Dal had been acting strangely all day. Once, early in the evening, when I had doubled no trump, he led me a club without apology, and later on, during his dummy, I saw him writing our names on the back of an envelope, and putting numbers after them. At my earliest opportunity I went to Max.
“There is something the matter with Dal, Max,” I volunteered. “He has been acting strangely all day, and just now he was making out a list—names and numbers.”
“You’re to blame for that, Kit,” Max said seriously. “You put washing soda instead of baking soda in those biscuits today, and he thinks he is a steam laundry. Those are laundry lists he’s making out. He asked me a little while ago if I wanted a domestic finish.”
Yes, I had put washing soda in the biscuits. The book said soda, and how is one to know which is meant?
“I do not think you are calculated for a domestic finish,” I said coldly as I turned away. “In any case I disclaim any such responsibility. But—there is SOMETHING on Dal’s mind.”
Max came after me. “Don’t be cross, Kit. You haven’t said a nice word to me today, and you go around bristling with your chin up and two red spots on your cheeks—like whatever-her-name-was with the snakes instead of hair. I don’t know why I’m so crazy about you; I always meant to love a girl with a nice disposition.”
I left him then. Dal had gone into the reception room and closed the doors. And because he had been acting so strangely, and partly to escape from Max, whose eyes looked threatening, I followed him. Just as I opened the door quietly and looked in, Dallas switched off the lights, and I could hear him groping his way across the room. Then somebody—not Dal—spoke from the corner, cautiously.
“Is that you, Mr. Brown, sir?” It was Flannigan.
“Yes. Is everything here?”
“All but the powder, sir. Don’t step too close. They’re spread all over the place.”
“Have you taken the curtains down?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Matches?”
“Here, sir.”
“Light one, will you, Flannigan? I want to see the time.”
The flare showed Dallas and Flannigan bent over the timepiece. And it showed something else. The rug had been turned back from the windows which opened on the street, and the curtains had been removed. On the bare hardwood floor just beneath the windows was an array of pans of various sizes, dish pans, cake tins, and a metal foot tub. The pans were raised from the floor on bricks, and seemed to be full of paper. All the chairs and tables were pushed back against the wall, and the bric-a-brac was stacked on the mantel.
“Half an hour yet,” Dal said, closing his watch. “Plenty of time, and remember the signal, four short and two long.”
“Four short and two long—all right, sir.”
“And—Flannigan, here’s something for you, on account.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Dal turned to go out, tripped over the rug, said something, and passed me without an idea of my presence. A moment later Flannigan went out, and I was left, huddled against the wall, and alone.
It was puzzling enough. “Four long and two short!” “All but the powder!” Not that I believed for a moment what Max had said, and anyhow Flannigan was the sanest person I ever saw in my life. But it all seemed a part of the mystery that had been hanging over us for several days. I felt my way across the room and knelt by the pans. Yes, they were there, full of paper and mounted on bricks. It had not been a delusion.
And then I straightened on my knees suddenly, for an automobile passing under the windows had sounded four short honks and two long ones. The signal was followed instantly by a crash. The foot bath had fallen from its supports, and lay, quivering and vibrating with horrid noises at my feet. The next moment Mr. Harbison had thrown open the door and leaped into the room.
“Who’s there?” he demanded. Against the light I could see him reaching for his hip pocket, and the rest crowding up around him.
“It’s only me,” I quavered, “that is, I. The—the dish pan upset.”
“Dish pan!” Bella said from back in the crowd. “Kit, of course!”
Jim forced his way through then and turned on the lights. I have no doubt I looked very strange, kneeling there on the bare floor, with a row of pans mounted on bricks behind me, and the furniture all piled on itself in a back corner.
“Kit! What in the world—!” Jim began, and stopped. He stared from me to the pans, to the windows, to the bric-a-brac on the mantel, and back to me.
I sat stonily silent. Why should I explain? Whenever I got into a foolish position, and tried to explain, and tell how it happened, and who was really to blame, they always brought it back to ME somehow. So I sat there on the floor and let them stare. And finally Lollie Mercer got her breath and said, “How perfectly lovely; it’s a charade!”
