Little Lost Sister Part 39

"What do you mean?" he asked, defiantly.

"I mean just that," replied John Boland. He turned toward the musicians'

stand and pointed dramatically at Patience Welcome, who, her face almost as pale as her white lace gown, was advancing toward the front of the platform to sing.

Harry Boland's face went white as hers.

The words he gasped were drowned by a cry, Elsie Welcome, coming for the first time since her return to Druce into the drinking room, saw her sister standing upon the rostrum, poised to sing.

"Patience! Patience!" she screamed in a voice of despair. "Oh, my sister, what brought you to this place?"

She fell to the floor fainting. The whole cafe was in an uproar.

Carter Anson, roused to fury by the disturbance, fought his way through the crowd to the place where he had seen her fall.

Druce, escaped from Harry Boland, struggled from another angle to make his way through the mob. As if by magic half a score of policemen suddenly hemmed in the fighting ma.s.s. Druce, struggling blindly to make a pathway for himself, suddenly looked up to see Mary Randall standing on a table on the opposite side of the room directing the police. A wave of maniacal anger overwhelmed him. In a flash his hand went to his pocket and reappeared with a pistol.

There was an explosion, a man's yell of rage, followed by a choking gulp of mortal anguish. Druce was seized and flung to the floor.

At the same moment Mary Randall, leaping down from her table, ran to the center of the room. Carter Anson lay there, struggling through his last throes,--the bullet in his brain.

CHAPTER XXIII

AFTER THE TRAGEDY

Mary Randall stood beside the dead body of Carter Anson. Such tragedy had not entered into her plans, nor had she conceived what it might be to see a man die bearing the bullet intended for her own intrepid heart. A strange numbness possessed her faculties.

She heard the voice of Mrs. Welcome beside her. The mother was speaking with anguished entreaty to Elsie. The girl had risen to her feet and was gazing with a dreadful fascination at Druce, writhing in the grasp of the officers who seized him.

"Come, Miss Randall," one of her police aids said to the reformer. "This is no place for you--now."

"There must be something I can do," she spoke with a flash of her usual energy, then laid her hand on Mrs. Welcome's arm.

"Harvey Spencer is here," she said. "There he is trying to get through the crowd to us now. Perhaps he can help you to persuade your daughter to go away with you."

Elsie Welcome looked at Mary Randall, who was destined never to forget the pitiful revelation of the girl's dark eyes. Mary Randall read that despair of the lost mingled with woman's intense clinging to the man she has chosen,--her strange stubborn clinging, when, entangled, she hears an echo of happier and purer love.

"How dare you meddle in people's affairs like this and put us into such dreadful trouble?" Elsie asked of the one who would help her. Then to her mother, pulling away from her longing clasp, "You understand that at a time like this my place is with my husband."

Elsie doubled under the arms which would have detained her and ran out of the cafe.

"Go to Millville, Mrs. Welcome, back to your old home, as soon you can.

Let me look after Elsie. Go to this boarding-house (handing her a card).

Go there with Patience tonight, and I will send you some money tomorrow."

Miss Randall spoke quickly, and before Mrs. Welcome realized it, had hurried in pursuit of Elsie.

But Elsie Welcome had disappeared.

Mary Randall found herself standing, as all who work for those who sin and suffer must often stand, baffled by evil's resistance. Saddened by somewhat of a divine sadness, Mary went across to the rendezvous where her faithful Anna awaited her and left the field.

Harvey Spencer came to her downtown office early next day. He found her surrounded by her strongest allies, already in conference as to the best means of pursuing their crusade which had aroused Chicago with the startling news of The Raid of Mary Randall on the Cafe Sinister, headlined in the morning newspapers.

Harvey Spencer had taken Mrs. Welcome to the boarding-house designated by Miss Randall where she was joined by Patience--and of Patience you shall know presently. The remainder of the night, or most of it, he spent trying to learn what had become of Elsie.

"I thought she might be still in that--hotel, as they call it," Harvey, haggard with his night's search, told Miss Randall. "I went to the jail too, but of course they would not let her inside there so late, even if she had wanted to."

"She is sure to go there today to see Druce. Try again, Mr. Spencer, when you go out from here," said Miss Randall.

"And keep you eye on Druce. n.o.body will suspect you of being a detective.

You can telephone here if you see any activity around him," said a clever special from headquarters.

"Good scheme," commended the journalist, another of Mary Randall's strongest aids.

Harvey Spencer made notes of the right steps to take and, thanking Miss Randall with a curious humility, went out again on his quest.

"Now we must learn what the vice-moneymakers will try to do next," said a former high official in the munic.i.p.ality. "Our one safe bet is that they will all get together and that John Boland, the boss of the bunch, will map out the fight against us."

"Is it a losing fight?" asked a famous banker, known among his intimates as the hard-headed enthusiast.

"Right against wrong can never be permanently a losing fight," quietly said a small muscular clergyman from the northwest side.

"It has taken two thousand years for mankind to begin this fight against buying and selling young virgins who can be coaxed or thrust into the market-place," said Mary Randall. "We must fight on, even in one seemingly losing field. It is not to be believed that the people of this nation will be content to submit very much longer to the presence of a band of prowling wolves tolerated by courts and protected by rascally lawyers whose acknowledged trade is to destroy virtue,--the latent motherhood of young women,--whose whole activity is directed to the exploitation of our little lost sisters."

"Chicago has to lead the fight, as she has been one of the leaders in the trade," said the banker. "Now, for our next step!"

CHAPTER XXIV

"THE HIGHWAY OF THE UPRIGHT"

Up to the moment when he heard the report of Druce's pistol and saw Carter Anson fall, Harry Boland's whole being had been concentrated in a consuming horror at sight of Patience Welcome in the Cafe Sinister.

The crack of the pistol restored his composure. He saw clearly the infamy of the plot against her,--and against himself. One of the conspirators was already dead on the scene of this last of many crimes. Druce was struggling with the police, taking him for murder of Anson, his partner.

John Boland, the third conspirator, faced his son in a desperate composure.

"Come, Harry, we must get out of here. It will never do to be seen here--"

"For you!" Harry shook off his father's hand upon his arm. "Go, by all means! I shall take care of myself." He walked towards the singers'

platform beyond the seething crowd.

John Boland believed of himself afterwards that he would have followed Harry, but at the moment he saw a bowed and gray-haired woman before him, great fear and horror on her face, pressing her way in from scrubbing in the booths beyond. The mop and bucket with which she had been working were in either hand. At sight of his face she dropped her tools of toil and clutched his coat. It was Tom Welcome's widow.