THE TRAIL OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 11279, 21 May 1902, Page 3

THE TRAIL OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Bt Karl Stxpots £_____-__, On a fine spring morning in tbe latter part of May, 1889, John BurCeigh, ' senior partner in the firm of Burleigh and Fields, commission merchants in the coffee trade, left his home in Beacon street a little earlier than usual, in order that he might have ample time to walk to his office in lower State street, and. incidentally, make a necessary call at the __o_a_nock Safety Deposit Vaults. Tbe first of these details, the walk to business, was a recent innovation resultant upon the advice of his physician, when tliat gentleman had been consulted regarding certain rather queer headaches and momentary lapses of memory, which bad lately attacked his patient with di—_T-.abls frequency. Tbe second

detail, the pause at tlie vault., was merely to take from the firm's compartment in that place United States Government bonds for one hundred thousand dollars. It was therefore past nine when Mr Burleigh entered his aromatic counting-room, and crossed rapidly to his private office. Arrived at his own desk, he unlocked it and rolled back its heavy top. Then he drew from the pocket of hie light overcoat tbe small packet 00-taini-g tbe precious bonds, and, after pausing thoughtfully for a moment or two, put it carefully under the four-inch pile of writingpaper in the upper right-hand drawer. Finally, this burden off his mind, be sank into his capacious chair, with a comfortable sigh of relief, and began the sorting of his mail. But he had scarcely opened the first envelope before Septimus Thomson, the ccn- _______! clerk, came in from the countingroom, and closed the door behind him with conspicuous caution. "I am sorry to disturb you at this h0.,.. sir," he said, "but there is a very -persistent person in the ante-room who has btetn waiting to see you ever since we opened the office this morning. I told him that you never saw anybody before luncheon. except by appointment; but he didn't seem to pay any more attention to mc than as if I warn a hop-toad; just pulled out a little pad and began making wild-looking triangles and things on it. He's not very wen. dressed, either, air; kind of shiny and patched, with long hair and no cuffs. I asked him what his name was, and he said it waa Bradley, David Bradley »" Mr Burleigh, who had listened to Thomson's preamble with perfunctory attention, whirled round abruptly at the'mention of , his visitor's identity. | "Bradley I Dave" Bradley V he exclaimed, in a tone of such evident pleasure that Mr Thomson rapidly repented his too explicit , de-cripti-n of "Dave" Bradley's exterior. "■Why, I haven't _____ old D.B. in tbirtv years"! -Well, well, well!" Wherenpon the dignified 3_r Burleigh bustled past his astonished clerk and fail, y rushed into the I ante-room, whence there _a__i«diately aro.e an inooherent rumble or cordial -reetin_. Mr Thomson, feeling unaccountably chagrined, discreetly withdrew. David Bradiy, A.M., Ph.D., F.R.S., was a tall, extremely lean gentleman of about fifty; undeniably shabby in spots, and distinctly underfed. His leonine mane, his eyeglasses, and his high forehead gave him an intellectual appearance that was in no way belied by his record. But he was devoted, as a rule, to _b_tr_-e theories. Practice, tbe tame demo_.tration of a theory haroeseed, he left to others, of more brawn than brain—or so he considered them. Only when his daily bread itself became a theory did be vouchsafe a grudging attention to the sordid phases of profit and loss. So it was simply a logical sequence of cause and effect that made him, simultaneous... a celebrity in tbe realm of science and __i object of dark suspicion to the butcher. ■ Late in life he had married a c6__k_ro_ little woman who sincerely believed in his ther.. . . . That's where we had our traoscendent genius; and thus sustained and -oothed by a faith that never faltered— evm after ten yeai*«' contemplation of a barren larder—-fie had serenely continued his numberless inventions in superfluous mechanic-, till, by dint of a truly praiseworthy perseverance, be had increased his income from certainly nothing to notbins* certain a year. . In fact, his only source of revenue i came in the form of intermittent royalties on a complicated—_ind despised—milkpail. At length, however, be bad become imbued with a sudden enthusiasm for aerial navigation, and, to his infinite delight, had finally succeeded in designing, upon naper, a dirigible balloon, that would foe, he fondle hoped, the prototype of al). the future argosies of flight- * The next step was, of j course, to put his scheme to proof, and, to j do this, a model must be built. But the building of a Mi-sized mod-l would require a large sum of ready money; ready money was to be obtained only from those wb" had it, and of those who had it, David Bradley mournfully assured himself that he knew not one. Then, by-and-by, he remembered John Burleigh.. * It was an inspiration. H? and Burleigh had been warm friends dnrin-* their career at college ; somebody had tol_ Mm that Burleigh was enviously prosperous And that was how