Chapter XVIII

Barry Lincoln was helping Sam Fitch to build a fence for his chicken run. The Fitch place stood up and back from the street on a slight elevation among a grove of light maples. The chicken run was higher up the hill to one side and commanded a wide view of the road winding round to the bridge, and over into the woods. It was the last house on the street as you went toward Frogtown from the south end of Silver Sands.

Barry had just pounded his thumb trying to straighten a refractory nail, and had thrown down the hammer and stuck the soiled thumb in his mouth when the flash of a scarlet hat, and the flutter of scarlet tulle came into sight down the road. For an instant he stared in astonishment for such a sight was not native to Silver Sands and Barry knew everybody that lived there, by sight at least. Then something familiar in the swagger of the plump figure struck him and he drew his brows in a frown and turned a quick look at Sam.

Sam was down on his hands and knees with his back to the street nailing wire to the base. He would not be likely to see her. Barry stooped and picked up his hammer, and began a tremendous pounding on the corner post, straightening another nail, his weather eye to the road, unheeding the blood which was streaming from his bruised thumb.

At just the right instant as Athalie passed behind the group of tall cedars and was for a few seconds lost to view, he threw down his hammer with an exclamation, and called to Sam in an imperative voice:

“Oh, I say, Sam, run to the house quick and get me a rag to do up this blamed thing. It’s bleedin’ like the deuce!”

Sam accustomed to obey Barry, his baseball idol, dropped his own hammer instantly and with a sympathetic glance toward his wounded companion steamed toward the house without delay. When he returned with the required rag and a bottle of arnica Athalie was well across the bridge.

A tumult of thoughts was running through Barry’s brain, foremost among them the telephone conversation he had overheard the day before. Vaguely in the background the sudden flash of coral and silver draperies and little shiny slippers, the tempest of words he had heard in the Silver hall the evening before, with the stormy sobs, lasting long after the music had begun. How much responsibility had he, Barry Lincoln, for this strange fat specimen of womanhood who wore pants and made appointments over the telephone to meet men from the city agreeing to stay till all hours of the night? Barry Lincoln’s code was a simple one, but it had an old-fashioned twist to its ideas of womanhood. His mother was a sweet faced, sad-eyed little widow who wore plain black dresses and did her hair smoothly except for the satiny crinkle of it around the edges of her forehead. She had given him the habit of a clean mind in the midst of a wicked and perverse world, and he somehow patterned his ideas of Girl and what she should be on a picture of his mother taken just before she was married, when the light of joy was in her face and her eyes were like reflections of the kingdom of heaven. Barry knew a whole lot more about the world than his mother had ever told him, but he had kept his clean habit of mind, and any deviation from it on the part of a woman, especially a young woman, gave him always a feeling of nausea. However, this was something no one would ever have guessed. Barry was one who told not his thoughts among men.

So, now, when he saw this poor little daughter of Eve taking her way toward the path of temptation he was not interested. But the memory of a haunted look in her father’s eyes the night before and the good comradeship he had offered on the evening of the fire, together with the lingering fragrance of cookies imbibed now laid upon Barry’s conscience a duty toward his fellowman. If this girl was really going on an unlawful holiday which might bring pain and shame to his friend, ought he not in all loyalty to that friend to do something about it?

Out of the tail of his eye he watched the scarlet flash as it followed along the line of the road, crossed the bridge, left the road and crept up the hill toward the woods. He sat down on the doorstep and kept Sam’s back to the hillside until the scarlet hat and the dark cloak disappeared into the woods, and only glimmered unnoticeably among the young leaves as it went farther and farther away from the road. At last his mind was made up.

“Doggone it, Sam, now that hand’s goin’ to be no good today. Wha’d I have to pound that for? Clumsy! Say, Sam, les finish this t’morra. What’d’ya say we take a day off and go see if we can find Beazley? He ought to be back home from his aunt’s by this time and it isn’t much of a run over to the Corners. Say, you go get the roadster and run her over to the Pike, an’ I’ll skip across to the creek where I was yesterday morning and see if I can find my knife. I’ll meet you up by the old camp entrance in about fifteen minutes. But if it’s half an hour or longer you stick, for I’ll be there! Beat it now, and don’t talk, Sam. Remember to keep yer mouth shut!”

