_ CHAPTER XII. THE OLD GRIGSBY HOUSE PAYS PENANCE
To young Bassett, of The American, the excitement of existence, since he became a reporter and joined the jehus of the truth wagon, had consisted mainly of "chasing pictures" in the afternoons and going to strings of banquets at night. He had no more enthusiasm for photographs than he had for banquets. Word painting and graining was his art. And so when a big story walked up and beckoned to him he was as happy as a boy in love.
It had been a dull day for news. The evening papers were barren of suggestions and the assignments had run out before Bassett's name was reached. That meant another afternoon of dismal lingering in the office, without even a photograph to chase.
Bassett flung himself disgustedly into a chair and straightened a newspaper with a vicious crackle as the last of the other reporters hurried out. He thought he caught a gleam of merry pity in the reporter's eye. Never mind. Let 'em laugh. Let 'em wait. One of these days he'll be the one getting the real stuff and putting it through, too, from tip to type, without a rewrite man or a copy reader touching it. Let 'em wait!
"In a balloon? Where?"
The suddenly vibrant voice of the city editor talking over the telephone caused Bassett to lower his paper and hushed even the chatter of the office boys.
"Palisades--Panatella; yes. Who's the girl? You don't know?"
The paper dropped from Bassett's hands.
"Much obliged. I'll have a man over there, but you go right ahead." The city editor clicked down the receiver and whirled in his chair.
"Oh--Bassett. Our Weehawken man says a young woman has been carried off by Panatella's balloon. They've lost the balloon. Get a car and get over there quick. Go as far as you like, only find the girl and let me hear from you--quick."
Bassett jumped to a phone and ordered a high-powered machine to meet him at Ninety-sixth street. He ran down William street, with his straw hat under his arm, and dived into the subway. An express had him at Ninety-sixth street in a few minutes. His machine was there. They dashed for the ferry and were on the aviation field before the bewildered crowd that had witnessed the runaway flight of the balloon had dispersed.
Bassett jumped out and mingled with the people. They knew nothing except the general direction toward the west that the balloon had taken. Automobilists had pursued for a long way, but had seen the gas bag turn to the north and disappear in the hills. The automobilists had returned--most of them. Two who had been with the girl before she leaped into the basket had not returned.
Bassett got back in the car beside the driver, and they glided off on the westward road.
Every one in the farm houses along the route had seen the balloon. But the houses were further and further apart as Bassett's course was drawn northward and, often he missed the trail.
The trail was blazed by the wheel ruts of a giant touring car and a small runabout that frequently left the highways and plowed across the fields. He lost them in the middle of a field that was marshy where the automobiles left the road and rock-dry at the middle and further side. After a half-hour's maneuvering he ordered the driver to go back to the road.
"Maybe they done the same thing--turned round an' come back," suggested the chauffeur. "Hello, what kind of a rig is that?" he added as a wagon appeared around a bend in the road.
The peculiar thing about the "rig" was that while it was a tongued wagon with whiffletrees for two horses, there was only one horse. The driver, a bearded farmer, was urging the patient animal on, although it was impossible for it to do more than plod in its awkward harness.
"What's the matter?" called Bassett, cheerily, as the machine drew alongside and stopped.
"I dunno," replied the farmer, shaking his grizzled bead. "Ef I was a young feller like you I'd go right off an' find out."
"I'll go right away; what's up?"
"I dunno. I ain't knowed anythin' like it in this part o' the country in fifty year. First, down yonder on the old river road I meets a autymobile, with a man drivin' it and somethin' alive an' movin' lyin' in a blanket by his feet. I ain't got more'n a half mile back from there when I finds a fine young feller, with his good clothes--what he's got left--tore to pieces, no shoes, or hat on him, an' his head bleedin' bad from cuts. 'Where are they? Did you see a autymobile?' he yells at me. I tells him what I had saw, an' he takes my off hoss there an' goes gallopin' up the road."
"What road?" cried Bassett.
"Ye circle this here field an' climb the hill, then take the first turn."
"Which way?"
"West, if you don't want ter jump in the river."
"What, we're back at the river," gasped Bassett.
"That's about my luck. The balloon's gone over the river; it's in New York, and some Harlem reporter is leading it down to his office on a leash to have it photographed, and I'm--I'm hoodooed, that's all."
"I dunno," said the farmer, "but ef ye ast me, I'd say that feller in the autymoble was makin' for the woods beyond Quirksborough. It's lonely up through there, an' he had somethin' in that there machine that he wanted to keep lonely, I'm guessin'."
Bassett motioned to the driver to go on. "We might as well see what it is; the balloon's gone home for supper," he said bitterly.
In five minutes they reached the turn where the farmer had last seen Harry Marvin disappear. They took the turn into an ill-kept, dust-heavy road that had cast its blight of brown upon the reeds bordering it. The woods became more and more dense and the road more narrow. In some places the dust was crusted, as it had dried after the last rain, and the men in the automobile could see that the wheels of another machine and the hoofs of a galloping horse had plunged through this crust but a short time before.
