Richardson Scores Again (8 page)

Dick went on to his club to ask for letters. He was turning away from the porter's box in deep dejection when a hand tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to find his Canadian friend, Jim Milsom, a cheerful, irresponsible young man reputed to be the heir to a millionaire uncle.

He scrutinized Dick's face gravely. “What's the matter, old man? Have you been backing a loser, or having a dust-up with a judge?”

“Neither. I'm all right.”

“Bunk! Something's been biting you. Where's the merry smile? Come into the card-room and unburden your soul. Consultations free from two to four.”

Dick allowed himself to be led. Milsom rang for drinks.

“Now that we're alone, out with it. These walls have no ears.”

“What would you do if someone left you in charge of a parrot and you lost it?”

“I shouldn't make a song about that. I'd go down to the docks and buy its double.”

“And lie about it?”

“A lie is a very present help in trouble. If the lie would bring happiness to a stricken home it will bring its reward. But maiden aunts who dote on parrots deserve all that's coming to them.”

“The owner of this bird isn't a maiden aunt, and she hated it,” said Dick warmly.

“Well, then, she'll be grateful to you.”

“You don't understand. I'd better tell you the whole story.”

His irrepressible friend heard him out and began to chuckle.

“This is a job for an expert, old man. You'll have to leave it to me. You say he's a yellow-fronted Amazon. I know the brutes well. They're dressed in the worst possible taste—bilious green, with touches of coral pink in the wrong places, and a thoroughly vicious yellow eye. There are dozens of them down at the docks, as like one another as golf-balls.”

“It's no good, my dear fellow. You couldn't find one that croaks ‘Absolutely' with appalling distinctness. Unless your bird did that the fraud would be detected at once.”

“Lord! That's nothing. All you have to do is to stick my bird in a dark boot-cupboard for forty-eight hours and repeat the word to him in a parrot-sort-of-voice for three hours a day without stopping, and then you take him in to the lady, and she says, ‘Is this really my bird?' and he says, ‘Absolutely,' and she falls into your arms crying, ‘My preserver,' and the scene fades out to slow music.”

“Dash it! Her flat's just overhead. If she heard me chanting ‘Absolutely' for hours on end she'd ring up for the looney squad and get me put away.”

“Then I'll do the training. The man overhead in my flat is a futurist painter and he's been certifiable for months past. Now, Dick, I've listened to your tale of woe and I'll have you listen to mine, and give me a little of the professional advice for which you are so justly famous.”

“I'll listen to you as long as you like if you'll just give me time to send a telegram. Sit tight while I take it down to the porter.”

He ran downstairs, and after a brief search in his pocket-book for Patricia's address and a telegraph form, handed the following message to the porter:

“N
OW
I'
M READY
to hear the worst,” said Dick, flinging himself into a chair after dispatching his telegram.

“Well—as I've told you before, when I've nothing better to do, I like to slip down to the London docks. They've a sort of fascination for me.”

“Take care, old man; I've heard that it grows upon a man like drink. What's the attraction?”

“Oh, the ships and the men who sail in them, I suppose. Sometimes I run across old friends, and there are always the bird and animal merchants. I was looking into my pet bird-fancier—an old ruffian who buys birds from the sailors—or rather, did buy them before the doctors who didn't like parrots invented the disease of psittacosis to account for diseases they couldn't cure. While I was talking to him, a guy poked me in the back. I swung round on him and I'm damned if it wasn't Harding Moore—a guy we used to call ‘Poker' Moore because of his poker dial when he used to play the game he lived on. I must have told you about him?”

“Have you?” said Dick absently. “I don't remember it.”

“Well, listen. Poker Moore has about as much expression in his face as a cow looking at a passing train: he has eyes like a boiled cod, and a nose and mouth to match. I'd dare you to guess what he's thinking about. ‘What ho, Poker,' I said. ‘What brings you over?' ‘Never mind what brought me over,' he said, ‘but if you want to know, I'll tell you. I've an account to square.'”

“An account to square?”

“That's what he said, and when a man like Poker says that, you've got to sit up and take notice, because he means what he says. He went on to tell me that the guy he was looking for was a young Welshman named Owen Jones.”