Sam hurried away with a light of eagerness in his eyes and Barry arose and took long strides across the fields toward a spot in the landscape a quarter of a mile to the north of where Athalie had entered the woods. As he disappeared among the undergrowth he cast a speculative eye to the distant road, but no one was to be seen as yet.

Now the “roadster” above-mentioned was as much a part of Barry Lincoln’s existence as his dog or his fishing rod or anything but his mother. It was called the “roadster” by courtesy because it could get over the road so rapidly, but there was nothing about it that would have suggested that name in the modern acceptation of the term. It was ancient and worn and stripped of everything that it could be stripped of and be. It consisted merely of its throbbing loyal heart, its four wheels, and enough timber and metal to keep them from flying apart when they went catapulting through space. However Barry and whomever he elected to take with him as a companion managed to stick on and always come home alive was a continual wonder in Silver Sands. People told Mrs. Lincoln that they didn’t see how she stood it having her son go off in that awful thing, that it wasn’t safe and it wasn’t Christian, and he always looked as if he was going to destruction and was glad of it, that they should think it would affect his morality, a boy like that to own an infernal machine. He was in daily danger of becoming a murderer!

And besides, how could they _afford_ to keep it!

When they twisted on that prying look and said that about affording—it was usually the people for whom she did plain sewing that said that—Barry’s mother always crinkled up her lips into a smile that let little gold lights into her brown eyes and made her look like Barry, and answered always quite pleasantly:

“Oh, the old roadster is one of the family. We couldn’t live without that. Barry never has killed anybody yet. I hope he never will.” And she never even reminded them how he had saved a girl’s life once with it, running after a machine that had got out of her control, nor how he rushed Tad Moffat to the hospital in the city in time to save his hand, the time he got it caught in the reaper.

But if you had asked the boys of the town about the old roadster they would have told you that Barry made it “out of pieces of nothin’ off the junk heap behind the garage” and that its chief characteristic was that it could “go like the devil.”

It was this same go-devil that Sam climbed into, as it stood waiting under its oilcloth lean-to beside the Lincoln cottage, and presently shot out of the yard and around the Creek road toward the Pike, a proud lad that Barry had selected him to run his car.

Barry himself had rustled across the creek by a route well known to himself, and stolen up to a favorite rendezvous of his own near an old tree under which he often sat by the hour fishing, looking down from his perch on a rock into the limpid stream below, or swinging up in the trusty branches above, from limb to limb till he reached a point where all the woods was an open book and himself enveloped in foliage.

It was to this point of vantage that he now hastened, silently, stealthily, as only such as he knew how to go. The tree was the tallest in all the region round about. Looking east from its height he could see the Flats of Frogtown with the gleaming water and Silver Sands shining in the late afternoon sun. Between him and the Flats wound the smooth white ribbon of a road, and far as he could see a black speck sped like a spider down its thread. He watched it an instant and then his eyes scanned the hillside below him, down through the trees. Yes, there was a gleam of scarlet. Her hat. She had thrown it on the ground and was sitting on the log. Her scarlet frock was spread about her radiantly like a splash of vermilion in the spring newness of green. She seemed like some great scarlet tanager waiting for its mate. Yet when she lifted her face to look up at the strangeness of her surroundings, her bare neck and arms, her painted lips and pencilled brows, the white, white whiteness of her face seemed out of place there in the holy quiet of nature’s temple, a parody on a living soul, stark and shameless in a setting of God’s things as they are. Something of this thought perhaps entered the boy’s mind as he saw her first, half startled to realize how near he was to her trysting place, half tempted to slide quietly down and slip away before she discovered him.

Yet her waiting, listening attitude held him. She was evidently expecting someone. If the guy she had phoned up should turn out to be an all-right fellow, why then he would just make a quiet getaway and join Sam, and no one the wiser. If, on the other hand, he should turn out to be one of these fresh rotters from the city he could let him know where to get off and see that no harm came to that silly little simp down there, just for the sake of her father who was a good old scout.

