It was after midnight when Stanley Ingham stopped his car and yielded up the steering-wheel to Herrick. Besides themselves their car carried three of Kane's detectives and they were followed by the sheriff and a roadster full of armed men.
The detectives had a secondary mission. At the last minute Kane had received a message from a much concerned elderly cousin of Joe Patrick's. This cousin was a waiter at "Riley's," a roadhouse which was not only a cheap edition of the aristocratic Palisades, whence Christina had disappeared, but was kept by a brother-in-law and erstwhile partner of the Palisades' proprietor. The waiter at Riley's declared that a drunken taxi-driver had just turned up with a note from the Palisades urging Riley's to keep him over night. This man was quite drunk enough to talk about having lost his place through obliging the Palisades and Joe's cousin volunteered to keep an eye on him till the arrival of the detectives. These were to return to New York with their prisoners of the yellow house not from Waybridge, but from Benning's Point, stopping on the way to that station at Riley's and telephoning thence all news to Kane.
At Waybridge they had been fortunate in finding the sheriff up and starting forth after some marauders who were reported to have robbed a still burning post-office at Benning's Point; the station agent whom they found with him had seen Nicola, that morning, meet a lady with that old car of his that he had painted black when there was so much talk about those New York Guinees having a gray one; the agent was sure the lady had taken no return train.
From both him and the sheriff it was evident that the Pascoes as foreigners, had been contemptible, but not disliked. The unpopular person was a boarder they had; a woman with red hair who stayed out there to write novels and thought she was so much too good for other people that she never so much as passed the time of day with anybody. Friends of hers did come out from the city to see her sometimes. Going or coming from the city herself she was tied up in one o' those automobile veils—might 'uv been her come back this morning, only she looked kind of shabby-dressed. The sheriff added that there was old Mrs. Pascoe, Nicola's mother, as nice a little woman as you'd want to see; real neat, trim, gray-haired lady, an American lady. Herrick suddenly turned and stared.
But now they were within half a mile of the Pascoe house. Stanley and the detectives crowded into the sheriff's car. They had been instructed to send Herrick on alone; he was to attempt an entrance by a message of urgent and friendly warning, endeavoring to get the lay of the land and to make his presence known to any watchful captive, but otherwise awaiting reinforcements. One of the detectives said to Herrick, "If they won't let you in, just leave your message. And let them hear you drive off. Then we'll get together."
Herrick ran the car slowly along the unfamiliar road. This was still clogged and rutted with mud, which had begun to stiffen since the rain had stopped; a high wind shouldered the clouds in driving masses. His destination was the second house on his left; and, as he peered along the roadside, the deep excitement, the terrible questions which glowed in that dark night, worked in him with a fearful gladness. Certainty was at hand! A bitter exultation rode within him nearer and nearer to whatever stroke Fate stood to deal him in the yellow house. A hundred visions of Christina shone and darkened before him, leaping along his pulse, and his blood sang in him with a kind of madness.—The second house on the left! There it rose, a blot on the blackness! Dark as a stone, it somehow struck cold on his hot hopes.
He brought up the car before the gate and flung a falsely cheerful halloo upon the wind. Nothing answered. The gate yielded to his hand; as he went up the path a fragrance greeted him like Christina's presence—the cold, moist air was filled with the sweetness of old-fashioned, garden flowers. His fingers missed the bell; but, lighting on the brass knocker, sent loud reverberations through the house. Nothing within it seemed to stir. But the silence echoed horribly and swung, quaking, in his breast. Of a sudden he knew that house was empty.
Nothing else mattered. Discretion ceased to exist. He drew back and scanned the vacant, shuttered windows; he ran round the house; there was still no light; he tried the kitchen door and drew back to listen; it was as though within the house he could hear silence walking and her step was ominous. He put his shoulder to the kitchen door and burst it in.
Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp, and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house; and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair, that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open and he paused to look into a closet.
It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them half full of earth. Nothing else.
At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and listened while his voice went dying about the empty house. "Christina—it's I—Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me, Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the balusters to him. He went upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing. But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina! Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and empty; he snatched at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of paper in it and a handful of torn-up scraps. He shook the scraps into his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying eyes.
Mrs. Hope,Honored Madam,
Mrs. Hope,Honored Madam,
There was no date or other heading. The note ran:
Mrs. Hope,Honored Madam,Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on earth. I surmise she will be heard from.
Mrs. Hope,Honored Madam,Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on earth. I surmise she will be heard from.
There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone away—" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road.
The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare, air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves confronted them.
Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets—the clothes of working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim, sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when, considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame. Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say.
Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken glass on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?" Stanley cried, bounding forward.
The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!" Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace.
The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry gleaned but the one circumstance—the search party itself discovered, pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's, had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and under a troubled, scudding moon.
From that desert purity and freedom of cold space Riley's accosted them like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden; along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure against the wind passed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer when they suffer.
He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no fitting gratitude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others, babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time; what wasshedoing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter, beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with God knew what terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her eyes besought him.
Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!—What are those?"—For the detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out upon the table-cloth the handful of torn scraps from the waste-paper basket.
They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate associate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to Herrick's hand in this order—
At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get mixed up with this lot? What kind of holdcanthey have on her?" "Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the scraps. The detective was returning.
Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings. Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it; but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure of corrugated brass. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli.
He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley asked. "He brought us letters—this is his first visit. He's going to do our Italian correspondence."
It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face!
But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes' enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside, beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano, leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust!
A gasp of amazement, a prickle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that susceptible assembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running, exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase growing over, topping all the others—"The shadow! It's the shadow! The shadow on the blind!"
Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes—up there! The third window! Look, it's dark—they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears. "It had its back to the window—it threw out its right arm—"
The door of the room was thrown open. The proprietor's wife, shaken with hysterical laughter, ushered in the crowd. She was a flushed, stout woman in the gaudiest of kimonos, larger than the fat man in the driving-coat to whom she appealed. "My brother here 's from Mizzouri and I was just showing him how the shadow must have done—you can't earn any reward's round here! Anyhow, you don't suppose that hussy spends all her time giving signals for murders, do you?"—"But the shadow was so slim!" somebody said, as Mrs. Riley scornfully assisted Thompson in his researches. These coming to nothing the young men were powerless to refuse going oil to Benning's Point and telephoning from there—Thompson had begun to be suspicious of this exchange.
They had gone perhaps a mile, moving slowly, watchful of the leaves in every bush, and Herrick was remounting from the examination of a false alarm when they heard a hail in their rear and beheld approaching through the moonlight a hatless figure on a motorcycle.
The elderly cousin of Joe Patrick, whom they had not seen since he first welcomed them, bore down upon them in timid and disheveled haste.—"Yis, sor. I tried to see y' alone, sor, but yeh were gone. 'T is the reward, sor; I'd not be sharin' it with the policeman an' him takin' th' whole of it, not a doubt! An' impidence, beside, they do always give yeh! But a gintleman, sor, I don't mind tellin' him; if yeh 'll exscuse me sayin' so, Mrs. Riley's a liar!"
Not that he really knew anything. "No more than yirselves! But the piana, sor! It stands there fer the upstairs dances, an' her not knowin' wan note from another!—An' what's more, comin' down the back stairs from that same room wid the dhirty dishes, what did I see standin' at the back door but a car like yer own—only still as death an' no lights in its head! Wasn't that a queer thing, now? An' it gone whin I rode out."
What was that?—down the road which crossed theirs, where they had just reconnoitered for a sound! Nothing but their distorted fancy, their roused longing! "An' all I can tell surely, sor, is that awhile back, whin Riley sinds me upstairs with a bite o' supper for Mrs. Riley's brother that's just come in, barrin' the long drink, stheamin' hot, 'twas chicken an' like that yeh'd give to a lady. He has his own room, has the brother, but 'twas to hers I took the thray. An' though I saw no wan an' I heard no wan, yit sure there was some wan beyond Riley she was yellin' at an' him prayin' her 'Hoosh! Hoosh!' as I come to the door!"
"Did you hear anything of what she was saying?"
"Just the wan thing, sor, an' you'll remimber 'twas me told yeh. She said, 'I'll thank yeh to hand over that diamond necklace!'"
There was something there! They could not hear, but they could somehow feel from far behind them a stealthy purring. They turned; no lamp nor headlight but their own was anywhere to be seen. The second and less traveled road crossed theirs just above them at a narrow angle; but it, too, lay untenanted, not a breath quivering on the stillness. They saw themselves quite alone beneath the moon, breathing a night silence drenched with coldest sweetness; the last words rang in their blood with an accent that could not leave them wholly sober; they were, perhaps, a little "fey." At any rate, it was by an impulse with which reason had nothing to do that, as the old waiter continued—"'Twas for her, surely, they'd have that dark car waitin'!" Herrick held up a warning hand. The waiter hushed himself, stricken, and huddled in against their car; Herrick bent forward in a passionate readiness, and from far in the rear, but nearing swifter than the flight of time, along the intersecting road came the tremulous vibration of a second automobile.
They listened, incredulous, straining their eyes among the black pools and bright patches of wooded, winding way up from the river and discerned—almost on the instant close at hand—a gray ghost dipped in moonshine; lost under the trees and then springing out upon them, a black shape against the darkness, heralded by no sound of voice or horn, speeding as if with its head down like some sullen thunderbolt.
With their lights blazing defiance Herrick, catching out his revolver, attempted to cross the junction in time to throw their own car across the narrow road. He was too late; she grazed them as she passed; they fell in behind her, shouting threats which were lost in the wind of that flight; the road fell away before them; the hilled and wooded earth tore past; the noise, as of blowing forests, of multitudinous crowds and the roaring of the sea, surged in their ears; great waves and solid hills of air rose up and moved upon them, and, as they passed through, split into stinging, icy shreds that whipped their faces; the car rocked in the wild tide of its own speed, and in a world where they had gone blind to everything but one crazy whirl, they yet saw their lights fall ever nearer and brighter upon the fugitive.
It was now nearing three o'clock, the moon wholly victorious and the cars leaping through a world of molten silver. Herrick said to the boy beside him, "Can you shoot?"
"Not so that you can tell it!"
"Take the wheel, then!"
He could not make out her figure in the car. But in such thickly looming dangers, what must be, must be.
The men ahead heard him call to them to stop before he fired. In answer they merely leaned forward shielding themselves, and Herrick let fly two shots, aiming for the back tires; but, in that swaying speed, he missed. With a kind of harsh gaiety he answered Stanley, "No more can I!" and with the words the man beside Nicola turned and fired straight at Herrick's head. The wind-shield shattered in their faces; as the bullet passed between them Stanley felt a little sting, like the scorch of a quick, hot iron, on his cheek. "Slide down," Herrick said to him, "way under the wheel! Keep your head to one side." He himself was kneeling, resting his revolver on the frame of the broken wind-shield. At his third bullet they heard Nicola cry out and clap his hand to the back of his neck; the touring-car swerved and gave a kind of bounce; the man beside Nicola fired again and put a hole through Herrick's cap. The next minute the revolver dropped out of his hand; Herrick's fourth shot had broken his wrist. And now the road broadened a little, and the Ingham car was drawing on a level with its opponent. The touring-car did not carry Christina.
