“Wings, fluttering of wings!”
“A plague on the wings!” exclaimed Jimmie, as his muscles stiffened in readiness for an emergency.
Wings! Did he hear them? He could not be sure. He would see what he could see!
He touched a button and a light flashed brightly from a white globe aloft.
His keen eyes searched the place in vain. Yet sixty seconds had not elapsed before there came the sound of a slight impact, followed by a terrific crash. The light above blinked out.
In his excitement, Jimmie threw off the spotlight and the theatre beneath him became a well of darkness.
And what of Jeanne? When the crash came her dance ended. When the spotlight blinked out she sprang back in terror. At that instant something touched her ankle.
With a little cry of fright, she bounded forward. Her foot came in contact with some solid object and sent it spinning.
“The Fire God!” she thought in consternation. “I have kicked him across the stage.”
Then the house lights flashed on, and all was light as day.
Flashing a quick look about the stage, the girl found everything as it had been, except that the Fire God was standing on his head in a corner, and half way down the center aisle was a pile of shattered glass. This glass had, a moment before, been the white globe aloft.
“Jimmie!” she called. “It’s all right. The globe fell, that’s all.”
“Must have been loose,” Jimmie grumbled. “Good thing it fell now. Might have killed somebody.”
But Jeanne was sure it had not been loose. She had not forgotten that flutter of wings.
“Some one,” she told herself, “is trying to frighten me. But I shan’t be frightened.”
At that she walked to the corner of the stage, took up her Fire God, slipped on her coat and prepared to go home.
“Jimmie,” she called, loud enough for anyone who might be hiding in the place to hear, “that’s all for to-night. But come again day after to-morrow. What do you say?”
“O. K.,” Jimmie shouted back.
Jeanne was to regret this rashness, if rashness it might be called.
“But what is it?” Petite Jeanne stepped back, half in terror, as she gripped Florence’s arm and stared about her.
They had just alighted from a Halsted Street car and had entered the maze of booths, carts, rough board counters, and wagons. “This is Maxwell Street on a bright Sunday afternoon in late autumn,” replied Merry with a smile.
They were on their way, Petite Jeanne and Merry, to the promised party at which many mysterious bags and trunks were to be opened. Florence was with them; so, too, was Angelo. Dan Baker also had agreed to come at the last moment. So they were quite a party, five in all.
About these portable stores swarmed a motley throng. Some were white, some brown, some black. All, stall keepers and prospective purchasers alike were poor, if one were to judge by attire.
“Don’t be afraid,” Merry smiled at the little French girl. “These are harmless, kindly people. They are poor, to be sure. But in this world, ninety out of every hundred are poor and probably always will be.
“Some of these people have a few poor things to sell. The others hope to purchase them at a bargain; which indeed they often do.
“So you see,” she ended, “like other places in the world, Maxwell Street deserves its place in the sun, for it serves the poor of this great city. What could be nobler?”
“Ah, yes, What could be nobler?” the little French girl echoed.
“How strange!” she murmured as they walked along. “There is no order here. See! There are shoes. Here are cabbages. And here are more shoes. There are chickens. Here are more shoes. And yonder are stockings to go with the shoes. How very queer.”
“Yes,” Florence sighed, “there is no order in the minds of the very poor. Perhaps that is why they are poor.”
“Come!” Merry cried impatiently. “We must find the shops of our friends. They are on Peoria Street. Two blocks up.”
“Lead the way.” Petite Jeanne motioned her friends to follow.
As they wedged their way through the throng, Petite Jeanne found her spirits drooping. “How sad it all seems!” she thought to herself. “There is a little dried up old lady. She must be eighty. She’s trying to sell a few lemons. And here is a slip of a girl. How pinched her face is! She’s watching over a few wretched stockings. If you whistled through them they’d go into rags.
“And yet,” she was ready to smile again, “they all seem cheerful.”