And Anne guessed “kitchen” at once. “Kit, you know, and the pans and—all that,” she said vaguely. At that they all took to guessing! And I sat still, until Mr. Harbison saw the storm in my eyes and came over to me.
“Have you hurt your ankle?” he said in an undertone. “Let me help you up.”
“I am not hurt,” I said coldly, “and even if I were, it would be unnecessary to trouble you.”
“I can not help being troubled,” he returned, just as evenly. “‘You see, it makes me ill for days if my car runs over a dog.’”
Luckily, at that moment Dal came in. He pushed his way through the crowd without a word, shut off the lights, crashed through the pans and slammed the shutters closed. Then he turned and addressed the rest.
“Of all the lunatics—!” he began, only there was more to it than that. “A fellow goes to all kinds of trouble to put an end to this miserable situation, and the entire household turns out and sets to work to frustrate the whole scheme. You LIKE to stay here, don’t you, like chickens in a coop? Where’s Flannigan?”
Nobody understood Dal’s wrath then, but it seems he meant to arrange the plot himself, and when it was ripe, and the hour nearly come, he intended to wager that he could break the quarantine, and to take any odds he could get that he would free the entire party in half an hour. As for the plan itself, it was idiotically simple; we were perfectly delighted when we heard it. It was so simple and yet so comprehensive. We didn’t see how it COULD fail. Both the Mercer girls kissed Dal on the strength of it, and Anne was furious. Jim was not so much pleased, for some reason or other, and Mr. Harbison looked thoughtful rather than merry. Aunt Selina had gone to bed.
The idea, of course, was to start an embryo fire just inside the windows, in the pans, to feed it with the orange-fire powder that is used on the Fourth of July, and when we had thrown open the windows and yelled “fire” and all the guards and reporters had rushed to the front of the house, to escape quietly by a rear door from the basement kitchen, get into machines Dal had in waiting, and lose ourselves as quickly as we could.
You can see how simple it was.
We were terribly excited, of course. Every one rushed madly for motor coats and veils, and Dal shuffled the numbers so the people going the same direction would have the same machine. We called to each other as we dressed about Mamaroneck or Lakewood or wherever we happened to have relatives. Everybody knew everybody else, and his friends. The Mercer girls were going to cruise until the trouble blew over, the Browns were going to Pinehurst, and Jim was going to Africa to hunt, if he could get out of the harbor.
Only the Harbison man seemed to have no plans; quite suddenly with the world so near again, the world of country houses and steam yachts and all the rest of it, he ceased to be one of us. It was not his world at all. He stood back and watched the kaleidoscope of our coats and veils, half-quizzically, but with something in his face that I had not seen there before. If he had not been so self-reliant and big, I would have said he was lonely. Not that he was pathetic in any sense of the word. Of course, he avoided me, which was natural and exactly what I wished. Bella never was far from him and at the last she loaded him with her jewel case and a muff and traveling bag and asked him to her cousins’ on Long Island. I felt sure he was going to decline, when he glanced across at me.
“Do go,” I said, very politely. “They are charming people.” And he accepted at once!
It was a transparent plot on Bella’s part: Two elderly maiden ladies, house miles from anywhere, long evenings in the music room with an open fire and Bella at the harp playing the two songs she knows.
When we were ready and gathered in the kitchen, in the darkness, of course, Dal went up on the roof and signaled with a lantern to the cars on the drive. Then he went downstairs, took a last look at the drawing room, fired the papers, shook on the powder, opened the windows and yelled “fire!”
Of course, huddled in the kitchen we had heard little or nothing. But we plainly heard Dal on the first floor and Flannigan on the second yelling “fire,” and the patter of feet as the guards ran to the front of the house. And at that instant we remembered Aunt Selina!
That was the cause of the whole trouble. I don’t know why they turned on me; she wasn’t my aunt. But by the time we had got her out of bed, and had wrapped her in an eiderdown comfort, and stuck slippers on her feet and a motor veil on her head, the glare at the front of the house was beginning to die away. She didn’t understand at all and we had no time to explain. I remember that she wanted to go back and get her “plate,” whatever that may be, but Jim took her by the arm and hurried her along, and the rest, who had waited, and were in awful tempers, stood aside and let them out first.