"Get as far forward as you can," Herrick said, "I'm after the front tires."
Their own front tires passed the rear of the first car; as they came abreast the man with the broken wrist, using his left hand, emptied his pistol almost in their faces; a shot from the man in the body of the car struck their steering-wheel; there was a cloud now between the two cars, smelling so thick of powder that Stanley seemed to himself to eat it. He was aware of Herrick suddenly casting aside all defenses, leaning forward into this cloud, his brows knotted and his arm outstretched. There came the quick Ping!—Ping! of his last two shots and as if in the same breath, the earthquake! The black touring-car seemed to spring into the air; then her fore wheels collapsed and she sank forward, still sliding a little as if on her nose, and, running quietly over the edge of the road into the shallow ditch that edged it, turned on her side.
They were well passed by this time, and despite the jerk with which Stanley brought up, Herrick had leaped out before they were stopped, and at the same moment a figure scrambled from the fallen hulk and, without a glance behind, made off across the fields. Herrick, shifting his empty revolver as he ran, till he carried it by the barrel, swung into full pursuit.
This was the more foolhardy because on getting to his feet Nicola had drawn his own revolver, from which Herrick had to dodge as he ran, and at length indeed to throw himself down, and get forward only by his hands and knees. They were now in a broken, stony lot, spotted with underbrush; a brook running through it, and here and there tall chestnut trees. By screening himself with these, and making a run for it in any patch of shadow, he kept his man in sight and even gained upon him; he was waiting till Nicola's gun should be as empty as his own before he came to closer quarters. For this he knelt and rose and ran and crawled, now showing himself, to draw—and waste!—a bullet; and now plumping down among bushes. It was at one of these moments that he heard a shot behind him and, peering through the screen of twigs, saw that Nicola's comrades had freed themselves from the ditch and were advancing, apparently full-armed, and he of the uninjured hand beating the coverts as they came. They called to each other, and in Italian sure enough; and they carried a lantern from Stanley's car. What had become of Stanley? And what now was he himself to do?
He crept forward to the edge of his thicket and could just make out a figure, not very far off, running heavily across a cleared space. Then, in a blanket of darkness, the figure disappeared as though through a trap-door, and Herrick, for all his listening, could hear only the calling and trampling of the men with the lamp. He told himself that Nicola had taken a leaf from his own book and was perhaps lying flattened to the earth—there came a disturbance in the bushes, a jar along the ground, as of some one plunging back from that cleared space toward the road; it appeared to him that a bulk of blacker blackness appeared and disappeared where those sounds rose. But the moon had so gone under a cloud that he could not be sure. So he thought; and then his heart leaped to admit the blessed truth—the moon had set! He slipped to his feet and fled, swift as a shadow and strong as a hound, after the heavier runner. He had guessed the truth, that Nicola was returning to the road. He had been led out across the fields on a false scent, but now Nicola, thinking to have doubled and shaken him off, was on the home trail straight for the high road. They came out upon it perhaps two hundred feet to the south of their empty motors; Herrick steadily gaining, and surprised cries and lantern-flashes piercing the field they had left behind. But as Herrick lifted his gun to let the lagging quarry have its butt-end, suddenly Nicola pitched forward and lay at his feet. He brought up short, suspicious of a trick. And then he remembered how Nicola had clapped his hand to the back of his neck. Holding the gun ready, he stooped and put his own hand to the same spot. It was covered with something hot and wet, which Herrick, with a surprising lack of sentiment, wiped off on the man's coat; he tried to lift the senseless figure and get it back to his own car. Something fell out of Nicola's breast with a little silver tinkle. The sound, as of some woman's trinket, drove the sense out of Herrick's head. Though he might as well have run up an electric target, he struck a match. A silver locket lay in his hand. It had been violently wrested from a neck-chain in whose wrenched links a thread or two of lace still clung. In one broken side the glass had been ground to fragments, as though under a man's heel, but the marred lines of a likeness were still there. The likeness, cut from an old kodak picture, was of Will Denny. Some one, like Signor Gabrielli, had never voluntarily parted with the features of her love! Out of the locket's other side, warm from Nicola's breast and unmarred but by the trickling of his blood, cried mutely, eagerly, to Herrick the fresh youth of Nancy Cornish.
Almost as he saw the bullets sang about him, as if he had charged into a bee hive. The lamp the Italians carried swallowed up his little match and picked him out with brightness, holding him in the circle of its light. He snatched up Nicola's gun and pulled the trigger, but the barrel was empty as that of his own; he might have flung himself down and taken his chance to crawl off in the ditch, but he had no mind to die like that; and what he did was to snatch off his coat and hold it before him, back and forth like a moving screen, as he ran forward into the mouth of the revolvers to crack at least one man on the head with his cold weapon before he fell. Just then from down the road a fresh volley of bullets shattered the night, and the voice of Stanley and the sheriff came to him like music.
The rescue which so much firing had helped Stanley to summon swept in full chase after the Pascoes and the tables were completely turned. But the shouts of the sheriff's party—"Got one?" "No; haven't you?" "Hi, Williams, they must have got over the wall of the Hoover place!" "We'll scramble over from the hood and see if they've struck down to the river!" "Blake, you and Cobbett drive round and ring up the lodge. Them old folks are easy a million, but get 'em up!"—warned Herrick of a blank in the sequel. And sure enough when the conquerors foregathered, the escape of the Pascoes, presumably by the river, was the end of their conquest.