Dick Meredith permitted himself to yawn. He had graver things to think about than the ups and downs of professional card-players.

“Most Welshmen are named Owen Jones, aren't they?”

“That's what I said. I asked him how he was going to find him. ‘I've found him already, my boy,' he said. ‘Look at this.' He pulled out of his pocket a poster of a meeting at the Albert Hall and pointed to a portrait on it. ‘That's my man,' he said. It was a picture of the principal speaker at the meeting—a guy called Ralph Lewis.”

If Dick had been inattentive up to this point, he made up for it now. “How did your friend think that Owen Jones could be Ralph Lewis when the name was staring him in the face?”

“That's exactly what I said to him, but I never got the mystery cleared up, because at that moment one of his pals barged in and they went off together. Before he went Poker gave me his address—Suffolk Hotel, Bloomsbury—and I gave him mine. He said that he would come round and dine with me to tell me the rest of his story, but he never came. I rang up the Suffolk Hotel and they told me that he had gone away without his luggage and without paying his bill—they didn't know where. That was six days ago and I've never seen or heard of him since.”

“Perhaps he went off somewhere with his friend. In any case, he's not in the least likely to find the man he's looking for.”

“So anyone might say if he didn't know Poker Moore, but when Poker's on the job, you could safely back him against any ferret. Besides, he thinks that he's run the man to ground already.”

“You mean Ralph Lewis? He can take care of himself. He hasn't got a past.”

“Hasn't he? Why, everybody's got a past. You might not think it, but I have a sultry past. I once kidnapped a child.”

“Oh, do be serious.”

“It's a fact. It was only my appealing eyes that saved me from prosecution and a long term in a penitentiary. But never mind about me. This guy, Harding Moore, means to attend that meeting in the Albert Hall and lay the speaker out.”

“Give him a thrashing, you mean?”

“If he stopped at beating him up, I wouldn't raise a finger to stop him. The young politician who's set on making a living out of the politics business is asking for it, but Poker Moore, if I know the guy, won't stop at beating an enemy up. He's got a gun. Now, I don't want to see poor old Poker in the condemned cell, but that's where he's likely to be if we don't get busy. Suppose he bores a hole in the wrong guy?”

“If he's going on a portrait on a poster, he will. Would you mind telling me where I come in?”

“As a man of law to keep me straight. I'd rather take your advice than any solicitor's. You know what a solicitor would do—pull a long face and advise me to go to Scotland Yard, and then some heavy-footed sleuth would be put on the heels of Poker, and he'd turn on the blighter and cop him one on the jaw, and I'd have to go down and bail him out. No, Dick, old man, your advice is good enough for me.”

“I'm not sure that I shouldn't give you the same advice—to go to Scotland Yard. Does it matter very much to you if your friend, Moore, does assault Ralph Lewis?”

Jim Milsom's eye roved meditatively over the past. “Poker Moore did me a big service at the risk of his life years ago, and I shouldn't like him to think that there was a streak of yellow in me.”

“I understand. Give me to-day to think it over, and come and see me to-morrow.”

The more Dick thought over what he had been told, the less he liked it. If this professional gambler had mistaken Ralph Lewis for another man, as it was evident that he had, and in that belief assaulted, and, in Jim Milsom's expressive phrase, “beat him up,” Lewis would become a greater hero than before to his flapper band of admirers. Ought he, Dick Meredith, to waste an evening listening to this rising political luminary? His blood ran cold at the very thought of it. True, he had half-promised Patricia that he would, but that was in those happier days when she trusted him—before that little demon, James, took to wing, carrying her trust with him.

He lunched at the Temple and listened to the gossip of his fellow-lunchers. Then back in his chambers again, he tried to distract his mind by work, but at five o'clock he took the Underground to Sloane Square and went home.

The loathly Albert met him on the doorstep to impart information. “Miss Carey's back from the country. She's in a terrible way about her parrot you lost.”

Dick could have relieved his feelings by kicking him behind as he retreated, but he forbore. If Patricia was upstairs, he must go and make his peace with her if he could. Rejecting Albert's offer of the lift, he toiled up to the fifth floor and tapped at Patricia's door. She found a figure of contrition standing on the doormat. “I'm awfully sorry,” it began.