She had said this last aloud. “Yes,” Merry answered, “cheerful and kind. Very considerate of one another. It is as if suffering, hunger, rags, disease, brought friends who cannot be bought with gold.”
“It is true. And such a beautiful truth. I—”
Petite Jeanne broke short off, then dodged quickly to one side. She had barely escaped being run down by an automobile. Coming in from behind, the driver had not honked his horn.
The man was large. The companion at his side was large. The bright blue car was large. The whole outfit fairly oozed comfort, riches and self-satisfaction.
“Stand gawking around and you’ll get a leg taken off!” The driver’s voice was harsh, unkind. He spoke to the little French girl.
The hot fire that smouldered behind Angelo’s dark eyes blazed forth.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” he demanded in a fury. “Running people down! Crowding them about! You with your big car! If you want to gaze, why don’t you walk as we do?”
The car came to a halt. A deep flush had spread over the driver’s face. Springing from the car, he launched a blow that sent the slight Italian youth spinning into the crowd behind him.
But what was this? Hardly had the man swayed back, a leer of satisfaction on his face, than a whirling catapult launched itself upon him. A circle of steel closed about his neck. He found himself whirling through space. He landed with a mighty clatter atop a pile of frying pans and stew kettles.
Quickly scrambling to his feet, he glowered at the gathering throng as he demanded,
“Who did that?”
For the count of ten, no one answered. Then a scrawny little Irishman, who wore a Cross of Honor on his ragged jacket, pushed Florence forward as he whispered hoarsely,
“Tell ’im, Miss. I’m wid y’. Me, as never lost a battle yet.”
“I did!” The girl’s words were clear and quite distinct.
A hush fell over the thickening crowd. A fight on Maxwell Street is always an occasion. But a fight between a prosperous man and a good looking girl! Who had seen this before?
Florence, as you will recall, was not one of those weaklings who subsist on pickles and ice-cream in order to develop a slender figure. She weighed one hundred and sixty, was an athletic instructor, knew a few tricks and was hard as a rock.
There was no fight. The man looked her up and down. Then he called her a name. It was a nasty name, seldom heard on Maxwell Street. For the people there, though poor, are a gentle folk.
Then Maxwell Street, slow going, gentle, kindly, poverty-stricken Maxwell Street, went mad. Who threw the first ripe tomato that struck this prosperous insulter squarely on the jaw? No one will ever know. Enough that it was thrown. It was followed quickly by a bushel more, and after that by a cart load of over-ripe fish.
When at last the irate but badly beaten man of importance turned his car southward and fled from Maxwell Street, his beautiful car was no longer blue. It was tomato-pink and fish-yellow. And his costume matched the car.
Then Maxwell Street indulged in a good laugh. In this laugh Angelo did not join. He divided his attention between the business of nursing his swollen jaw and paying the poor venders of tomatoes and fish for their missing wares.
“Some people,” he might have been heard to grumble to himself, “talk too much.”
“The battle of Maxwell Street!” exclaimed Merry at his elbow. Her eyes shone. “And we won!”
“I am sure of it!” Angelo agreed heartily. “However, I am out four dollars and sixty-five cents for fish and tomatoes.”
“But look!” Merry pointed to the battered little Irishman with the Cross of Honor. “He is taking up a collection. You will be paid.”
“No, no! That cannot be!” True distress was in the Italian boy’s eyes. “Stop him.”
“No. We must not!” Merry’s tone was tense with emotion. “You are their hero. You stood up for their rights. Would you be so mean as to rob them of the right to do homage to their hero?”
“Ah, me!” Angelo rubbed his eyes. “This is a very strange world.”
In the end he departed with a heavy sack of nickels and pennies, while the crowd shouted their approval of the “brave little Dago.” And for once Angelo did not hate this name they had given his people.
They had gone another block before Angelo spoke again. What he said both puzzled and troubled the little French girl. “That whole affair,” he said quietly, “was afaux pas.”