For this had they fought and ridden, crawled and run! No wonder they felt a certain need of cheering each other with what gains they had. There was the yellow house; the home of the Pascoes and their Arm of Justice, the rainbow end of Kane's dream! And there, in the ditch beside them was a vague tumble of wreckage. "Hail, and farewell!" Herrick whistled, with a curious laugh. "We've met once too often!" For there, at least, was the end of his acquaintance, the gray touring-car.
As the two young men reëntered New York with the milk wagons and drove soberly through the Park, a cool gray light, more like darkness than light and yet perfectly and strangely clear like shadowed water, had begun to break above the sleeping town. Then Herrick drew from his pocket his paper puzzle and spread it out beside him on the rear seat of the car.
Some of the connections were obvious enough, but what the torn edges helped him still further to form was a purely domestic statement. "This time she's got to do the way I say. She ain't ever been any real daughter to me. But—" Then there was a bit gone. Then, "She can get rid of" word missing, "mebbe, but she can't get rid of her mother—"
"Well!" cried Stanley in disdainful disappointment. "What's that got to do with anything?"
"How should I know?"
He made the scraps into a little pile on the floor of the car, set fire to them, and ground them to ashes with his heel. For he knew only too well. That gray parrot face, that sharp, ignorant, cold voice in the sunny table d'hôte! "I want you should clear out from here, young man. I'd oughta know Dagoes; I married one." Yes, that was it! Wasn't it Stanley who wanted to know what hold such people had on Chris? "My girl's good Yankee—fair as any one. I brought her up so fine—" As they turned down still unawakened Broadway to his rooms Herrick looked into the light that was like darkness with eyes that made nothing of the first pale blush of peach blow nor the first hint of vaporous blue.
Till he heard Stanley say, "And if that Pascoe Arm-of-Justice gang have run away and yet come back, where did they run to?"
Through all his preoccupation Herrick was aware of an immense stupidity. "You're right. We went over that place inch by inch. And you know, when they left, they must have tumbled into their car and off—no time for anything. They packed nothing, they took nothing. Well, then, Stan, where was Justice's typewriter? And in what room or garret or cellar was the printing-press?"
Stanley gaped.
"Agreed—there wasn't any. And so that never was their real shop. Only a blind. Their real place of business, Stan, their fortress, their retreat, we've never found at all!"
This was the net result of town and country in their search for a missing girl, twenty-four hours after Christina had disappeared.
The anxiety of her friends would have been scarcely more enlightened, or even more relieved, had the search not happened to miss one accident of that cross-wired night.
At about eleven o'clock, more than an hour before Herrick had forced an entrance, the since damaged touring-car, returning from its expedition of the morning, had drawn up before the gate of the yellow house. The night world was then still a world of wind and rain; the car was splashed as though it had passed through a flood, and Nicola, stiff, muddy and drenched, was not in a very good humor when he got no reply to his knock at the kitchen door. He had driven quietly and knocked quietly, but now he lost control of himself and began to hammer; catching hold of the knob impatiently, he felt it turn in his grasp and entered. The door had not been locked, though the kitchen was lighted. He thought he could hear, somewhere, some one knocking. He took the lamp and went up the back stairs; then it seemed to him that the knocking came from the front of the house. He retraced his steps. Yes, there was a light in the hall and the knocking came from the closet under the stairs.
The Pascoes were in desperate straits, and Nicola was alone. He drew his knife from the capacious foldings of his coat, and stepped a little behind the door as he flung it open. There stumbled out, and sank, gasping, at his feet, the figure of a woman. She brought with her, out of the reeking closet, a strong odor of ammonia. Nicola gave a grunt of amazement. Then, like Herrick afterward, he lifted his lamp, and stared about the closet. On the floor lay an empty quart bottle which had recently been full of household ammonia, a still soaking towel, and a large silk umbrella, the rod broken and the handle missing. With the point of this umbrella a pane of the little window overhead had been broken and a slant of the outside shutter forced open for air. Nicola could make nothing of it; he turned at length, and grouchily pulled the gasping woman to her feet. This woman was the gray-haired housekeeper, Mrs. Pascoe.
At ten o'clock she said she had gone to get something from the closet and, as she opened the door, she had smelled ammonia. Then a towel, soaking with it, had been pressed on her face. Before she could do more than struggle with that, she had been pushed into the closet and the door had clicked upon her. That was all she knew. She must have been unconscious part of the time.—At ten o'clock! What an eternity of despair, then, had Christina not lived through before she thus ruthlessly freed herself! And what, now, had become of her; under a dawn some seven hours later than when, leaving Nancy behind, she had rushed out of that house and sped away, along the storm-tossed road?
At the end of four days Christina's friends gave up their private search for the retreat of the Arm of Justice.
During those days Herrick and the faithful Stanley, sometimes accompanied by Wheeler's stalwart hopefulness, had persistently attempted to take up the trail where it had broken—in the fields at one end of the Hoover estate. The beautiful old place, one of the great show places of the Hudson, stretched three miles deep to the river bank and a mile and a half along the road; remembering the theory of an escape through the grounds they presented themselves as richly tipping tourists to the little old, old couple at the lodge. These aged folk accustomed, during the Hoovers' prolonged absence abroad, to curious sightseers, welcomed them beneath the winged marble lions of the entrance-gates and made them free of the grounds with a host-like courtesy. But no broken shrubbery, no footstep save of that of a stray gardener or of their rival searchers the police, rewarded them; from the Hudson Club's boathouse, which had rented a strip of the beach, no boat was missing; the shores of unbroken woodland for a league on either side yielded no sign; when a hanging shutter at the great house led to a belief that the refugees had sheltered there the friends watched anxiously the disappointed ransacking of privileged authorities, and their only gain came from the gossip of the old lodge-keepers which informed them that the body of Nicola Pascoe had never been found. He could, then, have been only stunned. Thus it was still he they were most alert for during the next three days when the whole district—inns and post-offices, country-stores and stable-yards as well as every grove and by-lane—yielded them by day or night no scrap of news.
