The Law of the Land, Emerson Hough [best beach reads of all time TXT] 📗

had for that.” He threw on the table before Blount a soiled and wrinkled bit of linen, the same mysterious handkerchief which he had put in his pocket at the train wreck long ago.

“Did you ever see that before?” asked he. Blount sat up straighter and looked closely at the object, but shook his head.

“It might be Delphine’s,” said Eddring. At this the other man shut his mouth hard and his face grew suddenly serious.

“Now, I say I had suspicions,” resumed Eddring. “That list of claims was never written out by that traveling man, Thompson. It might have been done by Henry Decherd, might it not?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Nothing, except that I believe those papers were in Henry Decherd’s valise. In fact, I know it. He did not want to claim the valise when he saw that I had it. This letter might very possibly have been written by Delphine to Decherd. See here.” He placed before Blount the unsigned letter which he had preserved ever since the time of its discovery. Blount read it through in silence, flushing a bit to see his own name mentioned by a servant in such connection; but without comment he looked quietly at Eddring, now eager in the instinct of the chase.

“I’ll tell you frankly, Cal,” said the latter, “I guessed all along that these two were concerned in all this business, but I couldn’t speak. I didn’t dare tell my suspicions when I had no better proof than was possible to get at that time. I didn’t want to tell the sheriff. I didn’t dare tell even you what I thought. Now there was something else in that valise which I did not turn over to the company, because I did not think it was their property.”

He took from his pocket the mysterious little volume, the same which had so strangely appeared at different times and in the hands of different parties, not all of whom were at that time known to himself. Blount turned it over curiously in his hand.

“Funny sort of book for a traveling man to have in his valise,” said he. “You reckon he was some sort of book collector?”

“Well, I don’t reckon that Thompson was. Upon the other hand, Henry Decherd might have been, for certain reasons. Let’s see.

“Now, here is this little French book. It tells about a certain journey made from America to France in the year 1825 by several Indian chieftains. They went with one Paul Loise, interpreter. With them was a young girl, Louise Loisson—don’t you see the name?—and she is carefully described as a descendant, not of Paul Loise, but of the Comte de Loisson, a nobleman who came to St. Louis shortly before

1825.”

 

Blount sat up still straighter in his chair. “This here is mighty strange,” said he. “Names sound right near alike.”

“Yes,” said Eddring. “But that Louise Loisson must have been dead, buried and forgotten half a hundred years ago. If so, what is she doing dancing down at New Orleans to-day? As soon as I saw that name in the newspaper, I looked it up again in my little book. Then I put together my suspicions about the letter, and the list, and the valise. If I hadn’t seen the name in the newspaper, I might never have been so much interested in it; and certainly I should never have put the matter before you.”

“I am mighty glad you did. There may be a heap under all this that I want to know about.”

“There is. And now I want you to follow me closely; because this very same thing has come to me from another direction.

“You know that in my work I have to examine papers in all sorts of claim cases. Now, within the year, I ran across a United States Supreme Court brief, a case which came up from the Indian Nations, and which was decided not long ago. It seems that the plaintiff used to be on the Omaha pay-rolls. Some one in the tribe, apparently as a test case, covering certain other claims, objected that the claimant was not all Indian, indeed not Indian at all, and hence not entitled to be on the rolls; although you know Uncle Sam recognizes Indian blood to the one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth part.

“I might never have taken much interest in that suit, which I happened to be going over for other reasons, if I hadn’t caught sight, in the testimony, of the names of Loise and Loisson, and if I hadn’t found the name of Henry Decherd among counsel for the plaintiff!”

“Well, by jinks, that’s mighty curious!” said Blount. “I didn’t know he was a lawyer.”

“Yes. He was a lawyer; so much the more dangerous, as I’ll show you. Now Paul Loise was official interpreter for the United States government at St. Louis in 1825. He was of absolutely no kinship to the Comte de Loisson, the similarity of names being a mere coincidence, though one which has made much trouble in the records since that time, as I have discovered. The confusion of these two names was one of the most singular legal blunders ever known in the South. It was this entanglement of the records that gave Henry Decherd his chance.

“The Comte de Loisson was a widower, and he brought with him from France a young daughter. He pushed on up the Missouri River in search of adventures, but he left this daughter, as nearly as can now be learned, in charge of the half-breed interpreter, Paul Loise, perhaps with the understanding that the latter was to obtain suitable care for her from officials in the government employ. That was about the time the Redhead Chief—Clark, of Lewis and Clark, you know—was Indian commissioner at St. Louis.

