there ain't a lot more just like
him--what?"
"That is what I say," Bainbridge agreed. Then, with a sudden twinge of
remorse for having told Griswold's story to a stranger, he changed the
subject with an abrupt question.
"Where are you headed for, Broffin?"
The man who might have passed for a steamboat captain or a plantation
overseer, and was neither, chuckled dryly.
"You don't expect me to give it away to you, and you a newspaper man,
do you? But I will--seeing you can't get it on the wires. I'm going down
to Guatemala after Mortsen."
"The Crescent Bank defaulter? By Jove! you've found him at last, have
you?"

The detective nodded. "It takes a good while, sometimes, but I don't fall
down very often when there's enough money in it to make the game
worth the candle. I've been two years, off and on, trying to locate
Mortsen: and now that I've found him, he is where he can't be
extradited. All the same, I'll bet you five to one he goes back with me
in the next steamer--what? Have a new smoke. No? Then let's go and
turn in; it's getting late in the night."

III
THE RIGHT OF MIGHT
Two days after the supper at Chaudière's and the clearing of the fruit
steamer Adelantado for the banana coast, or, more specifically, in the
forenoon of the second day, the unimpetuous routine of the business
quarter of New Orleans was rudely disturbed by the shock of a genuine
sensation.
To shatter at a single blow the most venerable of the routine precedents,
the sensational thing chose for its colliding point with orderly system
one of the oldest and most conservative of the city's banks: the Bayou
State Security. At ten o'clock, following the precise habit of half a
lifetime, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, president of the Bayou State, entered
his private room in the rear of the main banking apartment, opened his
desk, and addressed himself to the business of the day. Punctually at
ten-five, the stenographer, whose desk was in the anteroom, brought in
the mail; five minutes later the cashier entered for his morning
conference with his superior; and at half-past the hour the president was
left alone to read his correspondence.
Being a man whose mental processes were all serious, and whose
hobby was method, Mr. Galbraith had established a