“James
must
be found,” she said firmly, feeling that with people lacking in the sense of responsibility firmness was the only possible attitude.

“I've done everything I could think of—advertised a big reward and applied to the police.”

“How did it happen?”

“May I come in and explain?” He felt that her manner as a hostess lacked something of the sense of welcome. “I don't know what possessed that bird. He seemed to have quite taken to me—let me scratch his head, showed a strong partiality for buttered toast at breakfast-time, and behaved as if the butter wouldn't melt in his beak. He kept rattling at the cage door, so I let him out—”

“And left the window open? I might have known it.”

“Certainly the window did happen to be open, but to do the bird justice, I don't believe that he was thinking of the window. He was quite happy with me. No, it was an accident that made him take to wing. I'll make a clean breast of it. My foot caught against the foot of the stool under his cage—”

“And naturally he took to wing. He's done that before, but though his master may be a prosy old man, he never had the window open when James was out of his cage. It was my fault for leaving him with a stranger.”

“Do you think that it's fair to call me a stranger? You might justly call me a fool for not thinking of the window, but not a stranger. After all, we live under the same roof—in fact, I was going to ask you to come out and dine with me to-night—to make plans for getting James back. I feel sure that we shall get him back.”

“Thank you, but I couldn't go out and amuse myself while he's lost. You don't seem to realize that if he's not found it will cost me my job.”

“But not even John Howard himself could possibly blame
you
, and as for James, he's probably having the time of his life with the other lost parrots in the Park. He'd hate you to mourn.”

Dick regretted his flippancy the moment the words had passed his lips. He saw that the girl was facing the crisis in her life and was in no mood for jesting. Indeed, he could see that she was very near to tears. He rose awkwardly. “I see that you don't believe that I'm doing all I can—that I don't realize all it means to you, so I'll take myself off. The moment I hear anything of James I'll ring you up. When we've got him back, as I'm sure we shall, we'll laugh over the bad time we're both going through.”

Patricia relented. “Won't you sit down, Mr. Meredith? I don't want you to think me ungrateful when you were so good in making it possible for me to go home and see my people. If I seemed ungrateful it was only because your telegram was a great shock to me. Tell me what you are doing, and let us talk over what we can do next.”

They sat talking for nearly half an hour—not exclusively about the missing bird. “I hear that your friend, Ralph Lewis, is to speak at the Albert Hall in a few days, and that the meeting is being advertised on posters. Are you going to hear him?”

“I ought to if I'm in London. Mr. Vance is sure to ask me how he was received.”

“Do you think I might come with you? I should like to hear him,” added Dick mendaciously.

“Very well. We'll go together, if you like…I'll watch your conversion.”

Dick noticed that she blushed with pleasure, but he thought bitterly that it was on account of the speaker, not at the prospect of his company.

“I suppose that Ralph Lewis is a Welshman; it's a Welsh name.”

“Yes, he comes from Wales.”

“Has he any relations there?”

“I heard someone say that he has a host of them.” Having done his best to thaw the ice-barrier that the recreant James had erected between them, Dick returned to his rooms on the floor below and brooded. Jim Milsom's plan of buying another parrot and educating it to ejaculate the word “Absolutely” no longer seemed fantastic. It would have to be done—otherwise the knowledge that he had ruined Patricia's prospects would haunt him through life. James was not her property. Surely she would not judge harshly the fraud of personation. But James's owner! Would he be taken in so easily? The modern John Howard! A philanthropist who thought he had a mission in life! Surely he was just the kind of man who would swallow anything. But if he didn't! If, for example, Jim Milsom's changeling bit him on the finger when he went to scratch his head—if he had learned sailors' profanity on the voyage from Brazil and let forth a string of bad language at a meeting of earnest prison-reformers in the modern John Howard's dining-room, Patricia's fate would be sealed. Either the bird would be detected as a changeling, or she would be accused of teaching him to swear. In either case she would be discharged without a character. She would never confess that she had trusted so precious a bird as James to the care of a comparative stranger, because that in itself would be enough to procure her dismissal.