Suddenly she found herself in the midst of a throng of people. A movie theater had disgorged this throng. Like a sudden flood of water, they surrounded her and bore her on. They poured down the street to break up into two smaller streams, one of which flowed on down the street and the other into a hole in the ground. Having been caught in the latter stream, and not knowing what else to do, eager for companionship of whatever sort, the girl allowed herself to be borne along and down into the hole. Down a steep flight of steps she was half carried, to be at last deposited on a platform, alongside of which in due time a train of electric cars came rattling in.
“The subway,” she breathed. “It will take me anywhere, providing I know where I want to go.”
Just as she was beginning to experience a sense of relief from contact with this flowing mass of humanity she was given a sudden shock. To the right of her, through a narrow gap in the throng, she recognized a face. The gap closed up at once and the face disappeared, but the image of it remained. It was the face of the man she had seen in the shop, he of the birthmark on his chin.
“No doubt of it now,” she said half aloud. “Heisfollowing me.” Then, like some hunted creature of the wild, she began looking about her for a way of escape. Before her there whizzed a train. The moving cars came to a halt. A door slid open. She leaped within. The next instant the door closed and she was borne away. To what place? She could not tell. All she knew was that she was on her way.
Quite confident that she had evaded her pursuer, she settled back in her seat to fall into a drowsy stupor. How far she rode she could not tell. Having at last been roused to action by the pangs of hunger, she rose and left the car. “Only hope there is some place to eat near,” she sighed.
Again she found herself lost in a jam; the legitimate theaters were disgorging their crowds. She was at this time, though she did not know it, in the down town district.
Her right hand was disengaged; in her left she carried a small leather bag. As she struggled through the throng, she experienced difficulty in retaining her hold on this bag. Of a sudden she felt a mighty wrench on its handle and the next instant it was gone. There could be no mistaking that sudden pull. It had been torn from her grasp by a vandal of some sort. As she turned with a gasp, she caught sight of a face that vanished instantly, the face of the man with the birthmark on his chin.
Instantly the whole situation flashed through her mind; this man had been following her to regain possession of one or both of the books which at this moment reposed in her coat pocket. He had made the mistake of thinking these books were in the bag. He would search the bag and then—
She reasoned no further; a car door was about to close. She dashed through it at imminent risk of being caught in the crush of its swing and the next instant the car whirled away.
“Missed him that time,” she breathed. “He will search the bag. When he discovers his mistake it will be too late. The bird has flown. As to the bag, he may keep it. It contains only a bit of a pink garment which I can afford to do without, and two clean handkerchiefs.”
Fifteen minutes later when she left the car she found herself in a very much calmer state of mind. Convinced that she had shaken herself free from her undesirable shadow, and fully convinced also that nothing now remained but to eat a belated supper and board the next train for her home city, she went about the business of finding out what that next train might be and from what depot it left.
Fortunately, a near-by hotel office was able to furnish her the information needed and to call a taxi. A half hour later she found herself enjoying a hot lunch in the depot and at the same time mentally reveling in the soft comfort of “Lower 7” of car 36, which she was soon to occupy.
One might have supposed that, considering she was now late into the night of the most exacting and exciting day of her whole life, Lucile, once she was safely stowed away in her berth on the train, would immediately fall asleep. This, however, was not the case. Her active brain was still at work, still struggling to untangle the many mysteries that, during the past weeks, had woven themselves into what seemed an inseparable tangle. So, after a half hour of vain attempt to sleep, she sat bolt upright in her berth and snapped on the light, prepared if need be to spend the few remaining hours of that night satisfying the demands of that irreconcilable mind of hers.
The train had already started. The heavy green curtains which hid her from the little outside world about her waved gently to and fro. Her white arms and shoulders gleamed in the light. Her hair hung tumbled in a mass about her. As the train took a curve, she was swung against the hammock in which her heavy coat rested. Her bare shoulder touched something hard.
“The books,” she said. “Wonder what my new acquirement is like?”
