by Lewis Hockley [Percy Longhurst].
Originally published in The Magnet Library (The Amalgamated Press, Ltd.) vol.1 #6 (21 Mar 1908).
A New Acquaintance.
The door opened, and in walked—not Mrs. Brewer, but a man.
"Mornin', boys!" was his salutation.
It was a keen disappointment; both young men felt it, Bob Lomax none the less because he permitted his features to give less expression of his feelings than did his chum.
Dennis, his hopes drooping, raised sky-high by the knock at the door, and again to fall, looked swiftly at his chum, his face suddenly reddening with vexation and disappointment. He felt a sudden unreasonable but intense hatred of the intruder. Mrs. Brewer had failed them; their labour had been in vain, their hopes without foundation. What was the good of going on if this—
"I said good-mornin', boys; you don't seem over chippy. Ain't you glad to see me?"
The words were spoken in a slightly nasal, drawling, but by no means unpleasant voice; the expression in the quick, shrewd-looking eyes, light grey in colour, decidedly friendly, though a trifle amused. The speaker was a young man of some thirty years of age apparently, clean shaven, sharp of features, of about the middle height, and wiry and active in build. He was fair, but scarcely seemed English; the nasal drawl in his voice indicated an acquaintance at least with tho country on the further side of the herring pond.
Neither of the young men had acknowledged his preliminary salutation, not from rudeness, but from the sharpness of their disappointment; yet the intruder did not appear at all embarrassed or disconcerted. Shutting the door, he came furthar into the room, without removing the soft grey wideawake hat he wore.
"Good morning!" Robert Lomax answered.
The stranger looked from one face to the other with a quizzical expression.
"Ain't I welcome, boys?" he asked smilingly. "If not, say the word, and I'm off. Don't want to intrude, but I thought I'd just give you a look up."
Lomax got up and dragged over the third chair.
"Will you sit down?" he said, with a reserved sort of hospitality.
"Thanks! Weren't expecting me—eh?"
"No, we weren't,” Dennis answered, a trifle sharply.
"I guess not," the stranger said composedly. "Didn't know I was alive, anyway. My name's Baxter—Harvey J. Baxter. I'm on one of your dailies here, Come over from the blessed land of the Union to show some of your English reporters just how newspaper work ought to be done. Which of you is Maxennis?"
There was an ease about Mr. Harvey J. Baxter's manner that was pleasant, though his slighting reference to the English newspaper man the reverse of the same. Lomax resented his implied superiority at once.
"You're an American," he said; and he said it in such a manner as to leave his visitor in no doubt that an American was not the equal of a Britisher in his opinion.
"You hit the bell first shot, young man," was the easy reply. "Any harm in it?"
"Not particularly," said Lomax coolly.
"Well, I just saw the new name-plate on the doorpost," went on Baxter, quite unabashed, "and I thought I'd just slip in and while away a minute by seeing who this new candidate for 'tec honours might be. Say, who's Maxennis."
"We are." Dennis answered promptly.
Mr. Baxter looked long at the two friends, and he whistled.
"Fancy name?" he queried.
"Little of each. My name's Dennis, my friend's Lomax."
The Yankee whistled again; an amused expression came into his light-grey eyes.
"Say, that's a bright idea of yours. Maxennis! Sort of sticks in one's mind—eh, don't it? Congratulate you, Mr. Maxennis. You've gone the first step towards success: got a name folks can't forget easily. Want to know whet the Sam Hill it all means. You'll have persons coming up these stairs just to look in and see who Maxennis is. That name, boys, is just a touch of genius. You ought to be in the advertising business in New York if you can turn out words like that. Congratulate you! Making a good thing of it?"
Dennis informed him that Maxennis's start as a public character dated only from that morning, and added that
they were awaiting their first client.
"Ah, that first client!" And the American wagged his head.
"We've got her!" Dennis said triumphantly, "She's a bit late; due here at ten."
