Persons Unknown Part 41

CHAPTER VIII

JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR

They listened, incredulous, straining their eyes among the black pools and bright patches of wooded, winding way up from the river and discerned--almost on the instant close at hand--a gray ghost dipped in moonshine; lost under the trees and then springing out upon them, a black shape against the darkness, heralded by no sound of voice or horn, speeding as if with its head down like some sullen thunderbolt.

With their lights blazing defiance Herrick, catching out his revolver, attempted to cross the junction in time to throw their own car across the narrow road. He was too late; she grazed them as she pa.s.sed; they fell in behind her, shouting threats which were lost in the wind of that flight; the road fell away before them; the hilled and wooded earth tore past; the noise, as of blowing forests, of mult.i.tudinous crowds and the roaring of the sea, surged in their ears; great waves and solid hills of air rose up and moved upon them, and, as they pa.s.sed through, split into stinging, icy shreds that whipped their faces; the car rocked in the wild tide of its own speed, and in a world where they had gone blind to everything but one crazy whirl, they yet saw their lights fall ever nearer and brighter upon the fugitive.

It was now nearing three o'clock, the moon wholly victorious and the cars leaping through a world of molten silver. Herrick said to the boy beside him, "Can you shoot?"

"Not so that you can tell it!"

"Take the wheel, then!"

He could not make out her figure in the car. But in such thickly looming dangers, what must be, must be.

The men ahead heard him call to them to stop before he fired. In answer they merely leaned forward shielding themselves, and Herrick let fly two shots, aiming for the back tires; but, in that swaying speed, he missed.

With a kind of harsh gaiety he answered Stanley, "No more can I!" and with the words the man beside Nicola turned and fired straight at Herrick's head. The wind-shield shattered in their faces; as the bullet pa.s.sed between them Stanley felt a little sting, like the scorch of a quick, hot iron, on his cheek. "Slide down," Herrick said to him, "way under the wheel! Keep your head to one side." He himself was kneeling, resting his revolver on the frame of the broken wind-shield. At his third bullet they heard Nicola cry out and clap his hand to the back of his neck; the touring-car swerved and gave a kind of bounce; the man beside Nicola fired again and put a hole through Herrick's cap. The next minute the revolver dropped out of his hand; Herrick's fourth shot had broken his wrist. And now the road broadened a little, and the Ingham car was drawing on a level with its opponent. The touring-car did not carry Christina.

"Get as far forward as you can," Herrick said, "I'm after the front tires."

Their own front tires pa.s.sed the rear of the first car; as they came abreast the man with the broken wrist, using his left hand, emptied his pistol almost in their faces; a shot from the man in the body of the car struck their steering-wheel; there was a cloud now between the two cars, smelling so thick of powder that Stanley seemed to himself to eat it. He was aware of Herrick suddenly casting aside all defenses, leaning forward into this cloud, his brows knotted and his arm outstretched.

There came the quick Ping!--Ping! of his last two shots and as if in the same breath, the earthquake! The black touring-car seemed to spring into the air; then her fore wheels collapsed and she sank forward, still sliding a little as if on her nose, and, running quietly over the edge of the road into the shallow ditch that edged it, turned on her side.

They were well pa.s.sed by this time, and despite the jerk with which Stanley brought up, Herrick had leaped out before they were stopped, and at the same moment a figure scrambled from the fallen hulk and, without a glance behind, made off across the fields. Herrick, shifting his empty revolver as he ran, till he carried it by the barrel, swung into full pursuit.

This was the more foolhardy because on getting to his feet Nicola had drawn his own revolver, from which Herrick had to dodge as he ran, and at length indeed to throw himself down, and get forward only by his hands and knees. They were now in a broken, stony lot, spotted with underbrush; a brook running through it, and here and there tall chestnut trees. By screening himself with these, and making a run for it in any patch of shadow, he kept his man in sight and even gained upon him; he was waiting till Nicola's gun should be as empty as his own before he came to closer quarters. For this he knelt and rose and ran and crawled, now showing himself, to draw--and waste!--a bullet; and now plumping down among bushes. It was at one of these moments that he heard a shot behind him and, peering through the screen of twigs, saw that Nicola's comrades had freed themselves from the ditch and were advancing, apparently full-armed, and he of the uninjured hand beating the coverts as they came. They called to each other, and in Italian sure enough; and they carried a lantern from Stanley's car. What had become of Stanley?

