The Madness of May Part 7

"A defaulter?" Hood supplied blandly.

"It's impossible!" roared Deering. "Father's the very soul of honor."

"I dare say he is," remarked Hood carelessly. "So were you till greed led you to pilfer your governor's strong box. Let us be tolerant and withhold judgment. It's enough that your own skirts are clear. Put that stuff out of sight; we must flit."

Hood set off for the Barton Arms at a brisk pace, talking incessantly.

"This whole business is bully beyond my highest expectations. By George, it's almost too good to be true! Critics of the drama complain that the average amateur's play ends with every act; but so far in our adventures every incident leads on to something else. Perfectly immense that somebody had beaten you to the bonds!"

Deering's emotions were beyond utterance. It was a warm morning, and he did not relish carrying the suitcase, whose recovery had plunged him into a despair darker than that caused by its loss.

At a turn in the road Hood paused, struck his stick heavily upon the ground, and drew out the slipper. He whirled it in the air three times and twice it pointed east. He thrust it back into his pocket with a sigh of satisfaction and brushed the dust from his hands.

"Once more we shall follow the pointing slipper. Yesterday it led us to the moon girl, the bungalow, and the suitcase; now it points toward the mysterious east, and no telling what new delights!"

VI

Hood and Deering found Ca.s.sowary sitting in the machine in the inn yard reading a newspaper; this Hood promptly seized and scanned with his trained eye.

"Are the bags aboard? Ah, I see you have been forehanded, Ca.s.sowary!"

Deering went to the inn office and came out with a number of telegrams which he read as he slowly crossed the yard.

"What do you think of this?" he asked weakly. The yellow sheets shook in his hand and his face was white. "I wired to a bank and a club in San Francisco last night, and they've answered that father isn't in San Francisco and hasn't been there! And I wired the people Constance was to visit at Pasadena, and they don't know anything about her. Just look at these things!"

"Sounds like straight information, but why worry?" remarked Hood, scanning the telegrams.

"But why should father lie to me? Why should Constance say she was going to California if she wasn't?"

"My dear boy, don't ask me such questions!" Hood remarked with an injured air. "You are guilty of the gravest error in sending telegrams without consulting me! How can we trust ourselves to Providence if you persist in sending telegrams! If you do this again, I shall be seriously displeased, and you mustn't displease Hood. Hood is very ugly in his wrath."

Deering was at the point of tears. Hood was a fool, and he wished to tell him so, but the words stuck in his throat.

"We move eastward toward the Connecticut border, Ca.s.sowary," Hood ordered and pushed Deering into the machine.

Hood was as merry as the morning itself, and talked ceaselessly as they rolled through the country, occasionally bidding Ca.s.sowary slow down and give heed to his discourse. The chauffeur listened with a grin, glancing guardedly at Deering, who stared grimly ahead with an unlighted cigar in his mouth. He was not to be disturbed in his meditations upon the blackness of the world by the idiotic prattle of a madman. For half an hour Hood had been describing his adventures with a Dublin University man, whose humor he p.r.o.nounced the keenest and most satisfying he had ever known. He had gathered from this person an immense fund of lore relating to Irish superst.i.tions.

"He left me just when I had learned to love him," Hood concluded mournfully. "Became fascinated with a patent-medicine faker we struck at a county fair in Indiana. He was so tickled over the way the long-haired doctor played the banjo and jollied the crowd that he attached himself to his caravan. That Irishman was one of the most agreeable men to be in jail with that I ever knew; even hardened murderers would cotton to him.

That spire over there must be Addington. The inn is nothing to boast of, but we'd better tackle it."

His gayety at luncheon once more won Deering to a cheerier view of his destiny. Hood called for the proprietor and lectured him roundly for offering canned-blueberry pie. The fact that blueberries were out of season made no difference to the outraged Hood; pie produced from a can was a gross imposition. He cited legal decisions covering such cases and intimated that he might bring proceedings. As the innkeeper strode angrily away an elderly woman at a neighboring table addressed the dining-room on the miserable incompetence of the pastry-cooks of these later times, winding up by thanking Hood heartily for his protest. She was from Boston, she announced, and the declining intellectual life of that city she attributed to the deterioration of its pie.

Hood rose and gravely replied in a speech of five minutes, much to the delight of two girls at the old lady's table. Hood wrote his name on the menu card, and bade the giggling waitress hand it to the lady from Boston. Her young companions conferred for a moment, and then sent back a card on which appeared these names neatly pencilled:

Maid Marian The Queen of Sheba The d.u.c.h.ess of Suffolk (Ma.s.s.)

"My dear boy," Hood remarked to Deering after he had bowed elaborately to the trio, "I tell you the whole world's caught step with us! That lady and her two nieces, or granddaughters as the case may be, are under the spell, just as you and I are and Ca.s.sowary and your Pierrette and Babette of the bungalow. If only you could yield yourself to the May spirit, how happy we might be! Just think of Ca.s.sowary; worth a million dollars and eating his lunch with the chauffeurs somewhere below stairs and picking up much information that he will impart to me later! What a bully world this would be if all mankind followed my system: stupid conventions all broken-down; the G.o.d of mirth holding his sides as he contemplates the world at play! You may be sure that old lady is a stickler for the proprieties when she's at home; widow of a bishop most likely. Those girls have been carefully reared, you can see that, but full of the spirit of mischief. The moment I tackled that stupid innkeeper about his monstrous pie they felt the drawing of the mystic tie that binds us together with silken cords. Very likely they, like us, are in search of adventure, and if our own affairs were less urgent I should certainly cultivate their further acquaintance."

The lady who called herself the d.u.c.h.ess of Suffolk (Ma.s.s.) was undoubtedly a person of consequence and the possessor of a delightful humor. Deering a.s.sumed that she and her companions were abroad upon a lark of some kind and were enjoying themselves tremendously. Hood's spell renewed its grip upon him. It occurred to him that the whole world might have been touched with the May madness, and that the old order of things had pa.s.sed forever. It seemed ages since he had watched the ticker in his father's office. As they sat smoking on the veranda the d.u.c.h.ess of Suffolk, the Queen of Sheba, and Maid Marian came out and entered a big car. The old lady bowed with dignity as the car moved off; the girls waved their hands.

"Perfect!" Hood muttered as he returned their salutations. "We may never meet again in this world, but the memory of this encounter will abide with me forever."

"I don't want to appear fussy, Hood," Deering began good-naturedly, "but would you mind telling me what's next on your programme?"

"Not in the slightest. It's just occurred to me that it would be well to dine to-night in one of the handsome villas scattered through these hills. Still following the slipper, we shall choose one somewhere east of the inn and present ourselves confidently at the front door. Failing there, we shall a.s.sault the postern and, perhaps, enrich our knowledge of life with the servants' gossip."

"There are some famous kennels in this neighborhood, and I'd hate awfully to have an Airedale bite a hole in my leg," Deering suggested.

"My dear boy, that's the tamest thing that could happen to us! My calves are covered with scars from dogs' teeth; you soon get hardened to canine ferocity. We'll take a tramp for an hour to work the fuzz off our gray matter, and then a nap to freshen us up for the evening. We shall learn much to-night; I'm confident of that."

There seemed to be no way of escaping Hood or changing his mind once he announced a decision. The programme was put through exactly as he had indicated. The important thing about the tramp was that Ca.s.sowary accompanied them on the walk, and Deering found him both agreeable and interesting. He discoursed of polo, last year's Harvard-Yale football game, and ice-boating, in which he seemed deeply experienced.

Hood left them to look for hieroglyphics on a barn which he said was a veritable palimpsest of cryptic notations of roving thieves.

Ca.s.sowary's manner underwent a marked change when he and Deering were alone.

"If you're going to give the old boy the slip," he said earnestly, "I want you to give me notice. I'm not going to be left alone with him."

Their eyes met in a long scrutiny; then Deering laughed.

"I don't know how you feel about it, but, by George, I'm afraid to shake him!"

"That's exactly my fix," Ca.s.sowary answered. "I was in a bad way when he picked me up: just about ready to jump off a high building and let it go at that. And I must say he does make things seem brighter. He mustn't see us talking off key, as he'd say, but I'd like to ask you this: what's he running away from? That's what worries me. What's he grabbing newspapers for all the time and slashing out ads and other queer stuff?"

"You've got me there," Deering replied soberly. "We ran into some men the other night who he said were detectives looking for him, but it didn't seem to worry him any."

"There's nothing new in _that_. We've struck a number of men who apparently were looking for somebody, and he greatly enjoys chaffing them. If he's really a crook, he wouldn't be exposing himself to arrest as he does."

Hood was now returning from his investigations of the barn, and as he crossed the pasture was examining a bunch of the newspaper clippings with which his pockets were stuffed.

"You needn't be afraid of getting into trouble with him," Ca.s.sowary remarked admiringly. "He pulls off things you wouldn't think could be done. He's a marvel, that man!"

"Old Bill Fogarty's been ripping into the country stores in these parts,"

began Hood volubly; "found his mark on the barn, all right. Amusing cuss, Fogarty. Sawed himself out of most of the jails between here and Bangor.

We'll probably meet up with him somewhere. It's about time to go back for that snooze, boys. To the road again!"

He strode off singing, in a very good tenor voice, s.n.a.t.c.hes from Italian operas, and his pace was so rapid that his companions were hard pressed to keep up with him.

VII