you please, Mr. Vane." Fields turned back to the proprietor and snapped open his wallet. "We want to know about Mr. Ross and then shall leave you be. How much will you accept to convey your knowledge?"
"I shall not part with it for one red cent!" Vane laughed heartily, his eyes seeming to go quite far back into his brain. "Must everything be done for the sake of money?"
Vane proposed forty of Lowell's autographs as sufficient payment. Fields raised an advisory eyebrow at Lowell, who sourly agreed. As Lowell signed his name down two columns of a notepaper - "A superior piece of goods " Vane declared with approval of Lowell's writing - Vane told Fields that Ross was a former newspaper printer who had moved to pressing counterfeit money. Ross had made the mistake of passing the money to a gambling ring that used the queer bills to cheat the local gambling hells, and had even used some pawnshops as unwilling fences for goods purchased with the money won from that operation (the word unwilling was pronounced with the utmost twist in the gentleman's mouth, the tongue reaching up and over his lips, almost wetting his nose). It was only a matter of time before the schemes caught up with him.
Back at the Corner, Fields and Lowell repeated all this to Longfellow and Holmes. "I suppose we can guess what was in Bachi's satchel when he left Ross's store," said Fields. "A bag of queer bills as some sort of desperate arrangement. But what would he be doing mixed up in counterfeiting?"
"If you can't earn money, I suppose you must make it," said Holmes.
"Whatever brought him in," said Longfellow, "it seems Signor Bachi found his way out just in time."
When Wednesday evening came, Longfellow welcomed his guests from the Craigie House doorstep in the old manner. As they entered, they received a secondary welcome in the form of a yelp from Trap. George Washington Greene confessed how much heartier his health had been after receiving word of a meeting and that he hoped they would now resume their regular schedule. He was as diligently prepared for their assigned cantos as ever.
Longfellow called for the meeting to begin, and the scholars settled down into their places. The host passed out Dante's canto in Italian and the corresponding proofs of his English translation. Trap watched the proceedings with keen interest. Satisfied with the accustomed orderly seating arrangements and his master's comfort, the canine sentry settled down in the hollow under Greene's cavernous armchair. Trap knew the old man harbored special affection for him that manifested itself in food from the supper table and, besides, Greene's velveteen chair was positioned closest to the deep warmth of the study's hearth.
"A devil is behind here, who doth cleave us."
* * *
After taking his leave from the Central Station, Nicholas Rey tried to fight drifting off to sleep in the horsecar. It was only now that he felt how little rest he had been getting each night, though he had practically been chained to his desk by Mayor Lincoln's orders with little to fill his day. Kurtz had found a new driver, a green patrolman from Watertown. In Rey's brief dream set to the rough motions of the car, a bestial man approached him and whispered, "I can't die as I'm here," but even while dreaming, Rey knew that here was not a part of the puzzle left for him to solve on the grounds of Elisha Talbot's demise. I can't die as I'm. He was awakened by two men, hanging from the car's straps, arguing about the merits of women's suffrage, and then came drowsy decision - and a realization: that the beastly figure in his dream had the face of the leaper, though amplified in size three or four times. Soon the bell tinkled and the conductor shouted, "Mount Auburn! Mount Auburn!"
Having waited for Father to depart for his Dante Club meeting, Mabel Lowell, who had recently turned eighteen, stood over his French mahogany writing desk, which had been demoted to paper storage by Father, who preferred to write on an old pasteboard pad in his corner armchair.
She missed Father's good spirits around Elmwood. Mabel Lowell had no interest in chasing after Harvard boys or sitting with little Amelia Holmes's sewing circle and talking of whom they would accept or reject (except for foreign girls, whose rejection required no discussion) as if the whole civilized world were waiting to get into the sewing