again.”
He was as abject as any one could have wished. It was my minute of triumph, but I can not pretend that I was happy. Evidently it had been only a passing impulse. If he had really cared, now that he knew I was free, he would have forgotten himself again at once. Then a new explanation occurred to me. Suppose it had been Bella all the time, and the real shock had been to find that she had been married!
“The fault of the situation was really mine,” I said magnanimously; “I quite blame myself. Only, you must believe one thing. You never furnished us any amusement.” I looked at him sidewise. “The discovery that Bella and Jim were once married must have been a great shock.”
“It was a surprise,” he replied evenly. His voice and his eyes were inscrutable. He returned my glance steadily. It was infuriating to have gone half-way to meet him, as I had, and then to find him intrenched in his self-sufficiency again. I got up.
“It is unfortunate that our acquaintance has begun so unfavorably,” I remarked, preparing to pass him. “Under other circumstances we might have been friends.”
“There is only one solace,” he said. “When we do not have friends, we can not lose them.”
He opened the door to let me pass out, and as our eyes met, all the coldness died out of his. He held out his hand, but I was hurt. I refused to see it.
“Kit!” he said unsteadily. “I–I’m an obstinate, pig-headed brute. I am sorry. Can’t we be friends, after all?”
“‘When we do not have friends we can not lose them,'” I replied with cool malice. And the next instant the door closed behind me.
It was that night that the really serious event of the quarantine occurred.
We were gathered in the library, and everybody was deadly dull. Aunt Selina said she had been reared to a strict observance of the Sabbath, and she refused to go to bed early. The cards and card tables were put away and every one sat around and quarreled and was generally nasty, except Bella and Jim, who had gone into the den just after dinner and firmly closed the door.
I think it was just after Max proposed to me. Yes, he proposed to me again that night. He said that Jim’s illness had decided him; that any of us might take sick and die, shut in that contaminated atmosphere, and that if he did he wanted it all settled. And whether I took him or not he wanted me to remember him kindly if anything happened. I really hated to refuse him–he was in such deadly earnest. But it was quite unnecessary for him to have blamed his refusal, as he did, on Mr. Harbison. I am sure I had refused him plenty of times before I had ever heard of the man. Yes, it was just after he proposed to me that Flannigan came to the door and called Mr. Harbison out into the hall.
Flannigan–like most of the people in the house–always went to Mr. Harbison when there was anything to be done. He openly adored him, and–what was more–he did what Mr. Harbison ordered without a word, while the rest of us had to get down on our knees and beg.
Mr. Harbison went out, muttering something about a storm coming up, and seeing that the tent was secure. Betty Mercer went with him. She had been at his heels all evening, and called him “Tom” on every possible occasion. Indeed, she made no secret of it; she said that she was mad about him, and that she would love to live in South America, and have an Indian squaw for a lady’s maid, and sit out on the veranda in the evenings and watch the Southern Cross shooting across the sky, and eat tropical food from the quaint Indian pottery. She was not even daunted when Dal told her the Southern Cross did not shoot, and that the food was probably canned corn on tin dishes.
So Betty went with him. She wore a pale yellow dinner gown, with just a sophisticated touch of black here and there, and cut modestly square in the neck. Her shoulders are scrawny. And after they were gone–not her shoulders; Mr. Harbison and she–Aunt Selina announced that the next day was Monday, that she had only a week’s supply of clothing with her, and that no policeman who ever swung a mace should wash her undergarments for her.
She paused a moment, but nobody offered to do it. Anne was reading De Maupassant under cover of a table, and the rest pretended not to hear. After a pause, Aunt Selina got up heavily and went upstairs, coming down soon after with a bundle covered with a green shawl, and with a white balbriggan stocking trailing from an opening in it. She paused at the library door, surveyed the inmates, caught my unlucky eye and beckoned to me with a relentless forefinger.
“We can put them to soak tonight,” she confided to me, “and tomorrow they will be quite simple to do. There is no lace to speak of”–Dal raised his eyebrows–“and very little flouncing.”
Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry. It never occurred to any one that Bella should have gone; she had stepped into all my privileges–such as they were–and assumed none of my obligations. Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry.
It is strange what big things develop from little ones. In this case it was a bar of soap. And if Flannigan had used as much soap as he should have instead of washing up the kitchen floor with cold dish water, it would have developed sooner. The two most unexpected events of the whole quarantine occurred that night at the same time, one on the roof and one in the cellar. The cellar one, although curious, was not so serious as the other, so it comes first.
