THE SKY WALK
As she boarded the down-going car, the girl’s mind flashed through the
incidents leading up to this strange chase, and then came bang up against
a problem with no certain answer. Should she leave the car at the two
hundred foot level, the spot from which the cars of the Sky Ride went
flashing away into the night, or should she ride to the ground level?
Following instinct, when she reached the Sky Ride level she darted from
the car. At once she caught her breath. There was the long-eared
Chinaman.
The instant she saw him he was on the move. There was no mistaking the
look in her eyes. She meant to have that three-bladed knife. He made no
mistake about that. Imitating a monkey, a spider and a snake all in one,
he managed by curious contortions to make his way past the waiting
rocket-car and out upon the cables that carried the cars on their
exciting journey.
At once the place was in a panic.
“A car from the other side will come and crush him! He will fall! He’ll
be electrocuted!” came from the crowd as men fought for a spot where they
might view the impending catastrophe.
But no catastrophe occurred—at least not at once. Standing with the air
of a tight rope walker, which indeed this long-eared one must have been,
he unfolded his large yellow silk umbrella; then, apparently all
unconscious of the shouting throng, he turned and walked the cables as
another person might walk the street.
“If another car comes—” Florence came near to wishing she had stuck to
her resolve and made it a night of pure pleasure.
No car came from the other side. A quick-witted guard had stopped it in
the nick of time, by a phone call.
So the little yellow man in a long yellow jacket with a three-bladed
knife in his belt balanced himself with his yellow umbrella and proceeded
blithely on his way while an ever increasing sea of faces gazed upward.
Great searchlights began playing upon him. Like fingers they pointed him
out. Ten thousand, twenty, fifty, perhaps seventy thousand pairs of eyes
were fixed upon him.
Not one of all these people, save Florence, knew what it was all about.
“Is this one more feature, a grand surprise in this the grandest of all
shows?” This is what the thousands were asking.
Other questions occupied Florence’s mind. What did the man mean to do?
Did he know himself? How was it all to end?
The suspense continued. It is well that it did. The first few hundred
feet of this curious person’s sky walk was over the solid earth. Beneath
him was the gasping multitude. Jammed together in one solid mass, not one
of them could have moved had this sky walker come hurtling down from
those dizzy heights.
He did not fall. Instead, with all the grace of a fine lady out for a
promenade, he moved along the cables that, being all but invisible in the
night, made him seem to walk on air.
“If he were only over water!” Florence spoke without meaning to do so.
“Then there would be some chance.”
“At two hundred feet?” some one doubted.
All the same, Florence waited and hoped. “Now he’s a third of the way to
the place above the lagoon,” she assured herself. “Now half—now
two-thirds.
“Now!”
She caught her breath. Something was happening. The man was seen to
teeter.
“If he falls—” She set her lips tight. “If he does, if he falls and kills
some one, I shall never forgive myself. A knife!” She all but said it
aloud. “A knife with a diamond-studded hilt—what’s that to a human life?”
But the man had regained his poise. He was tripping along as before.
“He—he’s almost there,” she sighed, as a low prayer escaped her lips.
“He—he must be over the water. Thank—thank God!”
But, after all, what _did_ this astounding person propose to do?
Did he plan it, or was it the work of Fate? Perhaps no one will ever
know. Be that as it may, just as he reached a spot above the center of
the lagoon the man was seen once more to waver.
This time he did not regain his poise, but with a movement that seemed
half a leap, half a fall, launched himself into mid-air.
Florence closed her eyes. She opened them at once to find the Chinaman
still going down.
“How—how remarkable!” she breathed.
“It’s the umbrella,” some one at her side volunteered. “It’s made for
that purpose, like a parachute.”
She did not give the information that, as far as she could tell, the man
had entertained no notion of making that unusual journey.
She continued to watch while the Chinaman plunged downward. With his fall
checked by the umbrella, he had, she believed, a fair chance for a safe
landing.
“And then?” Some spirit inside her appeared to ask the question. “Why,
then,” she answered the spirit, “I’ll be after him!”
The Chinaman disappeared into shadows that lay above the surface of the
lagoon.
At once spotlights were playing upon the water. If he came to the surface
no one saw him.
“But then,” Florence assured herself, “there are a hundred boats out
there on the lagoon. A man with such a trick as that in his bag must have
others. He need only come up alongside a boat, cling there until the
excitement is over, then go on his way. We shall meet again.
“But not to-night,” she amended, as she surveyed the dense throng below.
“So here’s for a sky ride!”
She gave herself over to the joyous excitement of the hour.
Curiously enough, upon descending from the steel tower after a half hour
of shooting through space, she bumped squarely into her roommate and pal
of many strange adventures—Petite Jeanne.
“Oh, Jeanne!” she exclaimed. “I have found him, the little Chinaman with
long ears.”
“And the knife?”
“He still has it.”
“Tell me about it,” Jeanne begged.
In her own truly dramatic style Florence told the story. “And when he
dropped,” she ended breathlessly, “I said ‘that’s the end of him!’”
“But it was not?” Jeanne breathed.
“I am not sure it was not. We shall see him again, perhaps many times.”
“But, Florence, why does he want that three-bladed knife so very, very
much?”
“It is set with jewels,” Florence spoke slowly, “but there is something
more. I am sure of it. Perhaps something quite terrible. I saw it in his
eyes. He’d kill some one to possess that knife, if necessary. I am quite
sure of that.”
“Then, oh my Florence, you must be careful!”
“We will be careful. But we shall have the knife. It belongs to us. We
bought it.”
“Yes,” Jeanne agreed, “we bought it.”
As Jeanne closed her eyes she could see the place of purchase, a long,
low auction house blue with tobacco smoke; a bald-headed auctioneer
shouting:
“Three dollars. Who’ll make it three-fifty?”
A Chinaman in an obscure corner was bidding against her for that chest
with a blue dragon on the cover.
Sudden confusion. Three men dragging the protesting Chinaman away.
“What did it all mean?” she asked herself.
“Anyway,” she sighed, “we got the chest.”
Then a thought struck her all of a heap.
“Florence,” she cried, “there were other things in that chest. Oh, so
many more!”
“Other things?” Florence fairly sprang at her. “Why did you not tell me?
Is it still in our room under the bed?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“Then we must hurry home. They may be in our room at this very moment,
those little yellow men, carrying the chest away.”
“Yes!” Jeanne exclaimed. “Let us hurry!”