Hood and Deering found Cassowary sitting in the machine in the inn yard
reading a newspaper; this Hood promptly seized and scanned with his
trained eye.
"Are the bags aboard? Ah, I see you have been forehanded, Cassowary!"
Deering went to the inn office and came out with a number of telegrams
which he read as he slowly crossed the yard.
"What do you think of this?" he asked weakly. The yellow sheets shook in
his hand and his face was white. "I wired to a bank and a club in San
Francisco last night, and they've answered that father isn't in San
Francisco and hasn't been there! And I wired the people Constance was to
visit at Pasadena, and they don't know anything about her. Just look at
these things!"
"Sounds like straight information, but why worry?" remarked Hood,
scanning the telegrams.
"But why should father lie to me? Why should Constance say she was going
to California if she wasn't?"
"My dear boy, don't ask me such questions!" Hood remarked with an injured
air. "You are guilty of the gravest error in sending telegrams without
consulting me! How can we trust ourselves to Providence if you persist in
sending telegrams! If you do this again, I shall be seriously displeased,
and you mustn't displease Hood. Hood is very ugly in his wrath."
Deering was at the point of tears. Hood was a fool, and he wished to tell
him so, but the words stuck in his throat.
"We move eastward toward the Connecticut border, Cassowary," Hood ordered
and pushed Deering into the machine.
Hood was as merry as the morning itself, and talked ceaselessly as they
rolled through the country, occasionally bidding Cassowary slow down and
give heed to his discourse. The chauffeur listened with a grin, glancing
guardedly at Deering, who stared grimly ahead with an unlighted cigar in
his mouth. He was not to be disturbed in his meditations upon the
blackness of the world by the idiotic prattle of a madman. For half an
hour Hood had been describing his adventures with a Dublin University
man, whose humor he pronounced the keenest and most satisfying he had
ever known. He had gathered from this person an immense fund of lore
relating to Irish superstitions.
"He left me just when I had learned to love him," Hood concluded
mournfully. "Became fascinated with a patent-medicine faker we struck at
a county fair in Indiana. He was so tickled over the way the long-haired
doctor played the banjo and jollied the crowd that he attached himself to
his caravan. That Irishman was one of the most agreeable men to be in
jail with that I ever knew; even hardened murderers would cotton to him.
That spire over there must be Addington. The inn is nothing to boast of,
but we'd better tackle it."
His gayety at luncheon once more won Deering to a cheerier view of his
destiny. Hood called for the proprietor and lectured him roundly for
offering canned-blueberry pie. The fact that blueberries were out of
season made no difference to the outraged Hood; pie produced from a can
was a gross imposition. He cited legal decisions covering such cases and
intimated that he might bring proceedings. As the innkeeper strode
angrily away an elderly woman at a neighboring table addressed the
dining-room on the miserable incompetence of the pastry-cooks of these
later times, winding up by thanking Hood heartily for his protest. She
was from Boston, she announced, and the declining intellectual life of
that city she attributed to the deterioration of its pie.
Hood rose and gravely replied in a speech of five minutes, much to the
delight of two girls at the old lady's table. Hood wrote his name on the
menu card, and bade the giggling waitress hand it to the lady from
Boston. Her young companions conferred for a moment, and then sent back a
card on which appeared these names neatly pencilled:
Maid Marian
The Queen of Sheba
The Duchess of Suffolk (Mass.)
"My dear boy," Hood remarked to Deering after he had bowed elaborately to
the trio, "I tell you the whole world's caught step with us! That lady
and her two nieces, or granddaughters as the case may be, are under the
spell, just as you and I are and Cassowary and your Pierrette and Babette
of the bungalow. If only you could yield yourself to the May spirit, how
happy we might be! Just think of Cassowary; worth a million dollars and
eating his lunch with the chauffeurs somewhere below stairs and picking
up much information that he will impart to me later! What a bully world
this would be if all mankind followed my system: stupid conventions all
broken-down; the god of mirth holding his sides as he contemplates the
world at play! You may be sure that old lady is a stickler for the
proprieties when she's at home; widow of a bishop most likely. Those
girls have been carefully reared, you can see that, but full of the
spirit of mischief. The moment I tackled that stupid innkeeper about his
monstrous pie they felt the drawing of the mystic tie that binds us
together with silken cords. Very likely they, like us, are in search of
adventure, and if our own affairs were less urgent I should certainly
cultivate their further acquaintance."