Presently Barry turned his eyes westward and noted the “roadster” darting along like a small black bug as if it had the speed of a thousand-legger. He watched it to the Pike, and knew when it passed behind the old red barn that Sam would be waiting there for him should it be ten minutes hence or ten hours. Then he glanced to the south and saw the other car, coming at full speed down toward the bridge. Now, if he was right this would be his city man. There were two other cars coming, Eli Ward’s old gray limousine that he bought for two hundred and fifty dollars and fixed up himself, and the grocery delivery, speeding recklessly back from the afternoon rounds. But this was a strange car he saw at a glance, and presently it came to a halt, just below the group of chestnut trees, and a head came out and looked around. The car jerked on a few feet farther and the man got out, looking around him uncertainly. He measured the distance from the bridge with his eye and began an ascent at random, looking this way and that, furtively. As he came on there were places where the branches were thin and his face was in full view. Barry studied him curiously. He was tall and thick set, with a heavy jowl and a tiny black moustache over his full red lips. He had taken off his hat and was mopping his face. The climb seemed to be hard on him. As he looked up once the boy was astonished to see that he was not young and that there were bags under his eyes, puffy places that belonged to a high liver.

“He’s old enough to be her grandfather!” thought Barry disgustedly, “what a doggone little fool!”

Athalie arose and poised on the log with outspread arms, and the man cautiously approached, a hungry bestial glint in his eye that the boy in the tree resented.

“He’s rotten!” said the boy to himself. “Gosh! what’ll I do about this? Her father oughtta keep her in! Gee!”

The man was upbraiding Athalie for coming in such a noticeable dress. “Are you sure nobody saw you come?” he asked her in a surly tone smoothing the plumpness of her bare arms with his well groomed hand as he talked. “It won’t do to have your dad get onto us,” he added, “you’ve got to be careful you know.”

Athalie pouted, and the man talked to her in a low rumble. Barry could not hear many words. He wished he were well out of that tree and back making a chicken run. He wished he had never gone to that fire in Frogtown nor met the new Silver man, nor taken his old worms to him. Heck! What a mess! What did folks want to be fools for?

The word “divorce” floated up once, and then something about the state line. He heard Athalie protest that she must go home and get on a white dress, but the man insisted that he could not wait, it was now or never. What on earth did it all mean? The state line was miles to the south. Premonition filled his breast. That man certainly was a rotter. He wished he could get down and punch his head, but it didn’t seem to be advisable at the moment. He didn’t know enough about things to interfere. Maybe the man was just wanting to take her back to her mother. Her mother was divorced from her father. _Sure_, that was it. Some conspiracy to get her away to her mother again. Well, why worry? Wouldn’t that be a good thing for Mr. Greeves? From all he had heard the night before, and all the gossip that had been going around the town that day, he would not expect his new friend to be deeply grieved at his daughter’s disappearance. And yet—he didn’t like that man’s face! Of course he might be her uncle or something come after her. But anyhow, he didn’t like the way the man felt of her wrist. It wasn’t nice. Gosh, she was just a kid! Just a foolish little kid. She was too fat of course. She’d been eating too much candy and soda water. If she’d only get into condition, and take a little training she’d be all right. Gosh! He’d like to punch that man’s head even if he _was_ her uncle!

While he was thinking these things the two below him suddenly got up and began to move down toward the road. The man made the girl put on her cloak and turn the white fur inside out of sight. He made her hold up her scarlet dress so it wouldn’t show below the black, and tuck her red hat under the cloak, and then he pointed down the road to where a clump of bushes were embowered with wild honeysuckle, close to the roadside making a complete refuge, and the girl hurried off and crept under it. The man waited, hidden in the grove till the bread wagon passed by, and then went down to where he had parked his car.

A few rods up the hill in a shelter of laurel bushes a tramp looked out with greedy eyes like an old bird of prey and watched the girl.