She drew the new book from her pocket and, brushing her hair out of her eyes, scanned it curiously.
“French,” she whispered. “Very old French and hard to read.” As she thumbed the pages she saw quaint woodcuts of soldiers and officers. Here was a single officer seated impressively upon a horse; here a group of soldiers scanning the horizon; and there a whole battalion charging a very ancient fieldpiece.
“Something about war,” she told herself. “That’s about all I can make out.” She was ready to close the book when her eye was caught by an inscription written upon the fly leaf.
“Looks sort of distinguished,” she told herself. “Shouldn’t wonder if the book were valuable because of that writing if for nothing else.” In this surmise she was more right than she knew.
She put the book carefully away but was unable to banish the questions which the sight of it had brought up. Automatically her mind went over the incidents which had led up to this precise moment. She saw the child in the university library, saw her take down the book and flee, saw her later in the mystery cottage on Tyler street. She fought again the battle with the hardened foster mother of the child and again endured the torturing moments in that evil woman’s abode. She thought of the mysterious person who had followed her and had saved her from unknown terrors by notifying the police. Had that person been the same as he who had followed her this very night in an attempt to regain possession of the two books? No, surely not. She could not conceive of his doing her an act of kindness. She thought of the person who had followed them to the wall of the summer cottage out at the dunes and wondered vaguely if he could have been the same person who had followed them on Tyler street at one time and at that other saved her from the clutches of the child’s foster parents. She wondered who he could be. Was he a detective who had been set to dog her trail or was he some friend? The latter seemed impossible. If he was a detective, how had she escaped him on this trip? Or, after all, had she? It gave her a little thrill to think that perhaps in the excitement of the day his presence near her had not been noticed and that he might at this very moment be traveling with her in this car. Involuntarily she seized the green curtains and tried to button them more tightly, then she threw back her head and laughed at herself.
“But how,” she asked herself, “is all this tangle to be straightened out? Take that one little book, ‘The Compleat Angler.’ The child apparently stole it from Frank Morrow; I have it from her by a mere accident; Frank Morrow has it from one New York book shop; that shop from another; the other from a theologian; he from a third book shop; and that shop more than likely from a thief, for if he would attempt to steal it from me to-night, he more than likely stole it in the first place and was attempting to get it from me to destroy my evidence against him. Now if the book was stolen in the first place and all of us have had stolen property in our possession, in the form of this book, what’s going to happen to the bunch of us and how are we ever to square ourselves? Last of all,” she smiled, “where does our friend, the aged Frenchman, the godfather of that precious child, come in on it? And what is the meaning of the secret mark?”
With all these problems stated and none of them solved, she at last found a drowsy sensation about to overcome her, so settling back upon her pillow and drawing the blankets about her, she allowed herself to drift off into slumber.
The train she had taken was not as speedy as the one which had taken her to New York. Darkness of another day had fallen when at last she recognized the welcome sound of the train rumbling over hollow spaces at regular intervals and knew that she was passing over the streets of her own city. Florence would be there to meet her. Lucile had wired her the time of her arrival. It certainly would seem good to meet someone she knew once more.
As the train at last rattled into the heart of the city, she caught an unusual red glow against the sky.
“Fire somewhere,” she told herself without giving it much thought, for in a city of millions one thinks little of a single blaze.
It was only after she and Florence had left the depot that she noted again that red glow with a start.
The first indication that something unusual was happening in that section of the city was the large amount of traffic which passed the street car they had taken. Automobiles, trucks and delivery cars rattled rapidly past them.
“That’s strange!” she told herself. “The street is usually deserted at this time of night. I wonder if the fire could be over this way; but surely it would be out by now.”
At last the traffic became so crowded that their car, like a bit of debris in a clogged stream, was caught and held in the middle of it all.
“What’s the trouble?” she asked the conductor.
“Bad fire up ahead, just across the river.”
“Across the river? Why—that’s where Tyler street is.”
“Yes’m, in that direction.”
