Against Odds Part 28

with orders to turn out several dozen copies as rapidly as possible.

These I meant to distribute freely among specials, policemen, the Columbian Guards at the Fair City; and others were to be furnished the chief of police for use about the city proper, for I meant to have a thorough search made in the hotels, boarding places, furnished rooms, and in all the saloons and other haunts of vice and crime, wherever an officer, armed with one of these pictures and offering a princely reward, could penetrate.

On the morning of the third day another telegram came. This read:

'Still delayed because of illness. Hold rooms.

'TRENT.'

Accompanying the photograph had come a distracted letter from poor Hilda O'Neil, in which she had described Mrs. Trent, the mother of the missing young man, as almost broken down by the shock and suspense; and we readily guessed that her illness was the cause of the delay.

Twenty-four hours after receipt of this last message came another:

'Mrs. T. too ill to travel. Doctor forbids my leaving. Give up rooms. For G.o.d's sake work. Don't spare money. Letter follows.

'TRENT.'

In addition to these, every day brought across the wires, from Hilda O'Neil to her friend, the pitiful little question, 'Any news?' and took back the only possible reply, 'Not yet.'

And then came this letter from the father of Gerald Trent:

'DEAR SIR,' it began,

'I thank you heartily for your kind straightforward letter, and while I see and realize the many obstacles in the way of your search, I yet hope--I must hope--for your ultimate success; first, because Miss Jenrys' letter, so full of confidence in you, has inspired me with the same confidence; and, second, because to abandon hope would be worse than death. The prompt way in which you have taken up this search, at Miss Jenrys' request, has earned my sincerest grat.i.tude. Although I had ordered the search begun through our chief of police here, yours was the first word of hope or encouragement I have received, although I have since heard from your city police.

'My wife lies in a condition bordering upon insanity, and much as I long to be where I can, at least, be cognizant of every step in the search for my son, as it is taken, my duty to that son's mother holds me at her bedside. For this reason we must all remain here, and I implore you to work!

Leave no stone unturned! Employ more men; draw upon me for any sum you may require; offer any reward you may see fit; do what you will; only find my son, and save his mother from insanity and his father from a broken heart! Above all keep me informed, I beg of you. Remember all our moments here are moments of suspense.'

The name at the end was written in an uneven, diminishing scrawl, as if the letter had taxed the strength of the writer almost beyond endurance, and I heaved a sigh of earnest sympathy for the father, now doubly afflicted.

It was impossible now to do more than was being done from day to day, but every morning I gave an ungrudged fifteen minutes to the writing of a letter, in which I tried to say each day some new word of hope and to describe some new feature of our search, that he might feel that we were indeed leaving no stone unturned.

Meantime, from the moment when our brunette vanished from Master Billy in the Plaisance, no trace of her could be found by the lad or by ourselves.

For a number of days Dave and I gave ourselves to an untiring search, by day and night. We haunted the cafe where she had found lodgings, but we did not enter, for we did not wish to give the alarm to a young person already sufficiently shy, and we spent much time in Midway and upon Stony Island Avenue, near the places where the Camps had seen Smug, and the saloon wherein he had disappeared one day.

That the brunette had not entered the cafe since the night of the a.s.sault upon the guard, we soon a.s.sured ourselves. But we did not relax our vigilance, and for many days the beautiful White City was, to us, little more than a perplexing labyrinth in which we searched ceaselessly and knew little rest, stopping only to let another take up our seemingly fruitless search.

It was not often now that we sought our rest together or at the same time, but one night, after a week's fruitless seeking, I came to our door at a late hour to find Dave there before me, and not yet asleep.

He began to talk while watching me lay aside the rather uninteresting disguise I had worn all day.

'Carl, wake up that imagination factory of yours and tell me, or make a guess at least, why we don't run upon Greenback Bob, Delbras, or even Smug, to say nothing of that invisible pedestal-climber of yours, any more?'

'Easy enough,' I replied wearily. 'They're sticking close to business, and they don't show, at least by day, in the grounds any more. If they're here at all, they are lying perdu in Cairo Street or in some of the Turkish quarters, smoking hasheesh, perhaps, or flirting with the Nautch dancers, and all disguised in turban, fez, or perhaps a Chinese pigtail.'

'Do you believe it?'

'I certainly do.'

'Jove! I wonder how they managed to get into those foreign holy of holies.'

'Backsheesh,' I answered tartly.

'Look here, Carl!' Dave jerked himself erect in the middle of his bed.

'Suppose you wanted to get in with those people, how would you do it?'

'Dave,' I replied, 'why weren't you born with just a little b.u.mp of what you mistakenly call imagination? I'll show you to-morrow how to do the thing.'

'How?' Dave stubbornly insisted.

