From Place to Place Part 27

"Don't blindfold yourself, Claire," she whispered. "You must help Miss Ballister and me to play a joke on the others. You are to keep the bells rattling after we are gone. See? This way."

With that she s.h.i.+fted the leathern loop from about Miss Ballister's neck and replaced it over Mrs. Hadley-Smith's head which bent forward to receive it. Smiling in appreciation of the proposed hoax the widow took a step or two.

"Watch!" whispered Miss Smith in Miss Ballister's ear. "See how well the trick works. There--what did I tell you?"

For instantly all the players, deceived by the artifice, were falling back, huddling away from the fancied danger zone as Mrs. Hadley-Smith went toward them. In the same instant Miss Smith silently had opened the nearest door and, beckoning to Miss Ballister to follow her, was tiptoeing softly out into the empty hall. The door closed gently behind them.

Miss Ballister laughed a forced little laugh. She turned, presenting her back to Miss Smith.

"Now untie me, please do." In her eagerness to be free she panted out the words.

"Surely," agreed Miss Smith. "But I think we should get entirely away, out of sight, before the bells stop ringing and the hoax begins to dawn on them. There's a little study right here at the end of the hall. Shall we go there and hide from them? I'll relieve you of that handkerchief then."

"Yes, yes; but quickly, please!" Miss Ballister's note was insistent; you might call it pleading, certainly it was agitated. "Being tied this way gives one such a trapped sort of feeling--it's horrid, really it is.

I'll never let any one tie my hands again so long as I live. It's enough to give one hysterics--honestly it is.

"I understand. Come on, then."

With one hand slipped inside the curve of the other's elbow Miss Smith hurried her to the study door masked beneath the broad stairs, and opening it, ushered her into the inner room.

It contained an occupant: a smallish man with mild-looking gray eyes, who at their entrance rose up from where he sat, staring steadily at them. At sight of the unexpected stranger Miss Ballister halted. She uttered a shocked little exclamation and recoiled, pulling away from her escort as though she meant to flee back across the threshold. But her shoulders came against the solid panels.

The door so soon had been shut behind her, cutting off retreat.

"Well?" said the stranger.

Miss Smith stood away from the shrinking figure, leaving it quite alone.

"This is the woman," she said, and suddenly her voice was accusing and hard. "The stolen paper is in that necklace she is wearing round her neck."

For proof of the truth of the charge Mullinix had only to look into their captive's face. Her first little fit of distress coming on her so suddenly while she was being bound had made her pale. Now her pallor was ghastly. Little blemishes under the skin stood out in blotches against its dead white, and out of the mask her eyes glared in a dumb terror.

She made no outcry, but her lips, stiff with fright, twisted to form words that would not come. Her shoulders heaved _as_--futilely--she strove to wrench her arms free. Then quickly her head sank forward and her knees began to bend under her.

"Mind--she's going to faint!" warned Mullinix.

Both of them sprang forward and together they eased the limp shape down upon the rug. She lay there at their feet, a pitiable little bundle. But there was no compa.s.sion, no mercifulness in their faces as they looked down at her.

Alongside the slumped form Miss Smith knelt down and felt for the clasp of the slender chain and undid it. She pressed the catch of the locket and opened it, and from the small receptacle revealed within, where a miniature might once have been, she took forth a tightly folded half sheet of yellow parchment paper, which had it been wadded into a ball would have made a sphere about the size of the kernel of a fair-sized filbert.

Mullinix grasped it eagerly, pressed it out flat and took one glance at the familiar signature, written below the close-set array of seemingly meaningless and unrelated letters.

"You win, young lady," he said, and there was thanksgiving and congratulation in the way he said it. "But how did you do it? How was it done?"

She looked up from where she was casting off the binding about the relaxed hands of the unconscious culprit.

"It wasn't hard--after the hints you gave me. I made up my mind yesterday that the paper would probably be hidden in a piece of jewelry--in a bracelet or under the setting of a ring possibly; or in a hair ornament possibly; and I followed that theory. Two tests that I made convinced me that Madame Ybanca was innocent; they quite eliminated Madame Ybanca from the equation. So I centred my efforts on this girl and she betrayed herself soon enough."

"Betrayed herself, how?"

"An individual who has been temporarily deprived of sight will involuntarily keep his or her hands upon any precious object that is concealed about the person--I suppose you know that. And as I watched her after I had blindfolded her----"

"After you had what?"

