Part 24

“She hasn't come yet,” replied Bridge, “and she may not. I don't see how a girl can browse around a town like this with a big bear at night and not be seen, and if she is seen she'll be followed--it would be too much of a treat for the rubes ever to be passed up--and if she's followed she won't come here. At least I hope she won't.”

“What's that?” exclaimed The Oskaloosa Kid. Each stood in silence, listening.

The girl shuddered. “Even now that I know what it is it makes me creep,” she whispered, as the faint clanking of a distant chain came to their ears.

“We ought to be used to it by this time, Miss Prim,” said Bridge. “We heard it all last night and a good part of to-day.”

The girl made no comment upon the use of the name which he had applied to her, and in the darkness he could not see her features, nor did he see the odd expression upon the boy's face as he heard the name addressed to her. Was he thinking of the nocturnal raid he so recently had made upon the boudoir of Miss Abigail Prim? Was he pondering the fact that his pockets bulged to the stolen belongings of that young lady? But whatever was passing in his mind he permitted none of it to pass his lips.

As the three stood waiting in silence Giova came presently among them, the beast Beppo lumbering awkwardly at her side.

“Did he find anything to eat?” asked the man.

“Oh, yes,” exclaimed Giova. “He fill up now. That mak him better nature. Beppo not so ugly now.”

“Well, I'm glad of that,” said Bridge. “I haven't been looking forward much to his company through the woods to-night--especially while he was hungry!”

Giova laughed a low, musical little laugh. “I don' think he no hurt you anyway,” she said. “Now he know you my frien'.”

“I hope you are quite correct in your surmise,” replied Bridge. “But even so I'm not taking any chances.”

*****

Willie Case had been taken to Payson to testify before the coroner's jury investigating the death of Giova's father, and with the dollar which The Oskaloosa Kid had given him in the morning burning in his pocket had proceeded to indulge in an orgy of dissipation the moment that he had been freed from the inquest. Ice cream, red pop, peanuts, candy, and soda water may have diminished his appetite but not his pride and self-satisfaction as he sat alone and by night for the first time in a public eating place. Willie was now a man of the world, a bon vivant, as he ordered ham and eggs from the pretty waitress of The Elite Restaurant on Broadway; but at heart he was not happy for never before had he realized what a great proportion of his anatomy was made up of hands and feet. As he glanced fearfully at the former, silhouetted against the white of the table cloth, he flushed scarlet, assured as he was that the waitress who had just turned away toward the kitchen with his order was convulsed with laughter and that every other eye in the establishment was glued upon him. To assume an air of nonchalance and thereby impress and disarm his critics Willie reached for a toothpick in the little glass holder near the center of the table and upset the sugar bowl. Immediately Willie snatched back the offending hand and glared ferociously at the ceiling. He could feel the roots of his hair being consumed in the heat of his skin. A quick side glance that required all his will power to consummate showed him that no one appeared to have noticed his faux pas and Willie was again slowly returning to normal when the proprietor of the restaurant came up from behind and asked him to remove his hat.

Never had Willie Case spent so frightful a half hour as that within the brilliant interior of The Elite Restaurant. Twenty-three minutes of this eternity was consumed in waiting for his order to be served and seven minutes in disposing of the meal and paying his check. Willie's method of eating was in itself a sermon on efficiency--there was no lost motion--no waste of time. He placed his mouth within two inches of his plate after cutting his ham and eggs into pieces of a size that would permit each mouthful to enter without wedging; then he mixed his mashed potatoes in with the result and working his knife and fork alternately with bewildering rapidity shot a continuous stream of food into his gaping maw.

In addition to the meat and potatoes there was one vegetable in a side-dish and as dessert four prunes. The meat course gone Willie placed the vegetable dish on the empty plate, seized a spoon in lieu of knife and fork and--presto! the side-dish was empty. Whereupon the prune dish was set in the empty side-dish--four deft motions and there were no prunes--in the dish. The entire feat had been accomplished in 6:34 1/2, setting a new world's record for red-headed farmer boys with one splay foot.

In the remaining twenty five and one half seconds Willie walked what seemed to him a mile from his seat to the cashier's desk and at the last instant bumped into a waitress with a trayful of dishes. Clutched tightly in Willie's hand was thirty five cents and his check with a like amount written upon it. Amid the crash of crockery which followed the collision Willie slammed check and money upon the cashier's desk and fled. Nor did he pause until in the reassuring seclusion of a dark side street. There Willie sank upon the curb alternately cold with fear and hot with shame, weak and panting, and into his heart entered the iron of class hatred, searing it to the core.