'Well, if I must talk all night, suppose in the morning we go to Cairo, and find our way to some one in some small degree an authority--some one who can talk a little English, and most of them can. I might offer my man a cigar, and praise his show a bit, and then tell him how I want to tell the world all about him; how I want to see how they live, not so briefly, you understand. The circ.u.mlocution office is as much in vogue in the Orient as, according to our mutual friend d.i.c.kens, it is in old England. Well, when he fully understands that I admire their life and manners, and want to live it as well as write it, I begin to bid. They're here for money, and they won't let any pa.s.s them--see?'

'Old man!' cried Dave, smiting his knee with vigour, 'I'm going to try it on!'

It was seven days before our invalid--as we now by mutual consent called the still nameless guard--recovered his senses fully. There had been two or three days of the stupor, and then a brief season of active delirium; and at this stage the surgeon shook his head and looked very serious; and the little Quakeress, who, true to her first intention, came alone, carried away with her a face more serious still.

'She looks,' said the surgeon to me, 'as much shocked as if he were one of her own people.'

'She has a tender heart,' I replied, 'and--he is quite well known, I believe, to others of her family.'

'To one, a.s.suredly,' he said, with a dry smile and a quick glance; and I knew that June Jenrys' interest in the insensible guard had been as plain to this worldly-wise surgeon as to me.

Remembering this brief dialogue, I was not surprised, when I made my brief call in Washington Avenue, to note an added shade of seriousness on the fair face that, since the disappearance of Gerald Trent--unknown, but the friend of her friend--had been growing graver day by day, so that the charms of the great Fair had palled upon her, and she had made her daily visits in a subdued and preoccupied mood, and shortened them willingly, to return at an early hour with the more easily fatigued little Quakeress.

On the morning of the eighth day I called early, sent by the surgeon with a message to Miss Ross.

'She asked me to send her word the first moment when I found our patient sane enough and strong enough to receive a short call, and to listen for a few moments, not to talk, "that was not needed," she said,' he added with one of his quiet smiles, 'and when I told her that when he came to himself the sight of some friend for whom he cared would help him more than medicine, and asked her if he had any such, she said that she could at least tell him a bit of pleasant news, and asked me to send her word at once.'

I was very willing to take the message, and when it was delivered the little Quakeress thanked me in her own quaint sweet manner, and a few moments later, while I was talking with Miss Jenrys and giving her some details of our search for a clue to young Trent's disappearance, she excused herself quietly and left us without once glancing toward her niece.

When I visited the hospital in the afternoon, the doctor said:

'Your little Quakeress is certainly a sorceress as well. She came very soon after you left us yesterday, and she did not stay long. I had forbidden my patient to talk, and I heard every word she said. It was a mere nothing, but she has almost cured him.'

'If it was so simple,' I said, half ashamed of my curiosity, yet having a very good motive for it, 'may I not hear the words that so charmed and healed him?'

'As nearly as I can repeat them, you may. I had introduced her, as she bade me, and told him that she had called to see him every day, and I knew, from the look in those open blue eyes of his, that she was an utter stranger, and that even her name was unknown to him. He was pleased though, and small wonder, at sight of the dainty, white-haired, sweet-voiced little lady; and when she took his hand in hers and, holding it between both her own, said, in her pretty Quaker fashion: "I am very glad and thankful to see thee so much better, and my niece June will be also--I mean Miss Jenrys, who, hearing of thy adventure and injuries, came at once to see if it were really the friend she thought she recognised in the description. My niece's friends are mine, and so I have a.s.sumed an old woman's privilege and paid thee a visit daily, and now that thee seems much better I will, with thy permission, bring her with me when I come again."' The doctor stopped short and smiled.

'Was that all?' I asked, smiling also. 'What did he say?'

'Well, sir, for a moment I thought the fellow was going to faint, but it was a pleasurable shock, and he made a feeble clutch at her hand, and his face was one beam of grat.i.tude as he looked in hers and whispered, while he clung to her hand, "To-morrow." Then of course she turned to me, and I, pretending to have been quite un.o.bservant, ordered her away, and made their next visit contingent upon his good behaviour during the next twenty-four hours.'

I saw that the time had now come when the patient and I must understand each other better, and I began by taking the doctor a little into my confidence, telling him a little of what I knew and a part of what I guessed at or suspected.

'I want now to enlighten him a little concerning this attack upon him, doctor,' I concluded, 'and if I don't make him talk----'

'Oh, see him by all means. There's nothing worse for the sick than suspense. I begin to understand matters. Since his return to consciousness he has seemed singularly apathetic, but let me tell you one thing: there were two nights--he was always wildest at night--when he talked incessantly about that meeting at the bridge, and he fully believes now that she, whoever that may be, was there. His first question asked, after being told of his mishap, was this: "Was anyone else attacked or injured besides myself that night at the bridge?" and when I answered no, he seemed relieved of a great anxiety.'