The car that was bearing Shirley Hollister through the lonely wooded road at a breathless speed suddenly came to a halt in the rear of an old house whose front faced on another road equally lonely. During the brief time that they had been in the woods, the sky seemed to have perceptibly darkened with the coming evening.
Shirley looked about her with increased fright. It was almost night and here was her prison, far from town or human dwelling place. Even the road was at some distance in front of the house, and there were more woods on either side.
"This here is Secretary Baker's summer home," announced the man who had done the talking, as he climbed out of the car and opened the door for her. "You can just step in the back door and go through to the parlor; the help's all out this afternoon. The Secretary'll be down presently. He always takes a nap afternoons about this time. I'll tell him you've come."
There seemed nothing to do but obey, and Shirley chose to let the farce continue. Surely the man must know she was not a fool, but it was better than open hostility. There was nothing to be gained by informing him that she knew he was guying her.
"Oh, Jesus Christ, I trust myself to you!" she breathed in her heart as she stepped across the leaf-strewn grass and looked about her, wondering whether she should ever walk the earth again after she had stepped into the dim tree-shrouded house. But why go in?
"I think I will remain out here," she said calmly, albeit her heart was pounding away like a trip-hammer. "Please tell Mr. Baker to come to me here. It is much pleasanter than in the house a day like this."
"Aw no! You won't neither! The Secretary don't receive in the open air even in summer," drawled the man, and she noticed that he and the driver straightened up and stepped closer to her, one on either side. She gave one wild glance toward the open space. There was simply no chance at all to run away even if she succeeded in eluding them at the start by a quick, unexpected dash. They were alert athletic men, and no telling how many more were hidden in the house.
"Oh, very well, of course, if it's a matter of etiquette!" said Shirley pleasantly, determined to keep up the farce as long as possible.
A cold, dark air met the girl as she stepped within the creaking door and looked about her. At her left was an old-fashioned kitchen, dusty and cobwebby. A long, narrow hall led to the front of the house and her guide pointed her toward a room on the right. There was something hollow and eerie in the sound of their footsteps on the old oaken floor. The room into which she was ushered was musty and dusty as the rest. The floor was covered with an ancient ingrain carpet. The table was covered with a magenta felt cover stamped with a vine of black leaves and riddled with moth holes. The walls were hung with old prints and steel engravings suspended by woollen cords and tassels. The furniture was dilapidated. Everything was covered with dust, but there were finger marks in the dust here and there that showed the place had been recently visited. Through an open doorway an old square piano was visible in what must be the parlor. The place seemed to Shirley fairly teeming with memories of some family now departed. She leaped to the quick conclusion that the house had been long deserted and had only recently been entered and used as a rendezvous for illegal conferences. It occurred to her that there might be an opportunity for her to hide her precious papers somewhere safely if it came to it that she must be searched. How about that piano? Could she slip some of them between the keys? But it was hardly likely that there would be opportunity for anything like that.
She felt strangely calm as she looked about upon her prison.
"H'm! He ain't come yet!" remarked her guide as he glanced into the front room. "Well, you can set down. He won't be long now. Joe, you jest look about a bit and see if you can find the Secretary, and tell him the young lady is here."
The man flung himself full length on the carpet-covered couch and looked at her with satisfaction.
"What train was that you said you must make? I'm afraid now you might be going to be just a trifle late if he don't get a hustle on, but you can't hurry a great man like that you know."
"Oh, it's no matter!" said Shirley coolly, looking around her with the utmost innocence. "What a quaint old house! Has it been in the family a long time?"
The man looked at her amusedly.
"You're a cute one!" he remarked affably. "I believe you're a pretty good sport! You know perfectly well you're in my power and can't do a turn to help yourself, yet you sail around here as calm as a queen! You're some looker, too! Blamed if I'm not enjoying myself. I wouldn't mind a kiss or two from those pretty lips——"
But Shirley had melted through the doorway into the other room and her voice floated back with charming indifference as if she had not heard, though she was ready to scream with loathing and fear of the man:
"Why, isn't this a delightful old piano? The keys are actually mother-of-pearl. Isn't it odd? Would Mr. Baker mind if I played on it?"
And before her astonished captor could get himself to the doorway she had sat down on the rickety old hair-cloth stool and swept the keys lightly. The old chords trembled and shivered as if awaking from a tomb, and uttered forth a quavering, sweet sound like ancient memories.
The man was too much astonished to stop her, amused too, perhaps, and interested. Her white fingers over the dusty pearls in the growing dusk had a strange charm for the hardened reprobate, like the wonder of a flower dropped into the foulness of a prison. Before he could recover, he was startled again by her voice soaring out in the empty echoing house:
Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Save me Lord and make me pure!
