第100章

"Our plan against Dick Sherwood was to have him propose to me, then for me to confess that I was really married to a mean sort of man I didn't love--the idea being that Dick would be infatuated enough to pay a big sum to a dummy husband, and the three of us would disappear as soon as we got Dick's money. Dick offered to go through with the plan as Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle had shaped it up--go through with it to-night--and then after money had passed, we'd have a criminal case against them. By reminding him that Larry Brainard knew just what we were up to, and might spoil everything if we didn't act at once, I got Barney Palmer worked up to the point where he was going to pose as my husband and take the money. Dick Sherwood was to come a little later, after he'd first telephoned me, with a big roll of marked money."

There were stuttered exclamations from Barney and Old Jimmie, which were cut off by the dominant incisiveness of Joe Ellison's words to his daughter:

"I think you're lying to me! Besides, even if you're telling the truth, it's a pretty way you've taken to clear things up! Don't you see that by letting Dick Sherwood come here and play such a part, you'd be dead sure to involve him and his family in a dirty police story that the papers of the whole country would play up as a sensation? It's plain to any one that that's no way a person who wanted to square things would use Dick Sherwood. And that's why I think you're lying!"

"I had thought of that--you're right," said Maggie. "And so I wasn't going to do it. He was going to telephone me--just about this time--and when he called up I was going to fake his message. I was going to tell Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie that Dick had just telephoned he wasn't coming, because one of the two had just sold him a tip for ten thousand dollars that this was a crooked game. I thought this would have started a quarrel between the two; they are suspicious of each other, anyhow. Each would have accused the other, and in their quarrel they would have been likely to have let out a lot of truth that would have completely given each other away."

"Not a bad plan at all," commented Joe Ellison. He tried to peer deep into his daughter for a moment, his inflamed face relaxing neither in its harshness nor its doubt of her. "But since you are the clever crook I actually know you to be from your work on Dick Sherwood, and since Jimmie Carlisle says he has trained you to be a crook, I believe that everything you've told me is just something you've cleverly invented on the spur of the moment--just so many lies."

"But--but--"

She broke off before the harsh, accusing doubt of his pale face. For a fraction of a moment no one spoke. Then the telephone bell began to ring.

"Dick!" breathed Maggie, and started for the telephone.

"Stay right where you are!" her father ordered. "I'll answer that telephone myself, and see whether you're lying to me about Dick Sherwood! . . . No, we'll do this together. I'll hold the receiver and hear what he says. You'll do the talking and you'll answer just what I tell you to, and you'll keep your hand tight over the mouthpiece while I'm giving you your orders. You two"--to Barney and Old Jimmie, with a significant movement of Barney's automatic--"you'd better behave while this telephone business is going on."

The next moment Larry was hearing, or rather witnessing, the strangest telephone conversation of his experience. Maggie was holding the transmitter, and Joe had the receiver at his ears, grimly covering the two men with the automatic. Maggie obediently kept her palm tight over the mouthpiece during Joe's brief whispered directions, and no one in the room except Joe, not even Maggie, had the slightest idea of what was really passing over the wires.

What Larry heard was no more than a dozen most commonplace words in the world, transformed into the most absorbing words in the language.

Joe ordered Maggie to answer with "hello" in her usual tone, which she did, and Joe, after a startled expression at the first words that came over the wire, listened with immobile face for four or five seconds.

Then he nodded imperatively to Maggie and she put her hand over the mouthpiece.