Beginning with the year 1921 many men, who had too swiftly acquired fortunes in the handling of government contracts, began to pass under the rod of investigations concerning such wartime profits. George Cutter was one of these. Somebody, with a talent for figuring up the cost and sales price of lumber left over from a half-finished training camp for soldiers, discovered that the said George William Cutter had failed to turn in one million eight hundred and some odd thousands of dollars due the government. This statement appeared in a New York paper. Nothing followed. And nothing was heard of Mr. Cutter for another year. Then one afternoon in May, of 1922, a corpulent, extremely bald-headed man, with a seamy face and pouched eyes, stood up in the day coach of a train which was pulling into Shannon. He reached for his hat in the rack overhead, put it on jauntily, pulled down his vest, which had wrinkled up so often when he sat down and had been pressed so rarely that it remained faintly fluted diagonally across his broad expanse. He[264] squared his shoulders, you may say with a former air, and stepped briskly down the aisle and waited meekly on the platform between the coaches while several people descended at the station. Then he came down, and moved off hurriedly.
No one recognized him. Misfortune does something to you. It changes your manner, and takes the swagger out of your step, especially if you are the author of your misfortune.
This man walked heavily out Wiggs Street, looking about him furtively until he came to the Cutter residence. Then he lifted his eyes and beheld it in utter amazement—a fine, wide-winged, colonial mansion where a cottage had stood when he left Shannon five years before.
“I have missed her. She is gone,” he mumbled.
At this moment he caught sight of a small girl, who had already got sight of him and was regarding him curiously from the shade of a lilac bush.
There was a time when he would have strode finely up to the door, rung the bell and inquired for Mrs. Cutter; but now he was not equal to that display. He had lost his presence. He would get the information he needed from this child after the manner of the class to which he now belonged, the surreptitious class.
[265]“How do you do, my dear,” he said from the pavement to the small lady under the lilac bush.
She stuck a finger in her mouth and continued to regard him.
“Who lives here?”
“My muvver,” she answered, not pridefully, but with assurance.
“And what is your name?”
“Helen.”
He sat down on the terraced wall and stared so long at the ground that she feared he had forgotten her, and she was not of the age or sex to endure the idea of being forgotten.
“My muvver’s name is Helen, too,” she informed him. “And my brover’s name is Sammy. What’s yours?”
“Mine’s George. Ever heard it?” he asked.
She shook her head.
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