CHAPTER VITHE VOICE IN THE TELEPHONE
“Well, Bertie?” Mrs. Winter had gone back to her parlor in the most docile manner in the world. Her submission struck Rupert on the heart; it was as if she were stunned, he felt.
He was sitting opposite her, his slender, rather short figure looking shrunken in the huge, ugly, upholstered easy-chair; he kept an almost constrained attitude of military erectness, of which he was conscious, himself; and at which he smiled forlornly, recalling the same pose in Haley whenever the sergeant was disconcerted.
“But, first,” pursued his aunt, “who was that red-headed bell-boy with whom you exchanged signals in the hall?”
The colonel suppressed a whistle. “Aunt Becky, you’re a wonder! Did you notice? And he simply shut the palm of his hand! Why, it’s this way: I was convinced that Archie must be on the premises; hecouldn’tget off. So I telephoneda detective that I know here, a private agency,notthe police, to send me a sure man to watch. He is made up as a bell-boy (with the hotel manager’s consent, of course); either I, or Millicent, or that boy has kept an eye on the Keatcham doors and the next room ever since I found Archie was gone. No one has gone out without our seeing him. If any suspicious person goes out, we have it arranged to detain him long enough for me to get a good look. I can tell you exactly who left the room.”
“It is you who are the wonder, Bertie,” said Aunt Rebecca, a little wearily, but smiling. “Who has gone out?”
“At seven Mr. Keatcham’s secretary went down to the office and ordered dinner, very carefully. I didn’t see him, but my sleuth did. He had the secretary and the valet of the Keatcham party pointed out to him; he saw them. They had one visitor, young Arnold,theArnold’s son—”
“The one who has all the orange groves and railways? Yes, I knew his father.”
“That one; he only came a few moments since. Mr. Keatcham and his secretary dined together, and Keatcham’s own man waited on them; but the waiter for this floor brought up the dishes. Atnine the dishes were brought out and my man helped Keatcham’s valet to pile them a little farther down the corridor in the hall.”
These items the colonel was reading out of his little red book.
“You have put all that down. Do you think it means anything?”
“I have put everything down. One can’t weed until there is a crop of information, you know.”
“True,” murmured Aunt Rebecca, nodding her head thoughtfully. “Well, did anything else happen?”
“The secretary posted a lot of letters in the shute. They are all smoking now. Yes—” he was on his feet and at the door in almost a single motion. There had been just the slightest tattoo on the panel. When the door was opened the colonel could hear the rattle of the elevator. He was too late to catch it, but he could see the inmates. Three gentlemen stood in the car. One was Keatcham, the other two had their backs to Winter. One seemed to be supporting Keatcham, who looked pale. He saw the colonel and darted at him a single glance in which was something like a poignant appeal; what, it was too brief for the receiver to decide, for in the space of an eye-blinka shoulder of the other man intervened, and simultaneously the elevator car began to sink.
There was need to decide instantly who should follow, who stay on guard. Rupert bade the boy go down by the stairs, while, with a kind of bulldog instinct, he clung to the rooms. The lad was to fetch the manager and the keys of the Keatcham suite.
Meanwhile Rupert paced back and forth before the closed doors, whence there penetrated the rustle of packing and a murmur of voices. Presently Keatcham’s valet opened the farther door. He spoke to some one inside. “Yes, sir,” he said, “the porter hought to be ’ere now.”
The porter was there; at least he was coming down the corridor which led to the elevator, trundling his truck before him. He entered the rooms and busied himself about the luggage.
Doggedly the colonel stuck to his guard until the valet and another man, a clean-shaven, fresh-faced young man whom the watcher had never seen before, came out of the room. The valet superintended the taking of two trunks, accepting tickets and checks from the porter with a thoroughly Anglican suspicion and thoroughness ofinspection, while the young man stood tapping his immaculate trousers-leg with the stick of his admirably slender umbrella.
“It’s all right, Colvin,” he broke in impatiently; “three tickets to Los Angeles, drawing-room, one lower berth, one section, checks for two trunks; come on!”
Very methodically the man called Colvin stowed away his green and red slips, first in an envelope, then in his pocket-book, finally buttoning an inside pocket over all. He was the image of a rather stupid, conscientious English serving creature. Carefully he counted out a liberal but not lavish tip for the porter, and watched that functionary depart. Last of all, he locked the door.
With extreme courtesy of manner Winter approached the young man.