“Now Paul Loise, at that time engaged in the government treaty work with the tribes, was moving about from tribe to tribe, and he seems to have had an Indian wife in pretty much every one of them. He also had a white wife, or one nearly white, whom he left at his headquarters in St. Louis; and it was with this woman, white or partly white, that the young daughter of the Comte de Loisson was left, at least for a time. Paul Loise himself on one journey went up the river to the place where the Omaha tribe then lived. Whether he took this white child with him, or whether he left her in charge of his white wife at St. Louis, is something now very difficult to prove. This United States Supreme Court case hinges very largely on that same question; and hence it is of great interest to us, as I will show you after a while.”

“Well, now, couldn’t this dancer down at New Orleans—some sort of Creole like enough—have been a descendant of this Loise family of St. Louis?” asked Blount.

“That we can’t tell,” replied Eddring. “As I said, the similarity of the names set me looking up the whole matter as soon as I could.”

“Well, didn’t the French girl’s father ever come back after her?”

“Wait. We’ll come to that. The one thing certain is that he never came back down the Missouri River. He disappeared absolutely, no doubt killed somewhere by the Indians. His daughter grew up as best she might. She went to France, as our book shows. After a time Paul Loise, her erstwhile protector, died also. Here Louise Loisson disappears from view. She left behind her a very pretty legal question for others to solve, and a mightily mixed set of records to aid in the solution.

“Out of the uncertainty regarding the descendants of Paul Loise there arose a great deal of litigation. This lawsuit, which I have mentioned, no doubt originated by reason of that very confusion. Now, the attorneys in that suit had a knowledge of the existence of this very book which you have in your hand. They stated in this brief that there was but one copy of this book existing in America, that in the Congressional Library at Washington. They won their case by means of this book as evidence; for here is full proof, printed in Paris in 1825, that these Indians went to Paris, accompanied by Paul Loise, and by one Louise Loisson, a white girl, noble, and not his daughter; which meant that he had a mixed-blood daughter elsewhere, from whom the claimant had descent.

“How this book got into the possession of Henry Decherd—of course it did not belong to the man Thompson-is something I can’t tell. He no doubt intended to use it for his own purposes, as I will try to show you after a while. As to this Supreme Court case from the Indian Nations, it simply proves that the claimant did have a status on the pay-rolls; and it stops at that. The case is irrefutable evidence on the Paul Loise descent question. Perhaps Decherd, for reasons which we shall possibly find out, was not willing to let the matter rest quite there.

“As to our little book, it is a gay one enough. It says that the chieftains from America were received with distinguished honors in the city of Paris. They had so much champagne that three of them died. A titled woman of France fell in love with one of them, and there were all sorts of high jinks. As to the young girl—_La Belle Americaine_ they called her—it seems that Paris could not have enough of her. She was all the rage. She taught them the dances of the ‘sauvages.’ ‘Tres interessantes’ the Frenchmen thought these dances, it seems. That’s all we know of her—she danced. Well, if Mademoiselle Louise Loisson, down at New Orleans to-day, is as successful with her line of dancing as her possible mamma or grandmamma was in Paris years ago, it would certainly seem she has no reason for complaint.”

Blount sank back in his chair with a deep sigh. “You were right,” said he. “It is a little hard to understand all this at first, but I’m beginning to see. And unless I’m mistaken, this thing is going to come home mighty close to us. Decherd has surely been mixed up in this, if this was really his book, or in his valise, as you think. Delphine is in it, too, if that letter to him means anything. But now, what was Decherd after?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Eddring, “or at least, I’ll show you what I have discovered so far, and you can guess at the rest.

“When I got thus far along I was pretty deeply interested, as you see, and I followed it on out, just for the love of the mystery. Now I have unearthed the fact that the Comte de Loisson did leave some property when he died. Soon after his arrival in the neighborhood of St. Louis, he bought a good-sized tract of land, down in what is now St. Francois County, below St. Louis. The lands at that time were thought valueless, but perhaps the Comte de Loisson had more scientific knowledge than most of the inhabitants of St. Louis at that time. Perhaps he intended to develop his lands after he returned from his adventures up the Missouri River. He never did return, and the lands seem to have lain untouched for a generation or more, still for the most part considered valueless.

“Now, when I had got that far along, I took the trouble to look up the numbers of the sections of this land. Cal, I want to tell you that that land to-day is in the middle of the St. Francois lead region, which is full of this new disseminated lead ore, which everybody for a time thought was only flint!”

“On Jordan’s strand—” began Blount, suddenly bursting into