The door to the area steps was open, and by the street lights we could see a fence and a gate, which opened on a side street. Jim and Aunt Selina ran straight for the gate; the wind blowing Aunt Selina’s comfort like a sail. Then, with our feet, so to speak, on the first rungs of the ladder of Liberty, it slipped. A half-dozen guards and reporters came around the house and drove us back like sheep into a slaughter pen. It was the most humiliating moment of my life.
Dal had been for fighting a way through, and just for a minute I think I went Berserk myself. But Max spied one of the reporters setting up a flash light as we stood, undecided, at the top of the steps, and after that there was nothing to do but retreat. We backed down slowly, to show them we were not afraid. And when we were all in the kitchen again, and had turned on the lights and Bella was crying with her head against Mr. Harbison’s arm, Dal said cheerfully,
“Well, it has done some good, anyhow. We have lost Aunt Selina.”
And we all shook hands on it, although we were sorry about Jim. And Dal said we would have some champagne and drink to Aunt Selina’s comfort, and we could have her teeth fumigated and send them to her. Somebody said “Poor old Jim,” and at that Bella looked up.
She stared around the group, and then she went quite pale.
“Jim!” she gasped. “Do you mean—that Jim is—out there too?”
“Jim and Aunt Selina!” I said as calmly as I could for joy. You can see how it simplified the situation for me. “By this time they are a mile away, and going!”
Everybody shook hands again except Bella. She had dropped into a chair, and sat biting her lip and breathing hard, and she would not join in any of the hilarity at getting rid of Aunt Selina. Finally she got up and knocked over her chair.
“You are a lot of cowards,” she stormed. “You deserted them out there, left them. Heaven knows where they are—a defenseless old woman, and—and a man who did not even have an overcoat. And it is snowing!”
“Never mind,” Dal said reassuringly. “He can borrow Aunt Selina’s comfort. Make the old lady discard from weakness. Anyhow, Bella, if I know anything of human nature, the old lady will make it hot enough for him. Poor old Jim!”
Then they shook hands again, and with that there came a terrible banging at the door, which we had locked.
“Open the door!” some one commanded. It was one of the guards.
“Open it yourself!” Dallas called, moving a kitchen table to reenforce the lock.
“Open that door or we will break it in!”
Dallas put his hands in his pockets, seated himself on the table, and whistled cheerfully. We could hear them conferring outside, and they made another appeal which was refused. Suddenly Bella came over and confronted Dallas.
“They have brought them back!” she said dramatically. “They are out there now; I distinctly heard Jim’s voice. Open that door, Dallas!”
“Oh, DON’T let them in!” I wailed. It was quite involuntary, but the disappointment was too awful. “Dallas, DON’T open that door!”
Dal swung his feet and smiled from Bella to me.
“Think what a solution it is to all our difficulties,” he said easily. “Without Aunt Selina I could be happy here indefinitely.”
There was more knocking, and somebody—Max, I think—said to let them in, that it was a fool thing anyhow, and that he wanted to go to bed and forget it; his feet were cold. And just then there was a crash, and part of one of the windows fell in. The next blow from outside brought the rest of the glass, and—somebody was coming through, feet first. It was Jim.
He did not speak to any of us, but turned and helped in a bundle of red and yellow silk comfort that proved to be Aunt Selina, also feet first. I had a glimpse of a half-dozen heads outside, guards and reporters. Then Jim jerked the shade down and unswathed Aunt Selina’s legs so that she could walk, offered his arm, and stalked past us and upstairs, without a word!
None of us spoke. We turned out the lights and went upstairs and took off our wraps and went to bed. It had been almost a fiasco.
Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all morning. And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to any of us and he watched Bella furtively, as if he suspected her of trying to get him out of the house.
When luncheon time came around and he had shown no indication of going to the telephone and ordering it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen to remind him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio, and we waited together in the hall while Max went up. When he came down he was somewhat ruffled.
“He wouldn’t open the door,” he reported, “and when I told him it was meal time, he said he wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t give a whoop about the rest of us. He had asked us here to dinner; he hadn’t proposed to adopt us.”
So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o’clock Jim came downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left. Anne declared that Bella had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it. She was never seen to speak to him unnecessarily.