“Pardon me,” said he. “I am Colonel Winter; my aunt, Mrs. Winter, has the rooms near yours, and she finds that she needs another room or two. Are you leaving yours?”
“These are Mr. Keatcham’s rooms, not mine,” the young man responded politely. “Heis leaving them.”
“When you give up your keys, would you mindasking the clerk to send them up to me?” pursued the colonel. “Room three twenty-seven.”
“Certainly,” replied the young man, “or would you like to look at them a moment now?”
“Why—if it wouldn’t detain you,” hesitated Winter; he was hardly prepared for the offer of admittance.
“Get the elevator and hold it a minute, Colvin,” said the young man, and he instantly fitted the key to the door, which he flung open.
“Excuse me,” said he, as they stood in the room, “but aren’t you the Colonel Winter who held that mountain pass to let the other fellows get off, after your ammunition was exhausted?”
“I seem to recall some such episode, only it sounds rather gaudy the way you put it.”
“I read about you in the papers; you swam a river with Funston; did all kinds of stunts—”
“Or the newspaper reporter did. You don’t happen to know anything about the price of these rooms, I suppose?”
The young man did not know, but he showed the colonel through all the rooms with vast civility. He seemed quite indifferent to the colonel’s interest in closets, baths and wardrobes; he only wanted to talk about the Philippines.
The colonel, who always shied like a mettled horse from the flutter of his own laurels, grew red with discomfort and rattled the door-knobs.
“There the suite ends,” said the young man.
“Oh, we don’t want it all, only a room or two,” Colonel Winter demurred. “Any one of these rooms would do. Well, I will not detain you. The elevator boy will be tired, and Mr. Keatcham will grow impatient.”
“Not at all; he will have gone. I—I’m so very glad to have met you, Colonel—”
In this manner, with mutual civilities, they parted, the young man escorting the colonel to his own door, which the latter was forced to enter by the sheer demands of the situation.
But hardly had the door closed than he popped out again. The young man was swinging round the corner next the elevator.
“Is he an innocent bystander or what?” puzzled the soldier. He resumed his march up and down the corridor. The next room to the Keatcham suite was evidently held by an agent of the Fireless Cooking Stove, since one of his samples had strayed into the hall and was mutely proclaiming its own exceeding worth in very black letters on a very white placard.
“If the young man and the valet are straight goods, the key will come up reasonably soon from the office,” thought the watcher.
Sure enough, the keys, in the hands of Winter’s own spy, appeared before he had waited three minutes. He reported that the old gentleman got into a cab with his secretary and the valet, and the other gentlemen took another cab. The secretary paid the bill. Had he gone sooner than expected? No; he had engaged the rooms until Thursday night; this was Thursday night.
The colonel asked about the next room, which was directly on the cross corridor leading to the elevator. The detective had been instructed to watch it. How long had the Fireless Cooking Stove man had it? There was no meat for suspicion in the answer. The stove man had come the day before the Keatcham party. He was a perfectly commonplace, good-looking young man, representing the Peerless Fireless Cooking Stove with much picturesque eloquence; he had sold a lot of stoves to people in the hotel, and he tried without much success to tackle “old Keatcham”; he had attacked even the sleuth himself. “He gave me a mighty good cigar, too,” chuckled the red-headed one.
“Hmn, you got it now?”
“Only the memory,” the boy grinned.
“You ought to have kept it, Birdsall would tell you; you are watching every one in these rooms. Did it have a necktie? And did you throw that away?”
“No, sir, I kept that; after I got to smoking, I just thought I’d keep it.”
When he took the tiny scrap of paper from his pocket-book the colonel eyed it grimly. “‘A de Villar y Villar,’” he read, with a slight ironic inflection. “Decidedly our young Fireless Stove promoter smokes good cigars!”
“Maybe Mr. Keatcham gave it to him. He was in there.”
“Was he? Oh, yes, trying to sell his stove—but not succeeding?”
“He said he was trying to get past the valet and the secretary; he thought if he could only get at the old man and demonstrate his stove he could make the sale. He could cook all right, that feller.”
The colonel made no comment, and presently betook himself to his aunt. She was waiting for him in the parlor, playing solitaire. Through the open door the white bed that ought to have beenArchie’s was gleaming faintly. The colonel’s brows met.
“Well, Bertie? Did you find anything?” Mrs. Winter inquired smoothly.
