CHAPTER XIIIDERAILED
There was shrieking and confusion from one end of the train to the other as the car righted itself again. With a horrid noise of scraping brakes the cars ahead came to a jolting standstill.
Tavia was out of her seat bent on joining the general stampede for the door, but Dorothy held her back firmly.
“You will be hurt in that rush!” she cried. “Wait a minute; do, Tavia.”
Tavia obeyed, and crouched down in the seat and covered her eyes with her trembling hands.
“Oh, listen to those cries, Doro!” she wailed presently. “Somebody must be horribly hurt.”
“Just hysterics, Miss.”
A man, one of those who had been the first to jump from the train, returned and sank into a seat opposite the two girls. “The car ahead of us jumped the track, and it’s a mercy the whole train wasn’t wrecked. As it is, they ain’t nothing to worry about, except that we may be tied up here for some considerable time.”
Tavia uncovered her eyes and looked at him. Dorothy had already done so and had risen from her seat and started hastily for the door, because this man who had undertaken to reassure them was none other than the villainous looking companion of the tall dark stranger!
At her sudden motion the man put out his hand and made as though to rise.
“Better not go out there just now, Miss,” he said, his beady black eyes resting upon her admiringly. “The crowd is still mighty hysterical and it’s possible you might get hurt.”
Dorothy might have retorted that she preferred the hysterical crowd to the doubtful pleasure of his company, but she held her tongue.
Instead she smiled noncommittally and held out her hand to Tavia.
“Come along, dear,” she begged. “There may be something we can do out there.”
“I tell you there ain’t nobody hurt,” again put in the small, squat man in a faintly irritable voice. “Better stay right here—”
But the two girls were already half way to the door, Tavia accompanying her chum grumblingly.
“Every time anything interesting happens, Doro, you have to come along and spoil everything.”
“If you call that fellow interesting, then I am disappointed in your common sense,” retortedDorothy tartly. “Sometimes, Tavia, I really think you need a nurse.”
“Well, any time that I feel like engaging one, I’ll tell you,” drawled Tavia, angered in her turn, and there fell an uncomfortable silence between the girls.
Mechanically they walked through the excited crowd on the platform to the spot where the car had jumped the track. There it stood, its wheels on the gravel bed of the roadside, tilted crazily and only held upright by the cars in front and at the rear of it.
“The people in this car must have been jolted up for fair. Thought it was an earthquake or something,” murmured Tavia, interest getting the better of her anger at Dorothy. “It’s a wonder we didn’t have an honest-to-goodness wreck out of this.”
“It was the quick wit of the engineer who saved us, I guess,” said a musical voice behind her, and, astonished, the two girls turned about to find behind them the tall good-looking stranger who had caught Tavia’s particular attention.
The eyes of the irrepressible girl sparkled as she muttered in a tone audible only to Dorothy:
“We can’t run amiss of ’em, no matter how hard we try.”
Dorothy flushed with annoyance and pretended she had not heard the man’s observation. Not soTavia! If for no other reason than to annoy her chum she determined to see the adventure through.
“We should get up a vote of thanks and send it to the engineer,” she said in her sweetest tones. “He really was quite heroic. Fancy saving the lives of all the people on this train.”
“Just fancy!” mimicked Dorothy bitterly, but the young man was not to be so easily discouraged.
He immediately ranged himself beside the two girls and launched into a boringly detailed account of the accident. In the middle of it Dorothy excused herself and hurried back to the car.
Her cheeks were hot and she felt unreasonably angry with Tavia. To her mind her chum had always been far too easy-going and casual with men, and this, Dorothy thought, was going a little too far.
It was not that Tavia had responded to the stranger—that might have been excusable under the circumstances. It was the manner of her response.
She wondered if the offensive, squat man would still be occupying the seat opposite her when she returned to the car. She was busy framing a scathing speech as she ascended the car steps, but was immensely relieved a moment later to find that there was no need of delivering it.
The fellow had evidently been discouraged byher manner—sufficiently, that is, to slightly dampen his enthusiasm.
Yet he still lingered uncomfortably near. Dorothy was annoyed and more than a little alarmed to find that he occupied a seat in the same car with her and Tavia.
On the entire trip then, they would be forced to suffer the annoyance of his presence, to ward off his offensive attentions.
Dorothy could see that he often glanced at her over the top of the paper he pretended to be reading and knew that it needed only a word or a glance from her to bring him instantly to her side.
She wished more than ever that Garry were with her. He would know how to deal with offensive strangers who took advantage of the confusion and excitement consequent upon a train accident to become familiar.
She thought of Tavia, still, presumably, busy fascinating the good-looking stranger. This was always an interesting pastime with Tavia, and it would probably be some time before she tired of it.