Mr. Baxter lifted his eyebrows. If Maxennis didn't mind he'd sit there a bit longer, until client No. 1 turned up, in fact. He'd like to go on talking to them; they did him good—made him feel as if he were at home again amongst real life men, not galvanised corpses. He'd been in danger of falling asleep, but to know them had kind of woke him up to life again. They were a tonic, though they did make him feel homesick. He hoped they'd get on; they deserved it. They ought with such a name to alarm folk, as they had.
All this and a good deal more Mr, Baxter gave vent to, and his free and easiness, his evident genuineness and good-humour destroyed the dissatisfaction that seized Dennis consequent upon Mrs. Brewer's non-appearance, and even caused Bob Lomax to look more kindly at their newly acquired acquaintance.
"Had some experience, I guess?" he went on, after Dennis had acknowledged his kind expressions for their welfare.
"Been in a lawyer's office," volunteered Lomax. Baxter asked his questions so frankly it was impossible to answer him otherwise then in the same fashion, unless one were irritated into not answering him at all.
"Gosh! And from that you're starting right out as detectives?"
"Yes; why not?"
"Why, nothing. Boys, there's tho stuff in you, and no humbug. You've got the sand in you; true grit, I'll swear, right down to the bottom, and you'll turn out first-class, and with honours. You've got the pluck, though."
"So much the better, isn't it?" asked Dennis.
"Sure, but it ain't everybody who has. So much the better for those who have. Say, I'm real glad I dropped
in. Proud to know you, boys. Hope I'll see some more of you. Say?"
"Well?"
"If that Mrs. What-d'ye-call-her—you don't get any unmarried ladies calling on private detectives—turns up, and you can spare yourselves at 12.30, you're to lunch with me at the Press Restaurant. See! Is that a bet?"
"Why," began Lomax slowly, "it's certainly very kind of you, Mr. Baxter, and--"
"Oh, cut it out! Are you coming?"
"Yes."
"Then I'm with you 12:30. So long, Maxennis! Be with you in a couple of hours." And off went Mr. Harvey J. Baxter, leaving Maxennis in a better temper and happier frame of mind than had been the case when he entered the office.
"Made himself at home," observed Dennis.
"Oh, he's like all the Yankees! Who else would have had the sauce to ask such questions of us as he did? I wonder he didn't want to know how much money we'd got between us."
"Ob, well, he seamed friendly enough; paid us a good many compliments."
"Yes; words are cheap."
"But he's also invited us to lunch with him. What a suspicious beggar you are, Bob."
"In the blood, I suppose," Lomax answered. "We Yorkshire Tykes are proverbially cautious, like the Scotch. And, moreover, I don't like the folks who seem anxious to give one something for nothing. We don't in Yorkshire, as we say, give 'owt for nowt,' and I guess it's pretty much the same with everyone. I learned a bit at school that I remember--I could do Latin once upon a time; I've forgotten how it runs in Latin, but the translation is something to the effect that the Greeks were most to be feared when they came with gifts in their hands. Now, that Yankee chap means making something out of us, or he wouldn't have come here offering to stand us a lunch. You see!"
"Well," said Dennis, "I'm not so ready to think badly of everybody, as you are. There's a lot of Yankee brag and bounce about Mr. Baxter, but I reckon he's a real good sort, none the less. I'm inclined to like him, and I think you will too, Bob."
"H'm! Remains to be seen. D'you know, Frank, you're as full as a woman of whet she calls intuitions. You know that a thing is or will be so because you feel it, not because you've any good reason for it. I've noticed it lots of times in you."
"Thank you," Dennis answered: "for, if that's so, I've hit upon the calling for which I'm best suited. All the great detectives--"
"Oh, chuck it!" Lomax interrupted, with disgust in his voice. "More of those blessed story-books again? I tell you plainly I'm not struck with Mr. Baxter; he came here because he hoped to mate something out of us."