Aunt Selina put her clothes in a tub in the laundry and proceeded to dress them like a vegetable. She threw in a handful of salt, some kerosene oil and a little ammonia. The result was villainous, but after she tasted it–or snuffed it–she said it needed a bar of soap cut up to give it strength–or flavor–and I went into the store room for it.
The laundry soap was in a box. I took in a silver fork, for I hated to touch the stuff, and jabbed a bar successfully in the semi-darkness. Then I carried it back to the laundry and dropped it on the table. Aunt Selina looked at the fork with disgust; then we both looked at the soap. ONE SIDE OF IT WAS COVERED WITH ROUND HOLES THAT CURVED AROUND ON EACH OTHER LIKE A COILED SNAKE.
I ran back to the store room, and there, a little bit sticky and smelling terribly of rosin, lay Anne’s pearl necklace!
I was so excited that I seized Aunt Selina by the hands and danced her all over the place. Then I left her, trying to find her hair pins on the floor, and ran up to tell the others. I met Betty in the hall and waved the pearls at her. But she did not notice them.
“Is Mr. Harbison down there?” she asked breathlessly. “I left him on the roof and went down to my room for my scarf, and when I went back he had disappeared. He–he doesn’t seem to be in the house.” She tried to laugh, but her voice was shaky. “He couldn’t have got down without passing me, anyhow,” she supplemented. “I suppose I’m silly, but so many queer things have happened, Kit.”
“I wouldn’t worry, Betty,” I soothed her. “He is big enough to take care of himself. And with the best intentions in the world, you can’t have him all the time, you know.”
She was too much startled to be indignant. She followed me into the library, where the sight of the pearls produced a tremendous excitement, and then every one had to go down to the store room, and see where the necklace had been hidden, and Max examined all the bars of soap for thumb prints.
Mr. Harbison did not appear. Max commented on the fact caustically, but Dal hushed him up. And so, Anne hugging her pearls, and Aunt Selina having put a final seasoning of washing powder on the clothes in the tub, we all went upstairs to bed. It had been a long day, and the morning would at least bring bridge.
I was almost ready for bed when Jim tapped at my door. I had been very cool to him since the night in the library when I was publicly staked and martyred, and he was almost cringing when I opened the door.
“What is it now?” I asked cruelly. “Has Bella tired of it already, or has somebody else a rash?”
“Don’t be a shrew, Kit,” he said. “I don’t want you to do anything. I only–when did you see Harbison last?”
“If you mean ‘last,'” I retorted, “I’m afraid I haven’t seen the last of him yet.” Then I saw that he was really worried. “Betty was leading him to the roof,” I added. “Why? Is he missing?”
“He isn’t anywhere in the house. Dal and I have been over every inch of it.” Max had come up, in a dressing gown, and was watching me insolently.
“I think we have seen the last of him,” he said. “I’m sorry, Kit, to nip the little romance in the bud. The fellow was crazy about you–there’s no doubt of it. But I’ve been watching him from the beginning, and I think I’m upheld. Whether he went down the water spout, or across a board to the next house–“
“I–I dislike him intensely,” I said angrily, “but you would not dare to say that to his face. He could strangle you with one hand.”
Max laughed disagreeably.
“Well, I only hope he is gone,” he threw at me over his shoulder, “I wouldn’t want to be responsible to your father if he had stayed.” I was speechless with wrath.
They went away then, and I could hear them going over the house. At one o’clock Jim went up to bed, the last, and Mr. Harbison had not been found. I did not see how they could go to bed at all. If he had escaped, then Max was right and the whole thing was heart-breaking. And if he had not, then he might be lying–
I got up and dressed.
The early part of the night had been cloudy, but when I got to the roof it was clear starlight. The wind blew through the electric wires strung across and set them singing. The occasional bleat of a belated automobile on the drive below came up to me raucously. The tent gleamed, a starlit ghost of itself, and the boxwoods bent in the breeze. I went over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it. I had done the same thing so often before; I had carried all my times of stress so infallibly to that particular place, that instinctively my feet turned there.
And there in the starlight, I went over the whole serio-comedy, and I loathed my part in it. He had been perfectly right to be angry with me and with all of us. And I had been a hypocrite and a Pharisee, and had thanked God that I was not as other people, when the fact was that I was worse than the worst. And although it wasn’t dignified to think of him going down the drain pipe, still–no one could blame him for wanting to get away from us, and he was quite muscular enough to do it.
