Close on Young Remington's groan of utter disillusionment came a sound
from the street, formless and clumsy, but brought to a sharp climax with
the crash of breaking glass.
Even through the closed window which Penfield Evans hastily threw up,
there was an obvious quality to the disturbance which revealed its
character even before they had grasped its import.
The street was still full of morning shadows, with here and there
a dancing glimmer on the cobbles of the still level sun, caught on
swinging dinner pails as the loosely assorted crowd drifted toward shop
and factory.
In many of the windows half-drawn blinds marked where spruce window
trimmers added last touches to masterpieces created overnight, but
directly opposite nothing screened the offense of the Voiceless Speech,
which continued to display its accusing questions to the passer-by.
Clean through the plate-glass front a stone had crashed, leaving a heap
of shining splinters, on either side of which a score of men and boys
loosely clustered, while further down a ripple of disturbance marked
where the thrower of the stone had just vanished into some recognized
port of safety.
It was a clumsy crowd, half-hearted, moved chiefly by a cruel delight
in destruction for its own sake, and giving voice at intervals to
coarse comment of which the wittiest penetrated through a stream
of profanity, like one of those same splinters of glass, to the
consciousness of at least two of the three men who hung listening in the
window above:
"To hell with the----suffragists!"
At the same moment another stone hurled through the break sent the
Voiceless Speech toppling; it lay crumpled in a pathetic feminine sort
of heap, subject to ribald laughter, but Penny Evans' involuntary cry
of protest was cut off by his partner's hand on his shoulder. "They're
Noonan's men, Penny; it's a put-up job."
George had marked some of the crowd at the meetings Noonan had arranged
for him, and the last touch to the perfunctory character of the
disturbance was added by the leisurely stroll of the policeman turning
in at the head of the street. Before he reached the crowd it had
redissolved into the rapidly filling thoroughfare.
"It's no use, Penny. Our women have seen the light and beaten us to it;
we've got to go with them or with Noonan and his--Mike the Goat!"
Recollection of his wife's plight cut him like a knife. "The
Brewster-Smith women have got to choose for themselves!" He felt about
for his hat like a man blind with purpose.
The street sweeper was taking up the fragments of the shattered windows
half an hour later, when Martin Jaffry found himself going rather
aimlessly along Main Street with a feeling that the bottom had recently
dropped out of things--a sensation which, if the truth must be told,
was greatly augmented by the fact that he hadn't yet breakfasted. He had
remained behind the two younger men to get into communication with Betty
Sheridan and ask her to stay close to the telephone in case Miss Eliot
should again attempt to get into touch with her. He lingered still,
dreading to go into any of the places where he was known lest he should
somehow be led to commit himself embarrassingly on the subject of his
nephew's candidacy.
His middle-aged jauntiness considerably awry, he moved slowly down the
heedless street, subject to the most gloomy reflections. Like most men,
Martin Jaffry had always been dimly aware that the fabric of society is
held together by a system of mutual weaknesses and condonings, but he
had always thought of himself and his own family as moving freely in the
interstices, peculiarly exempt, under Providence, from strain. Now
here they were, in such a position that the first stumbling foot might
tighten them all into inextricable scandal.
It is true that Penny, at the last moment, had prevailed on George
to put off the relief of his feelings by public repudiation of his
political connections, at least until after a conference with the
police. And to George's fear that the newspapers would get the news from
the police before he had had a chance to repudiate, he had countered
with a suggestion, drawn from an item in the private history of the
chief--known to him through his father's business--which he felt certain
would quicken the chief's sense of the propriety of keeping George's
predicament from the press.
"My God!" said George in amazement, and Martin Jaffry had responded
fervently with "O Lord!"
Not because it shocked him to think that there might be indiscretions
known to the lawyer of a chief of police which the chief might not wish
known to the world, but because, with the addition of this new coil to
his nephew's affairs, he was suddenly struck with the possibility of
still other coils in any one of which the saving element of indiscretion
might be wanting.
Suppose they should come upon one, just one impregnable honesty, one
soul whom the fear of exposure left unshaken. On such a possibility
rested the exemption of the Jaffry-Remingtons. It was the reference to
E. Eliot in his instructions to Betty which had awakened in Jaffry's
mind the disquieting reflection that just here might prove such an
impregnability. They probably wouldn't be able to "do anything" with E.