The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne’s pearls, using them, the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with a copy of Poe’s Purloined Letter and Gaboriau’s Monsieur LeCoq. He went through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion. And the next day, the fourth, he found something—not much, but it was curious. He had been in the studio, poking around behind the dusty pictures, with Jimmy expostulating every time he moved anything and the rest standing around watching him.
Max was strutting.
“We get it by elimination,” he said importantly. “The pearls being nowhere else in the house, they must be here in the studio. Three parts of the studio having yielded nothing, they must be in the fourth. Ladies and gentlemen, let me have your attention for one moment. I tap this canvas with my wand—there is nothing up my sleeve. Then I prepare to move the canvas—so. And I put my hand in the pocket of this disreputable velvet coat, so. Behold!”
Then he gave a low exclamation and looked at something he held in his hand. Every one stepped forward, and on his palm was the small diamond clasp from Anne’s collar!
Jimmy was apoplectic. He tried to smile, but no one else did.
“Well, I’ll be flabbergasted!” he said. “I say, you people, you don’t think for a minute that I put that thing there? Why, I haven’t worn that coat for a month. It’s—it’s a trick of yours, Max.”
But Max shook his head; he looked stupefied, and stood gazing from the clasp to the pocket of the old painting coat. Betty dropped on a folding stool, that promptly collapsed with her and created a welcome diversion, while Anne pounced on the clasp greedily, with a little cry.
“We will find it all now,” she said excitedly. “Did you look in the other pockets, Max?”
Then, for the first time, I was conscious of an air of constraint among the men. Dallas was whistling softly, and Mr. Harbison, having rescued Betty, was standing silent and aloof, watching the scene with non-committal eyes. It was Max who spoke first, after a hurried inventory of the other pockets.
“Nothing else,” he said constrainedly. “I’ll move the rest of the canvases.”
But Jim interfered, to every one’s surprise.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you, Max. There’s nothing back there. I had ‘em out yesterday.” He was quite pale.
“Nonsense!” Max said gruffly. “If it’s a practical joke, Jim, why don’t you fess up? Anne has worried enough.”
“The pearls are not there, I tell you,” Jim began. Although the studio was cold, there were little fine beads of moisture on his face. “I must ask you not to move those pictures.” And then Aunt Selina came to the rescue; she stalked over and stood with her back against the stack of canvases.
“As far as I can understand this,” she declaimed, “you gentlemen are trying to intimate that James knows something of that young woman’s jewelry, because you found part of it in his pocket. Certainly you will not move the pictures. How do you know that the young gentleman who said he found it there didn’t have it up his sleeve?”
She looked around triumphantly, and Max glowered. Dallas soothed her, however.
“Exactly so,” he said. “How do we know that Max didn’t have the clasp up his sleeve? My dear lady, neither my wife nor I care anything for the pearls, as compared with the priceless pearl of peace. I suggest tea on the roof; those in favor—? My arm, Miss Caruthers.”
It was all well enough for Jim to say later that he didn’t dare to have the canvases moved, for he had stuck behind them all sorts of chorus girl photographs and life-class crayons that were not for Aunt Selina’s eye, besides four empty siphons, two full ones, and three bottles of whisky. Not a soul believed him; there was a a new element of suspicion and discord in the house.
Every one went up on the roof and left him to his mystery. Anne drank her tea in a preoccupied silence, with half-closed eyes, an attitude that boded ill to somebody. The rest were feverishly gay, and Aunt Selina, with a pair of arctics on her feet and a hot-water bottle at her back, sat in the middle of the tent and told me familiar anecdotes of Jimmy’s early youth (had he known, he would have slain her). Betty and Mr. Harbison had found a medicine ball, and were running around like a pair of children. It was quite certain that neither his escape from death nor my accusation weighed heavily on him.
While Aunt Selina was busy with the time Jim had swallowed an open safety pin, and just as the pin had been coughed up, or taken out of his nose—I forget which—Jim himself appeared and sulkily demanded the privacy of the roof for his training hour.
Yes, he was training. Flannigan claimed to know the system that had reduced the president to what he is, and he and Jim had a seance every day which left Jim feeling himself for bruises all evening. He claimed to be losing flesh; he said he could actually feel it going, and he and Flannigan had spent an entire afternoon in the cellar three days before with a potato barrel, a cane-seated chair and a lamp.
