GARTH BUYS A BOUTONNIERE
Garth wondered if relief would ever come. He was afraid that the slip of
frayed white paper must have gone astray. Otherwise, it seemed to him,
it would have brought help even before he had sounded his shrill alarm.
He glanced at Nora. She had placed her hand on his arm. She gazed at the
open door.
"I thought I heard--"
Then Garth heard, too--a tramping in the house, a struggle outside the
door, a voice whose roar betrayed excitement and triumph.
"Where's Garth?"
The door filled with men in uniform.
Nora covered her face with her hands and turned away. With a start Garth
grasped the reason. Planning vaguely, he arose and leaned over the
prostrate figure of George. The man breathed. The wound was in the
shoulder and appeared of little real consequence. He straightened to
find the inspector standing over him with a look of pleasure. It hurt
Garth to think of that expression's vanishing for one of unbelief and
revolt.
"This fellow will stand his trial," he said.
He added gently:
"For the murder of Joe Kridel. It was here, you know."
The inspector puffed.
"Garth, I'm proud of you."
His eye caught the figure of Nora, crouched against the safe. His voice
grew hard and business-like.
"Bring that woman here."
Slim, bound and at the door, laughed.
Garth grasped the inspector's arm.
"Don't," he said. "Don't bother about her. Let her go."
But the inspector strode to the safe, raised Nora, and drew her hands
from her face.
He gasped and leaned heavily against the divan. All at once he appeared
old.
Garth sprang to his side. He knew the inspector must not speak now.
"I'll tell you," he cried. "You have to thank Nora as much as me."
He glanced at the girl.
"That is, we put it over together. It was a winning combination, but we
didn't have the nerve to put you wise."
The color rushed back to Nora's cheeks, but the inspector's face did not
alter. He looked doubtfully from one to the other. At last he seemed to
gather his emotions in a volley of wrath for Garth.
"You dragged a woman in this! You ought to be horsewhipped. Dragging my
daughter into this hell!"
Garth took the girl's hand.
"Cheer up, chief," he said, "because if you and she would only let me
I'd drag her into a lot worse than that."
He turned to her anxiously. There were tears in her eyes. He questioned
if they had sprung from pity for him. She touched his hand. He looked
away, for the quick pressure expressed only thanks, and a friendship
troubled by his persistence.
* * * * * *
During the next few days Garth saw little of Nora, meeting her only once
or twice by chance in her father's office. He was not inclined, indeed,
to urge a more intimate opportunity. He had let her see rather too much
of his heart, and he shrank from an appearance of seeking advantage from
her gratitude.
That gratitude existed abundantly, and the inspector shared it. The
affair of the gray mask had altered a good deal for Garth. It had placed
him all at once apart from his fellows in the bureau. The newspaper
publicity, which, unlike most of his kind, he would have preferred to
avoid, had swept his reputation far beyond the boundaries of his own
city. He acknowledged a benefit in that. Such notoriety might deter the
desire for revenge of any of the friends of Slim and George who remained
at large.
A very real danger for Nora and himself lay there. It created, too, a
tie that the inspector visualized with an increasing friendliness and
confidence.
"If Slim and George go to the chair," the big man said on one of those
mornings when Garth had stumbled into Nora in the office, "you two are
probably safe enough. With those birds salted away the weaker brothers
aren't likely to take any wild chances, at least until the thing has
been pretty well forgotten."
Apprehension clouded his sleepy eyes.
"But, young people, if Slim and George escaped conviction or managed a
getaway, I'd look for a new first-class detective, and--"
He took Nora's hand and studied her face, whose dark beauty remained
unafraid.
"I guess I'd need another daughter, which I couldn't very well have."
He laughed brusquely.
"Slim and George are tight enough now, so why borrow trouble."
Garth saw the foreboding of his chief's eyes turn to curiosity, a trifle
groping.
"Wish you'd kept out of it, daughter."
"Don't scold," she laughed. "You did enough of that the other night."
"I'm not," he grumbled, "I'm only wondering where you got the nerve, and
the brains."
"Some from you, father."
"Not as much as all that. I guess your mother gave you a little that we
hum-drum New Yorkers don't quite understand."
"If," Garth said, "anything develops, you'll have to send Nora away."
"If there's time," the inspector agreed.
He turned back to his papers, shaking his head.
It is, perhaps, as well, when one fears, that the march of routine
brings new and destructive demands. It was only a few days afterwards
that Garth and Nora were involved in events that drove their minds for
the time from the threat, which they should never have quite lost sight
of. Yet the Elmford murder didn't leave room in one's mind for much
else.
On the afternoon before that tragedy Garth, leaving headquarters, made
an unaccustomed purchase. Not long ago such affectation would have
appealed to his sturdy, straightforward mind of a detective as trivial,
possibly unmasculine. He reddened as he handed his ten cents to the
shapeless Italian woman whose fingers about his coat lapel were
confusingly deft. He had no illusions as to the source of this foppish
prompting. The inspector had called him in and told him that Nora would
welcome him at the flat for dinner that evening. The event appeared a
milestone on the amorous path he sought to explore hand in hand with the
girl. He realized his desired destination was not yet in view, but such
progress required a deviation from the familiar--some peculiar
concession to its significance. So he turned away from the cheap
sidewalk stand, wearing, for the first time in his life, a flower in his
button hole--a rose of doubtful future and unaristocratic lineage.
* * * * * *
Before following Garth with his blushing decoration it is serviceable to
know what happened at Elmford.