“How could it be!” she exclaimed. “I thought it quite wonderful. What right have those big, bluffing bullies to run down poor people on Maxwell Street?”
“None at all,” Angelo replied soberly. “But after all, the battle of Maxwell Street is not our battle. This is a large city. Yet it is strange the way we meet the same people again and again. If that man really comes upon me in some other place, if he finds out what I do and where I live, he will do his best to ruin me. That is the way of his kind.”
Little did Angelo guess the manner in which his prophecy was to come true, much less the manner of vengeance that would be employed.
Petite Jeanne remained silent for a moment. Then she gave Angelo’s arm an affectionate squeeze as she answered: “I shall pray every night that he may never see you even once again.”
Even to Merry, who had never before visited her friends on Peoria Street just off Maxwell Street, the shop of Weston was something of a shock. It was nothing more than a hollow shell of a building with a great heap of second-hand goods of all sorts piled in one corner. Not a shelf, counter or table adorned this bleak interior. The plaster was cracked, the walls threatening to fall.
“I sell all in the street,” he explained in answer to their looks of astonishment. With a wave of his hand he indicated rough board counters where a miscellaneous assortment of human beings were pawing over a stock in trade as varied as themselves.
Now and again one would hold up an article in one hand, a coin in the other, and a bargain was speedily made.
“I don’t see how he lives,” Petite Jeanne whispered.
“He’s been doing this for twenty years, and he’s not bankrupt yet,” Merry whispered back.
They were led next to the shop of Kay King. This boasted of some little magnificence. There were shelves and tables and one glass showcase. Since his principal stock was composed of second-hand books, the wall was lined with them.
“A curious place for a book store, this Maxwell Street,” Dan Baker mused.
“I don’t do so badly,” Kay King smiled. “The poor wish to read. And here for a nickel, a dime, a quarter, I sell them a lamp to their feet, a light to their pathway.”
“Truly a missionary enterprise in a city wilderness,” the gentle old man murmured.
As for Petite Jeanne, her eyes had roamed up and down the dusty rows of books and had come to rest at last upon a badly hung pair of portieres at the back of the room.
“That,” she told herself, “is where he sleeps when the day is done, a dark and dingy hole.
“And yet,” she mused, “who can help admiring him? Here in his dingy little world he is master of his own destiny. While others who sell books march down each morning to punch a clock and remain bowing and scraping, saying ‘Yes mam’ this and ‘Yes mam’ that to females who think themselves superior beings, he moves happily among his own books selling when and as he chooses.”
Her reflections were broken off by a word from Kay King himself.
“There’s a story in every one.” He nodded toward the row of trunks and bags they had come to inspect.
“Little does one dream as he packs his trunk for a journey that he may never see that trunk again. Sad as it may seem, this is often the case.
“So, all unconscious of curious prying eyes, we tuck the very stories of our lives away in our trunks and watch them go speeding away in a motor van.”
“How?” Petite Jeanne asked.
“How? Look at this. Here is one I purchased some time ago.” He swung a large, strongly built wardrobe trunk about, threw it open and produced a bundle of letters. “This,” he explained, “is a young man. These letters are from his mother. And these,” he produced another packet, “are from other women. Still others are from his pals. They tell his story. And what a story! Bright, well educated, from a good family. But oh, such a rotter! He betrays his employer, his sweetheart, his pals. He deludes his trusting mother. And, how he lies to her!
“It is all written here.” He patted the letters.
“I had a letter from him yesterday,” he continued. “He wants the trunk; says it is a treasure and an heirloom; wants the contents, too; says sentiment makes him treasure these things. Sentiment!” He fairly stormed. “He knows but one emotion! He loves; ah yes, he loves himself supremely! He has not a redeeming trait.
“He wants this trunk because he is afraid. Afraid of me!” His laugh was bitter. “Me! I never hurt a flea. I only wish I could; that I were hard and ruthless as some men are, stamping their way through, trampling over others to fortune!