he came to be in ths ante-room of Burleigh and Fields, shaking hands with' the senior __rtner. Now, the sum that David Bradley Deeded for his balloon was one thousand dollars, and John Burleigh thought just as much o_ a thousand dollars as mast men do. But as he leaned back in his le__her-_us_io_.d chair and watched the eager, brilliant-eyed face of his quondam chum, glowing is the fervour of appeal, he was recalling something that the other bad apparently forgotten. . It was o__y. that, lopg ago, when j they were room-mates at the University, the embryo scientist had nursed the embryo merchant, voluntarily and triumphantly, through a weary. dangerous siege of J smallpox. So, while David was waxing eloquent over gas and silk and propeller, John was thinking; steadily of the hideous days and nights in the dreary pest-house. Consequently, when David BradLey went away, an hour later, he took with him a cheque for the thousand dollars he desired, . and John Burleigh liad become a full _art- j ncr in tbe unnamed, unbuilt, untried, dirigible balloon. During several minutes after his eccentric friend's departure, Mr Burleigh sat inertly staring at the floor, still j piecing together the mosaic of old mem-1 ories. Then, with a wistful smile lingering about- the corners of his mouth, he turned to his desk and began once mere | the perusal of his correspondence. But tlie first letter ha picked up seemed to puzzle him a good deal. For some reason the familiar words conveyed absolutely j nothing to him. Three times he read the paper slowly through, growing perceptibly nervous. Then a strange pallor crept over his anxious face, and, with a haf_emotbered, inarticulate cry, he started abruptly to his feet. It had dawned upon him. dimly but terribly, that his inability to decipher perfectly legible, typewritten English could only mean that his mind was deranged. Hastily" donning his overcoat and bat, he walked unobserved through the counting-room, and set out, somewhat hazily, for home. Three days later, when tbe hue and cry over his mysterious disappearance had spread across the entire continent, he was found, by a policeman, in an arbour of the Public Garden, penniless, lacking his watch, ring, gold studs and cheque book, and utterly bereft of intelligence. He could not even remember his own name. * The eminent physicians who were called to examine the unfortunate merchant shook th_ir heads gravely, but refused to name the sufferers malady." They agreed, however, that he might ultimately recover his intellectual faculties, an opinion mora optimistic than confident, and advised that he be sent, for an indefinite period, to the Woodlawn Sanatorium. To this pleasant suburban retreat for the mildly insane John Burleigh was therefor, committed, and, from the .jety beginning, seemed whc-Iy satisfied \*-i.h his new environment. He was allowed to stroll, praticaily unwat.hed, about the pretty park in tbe rear of the sanatorium, and gave none of his attendants any trouble whatever, simply pacing calmly to and fro, hour after hour, his bead bent to his chest and his lips muttering the single word "balloon/ All this transformation in Mr Burleigh's

life occurred in less than a week after that last lamentable morning in his private office. Meanwhile his partner, Mr Fields, was himself on the verge of "insanity through his failure to find any trace of the Government bonds that had been taken from the safety deposit vaults by the now irresponsible member of the firm, and apparently hidden, stolen, or destroyed. Mr Fields kept the knowledge of this loss confined to himself and Septimus Thomson, the confidential clerk; for bad it become public property the firm of Burleigh and Fields would have been, no doubt, pushed into bankruptcy by a clamouring throng of panic-stricken creditors. Indeed, the gulf of dishonourable collapse was only a matter of a short month under any circumstances, unless tbe bondwere safely regained in the interval. It was at tms juncture that there began a still hunt for Day. d Bradley, of whom nothing was known by hi? hunters save his name. They, were not prepared, of course, to accuse Mr Bradley of theft— though Septimus Thomson declared his readi hess to suspect him of anything—but they cherished a slender hope that he might possibly furnish thsm with something which would possess the importance of a definite clue. For a week, in this momentous quest, they groped darkly among directorie., cr stared fixedly int. the. face of every individual they met on the street; and then Mr Fields," by tbe merest chance, happened to glance through a stray copy of the "Scientific American," wherein he read not only David Bradley's name and address, but also an account of a certain marvellous balloon, with which that versatile scientist, was about to amaze humanity. Cm the following morning, at a quarter before eight, Mr Bradley saw two well-dres-cd gentlemen, obviously from the city, turn the corner of, tbe Cragville thoroughfare in which he resided,' and walk briskly toward him. He was standing in his front yard at the time —in fact he had been standing there since daybreak—proudly surveying his completed air-ship, which lay, or rather floated,, since