During their search, indeed, what clues existed had crumbled away. The cabman, for instance, had most truly driven Christina to the Amsterdam hotel, where she had simply given him so large a tip as to upset his sobriety and earn his discharge. Meeting in with the manager of The Palisades and applying fuddleheadedly for relief he had conveyed to that gentleman the idea of "knowing something," and had been sent to sober up at Riley's in order to keep the reward in the family. Then the day-clerk of the Amsterdam brought forth Christina's registered signature, engaging a suite on Thursday afternoon for Thursday night; she had claimed this suite from the night-clerk and occupied it; early in the morning she had sent for the housekeeper and hired some clothes of hers, saying she couldn't wait for her maid to bring her any. The frightened housekeeper had at length displayed the white and silver dress. Last and worst, to Herrick, when, on Saturday, he had sought out the table d'hôte, the dogs, the cats, the babies were unchanged, the Italian proprietress greeted him with a smile of welcome, but no gray-haired woman played solitaire behind the desk.
It was a curious enough blight without being heightened by the fact that Kane's patience with Herrick had plainly given out. Ever since the young man's return from Waybridge he had been aware of a change in the official attitude which rendered it suddenly impossible for him to see any one whom he asked to see and stretched like a fine wire excluding him from the whole affair. It increased his sense of outlawry, but a private preoccupation kept it from striking home.
This preoccupation ran parallel with, but, alas! could never be brought to meet that old story of the Hopes' love-affair which he could not help feeling to be the key to the true, the hidden, situation. That little pitted speck—and his novel! His novel of the Italian impostor! On the morrow of his chase after Nicola the table d'hôte had scarcely failed him before he was knocking at the door of Mrs. Deutch.
He took her for a walk on Riverside Drive, to be out of the way of dictographs, and laid before her not only the whole labyrinth of his perplexities but the best outline he could make of his dim conjectures. He had not failed to secure Signor Gabrielli's address from the Ingham office and he now put forward a petition which he tried not to feel monstrous. "Mrs. Deutch, there is a man who knows some strange things and strange people, who might perhaps send to Naples and receive from there a very enlightening cablegram. I am less than nothing to him, he will never send it for me. But I needn't tell you he is a man of great sensibility, very susceptible both to shame and pride. And still, after twenty-five years, he carries the miniature of his betrothed."
Mrs. Deutch looked out across the proud bright waters. Through the serene air the somber glory of an autumn leaf floated to her feet; its fellows were gathered everywhere in withered piles which shouting children rejoiced to trample into powder. "Yes," she said, by-and-by, "I will see him. There are always perhaps those of whom he is afraid. Perhaps he is like that. But it will be easy to say, 'We were very fond of each other, you and I, we were so young and you were so beautiful a person! It would be a great happiness to think that now you were brave!' I can tell him 'Christina is my youth and my prettiness and my true faith and all that you once knew.' Oh, yes, he will give them back to me! He will send your message!"
He had, indeed, sent it; but on Tuesday afternoon no reply had arrived. Having given up the countryside in despair Herrick could not keep away from the table d'hôte and, merely as a curious resort, he asked Stanley, who was returning to Springfield on Wednesday, to meet him there for dinner. He was able to show his guest the gorgeous Mr. Gumama with the knit, gloomy glories of his Saracen brow, but no mystery showed a feather. Inquiry, in his primitive Italian, elicited a statement that nearly wrenched a groan from his lips—his old lady had taken her eldest grandniece, Maria Rosa, to visit relations in the country! The mother of Maria Rosa insisted with a sweet smile that she could not remember the name of the place.
The young men sat for a while in the square, where Stanley's astuteness discovered so many blackmailers in the gentle, lolling crowd that even the statue of Garibaldi seemed scarcely safe, and then they started up Fifth Avenue; the austere, departing dignities of whose lower end never seem so faded, so historic, so composed, as in September dusks. When they made out the identity of an angular correctness sailing stiffly but handsomely some distance ahead of them, it seemed of all neighborhoods the most suitable in which to encounter Ten Euyck; yet they loitered, lacking the spirit to cope with their opportunities. And Stanley, who was still in favor with the powers, began to attempt the diversion of his moodier companion with an account of Ten Euyck's efforts to propel the Commissioner of Police. "Every little while you forget that he isn't anybody and can't do anything, even if there were anything to do. And you say to yourself, 'Golly! I'd rather Chris stayed lost than that he laid hands on her.' He looks so black and white and dried in vinegar he does get on your nerves all right. You remember what a lot of money he's got, after all, and pull and all the rest of it, and you feel as if he'd be able to findsomethingagainst her—or, even if he didn't—"
In the warm still evening his voice had carried farther than he thought; Ten Euyck turned round and recognized them. Evidently without offense, since he stood waiting for them to overtake him. "Good news for you, Ingham," he greeted the boy. "Judge Fletcher does not consider a confession equivalent to pleading guilty in the first degree! Moreover, in strict confidence, the judge is a veteran with an extreme distaste for the artistic temperament! If the prisoner is brought before him we shall get a first degree sentence yet!"