“But he shall pay,” he went on more calmly after a moment. “I mean to charge him twenty dollars.
“Then,” he smiled, “I shall return this one to its owners free.” He placed a hand on a sturdy little army locker. “This one belongs to a little family. How many trunks do! Father, mother and the little ones, all their clothes in one trunk! And then lost!
“There should be a society for the return of lost baggage to poor people.
“There are many like these. People come to a strange city for work. There is no work. They leave their trunks in the depot. Storage piles up. They cannot pay.
“But this must bore you!”
“No, no! Please go on.”
“There is not much more to tell. See!” He lifted the lid of the trunk. “Everything is spotlessly clean. A man’s shirts, a woman’s house dresses, little frocks and rompers for two tiny girls. Poor folks they are, like you and me. He was a soldier, too. There is a sharp-shooter’s medal on a pin cushion. There’s a child’s birth certificate, a doll with its nose kissed white, and a small Bible. They lost all that.
“And I—I shall send it back.”
“They will pay you,” said Petite Jeanne.
“They will not pay. They cannot. Some are always poor. These are like that.
“But this one—” His lips curled in sudden scorn. “This big boy who goes strutting through the world, he shall pay, and I shall pass it on to these who need and perhaps deserve it.
“But I am keeping you here!” he cried. “Here are the trunks we have saved for your own eyes. You will see that Weston has spoken truthfully. They are filled for the most part with junk. But now and then there is a story, a real story of some romantic life. See, this one opens easily. I have found a key for it.”
“Wait!” On Jeanne’s face was a look almost of distress. “You have told me so much. It seems so cruel that we should pry into their lives. It—it’s like coming upon people in the dark. I—I’m afraid. I—”
“Oh, come!” he laughed. “It’s not half as bad as that. Probably we won’t come upon anything of interest at all. Indeed that’s almost sure to be the case, and I am inclined to repent inviting you here.” So saying, he lifted the lid of the first of the row of trunks, and the show began.
Weston’s prophesy that the trunks contained “only junk” proved to be true. As trunk after trunk was opened, their search for hidden treasure continued to be unrewarded. Always there was the suggestion of pinching poverty, carelessness and neglect. These trunks were lost to their owners because they had not the ready money to pay the charges. One need not say that such as these have few valuable treasures to pack in a trunk.
The air of the small shop grew heavy with the odor of soiled clothing, cheap, highly scented soap and spilled talcum powder. The ladies had given up the search and were wandering about, looking at books, when the searching party came at last upon the three large pigskin bags from the British Isles.
“There is something to intrigue you!” exclaimed Angelo. “And see! They are all tightly locked.”
Kay King’s eyes shone. He had bid in these bags at a rather high figure. He was hoping that his judgment regarding their contents had been correct.
“Let me try these.” He rattled a huge bunch of keys. Not one of them would open the bags. “Oh well,” he smiled, “one may pick his own locks.” With skill born of ripe experience he opened the locks with a bit of twisted wire.
“Now!” He breathed deeply. “Now!”
They all crowded around. A wide-mouthed bag flew open, revealing its contents. At once an exclamation was on every lip. Not one of them all but knew on the instant that Kay had made an exceedingly good buy. The bag was packed to the very top with the choicest of wearing apparel. Indeed, not one of them all had worn such rich garments. A man’s outfit included shirts of finest silk and softest woolens, suits of broadcloth and shoes of rarest quality.
The second bag, though varying somewhat in its contents, matched the first in quality.
It was the third bag that set them gasping. For in this one the owner had packed with tender care the articles dearest to his heart. An ivory toilet set mounted with gold, a costly present from some dear friend; a brace of gold-mounted pistols; fountain pens; paper knives, elaborately carved; an astonishing collection of rare articles. And at one side, carefully wrapped in a swathing of silk, were three oval frames of beaten gold. Petite Jeanne’s fingers trembled as she unwrapped them and revealed, one after another, the portraits of a beautiful lady, a handsome boy and a marvelous girl, all dimples and golden hair.