it was fettered to earth only by a solitary rope, upon the adjacent sw__d. The first official trial of the Butterfly-—for ad the uncouth monster was christened—had been announced for three o'clock that afternoon, and he instantly surmised that the approaching _tr__gerj. were re porters, j*_-matu__.y arrived in order that they might secure a private view of his famous contrivance before it began to eoar. In _ flood-tide of innocent vanity, like that of a small boy with a sew bicycle,, the happy inventor felt moved to immediatelj take a little preliminary spin —to "show off," in other words. So, with his heart beating a lively tattoo, he bounced into the basket-like car of the Butterfly, cut the guy-rope with his knife, turned a shining wheel in the maze of weird machinery, and shot buoyantly up above the tree-tops. Then he turned another shining wheel, and the balloon, to tha disgust of Mr Fields and Septimus Thomson, who wen shouting and ..esticulating wildly, far below, swam rapidly eastward. For a long half-hour the daring aeronaut sailed steadily on, supremely enraptured with tie daza.ing triumph of his own achievement. Mc told himself he was, indeed, a brother to the birds. By ->eerin _ occasionally over the edge of his car, he saw the pretty villages of Cragville, Pikedale, and Roseburg in turn unrolled benneatb him, like topsy-turvy puzzles. He basked, anti.ipativ.ly, in the imminent g loiy that was his. Then, lust after he had passed over the western boundary, of Woodlawn. he was somewhat startled by discovering that a few further miles would carry him out above the broad blue bosom of tlie sea, which he now perceived for the first time, wrinkled, dimpled, and glittering, spread vastly before him. As he had no wish to go beyond the land's end in this unpre-

meditated unofficial trip, and feared, aa well, tliat the patience of the newspaper men, whom ho bad left behind, would be exhausted were his absence too prolonged, he determined to put the Butterfly about otnd return. Leaning forward, he confidently pulled a crooked lever, and whirled once more the set of little wheels. The Butterfly still kept ____nely on her previous course. Again he fumbled with his nrecious gear. There was no change. And then, with a heart-breaking moan, poor o_d David Bradley sank back upon the bottom of the car, and covered his face with _i_ trembling ha_t__. * For he had realised. in one blinding flash, that his dirigible batloon was nob dirigible at al; and, furthermore, from th c very start, had answered to no power save that of tbe fresh breeze of morning. About twenty minutes after tbe occurrence of this pitiful ca»ta_t-.p_e, John Burleigh, who was shuffling around in tbe tiny park of the Woodlawn Sanatorium, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes vacant. and bit lips muttering a single word, beard a t_______ous ripping and -p_tti__ that seemed to come from the air above him. For the first time in many days h*. ouicklv threw back his bead, and gazed shar.lv upward. What he saw was a queer-look-ing anchor, with one of its flukes buried in the sanatorium roof and tearing up a cloud of shingles. The anchor itself probably conveyed nothing to big fuddled understanding, but when, on following with his eyes the rope to which the anchor was at* tached, he beheld at the farther end the unfortunate Butterfly, a dim, puz_.ed smile crept over his face and lighted up his paze. For a half-hour lie stood staring intently at tbe swaying, straining balloon, while people rushed about him with ladders and ropes in response to shrill directions from the haggard gentleman banging in the sky. And when. a. last, the Butterfly, was safely brought to earth, John Burleigh's eyes once more sparkled with intelligence, and be was as sane as you or I. Well, none of the great specialists who were interested in Mr Burleigh's case eve_ agreed regarding its cause or cure. One, however, thought that the merchant had, in. long years of bending above his desk, slipped out of place a cord in his neck, and so dammed, in time, the current of anarterv that fed his brain; and that this arterial stricture had been accidentally removed by the acute angle at which he had held his" head during the rescue of the _._on__t. And probably this was the opinion that most moved the man it chiefly oonceraed, for three days later, enthroned again in his own private office, he wrote another cheque for a thousand dollars, and laid it on the knee of a certain disconsolat* scientist who beside him. "There, Dave," he said, in a voice not quite steady, "you take that, and kee. working on "our old balloon till you get M right." The b&wil-fered Mr Bradley opened his' mouth and tried to speak, but couldn't and so only leaned eagerly forward in his c_a;i regarding his friend with shining eyes. Mr Burleigh smiled genially back at him, and then, after a little pause, went on: •'There's something said, Dave, in an od book that doesn't mention +he oofiee-trade or flym_-mac_in_s. either, for that matter, about the man who casts his b'.ead on the face of the waters, setting it back asmir after many days. And—and well, Dave I guess that', about the size of it. Whs do you think?" And Mr Bradley agreed.