Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her
feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all
morning. And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to any of us and he
watched Bella furtively, as if he suspected her of trying to get him out
of the house.
When luncheon time came around and he had shown no indication of going
to the telephone and ordering it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen
to remind him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio, and we waited
together in the hall while Max went up. When he came down he was
somewhat ruffled.
“He wouldn’t open the door,” he reported, “and when I told him it was
meal time, he said he wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t give a whoop about
the rest of us. He had asked us here to dinner; he hadn’t proposed to
adopt us.”
So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o’clock Jim came
downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left. Anne declared that Bella
had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it. She was never
seen to speak to him unnecessarily.
The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms
of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne’s pearls, using them,
the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace
or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and
stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner
on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with
a copy of Poe’s Purloined Letter and Gaboriau’s Monsieur LeCoq. He went
through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and
lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion. And the next
day, the fourth, he found something--not much, but it was curious. He
had been in the studio, poking around behind the dusty pictures, with
Jimmy expostulating every time he moved anything and the rest standing
around watching him.
Max was strutting.
“We get it by elimination,” he said importantly. “The pearls being
nowhere else in the house, they must be here in the studio. Three parts
of the studio having yielded nothing, they must be in the fourth. Ladies
and gentlemen, let me have your attention for one moment. I tap this
canvas with my wand--there is nothing up my sleeve. Then I prepare
to move the canvas--so. And I put my hand in the pocket of this
disreputable velvet coat, so. Behold!”
Then he gave a low exclamation and looked at something he held in his
hand. Every one stepped forward, and on his palm was the small diamond
clasp from Anne’s collar!
Jimmy was apoplectic. He tried to smile, but no one else did.
“Well, I’ll be flabbergasted!” he said. “I say, you people, you don’t
think for a minute that I put that thing there? Why, I haven’t worn that
coat for a month. It’s--it’s a trick of yours, Max.”
But Max shook his head; he looked stupefied, and stood gazing from the
clasp to the pocket of the old painting coat. Betty dropped on a folding
stool, that promptly collapsed with her and created a welcome diversion,
while Anne pounced on the clasp greedily, with a little cry.
“We will find it all now,” she said excitedly. “Did you look in the
other pockets, Max?”
Then, for the first time, I was conscious of an air of constraint among
the men. Dallas was whistling softly, and Mr. Harbison, having
rescued Betty, was standing silent and aloof, watching the scene
with non-committal eyes. It was Max who spoke first, after a hurried
inventory of the other pockets.
“Nothing else,” he said constrainedly. “I’ll move the rest of the
canvases.”
But Jim interfered, to every one’s surprise.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you, Max. There’s nothing back there. I had ‘em
out yesterday.” He was quite pale.
“Nonsense!” Max said gruffly. “If it’s a practical joke, Jim, why don’t
you fess up? Anne has worried enough.”
“The pearls are not there, I tell you,” Jim began. Although the studio
was cold, there were little fine beads of moisture on his face. “I must
ask you not to move those pictures.” And then Aunt Selina came to the
rescue; she stalked over and stood with her back against the stack of
canvases.
“As far as I can understand this,” she declaimed, “you gentlemen are
trying to intimate that James knows something of that young woman’s
jewelry, because you found part of it in his pocket. Certainly you will
not move the pictures. How do you know that the young gentleman who said
he found it there didn’t have it up his sleeve?”
She looked around triumphantly, and Max glowered. Dallas soothed her,
however.
“Exactly so,” he said. “How do we know that Max didn’t have the clasp
up his sleeve? My dear lady, neither my wife nor I care anything for the
pearls, as compared with the priceless pearl of peace. I suggest tea on
the roof; those in favor--? My arm, Miss Caruthers.”
It was all well enough for Jim to say later that he didn’t dare to have
the canvases moved, for he had stuck behind them all sorts of chorus
girl photographs and life-class crayons that were not for Aunt Selina’s
eye, besides four empty siphons, two full ones, and three bottles of
whisky. Not a soul believed him; there was a a new element of suspicion
and discord in the house.
Every one went up on the roof and left him to his mystery. Anne drank
her tea in a preoccupied silence, with half-closed eyes, an attitude
that boded ill to somebody. The rest were feverishly gay, and Aunt
Selina, with a pair of arctics on her feet and a hot-water bottle at her
back, sat in the middle of the tent and told me familiar anecdotes of
Jimmy’s early youth (had he known, he would have slain her). Betty and
Mr. Harbison had found a medicine ball, and were running around like
a pair of children. It was quite certain that neither his escape from
death nor my accusation weighed heavily on him.
While Aunt Selina was busy with the time Jim had swallowed an open
safety pin, and just as the pin had been coughed up, or taken out of
his nose--I forget which--Jim himself appeared and sulkily demanded the
privacy of the roof for his training hour.
