I was surprised at her asking me instead of Brundige. I had never been
intimate with Anna. Susie I had known well and Mattie better, but
Leslie, in the old days, had merely smiled and seldom spoken, so that
I could not tell whether she liked me or not, while Anna had seemed to
avoid me.
I should have expected her to call Brundige, for Tom had been in Rio
longer than I, and much more recently.
She stood by the refrigerator in the back hall by the side door and
leaned against it, her brown hair almost golden against the lamp that
stood on the refrigerator.
“I daren’t look at the letter,” she said. “You read it, Billy.”
I found the name and it was Orodoff Guimaraes. Also, at the end of the
letter he told Mattie to write to him at his office address, Rua de
Alfandega, 49A.
“Come!” said Anna, in a fierce whisper.
I followed her through the side door and out into the tepid windless
moonlight.
She made for the barn.
The atmosphere of gloom and tragedy deepened about us. The moonlight
seemed weird and ghastly, the shadows of the trees grim and menacing,
the silence like that of a graveyard.
Anna leaned against the barnyard gate.
“Could I send a cablegram to Rio de Janeiro for thirty dollars?” she
queried.
“A long one for less,” I said. “When I was down there the rates were
sixty-five cents a word. That’s many years ago. The rates can’t be
over half that now. You could cable a letter for thirty dollars.”
“I have three ten-dollar bills,” she said. “Barton gave them to me for
emergencies just before I left Washington.”
“I have more than that in my pocket,” I said. “Between us we are sure
to have more than enough.”
“Do you suppose,” she asked, “that I could send a cable from Jonesville
this late Saturday night?”
“We might try,” I said.
“If we can’t,” she pressed me, “will you drive into Hagerstown with me?”
“Yes,” I promised.
“Oh,” she said, “I can’t bear it. I can see him lying dead on those
cruel paving stones. I can’t bear it.”
I remembered that, just as Rex and Leslie had been inseparable all
through their childhood, so Anna and Pake had been comrades from the
cradle on. I said nothing.
“Can you hitch up without the lantern?” she demanded.
“Has the stable been altered?” I asked.
“Not a bit,” she said.
In fact my hand in the dark found in the same places what might have
been the same hickory harness-pegs and on them what seemed like the
same old sets of harness.
“Which stall?” I asked.
“Laddie’s old stall,” she directed me; “call her Nell.”
I harnessed the mare and led her out to the carriage shed. Anna climbed
into the buggy. I opened the gate into the grove and closed it after
she had driven through. At the far end of the grove I got out of the
buggy again and let down the bars. After I had put them up and was at
last in the buggy she handed the reins to me.
“Nell can trot,” she said.
Nell trotted, the snaky black shadows lay inky dark across the road.
We tore past Grotto station. We neared Jonesville. I had no sense of
ineptitude or futility in what we were trying to do. I did not feel I
was on a wild goose chase. I did not feel absurd. I took our errand
most seriously. We were on our way to warn Pake against the devilish
machinations of a fiend who had contrived and compassed three ingenious
murders. We were racing against time to warn him before it was too
late. I was wrought up to the highest pitch of excitement over the
gravity and urgency of our mission.
We found the telegraph operator still awake. We persuaded him to do as
we asked. Anna wrote and I amended till we agreed on:
“Change your office immediately. Do not enter it again on any account.
Get another office at once. Act instantly; this is a matter of life
and death. Explanations by letter.
“ANNA.”
When the cablegram was sent off we drove homeward, at Nell’s natural
pace, which was not slow.
We felt only partly relieved.
A dozen times Anna sighed:
“I hope we were in time; oh, I hope we were in time!”
The atmosphere of gloom and tragedy pursued us as we returned,
enveloped the Alders when again we were seated on the porch.
Hardly were we seated when Mattie’s husband came. I had heard he had
been consumptive, but had recovered completely. He looked to me like a
dying man; haggard, gray-cheeked, sunken-eyed, trembling. He greeted
people like a sleep-walker.
As soon as greetings were over he said:
“Buck, I want to talk business to you a moment.”
Buck stood up. He had the Hibbard faculty of intuition and
unexpectedness. I was used to both, of old. But I was very much
astonished when he pinched me as he passed and indicated that I was to
come, too.
In the back hall by the refrigerator Alf looked up at Buck like a
hunted animal at bay.
“My God, Buck,” he said. “How’ll we ever break it to the girls?”
“Break what?” Buck queried, his voice dry and thin.
“There was a cablegram for you at Hagerstown,” Alf replied. “Beesore
had sense enough not to telephone it out here. He saw me and gave it to
me. Pake’s dead.”
“Let’s look at the cablegram,” Buck said thickly.
He looked, holding it closely to the kerosene lamp on the refrigerator.
Then he handed it to me.