MISS FITCHET IS SURPRISED
If after Josie left the Hotel Haddon with little Philip she had again
ensconced herself in the ladies’ parlor of the Alpha, at the window
overlooking the street, instead of hurrying off as she did to the
station, she would have seen an interesting drama enacted. About
fifteen minutes after Cheatham and his companion left the hotel a
rough-looking man in a tweed suit and battered derby came slinking
along the street. He stopped in front of the hotel and looked furtively
around and then, evidently seeing nothing disconcerting, he darted
within. He, too, avoided the desk and also saved the elevator boy the
trouble of taking him upstairs. He almost ran down the hall and turned
the knob of Number 220. The door opened to him as it had to Josie.
“Humph! Where’s that blasted kid?” he muttered. “Hi! You kid, where
yuh hiding? You better come on out from under the bed. I ain’t one to
be easy on bad boys.” His tone was rough and commanding. Receiving no
answer, he jerked open the closet door and looked under the bed. He
even pulled out the drawers of the bureau, poked behind the radiator,
and then turned up the mattress, as though he expected someone to be
hid under it.
“She sure said 220,” he muttered, and drew from his pocket a note
written on Hotel Haddon paper. He read:
“Dear Bill: Old C. will be here at three. I will take him out
walking and will leave the door unlocked. Get the brat and make
for L. on the night boat. Sis.”
“Something’s gone wrong,” he growled, “but she needn’t think she can
double-cross me. She took the kid with her more’n likely and left me in
a hole.” The man’s expression was brutal and lowering. Without stopping
to straighten the room, which he had succeeded in making look as though
a cyclone had struck it, he walked down the stairs and out of the
hotel. He then lounged across the street and, taking his stand near the
Hotel Alpha, he awaited the return of Cheatham and Miss Fitchet.
They were gone about an hour and then they came, walking very
leisurely, still talking animatedly but not so amicably as when they
had started on their ramble.
“I told you all the time Cincinnati was too close to Louisville and
Atlanta would be the better place,” Cheatham was saying.
“Well, Cincinnati suited me better,” she said with her panther-like
grin. “I reckon I’ve had all the trouble of this thing and I might be
considered a little.”
“So you have, but I have financed it,” he said.
“Oh, yes, financed it with a room in a cheap hotel and not even taxi
fare if you could help it!”
“Oh, well, I haven’t got so much, and you know it. I have managed to
keep Ursula Ellett from having the slightest inkling of Ben Benson’s
having left her a fortune. I wanted to be sure the boy was well hidden
and then I would get to work with letters telling her of her fortune,
following by demands for a large sum if the child was safely returned.
Ursula is such a softy and so close-mouthed she would be easy to do
out of this fortune, just as she has been easy to persuade that her
father’s fortune belonged to me. If she had had the gumption to go to a
good lawyer, I should have had to pursue other tactics. Well, I’ll bid
you good-bye, my dear. I’d like to take you to dinner but the boy knows
me too well for me to let him see me. It is a blessing he never saw you
before.”
“Good-bye then,” she smirked, “but it would be just as well to give
me a little cash. I am about broke and considering you expect to make
such large sums out of this business you might afford a little more
sumptuous quarters for your tool.”
He reluctantly separated several large bills from a roll.
“Not half enough,” she said. “Keep it up! You needn’t think I’ll do
your dirty work for nothing.”
He sullenly peeled off two more bills and put the roll back in his
pocket.
“Well, keep me informed how things are with you. It won’t be long
before I can make my haul.”
“Your haul, is it? I was thinking it would be our haul.”
“Oh, yes! Certainly! I have a man to see on business while I am in
Cincinnati and then I must catch the night train for Louisville. I’ll
see you again before I go. My room is 320--directly over yours. You can
telephone me there!”
The man in the tweed suit waited until Cheatham was out of sight and
then he darted across the street and again mounted the stairs to Room
220. He found the woman standing in the middle of the floor gazing with
disgust on the dismantled state of her room. One bureau drawer had been
pulled entirely out and the contents strewn over the floor. The open
closet door disclosed clothing jerked from the hooks and the mattress
was turned over, with bed clothes thrown around anywhere and everywhere.
“Well, Bill,” she said sharply, “you managed to get things in a nice
mess! Where’s the brat? You were to take him and keep him and not come
back until you heard from me. I don’t see that you need have turned up
my things in this way. Of course you were hunting money, but you might
have known I wouldn’t have left it around where you could get hold of
it.”
“Money, is it? You--you--you two-faced----!” The man was so angry he
could hardly speak. “You think you can double-cross me, do you, and get
by with it? Not on your life!”
The woman stared at him in astonishment. She looked at him fixedly and
her grin turned to a snarl.
“Bill, you are crazy. I don’t know what you are talking about. You stop
your carrying on and tell me where that boy is.”
“You tell me! When I got here he was gone and I messed up the room
hunting for him, thinking he was hiding.”
“Gone!” Miss Fitchet’s tone was one of such genuine dismay that the
brother was forced to recognize her sincerity.
“Yes, gone!”
“Well then you have got to find him. I don’t trust you, Bill. You have
lied to me before now.”
“Trust me or not--the kid’s gone and I reckon we’d best get busy
finding him. I’d have started before now, but I thought you were
playing me a trick.”
“He’s somewhere here in the hotel, I am sure. He’s always trying to
make friends and I guess as soon as I had my back turned he was out of
the room. I’ll settle things when I do find him.”
Inquiry at the desk for her “nephew” disclosed nothing. The clerk had
been off duty. The elevator boy had seen no child coming or going. The
chambermaid had no knowledge of the boy. The hotel was ransacked from
basement to roof.
“I fancy you’d better get in touch with the police,” suggested the
clerk. As that was the last thing Fitchet wished to do, she became
angry at mention of the officers of the law and began to berate the
management of the Hotel Haddon for their carelessness.
“Come, lady, we don’t run a nursery,” laughed the clerk. “You’d have
been better off at the Alpha if you’d wanted a day nurse for the boy.
We don’t make a specialty of kids.”
“I wonder if old Cheatham himself could have had the boy spirited away
while I was off,” Miss Fitchet suggested to her brother. “He’s capable
of it.”
“Of course! That’s exactly the ticket. I’ll wring his neck for him. He
ain’t got any honor,” said Bill.
“We’ll take the night train for Louisville and give him what’s what.
I reckon he’ll be expecting me to come to him with a tale of Philip’s
being stolen and he’ll have some big lie ready. I’ll fool him. I won’t
tell him the boy’s gone.”
While Fitchet was berating Cheatham to her brother, a messenger came
with a letter for her. It was from her employer and confederate telling
her he was taking the afternoon express for Louisville and would not
see her again but that he would be back in Cincinnati in a few days.
“The villain!” she cried. “Come on, Bill, we’ll catch the express!”
Literally throwing her clothes into a valise, and without stopping to
pay the jocular clerk, she and the disreputable brother jumped into a
taxi and sped to the station. They barely made the train, just as it
was pulling out.