Now, it may be said at once, though it's getting ahead of the story a bit, that both Lomax's suspicions and hie friend's intuition turned out correct; the Yankbe did make something out of them, and both the young men afterwards came to like the man who had so unceremoniously thrust his acquaintance on them. They didn't know it at the time—Baxter let them have a copy of the paper some months afterwards—but they figured, not in their real names, but under that which Dennis's wit had evolved, in a one-and-a-half column in the paper which Mr. Baxter honoured with his assistance, and that no later than the day after their first meeting with him. It was quite an interesting article, and it set persons wondering who and what Maxennis might be, and how it was, if he were such a wonderful man, they had heard nothing of him until then.
After that lunch the three saw a good deal of each other; and Lomax, in spite of himself, could not but admire the American, who was certainly a most interesting companion, full to the brim with anecdotes and stories of his adventures and experiences, a ready and a witty talker, a much-travelled man of the world, and with a deal of genuine talent and cleverness underlying his free-and-easiness and boastfulness. Dennis liked him at once, and it was not long before the hard-headed Yorkshireman, too, fell under the spell of his tongue and forcible good comradeship.
Mr. Harvey J. Baxter having retired, the chums sat down in their silent room to await the long-delayed coming of their first client, who at last made her appearance. At eleven-thirty, just when even Lomex had began to give up all hope, she walked unceremoniously into the room, and immediately flopped into the vacant chair.
"Sorry to've kept you two gents waiting." she said, by way of apology, "but the fact is, I've bin that awful upset that I reely couldn't get along. And all along of another of them gashly, blood-curdlin' picture-cards bein' left at my house this morning. It fair gave me the creeps, that it did."
"Perhaps it would be as well if you were to let us see the card that has done so much damage, madam," suggested Frank Dennis blandly, "Have you brought the rest of the missives with you?"
"Missives, young man! I've got nothin' to do with Miss Ives, whoever she may be. It's picture-postcards I was talking to you about. Oh, yes, I've got 'em!"
Mrs. Brewer plunged her hand into the fat reticule and dug out the cards of which she had made such a display the morning before in the gardens of Staple Inn, and one more which she held out between her finger and thumb towards Dennis.
"This is the last of 'em, sir." she said hurriedly; "and if you don't think that it's enough to break the 'eart of the soberest woman as ever drew the breath of life, tell me."
While Dennis was engaged in looking through the mighty pile of cards, Lomax addressed himself to the task of drawing from their owner some further particulars of the case, which certainly did present features decidedly out of the common. The process was long and difficult, principally because the lady found a difficulty in confining herself to a definite answer to a definite question, but wandered off into by-paths of her own existence and that of many of her acquaintances, who were about as closely connected with the case over which she had sought Maxennis's advice as a Gorgonzola cheese is with circus elephant.
"You say, madam, that these cards have all been sent by one person; what makes you think so?" Lomax asked.
"Because if you'd looked at 'em, young man,"—Mrs. Brewer's attitude fluctuated between the familiarly superior and the entirely deferential--"You'd see as they all have the same postmark," she replied promptly.
"But--I haven't examined them all closely—it doesn't appear that the handwriting on them all is identical."
"Ah, sir, that's their artfulness, as I was saying to Mrs. Biddlecombe only three Sundays gone--that's their artfulness. They wants me to think that there's only one against me, when I knows that it's all of 'em--all of the rogues and hussies who'd like to cheat me out of my money."
"And do all these people live in the same place, Mrs. Brewer?"
"No, they don't; some lives here, some there, an' some the Lord only knows where. They mayn't have a roof to their heads, for all I know, though I never speaks ill of anyone, like my neighbour Mrs. Biddlecombe will do. A good woman, young man, an' a perfec' lady, but, lor', no one's name ain't safe with her for a minute!"
Various other questions were put and answered with as much--or as little--satisfaction; and then, during a temporary lull, Dennis looked up from his table.
"I think this is a case upon which we may engage, Mr. Lomax," he said. "It is a little trivial, but--"
"Our fee, madam, will be ten guineas," Lomax said, turning to the visitor.
"And quite enough, too, I say," was the rejoinder. "But I won't begrudge it, if it means dyin' peaceful in my bed."