“Oh!” She breathed deeply and the breath was half a sob.
More was to come. Having taken up an unframed picture, she studied it for a space of seconds. Then, as her trembling fingers let the picture fall, her slender form stiffened and her face went white as she said in words that seemed to choke her:
“You can’t sell these things. You truly can’t.”
“Why can’t I?” Kay challenged. He had not looked into her white face.
“Because—” She put out a hand to steady herself. “Because they belong to a friend of mine. That is he,” she said, holding up the picture, “and that,” pointing to a signature at the bottom, “is his name.
“He—he came over on the boat with me. He—he was very, very kind to me. Helped me over the hard places.
“To sell out these would be a sacrilege.
“Sell them to me!” she pleaded, laying a hand on Kay’s arm. “I’ll pay you twice what you gave for them. Please, please do!” She was all but in tears.
She could not know the bargain she appeared anxious to drive. Only Weston and Kay King knew. They knew that in all their pinched and poverty-stricken lives they had never before made such a find; that the bags and their contents were worth not twice but ten times what Kay had paid for them.
And only Angelo, who had accidentally caught sight of her bankbook, knew that for the sake of a friend she had known only on a short voyage, she was willing to spend her all.
“Wha—what will you do with them?” Kay moistened dry lips.
“I—some way I’ll find him and give them to him. And if—if he’s dead I’ll find her.” She pointed to the beautiful lady in the gold frame. “I—I’ll find her and them.” She nodded toward the other portraits.
Kay was not one who measured out charity in a glass and served it with a spoon. “Then,” he said huskily, “you may have them for exactly what I paid—fifteen dollars.”
Without another word, he snapped the bags shut one by one.
A long silence followed. Merry stood this as long as she could; then, seizing a long strand of narrow golden ribbon that had fallen from the trunk, she dashed round and round the group, encircling them all in this fragile band. Then, with a deft twitch, she thrust herself within the band.
“This,” she cried, “is our Circle of Gold.”
“And such a circle as it is!” Dan Baker’s voice wavered. “You could break it with a touch, yet it is stronger than bands of steel, for such a band is but the emblem of a bond of human hearts that must not be broken.”
It was a subdued but curiously happy Petite Jeanne who rode back to the studio that night on a rattling street car. She felt as though she had been at church and had joined in the holiest of communions.
“And this is Sunday, too,” she whispered to Florence.
“Yes,” Florence agreed, not a little surprised at her words, not divining their meaning. “This is Sunday.”
Later in the day, when the shadows had fallen across the rooftops and night had come, Dan Baker sat dozing by Angelo’s fireplace. Jeanne sat at the opposite side, but she was not sleeping. She was deep in thought. The others had gone for a stroll on the boulevard.
Jeanne was trying to recall a name, not the name of the man who had once owned the three bags resting there in the shadows. She knew that. It was Preston Wamsley. But the name of the hotel where he had stopped in New York; this escaped her.
She could picture the place in her mind. She had taken a room there for a night. It was not one of those towering affairs of brick and stone where traveling men uphold the prestige of their firms by paying ten dollars a night for a bed. A humble, kindly old hostelry, it stood mellow with age. Within were many pictures of great men who had stopped there in days gone by.
“There were Presidents and Earls and Dukes,” she told herself. “Yes, and Princes.
“Prince!” she whispered excitedly. “Prince—Prince George! That was the name! I’ll address a letter to him there to-morrow.”
“No.” She changed her mind a moment later. “To-morrow may never come. Better do it now!”
She helped herself to paper and envelope and penned a simple note to her great friend, saying she had his traveling bags which had, no doubt, been lost; and where should she send them?
“That may reach him,” she told herself, as she hurried down to post it. “Here’s hoping!”