The whole thing had been shrouded in mystery. They sandpapered the inside of the barrel and took out all the nails, and when they had finished they carried it to the roof and put it in a corner behind the tent. Everybody was curious, but Flannigan refused any information about it, and merely said it was part of his system. Dal said that if HE had anything like that in his system he certainly would be glad to get rid of it.
At a quarter to six Jim appeared, still sullen from the events of the afternoon and wearing a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, Flannigan following him with a sponge, a bucket of water and an armful of bath towels. Everybody protested at having to move, but he was firm, and they all filed down the stairs. I was the last, with Aunt Selina just ahead of me. At the top of the stairs, she turned around suddenly to me.
“That policeman looks cruel,” she said. “What’s more, he’s been in a bad humor all day. More than likely he’ll put James flat on the roof and tramp on him, under pretense of training him. All policemen are inhuman.”
“He only rolls him over a barrel or something like that,” I protested.
“James had a bump like an egg over his ear last night,” Aunt Selina insisted, glaring at Flannigan’s unconscious back. “I don’t think it’s safe to leave him. It is my time to relax for thirty minutes, or I would watch him. You will have to stay,” she said, fixing me with her imperious eyes.
So I stayed. Jim didn’t want me, and Flannigan muttered mutiny. But it was easier to obey Aunt Selina than to clash with her, and anyhow I wanted to see the barrel in use.
I never saw any one train before. It is not a joyful spectacle. First, Flannigan made Jim run, around and around the roof. He said it stirred up his food and brought it in contact with his liver, to be digested.
Flannigan, from meekness and submission, of a sort, in the kitchen, became an autocrat on the roof.
“Once more,” he would say. “Pick up your feet, sir! Pick up your feet!”
And Jim would stagger doggedly past me, where I sat on the parapet, his poor cheeks shaking and the tail of his bath robe wrapping itself around his legs. Yes, he ran in the bath robe in deference to me. It seems there isn’t much to a running suit.
“Head up,” Flannigan would say. “Lift your knees, sir. Didn’t you ever see a horse with string halt?”
He let him stop finally, and gave him a moment to get his breath. Then he set him to turning somersaults. They spread the cushions from the couch in the tent on the roof, and Jim would poke his head down and say a prayer, and then curve over as gracefully as a sausage and come up gasping, as if he had been pushed off a boat.
“Five pounds a day; not less, sir,” Flannigan said encouragingly. “You’ll drop it in chunks.”
Jim looked at the tin as if he expected to see the chunks lying at his feet.
“Yes,” he said, wiping the back of his neck. “If we’re in here thirty days that will be one hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t forget to stop in time, Flannigan. I don’t want to melt away like a candle.”
He was cheered, however, by the promise of reduction.
“What do you think of that, Kit?” he called to me. “Your uncle is going to look as angular as a problem in geometry. I’ll—I’ll be the original reductio ad absurdum. Do you want me to stand on my head, Flannigan? Wouldn’t that reduce something?”
“Your brains, sir,” Flannigan retorted gravely, and presented a pair of boxing gloves. Jim visibly quailed, but he put them on.
“Do you know, Flannigan,” he remarked, as he fastened them, “I’m thinking of wearing these all the time. They hide my character.”
Flannigan looked puzzled, but he did not ask an explanation. He demanded that Jim shed the bath robe, which he finally did, on my promise to watch the sunset. Then for fully a minute there was no sound save of feet running rapidly around the roof, and an occasional soft thud. Each thud was accompanied by a grunt or two from Jim. Flannigan was grimly silent. Once there was a smart rap, an oath from the policeman, and a mirthless chuckle from Jim. The chuckle ended in a crash, however, and I turned. Jim was lying on his back on the roof, and Flannigan was wiping his ear with a towel. Jim sat up and ran his hand down his ribs.
“They’re all here,” he observed after a minute. “I thought I missed one.”
“The only way to take a man’s weight down,” Flannigan said dryly.
Jim got up dizzily.
“Down on the roof, I suppose you mean,” he said.