“I’m afraid not; but here is the report.” He gave it to her, even down to the cigar wrapper.
“It doesn’t seem likely that Mr. Keatcham has anything to do with it,” said she. “He, no doubt, has stolen many a little railway, but a little boy is too small game.”
“Oh, I don’t suspect Keatcham; but I wish I had caught the elevator to-night. He looked at me in a mighty queer way.”
“Did you recognize his secretary as any one whom you ever saw before?” asked Mrs. Winter.
“I can’t say,” was the answer, given with a little hesitation. “I’m not sure.”
“I don’t think I quite understand you, Bertie; better make a clean breast of all you know. I’m getting a little worried myself.”
The colonel reached across the cards and tapped his aunt’s arm affectionately. He felt the warmest impulse toward sympathy for her that he had ever known; it glistened in his eyes. Mrs. Winter’s cheeks slowly crimsoned; she turned her head, exclaiming, did she hear a noise; but thecolonel’s keen ears had not been warned. “Poor woman,” he thought, “she is worried to death, but she will not admit it.”
“Now, Bertie,” said Mrs. Winter calmly, but her elbow fell on her cards and spoiled a very promising game of Penelope’s Web, “now, Bertie,whatare you keeping back?”
Then, at last, the colonel told her of his experience in Chicago. She heard him quite without comment, and he could detect no shift of emotion in her demeanor of absorbed but perfectly calm attention, unless a certain tension of attitude and feature (as if, he phrased it, she were “holding herself in”) might be so considered. And he was not sure of this. When he came to the words which stuck in his throat, the sentence about Miss Smith, she smiled frankly, almost laughed.
At the end of the recital—and the colonel had not omitted a word or a look in his memory—she merely said: “Then you think Cary Mercer has kidnapped Archie, and the nice-looking Harvard boy is helping him?”
“Don’t you think it looks that way, yourself?”
She answered that question by another one: “But you don’t think, do you, that Janet is the Miss Smith mentioned?”
His reply came after an almost imperceptible hesitation: “No!”
Again she smiled. “That is because you know Janet; if you didn’t know her you would think the chances were in favor of their meaning her? Naturally! Well, I know Cary a little. I knew his fatherwell. I don’t believe he would harm a hair of Archie’s head. He isn’t a cruel fellow—at least not toward women and children. I’ve a notion that what he calls his wrongs have upset his wits a bit, and he might turn the screws on the Wall Street crowd that ruined him. That is, if he had a chance; but he is poor; he would need millions to get even a chance for a blow at them. But a child, a lad who looks like his brother—no, you may be sure he wouldn’t hurt Archie! Hecouldn’t.”
“But—the name, Winter; it is not such a common name; and the words about a lady of—of—” The polite soldier hesitated.
“An old woman, do you mean?” said Aunt Rebecca, with a little curving of her still unwrinkled upper lip.
“It sounds so complete,” submitted her nephew.
“Therefore distrust it,” she argued dryly. “Gaboriau’s great detective and Conan Doyle’sboth have that same maxim—not to pick out easy answers.”
Winter smiled in his own turn. “Still, sometimes the easy answers are right. Now, here is the situation: I hear this conversation at the depot. I find one of the men on the same train with me. He, presumably, if heisCary Mercer, and I don’t think I can be mistaken in his identity—”
“Unless another man is making up as Cary!”
“It may seem conceited, but I don’t think I could be fooled. This man had every expression of the other’s, and I was too struck by the—I may almost call it malignant—look he had, not to recognize him. No, itwasMercer; he would certainly recognize you, and he would know who I am; he would not be called upon to snub me as a possible confidence man.”
“That rankles yet, Bertie?”
He made a grimace and nodded.
“But,” he insisted, “isn’t it so? If he is up to some mischief, any mischief—doesn’t care to have his kin meet him—that is the way he would act, don’t you think?”
“He might be up to mischief, yet have no designs on his kin.”
“He might,” said the colonel musingly. A thought which he did not confide to the shrewd old woman had just flipped his mind. But he went on with his plea.
“He avoids you; he avoids me. He is seen going into Keatcham’s drawing-room; that means some sort of an acquaintance with Keatcham, enough to talk to him, anyway. How much, I can’t say. Then comes the attack by the robbers; he is in another car, so there is no call for him to do anything; there is no light whatever on whether he had anything to do with the robbery.
