DUSKIN (21 page)

Where
were
they going? And was he a fool? He was missing a most important appointment, one he had worked hard to get. It might mean a delay in tomorrow’s work. It might mean he would have to work hard to make up for the loss some other way. The man he was to meet had power with railroads and could but command and a freight car would come through in a night. There were materials that had not yet arrived and would be needed in two more days. Yet Duskin kept his car’s nose turned toward the taillight of the mayor.

And where was he going? A lonely road, and that sharp turn they were making ahead, up through the woods? Wasn’t there a roadhouse off here somewhere? Perhaps. He didn’t pay much attention to things of that sort, but he had overheard talk. Well, he was not surprised at the mayor, but—who was that girl? He must find out!

He didn’t know he was such a blamed fool. But he
had
to
find out.

He almost halted at the wooded road. Suppose the car should go on all night? He could not follow indefinitely. Just then came the clear gleam of colored lights, and Duskin heard the cessation of the big car’s engine and drove his own into the bushes at the side of the road out of the way.

Stealthily he came up on foot. Yes, that last car was the mayor’s, parked with its nose to the fence with the rest. He briefly swept the flashlight he always carried over the car’s door and read the initials “W.W.S.” There was no further doubt. He went on to the next and identified it as the big car he had followed first from the hotel. He swept its door, too, with a bug of light, and there were the same initials. He was right; the young fellow must be a relative. It was one of Schlessinger’s cars. From then on, his course was plain. He had to find out who that girl was! If Carol Berkley was not in that close-shuttered, blighted house he might go on his way content and make the best he could of his time back, calling himself a fool all the way. But if she was—well—
if she was
!

But it is no easy task to see into a room that has been purposely made safe from prying eyes, and Duskin crept twice around that building, carefully avoiding the back, where the servants were handling freezers and clattering dishes, before he discovered the one little spot where a drunken scuffle the night before had badly damaged the windowshade. And that, as it happened, was across the room from the table where Carol and Paisley sat.

It was some time before he got his eye properly adjusted to survey the room and several minutes before he found what he was searching for. Yes, there she was—her delicate face and slim little black satin figure standing out like a flower among all those coarse, bedizened people. He caught his breath when he saw her and watched, his brows lowering, his hands clenched.

It did not take him long to understand the situation. Indeed Carol’s attitude was plainly panic-stricken, as any man might read, and though he could not hear what the man at the next table was saying, he knew by the significant looks in that direction and by the fright on the girl’s face and the way she turned her eyes away piteously that it was nothing good.

He was about to spring away and try to force the door when he saw that look of horror come into her eyes anew, and his gaze followed hers and saw Schlessinger!

He waited only to count the windows that he might make no mistake, and then he crept stealthily around the house, pausing behind some shrubbery while some new arrivals came up on the porch. He tried to enter with them, but found the door shut in his face and went on to the window which he knew was just behind Carol’s table.

One moment he stood outside, calculating, looking back to count the windows again and make sure he had made no mistake, then he lifted the big whitewashed stone he had picked up from the edge of the drive and smashed it through the glass, tearing away the dark-lined curtain and getting one glimpse of the room and its people before everything went black.

Blindly he groped for her where he had seen her, touched the softness of her gown, flashed his light on her face faintly and out again, and caught her in his arms.

There was blood on his hands where he had cut them climbing through the window and blood on his face. He felt it trickle down and tossed his head to get it out of his eyes. The night was pitch black, for the moon had gone behind clouds and the air was still. All the red and yellow lights along the rim of the house had gone dead, too. There was nothing stirring anywhere in the universe but himself, and he hardly dared to breathe. The girl in his arms hung limp. He gathered her closer and stumbled across the drive and down into the woods to his car.

When he had put her in and started the car he reached out to touch her—fearful she had ceased to breathe, she lay so still—but she quivered away from his touch.

He pondered this as he hurried his car through the woods and back onto the highway again. He must make the best of his time. They might pursue him. At first perhaps they thought they were being raided, but they would find out—they would come after him—he must get the girl away.