Barry waited only long enough to see the man turn about, drive to the honeysuckle harbor and stop. Then he began quickly to slide down the tree. As he reached the ground he heard the purr of the engine starting again, and his feet hardly touched the sod as he sprang away along the ridge above the creek to where a log spanned the water, across like a bird in flight, and up the opposite bank he ran. Now this field, and the roadster waited for him.

“Over!” he shouted to Sam as he came panting up the hill and vaulted the fence, “we gotta hurry! Took me longer’n I expected.”

“Got’cher knife?” queried Sam as he moved over and gave Barry the wheel.

“Yep,” said Barry pulling his knife out of his pocket for a brief glimpse and started his engine.

“Say, which way you going, Blink? You don’t wantta turn round. I turned here a purpose. You said you were going after Beazley.”

“That’s all right, Sam. We gotta make the state line now before another guy gets there. You sit tight.”

Sam perceived that Blink had had one of his inspirations. This was an expedition! He settled his lank length on the airy structure of his seat and prepared to enjoy himself. Sam had pale blue eyes under golden lashes, carroty straight hair that stuck up like bristles, a gaunt mouth, and was peppered with freckles. He remembered contentedly that his mother was making apple dumplings for supper when he went in for the arnica. He glanced at Blink’s hand and noticed that the rag had disappeared. A smudge of blood on the finger was all that remained of the accident.

“Have any trouble findin’ yer knife, Blink?”

“Nope.”

The roadster was going like a bullet through the air now, its four wheels scarcely seemed to travel the earth. They had rounded the top of the hill and curved down into the lower thoroughfare. Far ahead on the road another car like a speck appeared, and disappeared. Barry eyed it steadily as he shot ahead, the speck in the distance growing visibly larger mile by mile. He let the roadster out a trifle more and watched the distance grimly. Was this his man? He didn’t want to waste time.

Sam pulled his hat over his eyes and flipped up his collar with a lank hand. His teeth were chattering.

“Gee! Blink, this is—grrr-reat!” he gulped and held on tight, a trifle pale under the freckles.

Barry shot ahead silently. Was that a glint of scarlet fluttering out the side of the car, or only a budded maple branch by the road?

At last they were within hailing distance and Barry let down his speed a trifle. He didn’t want to pass before the crossroad, now half a mile ahead. Strange he saw no sign of anyone on the back seat of that car, and only one head appeared at the front. If that was his man what had he done with the girl? If it wasn’t his man it was a pity to waste any more time and lose the trail. He began to cast about in his mind where his quarry could have gone if this was not the right car and to plan for instant action in case he found out his mistake.

The car ahead did not turn off at the crossroads and three minutes later Barry shot ahead. As he passed the other car he was sure he caught a glimpse of something red like a big ball suddenly dropping down out of sight in the back seat.

“Lamp that car, Sam!” he ordered grimly.

Sam fixed his pale eye on a bit of mirror fastened in midair over the engine, but the car seemed to be coming on steadily enough.

“Watch if there’s more than one person in it.”

Sam shifted the gum between his teeth and gave himself to more concentrated effort.

“Thought I saw something move in the back seat,” he said at length. “There it went again. Mightta ben mistaken though.”

Barry thought he saw it too. He suddenly ground his brakes on and sprang off to kneel before his engine.

“Nut loose,” he explained to the astonished Sam who had been nearly precipitated to the ground by the sudden halt. He wasn’t quite sure which car Blink meant “the nut” travelled in.

Barry’s car was well into the road. A passing vehicle must turn out if it went by. Barry reclined by a wheel, apparently deeply absorbed. At the very instant however, when the other car was about to curve by him, he was as by a miracle upright on his feet in the middle of the remaining road space, with one arm raised in distress. The oncoming driver had perforce to stop or submit to being a murderer. As the man ground on his brakes and jerked to a violent stop he let out an ugly oath, but Barry unconcerned asked nonchalantly:

“Len’ me a wrench?”

“No!” said the man shortly, “mine’s lost! Get out of my way!”

Barry lifted his cap from his curls politely and grinned.

“Thank you!” he said with his eye on the tonneau, and stepped out of the way. The car shot ahead, but Barry had seen what he was after, a big black eye peering up over the door of the car, surmounted by a travelling robe that seemed exceedingly alive. A flash of a white arm and a dash of scarlet showed against the darkness of the tonneau as the car swept by, and Barry was satisfied. He was on the right track.