Perhaps those dim, gloomy walls had echoed before to the grand old tune, but never could it have been sung in dire strait, or with more earnest cry from a soul in distress. She had chosen the first words that seemed to fit the chords she had struck, but every syllable was a prayer to the God in whom she trusted. It may be the man felt the power of her appeal as he stood rooted in the doorway and listened while she sang through all the verses she could remember. But the last trembling note was broken harshly by Joe's voice at the kitchen door in sharp, rasping orders:
"Hist, there! Can that noise! Do you want to raise hell here? Wake up, Sam! Get onto your job. Hennie's comin'."
"That's all right, Joe! Dry up! This is good Sunday School dope! This won't rouse no suspicions. Go to the devil and mind your business! I know what I'm about!"
Shirley was almost ready to cry, but she drew a deep breath and started on another song:
Jesus, Lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high!
Hide me, oh, my Saviour hide,
Till the storm of life is past.
On through the time-worn words she sang, while the sin-hardened man stood silently and listened. His eyes had gradually lost their leer and grown soft and tender, as if some childhood memories of home and mother and a time when he was innocent and good were looking out his eyes, reminding him of what he once intended to be before he ate the apple of wisdom and became as the gods and devils. Shirley gradually became aware that she was holding her strange audience; and a power beyond herself steadied her voice, and kept her fingers from trembling on the old pearl keys, as she wandered on from song to song; perhaps happening on the very ones,—who knows?—that this man, standing in the dying twilight of the old gloomy house, had sung beside his mother's hearth or in church during his childhood? Certain it is that he stood there silent and listened for at least half an hour without an interruption, while the light in the big room grew dimmer and dimmer and all about the house seemed still as death in the intervals between her voice. She was just beginning:
Abide with me,
Fast falls the eventide,
The darkness deepens,
Lord, with me abide!
When the man put his hand in his pocket and brought out a candle. Scratching a match on his trousers, he lit the candle and set it carefully on the piano, where its light fell flickering, wavering over her worn young face; and who shall say that she was not a messenger from another world to this man who had long trodden the downward path?
They were interrupted, however, before this song was finished by a newcomer who entered like a shadow and stood at the end of the piano looking wonderingly from Shirley to the man, when she glanced up. She stopped, startled, for although he wore no brass buttons nor blue clothes she was quite sure those were the same gray eyes that had looked at her from the recess of the window in the Government office that afternoon, perhaps the same boy who had come after her car and sent her off on this long way into the wilderness.
The man Sam straightened up suddenly and looked about him half-ashamed with an apologetic grin:
"Oh, you've come, have you, Hennie? Well, you been a long time about it! But now I guess we'll get to work. Where's Joe? Out on the watch? All right then, Miss, if you've no objection, we'll just take a little vacation on the psalm singin' and turn our attention to worldly things. I calculate you're sharp enough to know what we brought you put here for? I acknowledge you can sing real well, and you sorta got my goat for a while there with all that mourning bench tra-la, for you certainly have got that holy dope down fine; but now the time's come for business, and you needn't to think that because I can enjoy a little sentiment now and then in a leisure moment that you can put anything over on me, for it can't be did! I mean business and I've got you in my power! We're ten miles from any settlement, and no neighbors anywhere's about. Everybody moved away. So it won't do any good to work any funny business on us. You can't get away. We're all armed, and no one knows where you are! If you behave yourself and do as you're told there won't be any trouble. We'll just transact our business and then we'll have a bit of supper, and mebbe a few more tunes—got any rag-time in your repitwar?—and then sometime after midnight, when the moon's good and dark, we'll get you back to civilization where you won't have no trouble in gettin' home. But if you act up and get funny, why you know what to expect. There was a young girl murdered once in this house and buried in the cellar and ever since folks say it's hanted and they won't come near it. That's the kind of a place we're in! So, now are you ready?"
Shirley sat cold and still. It seemed as if her life blood had suddenly congealed in her veins and for a second she felt as if her senses were going to desert her. Then the echo of her own song: "Hide me, oh, my Saviour hide!" seemed to cry out from her soul silently and she rallied once more and gained her self-control.
"Well, Miss," went on the man impressively, "I see you're ready for the question, and you've got your nerve with you, too, I'll hand you that! But I warn you it won't do no good! We brung you out here to get a hold of that note-book you wrote in this morning, and we're goin' to have it. We know that Mr. Barnard left it in your care. Hennie here heard him say for you to keep it. So it won't be of any use for you to lie about it."
