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Then the distorted sense of honor got in its work again. Agatha Geddis's visit was still recent enough to make me believe that I owed her something. "You'll have to get me out of it in some way," I returned. "I can't afford to be convicted." "Abel Geddis has been a pretty good friend of yours in the past, Bert," the lawyer suggested. "You don't want to forget that."
Among other things, she had heard her father say that he would bear all the expenses, meaning I supposed that he would see to it that Whitredge did not lose his fee. I have more than once had professional mesmerists try to hypnotize me, without success. But there is little doubt that Agatha Geddis turned the trick for me that afternoon in the steel cell of the Glendale police station.
Wherefore I found myself saying, quite calmly: "Neither Abel Geddis nor Abner Withers would spend one copper penny for any such altruistic reason as this man has given you, Whitley. Their motive is strictly selfish and personal.
On the final day of the journey I persuaded him to tell me how I had been traced, and I was still human enough to find a grain of comfort in the assurance that Agatha Geddis had not taken my money at the last only to turn and betray me. Barton, the Glendale wagon sales manager, was the one who was innocently responsible. He had talked too much, as I had feared he would.
And the day when first this possibility of future fulfilment was pronounced a certainty was one of almost exalted beatitude, and when Doctor Geddis drove away down the Northern Avenue, Amaryllis seized a coat from the folded pile of John's in the hall, and walked out into the park hatless, the wind blowing the curly tendrils of her soft brown hair, a radiance not of earth in her eyes.
"This is pretty serious, Jimmie," he asserted, after he had re-lighted his cigar. "It isn't the mere fact that you have recklessly chucked a small fortune at the Geddis person that is a mere matter of dollars and cents, and the Little Clean-Up will square you up on that. But there is another side to it. The dreadful thing is the fact that she had enough of a grip on you to make you do it.
Dorgan made hard work of this, though it was evident that he was trying his best. His description would have fitted any one of a round million of American women, I suppose; yet out of it I thought I could draw some faint touches of familiarity. The stumbling description, coupled with Barton's assertion that Agatha Geddis was living in Colorado, fitted together only too well.
Her engagement with young Copper-Money was broken off nobody knew just how or why shortly after your er shortly after the trouble at the bank three years and a half ago. Agatha's out West somewhere now in a sanitorium, I believe. Her health has been rather poor for the last year or so." This was news indeed. As I had known her as girl and woman, Agatha Geddis had always been the picture of health.
For one little minute she almost made me believe what she didn't believe herself that the crime wasn't a crime. Her father, "our eminent and public-spirited fellow-citizen, the Hon. Abel Geddis," to quote the editor of the Glendale Daily Courier, was desperately involved. For months he had been throwing good money after bad in a Western gold mine; not only his own money, but the bank's as well.
"What became of the mining stock?" I inquired. "Geddis put it into the assets, 'to help out against the loss, as he said. Nobody wanted it, of course; and then, to be right large-hearted and generous, Geddis bought it in, personally at ten cents on the dollar." "And you say Geddis is still running the bank?" "Oh, yes; he and Withers run it and own it.
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