Eliot simply because she herself had never done anything she was afraid
to go to the public about. To do him justice, it never occurred to him
that in the case of a lady it was easily possible to invent something
which would be made to answer in place of an indiscretion.
Probably that was Martin Jaffry's own impregnability--that he wouldn't
have lied about a lady to save himself. What he did conclude was that
it was just this unbending quality of women, this failure to provide the
saving weakness, which unfitted them for political life.
He shuddered, seeing the whole fabric of politics fall in ruins around
an electorate composed largely of E. Eliots, feeling himself stripped
of everything that had so far distinguished him from the Noonans and the
Doolittles.
Out of his sudden need for reinstatement with himself, he raised in his
mind the vision of woman as the men of Martin Jaffry's world conceived
her--a tender, enveloping medium in which male complacency, unchecked
by any breath of criticism, reaches its perfect flower--the flower whose
fruit, eaten in secret and afar from the soil which nourishes it, is
graft, corruption and civic incompetence.
Instinctively his need directed him toward the Remington place.
Mrs. Brewster-Smith was glad to see him. Between George's hurried
departure and Jaffry's return several of the specters that haunt such
women's lives looked boldly in at the window.
There was the specter of scandal, as it touched the Remingtons, touching
that dearest purchase of femininity, social standing; there was the
specter of poverty, which threatened from the exposure of the source of
her income and the enforcement of the law; nearer and quite as poignant,
was the specter of an ignominious retreat from the comfort of George
Remington's house to her former lodging, which she was shrewd enough to
realize would follow close on the return of her cousin's wife.
All morning she had beaten off the invisible host with that
courage--worthy of a better cause--with which women of her class
confront the assaults of reality; and the sight of Martin Jaffry coming
up the broad front walk met her like a warm waft of security. She flung
open the door and met him with just that mixture of deference and relief
which the situation demanded.
She was terribly anxious about poor Genevieve, of course, but not
so anxious that she couldn't perceive how Genevieve's poor uncle had
suffered.
"What, no breakfast! Oh, you poor man! Come right out into the
dining-room."
Mrs. Brewster-Smith might have her limitations, but she was entirely
aware of the appeasing effect of an open fire and a spread cloth
even when no meal is in sight; she was adept in the art of enveloping
tenderness and the extent to which it may be augmented by the pleasing
aroma of ham and eggs and the coffee which she made herself. And oh,
those _poor_ women, what _disaster_ they were bringing on themselves by
their prying into things that were better left to more competent minds,
and what pain to _other_ minds! So _selfish_, but of course they didn't
realize. Really she hoped it would be a lesson to Genevieve. The dear
girl was so changed that she didn't see how she was going to go on
living with her; though, of course, she would like to stand by dear
George--and a woman did so appreciate a home!
At this point the enveloping tenderness of Mrs. Brewster-Smith
concentrated in her fine eyes, just brushed the heart of her listener
as with a passing wing, hovered a moment, and dropped demurely to the
tablecloth.
In the meantime two sorely perplexed citizens were grappling with the
problem of the disappearance of two highly respectable women from their
homes under circumstances calculated to give the greatest anxiety to
faithful "party" men. It hadn't needed Penny's professional acquaintance
with Chief Buckley to impress the need of secrecy on that official's
soul. "Squeal" on Noonan or Mike the Goat? Not if he knew himself.
Naturally Mr. Remington must have his wife, but at the same time it was
important to proceed regularly.
"And the day before election, too!" mourned the chief. "Lord, what a
mess! But keep cool, Mr. Remington; this will come out all right!"
After half an hour of such ineptitudes, Penfield Evans found it
necessary to withdraw his partner from the vicinity of the police before
his impatience reached the homicidal pitch.
"Buckley's no such fool as he sounds," Penny advised. "He probably has a
pretty good idea where the women are hidden, but you must give him time
to tip off Mike for a getaway."
But the suggestion proved ill chosen, at least so far as it involved a
hope of keeping George from the newspapers. Shocked to the core of his
young egotism as he had been, Remington was yet not so shocked that
the need of expression was not stronger in him than any more distant
consideration.
"Getaway!" he frothed. "Getaway! While a woman like my wife--" But the
bare idea was too much for him.
"They may get away, but they'll not get off--not a damned one of
them--of _us_," he corrected himself, and with face working the popular
young candidate for district attorney set off almost on a run for the
office of the Sentinel.
