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Page 92
"My word!" he cried. "One of the nine hundred horses!"
Hargrave stopped motionless like a man stricken by some sorcery.
"One of the nine hundred horses!" he echoed.
The Baronet was digging at the gold piece with the blade of his
knife.
"Precisely! In the criminal argot a counterfeit American
twenty-dollar gold piece is called a `horse.'
"Look," he said, and he dug into the coin with his knife, "it's
white inside, made of Babbit metal, milled with a file and
gold-plated. Where did you get it?"
The American stammered.
"Where could I have gotten it?" he murmured.
"Well," the Baronet said, "you might have got it from a big, old,
pasty-faced Alsatian; that would be 'Dago' Mulehaus. Or you
might have got it from an energetic, middle-aged, American woman
posing as a social leader in the States; that would be `Hustling'
Anne; both bad crooks, at the head of an international gang of
counterfeiters."
XII. The Spread Rails
It was after dinner, in the great house of Sir Henry Marquis in
St. James's Square.
The talk had run on the value of women in criminal investigation;
their skill as detective agents . . . the suitability of the
feminine intelligence to the hard, accurate labor of concrete
deductions.
It was the American Ambassadress, Lisa Lewis, who told the story.
It was a fairy night, and the thing was a fairy story.
The sun had merely gone behind a colored window. The whole vault
of the heaven was white with stars. The road was like a ribbon
winding through the hills. In little whispers, in the dark
places, Marion told me it. We sat together in the tonneau of the
motor. It was past midnight, of a heavenly September. We were
coming in from a stately dinner at the Fanshaws'.
A fairy story is a nice, comfortable human affair. It's about a
hero, and a thing no man could do, and a princess and a dragon.
It tells how the hero found the task that was too big for other
men, how he accomplished it, circumvented the dragon and won the
princess.
The Arabian formula fitted snugly to the facts.
The great Dominion railroad, extending from Montreal into New
York, was having a run of terrible luck; one frightful wreck
followed another. Nobody could get the thing straightened out.
Old Crewe, the railroad commissioner of New York, was relentless
in pressing hard conditions on the road. Then out of the West,
had come young Clinton Howard, big, tawny, virile, like the race
of heroes. He had cleaned out the tangles, set the thing going,
restored order and method; and the confidence of Canada was
flowing back. Then Howard had made love to Marion in his
persistent dominating fashion . . . . and here, with her
whispered confession, was the fairy story ended.
Marion pointed her finger out north, where, far across the
valley, a great country-house sat on the summit of a wooded hill.
"Clinton has discovered the Commissioner's secret, Sarah," she
said. "The safety of the public isn't the only thing moving old
Crewe to hammer the railroad. He pretends it is. But in fact he
wishes to get control of the road in a bankrupt court."
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