"Police!" Hedrick woke so abruptly, and uttered the word with such
passionate and vehement protest, that everybody started. "I
suppose you want to _kill_ your father, Laura Madison!"
"How?"
"Do you suppose he wouldn't know something had happened with a
squad of big, heavy policemen tromping all over the house? The
first thing they'd do would be to search the whole place----"
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Madison quickly. "It wouldn't do at all."
"I should think not! I'm glad," continued Hedrick, truthfully,
"_that_ idea's out of your head! I believe Laura imagined the
whole thing anyway."
"Have you looked at her mattress," inquired Cora, "darling little
boy?"
He gave her a concentrated look, and rose to leave. "Nothin' on
earth but imagina----" He stopped with a grunt as he forgetfully
put his weight on his left leg. He rubbed his knee, swallowed
painfully, and, leaving the word unfinished, limped haughtily from
the room.
He left the house, gloomily swinging his books from a spare length
of strap, and walking with care to ease his strains and bruises as
much as possible. He was very low in his mind, that boy. His
fortunes had reached the ebb-tide, but he had no hope of a rise.
He had no hope of anything. It was not even a consolation that,
through his talent for surprise in waylayings, it had lately been
thought necessary, by the Villard family, to have Egerton
accompanied to and from school by a man-servant. Nor was Hedrick
more deeply depressed by the certainty that both public and
domestic scandal must soon arise from the inevitable revelation of
his discontinuing his attendance at school without mentioning this
important change of career at home. He had been truant a full
fortnight, under brighter circumstances a matter for a lawless
pride--now he had neither fear nor vainglory. There was no room in
him for anything but dejection.
He walked two blocks in the direction of his school; turned a
corner; walked half a block; turned north in the alley which ran
parallel to Corliss Street, and a few moments later had cautiously
climbed into an old, disused refuse box which stood against the
rear wall of the empty stable at his own home. He pried up some
loose boards at the bottom of the box, and entered a tunnel which
had often and often served in happier days--when he had
friends--for the escape of Union officers from Libby Prison and
Andersonville. Emerging, wholly soiled, into a box-stall, he
crossed the musty carriage house and ascended some rickety steps
to a long vacant coachman's-room, next to the hayloft. He closed
the door, bolted it, and sank moodily upon a broken, old horsehair
sofa.
This apartment was his studio. In addition to the sofa, it
contained an ex-bureau, three chair-like shapes, a once
marble-topped table, now covered with a sheet of zinc, two empty
bird cages, and a condemned whatnot. The walls were rather
over-decorated in coloured chalks, the man-headed-snake motive
predominating; they were also loopholed for firing into the
hayloft. Upon the table lay a battered spy-glass, minus lenses,
and, nearby, two boxes, one containing dried corn-silk, the other
hayseed, convenient for the making of amateur cigarettes; the
smoker's outfit being completed by a neat pile of rectangular
clippings from newspapers. On the shelves of the whatnot were some
fragments of a dead pie, the relics of a "Fifteen-Puzzle," a pink
Easter-egg, four seashells, a tambourine with part of a girl's
face still visible in aged colours, about two thirds of a
hot-water bag, a tintype of Hedrick, and a number of books:
several by Henty, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," "100
Practical Jokes, Easy to Perform," "The Jungle Book," "My Lady
Rotha," a "Family Atlas," "Three Weeks," "Pilgrim's Progress," "A
Boy's Life in Camp," and "The Mystery of the Count's Bedroom."
The gloomy eye of Hedrick wandered to "The Mystery of the Count's
Bedroom," and remained fixed upon it moodily and contemptuously.
His own mystery made that one seem tame and easy: Laura's bedroom
laid it all over the Count's, in his conviction; and with a soul
too weary of pain to shudder, he reviewed the bafflements and
final catastrophe of the preceding night.
He had not essayed the attempt upon the mattress until assured
that the house was wrapped in slumber. Then, with hope in his
heart, he had stolen to Laura's room, lit the lamp, feeling safe
from intrusion, and set to work. His implement at first was a long
hatpin of Cora's. Lying on his back beneath the bed, and, moving
the slats as it became necessary, he sounded every cubic inch of
the mysterious mattress without encountering any obstruction which
could reasonably be supposed to be the ledger. This was not more
puzzling than it was infuriating, since by all processes of
induction, deduction, and pure logic, the thing was necessarily
there. It was nowhere else. Therefore it was there. It _had_ to be
there! With the great blade of his Boy Scout's knife he began to
disembowel the mattress.
For a time he had worked furiously and effectively, but the
position was awkward, the search laborious, and he was obliged to
rest frequently. Besides, he had waited to a later hour than he
knew, for his mother to go to bed, and during one of his rests he
incautiously permitted his eyes to close. When he woke, his
sisters were in the room, and he thought it advisable to remain
where he was, though he little realized how he had weakened his
shelter. When Cora left the room, he heard Laura open the window,
sigh, and presently a tiny clinking and a click set him a-tingle
from head to foot: she was opening the padlocked book. The
scratching sound of a pen followed. And yet she had not come near
the bed. The mattress, then, was a living lie.
With infinite caution he had moved so that he could see her,
arriving at a coign of vantage just as she closed the book. She
locked it, wrapped it in an oilskin cover which lay beside it on
the table, hung the key-chain round her neck, rose, yawned, and,
to his violent chagrin, put out the light. He heard her moving but
could not tell where, except that it was not in his part of the
room. Then a faint shuffling warned him that she was approaching
the bed, and he withdrew his head to avoid being stepped upon. The
next moment the world seemed to cave in upon him.
Laura's flight had given him opportunity to escape to his own room
unobserved; there to examine, bathe and bind his wounds, and to
rectify his first hasty impression that he had been fatally
mangled.