The Million-Dollar Suitcase — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Million-Dollar Suitcase
John Stuart Mill · en
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 snatched 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."