JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR
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 reentered 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.
This time get rid of her.
I say. She but she can't g
real dau mother
et rid do the way
een any
She can but
mebbe
of
she's got to
ain't ever b
ghter to me
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'hote! "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?