Reflecting that if his friend was bent upon official suicide, there was
still no reason for his being, a witness to it, Penny turned aside into
a telephone booth and called up Betty Sheridan. He heard her jump at
the sound of his voice, and the rising breath of relief running into his
name.
"O-o-oh, Penny! Yes, about twenty minutes ago. Genevieve is with her....
Oh, yes, I'm sure."
Her voice sounded strong and confident.
"They're in a house about an hour from the factory," she went on, "among
some trees. I'm sure she said trees. We were cut off. No, I couldn't get
her again.... Yes... it's a party line. In the Redfield district. Oh,
Penny, do you think they'll do her any harm?"
It was, no doubt, the length of time it took to assure Miss Sheridan on
this point that prevented Evans from getting around to the _Sentinel_,
whose editor was at that moment giving an excellent exhibition of
indecision between his obligation as a journalist and his role of
leading citizen in a town where he met his subscribers at dinner.
It was good stuff--oh, it was good! What headlines!
PROMINENT SOCIETY WOMEN KIDNAPPED
CANDIDATE REMINGTON REPUDIATES PARTY!
It was good for a double evening edition. On the other hand, there was
Norton, one of his largest advertisers. There was also the rival city
of Hamilton, which was even now basely attempting to win away from
Whitewater a recently offered Carnegie library on the ground of its
superior fitness.
Finally there was the party.
The _Sentinel_ had always been a sound party organ. But _what_ a scoop!
And suppose it were possible to save the party at the expense of
its worst element? Suppose they raised the cry of reform and brought
Remington in on a full tide of public indignation?
Would Mike stand the gaff? If it were made worth his while. But what
about Noonan and Doolittle? So the editorial mind shuttled to and fro
amid the confused outpourings of the amazed young candidate, while with
eyes bright and considering as a rat's the editor followed Remington in
his pacings up and down the dusty, littered room.
Completely occupied with his own reactions, George's repudiation swept
on in an angry, rapid stream which, as it spent itself, began to give
place to the benumbing consciousness of a divided hearing.
Until this moment Remington had had a pleasant sense of the press as
a fine instrument upon which he had played with increasing mastery, a
trumpet upon which, as his mind filled with commendable purposes,
he could blow a very pretty tune,--a noble tune with now and then a
graceful flourish acceptable to the public ear. Now as he talked he
began to be aware of flatness, of squeaking keys....
"Naturally, Mr. Remington, I'll have to take this up with the business
management..." dry-lipped, the tune sputtered out. At this juncture the
born journalist awaked again in the editorial breast at the entrance of
Penfield Evans with his new item of Betty's interrupted message.
Two women shut up in a mysterious house among the trees! Oh, hot stuff,
indeed!
Under it George rallied, recovered a little of the candidate's manner.
"Understand," he insisted. "This goes in even if I have to pay for it at
advertising rates."
A swift pencil raced across the paper as Remington's partner swept him
off again to the police.
Betty's call had come a few minutes before ten. What had happened was
very simple.
The two women had been given breakfast, for which their hands had been
momentarily freed. When the bonds had been tied again it had been easy
for E. Eliot to hold her hands in such a position that she was left,
when their keeper withdrew, with a little freedom of movement.
By backing up to the knob she had been able to open a door into an
adjoining room, in which she had been able to make out a telephone on a
stand against the wall.
This room also had locked windows and closed shutters, but her quick wit
had enabled her to make use of that telephone.
Shouldering the receiver out of the hook, she had called Betty's number,
and, with Genevieve stooping to listen at the dangling receiver, had
called out two or three broken sentences.
Guarded as their voices had been, however, some one in the house had
been attracted by them, and the wire had been cut at some point outside
the room. E. Eliot and Genevieve came to this conclusion after having
lost Betty and failed to raise any answer to their repeated calls.
Somebody came and looked in at them through the half-open door, and,
seeing them still bound, had gone away again with a short, contemptuous
laugh.
"No matter," said E. Eliot. "Betty heard us, and the central office will
be able to trace the call."
It was because she could depend on Betty's intelligence, she went on to
say, that she had called her instead of the Remington house--for suppose
that fool Brewster-Smith woman had come to the telephone!
She and Genevieve occupied themselves with their bonds, fumbling back
to back for a while, until Genevieve had a brilliant idea. Kneeling,
she bit at the cords which held Miss Eliot's wrists until they began to
give.