“What’s eatin’ you, Barry? The wrench’s in its place under the cushion.” Sam eyed him puzzled. It wasn’t like Barry to forget anything.

“Oh, is it?” said Barry innocently, swinging up on his minute cushion, “pile in, boy, we gotta hurry.”

Sam scrambled back into place again as the roadster leapt forward. The other car was some distance ahead now. Barry seemed to have lost interest in it. Sam couldn’t make him out. Somehow Sam never could quite make out Barry. He said so to the boys once and Ben Holden told him it was because he hadn’t any sense of humor, but that troubled Sam still more, because what did a sense of humor have to do with understanding a person who was perfectly grave and serious?

Whenever they came near a crossroad or a village, Barry speeded up. Sam kept hoping he would stop and buy something to eat. He kept remembering those apple dumplings. The sun was getting lower and lower. A dank little breath swept up from the valley, full of sleepy violets and drowsy bees humming. The birds were calling good night. Sam’s legs were long for the space allowed on the roadster. He grew uneasy.

“Say, what time do you expect to get home for supper?” he questioned, shifting a leg, and putting his hand under his knee surreptitiously to ease the stiffness.

“Don’t expect!” said Barry crisply, “if you do you might get disappointed. Hungry, Sam? Let you out on the road anywhere you say, if you like.”

“Oh, no,” said Sam detecting displeasure in his idol’s voice, “oh, no, no, I’m just enjoying this, havin’ the time of my young life. Gee, it’s great. Only I was wondering what your plans were?”

“That depends,” said Barry, and said no more. With shut lips the two whizzed through the county, watching a little black speck ahead that grew dimmer and dimmer as the light of the sun failed.

Then suddenly it seemed quite dark. The other car was only a place of blackness in the darkness, one could not be sure if it were there or only had been. There were lights ahead. They were nearing a town. The roadster reached the top of a hill leading down into the main street among dwellings. A little trolley like a toy plied to and fro with childish bells and lights. A church bell rang with a sweet wholesome call to prayer. Cottages appeared. A child under a light with a green porcelain shade looking at a book. A family in the dining room eating their supper. Pleasant thought. Dumplings, apple dumplings with plenty of goo! Ummmmm! Sam looked wistfully back.

The other car at the foot of the hill turning into the main street, stopped for an instant by the trolley. Barry made time and arrived in its immediate vicinity as it started on again. Barry slowed up. He let several cars and trucks and foot passengers get between him and the open road. Sam eyed him wonderingly. The other car had gone on. Sam hadn’t noticed it particularly.

Barry saw it slow up in front of a drug store, and immediately he ran his car down a side street by the blank side of a real estate office closed for the night, and sprang out.

“Watch me, Sam! keep yer eyes peeled,” he said to his astonished vassal. “If I don’t come back soon you folla. I gotta get that car and its contents back to Silver Sands t’night! See? But mind you keep yer mouth shut.”

He was gone in the darkness, and Sam, whirling dazedly round on his unsteady seat saw him vanishing round the car that was parked in front of the drug store. An instant more and he heard the door on the driving side slam and the engine begin to purr.

“By gosh!” said Sam and unfolded himself to his full height on the curb stone. “He’s a nut if there ever was one,” said Sam to the roadster aloud.

The other car was moving! It was passing out of sight! Blink was nowhere to be seen. Sam must move too if he were not to lose him. Sam clambered to his task with sudden panic and threw in the clutch.

“By gosh!” he ejaculated, but the roadster was already going so fast that his words fell backward on the real estate curb unheard in the darkness. Sam had already assumed his new importance. Apple dumplings were forgotten for the time. He had to get that roadster home or he’d hear about it all the rest of his mortal days. Besides he knew his mother would keep plenty of dumplings warm for him on the back of the stove against his coming.

He made out to see a dim outline of a car in the darkness ahead and followed, being mildly aware of an excited man on the pavement behind him shouting and waving his arms.