I was in the depths of self-abasement when I heard a sound behind me. It was a long breath, quite audible, that ended in a groan. I gripped the parapet and listened, while my heart pounded, and in a minute it came again.
I was terribly frightened. Then–I don’t know how I did it, but I was across the roof, kneeling beside the tent, where it stood against the chimney. And there, lying prone among the flower pots, and almost entirely hidden, lay the man we had been looking for.
His head was toward me, and I reached out shakingly and touched his face. It was cold, and my hand, when I drew it back, was covered with blood.
Chapter XXII. IT WAS DELIRIUM
I was sure he was dead. He did not move, and when I caught his hands and called him frantically, he did not hear me. And so, with the horror over me, I half fell down the stairs and roused Jim in the studio.
They all came with lights and blankets, and they carried him into the tent and put him on the couch and tried to put whisky in his mouth. But he could not swallow. And the silence became more and more ominous until finally Anne got hysterical and cried, “He is dead! Dead!” and collapsed on the roof.
But he was not. Just as the lights in the tent began to have red rings around them and Jim’s voice came from away across the river, somebody said, “There, he swallowed that,” and soon after, he opened his eyes. He muttered something that sounded like “Andean pinnacle” and lapsed into unconsciousness again. But he was not dead! He was not dead!
When the doctor came they made a stretcher out of one of Jim’s six-foot canvases–it had a picture on it, and Jim was angry enough the next day–and took him down to the studio. We made it as much like a sick-room as we could, and we tried to make him comfortable. But he lay without opening his eyes, and at dawn the doctor brought a consultant and a trained nurse.
The nurse was an offensively capable person. She put us all out, and scolded Anne for lighting Japanese incense in the room–although Anne explained that it is very reviving. And she said that it was unnecessary to have a dozen people breathing up all the oxygen and asphyxiating the patient. She was good-looking, too. I disliked her at once. Any one could see by the way she took his pulse–just letting his poor hand hang, without any support–that she was a purely mechanical creature, without heart.
Well, as I said before, she put us all out, and shut the door, and asked us not to whisper outside. Then, too, she refused to allow any flowers in the room, although Betty had got a florist out of bed to order some.
The consultant came, stayed an hour, and left. Aunt Selina, who proved herself a trump in that trying time, waylaid him in the hall, and he said it might be a fractured skull, although it was possibly only concussion.
The men spent most of the morning together in the den, with the door shut. Now and then one of them would tiptoe upstairs, ask the nurse how her patient was doing, and creak down again. Just before noon they all went to the roof and examined again the place where he had been found. I know, for I was in the upper hall outside the studio. I stayed there almost all day, and after a while the nurse let me bring her things as she needed them. I don’t know why mother didn’t let me study nursing–I always wanted to do it. And I felt helpless and childish now, when there were things to be done.
Max came down from the roof alone, and I cornered him in the upper hall.
“I’m going crazy, Max,” I said. “Nobody will tell me anything, and I can’t stand it. How was he hurt? Who hurt him?”
Max looked at me quite a long time.
“I’m darned if I understand you, Kit,” he said gravely. “You said you disliked Harbison.”
“So I do–I did,” I supplemented. “But whether I like him or not has nothing to do with it. He has been injured–perhaps murdered”–I choked a little. “Which–which of you did it?”
Max took my hand and held it, looking down at me.
“I wish you could have cared for me like that,” he said gently. “Dear little girl, we don’t know who hurt him. I didn’t, if that’s what you mean. Perhaps a flower pot–“
I began to cry then, and he drew me to him and let me cry on his arm. He stood very quietly, patting my head in a brotherly way and behaving very well, save that once he said:
“Don’t cry too long, Kit; I can stand only a certain amount.”
And just then the nurse opened the door to the studio, and with Max’s arm still around me, I raised my head and looked in.
Mr. Harbison was conscious. His eyes were open, and he was staring at us both as we stood framed by the doorway.
He lay back at once and closed his eyes, and the nurse shut the door. There was no use, even if I had been allowed in, in trying to explain to him. To attempt such a thing would have been to presume that he was interested in an explanation. I thought bitterly to myself as I brought the nurse cracked ice and struggled to make beef tea in the kitchen, that lives had been wrecked on less.
Dal was allowed ten minutes in the sick room during the afternoon, and he came out looking puzzled and excited. He refused to tell us what he had learned, however, and the rest of the afternoon he and Jim spent in the cellar.