When he had passed the woods and come a mile down the highway he took out his flashlight and turned it into the girl’s face. He could not bear her stillness any longer. But when he looked he saw her eyes were wide open and full of fear.

She had not known who he was! Of course! He ought to have remembered that.

“Miss Berkley,” he said very gently, “I thought you were in trouble back there. Did I do right to bring you away?”

“Oh, is it you, Mr. Duskin? Oh, I am so glad,” and he felt she was crying softly as she spoke. “I have been—so—frightened!”

“Are you hurt?” he asked anxiously. “I’m afraid I was rather rough!”

“Oh, no, but I wouldn’t mind if I was, I’m so thankful to be out of that terrible place! But I thought—you were Mr. Schlessinger!”

“You poor child!” said Duskin as he might have talked to a little girl of five, and his voice held a caress that she did not seem to mind.

Duskin forgot that he had had one fearful moment when he thought that perhaps this girl who had seemed so true and honorable had been one of the league against him, too. How could he have harbored such a thought? But then, he had been through so much and borne so many setbacks from this unscrupulous gang!

“It was all my fault!” she said earnestly. “But I didn’t want to go with them. I tried to get word to Mrs. Arthwait that I couldn’t go, but I could not get my message to her till it got so late I was ashamed to back out. And then her son came alone!”

“The sucker! The dirty sucker!” said Duskin under his breath.

“He got me into the car before he told me his mother was sick and couldn’t go, and I
couldn’t make
him take me back and wait until she could go. I tried by best.”

“Look here!” said Duskin savagely. “Don’t you suppose I know it wasn’t your fault? Don’t you suppose I can see with a glance that you’re not their kind? Oh, the dirty crooks! But I’ve got something on the mayor now that will make him clear out and let us alone for a while, I’m thinking. He won’t want it known that he went to a place like that. Perhaps we can work in peace for a little while till he thinks up a new way to torment us.”

“Oh!” she said suddenly, her voice full of eagerness. “We’ve got more than that on him. I ought to have told you long ago! What a fool I have been not to trust you!”

And then she began at the beginning and told him all about the conversation she had overheard between Schlessinger and Blintz back in the New York office.

“And you say you have the full notes of all that?” he asked eagerly.

“Every word.”

“Then we’ll fix the old fox for a fact! But we’ll finish the building first and wait for Fawcett if possible. Say, you are great! You’ve pulled off the biggest thing you could have done when you took down that conversation! That certainly was clever of you. I’ve had a hunch all along that we were going to have trouble with those two birds at the end. They’ll have something else up their sleeves to spring on us at the last minute or I’ll miss my guess. But this finishes that. They can’t pull anything in the face of that evidence! I could shout for joy! But say—are
you
all right?”

He turned the flashlight full on her face once more, and by its reflection she saw his face.

“Yes, but you are not!” she cried. “Why, there’s blood on your face, Mr. Duskin, and on your hands. It’s running down. Let me tie it up.”

“No, I’m quite all right,” said Duskin with a sudden light of delirious joy in his eyes. To have her speak to him in that voice went quite to his head. What was the matter with him? He ought to have eaten his dinner. He never before had a girl’s sympathy affect him like that!

“It’s just a little cut in my hand—from the glass,” he explained and felt as if he were shouting it from the hilltops. Why did he feel so glad? It was all out of proportion.

“I’m going to tie it up!” said Carol firmly, bringing out a soft handkerchief and dabbing at his hurt hand.

He stopped the car and allowed her to tie up his hand.

“You’re very kind,” he said in a tone that was almost embarrassed. “That’s the way my mother used to do when I was a little kid.”

“Kind?” said Carol. “When you saved my life!”

“Oh, no, I don’t anticipate they would have gone as far as that,” he said. “But I do think they intended to detain you awhile to get what information they could out of you. Very likely their plan was to force you to fire me.”

“Oh, do you really think that?” she said appalled. “Do you think it really was intentional?”

“I should say I did,” he answered vehemently. “Didn’t you know you were riding in one of Schlessinger’s cars? I made sure of that before I went to look in the place.”

“Oh mercy!” said Carol, pausing in her bandaging to look up in horror. “How terrible! I was frightened enough as it was, but if I had known that I certainly would have jumped out!”