If she had the audacity to bring that man into their car—Dorothy gasped for, out of the corner of her eye, she saw that was just what Tavia was doing.
Her color high, she turned and looked steadilyout of the window as Tavia and her latest conquest approached. The latter seemed about to take the seat his unpleasant friend had so recently vacated but a glance at Dorothy’s averted profile warned Tavia that, for the time, she had gone far enough.
“Thank you so much!” she said sweetly, sinking into the opposite seat and adroitly placing a box of candy—the gift of her new friend—upon the other half of the seat, so that there was no room left for him. “You are in this car, too, and going through to Chicago? How nice! Ah, yes, thank you,” as the young man handed her a magazine that had fallen to the floor.
The latter lingered, indulging in inanities—or so Dorothy termed them—with Tavia, but evidently interested in Dorothy’s stubbornly averted profile.
At length, as his room was so patently desired to his company, he reluctantly moved on, joining his unpleasant friend.
Tavia looked at Dorothy with a sparkle in her eye. Evidently she had been enjoying herself immensely and was in a conciliatory mood.
“Don’t be mad with me, Doro, darling,” she coaxed. “I know I’m a perfect simpleton. But I was born that way, you know. I really can’t help it.”
“You could help a good many things, Tavia,if you wanted to,” said Dorothy, turning away from the window. “Sometimes I wonder how you can be in love with Nat and still act the way you do.”
“Well, I am in love with Nat and that’s all that matters—to Nat and me,” retorted Tavia, her voice suddenly hard and cold. “I think you are too absurdly conventional for words, Dorothy Dale. If you insist on being a spoil-sport, then you can be one by yourself. I don’t intend to help you!”
And so began the quarrel—the first real one the girls had ever had, and one that lasted all through that miserable journey to Chicago.
Tavia, through a perverse desire to torment her chum, was almost constantly to be seen in the company of the young man whose name, according to him, was Stanley Blake.
Chicago came at last, and with it an immense relief to Dorothy Dale. Her relief vanished immediately, however, when she found that Stanley Blake had taken the place of a porter and was to carry their bags.
“He shan’t carry mine,” she said, in a sudden fury, to Tavia. “If you want to go on being an—an——”
“Idiot. You might as well say it,” Tavia finished for her. “You can do as you please, Doro. If you want to make a scene over such a foolishlittle thing—— Come on, be a sport,” she added, suddenly conciliatory again. “What’s your awful objection to saving a porter’s tip?”
Dorothy bit her lips to keep back a flood of angry words. She could not very well make a scene by refusing the attentions of this man when Tavia so casually accepted them. She would, she decided, put up with Tavia’s folly once more, but, after that— She was fortified by the knowledge that they were now at their journey’s end and so would automatically dispense with the company of Stanley Blake and his fox-eyed friend.
They were in their room in the Blenheim Hotel at last. Tavia and she were alone.
“Thank goodness, we’re rid of them,” thought Dorothy, as she removed her hat and sank wearily upon the edge of the hard, hotel bed. “I hope I never have to see either of them again.”
But she did, and that in a way that was not only unpleasant but exceedingly startling.
Descending with Tavia to the hotel dining room, Dorothy saw at a table near the door the very two persons whom she had so recently and fervently wished never to see again! Tavia had not seen them yet, and Dorothy prayed fervently that she might not.
The head waiter coming toward them and beaming benignly seemed like a rescuing angel to Dorothy. She must get Tavia seated somewhere,anywhere, before she became aware of the presence of Blake and his friend. To have again their company thrust upon her was unthinkable.
Even at that last moment she would have turned away, urged Tavia to go with her to some quiet, small restaurant outside. But it was too late. The head waiter already was guiding them toward a table.
The table was next to the one at which Blake and his friend sat, at the side and a little to the rear of it. Dorothy gasped, would have protested could she have done so without rousing the suspicion of her friend.
For Tavia was still blissfully unaware of anything unusual in the atmosphere. And the head waiter, with a beaming smile, had motioned one of the waiters to take their order.
Well, it couldn’t be helped, thought Dorothy resignedly. If Tavia saw them she would have to. Lucky the two men were sitting with their backs toward the table where the chums were ensconced, and, by skillful maneuvering on Dorothy’s part, Tavia also had her back turned to them.
Dorothy turned sideways so that only her profile would be exposed to view, if either of the men chanced to glance over his shoulder.
Suddenly she stiffened, for, coming to her witha startling distinctness above the noise and chatter all about her, she heard a familiar name.
It was a very familiar name. The two men were talking about Garry Knapp!
“What is the matter, Doro?” asked Tavia, looking at her curiously. “You resemble a storybook detective on the eve of a startling discovery.”
Dorothy motioned her sharply to be still.
“They are talking of Garry,” she explained, in a tense whisper.