Around a bend in the road, going at full speed, Bassett sighted Harry Marvin for the first time. He stood up beside the driver and hailed him, but Harry did not even turn around. The beat of his horse's hoofs drowned the sound. The deep lines of the runabout's wheels in the dust held his gaze and his senses to one thing alone--the rescue of Pauline. He urged the poor beast to its last tug of strength. Weak and dizzy from his wound, he knew that he could go but a little way afoot. The road's high, close-set wall of trees was broken for the first time by a little clearing. Harry's passing glance showed him that there was a house in the clearing. He was exhausted and a thirst, but his eyes swept back to the wheel tracks on the road.
The runabout had gone on. Harry, without drawing rein, was about to follow. But suddenly, weirdly, the rickety walls of the deserted house gave forth a sound, a rattle and a crash, and from a shuttered window beside the low-silled door bellied a sheet of smoke.
Harry reined the foaming horse and sprang off. Freed of his weight, the animal staggered on a few paces and fell, panting, in the dust.
Harry did not see it. He was battering at the door of the burning house.
Hicks could hardly be called a nervous or a timid man. He was certainly not a coward, like Owen; but neither did he have the shrewd, scheming mind which was the bulwark of the craven secretary's weakness. At the moment when they discovered the young lovers safe at the foot of the cliff after the escape from the balloon and rock ledge, the two arch conspirators were two very different men. Owen was shaking like a leaf in his terror of discovery, but thinking of a hundred schemes to save himself. Hicks was deadly cool, and thinking of just one thing--immediate and cold-blooded murder.
But now, although he thought he had killed Harry, although he knew he had Pauline gagged and bound in the bottom of the runabout, Hicks was afraid. He was afraid of the incompleteness of the thing. He was eager to have done with the girl as well as with the man. And now this latest plan of Owen's was but another chapter of procrastination.
The incident of the farmer's curiosity had unnerved him, too. He put back over his face one of the white handkerchiefs that he had taken off when he began the flight.
"There's no more 'pity-the-poor-girl' stuff in this," he said gruffly to Pauline. "If you don't keep quiet I'll kill you. I mean what I say."
He still had the instinctive crook sense to conceal his natural voice. Hicks was afraid, but as mile after mile fell behind them and the westerning sun gave promise of the early shelter of dark, he began to gain confidence. He mumbled to himself reminiscently:
"The old Grigsby house, eh? Nobody but--" he checked himself. "Nobody but somebody would thought've that."
The "old Grigsby house," in front of which the runabout came to a stop after many miles of travel, was set back from the road about three hundred yards. In front of it and on either side, the trees had been cut away, but a tangle of riotous shrubbery lined the path to the door. Behind the house the trees had been left untouched, and now in its tottering condition the venerable building literally rested on two of the great elms, like an old man on crutches.
The windows were few and shuttered. The black steel blinds were dead as the eyes of a skull. The steel was not rusted and only a little weather-stained.
There were no steps to the door. It opened on the ground level, with a cracked board serving as both porch and foot mat. The signs of attempted preservation were what gave the place its ominous air. There was a menace in the steel shutters of the old Grigsby house, and in the fact that the path to the door was kept clear.
Up this path Hicks carried Pauline. Before he lifted her in his arms he tested her bonds. He did not know that Pauline was too terrified to conceive the simplest plan of action. Compared with the fear that possessed her now the torturing suspense of the balloon flight seemed like peace and safety.
Hicks held her with one arm while with the other he unlocked the low door. Swinging heavy on strong hinges, it opened into a narrow hall, mildewed with the dampness of decay, the dust of disuse. He carried Pauline up the stairs, which groaned and bent under his steps and pushed open a door. There was a broken chair, a table, a cot, a washstand, with pitcher and bowl, and a small oil lamp set in a bracket on the wail.
Hicks laid Pauline on the cot, and lighted the lamp, using the same match for a cigarette. He seemed spurred by a desire to get away as if the tottering, grimy halls held memories too grim for even his hardened soul. After testing the shutters of the window, which were locked on the outside, he stepped back to the cot and cut Pauline's bonds, and removed the bandage from her lips. As she fell back in a half swoon he hurried through the door, closed and locked it and went down the stairs.
Half way down he stopped abruptly, stood for a moment listening, then hastened on, dropping his cigarette over the banister. He did not see where it fell. He did not care. His only aim was to get out--to get away. He had heard a sound as he came down the stairs that turned his fear to terror--it was the distant grumble of an automobile horn. He locked the door and sped down the bramble-walled path to the runabout. He had left it in the middle of the road, so that as he leaped in and started again it left no swerve of its wheel ruts toward the old Grigsby house. It was five miles to the nearest town, but Hicks made it in twenty minutes, and without hearing again the threatening automobile horn. The first thing he did was to telephone to Owen.