* * * * *
What Betty had done intelligently was nothing to what she had done
without meaning it. She had been unkind to Pudge. Young Sheridan was in
a condition which, according to his own way of looking at it, demanded
the utmost kindness.
Following a too free indulgence in _marrons glaces_ he had been
relegated to a diet that reduced him to the extremity of desperation.
Not only had he been forbidden to eat sweets, but while his soul still
longed for its accustomed solace, his stomach refused it, and he was
unable to eat a box of candied fruit which he had with the greatest
ingenuity secured.
And that was the occasion Betty took--herself full of nervous starts and
mysterious recourse to the telephone behind locked doors--to remind him
cruelly that he was getting flabby from staying too much in the house
and to recommend a long walk for his good.
It was plain that she would stick at nothing to get her brother out of
the way, and Pudge was cut to the heart.
Oh, well, he would go for a walk, from which he would probably be
brought home a limp and helpless cripple. Come to think of it, if he
once got started to walk he was not sure he would ever turn back; he
would just walk on and on into a kinder environment than this.
After all, it is impossible to walk in that fateful way in a crowded
city thoroughfare. Besides, one passes so many confectioners with their
mingled temptation and disgust. Pudge rode on the trolley as far as
the city limits. Here there was softer ground underfoot and a hint
of melancholy in the fields. A flock of crows going over gave the
appropriate note.
Off there to the left, set back from the road among dark, crowding
trees, stood a mysterious house. Pudge always insisted that he had
known it for mysterious at the first glance. It had a mansard roof and
shutters of a sickly green, all closed; there was not a sign of life
about, but smoke issued from one of the chimneys.
Here was an item potent to raise the sleuth that slumbers in every boy,
even in such well-cushioned bosoms as Pudge Sheridan's.
He paused in his walk, fell into an elaborately careless slouch, and
tacked across the open country toward the back of the house. Here he
discovered a considerable yard fenced with high boards that had once
been painted the same sickly green as the shutters, and a great buckeye
tree just outside, spreading its branches over the corner furthest from
the house.
Toward this post of observation he was drifting with that fine
assumption of aimlessness which can be managed on occasion by almost any
boy, when he was arrested by a slight but unmistakable shaking of one of
the shutters, as though some one from within were trying the fastenings.
The shaking stopped after a moment, and then, one after another, the
slats of the double leaves were seen to turn and close as though for a
secret survey of the field. After a moment or two this performance was
repeated at the next window on the left, and finally at a third.
Here the shaking was resumed after the survey, and ended with the
shutter opening with a snap and being caught back from within and
held cautiously on the crack. Pudge kicked clods in his path and was
pretentiously occupied with a dead beetle which he had picked up.
All at once something flickered across the ground at his feet, swung two
or three times, touched his shoe, traveled up the length of his trousers
and rested on his breast. How that bosom leaped to the adventure!
He fished hurriedly in his pocket and brought up a small round mirror.
It had still attached to its rim a bit of the ribbon by which it had
been fastened to his sister's shopping bag, from which, if the truth
must be told, he had surreptitiously detached it.
Pretending to consult it, as though it were some sort of pocket oracle,
Pudge flashed back, and presently had the satisfaction of seeing a
bright fleck of light travel across the shutter. Immediately there was
a responsive flicker from the window: one, two, three, he counted, and
flashed back: one, two, three.
Pudge's whole being was suffused with delicious thrills. He wished now
he had obeyed that oft-experienced presentiment and learned the Morse
code; it was a thing no man destined for adventure should be without.
This wordless interchange went on for a few moments, and then a hand,
a woman's hand--O fair, imprisoned ladies of all time!--appeared
cautiously at the open shutter, waved and pointed.
It pointed toward the buckeye tree. Pudge threw a stone in that
direction and sauntered after it, pitching and throwing. Once at the
corner, after a suitable exhibition of casualness, he climbed until he
found himself higher than the fence, facing the house.
While he was thus occupied, things had been happening there. The shutter
had been thrown back and a woman was climbing down by the help of a
window ledge below and a pair of knotted window curtains.
Another woman prepared to follow her, gesticulating forcibly to the
other not to wait, but to run. Run she did, but it was not until Pudge,
lying full length on the buckeye bough, reached her a hand that he
discovered her to be his sister's friend, Genevieve Remington.