“Come on,” she said, seizing Florence by the arm; “the fire’s down toward Tyler street. I think we ought to try to get to the cottage if we can. What could that child and the old Frenchman do if the fire reached their cottage? He’d burn rather than leave his books and the child wouldn’t leave him; besides there are the books that belong to other people and that I’m partly responsible for. C’m’on.”
For fifteen minutes they struggled down a street that was thronged with excited people.
“One wouldn’t believe that there could be such a crowd on the streets at this hour of the night,” panted Florence, as she elbowed her way forward. “Lucile, you hang to my waist. We must not be separated.”
They came to a dead stop at last. At the end of the river bridge a rope had been thrown across the street. At paces of ten feet this rope was guarded by policemen. None could pass save the firemen.
The fire was across the river but sent forth a red glare that was startling. By dint of ten minutes of crawling Florence succeeded in securing for them a position against the rope.
A large fire in a city at night is a grand and terrible spectacle. This fire was no exception. Indeed, it was destined to become the worst fire the city had experienced in more than forty years.
Starting in some low, ancient structures that lay along the river, it soon climbed to a series of brick buildings occupied by garment makers. The flames, like red dragons’ tongues, darted in and out of windows. With a great burst they leaped through a tar-covered roof to mount hundreds of feet in air. Burning fragments, all ablaze, leaped to soar away in the hot currents of air.
The firemen, all but powerless, fought bravely. Here a fire tower reared itself to dizzy heights in air. Here and there fire hose, like a thousand entwined serpents, writhed and twisted. Here a whole battery of fire engines smoked and there two powerful gasoline driven engines kept up a constant heavy throbbing. Roofs and walls crumbled, water tanks tottered and fell, steel pillars writhed and twisted in the intense heat, chimneys came crashing in heaps.
The fire had all but consumed the row of four-story buildings. Then with a fresh dash of air from the lake it burst forth in earnest, a real and terrible conflagration.
Lucile, as she stood there watching it, felt a thousand hitherto unexperienced emotions sweep over her. But at last she came to rest with one terrible fact bearing down upon her very soul. Tyler street was just beyond this conflagration. Who could tell when the fire would reach the mysterious tumble-down cottage with its aged occupant? She thought of something else, of the books she might long since have returned to their rightful owners and had not.
“Now they will burn and I will never be able to explain,” she told herself. “Somehow I must get through!”
In her excitement she lifted the rope and started forward. A heavy hand was instantly laid on her shoulders.
“Y’ can’t go over there.”
“I must.”
“Y’ can’t.”
The policeman thrust her gently back behind the rope and drew it down before her.
“I must go,” she told herself. “Oh, I must! I must!”
“Come on,” Lucile said, pulling at Florence’s arm. “We’ve got to get there. It must be done. For everything that must be done there is always a way.”
They crowded their way back through the throng which was hourly growing denser. It was distressing to catch the fragments of conversation that came to them as they fought their way back. Tens of thousands of people were being robbed of their means of making a living. Each fresh blaze took the bread from the mouths of hundreds of children.
“T’wasn’t much of a job I had,” muttered an Irish mother with a shawl over her head, “but it was bread! Bread!” “Every paper, every record of my business for the past ten years, was in my files and the office is doomed,” roared a red-faced business man. “It’s doomed! And they won’t let me through.”
“There’s not one of them all that needs to get through more badly than I,” said Lucile, with a lump in her throat. “Surely there must be a way.”
Working their way back, the two girls hurried four blocks along Wells street, which ran parallel to the river, then turned on Madison to fight their way toward a second bridge.
“Perhaps it is open,” Lucile told Florence.
Her hopes were short-lived. Again they faced a rope and a line of determined-faced policemen.
“It just must be done!” said Lucile, setting her teeth hard as they again backed away.
An alley offered freer passage than the street. They had passed down this but a short way when they came upon a ladder truck which had been backed in as a reserve. On it hung the long rubber coats and heavy black hats of the firemen.
