The Oakdale Affair Part 6

The General fumbled in an inside pocket for a package of matches carefully wrapped against possible damage by rain. Presently he struck one and held the light in the direction of The Kid's face while he and the girl and Dopey Charlie leaned forward to scrutinize the youth's features.

"It's him all right," said Dopey Charlie.

"You bet it is," seconded The General.

"Why he's only a boy," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the girl. "The one who threw me from the machine was a man."

"Well, this one said he was The Oskaloosa Kid," persisted The General.

"An' he shot me up," growled Dopey Charlie.

"It's too bad he didn't kill you," remarked Bridge pleasantly. "You're a thief and probably a murderer into the bargain--you tried to kill this boy just before he shot you."

"Well wot's he?" demanded Dopey Charlie. "He's a thief--he said he was--look in his pockets--they're crammed wid swag, an' he's a gun-man, too, or he wouldn't be packin' a gat. I guess he ain't got nothin' on me."

The darkness hid the scarlet flush which mounted to the boy's cheeks--so hot that he thought it must surely glow redly through the night. He waited in dumb misery for Bridge to demand the proof of his guilt.

Earlier in the evening he had flaunted the evidence of his crime in the faces of the six hobos; but now he suddenly felt a great shame that his new found friend should believe him a house-breaker.

But Bridge did not ask for any substantiation of Charlie's charges, he merely warned the two yeggmen that they would have to leave the boy alone and in the morning, when the storm had pa.s.sed and daylight had lessened the unknown danger which lurked below-stairs, betake themselves upon their way.

"And while we're here together in this room you two must sit over near the window," he concluded. "You've tried to kill the boy once to-night; but you're not going to try it again--I'm taking care of him now."

"You gotta crust, bo," observed Dopey Charlie, belligerently. "I guess me an' The General'll sit where we d.a.m.n please, an' youse can take it from me on the side that we're goin' to have ours out of The Kid's haul.

If you tink you're goin' to cop the whole cheese you got another tink comin'."

"You are banking," replied Bridge, "on the well known fact that I never carry a gun; but you fail to perceive, owing to the Stygian gloom which surrounds us, that I have the Kid's automatic in my gun hand and that the business end of it is carefully aiming in your direction."

"Cheese it," The General advised his companion; and the two removed themselves to the opposite side of the apartment, where they whispered, grumblingly, to one another.

The girl, the boy, and Bridge waited as patiently as they could for the coming of the dawn, talking of the events of the night and planning against the future. Bridge advised the girl to return at once to her father; but this she resolutely refused to do, admitting with utmost candor that she lacked the courage to face her friends even though her father might still believe in her.

The youth begged that he might accompany Bridge upon the road, pleading that his mother was dead and that he could not return home after his escapade. And Bridge could not find it in his heart to refuse him, for the man realized that the boyish waif possessed a subtile attraction, as forceful as it was inexplicable. Not since he had followed the open road in company with Billy Byrne had Bridge met one with whom he might care to 'Pal' before The Kid crossed his path on the dark and storm swept pike south of Oakdale.

In Byrne, mucker, pugilist, and MAN, Bridge had found a physical and moral counterpart of himself, for the slender Bridge was muscled as a Greek G.o.d, while the stocky Byrne, metamorphosed by the fire of a woman's love, possessed all the chivalry of the care free tramp whose vagabondage had never succeeded in submerging the evidences of his cultural birthright.

In the youth Bridge found an intellectual equal with the added charm of a physical dependent. The man did not attempt to fathom the evident appeal of the other's tacitly acknowledged cowardice; he merely knew that he would not have had the youth otherwise if he could have changed him. Ordinarily he accepted male cowardice with the resignation of surfeited disgust; but in the case of The Oskaloosa Kid he realized a certain artless charm which but tended to strengthen his liking for the youth, so brazen and unaffected was the boy's admission of his terror of both the real and the unreal menaces of this night of horror.

That the girl also was well bred was quite evident to Bridge, while both the girl and the youth realized the refinement of the strange companion and protector which Fate had ordered for them, while they also saw in one another social counterparts of themselves. Thus, as the night dragged its slow course, the three came to trust each other more entirely and to speculate upon the strange train of circ.u.mstances which had brought them thus remarkably together--the thief, the murderer's accomplice, and the vagabond.

It was during a period of thoughtful silence when the night was darkest just before the dawn and the rain had settled to a dismal drizzle unrelieved by lightning or by thunder that the five occupants of the room were suddenly startled by a strange pattering sound from the floor below. It was as the questioning fall of a child's feet upon the uncarpeted boards in the room beneath them. Frozen to silent rigidity, the five sat straining every faculty to catch the minutest sound from the black void where the dead man lay, and as they listened there came up to them, mingled with the inexplicable footsteps, the hollow reverberation from the dank cellar--the hideous dragging of the chain behind the nameless horror which had haunted them through the interminable eons of the ghastly night.

Up, up, up it came toward the first floor. The pattering of the feet ceased. The clanking rose until the five heard the sc.r.a.ping of the chain against the door frame at the head of the cellar stairs. They heard it pa.s.s across the floor toward the center of the room and then, loud and piercing, there rang out against the silence of the awful night a woman's shriek.

Instantly Bridge leaped to his feet. Without a word he tore the bed from before the door.

"What are you doing?" cried the girl in a m.u.f.fled scream.

"I am going down to that woman," said Bridge, and he drew the bolt, rusty and complaining, from its corroded seat.

"No!" screamed the girl, and seconding her the youth sprang to his feet and threw his arms about Bridge.

"Please! Please!" he cried. "Oh, please don't leave me."

The girl also ran to the man's side and clutched him by the sleeve.

"Don't go!" she begged. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake, don't leave us here alone!"

"You heard a woman scream, didn't you?" asked Bridge. "Do you suppose I can stay in up here when a woman may be facing death a few feet below me?"

For answer the girl but held more tightly to his arm while the youth slipped to the floor and embraced the man's knees in a vice-like hold which he could not break without hurting his detainer.

"Come! Come!" expostulated Bridge. "Let me go."

"Wait!" begged the girl. "Wait until you know that it is a human voice that screams through this horrible place."

The youth only strained his hold tighter about the man's legs. Bridge felt a soft cheek pressed to his knee; and, for some unaccountable reason, the appeal was stronger than the pleading of the girl. Slowly Bridge realized that he could not leave this defenseless youth alone even though a dozen women might be menaced by the uncanny death below.

With a firm hand he shot the bolt. "Leave go of me," he said; "I shan't leave you unless she calls for help in articulate words."

The boy rose and, trembling, pressed close to the man who, involuntarily, threw a protecting arm about the slim figure. The girl, too, drew nearer, while the two yeggmen rose and stood in rigid silence by the window. From below came an occasional rattle of the chain, followed after a few minutes by the now familiar clanking as the iron links sc.r.a.ped across the flooring. Mingled with the sound of the chain there rose to them what might have been the slow and ponderous footsteps of a heavy man, dragging painfully across the floor. For a few moments they heard it, and then all was silent.

For a dozen tense minutes the five listened; but there was no repet.i.tion of any sound from below. Suddenly the girl breathed a deep sigh, and the spell of terror was broken. Bridge felt rather than heard the youth sobbing softly against his breast, while across the room The General gave a quick, nervous laugh which he as immediately suppressed as though fearful unnecessarily of calling attention to their presence. The other vagabond fumbled with his hypodermic needle and the narcotic which would quickly give his fluttering nerves the quiet they craved.

Bridge, the boy, and the girl shivered together in their soggy clothing upon the edge of the bed, feeling now in the cold dawn the chill discomfort of which the excitement of the earlier hours of the night had rendered them unconscious. The youth coughed.

"You've caught cold," said Bridge, his tone almost self-reproachful, as though he were entirely responsible for the boy's condition. "We're a nice aggregation of mollycoddles--five of us sitting half frozen up here with a stove on the floor below, and just because we heard a noise which we couldn't explain and hadn't the nerve to investigate." He rose. "I'm going down, rustle some wood and build a fire in that stove--you two kids have got to dry those clothes of yours and get warmed up or we'll have a couple of hospital cases on our hands."

Once again rose a chorus of pleas and objections. Oh, wouldn't he wait until daylight? See! the dawn was even then commencing to break. They didn't dare go down and they begged him not to leave them up there alone.

At this Dopey Charlie spoke up. The 'hop' had commenced to a.s.sert its dominion over his shattered nervous system instilling within him a new courage and a feeling of utter well-being. "Go on down," said he to Bridge. "The General an' I'll look after the kids--won't we bo?"

"Sure," a.s.sented The General; "we'll take care of 'em."

"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Bridge; "we'll leave the kids up here and we three'll go down. They won't go, and I wouldn't leave them up here with you two morons on a bet."

The General and Dopey Charlie didn't know what a moron was but they felt quite certain from Bridge's tone of voice that a moron was not a nice thing, and anyway no one could have bribed them to descend into the darkness of the lower floor with the dead man and the grisly THING that prowled through the haunted chambers; so they flatly refused to budge an inch.

Bridge saw in the gradually lighting sky the near approach of full daylight; so he contented himself with making the girl and the youth walk briskly to and fro in the hope that stimulated circulation might at least partially overcome the menace of the damp clothing and the chill air, and thus they occupied the remaining hour of the night.

From below came no repet.i.tion of the inexplicable noises of that night of terror and at last, with every object plainly discernible in the light of the new day, Bridge would delay no longer; but voiced his final determination to descend and make a fire in the old kitchen stove. Both the boy and the girl insisted upon accompanying him. For the first time each had an opportunity to study the features of his companions of the night. Bridge found in the girl and the youth two dark eyed, good-looking young people. In the girl's face was, perhaps, just a trace of weakness; but it was not the face of one who consorts habitually with criminals. The man appraised her as a pretty, small-town girl who had been led into a temporary escapade by the monotony of village life, and he would have staked his soul that she was not a bad girl.

The boy, too, looked anything other than the role he had been playing.

Bridge smiled as he looked at the clear eyes, the oval face, and the fine, sensitive mouth and thought of the youth's claim to the crime battered sobriquet of The Oskaloosa Kid. The man wondered if the mystery of the clanking chain would prove as harmlessly infantile as these two whom some accident of hilarious fate had cast in the roles of debauchery and crime.

Aloud, he said: "I'll go first, and if the spook materializes you two can beat it back into the room." And to the two tramps: "Come on, boes, we'll all take a look at the lower floor together, and then we'll get a good fire going in the kitchen and warm up a bit."

Down the hall they went, Bridge leading with the boy and girl close at his heels while the two yeggs brought up the rear. Their footsteps echoed through the deserted house; but brought forth no answering clanking from the cellar. The stairs creaked beneath the unaccustomed weight of so many bodies as they descended toward the lower floor.

Near the bottom Bridge came to a questioning halt. The front room lay entirely within his range of vision, and as his eyes swept it he gave voice to a short exclamation of surprise.