"Oh, I don't care!" cried the lad, making a disgusted face. "It's all too horrible and—and queer, somehow! I don't want to hear about it."
"Oh, if your consideration is for the actor in the lady's cloak—what a symbol of his whole conduct!—I understand he prefers it." Ten Euyck gave a short laugh. He was evidently in his happy vein of inquisitorial power. "When a man's been ruffling before the public in lace and satin and diamonds of course he baulks at prison accommodations. Yet even there our temperamental friend is welching."—He had evidently approached his point and they could not deny him the tribute of a stare.
"We may be very foolish, my dear sirs, but we are not incapable of learning and I may tell you that we have acted on a hint."
"You mean by 'we' yourself and the law?"
"Perhaps I do, Mr. Herrick. At any rate, this time to-morrow we shall have rung the door-bell of the Arm of Justice."
He took a tolerant pity on their restiveness, relaxing to an urbane smile as though his machinery were eased by the oil which always flowed when his prosecuting talent raised its head. "When that disgraceful laxity occurred at the Tombs and a prisoner was attacked there, we took a leaf from the criminals' book and put in among the guards some men of our own. One of these, a man named Firenzi, a very capable fellow, informed himself in no time of a marvelously well-paid plan for the prisoner's escape. Yes, by the very tribe who tried to kill him. Anything, you see, to get him out of the way. The idea is the old one of passing him out as a guard, leaving the true-false guard quite overcome in his cell;—a slim chap who's let wear a black beard on account of asthma or some such nonsense. They naturally suppose that an actor will look less conspicuous than most criminals in a bit of make-up! Does our consistent hero refuse to go? Filled with the bright hope of a hanging judge he does have to be coaxed a little, but not much. He is not lured by being told that he is to be sent to the safety of foreign lands, a far-off country and, I believe, a tropical climate, suited to his complexion. Firenzi reports him as demanding what they suppose there is in this foreign country to interest him. 'The lady who throws a shadow that you know.' 'It's enough!' says Denny, through his teeth, I am informed. I don't mind telling you that it's enough for us, too! They will be sure to take him to their nest to transfer him to the escort of their gang and his visit—before a Sampson shorn of his new beard and having still further done for himself with Fletcher, is returned to a jail somewhat less porous than he imagines to-night—his visit will be well watched!"
They had reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned toward Broadway where Stanley had an errand. The two puppets in Ten Euyck's hands had nothing to say. Neither of them could bring himself to utter his excitement in that now potent presence and Herrick wondered if he were really trembling. A far-off country! The phrase chilled and hardened him, as premeditated safety always does. He was scarcely even grateful for the strength and fleetness of her wings. Never had Ten Euyck's inspectorship seemed less absurd or more really a fact. Of to-night and to-morrow he was now the master. And yet, beside the news of a far-off country, what news could he wring from the Arm of Justice to-morrow for which Herrick need care so much? They stopped on the corner of Long Acre and as Stanley plunged into a drug-store, a certain embarrassment fell upon the two men left together. "It's remarkable how warm it is!" Ten Euyck said.
Herrick refrained from the flippancy of replying, "Wonderful weather for the time of year!" On closer inspection Ten Euyck proved a good deal worked up. His excitement was like a sort of dry paste and as he now grew pastier and pastier something that was almost a tremor seemed about to crack it; in fact the dry mask of his face was suffering from a lockjaw which was his form of hysteria. He took off his hat and, cold as he looked, produced an extremely superior handkerchief and wiped his brow. He said something about the last hot spell of the year and his lips clicked on the words as though they were rather a compromising statement; was it the coming crisis that creaked in his throat? It occurred to Herrick that Ten Euyck might be suffering from a sense that his vanity of achievement and his taste for torture, in leading him to disclose to-morrow's program, had led him injudiciously far. At any rate he studied, as if for sympathy, the irreproachable excellence of his hat-lining and a little pink line came out about his nose.
Herrick looked uneasily at the doorway beyond which Stanley still loitered; he saw no reprieve. And as he made sure of this Ten Euyck again fortified himself with the interior of his hat and spoke. "On your honor, now, Herrick, you wouldn't keep it from me? You've no idea where she is?" And he followed this extraordinary question with a piteous, a blenching glance.
Herrick did not speak; and Ten Euyck moistened his lips. The whole outline of his face seemed to take on a certain sharpness, and famine and fever thrust themselves, for a moment, into the windows of his eyes. In the silence which Herrick could not break, he murmured, "I'm not like this about women! You know that! Only she—" His voice cracked and then snapped off short, but with a hundred quiverings, like the string of a banjo breaking.
Herrick seemed to himself to look through a door, in a house of revelations. Was this what covered Ten Euyck's complacent coldness to the other sex? Did those neat and formal lips often stifle an outcry like this? True, Christina's own story had revealed to him that Ten Euyck's coldness was all hot ice and very swarthy snow. But he had presumed that incident to be a deliberate brutality; Ten Euyck had always appeared to govern his instincts masterfully or to walk on them, indeed, with heels of iron. To see him bared and shaken like this was to put a new value on the force that had betrayed him; but Herrick was too young and too much in love to endure this lusting and trembling breath when it blew upon Christina.
"On the whole," said he, deliberately, "keep your confidences to yourself, can't you? They make me sick."