The day dragged on. Downstairs people ate and read and wrote letters, and outside newspaper men talked together and gazed over at the house and photographed the doctors coming in and the doctors going out. As for me, in the intervals of bringing things, I sat in Bella’s chair in the upper hall, and listened to the crackle of the nurse’s starched skirts.
At midnight that night the doctors made a thorough examination. When they came out they were smiling.
“He is doing very well,” the younger one said–he was hairy and dark, but he was beautiful to me. “He is entirely conscious now, and in about an hour you can send the nurse off for a little sleep. Don’t let him talk.”
And so at last I went through the familiar door into an unfamiliar room, with basins and towels and bottles around, and a screen made of Jim’s largest canvases. And someone on the improvised bed turned and looked at me. He did not speak, and I sat down beside him. After a while he put his hand over mine as it lay on the bed.
“You are much better to me than I deserve,” he said softly. And because his eyes were disconcerting, I put an ice cloth over them.
“Much better than you deserve,” I said, and patted the ice cloth to place gently. He fumbled around until he found my hand again, and we were quiet for a long time. I think he dozed, for he roused suddenly and pulled the cloth from his eyes.
“The–the day is all confused,” he said, turning to look at me, “but–one thing seems to stand out from everything else. Perhaps it was delirium, but I seemed to see that door over there open, and you, outside, with–with Max. His arms were around you.”
“It was delirium,” I said softly. It was my final lie in that house of mendacity.
He drew a satisfied breath, and lifting my hand, held it to his lips and kissed it.
“I can hardly believe it is you,” he said. “I have to hold firmly to your hand or you will disappear. Can’t you move your chair closer? You are miles away.” So I did it, for he was not to be excited.
After a little–
“It’s awfully good of you to do this. I have been desperately sorry, Kit, about the other night. It was a ruffianly thing to do–to kiss you, when I thought–“
“You are to keep very still,” I reminded him. He kissed my hand again, but he persisted.
“I was mad–crazy.” I tried to give him some medicine, but he pushed the spoon aside. “You will have to listen,” he said. “I am in the depths of self-disgust. I–I can’t think of anything else. You see, you seemed so convinced that I was the blackguard that somehow nothing seemed to matter.”
“I have forgotten it all,” I declared generously, “and I would be quite willing to be friends, only, you remember you said–“
“Friends!” his voice was suddenly reckless, and he raised on his elbow. “Friends! Who wants to be friends? Kit, I was almost delirious that night. The instant I held you in my arms–It was all over. I loved you the first time I saw you. I–I suppose I’m a fool to talk like this.”
And, of course, just then Dallas had to open the door and step into the room. He was covered with dirt and he had a hatchet in his hand.
“A rope!” he demanded, without paying any attention to us and diving into corners of the room. “Good heavens, isn’t there a rope in this confounded house!”
He turned and rushed out, without any explanation, and left us staring at the door.
“Bother the rope!” I found myself forced to look into two earnest eyes. “Kit, were you VERY angry when I kissed you that night on the roof?”
“Very,” I maintained stoutly.
“Then prepare yourself for another attack of rage!” he said. And Betty opened the door.
She had on a fetching pale blue dressing gown, and one braid of her yellow hair was pulled carelessly over her shoulder. When she saw me on my knees beside the bed (oh, yes, I forgot to say that, quite unconsciously, I had slid into that position) she stopped short, just inside the door, and put her hand to her throat. She stood for quite a perceptible time looking at us, and I tried to rise. But Tom shamelessly put his arm around my shoulders and held me beside him. Then Betty took a step back and steadied herself by the door frame. She had really cared, I knew then, but I was too excited to be sorry for her.
“I–I beg your pardon for coming in,” she said nervously. “But–they want you downstairs, Kit. At least, I thought you would want to go, but–perhaps–“
Just then from the lower part of the house came a pandemonium of noises; women screaming, men shouting, and the sound of hatchet strokes and splintering wood. I seized Betty by the arm, and together we rushed down the stairs.
Chapter XXIII. COMING
The second floor was empty. A table lay overturned at the top of the stairs, and a broken flower vase was weltering in its own ooze. Part way down Betty stepped on something sharp, that proved to be the Japanese paper knife from the den. I left her on the stairs examining her foot and hurried to the lower floor.
Here everything was in the utmost confusion. Aunt Selina had fainted, and was sitting in a hall chair with her head rolled over sidewise and the poker from the library fireplace across her knees. No one was paying any attention to her. And Jim was holding the front door open, while three of the guards hesitated in the vestibule. The noises continued from the back of the house, and as I stood on the lowest stair Bella came out from the dining room, with her face streaked with soot, and carrying a kettle of hot water.