And what now was he himself to do?

He crept forward to the edge of his thicket and could just make out a figure, not very far off, running heavily across a cleared s.p.a.ce. Then, in a blanket of darkness, the figure disappeared as though through a trap-door, and Herrick, for all his listening, could hear only the calling and trampling of the men with the lamp. He told himself that Nicola had taken a leaf from his own book and was perhaps lying flattened to the earth--there came a disturbance in the bushes, a jar along the ground, as of some one plunging back from that cleared s.p.a.ce toward the road; it appeared to him that a bulk of blacker blackness appeared and disappeared where those sounds rose. But the moon had so gone under a cloud that he could not be sure. So he thought; and then his heart leaped to admit the blessed truth--the moon had set! He slipped to his feet and fled, swift as a shadow and strong as a hound, after the heavier runner. He had guessed the truth, that Nicola was returning to the road. He had been led out across the fields on a false scent, but now Nicola, thinking to have doubled and shaken him off, was on the home trail straight for the high road. They came out upon it perhaps two hundred feet to the south of their empty motors; Herrick steadily gaining, and surprised cries and lantern-flashes piercing the field they had left behind. But as Herrick lifted his gun to let the lagging quarry have its b.u.t.t-end, suddenly Nicola pitched forward and lay at his feet. He brought up short, suspicious of a trick. And then he remembered how Nicola had clapped his hand to the back of his neck.

Holding the gun ready, he stooped and put his own hand to the same spot.

It was covered with something hot and wet, which Herrick, with a surprising lack of sentiment, wiped off on the man's coat; he tried to lift the senseless figure and get it back to his own car. Something fell out of Nicola's breast with a little silver tinkle. The sound, as of some woman's trinket, drove the sense out of Herrick's head. Though he might as well have run up an electric target, he struck a match. A silver locket lay in his hand. It had been violently wrested from a neck-chain in whose wrenched links a thread or two of lace still clung.

In one broken side the gla.s.s had been ground to fragments, as though under a man's heel, but the marred lines of a likeness were still there.

The likeness, cut from an old kodak picture, was of Will Denny. Some one, like Signor Gabrielli, had never voluntarily parted with the features of her love! Out of the locket's other side, warm from Nicola's breast and unmarred but by the trickling of his blood, cried mutely, eagerly, to Herrick the fresh youth of Nancy Cornish.

Almost as he saw the bullets sang about him, as if he had charged into a bee hive. The lamp the Italians carried swallowed up his little match and picked him out with brightness, holding him in the circle of its light. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up Nicola's gun and pulled the trigger, but the barrel was empty as that of his own; he might have flung himself down and taken his chance to crawl off in the ditch, but he had no mind to die like that; and what he did was to s.n.a.t.c.h off his coat and hold it before him, back and forth like a moving screen, as he ran forward into the mouth of the revolvers to crack at least one man on the head with his cold weapon before he fell. Just then from down the road a fresh volley of bullets shattered the night, and the voice of Stanley and the sheriff came to him like music.

The rescue which so much firing had helped Stanley to summon swept in full chase after the Pascoes and the tables were completely turned. But the shouts of the sheriff's party--"Got one?" "No; haven't you?" "Hi, Williams, they must have got over the wall of the Hoover place!" "We'll scramble over from the hood and see if they've struck down to the river!" "Blake, you and Cobbett drive round and ring up the lodge. Them old folks are easy a million, but get 'em up!"--warned Herrick of a blank in the sequel. And sure enough when the conquerors foregathered, the escape of the Pascoes, presumably by the river, was the end of their conquest.

For this had they fought and ridden, crawled and run! No wonder they felt a certain need of cheering each other with what gains they had.

There was the yellow house; the home of the Pascoes and their Arm of Justice, the rainbow end of Kane's dream! And there, in the ditch beside them was a vague tumble of wreckage. "Hail, and farewell!" Herrick whistled, with a curious laugh. "We've met once too often!" For there, at least, was the end of his acquaintance, the gray touring-car.

As the two young men reentered New York with the milk wagons and drove soberly through the Park, a cool gray light, more like darkness than light and yet perfectly and strangely clear like shadowed water, had begun to break above the sleeping town. Then Herrick drew from his pocket his paper puzzle and spread it out beside him on the rear seat of the car.

This time get rid of her.

I say. She but she can't g real dau mother

et rid do the way een any She can but mebbe of

she's got to ain't ever b ghter to me

Some of the connections were obvious enough, but what the torn edges helped him still further to form was a purely domestic statement. "This time she's got to do the way I say. She ain't ever been any real daughter to me. But--" Then there was a bit gone. Then, "She can get rid of" word missing, "mebbe, but she can't get rid of her mother--"

"Well!" cried Stanley in disdainful disappointment. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"How should I know?"

He made the sc.r.a.ps into a little pile on the floor of the car, set fire to them, and ground them to ashes with his heel. For he knew only too well. That gray parrot face, that sharp, ignorant, cold voice in the sunny table d'hote! "I want you should clear out from here, young man.

I'd oughta know Dagoes; I married one." Yes, that was it! Wasn't it Stanley who wanted to know what hold such people had on Chris? "My girl's good Yankee--fair as any one. I brought her up so fine--" As they turned down still unawakened Broadway to his rooms Herrick looked into the light that was like darkness with eyes that made nothing of the first pale blush of peach blow nor the first hint of vaporous blue.

Till he heard Stanley say, "And if that Pascoe Arm-of-Justice gang have run away and yet come back, where did they run to?"

Through all his preoccupation Herrick was aware of an immense stupidity.

"You're right. We went over that place inch by inch. And you know, when they left, they must have tumbled into their car and off--no time for anything. They packed nothing, they took nothing. Well, then, Stan, where was Justice's typewriter? And in what room or garret or cellar was the printing-press?"

Stanley gaped.

"Agreed--there wasn't any. And so that never was their real shop. Only a blind. Their real place of business, Stan, their fortress, their retreat, we've never found at all!"

This was the net result of town and country in their search for a missing girl, twenty-four hours after Christina had disappeared.

The anxiety of her friends would have been scarcely more enlightened, or even more relieved, had the search not happened to miss one accident of that cross-wired night.

At about eleven o'clock, more than an hour before Herrick had forced an entrance, the since damaged touring-car, returning from its expedition of the morning, had drawn up before the gate of the yellow house. The night world was then still a world of wind and rain; the car was splashed as though it had pa.s.sed through a flood, and Nicola, stiff, muddy and drenched, was not in a very good humor when he got no reply to his knock at the kitchen door. He had driven quietly and knocked quietly, but now he lost control of himself and began to hammer; catching hold of the k.n.o.b impatiently, he felt it turn in his grasp and entered. The door had not been locked, though the kitchen was lighted.

He thought he could hear, somewhere, some one knocking. He took the lamp and went up the back stairs; then it seemed to him that the knocking came from the front of the house. He retraced his steps. Yes, there was a light in the hall and the knocking came from the closet under the stairs.

The Pascoes were in desperate straits, and Nicola was alone. He drew his knife from the capacious foldings of his coat, and stepped a little behind the door as he flung it open. There stumbled out, and sank, gasping, at his feet, the figure of a woman. She brought with her, out of the reeking closet, a strong odor of ammonia. Nicola gave a grunt of amazement. Then, like Herrick afterward, he lifted his lamp, and stared about the closet. On the floor lay an empty quart bottle which had recently been full of household ammonia, a still soaking towel, and a large silk umbrella, the rod broken and the handle missing. With the point of this umbrella a pane of the little window overhead had been broken and a slant of the outside shutter forced open for air. Nicola could make nothing of it; he turned at length, and grouchily pulled the gasping woman to her feet. This woman was the gray-haired housekeeper, Mrs. Pascoe.

At ten o'clock she said she had gone to get something from the closet and, as she opened the door, she had smelled ammonia. Then a towel, soaking with it, had been pressed on her face. Before she could do more than struggle with that, she had been pushed into the closet and the door had clicked upon her. That was all she knew. She must have been unconscious part of the time.--At ten o'clock! What an eternity of despair, then, had Christina not lived through before she thus ruthlessly freed herself! And what, now, had become of her; under a dawn some seven hours later than when, leaving Nancy behind, she had rushed out of that house and sped away, along the storm-tossed road?

CHAPTER IX

A SIGN IN THE SKY

At the end of four days Christina's friends gave up their private search for the retreat of the Arm of Justice.

During those days Herrick and the faithful Stanley, sometimes accompanied by Wheeler's stalwart hopefulness, had persistently attempted to take up the trail where it had broken--in the fields at one end of the Hoover estate. The beautiful old place, one of the great show places of the Hudson, stretched three miles deep to the river bank and a mile and a half along the road; remembering the theory of an escape through the grounds they presented themselves as richly tipping tourists to the little old, old couple at the lodge. These aged folk accustomed, during the Hoovers' prolonged absence abroad, to curious sightseers, welcomed them beneath the winged marble lions of the entrance-gates and made them free of the grounds with a host-like courtesy. But no broken shrubbery, no footstep save of that of a stray gardener or of their rival searchers the police, rewarded them; from the Hudson Club's boathouse, which had rented a strip of the beach, no boat was missing; the sh.o.r.es of unbroken woodland for a league on either side yielded no sign; when a hanging shutter at the great house led to a belief that the refugees had sheltered there the friends watched anxiously the disappointed ransacking of privileged authorities, and their only gain came from the gossip of the old lodge-keepers which informed them that the body of Nicola Pascoe had never been found. He could, then, have been only stunned. Thus it was still he they were most alert for during the next three days when the whole district--inns and post-offices, country-stores and stable-yards as well as every grove and by-lane--yielded them by day or night no sc.r.a.p of news.

During their search, indeed, what clues existed had crumbled away. The cabman, for instance, had most truly driven Christina to the Amsterdam hotel, where she had simply given him so large a tip as to upset his sobriety and earn his discharge. Meeting in with the manager of The Palisades and applying fuddleheadedly for relief he had conveyed to that gentleman the idea of "knowing something," and had been sent to sober up at Riley's in order to keep the reward in the family. Then the day-clerk of the Amsterdam brought forth Christina's registered signature, engaging a suite on Thursday afternoon for Thursday night; she had claimed this suite from the night-clerk and occupied it; early in the morning she had sent for the housekeeper and hired some clothes of hers, saying she couldn't wait for her maid to bring her any. The frightened housekeeper had at length displayed the white and silver dress. Last and worst, to Herrick, when, on Sat.u.r.day, he had sought out the table d'hote, the dogs, the cats, the babies were unchanged, the Italian proprietress greeted him with a smile of welcome, but no gray-haired woman played solitaire behind the desk.

It was a curious enough blight without being heightened by the fact that Kane's patience with Herrick had plainly given out. Ever since the young man's return from Waybridge he had been aware of a change in the official att.i.tude which rendered it suddenly impossible for him to see any one whom he asked to see and stretched like a fine wire excluding him from the whole affair. It increased his sense of outlawry, but a private preoccupation kept it from striking home.

This preoccupation ran parallel with, but, alas! could never be brought to meet that old story of the Hopes' love-affair which he could not help feeling to be the key to the true, the hidden, situation. That little pitted speck--and his novel! His novel of the Italian impostor! On the morrow of his chase after Nicola the table d'hote had scarcely failed him before he was knocking at the door of Mrs. Deutch.