The pinkness spread over Ten Euyck's face:
"Oh, I had forgotten your happiness!" he managed to cry, with a fierce shaking laugh. "Do let me know the date of the wedding!" He lifted his hat and strode from a neighborhood dangerous to dignity. But as he flung over his shoulder the ejaculation, "I hope you thought my diamonds became her!" Stanley's return arrested him.
"These infernal papers!" the boy cried.
Neither he nor Herrick had ever been strong enough to deny themselves the foolish headlines where one hour Christina had been seen as a passenger for Hongkong and another as a chambermaid in Yonkers. Nancy's ill-treated locket had roused the public to frenzy, but its imagination had definite items only of the eclipsing Christina Hope who, in the mid-day editions, generally lapsed to a lunatic in a suburban sanitarium; but nightfall always saw her mount again to the ghastliest and most criminal of "bodies." It was some such horror upon which Stanley had now fallen; below it Herrick saw the statement that in a day or two Denny would come up for sentence before Judge Fletcher.
He had little enough love for Will Denny, but it was with a feeling of nausea that he observed the mounting satisfaction of Ten Euyck. After four years the law was to wipe out, for its most obedient son, a blow across the mouth! It was, nevertheless, the poisoned rumor of Christina which had set the air afire between all three men. This dealt with some lovely fugitive hunted out that day by wireless and then disappearing from a steamer in mid-ocean. The languor of an incredible fatigue stole feverishly through Herrick's veins. Ten Euyck shouted to Stanley in a kind of bark, "Well, no waves can hold her down!" And he began to hum a tune in defiance of the faith with which Herrick's silence defied the printed words. Herrick looked up and their gaze met across the screaming columns. Ten Euyck's tune was, "Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer." Herrick knocked the newspaper out of his hand and there was a second's tense fury before these two, who had forgotten everything else, should leap at each other. In that second Stanley, lifting his eyes, whistled excitedly and caught Herrick's arm.
They were standing at the corner of Long Acre where five nights ago Herrick had met Wheeler in the rain. Fiery words and figures flashed their announcements, bright as ever, against the soft, lowering, purple blackness of the night. Down the side street Wheeler's theater, since Christina's disappearance, had been dark. It was still closed, but Wheeler must now have taken heart; for dark, save in theatrical parlance, it was no longer. The electric sign—
ROBERT WHEELERINTHE VICTORS
had been re-lighted. And beneath this, in letters of equal size and brilliancy ran the surprising legend—
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH,CHRISTINA HOPEWILL POSITIVELY REAPPEAR
"I know no more than you do," Wheeler said. "Or rather, no more than this." And he spread before them a sheet of writing-paper.
Above the penciled scribble was neither date nor heading, but the signature in Christina's slapdash scrawl made the world spin before Herrick's eyes. Upon that sheet of paper her hand had rested and had written there to Wheeler, but not to him! The message ran—
"Announce me for Thursday night, September 20th. I will be there."Christina Hope."
"Announce me for Thursday night, September 20th. I will be there.
"Christina Hope."
"Where did it come from?"
"From the infernal regions, apparently. It was left here at the club without the mannikin in buttons so much as noticing by whom. It may have been written from across the street; it may have been enclosed from anywhere."
"When?"
"This noon-time. You don't doubt its being genuine?" Wheeler asked. "No more do I. As for what to think, I haven't a guess. The girl may be, for all I know, a mere born-devil, or the tool of devils. Let her come back to my cast, and, for what I care, she may bring all hell in her pocket! I've had a very nasty interview with Ten Euyck, who thinks I can explain my sign."
Stanley stood there with his face working. "You don't mean to tell me," he cried aloud, "you don't mean to tell me that it's been nothing but an advertising trick from the beginning!"
"God forgive you!" Wheeler said. "You are our public!—No, my dear lad, there is one thing in this angelic wildcat of ours that you can tie to. When she tells me, in our business, to bank on her being in the theater Thursday night, I bank on it; if she can set one foot before the other, there she will be. That's my belief, if it were my last breath, and I'm staking everything on it. But we've got to allow for one thing.If she can!Christina has a great idea of her powers. But, even for her, heaven and earth are not always movable."
More people than one were perhaps discovering a certain helplessness before fate. About noon of the next day Mrs. Pascoe sat knitting in a bedroom above her niece's table d'hôte. There was only one other person in the room, a smallish man in the early thirties, who looked as though he had once been a gentleman, and whose correct feminine little features were now drawn into an expression at once weak and wild. His soft helpless-looking figure writhed and twitched as he now lay down and now sat up upon the bed; his face was swollen with weeping and the tears still flowed from his eyes.
"Well, if yeh're goin' to take on that way," said Mrs. Pascoe, "I dunno as I can blame her any. I dunno as I blame her anyhow. Yeh never objected when there was any money in it. It's kind o' late to carry on, now. What say?"
The gentleman poured forth in Italian, which Mrs. Pascoe understood better than he did English, that the lady he lamented had never wished to leave him before; she had never loved anybody before; hitherto it had always been business. The business of the whole family he had never interfered with, but this he would not bear; he had borne too much. And, indeed, from his language, it appeared that he had.