“Jim,” she called wildly. “While Max and Dal are below, you can pour this down from the top. It’s boiling.”
Jim glanced back over his shoulder. Carry out your own murderous designs,” he said. And then, as she started back with it, “Bella, for Heaven’s sake,” he called, “have you gone stark mad? Put that kettle down.”
She did it sulkily and Jim turned to the policeman.
“Yes, I know it was a false alarm before,” he explained patiently, “but this is genuine. It is just as I tell you. Yes, Flannigan is in the house somewhere, but he’s hiding, I guess. We could manage the thing very well ourselves, but we have no cartridges for our revolvers.” Then as the noise from the rear redoubled, “If you don’t come in and help, I will telephone for the fire department,” he concluded emphatically.
I ran to Aunt Selina and tried to straighten her head. In a moment she opened her eyes, sat up and stared around her. She saw the kettle at once.
“What are you doing with boiling water on the floor?” she said to me, with her returning voice. “Don’t you know you will spoil the floor?” The ruling passion was strong with Aunt Selina, as usual.
I could not find out the trouble from any one; people appeared and disappeared, carrying strange articles. Anne with a rope, Dal with his hatchet, Bella and the kettle, but I could get a coherent explanation from no one. When the guards finally decided that Jim was in earnest, and that the rest of us were not crawling out a rear window while he held them at the door, they came in, three of them and two reporters, and Jim led them to the butler’s pantry.
Here we found Anne, very white and shaky, with the pantry table and two chairs piled against the door of the kitchen slide, and clutching the chamois-skin bag that held her jewels. She had a bottle of burgundy open beside her, and was pouring herself a glass with shaking hands when we appeared. She was furious at Jim.
“I very nearly fainted,” she said hysterically. “I might have been murdered, and no one would have cared. I wish they would stop that chopping, I’m so nervous I could scream.”
Jim took the Burgundy from her with one hand and pointed the police to the barricaded door with the other.
“That is the door to the dumb-waiter shaft,” he said. “The lower one is fastened on the inside, in some manner. The noises commenced about eleven o’clock, while Mr. Brown was on guard. There were scraping sounds first, and later the sound of a falling body. He roused Mr. Reed and myself, but when we examined the shaft everything was quiet, and dark. We tried lowering a candle on a string, but–it was extinguished from below.”
The reporters were busily removing the table and chairs from the door.
“If you have a rope handy,” one of them said, “I will go down the shaft.”
(Dal says that all reporters should have been policemen, and that all policemen are natural newsgatherers.)
“The cage appears to be stuck, half-way between the floors,” Jim said. “They are cutting through the door in the kitchen below.”
They opened the door then and cautiously peered down, but there was nothing to be seen. I touched Jim gingerly on the arm.
“Is it–is it Flannigan,:” I asked, “shut in there?”
“No–yes–I don’t know,” he returned absently. “Run along and don’t bother, Kit. He may take to shooting any minute.”
Anne and I went out then and shut the door, and went into the dining room and sat on our feet, for of course the bullets might come up through the floor. Aunt Selina joined us there, and Bella, and the Mercer girls, and we sat around and talked in whispers, and Leila Mercer told of the time her grandfather had had a struggle with an escaped lunatic.
In the midst of the excitement Tom appeared in a bathrobe, looking very pale, with a bandage around his head, and the nurse at his heels threatening to leave and carrying a bottle of medicine and a spoon. He went immediately to the pantry, and soon we could hear him giving orders and the rest hurrying around to obey them. The hammering ceased, and the silence was even worse. It was more suggestive.
In about fifteen minutes there was a thud, as if the cage had fallen, and the sound of feet rushing down the cellar stairs. Then there were groans and loud oaths, and everybody talking at once, below, and the sound of a struggle. In the dining room we all sat bent forward, with straining ears and quickened breath, until we distinctly heard someone laugh. Then we knew that, whatever it was, it was over, and nobody was killed.
The sounds came closer, were coming up the stairs and into the pantry. Then the door swung open, and Tom and a policeman appeared in the doorway, with the others crowding behind. Between them they supported a grimy, unshaven object, covered with whitewash from the wall of the shaft, an object that had its hands fastened together with handcuffs, and that leered at us with a pair of the most villainously crossed eyes I have ever seen.
None of us had ever seen him before,
“Mr. Lawrence McGuirk, better known as Tubby,'” Tom said cheerfully. “A celebrity in his particular line, which is second-story man and all-round rascal. A victim of the quarantine, like ourselves.”