Instinctively Lucile’s hand went out for a coat. She glanced to right and left. She saw no one. The next instant she had donned that coat and was drawing a hat down solidly over her hair.
“I know it’s an awful thing to do,” she whispered, “but I am doing it for them, not for myself. You may come or stay. It’s really my battle. I’ve got to see it through to the end. You always advised against going further but I ventured. Now it’s do or die.”
Florence’s answer was to put out a hand and to grasp a fireman’s coat. The next moment, in this new disguise, they were away.
Had the girls happened to look back just before leaving the alley they might have surprised a stoop-shouldered, studious-looking man in the act of doing exactly as they had done, robing himself in fireman’s garb.
Dressed as they now were, they found the passing of the line a simple matter. Scores of fire companies and hundreds of firemen from all parts of the city had been called upon in this extreme emergency. There was much confusion. That two firemen should be passing forward to join their companies did not seem unusual. The coats and hats formed a complete disguise.
The crossing of the bridge was accomplished on the run. They reached the other side in the nick of time, for just as they leaped upon the approach the great cantilevers began to rise. A huge freighter which had been disgorging its cargo into one of the basements that line the river had been endangered by the fire. Puffing and snarling, adding its bit of smoke to the dense, lampblack cloud which hung over the city, a tug was working the freighter to a place of safety.
“We’ll have to stay inside, now we’re here,” panted Lucile. “There’s a line formed along the other approach. Here’s a stair leading down to the railway tracks. We can follow the tracks for a block, then turn west again. There’ll be no line there; it’s too close to the fire.”
“Might be dangerous,” Florence hung back.
“Can’t help it. It’s our chance.” Lucile was halfway down the stair. Florence followed and the next moment they were racing along a wall beside the railway track.
A switch engine racing down the track with a line of box cars, one ablaze, forced them to flatten themselves against the wall. There was someone following them, the studious boy in a fireman’s uniform. He barely escaped being run down by the engine, but when it had passed and they resumed their course, he followed them. Darting from niche to niche, from shadow to shadow, he kept some distance behind them.
“Up here,” panted Lucile, racing upstairs.
The heat was increasing. The climbing of those stairs seemed to double its intensity. Cinders were falling all about them.
“The wind has shifted,” Florence breathed. “It—it’s going to be hard.”
Lucile did not reply. Her throat was parched. Her face felt as if it were on fire. The heavy coat and hat were insufferable yet she dared not cast them away.
So they struggled on. And their shadow, like all true shadows, followed.
“Look! Oh, look!” cried Florence, reeling in her tracks.
A sudden gust of wind had sent the fire swooping against the side of a magnificent building of concrete and steel. Towering aloft sixteen stories, it covered a full city block.
“It’s going,” cried Lucile as she heard the awful crash of glass and saw flames bursting from the windows as if from the open hearth furnace of a foundry.
It was true. The magnificent mahogany desks from which great, high-salaried executives sent out orders to thousands of weary tailors, made quite as good kindling that night as did some poor widow’s washboard, and they were given quite as much consideration by that bad master, fire.
“Hurry!” Lucile’s voice was hoarse with emotion. “We must get behind it, out of the path of the wind, or we will be burned to a cinder.” Catching the full force of her meaning, Florence seized Lucile’s hand and together they rushed forward.
Burning cinders rained about them, a half-burned board came swooping down to fall in their very path. Twice Lucile stumbled and fell, but each time Florence had her on her feet in an instant.
“Courage! Courage!” she whispered. “Only a few feet more and then the turn.”
After what seemed an age they reached that turn and found themselves in a place where a breath of night air fanned their cheeks.
Buildings lay between them and the doomed executive building. The firemen were plying these with water. The great cement structure would be completely emptied of its contents by the fire but it would stand there empty-eyed and staring like an Egyptian sphinx.
“It may form a fire-wall which will protect this and the next street,” said Florence hopefully. “The worst may be over.”
On a night such as this, one does not stand on formalities. There was a light burning in the mystery cottage on Tyler street. The girls entered without knocking.