The next proceedings were mysterious. Flannigan rolled the barrel into the tent, and carried in a small glass lamp. With the material at hand he seemed to be effecting a combination, no new one, to judge by his facility. Then he called Jim.
At the door of the tent Jim turned to me, his bathrobe toga fashion around his shoulders.
“This is a very essential part of the treatment,” he said solemnly. “The exercise, according to Flannigan, loosens up the adipose tissue. The next step is to boil it out. I hope, unless your instructions compel you, that you will at least have the decency to stay out of the tent.”
“I am going at once,” I said, outraged. “I’m not here because I’m mad about it, and you know it. And don’t pose with that bath robe. If you think you’re a character out of Roman history, look at your legs.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said sulkily. “Only I’m tired of having you choked down my throat every time I open my mouth, Kit. And don’t go just yet. Flannigan is going for my clothes as soon as he lights the—the lamp, and—somebody ought to watch the stairs.”
That was all there was to it. I said I would guard the steps, and Flannigan, having ignited the combination, whatever it was, went downstairs. How was I to know that Bella would come up when she did? Was it my fault that the lamp got too high, and that Flannigan couldn’t hear Jim calling? Or that just as Bella reached the top of the steps Jim should come to the door of the tent, wearing the barrel part of his hot-air cabinet, and yelling for a doctor?
Bella came to a dead stop on the upper step, with her mouth open. She looked at Jim, at the inadequate barrel, and from them she looked at me. Then she began to laugh, one of her hysterical giggles, and she turned and went down again. As Jim and I stared at each other we could hear her gurgling down the hall below.
She had violent hysterics for an hour, with Anne rubbing her forehead and Aunt Selina burning a feather out of the feather duster under her nose. Only Jim and I understood, and we did not tell. Luckily, the next thing that occurred drove Bella and her nerves from everybody’s mind.
At seven o’clock, when Bella had dropped asleep and everybody else was dressed for dinner, Aunt Selina discovered that the house was cold, and ordered Dal to the furnace.
It was Dal’s day at the furnace; Flannigan had been relieved of that part of the work after twice setting fire to a chimney.
In five minutes Dal came back and spoke a few words to Max, who followed him to the basement, and in ten minutes more Flannigan puffed up the steps and called Mr. Harbison.
I am not curious, but I knew that something had happened. While Aunt Selina was talking suffrage to Anne—who said she had always been tremendously interested in the subject, and if women got the suffrage would they be allowed to vote?—I slipped back to the dining room.
The table was laid for dinner, but Flannigan was not in sight. I could hear voices from somewhere, faint voices that talked rapidly, and after a while I located the sounds under my feet. The men were all in the basement, and something must have happened. I flew back to the basement stairs, to meet Mr. Harbison at the foot. He was grimy and dusty, with streaks of coal dust over his face, and he had been examining his revolver. I was just in time to see him slip it into his pocket.
“What is the matter?” I demanded. “Is any one hurt?”
“No one,” he said coolly. “We’ve been cleaning out the furnace.”
“With a revolver! How interesting—and unusual!” I said dryly, and slipped past him as he barred the way. He was not pleased; I heard him mutter something and come rapidly after me, but I had the voices as a guide, and I was not going to be turned back like a child. The men had gathered around a low stone arch in the furnace room, and were looking down a short flight of steps, into a sort of vault, evidently under the pavement. A faint light came from a small grating above, and there was a close, musty smell in the air.
“I tell you it must have been last night,” Dallas was saying. “Wilson and I were here before we went to bed, and I’ll swear that hole was not there then.”
“It was not there this morning, sir,” Flannigan insisted. “It has been made during the day.”
“And it could not have been done this afternoon,” Mr. Harbison said quietly. “I was fussing with the telephone wire down here. I would have heard the noise.”
Something in his voice made me look at him, and certainly his expression was unusual. He was watching us all intently while Dallas pointed out to me the cause of the excitement. From the main floor of the furnace room, a flight of stone steps surmounted by an arch led into the coal cellar, beneath the street. The coal cellar was of brick, with a cement floor, and in the left wall there gaped an opening about three feet by three, leading into a cavernous void, perfectly black—evidently a similar vault belonging to the next house.
