CHAPTER XIIA BLOW
There was no one but Mrs. Winter to welcome the colonel when, jaded, warm and dusty, he tapped on Aunt Rebecca’s parlor door. Mrs. Millicent was bristling with a sense of injury; one couldn’t touch her conversationally without risk of a scratch. The colonel put up the shield of his unsuitable appearance, his fatigue and his deplorable need of a bath, and escaped into his own apartment. But he made his toilet with reckless haste. All the time he was questioning his recent experience, trying to sort over his theories, which had been plunged into confusion by Mercer’s confession. “I suppose,” he reflected, “that I had no right to give Mercer that hint at the door.” The hint had been given just as they parted. It was in a single sentence:
“By the way, Mercer, if that pillar in thepatiois of importance in your combination, you would better keep an eye on it; it has a trick of cracking.”
“The devil it has!” grunted Mercer. Then hethanked him, with a kind of reluctant admiration in his tone.
“You are sure you don’t object to my detective’s staying?” questioned the colonel.
“No, suh; prefer to have him. You told him to have his men in and overhaul the house?”
“I did. I warned you I should have to. You promise there shall be no racket? But I—I think I’ll take Haley.”
“Thank you. That’s right kind of you, suh. Good-by, suh.”
This had been the manner of their parting—assuredly a singular one, after the sinister suspicions and the violent promises which the soldier had made himself in regard to this very man. After leaving, he had motored into town, down to the police courts, to discover no records of the arrest and no trace of Archie. Thence, discouraged, perplexed and more worried than he liked to admit, he had repaired to the hotel. His aunt was gone, Miss Smith was gone, and Randall could only relate how Mrs. Winter “had flewed like a bird, sir, into a big red motor-car and gone off, and then Miss Smith and a lady and gentleman had got into a white car and gone off in the same direction.”
He was meditating on his next step, when Birdsall was announced below. The detective looked as warm and as tired as the colonel had felt an hour before. Rupert was not eager to see him, but neither was he anxious for the tête-à-tête with Millicent which awaited him in the parlor. Between the two he chose Birdsall.
“Well,” he greeted him, “did you find any trace of the boy?”
“Of course I did,” growled Birdsall. “They didn’t try to hide ’im. They had him lodged in a dandy room with his own bath. Of course, he left his tooth-brush. They’d got him some automobile togs, too, and he’d left some leggings when he packed, and a letter begun on a pad to Miss Smith—‘Dear Miss Janet,’ it begins, ‘I am having a bully time. I can steer the machine, only I can’t back’—that’s all. Say, the young dog has been having it fat while we were in the frying-pan for fear somebody was bothering him.”
“But he is not in the house now?”
“No, nor nothing else.”
“Nobodyhidden away? Where did the groans you heard come from?” queried the colonel politely.
Birdsall flushed. “I do believe that slick deceiveryou call Mercer put up a game on us out of meanness—just to git me guessing.”
“That sort of thing looks more like the college boys.”
“Say, it might have been. This thing is giving me nervous prostration. Say, why didn’t you see the thing out with me?”
The colonel shamelessly told the truth to deceive. “I was called here. I was told that Mrs. Winter, my aunt, had seen Archie in the street.”
“She was just getting out of a machine as I came up. Miss Smith was with her, and they had their hands full of candy boxes. They were laughing. I made sure the boy had been found.”
“Not to my knowledge,” said the colonel. But in some excitement he walked into the parlor. The ladies had arrived; they stood in the center of the room while Randall took away the boxes.
“Candy for Archie,” explained Aunt Rebecca, and these were the first words to reach Rupert Winter’s ears. “I expect him to dinner.”
“Aunt Rebecca,” proclaimed Millicent, “I never have been one to complain, but therearelimits to human endurance. I am a modern person, a civilized Episcopalian, accustomed to a regular and well-ordered life, and for the last few days I seemto have been living in a kind of medieval mystery, with kidnappers, and blood-stains, and, for anything I know, somebody ready to stick a knife into any one of us any time! You people may enjoy this sort of thing—you seem to—but I don’t. And I tell you frankly that I am going to apply to the police, not to any private detective inquiry office, as like as not in league with the criminals”—thus ungratefully did Mrs. Millicent slur the motives of her only truly interested auditor—“butrealpolicemen. I shall apply—”
She did not tell where she should apply, the words being snapped out of her mouth by the sharp tinkle of the telephone bell.