The lady who called herself the Duchess of Suffolk (Mass.) was
undoubtedly a person of consequence and the possessor of a delightful
humor. Deering assumed that she and her companions were abroad upon a
lark of some kind and were enjoying themselves tremendously. Hood's spell
renewed its grip upon him. It occurred to him that the whole world might
have been touched with the May madness, and that the old order of things
had passed forever. It seemed ages since he had watched the ticker in his
father's office. As they sat smoking on the veranda the Duchess of
Suffolk, the Queen of Sheba, and Maid Marian came out and entered a big
car. The old lady bowed with dignity as the car moved off; the girls
waved their hands.
"Perfect!" Hood muttered as he returned their salutations. "We may never
meet again in this world, but the memory of this encounter will abide
with me forever."
"I don't want to appear fussy, Hood," Deering began good-naturedly, "but
would you mind telling me what's next on your programme?"
"Not in the slightest. It's just occurred to me that it would be well to
dine to-night in one of the handsome villas scattered through these
hills. Still following the slipper, we shall choose one somewhere east of
the inn and present ourselves confidently at the front door. Failing
there, we shall assault the postern and, perhaps, enrich our knowledge of
life with the servants' gossip."
"There are some famous kennels in this neighborhood, and I'd hate awfully
to have an Airedale bite a hole in my leg," Deering suggested.
"My dear boy, that's the tamest thing that could happen to us! My calves
are covered with scars from dogs' teeth; you soon get hardened to canine
ferocity. We'll take a tramp for an hour to work the fuzz off our gray
matter, and then a nap to freshen us up for the evening. We shall learn
much to-night; I'm confident of that."
There seemed to be no way of escaping Hood or changing his mind once he
announced a decision. The programme was put through exactly as he had
indicated. The important thing about the tramp was that Cassowary
accompanied them on the walk, and Deering found him both agreeable and
interesting. He discoursed of polo, last year's Harvard-Yale football
game, and ice-boating, in which he seemed deeply experienced.
Hood left them to look for hieroglyphics on a barn which he said was a
veritable palimpsest of cryptic notations of roving thieves.
Cassowary's manner underwent a marked change when he and Deering were
alone.
"If you're going to give the old boy the slip," he said earnestly, "I
want you to give me notice. I'm not going to be left alone with him."
Their eyes met in a long scrutiny; then Deering laughed.
"I don't know how you feel about it, but, by George, I'm afraid to shake
him!"
"That's exactly my fix," Cassowary answered. "I was in a bad way when he
picked me up: just about ready to jump off a high building and let it go
at that. And I must say he does make things seem brighter. He mustn't see
us talking off key, as he'd say, but I'd like to ask you this: what's he
running away from? That's what worries me. What's he grabbing newspapers
for all the time and slashing out ads and other queer stuff?"
"You've got me there," Deering replied soberly. "We ran into some men the
other night who he said were detectives looking for him, but it didn't
seem to worry him any."
"There's nothing new in _that_. We've struck a number of men who
apparently were looking for somebody, and he greatly enjoys chaffing
them. If he's really a crook, he wouldn't be exposing himself to arrest
as he does."
Hood was now returning from his investigations of the barn, and as he
crossed the pasture was examining a bunch of the newspaper clippings with
which his pockets were stuffed.
"You needn't be afraid of getting into trouble with him," Cassowary
remarked admiringly. "He pulls off things you wouldn't think could be
done. He's a marvel, that man!"
"Old Bill Fogarty's been ripping into the country stores in these parts,"
began Hood volubly; "found his mark on the barn, all right. Amusing cuss,
Fogarty. Sawed himself out of most of the jails between here and Bangor.
We'll probably meet up with him somewhere. It's about time to go back for
that snooze, boys. To the road again!"
He strode off singing, in a very good tenor voice, snatches from Italian
operas, and his pace was so rapid that his companions were hard pressed
to keep up with him.