“We’ve missed him for a week,” one of the guards said with a grin. “We’ve been real anxious about you, Tubby. Ain’t a week goes by, when you’re in health, that we don’t hear something of you.”
Mr. McGuirk muttered something under his breath, and the men chuckled.
“It seems,” Tom said, interpreting, “that he doesn’t like us much. He doesn’t like the food, and he doesn’t like the beds. He says just when he got a good place fixed up in the coal cellar, Flannigan found it, and is asleep there now, this minute.”
Aunt Selina rose suddenly and cleared her throat.
“Am I to understand,” she asked severely, “that from now on we will have to add two newspaper reporters, three policemen and a burglar to the occupants of this quarantined house? Because, if that is the case, I absolutely refuse to feed them.”
But one of the reporters stepped forward and bowed ceremoniously.
“Madam,” he said, “I thank you for your kind invitation, but–it will be impossible for us to accept. I had intended to break the good news earlier, but this little game of burglar-in-a-corner prevented me. The fact is, your Jap has been discovered to have nothing more serious than chicken-pox, and–if you will forgive a poultry yard joke, there is no longer any necessity for your being cooped up.”
Then he retired, quite pleased with himself.
One would have thought we had exhausted our capacity for emotion, but Jim said a joyful emotion was so new that we hardly knew how to receive it. Every one shook hands with every one else, and even the nurse shared in the excitement and gave Jim the medicine she had prepared for Tom.
Then we all sat down and had some champagne, and while they were waiting for the police wagon, they gave some to poor McGuirk. He was still quite shaken from his experience when the dumb-waiter stuck. The wine cheered him a little, and he told his story, in a voice that was creaky from disuse, while Tom held my hand under the table.
He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a closet in one of the maids’ rooms–the one where we had put Jim. It was Jim waking out of a nap and declaring that the closet door had moved by itself and that something had crawled under his bed and out of the door, that had roused the suspicions of the men in the house–and he slept at night on the coal in the cellar. He was actually tearful when he rubbed his hand over his scrubby chin, and said he hadn’t had a shave for a week. He took somebody’s razor, he said, but he couldn’t get hold of a portable mirror, and every time he lathered up and stood in front of the glass in the dining room sideboard, some one came and he had had to run and hide. He told, too, of his attempts to escape, of the board on the roof, of the home-made rope, and the hole in the cellar, and he spoke feelingly of the pearl collar and the struggle he had made to hide it. He said that for three days it was concealed in the pocket of Jim’s old smoking coat in the studio.
We were all rather sorry for him, but if we had made him uncomfortable, think of what he had done to us. And for him to tell, as he did later in court, that if that was high society he would rather be a burglar, and that we starved him, and that the women had to dress each other because they had no lady’s maids, and that the whole lot of us were in love with one man, it was downright malicious.
The wagon came for him just as he finished his story, and we all went to the door. In the vestibule Aunt Selina suddenly remembered something, and she stepped forward and caught the poor fellow by the arm.
“Young man,” she said grimly. “I’ll thank you to return what you took from ME last Tuesday night.”
McGuirk stared, then shuddered and turned suddenly pale.
“Good Lord!” he ejaculated. “On the stairs to the roof! YOU?”
They led him away then, quite broken, with Aunt Selina staring after him. She never did understand. I could have explained, but it was too awful.
On the steps McGuirk turned and took a farewell glance at us. Then he waved his hand to the policemen and reporters who had gathered around.
“Goodby, fellows,” he called feebly. “I ain’t sorry, I ain’t. Jail’ll be a paradise after this.”
And then we went to pack our trunks.
NOTE FROM MAX WHICH CAME THE NEXT DAY WITH ITS ENCLOSURE.
My Dear Kit–The enclosed trunk tag was used on my trunk, evidently by mistake. Higgins discovered it when he was unpacking and returned it to me under the misapprehension that I had written it. I wish I had. I suppose there must be something attractive about a fellow who has the courage to write a love letter on the back of a trunk tag, and who doesn’t give a tinker’s damn who finds it. But for my peace of mind, ask him not to leave another one around where I will come across it. Max.
WRITTEN ON THE BACK OF THE TRUNK TAG.
Don’t you know that I won’t see you until tomorrow? For Heaven’s sake, get away from this crowd and come into the den. If you don’t I will kiss you before everybody. Are you coming? T.
WRITTEN BELOW.
No indeed. K.
THIS WAS SCRATCHED OUT AND BENEATH.
Coming.