Aunt Rebecca responded to the call. “Send him up,” was her answer to the inaudible questioner.
She laid down the receiver. Then she put it back. Then she stood up, her silver head in the air, her erect little figure held motionless.
Janet Smith’s dark eyes sought hers; her lips parted only to close firmly again.
Even the detective perceived the electric intensity of the moment, and Rupert shut his fists tight, with a quickened beating of the heart; but emotional vibrations did not disturb Mrs. Melville Winter’s poise. She continued her plaint.
“This present situation is unbearable, unprecedented and un—un—unexpected,” she declaimed, rather groping for a climax which escaped her. Aunt Rebecca raised her hand.
“Would you be so very kind, Millicent,” said she, “as to wait a moment? I am trying to listen.”
Like a response to her words, the knob of the door was turned, the door swung, and Archie entered the room, smiling his odd little chewed-up smile.
Janet uttered a faint cry and took a single step, but, as if recognizing a superior right, hung back while the boy put his arm about his great-aunt’s waist and rather bashfully kissed her cheek.
She received the salute with entire composure, except for a tiny splash of red which crept up to each cheek-bone. “Is it really you, Archie?” said she. “You are a little late for dinner day before yesterday, but quite in time for to-day. Sit down and tell us where you have been.”
“Quite so!” exclaimed Mrs. Millicent. “Good heavens! Do you know how we have suffered?Wherehave you been?Whydid you run away?”
But Archie, who had surrendered one-half of him to be hugged by Miss Smith and the other to be clapped on the shoulder by his uncle, seemedto think a vaguely polite “How-de-do, Aunt Millicent; I’m sorry to have worried you!” to be answer enough. Only when the question was repeated by Mrs. Winter herself did he reply: “I’m awfully sorry, Aunt Rebecca, but I’ve promised not to say anything about it. But, truly, I didn’t mean to bother you.”
Millicent exploded in an access of indignation: “And do you mean that you expect us to accept such a ridiculous promise—after all we have been through?”
“Quite so,” remarked Aunt Rebecca, with a precise echo of her niece’s most Anglican utterance—the gift of mimicry had been one of Mrs. Winter’s most admired and distrusted social gifts from her youth.
Rupert Winter hastened to distract Millicent’s attention by saying decisively: “If the boy has promised, that ends it; he can’t break his parole. Anyhow, they don’t seem to have hurt you, old son?”
“Oh, they treated me dandy, those fellows,” said Archie. “Miss Janet, I know how to run an electric motor-car, except backing.”
“I’ll bet you do,” muttered the detective.
Here the colonel came to the boy’s relief a secondtime and drew Birdsall aside. “Best let me pump the chap a little. You get down-stairs and see how he got here, who brought him. They’ll get clean away. It is late for that as it is. You can report to-morrow.”
It was the colonel, also, who eliminated Mrs. Millicent by the masterly stratagem of suggesting that she pass the news to Mrs. Wigglesworth. He artfully added that it would require tact to let the lady from Boston understand that the lad had been found without in any way gratifying her natural curiosity in regard to the manner of finding or the cause of disappearance. “I’ll have to leavethatto you,” he concluded. “Maybe you can see a way out; I confess my hands are in the air.”
Millicent thus relegated to the ambassador’s shelf, the colonel slipped comfortably into his pet arm-chair facing his nephew on the lounge between Aunt Rebecca and Miss Smith. Miss Smith looked frankly, charmingly happy. Aunt Rebecca looked rather tired.
“Of course,” remarked he, “I understand, old man, that you have promised secrecy to—well, to the Fireless Stove gang, as we’ll call them; but theotherkidnappers, the crowd that held up your car and then switched you off on a side track whileyoung Fireless was detained—they haven’t any hold on you?”
“No, sir,” said Archie; “but—you see, that strange gentleman and Aunt Millicent—I was scared lest I’d give something away.”
“They’re not here now. All friends here. Suppose you make a clean breast of your second kidnapping. It may be important you should.”
Nothing loath, Archie told his story. Left outside while Tracy went into the office with a policeman, to whom he gave his assumed name, he remained for hardly two minutes before a gentleman and a “cop” came up to him, and the latter ordered him to descend from the machine—but not until they had found it impossible to move the vehicle. When they did discover that the key was out and gone, the man in citizen’s clothes hailed a cab and the officer curtly informed Archie that Gardiner (Tracy’s traveling name) had been taken to another court and he was to follow. He didn’t suspect anything beyond a collision with the speed regulations of the city, but had he seen a chance to dive under his escort’s arm the boy would have taken it. Such chance was not afforded him, and all he was able to do was to lean out suddenly as they passed the Palace and towave at Randall. “I wanted them to stop and let me get some one to pay my fine,” said Archie, “but they said I was only a witness. They wouldn’t let me stop; they run down the curtain—at least so far as it would run. It was like all those hack curtains, you know—all out of order.”
“Archie,” the colonel interjected here, “was one of the men a little fellow, clean-shaven, with a round black head, blue eyes—one of his eyes winks a little faster than the other?”
“Yes, sir. How did you know?”
“I didn’t know; I guessed. Well, get on; they wanted to pump you when they got you safely out of sight?”
“Yes,” Archie said, “they put me into the sweat-box, all right.”
“Did you tell them anything?” asked Mrs. Winter.
Archie looked at her reproachfully. Did she think that he had gone to boarding-school for nothing? He explained that, being a stranger in the town, he could not tell anything about where he’d been. There was an agent at the house trying to sell stoves, and they let him take him off back to the hotel. The man seemed to know all about who he (Archie) was, and about his having goneaway. The men asked him an awful lot of questions about how he was taken away. He said he didn’t know, and he’d promised not to tell. He couldn’t tell. They said he would have to go to jail if he didn’t tell, because the men who had him were such bad men. But he didn’t tell.
“Did they try to frighten you—to make you tell?” said Mrs. Winter.
“Oh, they bluffed a little,” returned Archie carelessly, yet the keen eyes on him—eyes both worldly-wise and shrewd—noted that the lad’s color shifted and he winced the least in the world over some remembrance.
“But they didn’t hurt you? They didn’t burn you or cut you or twist your arms, or try any other of their playful ways?” Mrs. Winter demanded; and Janet began feeling the boy’s arms, breathing more quickly. The colonel only looked.
“No, they didn’t do a thing. I knew they wouldn’t, too,” Archie assured her earnestly. “I told them if they did anything, Uncle Rupert and you would make them pay.”
“And you weren’t frightened, away from every one—in that hideous quarter?” cried Miss Smith. “Oh, my dear!” She choked.
“Well, maybe I was a little scared. I kept thinkingof a rotten yarn of Kipling’s; something happened tohim, down in the underground quarter, in just such a hot, nasty-smelling hole, I guess, as I was in; you remember, Miss Janet, about the game of cards and the Mexican stabbing a Chink for cheating, and how Kipling jumped up and ran for his life, never looked around; and don’t you remember that nasty bit, how he felt sure they had dealt with the greaser their own way and he’d never get up to the light again—”
“I’ve been remembering that story all this afternoon,” answered Miss Smith with a shudder.
“Agreeable little tale,” said Aunt Rebecca dryly. “Archie, you must have had a right nasty quarter of an hour; what stopped it?”
“Why, a Chink came and called the little man off; and there was a lot of talking which I couldn’t hear, and the cop was swearing; I think they didn’t like it. But, in a minute the Chinaman—he was an awful nice little feller—he came up to me and took me out, led me all sorts of ways, not a bit like the way I came in, and got me out to the street. The other fellows were very polite; they told me that they were my friends and only wanted to find a clue to my kidnappers; and the burning holes in me was only a joke to give mean excuse to break my word under compulsion—why,theywouldn’t hurt me for the world! I pretended to be fooled, and said it was all right, and looked pleasant; but—I’d like to scare them the same way, once, all the same.”
The boy caught at his lip which was trembling, and ended with a shaky laugh. Miss Smith clenched the fist by her side; but she dropped the arm near Archie, and said in a matter-of-fact, sprightly tone: “Archie, you really ought to go dress—and wash for dinner; excuse me for mentioning it, but you have no idea how grimy you are.”
The commonplace turn of thought did its errand. Archie, who had been bracing himself anew against the horror which he remembered, dropped back into his familiar habits and jumped up consciously. “It’s the dust, motoring,” he offered bashfully. “I ought to have washed before I came up. Well, that’s all; we came straight here. Now, may I go take a bath?”
Aunt Rebecca was fingering a curious jade locket on her neck. She watched the boy run to the open door.
“I wish you’d go into your room, Colonel,” said Miss Smith, “and see that nothing happensto him. It’s silly, but I am expecting to see him vanish again!”
The sentence affected the colonel unpleasantly; why need she be posing before him, as if that first disappearance had had any real fright in it? Of course she didn’t know yet (although Aunt Rebecca might have told her—sheoughtto have told her and stopped this unnecessary deceit) that he was on to the game; but—he didn’t like it. Unconsciously, his inward criticism made his tone drier as he replied with a little bow that he imagined Archie was quite safe, now, and he would ask to be excused, as he had to attend to something before dinner.
Was it his fancy that her face changed and her eyes looked wistful? It must have been. He walked stiffly away. Hardly had he entered his room and turned his mind on the changed situation before the telephone apprised him that a gentleman, Mr. Gardiner, who represented the Fireless Cook Stove, said that he had an appointment with Colonel Winter to explain the stove; should he be sent up?
Directly, Endicott Tracy entered, smiling. “Where’s the kid? I know he’s back,” were his first words; and he explained that he had beenhunting the kidnappers to no purpose. “Except that I learned enough to know they put up a job with the justice, all right; I got next to that game without any Machiavellian exertions. But they got away. Who is it? Any of Keatcham’s gang?”
“Atkins,” said the colonel concisely.
Tracy whistled and apologized. “It’s a blow,” he confessed. “That little wretch! He has brains to burn and not an ounce of conscience. You know he has been mousing round at the hotels after Keatcham’s mail—”
“He didn’t get it?”
“No, Cary had covered that point. Cary has thought this all out very carefully, but Atkins has got on to the fact that Cary was here in this hotel with Keatcham. But he doesn’t know where we come in; whether Keatcham’s gang is just lying low for some game of its own, or whetherwe’vegot him. At least, I don’t believe he knows.”
“You ought not to be talking so freely to me; I haven’t promised you anything, you know,” warned the colonel.
“But you’ve got your nephew back all right; we have been on the square withyou; why should you butt in? I know you won’t.”
“I don’t seem to have a fair call to,” observed the colonel.
“And I think the old boy is going to give in; he has made signals of distress, to my thinking. Wanted his mail; and wanted to write; and informed Cary—he saw him for the first time to-day—that he had bigger things on deck than the Midland; and wanted to get at them. We’re going to win out all right.”
“Unless Atkins gets at him to-night,” the colonel suggested. “You oughtn’t to have come here, Gardiner. Don’t go home, now. Wait until later, and let me rig you up in another lot of togs and give you my own motor-car. Better.”
Tracy was more than impressed by the proposal; he was plainly grateful. He entered with enthusiasm into the soldier’s masquerade—Tracy had always had a weakness for theatricals and some of his Hasty PuddingPortraits of Unknown People We Knowhad won him fame at Cambridge. Ten minutes later, there sat opposite the colonel a florid-faced, mustached, western commercial traveler whose plaided tweeds, being an ill-advised venture of Haley’s which the colonel had taken off his hands and found no subject of charity quite obnoxious enough to deserve them,naturally did not fit the present wearer, but suited his inane complacence of bearing and might pass for a bad case of ready-made purchase.
“Now,” said the adviser, “I’ll notify Haley to have my own hired motor ready for you and you can slip out and take it after you’ve had something to eat. Here’s the restaurant card. Haley will be there. Leave it at the drug store on Van Ness Street—Haley will give you the number—and get home as unobtrusively as possible. You can peel off these togs in the motor if necessary. You’ve your own underneath except your coat. Wrap that in a newspaper and carry it. I don’t know that Atkins has any one on guard at the hotel, but I think it more than likely he suspects some connection between our party and Keatcham’s. But first, tell me about Atkins; what do you know about him? It’s an American name.”
“America can take all the glory of him, I fancy,” said Tracy. “He’s been Keatcham’s secretary for six years. He seems awfully mild and useful and timid. He’s not a bit timid. He’s full of resource; he’s sidled suggestions into Keatcham’s ear and has been gradually working to make himself absolutely necessary. I think he aimed at a partnership;but Keatcham wouldn’t stand for it. I think it was in revenge that he sold out some of Keatcham’s secrets. Cary got on to that and has a score of his own to settle with him, besides. I don’t know how he managed, but he showed him up; and Keatcham gave him the sack in his own cold-blooded way. I know him only casually. But my cousin, Ralph Schuyler, went to prep. school with him, so I got his character straight off the bat. His father was a patent-medicine man from Mississippi, who made a fair pile, a couple of hundred thousand which looked good to that section, you know. I don’t know anything about his people except that his father made the ‘Celebrated Atkins’ Ague Busters’; and that Atkins was ashamed of his people and shook his married sisters who came to see him, in rather a brutal fashion; but I know a thing or two about him; he was one of those bounders who curry favor with the faculty and the popular boys and never break rules apparently, but go off and have sly little bats by themselves. He never was popular, yet, somehow, he got into things; he knew where to lend money; and he was simply sickeningly clever; in math. he was a wonder. Ralph hated him. For one thing, he caught him in adirty lie. Atkins hated him back and contrived to prevent his being elected class president, and when he couldn’t prevent Ralph’s making his senior society the happy thought struck Atkins to get on the initiation committee. They had a cheery little branding game to make the fellows quite sure they belonged, you know, and he rammed his cigar stump into Ralph’s arm so that Ralph had blood-poisoning and a narrow squeak for his life. You see that I’m not prepossessed in the fellow’s favor. He’s got too vivid an imagination for me!”
“Seems to have,” acquiesced the colonel.
“I think, you know”—Tracy made an effort to be just—“I think Atkins was rather soured. Some of the fellows made fun of the ‘Ague Busters’; he had a notion that the reason it was such uphill work for him in the school, was his father’s trade. No doubt he did get nasty licks, at first; and he’s revengeful. He hasn’t got on in society outside, either—this he lays to his not being a university man. You see his father lost some of his money and put him to work instead of in college. He was willing enough at the time—I think he wanted to get married—but afterward, when he was getting a good salary and piling up money on his tips, he began to think thathe had lost more than he had bargained for. Altogether, he’s soured. Now, what he wants is to make a thundering big strike and to pull out of Wall Street, buy what he calls ‘a seat on the James’ and set-up for a Southern gentleman. He’s trying to marry a Southern girl, they say, who is kin to the Carters and the Byrds and the Lees and the Carys—why,youknow her, she’s Mrs. Winter’s secretary.”
“Does—does she care for him?” The colonel suddenly felt his mouth parched; he was savagely conscious of his mounting color. What a fiendish trick of fate! he had never dreamed of this! Well, whether she cared for him or not, the man was a brute; he shouldn’t get her. That was one certainty in the colonel’s mind.
“Why, Cary vows she doesn’t, that it was only a girlish bit of nonsense up in Virginia, that time he was prospecting, you know. But I don’t feel so safe. She’s too nice for such a cur. But you know what women are; the nicest of them seem to be awfully queer about men. There’s no betting on them.”
“I’m afraid not,” remarked the colonel lightly. But he put his fingers inside his collar and loosened it, as if he felt choked.
Because he had a dozen questions quarreling for precedence in his head, he asked not one. He only inquired regarding the situation; discovering that both Mercer and Tracy were equally in the dark with himself as to Atkins’ plans, Atkins’ store of information, Atkins’ resources. How he could have waylaid Tracy and the boy without knowing whence they came was puzzling; it was quite as puzzling, however, assuming that he did know their whereabouts, to decide why he was so keen to interrogate the boy. In fact, it was, as Tracy said, “too much like Professor Santa Anna’s description of a German definition of metaphysics, ‘A blind man hunting in a dark room for a black cat that isn’t there.’”
“In any event, you would better keep away fromme,” was the colonel’s summing up of the situation; “I don’t want to be inhospitable, but the sooner you are off, and out of the hotel, the safer for your speculation.”
“Friends will please accept the intimation,” said Tracy good-humoredly. “Very well, it’s twenty-three for me. I’m hoping you’ll see your way clear to run over as soon as the old man has surrendered; I’m going to invite him to make us a proper visit, then, and see the country. I’m alwaysfor letting the conquered keep their side-arms.”
He went away smiling his flashing smile, and turned it up at the hotel as he walked out; the colonel made no sign of recognition from the window whence he observed him. Instead, he drew back quickly, frowning; it might be a mere accident that only a hand’s-breadth of space from the young Harvard man was a dapper little shape in evening clothes, a man still young, with a round black head; if so, it was an accident not to the colonel’s liking.
“Damn you!” whispered Rupert Winter very softly. “What is your little game?”
At once he descended, having telephoned Haley to meet him at the court. When he entered and sent his glance rapidly among the little tables, by this time filled with diners, he experienced a disagreeable surprise. It did not come from the sight of Sergeant Haley in his Sunday civilian clothes, stolidly reading theCall; it came from a vision of Atkins standing, bowing, animatedly talking with Janet Smith.
Instead of approaching Haley, Winter fell back and scribbled a few words on a page of his note-book, while safely shielded by a great palm. Thenote he despatched to Haley, who promptly joined him. While they stood, talking on apparently indifferent subjects, Miss Smith passed them. Whether because he was become suspicious or because she had come upon him suddenly, she colored slightly. But she smiled as she saluted him and spoke in her usual tranquil tone. “You are going to dine with us, aren’t you, Colonel?” said she. “I think dinner is just about to be served.”
The colonel would be with them directly.
Haley’s eyes followed her; he had returned her nod and inquiry for his wife and little Nora with a military salute and the assurance that they were both wonderfully well and pleased with the country.
“Sure, ain’t it remarkable the way that lady do keep names in her mind?” cried he. “An’ don’t she walk foine and straight? Oi’ve been always towld thim Southern ladies had the gran’ way wid ’em; Oi see now ’tis thrue.” The unusual richness of Haley’s brogue was a sure sign of feeling. The colonel only looked grim. After he had taken Haley to a safe nook for his confidence, a nook where there were neither ears nor eyes to be feared, he would have made his way up-stairs;but half-way down the office he was hailed by the manager. The manager was glad to hear that the young gentleman was safely back. He let the faint radiance of an intelligent, respectfully tactful smile illumine his words and intimate that his listener would have no awkward questions to parry from him. The colonel felt an ungrateful wrath, a reprehensible snare of temper which did not show in his confidentially lowered voice, as he replied: “Mighty lucky, too, we are; the boy’s all right; but San Francisco is no place for an innocent kid even to take the safest-looking walk. What sort of a police system have you, anyhow?”
The manager shook his head. “I’m not bragging about it; nor about the Chinese quarter, either. I confess I’ve felt particularly uncomfortable, myself, the last day. Well—if you’ll excuse the advice—least said, you know.”
The colonel nodded. He proffered his cigar-case; the manager complimented its contents, as he selected a cigar; and both gentlemen bowed. A wandering, homesick Frenchman, who viewed their parting, felt refreshed as by a breath from his own land of admirable manners. Meanwhile, the colonel was fuming within: “Confound his insinuating curiosity! but I reckon I headed himoff. And who would have thought,” he wondered forlornly, “that I could be going to dine with the boy safe and sound and be feeling so like a whipped hound!”
But none of this showed during the dinner at which Millicent was in high good humor, having obtained information about most astounding bargains in the Chinese quarter from Mrs. Wigglesworth. Her good humor extended even to Miss Smith, who received it without enthusiasm, albeit courteously; and who readily consented to be her companion for the morning sally on the distressed Orientals, whose difficulties with the customs had reduced them to the necessity of sales at any cost. Aunt Rebecca listened with an absent smile, while Archie laughed at every feeblest joke of his uncle in a boyish interest so little like his former apathy that often Miss Smith’s eyes brightened and half timidly sought the uncle’s, as if calling his attention to the change. Only a few hours back, his would have brightened gratefully in answer; now, he avoided her glances. Yet somehow, his heart felt heavier when they ceased. For his part, he was thankful to have his aunt request his company in a little promenade around the “loggia,” as she termed it, overlooking the great court.
She took him aside to tell him her afternoon experience, and to ask his opinion of the enigmatical appearance of Atkins. He was strongly tempted, in return, to question her frankly about Miss Smith, to tell her of seeing the latter with Atkins only that evening. He knew that it was the sensible thing to do—but he simply could not do it. To frame his suspicions past or present of the woman he loved; to discuss the chances of her affection for a man loathsomely unworthy of her; worse, to balance the possibilities of her turning betrayer in her turn and chancing any damage to her benefactress and her kinsman for this fellow’s sake—no, it was beyond him. He had intended to discuss his aunt’s part in the waylaying of Keatcham, with calmness and with the deference due her, but unsparingly; he meant to show her the legal if not moral obliquity of her course, to point out to her the pitfalls besetting it, to warn her how hideous might be the consequences of a misstep. Somehow, however, his miserable new anxiety about Miss Smith had disturbed all his calculations and upset his wits; and he could not rally any of the poignant phrases which he had prepared. All he was able to say was something about the rashness of the business;it was like the Filipinos with their bows and arrows fighting machine-guns.
“Or David with his ridiculous little sling going against Goliath,” added she. “Very well put, Bertie; only the good advice comes too late; the question now is, how to get out with a whole skin. Surprising as it may be, I expect to—with your help.”
“Honored, I’m sure,” growled Bertie.
“There is one thing I meant to ask you—I haven’t, but I shall now. Instead of making it impossible for me to sleep to-night, as you virtuously intended in order to clear your conscience before you tried to pull me out of the trap I’ve set for myself, suppose you do me a favor, right now.”
“You put it so well, you make me ashamed of my moral sense, Aunt Becky; what is it you want?”
“Oh, nothing unbefitting a soldier and a gentleman, dear boy; just this: Cary has to have some money. I meant to give it to Stoves, but you hustled him off in such a rush that I didn’t get at him. You know where he is, don’t you? You haven’t sent him straight back?”
“I can find him, I reckon.”
“Then I’ll giveyouthe money, at once.”
How weak a thing is man! Here was an eminently cool-headed, reasonable man of affairs who knew that paws which had escaped from the fire unsinged had no excuse to venture back for other people’s chestnuts; he had expressed himself clearly to this effect to young Tracy; now, behold him as unable to resist the temptation of a conflict and the chance to baffle Atkins as if he were a hot-headed boy in plain shoulder-straps!
“I’ll do better for you, Aunt Rebecca,” said he. “I’ll not only take Fireless the money, I’ll go with him to the house. I can make a sneak from here; and Atkins is safely down-stairs at this moment. He may be shadowing Fireless; if he is, perhaps I can throw him off the track.”
Thus it befell that not an hour later Rupert Winter was guiding the shabby and noisy runabout a second time toward the haunted house.
“Nothing doin’,” said the joyous apprentice to crime; “I called old Cary up and got a furious slating for doing it; but he said there wasn’t a watch-dog in sight; and the old man had surrendered. He was going to let him into the library on parole.”
“You need a guardian,” growled the colonel;“where did you telephone?Notin the drug store?”
“Oh, dear, no, not in such a public place; I’ve a shrinking nature that never did intrude its private, personal affairs on the curious world. I used the ’phone of that nice quiet little restaurant where they gave me a lovely meal but were so long preparing it, I used up all the literature in sight, which was theLadies’ Home Journaland a tract on the virtues of Knox’s Gelatine. When I couldn’t think of anything else to do I routed out Cary—I’d smoked all my cigarettes and all my cigars but one which I was keeping for after dinner. And Cary rowed me good and plenty. There wasn’t a soul in the room.”
“Has any one followed you?”
“Not a man, woman or child, not even a yellow dog. I kept looking round, too.”
“It was a dreadfully risky thing to do; you don’t deserve to escape; but perhaps you did. Atkins may have come to the Palace for some other purpose and never have noticed you.”
“My own father wouldn’t have got on to me in that dinky rig.”
Winter was not so easy in his mind. But he hoped for the best, since there was nothing elsefor him to do. They were in sight of the house now, which loomed against the dim horizon, darker, grimmer than ever. Where the upper stories were pierced with semicircular arches, the star-sown sky shone through with an extraordinary effect of depth and mystery. All the lighter features of the architecture, carving on pediment or lintel or archivolt, delicate iron tracery ofrejas, relief of arcature and colonnade—all these the dusk blurred if it did not obliterate; the great dark bulk of the house with its massive buttresses, its pyramidal copings and receding upper stories, was the more boldly silhouetted on the violet sky; yet because of the very flatness of the picture, the very lack of shadow and projection, it seemed unsubstantial, hardly more of reality than the giant shadow it cast upon the hillside. Electric lights wavered and bristled dazzling beams on either side of the street; not a gleam, red, white or yellow, leaked through the shuttered windows of the house. In its blackness, its silence, its determined isolation it renewed, but with a greater force, the first sinister thrill which the sight of it had given the man who came to rifle it of its secrets.
“Lonesome-looking old shanty, isn’t it?” saidthe Harvard boy; “seems almost indecorous to speak out loud. Here’s where wecachethe car and make a gentle detour by aid of the shrubbery up the arroyo to the north side of thepatio. See?”
He directed the colonel’s course through an almost imperceptible opening in the hedge along sharp turns and oblique and narrow ways into a small vacant space where the vines covered an adobe hut. Jumping out, Tracy unlocked the door of this tiny building so that the colonel could run the car inside; and after Winter had emerged again, he re-locked the door. As there was no window, the purpose of the hut was effectually concealed.
“Very neat,” the colonel approved; whereat Tracy flashed his smile at him in the moonlight and owned with ingenuous pride that he himself was the contriver of this reticent garage.
From this point he took the lead. Neither spoke. They toiled up the hill, in this part of the grounds less of the nature of a hill than of an arroyo or ravine through which rocks had thrust their rugged sides and over which spiked semi-tropical cacti had sprawled, and purple and white flowered vines had made their own untended tangle. Before they reached the level the colonelwas breathing hard, every breath a stab. Tracy, a famous track man who had won his H in a wonderful cross-country run, felt no distress—until he heard his companion gasp.
“Jove! But that hill’s fierce!” he breathed explosively. “Do you mind resting a minute?”
“Hardly,”—the colonel was just able to hold his voice steady—“I have a Filipino bullet in my leg somewhere which the X-ray has never been able to account for; and I’m not exactly a mountain goat!”
“Why, of course, I’m a brute not to let you run up the drive in the machine. Not a rat watching us to-night, either; but I wanted you to see the place; and you seem so fit—”
“You oughtn’t to give away your secrets to me, an outsider—”
“You’re no outsider; I consider you the treasurer of the band,” laughed Tracy. They had somehow come to an unexpressed but perfectly understood footing of sympathy. The colonel even let the younger man help him up the last stiff clamber of the path. He forgot his first chill, as of a witness approaching a tragedy; there was a smile on his lips when the two of them passed into thepatio. It lingered there as he stood in theflower-scented gloom. It was there as Tracy stumbled to a half-remembered push-button, wondering aloud what had become of Cary and Kito that they shouldn’t have answered his whistle; it was there, still, when Tracy slipped, and grumbled: “What sticky stuff has Kito spilled on this floor?”—and instantly flooded the court with light. Then—he saw the black, slimy pool and the long slide of Tracy’s nailed sole in it; and just to one side, almost pressing against his own foot, he saw a man in a gray suit huddled into the shape of a crooked U, with his arms limp at his side and his head of iron-gray fallen back askew. The light shone on the broad bald dome of the forehead. He had been stabbed between the shoulders, in the back; and one side of the gray coat was ugly to see.
“Good God!” whispered Tracy, growing white. “It’s Keatcham! they’ve killed him! Oh, why didn’t I come back before!”