“Then we come here. Keatcham has the room next but one. Archie goes into his own room; we see him go; I am outside, directly outside; it is simply impossible for him to go out into the hall without my seeing him; besides, I found the doors outside all locked except the one to the right where we entered your suite; then we may assume that he could not go out. He could not climb out of locked windows on the third floor down a sheer descent of some forty or fifty feet. Your last room to the right, Miss Smith’s bedroom, is a corner room; besides, she was in it; that excludes every exit except that to the left. We find Mrs. Wigglesworth was absent, and there were evidencesof—an—an attack of some kind carefully hidden, afterward. But there is no sign of the boy. I watch the rooms. If he is hidden somewhere in Keatcham’s rooms, the chances are, after Keatcham goes, they will try to take him off. I don’t think it probable that Keatcham knows anything about the kidnapping; in fact, it is wildlyimprobable. Well, Keatcham goes; immediately I get into the room. The valet and the young man visiting Keatcham, young Arnold, let me in without the slightest demur. Either they know nothing of the boy or somehow they have got him away, else they would not let me in so easily. Maybe they are ignorant and the boy is gone, both. We go to the rooms very soon after; there is not the smallest trace of Archie.”
“How did he get out?”
“They must have outwitted me, somehow,” the colonel sighed, “and it looks as if he went voluntarily; there was no possible carrying away by force. And there was no odor of chloroform about; that is very penetrating; it would get into the halls. They must have persuaded him to go—but how?”
“If they have kidnapped him,” said Mrs. Winter, “they will send me some word, and if theyhave persuaded him to run away, plainly he must be able to walk, and that—mess in Mrs. Wigglesworth’s room doesn’t mean anything bad.”
“Of course not,” said the colonel firmly.
Then, in as casual a tone as he could command: “By the way, where is Miss Smith? She is back, isn’t she?”
“Oh, a long time ago,” said Mrs. Winter. “I sent her to bed.”
“I’ve been frank with you. You will reciprocate and tell me why, for what, you sent her out?”
Mrs. Winter made not the least evasion. She answered frankly: “I sent her with a carefully worded advertisement—but you needn’t tell Millicent, who has also gone to bed, thank Heaven—I sent her with a carefully worded advertisement to all the papers. This is the advertisement. It will reach the kidnappers, and it will not reach any one else. See.” She handed him a slip of paper from her card-case. He read:
“To the holders of Archie W: Communicate with R. S. W., same address as before, and you will hear of something to your advantage. Perfectly safe.”
The colonel read it thoughtfully, a little puzzled. Before he had time to speak, his quick earscaught the sharp ring of his room telephone bell. He excused himself to answer it. His room was the last of the suite, but he shut the door on his way to the telephone.
He expected Haley; nor was he disappointed. Haley reported—in Spanish—that he had traced the automobile; it was the property of young Mr. Arnold, son of the rich Mr. Arnold. Young Arnold had been at Harvard last year, and he took out a Massachusetts license; he had a California one, too. Should he (Haley) look up young Arnold? And should he come to report that night?
The colonel thought he could wait till morning, and, a little comforted, hung up the receiver. Barely was it out of his hand when the bell shrilled again, sharply, vehemently. Winter put the tube to his ear.
“Does any one want Colonel Winter, Palace Hotel?” he asked.
A sweet, eager, boyish voice called back: “Uncle Bertie! Uncle Bertie, don’t you worry; I’m all right!”
“Archie!” cried the colonel. “Where are you?”
But there was no answer. He called again, and a second time; he told the lad that they were dreadfully anxious about him. He got no responsefrom the boy; but another voice, a woman’s voice, said, with cold distinctness, as if to some one in the room: “No, don’t let him; it is impossible!” Then a dead wall of silence and Central’s impassive ignorance. He could get nothing.
Rupert Winter stood a moment, frowning and thinking deeply. Directly, with a shrug of the shoulders, he walked out of his own outside door, locking it, and went straight to Miss Smith’s.
He knocked, at first very gently, then more vigorously. But there was no answer. He went away from the door, but he did not reënter his room. He did not bear to his aunt the news which, with all its meagerness and irritating incompleteness, had been an enormous relief to him. He simply waited in the corridor. Five minutes, ten minutes passed; then he heard the elevator whir, and, standing with his hand on the knob of his open door, he saw his aunt’s companion, dressed for the street, step out and speed down the corridor to her own door.
The other voice—the woman’s voice—had been Janet Smith’s.