Fortunately for youth it recuperates rapidly from mortal blows, and so it was that another half hour found Willie wandering up and down Broadway but at the far end of the street from The Elite Restaurant. A motion picture theater arrested his attention; and presently, parting with one of his two remaining dimes, he entered. The feature of the bill was a detective melodrama. Nothing in the world could have better suited Willie's psychic needs. It recalled his earlier feats of the day, in which he took pardonable pride, and raised him once again to a self-confidence he had not felt since he entered the ever to be hated Elite Restaurant.

The show over Willie set forth afoot for home. A long walk lay ahead of him. This in itself was bad enough; but what lay at the end of the long walk was infinitely worse, as Willie's father had warned him to return immediately after the inquest, in time for milking, preferably. Before he had gone two blocks from the theater Willie had concocted at least three tales to account for his tardiness, either one of which would have done credit to the imaginative powers of a Rider Haggard or a Jules Verne; but at the end of the third block he caught a glimpse of something which drove all thoughts of home from his mind and came but barely short of driving his mind out too. He was approaching the entrance to an alley. Old trees grew in the parkway at his side. At the street corner a half block away a high flung arc swung gently from its supporting cables, casting a fair light upon the alley's mouth, and just emerging from behind the nearer fence Willie Case saw the huge bulk of a bear. Terrified, Willie jumped behind a tree; and then, fearful lest the animal might have caught sight or scent of him he poked his head cautiously around the side of the bole just in time to see the figure of a girl come out of the alley behind the bear. Willie recognized her at the first glance--she was the very girl he had seen burying the dead man in the Squibbs woods. Instantly Willie Case was transformed again into the shrewd and death defying sleuth. At a safe distance he followed the girl and the bear through one alley after another until they came out upon the road which leads south from Payson. He was across the road when she joined Bridge and his companions. When they turned toward the old mill he followed them, listening close to the rotting clapboards for any chance remark which might indicate their future plans. He heard them debating the wisdom of remaining where they were for the night or moving on to another location which they had evidently decided upon but no clew to which they dropped.

“The objection to remaining here,” said Bridge, “is that we can't make a fire to cook by--it would be too plainly visible from the road.”

“But I can no fin' road by dark,” explained Giova. “It bad road by day, ver' much worse by night. Beppo no come 'cross swamp by night. No, we got stay here til morning.”

“All right,” replied Bridge, “we can eat some of this canned stuff and have our ham and coffee after we reach camp tomorrow morning, eh?”

“And now that we've gotten through Payson safely,” suggested The Oskaloosa Kid, “let's change back into our own clothes. This disguise makes me feel too conspicuous.”

Willie Case had heard enough. His quarry would remain where it was over night, and a moment later Willie was racing toward Payson and a telephone as fast as his legs would carry him.

In an old brick structure a hundred yards below the mill where the lighting machinery of Payson had been installed before the days of the great central power plant a hundred miles away four men were smoking as they lay stretched upon the floor.

“I tell you I seen him,” asserted one of the party. “I follered this Bridge guy from town to the mill. He was got up like a Gyp; but I knew him all right, all right. This scenery of his made me tink there was something phoney doin', or I wouldn't have trailed him, an' its a good ting I done it, fer he hadn't ben there five minutes before along comes The Kid an' a skirt and pretty soon a nudder chicken wid a calf on a string, er mebbie it was a sheep--it was pretty husky lookin' fer a sheep though. An' I sticks aroun' a minute until I hears this here Bridge guy call the first skirt 'Miss Prim.'”

He ceased speaking to note the effect of his words on his hearers. They were electrical. The Sky Pilot sat up straight and slapped his thigh. Soup Face opened his mouth, letting his pipe fall out into his lap, setting fire to his ragged trousers. Dirty Eddie voiced a characteristic obscenity.

“So you sees,” went on Columbus Blackie, “we got a chanct to get both the dame and The Kid. Two of us can take her to Oakdale an' claim the reward her old man's offerin' an' de odder two can frisk de Kid, an'--an'--.”

“An' wot?” queried The Sky Pilot.