“Who? When? Where?” cried Tavia, screwing her head about most absurdly in a vain effort to bring the entire dining room within her range of vision at the same time. “What do you mean, Doro?”
Dorothy gestured toward the two men at the table next to them, at the same moment making an imploring gesture pleading silence.
“Why, Stanley Blake and his dear little friend!” exclaimed Tavia in a tone of pleased surprise. “Always turning up like the proverbial bad penny, aren’t they, Doro? Do you mind if I ask them to join us?”
She half rose from the table as if about to carry out her preposterous threat, but Dorothy seized her fiercely by the arm and forced her back into her seat.
“If you move or say a word, I never will speak to you again!” she said, and at the vehemenceof the usually gentle Dorothy, Tavia looked surprised. However, she obeyed and remained curiously quiet.
Dorothy had missed something of what the men had said. She realized this with a sharp annoyance. But the next moment a wave of rage and fear swept over her, blotting out every other sensation.
They were not only speaking of Garry, these two men, but they were threatening him as well. She held her breath so that she might not miss one word of what was to follow.
“He is a kind of simple guy, this Dimples Knapp,” the beady-eyed man was saying with a half-satisfied smirk. “Thinks this old world is made up of goody-goody stiffs who believe in the Golden Rule and go to church regular twice on Sundays. A cute little lamb to fleece!”
“And a nice fat, succulent one,” added Stanley Blake, in a voice neither of the girls recognized. It had a cold, mean quality that made Dorothy shiver, though the dining room was hot.
She glanced at Tavia and saw the look of bewilderment and horror on her face. Tavia had “caught on” at last. She was beginning to find that Dorothy’s aversion to these two men had been founded on something very much more real than a whim.
“THEY ARE TALKING OF GARRY,” SHE EXPLAINED, IN A TENSE WHISPER.“Dorothy Dale to the Rescue.” Page99
“THEY ARE TALKING OF GARRY,” SHE EXPLAINED, IN A TENSE WHISPER.“Dorothy Dale to the Rescue.” Page99
“THEY ARE TALKING OF GARRY,” SHE EXPLAINED, IN A TENSE WHISPER.“Dorothy Dale to the Rescue.” Page99
“What does it all mean, Doro?” she whispered, but once more Dorothy held up her hand for silence.
“Wait, and perhaps we shall hear,” she said tensely.
“The fellow thinks he’s goin’ to have the best l’il wheat ranch in the West,” went on Stanley’s companion, pushing back his plate and lighting a cigar. “He’s got the cash to do it and—I feel forced out o’ the kindness of my heart to say it, Cal—he’s got the brains. If it wasn’t for that trustin’ little disposition of his—” he did not finish the sentence, but ended with a chuckle, a thin, mean alien sound in that convivial atmosphere.
Dorothy was the victim of a chill fear. The man was like a snake, a mean, poisonous snake that would lie treacherously still in a crevice of rock awaiting the moment to strike at an unsuspecting prey.
She thought of that horrible moment during her first trip to Desert City, seemingly ages ago, when she had flung the rock that had snuffed out the life of the rattlesnake that had threatened the life of her chum. She had acted then swiftly, unerringly, not thinking of herself, but of Tavia’s peril.
But this was another, a more venomous kind of reptile, and something told her he would be infinitely harder to deal with.
Stanley Blake was speaking now, and both she and Tavia listened breathlessly.
“You may think this fellow Dimples Knapp is easy game, Gibbons, but I know better,” drawled the hero of Tavia’s gay moments. “He may be as trusting as you say he is, but I tell you he’s got friends that were not born yesterday. And they weren’t born blind, either.”
“I s’pose you mean that snoopin’ Lance Petterby an’ his gang,” snarled the little man, and the girls started nervously. “Well, I’m goin’ on record now to the effect that if he tries any funny business, it’ll be the last time, that’s all. You hear me, Cal, it’ll be the last time!”
“Say, you poor little shrimp, will you cut out calling me by my first name? This is the second time you’ve done it in the last five minutes. Getting childish or something, aren’t you?”
The man whose name quite obviously was not Stanley Blake glanced hastily about the room as he gave vent to these irritable remarks, and Dorothy turned hastily aside lest he should recognize her profile, and so put an end to his remarkable discourse.
However, though the men continued talking and, presumably, on the same subject, it did not take Dorothy long to realize that she would hear nothing further of importance that day.
The two men, evidently beset by an excess ofcaution, had lowered their voices so that it was impossible to catch a word of their discourse.
Although the girls strained their ears, the conversation at the next table became only a confused mumbling and soon afterward the two men rose and left the dining room.
Although she had scarcely tasted her lunch, Dorothy rose too.
“Where are you going, Doro?” asked Tavia.
“To the office,” said Dorothy. “I must send a telegram to Garry at once!”