Argosy All-Story Weekly — "The Purple Limited" — page 143: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

al HOW see, I’m giving it to you straight. I stayed to get something on him that I could hold over him and make him either produce those emeralds if he’d taken them himself as we both thought, or else have my wife set free. He had influence enough to do it even after she was indicted if he had want- ed to, and I meant to make him want to worse than he had ever wanted anything in his life before! ‘Call it blackmail if you like, sir; my wife was facing prison for something she had never done, and I was near crazed with the thought of it. Of course, I would have been dismissed or maybe arrested, too, if they had known that Ilsa and I were man and wife, but we had meant from the start to keep it a secret until spring, and then leave and get a little place in the country. I’ve got quite a bit put by, and we were going to open a sort of little tea- place for motorists—” His voice broke, and for a minute he seemed on the point of breaking down, but McCarty waited without speaking, and finally he gathered himself together and went on: ; “ I knew even before Rollins told me of the words he had had with Mr. Waverly that Mr. Creveling bad what you -might call another affair on; I haven’t been with him all these years without learning his moods, and I took it that he wasn’t receiv- ing any too much encouragement. He was ugly for weeks past, and there was no pleasing him, but all at once he changed and began to act as if he owned the earth. Whoever the—the lady was, he must have had reason to think she’d begun to like him.” “Then you don’t know who it was?” McCarty asked bluntly. ‘‘ This is no time for us to be quibbling about names, Hill; he didn’t stop at blackening your wife’s. You didn’t find out?” Hill shook his head. -“ Then what makes you sure that it was a—a real lady?” cCarty chose his words now with evident ‘care. “ Because he was so extra cautious and secretive. You’d think after all the years I’ve been with him he would have trusted me a little or made some break that would MANY CARDS? 709 have given me a line on him, but not he! That’s why I knew it must be some one with position; some one in his own set, maybe. It was news to me that Mr. Wav- erly was jealous, as he must have been from what Rollins overheard. I—I’m quite sure that Mrs. Waverly was not the lady alluded to in that quarrel.” “How did your wife come to jump her bail, Hill?” McCarty asked with seeming irrelevance... ‘Well, we talked it over, sir, and it didn’t seem that there was a chance for her if she went to trial, so there wasn’t anything else to be done. We both hated the thought of it, for it looked like a con- fession of guilt, but we couldn’t either of us face the worse thought of her going to prison. It’s no harm to tell you now, for she’s safe out of the country, but there was one that was in our confidence and helped us plan the whole thing, even to furnish- ing up that little flat all ready for us, and that was Mrs. _Jarvie, the Crevelings’ housekeéper, sir. She’d engaged Ilsa in ‘the beginning, you know, and she -thought the world of her, and never believed for a minute that she took those jewels, bless her! “Tisa’s trial was set for about a month ago, and when she couldn’t be found Mrs. Creveling shut up the house except for Rollins, and Sarah, and me, and went off to Long Island. I thought that with her out of the way Mr. Creveling would may- be show his hand, and I stuck to him closer than ever, but he didn’t, and I was begin- ning to. get desperate! It wasn’t till last Thursday mornifig that I found something out about him—something that wasn’t at all what I thought it would be; but it was enough to bring him to terms, for all that. He was working the same sort of thing on somebody else that I was trying to do to him.’’ “What do you mean?” McCarty stared. ‘Blackmail, if you choose to call it that; anyway, he was holding something over somebody else’s head. He came to the house about ten in the morning from his club, and after changing his clothes he went to the telephone and called up Maz- zarini, the caterer, and ordered a supper Conn C 6)(0)©) S (CCO)INN)