The scene which struck their eyes was most dramatic. On a long, low couch lay the aged Frenchman. Beside his bed, her hair disheveled, her garments blackened and scorched by fire, knelt the child. She was silently sobbing. The man, for all one could see, might be dead, so white and still did he lie.
Yet as the girls, still dressed in great coats and rubber hats, stepped into the room, his eyes opened; his lips moved and the girls heard him murmur:
“Ah, the firemen. Now my books will burn, the house will go. They all will burn. But like Montcalm at Quebec, I shall not live to see my defeat.”
“No, no, no!” the child sprang to her feet. “They must not burn! They shall not burn!”
“Calm yourself,” said Lucile, advancing into the room and removing her coat as she did so. “It is only I, your friend, Lucile. The fire is two blocks away and there is reason to hope that this part of Tyler street will be saved. The huge concrete building is burning out from within but is standing rugged as a great rock. It is your protection.”
“Ah, then I shall die happy,” breathed the man.
“No! No! No!” almost screamed the child. “You shall not die.”
“Hush, my little one,” whispered the man. “Do not question the wisdom of the Almighty. My hour has come. Soon I shall be with my sires and with my sons and grandsons; with all the brave ones who have so nobly defended our beloved France.
“And as for you, my little one, you have here two friends and all my books. It is in the tin box behind the books, my will. I have no living kin. I have made you my heir. The books are worth much money. You are well provided for. Your friends here will see that they are not stolen from you, will you not?”
Florence and Lucile, too touched to trust themselves to speak, bowed their heads.
“As for myself,” the man went on in a hoarse whisper, “I have but one regret.
“Come close,” he beckoned to Lucile. “Come very close. I have something more to tell you.”
Lucille moved close to him, something seeming to say to her, “Now you are to hear the gargoyle’s secret.”
“Not many days ago,” he began, “I told you some of my life, but not all. I could not. My heart was too sore. Now I wish to tell you all. You remember that I said I took my books to Paris. That is not quite true. I started with all of them but not all arrived. One box of them, the most precious of all, was stolen while on the way and a box of cheap and worthless books put in its place.
“Heartbroken at this loss, I traced the robbers as best I could at last to find that the books had been carried overseas to America.
“I came to America. They had been sold, scattered abroad. The thief eluded me, but the books I could trace. By the gargoyle in the corner and by the descriptions of dealers in rare books, I located many of them.
“Those who had them had paid handsomely for them. They would not believe an old man’s story. They would not give them up.
“I brought suit in the courts. It was no use. No one would believe me.
“Young lady,” the old man’s voice all but died away as his feeble fingers clutched at the covers, “young lady, every man has some wish which he hopes to fulfill. He may desire to become rich, to secure power, to write a book, to paint a great picture. There is always something. As for me, I wished but one thing, a very little thing: to die with the books, those precious volumes I had inherited. The foolish wish of a childish old man, perhaps, but that was my wish. The war has taken my family. They cannot gather by my bedside; I have only my books. And, thanks to this child,” he attempted to place his hand on the child’s bowed head, “thanks to her, there are but few missing at this, the last moment.”
For a little there was silence in the room, then the whisper began again, this time more faint:
“Perhaps it was wrong, the way I taught the child to get the books. But they were really my own. I had not sold one of them. They were all my own. She knows where they came from. When I am gone, if that is the way of America, they may all be returned.”
Lucile hesitated for a moment, then bent over the dying man.
“The books,” she whispered. “Were two of them very small ones?”
The expression on the dying man’s face grew eager as he answered, “Yes, yes, very small and very rare. One was a book about fishing and the other—ah, that one!—that was the rarest of all. It had been written in by the great Napoleon and had been presented by him to one of his marshals, my uncle.”
Lucile’s hand came out from behind her back. In it were two books.
“Are these the ones?” she asked.
“Yes, yes,” he breathed hoarsely. “Those are the very most precious ones. I die—I die happy.”
For a second the glassy eyes stared, then lighted up with a smile that was beautiful to behold.
