Persons Unknown Part 25

He hung about the outskirts of One Hundred-and-tenth Street till he saw her enter the Park and till he saw her leave it--safe, but with an exceedingly clouded brow.

"They didn't come, of course!" she said to him at the station. "They very naturally refused to swim into a net. Mr. Kane is a great dear, but I wish he would mind his own business! Mother, speak to Bryce." She took leave of them both with a serenely fond indifference to public conjecture and the train bore her away.

Mrs. Hope may habitually have endeavored to clutch at the life-lines of her own world even while she was being submerged in the billows of Christina's but she was not mercenary and she accepted Herrick with an evident thankfulness that he was no worse. When he had taken her home, he found himself at a loss as to what to do with his life. Christina had become so wholly his occupation that to lose her even for a few days was to lose the bottom out of the world. Although the morning was still swathed in yesterday's fog, the sun was struggling, the damp air was very warm, and his steps turned toward the Park. But he did not follow the paths which he and Christina had trod homeward from rehearsals; instinctively, he turned north. Then he smiled to see that he was once more making for the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance.

Yes, here was the last spot which had held her, and, as he looked about him, his heart stirred to think of her here. They should come here together, he and she. The place was a little wilderness; he could not have believed that in that kempt and ordered domain there could be so wild and sweet a grace of nature and charmed loneliness. The hill was high and thinly wooded; finely veiled in the mist and the faint sunshine it was the very spot for the dryad length and lightness of Christina's movements. At the same time, so close to the city's hum, there seemed something magic, something ominous and waiting in the utter, perfect stillness, and the little clearing at the top of the hill somehow, whether by its broken boulders or the columnar straightness of a semicircle of trees, suggested a Druid clearing. Those who wished to make a sacrifice here would be very strangely unmolested. High and low and far away there was no human figure, and a cry might perish long before it traveled those misty distances. Herrick thought, "If she had come alone!" and shuddered.

But there was the little squirrel house; there the bench where she had waited; and at its base he smiled to see the scattered nuts which Christina, with her variegated interests, had not failed to bring her furry hosts. A la.s.situde of loneliness came over him; he was still not wholly recovered from his accident of three weeks before and with a weary yielding to stiffness and weakness he dropped down on the bench.

Then he saw that along one of its slats some one had recently penciled a line, and he recognized Christina's hand. "I will come again for three days running, after Thursday. At the same hour. And I will come _alone_."

He was startled, but he smiled. It was so like her! Looking up, he saw behind him a man sweeping leaves in the distance, and, far down the hill, there appeared a loafer with a newspaper. The charm was broken.

Good heavens, where were people starting from! He could perceive, now, to his left a man sleeping in the gra.s.s. Could any of these be the plain clothes men, still lingering hopefully about? By George, they must be!

And Christina was right--they were too obvious a snare! Why, there was a fourth, altogether too loutishly and innocently eating an apple as he strayed on!

Herrick looked down at Christina's message, wondering if the detectives had seen it. Intrepid and obstinate darling, how resolute she was to know all there was to be known! When he looked up again he saw that the slumberer had wakened and was sitting up. The other three men were approaching from their respective angles, nearer and nearer to the bench. And then it occurred to him--did they take him for a blackmailer?

It made him laugh and then somehow it vexed him; and he began to stir the fallen leaves with a light stick he carried, restlessly. The men came on, and it annoyed him to be surrounded like this, as by a pack of wolves. He lifted his head impatiently, and was about to hail the nearest man when a splash of sun fell full on that man's face. It was the face of the chauffeur in the gray touring-car.

He knew then that he was in a trap. Controlling his first impulse to spring up and bring the struggle to an issue, he counted his chances. He remembered how far and still was this deserted spot; his muscles were very stiff, and he felt the slimness of the stick in his hand. He had no other weapon. And there were four of those figures sauntering in upon him through the silence and the pale, dreamy sunshine. He felt the high, hot beating of his heart. The city lay so close at hand! He could still feel on his mouth Christina's kiss! And the immense desire to live, and all a man's fury against outrage, against this causeless and inexplicable brute-hate, which already, in the city's very streets, had dared to maim and tried to murder him, rose in him with a colder rage and kept him quiet and expressionless. He rose; and striking the dust of the bench from his clothes, he glanced about. Yes, the man behind him was still advancing, sweeping leaves; down the hill before him the man climbed upward, still mumbling over his newspaper; to his right the apple-eater, chewing his last bite, tossed away the core as he came on; the chauffeur alone disdained subterfuge, advancing quietly; he carried in his hand some lengths of rope. Herrick believed that he had one chance. This wooded isolation could not be so far-reaching as it seemed: they would scarcely dare to fire a shot.