In the interval of her scrambling up by the aid of the bent bough and
such help as he could give her, they had neglected to observe the other
woman. Now, as Mrs. Remington's heels drummed on the outside of the
fence, Pudge was aware of some commotion in the direction of the house,
and saw Miss Eliot running toward him, crying: "Run, run!" while two
men pursued her. She made a desperate jump toward the tree, caught
the branch, hung for a moment, lost her hold, and brought Pudge
ignominiously down in a heap beside her.
If Miss Eliot had not contradicted it, Pudge would have believed to his
dying day that bullets hurtled through the air; it was so necessary to
the dramatic character of the adventure that there should be bullets.
He recovered from the shock of his fall in time to hear Miss Eliot
say: "Better not touch me, Mike; if there's so much as a bruise when my
friends find me, you'll get sent up for it."
Her cool, even tones cut the man's stream of profanity like a knife.
He came threateningly close to her, but refrained from laying hands on
either of them.
Meantime his companion drew himself up to the top of the fence for a
look over, and dropped back with a gesture intended to be reassuring.
Pudge rose gloriously to the occasion.
"The others have gone back to call the police," he announced. Mike spat
out an oath at him, but it was easy to see that he was not at all sure
that this might not be the case. The possibility that it might be,
checked a movement to pursue the fleeing Genevieve. Miss Eliot caught
their indecision with a flying shaft.
"Mrs. George Remington," she said, "will probably be in communication
with her friends very shortly. And between his wife and his old and dear
friend Mike it won't take George Remington long to choose."
This was so obvious that it left the men nothing to say. They fell in
surlily on either side of her, and without any show of resistance she
walked calmly back toward the house. Pudge lingered, uncertain of his
cue.
"Beat it, you putty-face!" Mike snarled at him, showing a yellow fang.
"If you ain't off the premises in about two shakes, you'll get what's
comin' to you. See?"
Pudge walked with as much dignity as he could muster in the direction
of the public road. He could see nothing of Mrs. Remington in either
direction; now and then a private motor whizzed by, but there was no
other house near enough to suggest a possibility of calling for help.
He concealed himself in a group of black locusts and waited. In about
half an hour he heard a car coming from the house with the mansard roof,
and saw that it held three occupants, two men and a woman. The men
he recognized, and he was certain that the woman, though she was well
bundled up, was not E. Eliot.
The motor turned away from the town and disappeared in the opposite
direction. Pudge surmised that Mike was making his getaway. He waited
another half hour and began to be assailed by the pangs of hunger. The
house gave no sign; even the smoke from the chimney stopped.
He was sure Miss Eliot was still there; imagination pictured her
weltering in her own gore. Between fear and curiosity and the saving
hope that there might be food of some sort in the house, Pudge left his
hiding place and began a stealthy approach.
He came to the low stoop and crept up to the closed front door. Hovering
between fear and courage, he knocked. But there was no response. With
growing boldness he tried the door. It was locked.
The rear door also was bolted; but, creeping on, he found a high
side window that the keepers of this prison in their hasty flight had
forgotten to close. With the aid of an empty rain barrel, which he
overturned and rolled into position, Pudge scrambled with much hard
breathing through the window and dropped into the kitchen. Here he
listened; his ears could discern no sound. On tiptoe he crept through
the rooms of the first floor--but came upon neither furtive enemy nor
imprisoned friend. Up the narrow stairway he crept--peeped into
three bedrooms--and finally opening the door of what was evidently a
storeroom, he found the object of his search.
E. Eliot sat in an old splint-bottomed chair--gagged, arms tied behind
her and to the chair's back, and her ankles tied to the chair's legs. In
a moment Pudge had the knotted towel out of her mouth, and had cut her
bonds. But quick though Pudge was, to her he seemed intolerably slow;
just then E. Eliot was thinking of only one thing.
This was the final afternoon of the campaign and she was away out here,
far from all the great things that might be going on.
She gave a single stretch of her cramped muscles as she rose. "I know
you--you're Betty Sheridan's brother--thanks," she said briskly. "What
time is it?"
Pudge drew out his most esteemed possession, a watch which kept perfect
time--except when it refused to keep any time at all.
"Three o'clock," he announced.
"Then our last demonstration is under way, and when I tell my story--"
E. Eliot interrupted herself. "Come on--let's catch the trolley!"
With Pudge panting after her, she hurried downstairs, unbolted the door,
and, running lightly on the balls of her feet, sped in the direction of
the street car line.