She had cast her bread upon the waters, half of all the bread she had in the world. And the cruel Fates had decreed that she should shortly have still less. For all that, her steps were light, her heart gay, as she clambered back up the long flight of stairs.
As she returned to her place by the fire, it seemed to her that the old trouper, Dan Baker, half hidden there in the darkness, was part of a dim, half dream life that at this moment might be passing forever. Her mind went slipping, gliding back over the days that lay in the shadows that were yesterdays.
She thought of the dark-faced gypsy who had followed her on that first morning when she was on her way to dance the sun up from the lake. It was true that she had recognized him. He was a French gypsy. This much she knew. That was all. She had seen him beside some camp fire in the land of her birth.
“And I am sure it was he who peered through the skylight on the first night I danced the dance to the God of Fire,” she told herself. Involuntarily her eyes strayed to that skylight. There was no shadow there now.
“Could it have been that man who stole the God of Fire and sent it to America?” she asked herself. “Did he follow, only to find that it had been lost? And if so, what will he do to retrieve it?”
Knowing all too well the answer to this last question, she shuddered. A strange people, the gypsies care little for laws other than their own. If this man felt that he could formulate a claim to the gypsy God of Fire, he would stop at nothing to retake it.
“But he shall not have it!” she clenched her small hands tight.
From the gypsies she had absorbed a spirit of determination that was unshakable.
She thought of the flutter of wings in the theatre. “Some bird,” she reassured herself. “But what sort of bird? And who let him in?” Her mind was far from at rest on this point.
Nor did the thoughts that came to her as she recalled the “battle of Maxwell Street” bring her comfort. “Angelo was right,” she told herself. “It should not have happened. In times like these one cannot have too many friends; but one enemy is just one too many.”
Warming thoughts filled with great comfort came to her only when she recalled again the three traveling bags. “Ah! There is joy,” she breathed. “To serve another. And he was so big and kind. Perhaps he will come for the bags. It may be that I shall see him again.”
With this comforting thought she curled up in her chair. And there, half an hour later the others, on returning, found her, fast asleep.
As Petite Jeanne prepared to leave her room on the following evening for her third secret visit to the old Blackmoore, where she hoped once more to dance in Jimmie’s golden circle of light, she experienced a strange sensation. Events had been crowding in upon her. There was the strange gypsy, the fluttering of wings, the battle of Maxwell Street, the lost traveling bags. All these had, beyond doubt, exercised a powerful influence upon her. Be that as it may, she felt at that moment as if she were within a great funnel filled with sand. The sand was slipping, sliding, gliding downward toward a vortex and she, battling as she might, was slipping with it. And toward what an uncertain end!
As she closed her eyes, however, she realized that this vision belonged to the remote past—her very earliest childhood. In those days, she faintly recalled, there had been in a room of some house where she lived, an hour glass. This hour glass was composed of two glass funnels whose very narrow tips were made to meet. One of these funnels had been filled with fine sand. Then the broad ends of each had been sealed.
When this hour glass was set down with the empty funnel at the bottom, the sand trickled slowly down from the upper one.
“I seem to be inside the full glass,” she told herself. “The sands of time are sinking and I am sinking with them. Struggle as I may, I sink, sink, sink!
“But perhaps,” she said with a little shudder, “the giant hand of Fate, passing by, will seize the glass and turn it end for end. Then the sand will begin trickling down upon my head.”
The thought did not please her, so, shaking herself free from it, she hastened down the stairs and caught a bus, and whirled away toward quite another world.
As she closed her eyes once more for a moment’s rest, a second vision passed before her. A fleeting but very real vision it was, too—a marble falcon with a broken beak looking intently toward the sky. Then she recalled Merry’s words as they had parted on the previous evening: “Things are rather hard at times, but the falcon still looks up, so all will be well in the end.”
In spite of her efforts at self-control, Jeanne found her knees trembling as she entered Jimmie’s circle of light that night.
“For shame!” She stamped her dainty foot. “What is there to fear? The sound of wings. A bat perhaps, or a pigeon.”