"Blindfolded her. Oh, I kept my promise," she added, reading the expression on his face. "There was no force used, and no violence. She suffered herself to be blindfolded--indeed, I did the blinding myself.

Well, after she had been blindfolded with a thick silk handkerchief I watched her, and I saw that while with one hand she groped her way about, she kept the other hand constantly clutched upon this locket, as though to make sure of the safety of something there. So then I was sure; but I was made doubly sure by her actions while I was tying her hands behind her. And then, after I had her tied and helpless, I could experiment further--and I did--and again my experiment convinced me I was on the right track."

"Yes--but tying her hands--didn't she resist that?"

"No; you see, she let me tie her hands too. It was a part of a game.

They all played it."

"Some of the others were blinded, eh?"

"All of them were; every single one of them was. They still are, I imagine, providing my cousin is doing her part--and I am sure she is.

There'll be no suspicion of the truth, even after their eyes are unhooded. Claire has her explanations all ready. They'll miss this girl of course and wonder what has become of her, but the explanation provides for that: She was taken with a sudden indisposition and slipped away with me, not wis.h.i.+ng to spoil the fun by staying on after she began to feel badly. That's the story they'll be told, and there's no reason why they shouldn't accept it as valid either. See! She's coming to."

"Then I'll get out and leave you to attend to her. Keep her here in this room until she's better, and then you may send her back to her hotel.

You might tell her that there is to be no prosecution and no unpleasant notoriety for her if only she keeps her mouth shut about all that's happened. Probably she'll be only too glad to do that, for I figure she has learned a lesson."

"You won't want to question her, then, after she has been revived?"

"It's quite unnecessary. I have the other ends of the case in my hands.

And besides I must go outside to meet our dear friend Geltmann when he arrives. He should be driving up to the house pretty soon--I had a telephone message five minutes ago telling me to expect him shortly. So I'm going out to break some sad news to him on the sidewalk. He doesn't know it yet, but he's starting to-night on a long, long trip; a trip that will take him clear out of this country--and he won't ever, ever be coming back.

"But I'll call on you to-morrow, if I may--after I've seen to getting him off for the West. I want to thank you again in behalf of the Service for the wonderful thing you've done so wonderfully well. And I want to hear more from you about that game you played."

"I'll do better than that," she promised: "I'll let you read about it in a book--an old secondhand book, it is; you saw it yesterday. Maybe I can convert you to reading old books; they're often full of things that people in your line should know."

"Lady," he said reverently, "you've made a true believer of me already."

CHAPTER IX

THE BULL CALLED EMILY

We were sitting at a corner table in a certain small restaurant hard by where Sixth Avenue's L structure, like an overgrown straddlebug, wades through the restless currents of Broadway at a sharpened angle. The dish upon which we princ.i.p.ally dined was called on the menu _Chicken a la Marengo_. We knew why. Marengo, by all accounts, was a mighty tough battle, and this particular chicken, we judged, had never had any refining influences in its ill-spent life. From its present defiant att.i.tude in a cooked form we figured it had pipped the sh.e.l.l with a burglar's jimmy and joined the Dominecker Kid's gang before it shed its pin-feathers. There were two of us engaged in the fruitless attack upon its sinewy tissues--the present writer and his old un-law-abiding friend,--Scandalous Doolan.

For a period of minutes Scandalous wrestled with the thews of one of the embattled fowl's knee-joints. After a struggle in which the honours stood practically even, he laid down his knife and flirted a thumb toward a bottle of peppery sauce which stood on my side of the table.

"Hey, bo," he requested, "pa.s.s the liniment, will you? This sea gull's got the rheumatism."

The purport of the remark, taken in connection with the gesture which accompanied it, was plain enough to my understanding; but for the nonce I could not cla.s.sify the idiom in which Scandalous couched his request.

It could not be Underworld jargon; it was too direct and at the same time too picturesque. Moreover, the Underworld, as a rule, concerns itself only with altering such words and such expressions as strictly figure in the business affairs of its various crafts and pursuits. Nor to me did it sound like the language of the circus-lot, for in such case it probably would have been more complex. So by process of elimination I decided it was of the slang code of the burlesque and vaudeville stage, with which, as with the other two, Scandalous had a thorough acquaintance. I felt sure, then, that something had set his mind to working backward along the memory-grooves of some one or another of his earlier experiences in the act-producing line of endeavour, and that, with proper pumping, a story might be forthcoming. As it turned out, I was right.

"Where did you get that one, Scandalous?" I asked craftily. "Your own coinage, or did you borrow it from somebody else?"