For half an hour Owen had been locked in the library of the Marvin house. The events of the early afternoon, the failure of his best-laid plans, the suspense of waiting the result of Hicks's final move, had made him a nervous wreck. He had lighted a dozen cigars and thrown them away. As many times he had picked up the telephone only to set it down again without calling a number. At last he had taken out the thin tube of light pills, had drawn the shades, switched on the electric lights, and sat down to wait for the half-peace that morphine brought to his conscience.
As he leaned back in his chair, awaiting the effect of the drug, the mummy in its case stood in front of him. He closed his eyes in a pleasant stupor. He opened them in terror. For a moment his hands were outstretched in front of him, with claw-like fingers clutching at thin air; then he covered his eyes with them to shut from view the mummy, which stood over him, its upraised hand pointing to him the finger of accusation; its woman's eyes blazing with anger; its cold lips speaking a message that chilled his blood.
The telephone bell jangled again and again before Owen found courage to open his eyes. When he did so he clutched at the instrument, eager for the sound of a human voice.
"Hello! . . . Yes, this is Owen . . ." He glanced apprehensively over his shoulder at the mummy. Its hand was lowered and it stood motionless as before. He turned excitedly back to the telephone. "It's YOU! Hicks? . . . What news? . . . . She's at Grigsby's? What do you mean? Somebody after you? . . . Not him? . . . I give you my word there hadn't been anything on that road for two months. . . . What have you done? What! Nothing? You should have called the police from Jersey. . . . All gone to pieces? . . . Stay over there, I'll join you tonight. Yes, go back to the house and watch. . . . What? . . . All right."
Pauline, left alone, began to regain her courage. After a few moments she was able to stand up and move slowly about her prison room. She tried the door and the window shutters mechanically. She searched the room for something that might be used to batter down the door. There was nothing. She sat on the cot and tried to think.
She sprang up again, trembling. The dry, choking smell of smoke had reached her. Hicks's lighted cigarette had fallen among the wisps of old wall paper in the hall.
She ran to the door. Baffled, piteous, alone, she turned--and looked on death.
For through the cracks in the floor flashed now the golden daggers of flame in sheaths of stifling smoke. She cowered, choking, by the outer wall of the room.
The flame daggers grew into scimitars. The inner wall caught fire. There was no outlet for the suffocating smoke.
She sprang to the middle of the room and seized the broken chair. With all her might she crashed it against the door. It fell in pieces at her feet.
She picked up a leg of the chair and, running to the window, pounded upon the shutters. She screamed, and beat upon the shutters. It was the rattle and crash upon the shutters that made Harry rein in his horse before the old Grigsby house.
He saw smoke burst from the lower windows, and, battering on the locked door, he heard her screams.
"Harry! Harry!"
It was to him she called again in her peril, as she had called before --in the wreck of the yacht, in the den of Baskinelli, and even this day from the rim of the runaway balloon. Always, inspired by that call, he had found their way to safety.
He thrust the full weight of his mighty body against the door which held like solid rock.
"Harry! Harry!" came the cries again.
"I'm coming, Polly; I'm here!"
He dashed to where a heavy tree limb had fallen, carried it to the door, raised it and charged with it as a battering ram. He might as well have slapped the door with his flat palm.
He looked at the windows whence the smoke poured--smoke mingled with flame. Half crazed by the cries from above, he raised the limb to try to break the shutters. He stopped and let it fall. The toot of an automobile horn and the excited voice of young Bassett stopped him.
"What's doing?" gasped the reporter. "Is anybody in there?"
Harry pointed to the shuttered window of the upper room. The cries came again, and with the sound, of the woman's voice Bassett turned sick. He made a dizzy charge at the door, but Harry caught him back.
"All three together," he said.
They flung their strength at the portal--but still it held.
Bassett turned away, sobbing. He looked up to see Harry spring into the big car which he forced through the brambles.
"What are you doing? You're crazy!" yelled the chauffeur, running toward the machine.
"Get her--if I can't--after the smash!" was Harry's answer. The car lunged on at full speed.
The impact rocked the burning house. Frame and door crashed down together before the battering car. It plowed for half its length into the smoke and fire, stopped an instant, quivered and backed out again, splendid ruin.
On Harry's forehead a deep cut streamed.
Bassett sprang to catch him, but he climbed out unhelped. Together they leaped the shattered wall. Through searing smoke they climbed the quaking stairs and burst into the shuttered room.
The lamp still flickered dimly in its bracket.
"Pauline," called Harry, chokingly, "Pauline, answer me."
There was no answer.
On hands and knees he groped over the hot floor. He found her by the window, where she had fallen. And flames choked them as they fled.
Outside he knelt beside her, chafing her hands, when she wakened. He had turned her so that she did not see the towering glare of the flames as the old Grigsby house furnished burnt penance for its crimes. Pauline raised her arms and touched tenderly his bleeding brow. He lifted her into the car that Bassett and the driver had patched up.
"Home, James," said Bassett, with a tired grin, "but stop at a telephone somewhere and let me tell my boss that I've got a piece for the paper." _