The whole place was ghostly, full of shadows, shivery with possibilities. It was Mr. Harbison finally who took Jim’s candle and crawled through the aperture. We waited in dead silence, listening to his feet crunching over the coal beyond, watching the faint yellow light that came through the ragged opening in the wall. Then he came back and called through to us.
“Place is locked, over here,” he said. “Heavy oak door at the head of the steps. Whoever made that opening has done a prodigious amount of labor for nothing.”
The weapon, a crowbar, lay on the ground beside the bricks, and he picked it up and balanced it on his hand. Dallas’ florid face was almost comical in his bewilderment; as for Jimmy—he slammed a piece of slag at the furnace and walked away. At the door he turned around.
“Why don’t you accuse me of it?” he asked bitterly. “Maybe you could find a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me.”
He stalked up the stairs then and left us. Dallas and I went up together, but we did not talk. There seemed to be nothing to say. Not until I had closed and locked the door of my room did I venture to look at something that I carried in the palm of my hand. It was a watch, not running—a gentleman’s flat gold watch, and it had been hanging by its fob to a nail in the bricks beside the aperture.
In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H. and the picture of a girl, cut from a newspaper.
It was my picture.
Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar and stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a tracing of it and of some footprints in the coal dust on the other side.
I did not go. I went into the library with the guilty watch in the fold of my gown, and found Mr. Harbison there, staring through the February gloom at the blank wall of the next house, and quite unconscious of the reporter with a drawing pad just below him in the area-way. I went over and closed the shutters before his very eyes, but even then he did not move.
“Will you be good enough to turn around?” I demanded at last.
“Oh!” he said wheeling. “Are YOU here?”
There wasn’t any reply to that, so I took the watch and placed it on the library table between us. The effect was all that I had hoped. He stared at it for an instant, then at me, and with his hand outstretched for it, stopped.
“Where did you find it?” he asked. I couldn’t understand his expression. He looked embarrassed, but not at all afraid.
“I think you know, Mr. Harbison,” I retorted.
“I wish I did. You opened it?”
“Yes.”
We stood looking at each other across the table. It was his glance that wavered.
“About the picture—of you,” he said at last. “You see, down there in South America, a fellow hasn’t much to do in the evenings, and a—a chum of mine and I—we were awfully down on what we called the plutocrats, the—the leisure classes. And when that picture of yours came in the paper, we had—we had an argument. He said—” He stopped.
“What did he say?”
“Well, he said it was the picture of an empty-faced society girl.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed.
“I—I maintained there were possibilities in the face.” He put both hands on the table, and, bending forward, looked down at me. “Well, I was a fool, I admit. I said your eyes were kind and candid, in spite of that haughty mouth. You see, I said I was a fool.”
“I think you are exceedingly rude,” I managed finally. “If you want to know where I found your watch, it was down in the coal cellar. And if you admit you are an idiot, I am not. I—I know all about Bella’s bracelet—and the board on the roof, and—oh, if you would only leave—Anne’s necklace—on the coal, or somewhere—and get away—”
My voice got beyond me then, and I dropped into a chair and covered my face. I could feel him staring at the back of my head.
“Well, I’ll be—” something or other, he said finally, and then he turned on his heel and went out. By the time I got my eyes dry (yes, I was crying; I always do when I am angry) I heard Jim coming downstairs, and I tucked the watch out of sight. Would anyone have foreseen the trouble that watch would make!
Jim was sulky. He dropped into a chair and stretched out his legs, looking gloomily at nothing. Then he got up and ambled into his den, closing the door behind him without having spoken a word. It was more than human nature could stand.
When I went into the den he was stretched on the davenport with his face buried in the cushions. He looked absolutely wilted, and every line of him was drooping.
“Go on out, Kit,” he said, in a smothered voice. “Be a good girl and don’t follow me around.”
“You are shameless!” I gasped. “Follow you! When you are hung around my neck like a—like a—” Millstone was what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t think of it.
He turned over and looked up from his cushions like an ill-treated and suffering cherub.
“I’m done for, Kit,” he groaned. “Bella went up to the studio after we left, and investigated that corner.”
“What did she find? The necklace?” I asked eagerly. He was too wretched to notice this.
“No, that picture of you that I did last winter. She is crazy—she says she is going upstairs and sit in Takahiro’s room and take smallpox and die.”
“Fiddlesticks!” I said rudely, and somebody hammered on the door and opened it.
“Pardon me for disturbing you,” Bella said, in her best dear-me-I’m-glad-I-knocked manner. “But—Flannigan says the dinner has not come.”
“Good Lord!” Jim exclaimed. “I forgot to order the confounded dinner!”
It was eight o’clock by that time, and as it took an hour at least after telephoning the order, everybody looked blank when they heard. The entire family, except Mr. Harbison, who had not appeared again, escorted Jim to the telephone and hung around hungrily, suggesting new dishes every minute. And then—he couldn’t raise Central. It was fifteen minutes before we gave up, and stood staring at one another despairingly.
“Call out of a window, and get one of those infernal reporters to do something useful for once,” Max suggested. But he was indignantly hushed. We would have starved first. Jim was peering into the transmitter and knocking the receiver against his hand, like a watch that had stopped. But nothing happened. Flannigan reported a box of breakfast food, two lemons, and a pineapple cheese, a combination that didn’t seem to lend itself to anything.
We went back to the dining room from sheer force of habit and sat around the table and looked at the lemonade Flannigan had made. Anne WOULD talk about the salad her last cook had concocted, and Max told about a little town in Connecticut where the restaurant keeper smokes a corn-cob pipe while he cooks the most luscious fried clams in America. And Aunt Selina related that in her family they had a recipe for chicken smothered in cream. And then we sipped the weak lemonade and nibbled at the cheese.
“To change this gridiron martyrdom,” Dallas said finally, “where’s Harbison? Still looking for his watch?”
“Watch!” Everybody said it in a different tone.
“Sure,” he responded. “Says his watch was taken last night from the studio. Better get him down to take a squint at the telephone. Likely he can fix it.”
Flannigan was beside me with the cheese. And at that moment I felt Mr. Harbison’s stolen watch slip out of my girdle, slide greasily across my lap, and clatter to the floor. Flannigan stooped, but luckily it had gone under the table. To have had it picked up, to have had to explain how I got it, to see them try to ignore my picture pasted in it—oh, it was impossible! I put my foot over it.
“Drop something?” Dallas asked perfunctorily, rising. Flannigan was still half kneeling.
“A fork,” I said, as easily as I could, and the conversation went on. But Flannigan knew, and I knew he knew. He watched my every movement like a hawk after that, standing just behind my chair. I dropped my useless napkin, to have it whirled up before it reached the floor. I said to Betty that my shoe buckle was loose, and actually got the watch in my hand, only to let it slip at the critical moment. Then they all got up and went sadly back to the library, and Flannigan and I faced each other.
Flannigan was not a handsome man at any time, though up to then he had at least looked amiable. But now as I stood with my hand on the back of my chair, his face grew suddenly menacing. The silence was absolute. I was the guiltiest wretch alive, and opposite me the law towered and glowered, and held the yellow remnant of a pineapple cheese! And in the silence that wretched watch lay and ticked and ticked and ticked. Then Flannigan creaked over and closed the door into the hall, came back, picked up the watch, and looked at it.
“You’re unlucky, I’m thinkin’,” he said finally. “You’ve got the nerve all right, but you ain’t cute enough.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I quavered. “Give me that watch to return to Mr. Harbison.”
“Not on your life,” he retorted easily. “I give it back myself, like I did the bracelet, and—like I’m going to give back the necklace, if you’ll act like a sensible little girl.”
I could only choke.
“It’s foolish, any way you look at it,” he persisted. “Here you are, lots of friends, folks that think you’re all right. Why, I reckon there isn’t one of them that wouldn’t lend you money if you needed it so bad.”
“Will you be still?” I said furiously. “Mr. Harbison left that watch—with me—an hour ago. Get him, and he will tell you so himself!”
“Of course he would,” Flannigan conceded, looking at me with grudging approval. “He wouldn’t be what I think he is, if he didn’t lie up and down for you.” There were voices in the hall. Flannigan came closer. “An hour ago, you say. And he told me it was gone this morning! It’s a losing game, miss. I’ll give you twenty-four hours and then—the necklace, if you please, miss.”