Leisurely he idled a step or two down the slope toward the man with the newspaper, till he was just outside the closing semicircle of the others. Then, lowering his head, he shot swiftly forward. Immediately there was a shrill whistle and the reader cast his newspaper away. It was too late; Herrick's lowered head struck him in the diaphragm and knocked him backwards. As he fell, Herrick leaped over him and turning, caught the chauffeur a stinging blow across the eyes with his stick. The stick broke; and Herrick, dropping to his knees, caught the ankle of the next comer and threw him flat upon his face. The fourth man flung a blackjack which, as Herrick rose up, caught him just below the right elbow; the young fellow sprang up and, shouting now for help at the top of his strong voice, he raced down the hill as if, once more, he were bearing the ball to its last goal.

For a moment he felt that he had s.n.a.t.c.hed the victory, but his stiff muscles played him false and his right arm hung as if paralyzed. His shouts, too, were leaving him winded and the fourth man, now considerably in advance of the others, was gaining on him at every step.

Suddenly Herrick mistook the shadow of a little bush for the shadow of a fifth opponent; in his second's wavering the fourth man lunged at him, missed him, and losing his own balance clutched the end of Herrick's coat. They both went down together, getting and giving blows; and though Herrick was up and off again in an instant, the breath was pretty well knocked out of him. Violent pains were throbbing now through his arm; he seemed to himself as heavy as lead; near the bottom of the hill the fourth man was on him again; Herrick landed on the fellow's head with his left, only to fall himself into the hands of the two whom he had thrown at first and who now fell upon him with a zeal that all his French boxing, which enabled him to land a kick in one jaw and a horrible backheeled stroke into the ribs of the fellow who was trying to wrap a coat round his head, scarcely availed to rid him of. He gathered himself together for one shout that seemed to him to crack the tree-trunks. But the game was up; without knowing it he was turning faint from the pain in his arm, and then the men were all round him now; barring his path and only holding off from him a little because the chauffeur was running down hill toward them, aiming at Herrick, as he came, the rope which he had tied into a noose. Herrick leaped to one side, and clinging to the tactics which had served him best, dropped to the ground and pulled the chauffeur down atop of him. They clenched like that and went, rolling and struggling, down the hill; striking against trees, kicking, clawing, blind with rage, till they were stopped by the flat ground. It was Herrick who landed on his back and found himself staring up at the revolver the chauffeur was drawing from his pocket. At that moment there sounded a policeman's whistle.

The man who had been running after them with the coat for Herrick's head, dropped it and ran like mad. His companion's arm had been broken by Herrick's kick, but this man and the fourth continued wildly searching for something they had dropped on the hill. The chauffeur had had to ease a little on Herrick in order to draw his gun; but when he felt Herrick struggling onto his right side and even rolling himself on top of his right arm, he quickly slid the barrel of the revolver into his palm and lifted the b.u.t.t-end. As he did so Herrick's left fist shot up and dealt him a blow on the point of the chin. He fell back as if his neck were broken; the pistol slipped out of his hand and Herrick caught it just as the man with the broken arm dropped on his chest. The policemen's whistles were sounding nearer and nearer; the man on Herrick's chest kept him from aiming the pistol, but he discharged it in the gra.s.s, shot after shot, five of them, to guide the police. "Let him have it!" said the man on top of Herrick, but in an Italian phrase, to the fourth man, who leaned over Herrick raising what the other had dropped back there on the hill. It was the blackjack. Herrick could just turn the pistol a little and point it upward from his side. He fired it straight into the fourth man's face; and he was always glad, afterward, that, like a sick girl, he had closed his eyes. The next man who bent over him was a policeman.

"Don't mind me," Herrick said, "get them! Get after them!" But that automobile of theirs must have been waiting on the driveway near at hand; for the man whom Herrick had shot dead was the only one they caught.

At first the body seemed to offer no clue; save a soiled and torn half of a blank card on which had been uncouthly scribbled the number 1411--unless its being the body of a young Italian could be called a clue. Herrick, who had, of course, accompanied it to the station under a nominal arrest, turned sick with disappointment. At that moment the lieutenant in charge emitted an exclamation. He had found on the dead man a letter addressed in the typewriting of the Arm of Justice to Christina Hope. The inclosure was intact, and the lieutenant held it out to Herrick.

To the single sheet of paper was fastened a thick, soft curl of dark red hair. Under the curl, in a rounded but girlish handwriting, were four words: "Help me, dear Chris!"

CHAPTER VIII

A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS

This piece of information was very carefully guarded from the newspapers. Nothing of the Arm of Justice had as yet leaked out. But the fight in the Park was another matter; people linked it with the sinister automobile, and it broke out in headlines everywhere. Herrick began to find himself the most widely advertised man in New York; his battle-scarred appearance was but too apt to proclaim his ident.i.ty and he did not know whether he most objected to being considered a hero who had slain four ruffians with one hand or a presumptuous nine-pin always being bowled over and having to be rescued by the police! There was a good deal of pain below his elbow, where the blackjack had temporarily paralyzed certain muscles, so that for another day or so his arm hung helpless at his side; he could almost have wished it a more dangerous wound! Curious or jeering friends made his life a burden; Christina called him up over the long distance 'phone and swore him not to leave the house without his revolver; Marion telegraphed him entreaties to come home, and his own mind seethed in a turmoil of question and of horrible fancy to which the young figure of Nancy Cornish was the unhappy center. Nor could Mrs. Hope be called a comforting companion.

"Besides, Mr. Herrick,--Bryce--were they trying to kidnap you, too? And if so, wouldn't you think they had enough on their hands already? Or did they mean to murder you, really? And if so, why? Why? And, oh, Mr.

Bryce, just think how uncontrollable Christina is--and who will it be next?" Often as Herrick had asked himself these and many other questions, they could not lose their interest for him. His mind spun round in them like a squirrel which finds no opening to its cage.

Notoriety, however, sometimes brings strange fish in its net. And when Mrs. Grubey stopped Herrick on the street to applaud his prowess as a pugilist, within the loose-woven mesh of her wonder and concern he seemed to catch a singular gleam, significant of he knew not what.

For Mrs. Grubey, in celebrating the hero which Herrick had become to her Johnnie, did hope that he would see the boy, sometime, and use his influence against his being such a little liar.--"You remember that queer toy pistol, Mr. Herrick, that he said he borrowed off a boy friend?"

"A. A. A., Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing! It had no connection with them?"

"Why, it never come from a school at all!"

"I mis...o...b..ed it! Art-Drawing was rather elaborate than convincing."

"Oh, you'd oughtn't to laugh, Mr. Herrick--and the child so naughty! Why that morning after Mr. Ingham was killed he found it propping open the slit in our letter box." Herrick ceased to laugh. "He was so set on keeping it he made up that story, and then to go to work and lose it, an' it so queer the stones in it was maybe real--"

"He lost it, then?"

"Els't we'd never have known on account of him coming home crying. He lost it in the Park, where he'd been playing train-robber with it an'

lots o' the loafers on benches watchin' him. A bigger boy got it away from him, larkin' back an' forth, an' threw it to him, an' just then a horse took fright from an automobile and run up on the gra.s.s with its rig. The boys scattered in a hurry an' when they come back the pistol was gone. He hadn't noticed no particular person watching, so he didn't know who was gone, too. I tell him, G.o.d took it to punish his lyin',"

concluded Mrs. Grubey, with the self-righteousness of perfect truth, "but I certainly would like to know how much it was worth! An' how it ever got there an' who it belonged to."

Herrick had a vision of a comic valentine he had received on the same morning. "I'm afraid it was meant for me!" he said. He knew this could not clear things up much for Mrs. Grubey; and afterward he fell to wondering if the capital "C" scratched on the dummy pistol's golden surface bore any similarity to the slender, pointed lettering which had formed the words "To the Apollo in the bath-robe." He could never remember when the initials rose before him in a new order; the A's blent as one and then the C--A. C.--Oh, madness! Yet, on Friday, he would ask Christina.

One other tribute to his popular fame gave him a new idea. It came from his Yankee woman at the table d'hote. The night after the attack she motioned him to her as he was leaving and without ceasing to play solitaire she said, "If I was you, young feller, I guess I wouldn't come down here for one while."

His eyes opened in amused surprise. "Why not?"

"Ain't you the one shot a Dago yesterday in the Park? Pshaw, you needn't tell me--I know 'twas 'cause you had t' do it! An' good riddance! But it's healthier for you to stay where you belong."

Herrick looked round him on the good-tempered, smiling people at the little clean tables, and laughed. "But you don't suppose the whole nation is one united Black-Hand, do you? You seem to have a mighty poor opinion of Italians!"

"Well," said the woman, with a grim smile of her own, "I married one.

I'd oughta know!"

She finished her game and seeing him still lingering, in enjoyment of her tartness, she said, "All forriners 're pretty poor folks. When I get mad at my children I say it's the streak of forrin' in 'em. Well, my girl's good Yankee, anyhow. Fair as anybody. It's my son's took after his father, poor fellow!"

"Then the proprietress, here, isn't your daughter?"

"Her? Sakes, no! She's my niece-in-law. I brought up my daughter like she was an American girl! It's my son keeps in with these! He's homesick. My daughter's husband got into a little bit o' trouble in the Old Country," said this remarkable little dame, without the least embarra.s.sment, "and her an' me's glad enough to stay here. But the men kind o' mope. Their business worries 'em and as I say, 'tain't the business I ever would have chose, but I s'pose when I married a Dago I might's well made up my mind to it!" She said this with an air inimitably business like, and so continued--"Now I want you should clear out from here, young man! There's all kinds of fellers come here. It may be awful funny to you to think o' gettin' a knife in your back, but I don't want it any round where I am! When they're after Dagoes, it ain't my business. But my own folks is my own folks."

Now it could not be denied that there was something not wholly rea.s.suring as to the pursuits of this respectable old lady's family in this speech, and in lighter-hearted times Herrick might have noted it as a testimonial to that theory of his concerning the matter-of-fact in crime. But now it suggested to him that he might do worse than look for the faces of the blackmailers in such little eating-places as this one.

After all, they evidently were Italians, and it was with Italians that they would sojourn. Yes--that was one line to follow! He remembered that this region was in or adjacent to Ten Euyck's district and he wondered if he could bring himself to ask the favor of a list of its Latin haunts. He and Mrs. Hope were on their way to a big Wednesday night opening when this resolution took definite shape, and it was strange, with his mind full of these ideas, to come into the crush and dazzle of the theater lobby.

Mrs. Hope at once began bowing right and left; the theatrical season was still so young that there were actors and actresses everywhere. Herrick, abnormally aware of his new conspicuousness, could only endeavor to look pleasant; and, trailing, like a large helpless child, in her wake, was glad to catch the friendly eye of Joe Patrick; fellow-sufferer in a common cause, whom Christina's recommendation as usher he perceived to have landed him here, instead of at the theater where she was to play.

Unfortunately Joe hailed him by name, in an unexpectedly carrying voice; a blush for which Herrick could have kicked himself with rage flamed over him to the roots of his hair, and when he perceived, with horror, that they were entering a box, he clutched Mrs. Hope's cloak and slunk behind the curtains with it like a raw boy.

But even so, there was a continual coming and going of acquaintances, many of whom conveyed a sort of sympathetic flutter over Mrs. Hope's interest in to-night's play; an impression that Christina must feel her own absence simply too hard, and Herrick smiled to think how much more concentrated were Christina's interests than they realized. Not but their expectation of her appearance to-morrow was keen enough. It seemed to Herrick that there was a thrill of it in all the audience, which persistently studied Mrs. Hope's box. Christina's genius was a burning question, and the unknown quant.i.ty of her success agitated her profession like a troubled air--through which how many eyes were already ardently directed toward to-morrow night, pa.s.sionate astronomers, attendant on a new star! Murders come and murders go, but here was a girl who, in a few hours, might throw open the brand-new continent of a new career; who, next season, might be a queen, with powers like life and death fast in her hands. And, with that tremendous absorption in their own point of view which Herrick had not failed to observe in the members of Christina's profession, people asked if it wasn't too dreadful that this business of Ingham's murder and Nancy Cornish's disappearance should happen just at this time, when it might upset Christina for her performance?

Mrs. Hope introduced him to all comers with a liberality which her daughter had been far from displaying, and he could see them studying him and trying to place him in Christina's life. It was clear to him that if he ranked high, they were glad he had not gone and got himself beaten to death in the Park, or it might have upset her still more. He thought of the girl whose wet cheek had pressed his in the firelight.

The sweetness of the memory was sharp as a knife, and the rise of the curtain, displaying wicked aristocrats of Louis the Fourteenth, sporting on the lawns of Versailles, could not deaden it.

For if there is one quality essential to the effect of wicked aristocrats it is that of breeding; and of all mortal qualities there is none to which managers are so indifferent. In a costume play more particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she must entrust her fate.

A burst of applause, recalling his attention to the stage, pointed out to him a real aristocrat. Among the full-calved males in pinks and blues, the entrance of a slender fellow in black satin, not very tall, with an order on his breast and the shine of diamonds among his laces, had created something the effect of the arrival of a high-spirited and thoroughbred racehorse among a drove of caparisoned elephants. Herrick, the ingenuous outsider, supposed this actor the one patrician obtainable by the management; not knowing that it was his. .h.i.t as the spy in "Garibaldi's Advance" which had opened to him the whole field of foreign villains, and that he could never have been cast for a treacherous marquis of Louis Quatorze this season if he had not succeeded as a treacherous private of Garibaldi the season before.

With a quick, light gesture, which acknowledged and dismissed the welcome of the audience, the newcomer crossed the stage and bowed deeply before his king. The king stood at no great distance from Herrick's box, and when the newcomer lifted his extraordinarily bright, dark eyes they rested full on Herrick's own. Then Herrick found himself looking into the face of the man in the street who had questioned him about the murder on the night of Ingham's death.