And so, the prudent wretch merely adhered to his plain story that
he had sold the late Mr. Clayton an artist proof of the famous
Danube view. But, looking upon the unclaimed duplicate now in his
window, Lilienthal softly chuckled and rubbed his hands. "I am
a good two hundred and fifty ahead on that lucky picture." For
he could not find Miss Irma Gluyas to deliver to her the property
which was her own property.
Far away, by the shores of the yeasty Baltic, when Hugh Worthington
rendered up his repentant soul, two guilty ones stealthily regarded
each other's faces in the little hotel in Lastadie, where "Mr.
August Meyer" had taken refuge.
The huge "Mesopotamia" lay icily at her docks, and the graceful
woman had vanished from the cabins where her would-be betrayer had
watched her every movement. Fritz Braun's active mind had sounded
every danger now encircling his future pathway.
There was a circle of fire around him, though, as he kept hidden
in the little suburban hotel, where his smuggling confederates had
found him a safe refuge as their chief. The grinning head steward
had helped him smuggle his unsuspected booty on shore, and, while
Fritz Braun gazed moodily out of the windows of the old hostelry,
he planned his future hiding.
Neither the dangerous dupe at his side nor his hoodwinked associates
of the International Smuggling Association knew of the vast fortune
which Braun had artfully hidden upon his arrival.
Well he knew that his life would pay the penalty in a moment if
the blood-stained treasure were suspected to be in his hands.
And so, with careful craft, he labored to throw off all his
dangerous associates and quietly disappear to a retreat, already
decided upon, in the sleepy environs of Breslau.
"First, to watch my lady!" he decided, for he was not deceived by
Irma Gluyas' apparent quiet. His first care had been to obtain the
New York journals' regularly arriving. "If there is any hubbub over
there, I will be on guard, before they can reach me," he mused, as
he glowered over his wine at the woman who now panted for liberty.
Two weeks after his arrival passed with no detection of the murder.
"Safe, safe!" he laughed. "The trunk is now buried a hundred feet
deep in the ooze of the East River."
And he smiled in triumph at the precaution which had led to Leah
Einstein's hegira to her respectable First Avenue tenement, under
the decent alias of Mrs. Rachel Meyer.
He brooded, day by day, over the skill with which he had arranged
for cablegrams to a safe address. The innocent cipher arranged for
would warn him of all possible happenings.
And yet, at ease in his trust in the dumb fidelity of the distant
woman still his slave, he waited hungrily for the Magyar beauty to
trap herself. He was a man of infinite patience. Indulging every
seeming whim of his companion, he had never lost her from his sight
a moment since their arrival.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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