Part 7 (1/2)
”A defaulter?” Hood supplied blandly.
”It's impossible!” roared Deering. ”Father's the very soul of honor.”
”I dare say he is,” remarked Hood carelessly. ”So were you till greed led you to pilfer your governor's strong box. Let us be tolerant and withhold judgment. It's enough that your own skirts are clear. Put that stuff out of sight; we must flit.”
Hood set off for the Barton Arms at a brisk pace, talking incessantly.
”This whole business is bully beyond my highest expectations. By George, it's almost too good to be true! Critics of the drama complain that the average amateur's play ends with every act; but so far in our adventures every incident leads on to something else. Perfectly immense that somebody had beaten you to the bonds!”
Deering's emotions were beyond utterance. It was a warm morning, and he did not relish carrying the suitcase, whose recovery had plunged him into a despair darker than that caused by its loss.
At a turn in the road Hood paused, struck his stick heavily upon the ground, and drew out the slipper. He whirled it in the air three times and twice it pointed east. He thrust it back into his pocket with a sigh of satisfaction and brushed the dust from his hands.
”Once more we shall follow the pointing slipper. Yesterday it led us to the moon girl, the bungalow, and the suitcase; now it points toward the mysterious east, and no telling what new delights!”
VI
Hood and Deering found Ca.s.sowary sitting in the machine in the inn yard reading a newspaper; this Hood promptly seized and scanned with his trained eye.
”Are the bags aboard? Ah, I see you have been forehanded, Ca.s.sowary!”
Deering went to the inn office and came out with a number of telegrams which he read as he slowly crossed the yard.
”What do you think of this?” he asked weakly. The yellow sheets shook in his hand and his face was white. ”I wired to a bank and a club in San Francisco last night, and they've answered that father isn't in San Francisco and hasn't been there! And I wired the people Constance was to visit at Pasadena, and they don't know anything about her. Just look at these things!”
”Sounds like straight information, but why worry?” remarked Hood, scanning the telegrams.
”But why should father lie to me? Why should Constance say she was going to California if she wasn't?”
”My dear boy, don't ask me such questions!” Hood remarked with an injured air. ”You are guilty of the gravest error in sending telegrams without consulting me! How can we trust ourselves to Providence if you persist in sending telegrams! If you do this again, I shall be seriously displeased, and you mustn't displease Hood. Hood is very ugly in his wrath.”
Deering was at the point of tears. Hood was a fool, and he wished to tell him so, but the words stuck in his throat.
”We move eastward toward the Connecticut border, Ca.s.sowary,” Hood ordered and pushed Deering into the machine.
Hood was as merry as the morning itself, and talked ceaselessly as they rolled through the country, occasionally bidding Ca.s.sowary slow down and give heed to his discourse. The chauffeur listened with a grin, glancing guardedly at Deering, who stared grimly ahead with an unlighted cigar in his mouth. He was not to be disturbed in his meditations upon the blackness of the world by the idiotic prattle of a madman. For half an hour Hood had been describing his adventures with a Dublin University man, whose humor he p.r.o.nounced the keenest and most satisfying he had ever known. He had gathered from this person an immense fund of lore relating to Irish superst.i.tions.
”He left me just when I had learned to love him,” Hood concluded mournfully. ”Became fascinated with a patent-medicine faker we struck at a county fair in Indiana. He was so tickled over the way the long-haired doctor played the banjo and jollied the crowd that he attached himself to his caravan. That Irishman was one of the most agreeable men to be in jail with that I ever knew; even hardened murderers would cotton to him.
That spire over there must be Addington. The inn is nothing to boast of, but we'd better tackle it.”
His gayety at luncheon once more won Deering to a cheerier view of his destiny. Hood called for the proprietor and lectured him roundly for offering canned-blueberry pie. The fact that blueberries were out of season made no difference to the outraged Hood; pie produced from a can was a gross imposition. He cited legal decisions covering such cases and intimated that he might bring proceedings. As the innkeeper strode angrily away an elderly woman at a neighboring table addressed the dining-room on the miserable incompetence of the pastry-cooks of these later times, winding up by thanking Hood heartily for his protest. She was from Boston, she announced, and the declining intellectual life of that city she attributed to the deterioration of its pie.
Hood rose and gravely replied in a speech of five minutes, much to the delight of two girls at the old lady's table. Hood wrote his name on the menu card, and bade the giggling waitress hand it to the lady from Boston. Her young companions conferred for a moment, and then sent back a card on which appeared these names neatly pencilled:
Maid Marian The Queen of Sheba The d.u.c.h.ess of Suffolk (Ma.s.s.)