"My," said Mrs. Pascoe, "men are funny! Yeh been married to my girl since she was sixteen years old, and she ain't never treated yeh like anything but dirt. Well, what do yeh want to hang on to her for! Clear out! You ain't like me. Yeh can get another wife but I ain't got no other daughter. I gotta stick. She don't want me either. She wants swift folks an' gay folks, she'd forget she was mine if she could. But she can't! An' I can't! I can't deny anything yeh got to say. You say she ruined yer life. She'd ruin anybody's she can get her clutch onto. You say she don't love you. If you ask me, why should she? Even if 'twasn't herself she was thinkin' of, first, last an' all the time! She ain't never cared for any human bein' but this actin' feller, an' that's 'cause he cares 'bout the other one. Still, she got hold of him, oncet, an' do you think if she can get him again, if she can get them fellers our boys know to snake him out onto that boat for 'er, she's goin' to care whether you like it or not? You take it from me you ain't goin' to sail to-morrow any—or anyway not with us. You ain't never wanted anything but a wife that could take care o' you, an' you're quite a pretty lookin' little feller. The best you can do is to get some money out of her an' get a divorce."
The young man rolled back and forth and bit the pillows. Mrs. Pascoe, who had hitherto regarded him with contemptuous tolerance, observed a wave of genuine despair in this sea of grief and her eyes narrowed.
"See here, young man," she said, "don't you let me ketch ye doin' anything underhanded—squealin' on us or tryin' to keep us here, 'cause we got to get out. If I was to say a word to my son that I thought that, there wouldn't be no prettiness left to you. I ain't goin' to have her locked up in no jail for any man that ever was born. Mebbe you think, 'cause I speak harsh of her, I ain't fond of 'er. Why, you little fool, I ain't never had a thought but for that minx since she was born. Even when I first see the other child, an' the resemblance gimme such a turn, the first thing I think of was how I was goin' to get somepun' out of it for her. That's why when I got to nurse the little thing I never let on fur a minute that I had one the spittin' breathin' image of it,—hair, mouth and nose, an' the eyes, too, so I near fainted when I first seen theirs—somepun' warned me to shut up an' somepun' 'ud come of it. They thought I'd just gone cracked on their baby. It's been the same ever since. I read all them yarns about changed children an' I thought it would be funny if I couldn't work it. An' I did. She used to act it all to me afterwards, right out in poertry. 'The ol' earl's daughter died at my breast'—Didn't she ever do any of her actin' fur you? Goes—'I buried her like my own sweet child an' put my child in her stead.'" Mrs. Pascoe gave this forth with an inimitable relish of its stylish precedent. "If theirs hadn't died I'd ha' worked it somehow. They was rich then. She's walked on me an' on them, an' on the whole blame lot of us, ever since. But she's mine. What she wants she's goin' to have,—him or anything—I can't prevent her. No more can you. I'm goin' to stan' by her. An' you've got to."
"He's a murderer!" shrieked the Italian gentleman. "He's a murderer!"
"Seems like it's catchin'," Mrs. Pascoe commented. "Here's my daughter tells me you was hangin' round Mrs. Hope's all last Friday, lookin' fur that spy feller, an' all is you wasn't even competent to find him.—I guess I don't want to hear no talk outer you! Though as far forth as what roughness goes I don't say but what you wus druv to it."
The young man rose and stretching out a delicate hand, over which a gold bracelet drooped from underneath a highly fashionable British cuff, tremulously lighted a cigarette. Under its soothing influence he replied that of course he was a lost soul and he didn't deny that his companions had at last succeeded in dragging him to their level.
Mrs. Pascoe snorted like an angry horse. "Now you look here, Filly; when I married Mr. Ansello I didn't have no more idee what his business was than what you had. So far forth as what that goes, I didn't rightly ketch the whole o' what was goin' on till you come whoopin' along an' got us all into that muss where we had to clear out back to my country. I was mighty glad we did an' cut loose from all them demons—I said then an' I say now I won't stand fur nothin' rough! But you know as well as I do, oncet we was started out fur ourselves there's nobody ain't worked harder to keep to the quiet part o' the business 'un what yer brother-in-law an' yer wife has. It usta be, before Ally come back, that things did get oncet in a while beyond Nick's control, but never any more, thank the Lord—not in his own little crowd 'ut he has anything to do with! I guess there's one thing we agree on, young feller; it's jus' druv me crazy, lately, to get mixed up with the regular Society again. It's gettin' to be so big, even in this country, it won't let none o' the little ones work fur themselves—all this month since it took us in I've felt there was things goin' on I never got to hear of an' I'm mighty glad we're goin' to get away from it to-morrer." She caught herself back from what was evidently a favorite topic. "But don't let me hear any more talk about draggin' down! You've done considerable draggin' on us with all that feller spyin' on yeh costs us, an' yeh'd ought to thank the children the way they've kep' yeh clear out o' the whole business. Why, nobody hardly knows 'ut yer alive! Y' ain't asked to do anything, y' ain't asked to show yerself, y' ain't even ever been a member, so now the Society ain't nabbed on yeh none. I wisht it hadn't sent fur yeh to the meetin' to-day, jus' to take Nick the word an' his money. Ally nor me, we won't do—no, they gotta have a man, an' I s'pose they take you fur one! So far forth as what that goes the less I have to do with their greasy meetin's the better I like it, but I want you should be awful careful. If oncet they was to get on to who you was—Now, Filly, don't you smash them mugs!"
The Italian hastily resigned the object with which he had been angrily and absently rapping the table, and, exhausted with sobbing, began to breathe upon and polish his fingernails.
The mug, or jug, a little earthenware copy of a two-handled Etruscan drinking-vase, was one of three which stood there side by side, exactly alike save that the crude design which each of them bore—an arm and hand holding a scales—was differently colored; one red, one white, one green. But Mrs. Pascoe was aware of another difference and she turned the jugs around in a bar of sunlight till she found it; on one jug the scales of justice were gilded, on another silvered, on the third painted a dull gray. The single exclamation stenciled over each design translated into a sort of jingle: