At the humorous, intimate glance which again pa.s.sed between me and the dark girl, sudden remembrance came to me, and I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed,
"I know you now!"
"Only now?" smiling.
"You"ve changed a good deal in seven years," I defended myself.
"And you so very little," she was still smiling, "that I had almost a mind to come and shake hands with you when Ina went to speak to Worth."
I remembered then that it was Worth"s recognition of her which had brought him to his feet. I told her of it, and the glowing, vivid face was suddenly all rosy. Skeet regarded the manifestation askance, asking jealously,
"When did you see Worth last, Barbie? You weren"t still living in Santa Ysobel when he left, were you?"
I sat thinking while the girlish voices talked on. Barbie--the nickname for Barbara. Barbara Wallace; the name jumped at me from a poster; that"s where I first saw it. It linked itself up with what Worth had said over there about the forlorn childhood of this beguiling young charmer. Why hadn"t I remembered then? I, too, had my recollections of Barbara Wallace. About seven years before, I had first seen her, a slim, dark little thing of twelve or fourteen, very badly dressed in slinky, too-long skirts that whipped around preposterously thin ankles, blue-black hair dragged away from a forehead almost too fine, made into a bundle of some fashion that belonged neither to childhood nor womanhood, her little, pointed face redeemed by a pair of big black eyes with a wonderful inner light, the eyes of this girl glowing here at my left hand.
The father Worth spoke of brusquely as "the professor" was Elman Wallace, to whom all students of advanced psychology are heavily indebted. The year I heard him, and saw the girl, his course of lectures at Stanford University was making quite a stir. I had been one of a bunch of criminologists, detectives and police chiefs who, during a state convention were given a demonstration of the little girl"s powers, closing with a sort of rapid pantomime in which I was asked to take part. A half dozen of us from the audience planned exactly what we were to do. I rushed into the room through one door, holding my straw hat in my left hand, and wiping my brow with a handkerchief with the right.
From an opposite door, came two men; one of them fired at me twice with a revolver held in his left hand. I fell, and the second man--the one who wasn"t armed--ran to me as I staggered, grabbed my hat, and the two of them went out the door I had entered, while I stumbled through the one by which they had come in. It lasted all told, not half a minute, the idea being for those who looked on to write down what had happened.
Those trained criminologists, supposed to have eyes in their heads, didn"t see half that really took place, and saw a-plenty that did not.
Most of "em would have hung the man who s.n.a.t.c.hed my hat. Only one, I remember, noticed that I was shot by a left-handed man. Then the little girl told us what really had occurred, every detail, just as though she had planned it instead of being merely an observer.
"Pardon me," I broke in on the girls. "Miss Wallace, you don"t mean to say that you really know me again after seeing me once, seven years ago, in a group of other men at a public performance?"
"Why shouldn"t I? You saw me then. You knew me again."
"But you were doing wonderful things. We remember what strikes us as that did me."
She looked at me with a little fading of that glow her face seemed always to hold.
"Most memories are like that," she agreed listlessly. "Mine isn"t. It works like a cinema camera; I"ve only to turn the crank the other way to be looking at any past record."
"But can you--?" I was beginning, when Skeet stopped me, leaning around her companion, bristling at me like a snub-nosed terrier.
"If you want to make a hit with Barbie, cut out the reminiscences. She does loathe being reminded that she was once an infant phenom."
I glanced at my dark eyed girl; she bent her head affirmatively. She wouldn"t have been capable of Skeet"s rudeness, but plainly Skeet had not overstated her real feeling. I had hardly begun an apology when the dancers rushed back to the table with the information that there was no more than time to make the Los Angeles train; there was an instant grasping of wraps, hasty good-bys, and the party began breaking up with a bang. Worth went out to the sidewalk with them; I sat tight waiting for him to return, and to my surprise, when he finally did appear, Barbara Wallace was with him.
CHAPTER IV
AN APPARITION
"Don"t look so scared!" she said smilingly to me. "I"m only on your hands a few minutes; a package left to be called for."
I had watched them coming back to me at our old table, with its telephone extension, the girl with eyes for no one but Worth, who helped her out of her wrap now with a preoccupied air and,
"Shed the coat, Bobs," adding as he seated her beside him, "The luck of luck that I chanced on you here this evening."
That brought the color into her face; the delicate rose shifted under her translucent skin almost with the effect of light, until that l.u.s.trous midnight beauty of hers was as richly glowing as one of those marvellous dark opals of the antipodes.
"Yes," she said softly, with a smile that set two dimples deep in the pink of her cheeks, "wasn"t it strange our meeting this way?" Worth wasn"t looking at her. He"d signaled a waiter, ordered a pot of black coffee, and was watching its approach. "I didn"t go down to the wedding, but Ina herself invited me to come here to-night. I had half a mind not to; then at the last minute I decided I would--and I met you!"
Worth nodded, sat there humped in a brown study while the waiter poured our coffee. The minute the man left us alone, he turned to her with,
"I"ve got a stunt for you."
"A--a stunt?"
The light failed abruptly in her face; her mouth with its soft, firm molding, its vivid, floral red, like the lips of a child, went down a bit at the clean-cut corners. A small hand fumbled the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of her blouse; it was almost as if she laid it over a wounded heart.
"Yes," he nodded. "Jerry"s got something in his pocket that"ll be pie for you."
She turned to me a look between angry and piteous--the resentment she would not vent on him.
"Is--is Mr. Boyne interested in stunts--such as I used to do?"
"Sure," Worth agreed. "We both are. We--"
"Oh, that was why you wanted me to come back with you?" She had got hold of herself now. She was more poised, but still resentful.
"Bobs," he cut straight across her mood to what he wanted, "Jerry Boyne is going to read you something it took about "steen blind people to see--and you"ll give us the answer." I didn"t share his confidence, but I rather admired it as he finished, poising the tongs, "One lump, or two?"
Of course I knew what he meant. My hand was already fumbling in my pocket for the description of Clayte. The girl looked as though she wasn"t going to answer him; she moved to shove back her chair. Worth"s only recognition of her att.i.tude was to put out a hand quietly, touch her arm, not once looking at her, and say in a lowered tone,
"Steady, Bobs." And then, "Did you say one lump or two?"
"None." Her voice was scarcely audible, but I saw she was going to stay; that Worth was to have his way, to get from her the opinion he wanted--whatever that might amount to. And I pa.s.sed the paper to him, suggesting,
"Let her read it. This is too public a place to be declaiming a thing of the sort."
She hesitated a minute then gave it such a mere flirt of a glance that I hardly thought she"d seen what it was, before she raised inquiring eyes to mine and asked coldly,
"Why shouldn"t that be read--shouted every ten minutes by the traffic officer at Market and Kearny? They"d only think he was paging every other man in the Palace Hotel."
I leaned back and chuckled. After a bare glance, this sharp witted girl had hit on exactly what I"d thought of the Clayte description.
"Is that all? May I go now, Worth?" she said, still with that dashed, disappointed look from one of us to the other. "If you"ll just put me on a Haight Street car--I won"t wait for--" And now she made a definite movement to rise; but again Worth held her by the mere touch of his fingers on her sleeve.
"Wait, Bobs," he said. "There"s more."
"More?" Her eyes on Worth"s face talked louder than her tongue, but that also gained fluency as he looked back at her and nodded. "Stunts!" she repeated his word bitterly. "I didn"t expect you to come back asking me to do stunts. I hated it all so--working out things like a calculating machine!" Her voice sank to a vehement undertone. "n.o.body thinking of me as human, with human feelings. I have never--done--one stunt--since my father died."
She didn"t weaken. She sat there and looked Worth squarely in the eye, yet there was a kind of big gentleness in her refusal, a freedom from petty resentment, that had in it not so much a girl"s hurt vanity as the outspoken complaint of a really grieved heart.
"But, Bobs," Worth smiled at her trouble, about the same careless, good-natured smile he had given little Pete when he flipped him the quarter, "suppose you could possibly save me a hundred thousand dollars a minute?"