"Of course!" said Shirley, standing up and reaching over for her hand-bag, which she had laid on the piano beside her while she played. "I understand perfectly. But I'd like to ask you a question, Mr.——?"
"Smith, or Jones, whichever you like to call it. Spit it out!"
"I suppose you are paid to bring me out here, Mr. Smith, and get my property away from me?" she said gravely.
"Well, yes, we don't calculate to do it just for sweet charity."
"And I am paid to look after my note-book, you see. It's a trust that has been given me! I just have to look after it. It's out of the question for me to desert it!" Shirley spoke coolly and held her little bag close in the firm grasp of her two hands. The man stared at her and laughed. The boy Hennie fairly gaped in his astonishment. "A girl with all that nerve!"
"Of course, I understand perfectly that you can murder me and bury me down in the cellar beside that other girl that was murdered, and perhaps no one will find it out for a while, and you can go on having a good time on the money you will get for it. But the day will come when you will have to answer for it! You know I didn't come here alone to-day——!"
Both men looked startled and glanced uneasily into the shadows, as if there might be someone lurking there.
"God came with me and He knows! He'll make you remember some day!"
The boy laughed out a nervous ha! ha! of relief, but the man seemed held, fascinated by her look and words. There was silence for a second while the girl held off the ruffian in the man by sheer force of her strong personality. Then the boy laughed again, with a sneer in the end of it, and the spell was broken. The leer came into the eyes of the man again. The sneer of the boy had brought him to himself,—to the self he had come to be.
"Nix on the sob-stuff, girlie!" he said gruffly. "It won't go down with me! We're here for business and we've been delayed too long already. Come now, will you hand out that note-book or will we have to search you?" He took one stride across to where she stood and wrenched the hand-bag from her grasp before she was aware of his intention. She had not meant to give it up without a struggle, much as she loathed the thought of one. She must make the matter last as long as possible, if perchance God was sending help to her, and must contest every inch of the way as far as lay in her power. Oh, had anyone picked up her cards? Had the book with its message reached any friendly eye?
Frail and white and stern she stood with folded arms while they turned out the contents of the little bag and scattered it over the piano, searching with clumsy fingers among her dainty things.
The note-book she had rolled within her handkerchiefs and made it hard to find. She feared lest her ruse would be discovered when they looked it over. The boy was the one who clutched for the little book, recognizing it as the one he had seen in the office that morning. The man hung over his shoulder and peered in the candlelight, watching the boy anxiously. It meant a good deal of money if they put this thing through.
"Here it is!" said the boy, fluttering through the leaves and carefully scrutinizing the short-hand characters. "Yes, that's the dope!"
He ran his eye down the pages, caught a word here and there, technicalities of manufacture, the very items, of course, that he wanted, if this had been the specifications for the Government order. Shirley remembered with relief that none of the details were identical, however, with the notes she carried in her shoes. The book-notes were in fact descriptive of an entirely different article from that demanded by the Government. The question was, would these people be wise enough to discover that fact before she was out of their power or not?
Furtively she studied the boy. There was something keen and cunning about his youthful face. He was thick-set, with blond hair and blue eyes. He might be of German origin, though there was not a sign of accent about his speech. He had the bull-dog chin, retreating forehead and eagle nose of the Kaiser in embryo. Shirley saw all this as she studied him furtively. That he was an expert in short-hand was proved by the ease with which he read some of her obscure sentences, translating rapidly here and there as he examined the book. Was he well enough informed about the Government contract to realize that these were not the notes she had taken in the office that morning? And should he fail to recognize it, was there perhaps some one higher in authority to whom they would be shown before she was released? She shivered and set her weary toes tight with determination over the little crinkling papers in her shoes. Somehow she would protect those notes from being taken, even if she had to swallow them. There surely would be a way to hide them if the need came.
Suddenly the tense strain under which she was holding herself was broken by the man. He looked up with a grin, rubbing his hands with evident self-gratulation and relief:
"That's all right, Girlie! That's the dope we want. Now we won't trouble you any longer. We'll have supper. Hennie, you go get some of that wood out in the shed and we'll have a fire on the hearth and make some coffee!"
But Shirley, standing white and tense in the dim shadow of the room, suddenly felt the place whirling about her, and the candle dancing afar off. Her knees gave way beneath her and she dropped back to the piano stool weakly, and covered her face with her hands, pressing hard on her eyeballs; trying to keep her senses and stop this black dizziness that threatened to submerge her consciousness. She must not faint—if this was fainting. She must keep her senses and guard her precious shoes. If one of those should fall off while she was unconscious all would be undone.