“Ah!” he breathed, “I am happy now, happy as when a child I played beneath the grapevines in my own beloved France.”
Those were his last words. A moment later, Lucile turned to lead the silently weeping child into another room. As she did so, she encountered a figure standing with bowed head.
It was the studious looking boy who had donned the fireman’s coat and followed them.
“Harry Brock!” she whispered. “How did you come here?”
“I came in very much the same manner that you came,” he said quietly. “I have been where you have been many times of late. I did not understand, but I thought you needed protection and since I thought of myself as the best friend you had among the men at the university, I took that task upon myself. I have been in this room, unnoticed, for some time. I heard what he said and now I think I understand. Please allow me to congratulate you and—and to thank you. You have strengthened my faith in—in all that is good and beautiful.”
He stepped awkwardly aside and allowed her to pass.
There was no time for explanations that night. The fire had been checked; the cottage and the rare books were safe, but there were many other things to be attended to. It was several days before Lucile met Harry Brock again and then it was by appointment, in the Cozy Corner Tea Room.
Her time during the intervening days was taken up with affairs relating to her new charge, the child refugee, Marie. She went at once to Frank Morrow for advice. He expressed great surprise at the turn events had taken but told her that he had suspected from the day she had told the story to him that the books had been stolen from Monsieur Le Bon.
“And now we will catch the thief and if he has money we will make him pay,” he declared stoutly.
He made good his declaration. Through the loosely joined but powerful league of book sellers he tracked down the man with the birthmark on his chin and forced him to admit the theft of the case of valuable books. As for money with which to make restitution, like most of his kind he had none. He could only be turned over to the “Tombs” to work out his atonement.
The books taken from the university and elsewhere were offered back to the last purchasers. In most cases they returned them as the child’s rightful possession, to be sold together with the many other rare books which had been left to Marie by Monsieur Le Bon. In all there was quite a tidy sum of money realized from the sale. This was put in trust for Marie, the income from it to be used for her education.
As for that meeting of Lucile and Harry in the tea room, it was little more than a series of exclamations on the part of one or the other of them as they related their part in the mysterious drama.
“And you followed us right out into the country that night we went to the Ramsey cottage?” Lucile exclaimed.
“Yes, up to the wall,” Harry admitted. “The water stopped me there.”
“And it was you who told the police I was in danger when that terrible man and woman locked me in?”
Harry bowed his assent.
He related how night after night, without understanding their strange wanderings, he had followed the two girls about as a sort of bodyguard.
When Lucile thought how many sleepless nights it had cost him, her heart was too full for words. She tried to thank him. Her lips would not form words.
“But don’t you see,” he smiled; “you were trying to help someone out of her difficulties and I was trying to help you. That’s the way the whole world needs to live, I guess, if we are all to be happy.”
Lucile smiled and agreed that he had expressed it quite correctly, but down deep in her heart she knew that she would never feel quite the same toward any of her other fellow students as she did toward him at that moment. And so their tea-party ended.
Frank Morrow insisted on the girls’ accepting the two-hundred-dollar reward. There were two other rewards which had been offered for the return of missing books, so in the end Lucile and Florence found themselves in a rather better financial state.
As for Marie, she was taken into the practice school of the university. By special arrangement she was given a room in the ladies’ dormitory. It was close to that of her good friends, Lucile and Florence, so she was never lonely, and in this atmosphere which was the world she was meant to live in she blossomed out like a flower in the spring sunshine.
Mr. Snell is a versatile writer who knows how to write stories that will please boys and girls. He has traveled widely, visited many out-of-the-way corners of the earth, and being a keen observer has found material for many thrilling stories. His stories are full of adventure and mystery, yet in the weaving of the story there are little threads upon which are hung lessons in loyalty, honesty, patriotism and right living.
Mr. Snell has created a wide audience among the younger readers of America. Boy or girl, you are sure to find a Snell book to your liking. His works cover a wide and interesting scope.
Here are the titles of the Snell Books: