The Sturdy Oak Part 33

After half an hour of such inept.i.tudes, Penfield Evans found it necessary to withdraw his partner from the vicinity of the police before his impatience reached the homicidal pitch.

"Buckley's no such fool as he sounds," Penny advised. "He probably has a pretty good idea where the women are hidden, but you must give him time to tip off Mike for a getaway."

But the suggestion proved ill chosen, at least so far as it involved a hope of keeping George from the newspapers. Shocked to the core of his young egotism as he had been, Remington was yet not so shocked that the need of expression was not stronger in him than any more distant consideration.

"Getaway!" he frothed. "Getaway! While a woman like my wife--" But the bare idea was too much for him.

"They may get away, but they'll not get off--not a d.a.m.ned one of them--of _us_," he corrected himself, and with face working the popular young candidate for district attorney set off almost on a run for the office of the Sentinel.

Reflecting that if his friend was bent upon official suicide, there was still no reason for his being, a witness to it, Penny turned aside into a telephone booth and called up Betty Sheridan. He heard her jump at the sound of his voice, and the rising breath of relief running into his name.

"O-o-oh, Penny! Yes, about twenty minutes ago. Genevieve is with her....

Oh, yes, I'm sure."

Her voice sounded strong and confident.

"They're in a house about an hour from the factory," she went on, "among some trees. I'm sure she said trees. We were cut off. No, I couldn't get her again.... Yes... it's a party line. In the Redfield district. Oh, Penny, do you think they'll do her any harm?"

It was, no doubt, the length of time it took to a.s.sure Miss Sheridan on this point that prevented Evans from getting around to the _Sentinel_, whose editor was at that moment giving an excellent exhibition of indecision between his obligation as a journalist and his role of leading citizen in a town where he met his subscribers at dinner.

It was good stuff--oh, it was good! What headlines!

PROMINENT SOCIETY WOMEN KIDNAPPED

CANDIDATE REMINGTON REPUDIATES PARTY!

It was good for a double evening edition. On the other hand, there was Norton, one of his largest advertisers. There was also the rival city of Hamilton, which was even now basely attempting to win away from Whitewater a recently offered Carnegie library on the ground of its superior fitness.

Finally there was the party.

The _Sentinel_ had always been a sound party organ. But _what_ a scoop!

And suppose it were possible to save the party at the expense of its worst element? Suppose they raised the cry of reform and brought Remington in on a full tide of public indignation?

Would Mike stand the gaff? If it were made worth his while. But what about Noonan and Doolittle? So the editorial mind shuttled to and fro amid the confused outpourings of the amazed young candidate, while with eyes bright and considering as a rat's the editor followed Remington in his pacings up and down the dusty, littered room.

Completely occupied with his own reactions, George's repudiation swept on in an angry, rapid stream which, as it spent itself, began to give place to the benumbing consciousness of a divided hearing.

Until this moment Remington had had a pleasant sense of the press as a fine instrument upon which he had played with increasing mastery, a trumpet upon which, as his mind filled with commendable purposes, he could blow a very pretty tune,--a n.o.ble tune with now and then a graceful flourish acceptable to the public ear. Now as he talked he began to be aware of flatness, of squeaking keys....

"Naturally, Mr. Remington, I'll have to take this up with the business management..." dry-lipped, the tune sputtered out. At this juncture the born journalist awaked again in the editorial breast at the entrance of Penfield Evans with his new item of Betty's interrupted message.

Two women shut up in a mysterious house among the trees! Oh, hot stuff, indeed!

Under it George rallied, recovered a little of the candidate's manner.

"Understand," he insisted. "This goes in even if I have to pay for it at advertising rates."

A swift pencil raced across the paper as Remington's partner swept him off again to the police.

Betty's call had come a few minutes before ten. What had happened was very simple.

The two women had been given breakfast, for which their hands had been momentarily freed. When the bonds had been tied again it had been easy for E. Eliot to hold her hands in such a position that she was left, when their keeper withdrew, with a little freedom of movement.

By backing up to the k.n.o.b she had been able to open a door into an adjoining room, in which she had been able to make out a telephone on a stand against the wall.

This room also had locked windows and closed shutters, but her quick wit had enabled her to make use of that telephone.

Shouldering the receiver out of the hook, she had called Betty's number, and, with Genevieve stooping to listen at the dangling receiver, had called out two or three broken sentences.

Guarded as their voices had been, however, some one in the house had been attracted by them, and the wire had been cut at some point outside the room. E. Eliot and Genevieve came to this conclusion after having lost Betty and failed to raise any answer to their repeated calls.

Somebody came and looked in at them through the half-open door, and, seeing them still bound, had gone away again with a short, contemptuous laugh.

"No matter," said E. Eliot. "Betty heard us, and the central office will be able to trace the call."

It was because she could depend on Betty's intelligence, she went on to say, that she had called her instead of the Remington house--for suppose that fool Brewster-Smith woman had come to the telephone!

She and Genevieve occupied themselves with their bonds, fumbling back to back for a while, until Genevieve had a brilliant idea. Kneeling, she bit at the cords which held Miss Eliot's wrists until they began to give.

What Betty had done intelligently was nothing to what she had done without meaning it. She had been unkind to Pudge. Young Sheridan was in a condition which, according to his own way of looking at it, demanded the utmost kindness.

Following a too free indulgence in _marrons glaces_ he had been relegated to a diet that reduced him to the extremity of desperation.

Not only had he been forbidden to eat sweets, but while his soul still longed for its accustomed solace, his stomach refused it, and he was unable to eat a box of candied fruit which he had with the greatest ingenuity secured.

And that was the occasion Betty took--herself full of nervous starts and mysterious recourse to the telephone behind locked doors--to remind him cruelly that he was getting flabby from staying too much in the house and to recommend a long walk for his good.

It was plain that she would stick at nothing to get her brother out of the way, and Pudge was cut to the heart.

Oh, well, he would go for a walk, from which he would probably be brought home a limp and helpless cripple. Come to think of it, if he once got started to walk he was not sure he would ever turn back; he would just walk on and on into a kinder environment than this.

After all, it is impossible to walk in that fateful way in a crowded city thoroughfare. Besides, one pa.s.ses so many confectioners with their mingled temptation and disgust. Pudge rode on the trolley as far as the city limits. Here there was softer ground underfoot and a hint of melancholy in the fields. A flock of crows going over gave the appropriate note.

Off there to the left, set back from the road among dark, crowding trees, stood a mysterious house. Pudge always insisted that he had known it for mysterious at the first glance. It had a mansard roof and shutters of a sickly green, all closed; there was not a sign of life about, but smoke issued from one of the chimneys.

Here was an item potent to raise the sleuth that slumbers in every boy, even in such well-cushioned bosoms as Pudge Sheridan's.

He paused in his walk, fell into an elaborately careless slouch, and tacked across the open country toward the back of the house. Here he discovered a considerable yard fenced with high boards that had once been painted the same sickly green as the shutters, and a great buckeye tree just outside, spreading its branches over the corner furthest from the house.

Toward this post of observation he was drifting with that fine a.s.sumption of aimlessness which can be managed on occasion by almost any boy, when he was arrested by a slight but unmistakable shaking of one of the shutters, as though some one from within were trying the fastenings.

The shaking stopped after a moment, and then, one after another, the slats of the double leaves were seen to turn and close as though for a secret survey of the field. After a moment or two this performance was repeated at the next window on the left, and finally at a third.

Here the shaking was resumed after the survey, and ended with the shutter opening with a snap and being caught back from within and held cautiously on the crack. Pudge kicked clods in his path and was pretentiously occupied with a dead beetle which he had picked up.

All at once something flickered across the ground at his feet, swung two or three times, touched his shoe, traveled up the length of his trousers and rested on his breast. How that bosom leaped to the adventure!

He fished hurriedly in his pocket and brought up a small round mirror.