Even as she said the words, she knew that she was lying to herself. There were no pigeons in the place. Pigeons leave marks. There were no marks. Bats there could not be, for bats pass on silent wings. Then, too, they snap their teeth.
“It is nothing,” she insisted stoutly, “and I shall dance to-night as never before!”
Jimmy was ready, later, to testify that she carried out this promise to herself.
“Like some divine one,” was the way he expressed it. “I tell you,” he fairly stammered in his enthusiasm, “you could see her floating about like a ghost on that dark old stage!”
Once her feet began their tapping, Jeanne thought only of the Fire God and her art. Gone were thoughts of rushing wings and crashing glass, of darkness and the terror that lurks in the night.
Gone, too, was the shabby old playhouse with its dingy drapes and tarnished gilt. She seemed not there at all. In spirit she found herself beside a roadway at the edge of a pleasant village in France. It was springtime. The scent of apple blossoms was in the air. The dwarf pear trees that grew so close against the wall, were green with new leaves. The gypsies were about her, they and the country folk. Bihari was sawing at his violin. Jaquis was strumming a guitar and she was dancing bare-foot on the soft grass of spring, while the eyes of the Fire God gleamed softly upon her. It was all so like a dream that she wished it might last forever.
Slowly there drifted into that dream a sound. At first she thought it was only a part of the dream, the clap of night hawks’ wings as they circled in the moonlight.
“But no!” Her face went white. “It is the wings, the fluttering of wings!” She almost cried aloud.
At the same instant she became conscious of some presence among the shadows that circled her on every side.
Panic seized her. She wanted to run away; yet she dared not. Close about her was Jimmie’s friendly circle of light. Beyond that was what? She dared not stir from that circle.
Suddenly her dancing ceased. Standing there alone in that sea of darkness, she stretched slim arms high, and cried:
“Jimmie! Jimmie! I’m terribly afraid! Don’t leave me! Please, please don’t let the light fade!”
Jimmie read real terror in her eyes, and in his honest devotion would have risked anything to save her from the unknown terror that lurked in the dark.
But he was helpless for in an instant the place went black. He had not touched a switch, yet his light had blinked out. His head whirled. His trembling hand found a switch, threw it on. Still no light. Another and yet another.
“The house is dark! The wires are cut!” he told himself frantically.
Feeling his way along the aisle, he began stumbling down a stairway when to his startled ears there came a long drawn, piercing scream.
After that followed silence, silence such as only an empty playhouse holds in the dark night.
For a full minute he saw nothing, heard nothing. Then came a sound. Faint, yet very distinct it came, and appeared to cross the hall from end to end.
“Wings,” he murmured. “Just what she said. The flutter of wings!”
Jimmie went at once for the watchman. He was some time in finding him. At last he stumbled upon him in the front corridor.
“Some one’s been tryin’ the door. Don’t know what it was about. Gone now, I guess. I—”
“Listen!” Jimmie broke in. “A terrible thing’s happened. The girl’s gone!”
“Who’s gone?”
“Jeanne!”
“Where to?”
“Who knows?” Jimmie spread his arms excitedly. “Who can tell? She’s been carried off, I tell you! Devil’s got her, like as not. Never did like that Fire God thing; gypsies and devils, witches and all that.”
“Don’t lose your head, son!” The watchman laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “She’s about the place somewhere. We’ll find her.” He gave a hitch to the big gun he always carried under his left arm and led the way.
Petite Jeanne was not “about the place somewhere.” At least, if she was she was securely hidden. They did not find her.
At last in despair Jimmie called Angelo.
“She’s gone!” he said over the telephone. “Vanished, and the Fire God thing has gone with her. She screamed once after the light blinked out. Some one threw the master-switch. She’s gone I tell you!”
Angelo called Florence. Half an hour had not passed before they were at the theatre. The police had also been notified. Three plain clothes men were there.
