Further Adventures of Lad Part 26

But, deftly, Mrs. Schwartz met and conquered the difficulties raised.

In the first place, the baby would come to no harm. Her sister would see to that. In the second, the matter of the reward and of the return could be juggled so as to elude detectives and rural constables. She had known of such a case. And she related the details;--clever yet utterly simple details, and fraught with safety to all concerned;--details which, for that very reason, need not be cited here.

Bit by bit, she went on with her outline of the campaign; testing each step and proving the practicability of each.

The next Thursday evening, Rennick and his wife went, as usual, to the weekly meeting of a neighborhood bridge club which they had joined for the summer. The baby was left in charge of a competent nurse. At nine o'clock, the nurse went to the telephone in reply to a call purporting to be from an attendant at a New York hospital.

This call occupied the best part of twenty minutes. For the attendant proceeded to tell her in a very roundabout way that her son had been run over and had come to the hospital with a broken leg. He dribbled the information; and was agonizingly long-winded and vague in answering her volley of frightened questions.

Shaken between duty to her job and a yearning to catch the next train for town, the nurse went back at last to the nursery. The baby's crib was empty.

It had been the simplest thing in the world for Mrs. Schwartz to enter the house by the unfastened front door, while one of her husband's brothers held the nurse in telephone talk; and to go up to the nursery, unseen, while the other servants were in the kitchen quarters. There she had picked up the baby and had carried him gently down to the front door and out of the grounds.

One of Schwartz's brothers was waiting, beyond the gate; with a disreputable little runabout. Presently, the second brother joined him.

Mrs. Schwartz lifted the baby into the car. One of the men held it while the other took his place at the steering wheel. The runabout had started upon its orderly fourteen-mile trip to Paterson, before the panic stricken nurse could give the alarm.

Mrs. Schwartz then walked toward the village, where her husband met her. The two proceeded together to the local motion picture theater.

There, they laughed so loudly over the comedy on the screen that the manager had to warn them to be quieter. At once, the couple became noisily abusive. And they were ordered ignominiously from the theater.

There could scarcely have been a better alibi to prove their absence of complicity in the kidnaping.

Meanwhile, the two brothers continued quietly on their journey toward Paterson. The baby slept. His bearer had laid him softly on the floor of the car. A few drops of paregoric, administered by Mrs. Schwartz as the child awoke for an instant on the way to the gate, insured sound slumber. The joggling of the car did not rouse the tiny sleeper; as he lay snugly between the feet of the man into whose care he had been given.

The first six miles of the easy journey were soon traversed. Then, with a pop and a dispiritedly swishing sound, a rear tire collapsed. Out into the road jumped both men. Their nerves were none too steady. And, already, in fancy they could hear all the police cars in New Jersey close at their heels. It behooved them to change tires in a hurry, and to finish their nerve-twisting trip.

The driver vaulted over the side nearest him and began to explore the under-seat regions for a jack. The other man picked up the baby and hurried to the rear of the runabout to detach the spare tire from its dusty rack. Manifestly, he could not unstrap the tire while he was carrying a baby in his arms. So he set down his burden at the roadside, near him.

Then, still obsessed by fear of pursuit, he hit on a safer scheme.

Picking up the sleeper again, he carried the warm little bundle to the far side of the road, some thirty yards beyond, and deposited it there, behind a dwarf alder bush which screened it from any stray automobilist who might be pa.s.sing. Thus, in case of pursuit, he and his brother would merely be changing tires; and would know nothing of any missing baby.

Failing to find a jack under the seat, the driver climbed over into the adjoining field in search of two or three big stones to serve the same purpose in holding up the axle. For several minutes the men worked fast and tensely; blind and deaf to anything except the need of haste.

Thus it was that neither of them saw a tawny-and-snow collie,--huge and s.h.a.ggy except for a pair of absurdly tiny white forepaws,--come pacing majestically along the road from the direction in which they were heading. The car lamps played but faintly upon the advancing Lad; for the dimmers had been applied.

The big dog was taking his usual before-bedtime stroll. Of old, that evening stroll had been confined to the Place's grounds, a quarter-mile beyond. But, lately, his new obsession for finding treasures for the Mistress had lured him often and oftener to the highway.

Tonight, as for a day or so past, he had drawn blank in his quest. The road had been distressingly bare of anything worth carrying home. But, now, as he moved along, his near-sighted eyes were attracted by a dim blur of white, behind a bush, at the road-edge; just within the dim radiance of the car-lamps. Even sooner than he saw this, his keen nostrils had told him of human presence there. He shifted his course to investigate.

Standing over the compactly-fastened swathing of clothes, Laddie bent down and sniffed. It was a human. He knew that; in spite of the thick veil that covered the slumberer's face. But it was also a bundle. It was a bundle which might well be expected to delight the Mistress almost as much as had the parasol;--far more than had the defunct chicken.

Daintily, with infinite gentleness, Lad fixed his teeth in the loosest portion of the bundle that he could find; and lifted it. It was amazingly heavy, even for so powerful a dog. But difficulties had never yet swerved Lad from any set purpose. Bracing his strength, he turned homeward, carrying the burden between his mighty jaws.

And now, he was aware of some subtler feeling than mere desire to bring the Mistress one more gift. His great heart had ever gone out in loving tenderness toward everything helpless and little. He adored children.

The roughest of them could take unpardonable liberties with him. He would let them maul and mistreat him to their heart's content; and he reveled in such usage; although to humans other than the Mistress and the Master, he was sternly resentful of any familiarity.

His senses told him this bundle contained a child;--a baby. It had been lying alone and defenseless beside the road. He had found it. And his heart warmed to the helpless little creature which was so heavy to carry.

Proudly, now, he strode along; his muscles tensed; moving as if on parade. The bundle swinging from his jaws was carried as lovingly as though it might break in sixty pieces at any careless step.

The spare tire was adjusted. The men glanced nervously up and down the road. No car or pedestrian was in sight. The driver scrambled to his place at the wheel. His brother crossed to the alder bush behind whose shelter he had left the baby. Back he came, on the run.

"'Tain't there!" he blithered. "'Tain't there! 'Tain't rolled nowheres, neither. It's been took! Lord! What're we goin' to--?"

He got no further. His brother had scrambled down from the seat; and pushed him aside, in a dash for the alder. But a few seconds of frantic search proved the baby was gone. The two men glared at each other in silent horror. Then by tacit impulse they got into the car.

"It couldn't 'a' walked off, could it?" gurgled the driver. "They can't walk, can they;--not at six months? Not far, anyhow?"

"It--it was took!" sputtered his brother between chattering teeth.

Another moment of scared silence. Then the driver rallied his awed faculties. Stepping on the self-starter, he brought the runabout into motion, and headed down the road.

"Where are you goin'?" queried the other. "No use a-keepin' on, this d'rection. It--"

"If it was took," answered the driver, truculently, "'twasn't took by no car. We'd 'a' heard a car or we'd 'a' saw it. If it had been took by two or three folks a-walkin', we'd 'a' heard 'em blat to each other when they seen the kid layin' there. That means it was took by one person, all alone. He didn't pa.s.s us, while we was workin'. Then, unless he's took to the fields, he's a-goin' the same way we are. An'

we're due to overhaul him. There'll only just be one of him; and there's two of us. I ain't aimin' to lose my slice of that two thousand; without hittin' a single lick to get it. If he--SUFFERIN'

PINK SNAKES!"

In his sudden dismay, he drove down both feet on the pedals. The indignant car stalled. Through the blackness ahead, the white ray from the lamps had picked up a weird object. And the two brethren stared at it, slack-jawed.

Walking sedately on, in front of the stalled runabout, and in the exact centre of the dusty road, moved an animal. Huge and formless it bulked, as it receded into the fainter glow of light. It might have been anything from a lion to a bear; in that uncertain glimmer. But, the lamps' rays played strongly enough on one detail of the apparition to identify it, past doubt, to both the dumfounded onlookers. They saw, clearly enough, a white bundle suspended from the monster's jaws;--unquestionably the bundle which had been laid behind the alder.

For perhaps ten seconds the men sat moveless, gaping goggle-eyed. Then, the driver murmured in a faraway voice:

"Did you--did you--was you fool enough to think you seen anything? Was you, Eitel?"

"I-I sure seen SUTHIN', Roodie," quavered Eitel. "Suthin' with--with the kid in its mouth. It--"

"That's good enough for me!" announced the heroic Roodie, stamping again on the self-starter.

"If we both seen it, then it was THERE. And I'm goin' after it."

In another brace of seconds the lights once, more picked up the dark animal with its white bundle. Eitel shrank back in his seat. But Roodie put on another notch of gas. And, coming closer, both recognized the strange bundle-carrier as a dark-hued collie dog.

The identification did little to ease their feeling of incredulous mystification. But it banished their superst.i.tious dread. Both of them were used to dogs. And though neither could guess how this particular dog happened to be stealing the twice-stolen baby, yet neither had the remotest fear of tackling the beast and rescuing its human plunder.

Roodie brought the abused runabout to another jerky stop within a few inches of the unconcerned collie. And he and Eitel swarmed earthward from opposite sides of the machine. In a trice, Roodie had struck Lad over the head; while Eitel grabbed at the bundle to drag it away from the dog.

Now, the weight of years was beginning to tell on Laddie. But that weight had not robbed him of the ability to call, at will, upon much of his oldtime strength and bewildering swiftness. Nor had it in any way dampened his hero-spirit or dulled his uncannily wise brain.

He had been plodding peacefully along, bearing home a wonderful gift--a gift oftener confided to the care of storks than of collies--when he had been attacked from two sides in most unprovoked fashion. He had been struck! His blood surged hot.

There was no Law governing such a case. So, as usual in new crises, Lad proceeded to make his own Law and to put it into effect.

A deft turn of the head eluded Eitel's s.n.a.t.c.hing hand. With the lightness of a feather, Lad deposited the bundle in the soft dust of the road. In practically, the same gesture, the dog's curving eye-tooth slashed Eitel's outstretched wrist to the bone.

Then, staggering under a second head-blow from Roodie, the collie wheeled with lightning-swift fury upon this more hostile of his two a.s.sailants.

Hurling himself at the man's throat, in silent ferocity, he well-nigh turned the nocturnal battle into a killing. But Roodie's left arm, by instinct, flew up to guard his threatened jugular.

Through coat and shirt and skin and flesh,--as in the case of Lady's slayer,--the great dog's teeth clove their way; their rending snap checked only by the bone of the forearm. The impetus of his eighty-pound body sent the man clean off his balance. And together the two crashed backward to the ground.