“Well, that’s not so good either.” He smiled down at her. “But come, that’s enough. I must get you out of this. They might track us down even now. If they thought they could, they would, you know. It would be lovely for them if they could take me, too; it would be so much velvet. If they could just get me back to that roadhouse and then spread a story that I had been out there, and broadcast it back to Fawcett. Don’t you see what we’d have been up against?”

“Oh, and to think I did it! What a fool I have been! You must have thought—well—all sorts of things about me.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to think at first. When I saw you in that car, or thought I did, I wasn’t positive it was you with that fool of an Arthwait. No woman around either. You had led me to suppose it was a woman who had invited you. That troubled me some, although I realized you might have changed your plans afterward. You were not obliged to tell me everything of course. Still, it was an ugly thought. I followed you to prove to myself that it wasn’t you, and then when I found it was, I knew I must get you out somehow, if only to find out what it was all about.”

“You have been wonderful,” she said humbly. “I feel as if I can never thank you and never apologize sufficiently.”

“For what?” he asked.

She was still a minute.

“Well, for distrusting you in the first place and then for getting you into all this and wasting more of your time. Didn’t I hear you making an appointment over the phone this afternoon to meet a man at eight o’clock? You’ve missed that, haven’t you? And I heard you say it was very important.”

“You were more important,” he said quickly. “Suppose I had succeeded in getting all the freight cars through I wanted and then had found you were gone, kidnapped, and I had to spend the rest of my time hunting you?”

“I’m beginning to be convinced that you would be much better off without me,” said Carol, still more humbly. “I have been an awful fool, and you have been marvelous!”

“Look here,” said Duskin, “you and I just haven’t understood each other, that was all. When we get time we’ll sit down and explain a lot of things. Until then we’ll have to take each other on trust. We’ve got a big job to do, and it will help a lot if we do teamwork. How about it? Are you willing to trust me that far?”

“I’m certainly willing to trust you entirely, and I’ll begin by asking you if there isn’t still time for you to catch that man you were to see? If you let me out here on the edge of the city where I can take a trolley back to the hotel, and you drive hard, couldn’t you perhaps get him yet? I can’t bear to think I’ve kept you from that appointment. If you would stop at a drugstore and telephone, say you had to help somebody out of trouble, wouldn’t he perhaps wait till you got there?”

“I shall not drop you off anywhere, be assured of that,” he said decidedly, “but if you don’t mind sitting in the car I might take the chance and drive around that way. Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?”

“It would relieve me greatly,” she said eagerly, “and won’t you telephone?”

“I will,” he said. “That’s a good suggestion.”

He pulled up in front of a little country drugstore.

“I’ll only be gone a minute, and you are all safe here in the bright light. Plenty of people around, if any of those crooks come hunting you.”

“I’m not afraid,” she smiled, “but I’d advise you to ask the druggist to let you wash your face before you go calling.”

He grinned.

“Thank you, I’ll do that also.”

She watched him go into the telephone booth and then disappear into the back of the store. But he was gone only a few minutes.

“It’s all right,” he said, jumping into the car. “He says he’ll wait till I get there. And I got the druggist to put some stuff on my cuts so I don’t look quite so disreputable. Now, if you don’t mind going fast, I promised him I’d be there in ten minutes.”

“I love to go fast.”

There was no chance to talk as the car thundered through the city streets, and Carol had time to sit back in the hard little seat and think how much pleasanter this ride was than the one she had taken an hour before in the expensive limousine.

They came to the house before the ten minutes were up, and Duskin left her in the car and sprang up the steps. She watched him as he stood there under the bright light of the front door, a splendid figure, even in his rough clothes and old panama hat. His trousers might be bagged at the knees perhaps, from too much kneeling down on the floor with all the pliers to pull up electric wires, but he had the ease and grace of one born to society. He could look his man in the eye and make him forget what he had on. And straightaway she began to wonder that she had not known it all along. And then again she said, “What a fool, what a terrible fool I have been! Was I always a fool? Will I always stay a fool? I have made a worse mistake every day I have been here. Perhaps I ought to go home!”