Part 33 (2/2)

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-cus.h.i.+oned 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.

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