Yes, he was training. Flannigan claimed to know the system that had
reduced the president to what he is, and he and Jim had a seance every
day which left Jim feeling himself for bruises all evening. He claimed
to be losing flesh; he said he could actually feel it going, and he and
Flannigan had spent an entire afternoon in the cellar three days before
with a potato barrel, a cane-seated chair and a lamp.
The whole thing had been shrouded in mystery. They sandpapered the
inside of the barrel and took out all the nails, and when they had
finished they carried it to the roof and put it in a corner behind the
tent. Everybody was curious, but Flannigan refused any information about
it, and merely said it was part of his system. Dal said that if HE had
anything like that in his system he certainly would be glad to get rid
of it.
At a quarter to six Jim appeared, still sullen from the events of the
afternoon and wearing a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, Flannigan
following him with a sponge, a bucket of water and an armful of bath
towels. Everybody protested at having to move, but he was firm, and they
all filed down the stairs. I was the last, with Aunt Selina just ahead
of me. At the top of the stairs, she turned around suddenly to me.
“That policeman looks cruel,” she said. “What’s more, he’s been in a
bad humor all day. More than likely he’ll put James flat on the roof
and tramp on him, under pretense of training him. All policemen are
inhuman.”
“He only rolls him over a barrel or something like that,” I protested.
“James had a bump like an egg over his ear last night,” Aunt Selina
insisted, glaring at Flannigan’s unconscious back. “I don’t think it’s
safe to leave him. It is my time to relax for thirty minutes, or I
would watch him. You will have to stay,” she said, fixing me with her
imperious eyes.
So I stayed. Jim didn’t want me, and Flannigan muttered mutiny. But
it was easier to obey Aunt Selina than to clash with her, and anyhow I
wanted to see the barrel in use.
I never saw any one train before. It is not a joyful spectacle. First,
Flannigan made Jim run, around and around the roof. He said it stirred
up his food and brought it in contact with his liver, to be digested.
Flannigan, from meekness and submission, of a sort, in the kitchen,
became an autocrat on the roof.
“Once more,” he would say. “Pick up your feet, sir! Pick up your feet!”
And Jim would stagger doggedly past me, where I sat on the parapet, his
poor cheeks shaking and the tail of his bath robe wrapping itself around
his legs. Yes, he ran in the bath robe in deference to me. It seems
there isn’t much to a running suit.
“Head up,” Flannigan would say. “Lift your knees, sir. Didn’t you ever
see a horse with string halt?”
He let him stop finally, and gave him a moment to get his breath. Then
he set him to turning somersaults. They spread the cushions from the
couch in the tent on the roof, and Jim would poke his head down and say
a prayer, and then curve over as gracefully as a sausage and come up
gasping, as if he had been pushed off a boat.
“Five pounds a day; not less, sir,” Flannigan said encouragingly.
“You’ll drop it in chunks.”
Jim looked at the tin as if he expected to see the chunks lying at his
feet.
“Yes,” he said, wiping the back of his neck. “If we’re in here thirty
days that will be one hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t forget to stop in
time, Flannigan. I don’t want to melt away like a candle.”
He was cheered, however, by the promise of reduction.
“What do you think of that, Kit?” he called to me. “Your uncle is going
to look as angular as a problem in geometry. I’ll--I’ll be the original
reductio ad absurdum. Do you want me to stand on my head, Flannigan?
Wouldn’t that reduce something?”
“Your brains, sir,” Flannigan retorted gravely, and presented a pair of
boxing gloves. Jim visibly quailed, but he put them on.
“Do you know, Flannigan,” he remarked, as he fastened them, “I’m
thinking of wearing these all the time. They hide my character.”
Flannigan looked puzzled, but he did not ask an explanation. He demanded
that Jim shed the bath robe, which he finally did, on my promise to
watch the sunset. Then for fully a minute there was no sound save of
feet running rapidly around the roof, and an occasional soft thud. Each
thud was accompanied by a grunt or two from Jim. Flannigan was grimly
silent. Once there was a smart rap, an oath from the policeman, and a
mirthless chuckle from Jim. The chuckle ended in a crash, however, and I
turned. Jim was lying on his back on the roof, and Flannigan was wiping
his ear with a towel. Jim sat up and ran his hand down his ribs.
“They’re all here,” he observed after a minute. “I thought I missed
one.”
“The only way to take a man’s weight down,” Flannigan said dryly.
Jim got up dizzily.
“Down on the roof, I suppose you mean,” he said.
The next proceedings were mysterious. Flannigan rolled the barrel into
the tent, and carried in a small glass lamp. With the material at hand
he seemed to be effecting a combination, no new one, to judge by his
facility. Then he called Jim.
At the door of the tent Jim turned to me, his bathrobe toga fashion
around his shoulders.
“This is a very essential part of the treatment,” he said solemnly. “The
exercise, according to Flannigan, loosens up the adipose tissue. The
next step is to boil it out. I hope, unless your instructions compel
you, that you will at least have the decency to stay out of the tent.”
“I am going at once,” I said, outraged. “I’m not here because I’m mad
about it, and you know it. And don’t pose with that bath robe. If you
think you’re a character out of Roman history, look at your legs.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said sulkily. “Only I’m tired of
having you choked down my throat every time I open my mouth, Kit. And
don’t go just yet. Flannigan is going for my clothes as soon as he
lights the--the lamp, and--somebody ought to watch the stairs.”
That was all there was to it. I said I would guard the steps, and
Flannigan, having ignited the combination, whatever it was, went
downstairs. How was I to know that Bella would come up when she did? Was
it my fault that the lamp got too high, and that Flannigan couldn’t
hear Jim calling? Or that just as Bella reached the top of the steps
Jim should come to the door of the tent, wearing the barrel part of his
hot-air cabinet, and yelling for a doctor?
Bella came to a dead stop on the upper step, with her mouth open. She
looked at Jim, at the inadequate barrel, and from them she looked at me.
Then she began to laugh, one of her hysterical giggles, and she turned
and went down again. As Jim and I stared at each other we could hear her
gurgling down the hall below.
She had violent hysterics for an hour, with Anne rubbing her forehead
and Aunt Selina burning a feather out of the feather duster under her
nose. Only Jim and I understood, and we did not tell. Luckily, the next
thing that occurred drove Bella and her nerves from everybody’s mind.
At seven o’clock, when Bella had dropped asleep and everybody else was
dressed for dinner, Aunt Selina discovered that the house was cold, and
ordered Dal to the furnace.
It was Dal’s day at the furnace; Flannigan had been relieved of that
part of the work after twice setting fire to a chimney.
In five minutes Dal came back and spoke a few words to Max, who followed
him to the basement, and in ten minutes more Flannigan puffed up the
steps and called Mr. Harbison.
I am not curious, but I knew that something had happened. While Aunt
Selina was talking suffrage to Anne--who said she had always been
tremendously interested in the subject, and if women got the suffrage
would they be allowed to vote?--I slipped back to the dining room.
The table was laid for dinner, but Flannigan was not in sight. I could
hear voices from somewhere, faint voices that talked rapidly, and after
a while I located the sounds under my feet. The men were all in the
basement, and something must have happened. I flew back to the basement
stairs, to meet Mr. Harbison at the foot. He was grimy and dusty,
with streaks of coal dust over his face, and he had been examining his
revolver. I was just in time to see him slip it into his pocket.
“What is the matter?” I demanded. “Is any one hurt?”
“No one,” he said coolly. “We’ve been cleaning out the furnace.”
“With a revolver! How interesting--and unusual!” I said dryly, and
slipped past him as he barred the way. He was not pleased; I heard him
mutter something and come rapidly after me, but I had the voices as a
guide, and I was not going to be turned back like a child. The men had
gathered around a low stone arch in the furnace room, and were looking
down a short flight of steps, into a sort of vault, evidently under the
pavement. A faint light came from a small grating above, and there was a
close, musty smell in the air.
“I tell you it must have been last night,” Dallas was saying. “Wilson
and I were here before we went to bed, and I’ll swear that hole was not
there then.”
“It was not there this morning, sir,” Flannigan insisted. “It has been
made during the day.”
“And it could not have been done this afternoon,” Mr. Harbison said
quietly. “I was fussing with the telephone wire down here. I would have
heard the noise.”
Something in his voice made me look at him, and certainly his expression
was unusual. He was watching us all intently while Dallas pointed out to
me the cause of the excitement. From the main floor of the furnace room,
a flight of stone steps surmounted by an arch led into the coal cellar,
beneath the street. The coal cellar was of brick, with a cement floor,
and in the left wall there gaped an opening about three feet by three,
leading into a cavernous void, perfectly black--evidently a similar
vault belonging to the next house.
The whole place was ghostly, full of shadows, shivery with
possibilities. It was Mr. Harbison finally who took Jim’s candle and
crawled through the aperture. We waited in dead silence, listening to
his feet crunching over the coal beyond, watching the faint yellow light
that came through the ragged opening in the wall. Then he came back and
called through to us.
“Place is locked, over here,” he said. “Heavy oak door at the head of
the steps. Whoever made that opening has done a prodigious amount of
labor for nothing.”
The weapon, a crowbar, lay on the ground beside the bricks, and he
picked it up and balanced it on his hand. Dallas’ florid face was almost
comical in his bewilderment; as for Jimmy--he slammed a piece of slag at
the furnace and walked away. At the door he turned around.
“Why don’t you accuse me of it?” he asked bitterly. “Maybe you could
find a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me.”
He stalked up the stairs then and left us. Dallas and I went up
together, but we did not talk. There seemed to be nothing to say. Not
until I had closed and locked the door of my room did I venture to look
at something that I carried in the palm of my hand. It was a watch, not
running--a gentleman’s flat gold watch, and it had been hanging by its
fob to a nail in the bricks beside the aperture.
In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H. and the picture of a
girl, cut from a newspaper.
It was my picture.