Between them they only succeeded in discovering that a side door was open and that Jeanne was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, gone.
When all hope of discovering the little French girl’s whereabouts deserted them, they left the place to the police, to spend a miserable hour before the fire in the studio. Without Jeanne, the place was dead. Without Jeanne—no one said it, but everyone thought it—the light opera, which had cost so much labor, and upon which so much happiness and success depended, was a thing of the past. Jeanne’s part was written for her. Not another person in all the world of stage people could play it.
“She’s gone!” Angelo rose and paced the floor.
“Kidnaped!” Dan Baker’s face looked gray and old.
“Do you really think so?” Florence looked the picture of despair.
“Not a doubt of it.”
“But why?”
“Ransom, perhaps.”
“Ransom!” The girl laughed. It was not a happy laugh. “Who’d pay it, you or I?” She went through the gesture of emptying her pockets.
“They’d hope the manager might. There’s been a lot of things done to stage people these last years. Blackmail. Graft. No end.”
“There’s the gypsies,” said Swen. “Where’d she get that God of Fire?”
“Bought it. Seventy-five cents.”
“Seventy-five cents!” Swen stared.
Florence told him the story of the Fire God. “There’s something in that,” said Swen. “They’re a queer lot, these Romanies. I’ve been studying them in their flats over by the big settlement house. Picked up some fantastic bit of music for the play. Got their own laws, they have. Don’t care a rap for our laws. If they wanted Jeanne and her god, they’d take her. That’s their way.”
In the meantime the hour was growing late. The manager and director must be faced in the morning. An important rehearsal had been set for nine A. M. Angelo could shut his eyes and picture the director’s rage when Jeanne failed to show up.
“He’ll have to be told,” he said.
“Yes,” Dan Baker understood, “he will. What is worse, he’ll have to know how and why. We can’t tell him why. But when we tell him how it all came about and just what she was doing at the time, then may the good Father be kind to us all!”
“We’ll face it all better if we have a little sleep.” Florence moved toward the door. The party broke up. A very sad party it had been.
As Florence rode home she closed her eyes and allowed the events of the past weeks to drift through her mind. These had been happy, but anxious weeks. To her, as to millions of others during this time of great financial depression, when millions were out of work and hunger stalked around the corner, there had come the feeling that something great, powerful and altogether terrible was pressing in upon her from every side.
The loss of her position had depressed her. Still, hope had returned when she secured part-time work at night.
Most of all she had been concerned with the success of the little French girl. Having induced her to come to America, Florence felt a weight of responsibility for her. Her continued success and happiness rested heavily upon Florence’s shoulders.
“And now—” She sighed unhappily.
But after all, what could have happened? She thought of the dark-faced gypsy Jeanne had spoken of; thought, too, of the Fire God that had fallen from some planet, been forged beneath the palms in some tropical jungle, or in one way or another had found its way into the wayside camps and the superstitious hearts of the gypsies.
“There might be many who would risk life itself to come into possession of it,” she told herself.
She thought of the curious phenomena that twice had frightened the little French girl.
“Wings,” she whispered. “Wings! The flutter of wings!”
The conductor called her station. Startled out of the past by the needs of the immediate present, she dashed off the street car, only to find herself thinking of the future.
“To-morrow,” she murmured, “what of to-morrow?”
How many millions had asked that same question during these trying times! And how varied were the answers!
It was the keen blue eyes of the Irish girl, Merry, that made an important discovery connected with Petite Jeanne’s disappearance.
Knowing that Merry was up bright and early every morning, Florence called her at seven o’clock the next morning to tell her of Jeanne’s disappearance.
“But what can have happened?” the girl asked in tearful consternation.
“That,” replied Florence, “is just what we all would like to know.”
“I’m coming down,” Merry announced. “Coming right away.”
“Then come to the theatre. I’m going there at once. The night watchman is on till eight. He’ll let us in. Places never look the same by the light of day. We may discover some clue.”