CHAPTER XVI
STOP, THIEF!
I was pretty nervous when I took charge of the news stand that evening.
Amanda King had an appointment with the dentist and had left everything
topsyturvey. I was still straightening up when people began to come down
to dinner.
Miss Cobb walked over to the news stand, and she'd cut the white yoke
out of her purple silk. She looked very dressy, although somewhat thin.
"Everybody has dressed for dinner to-night, Minnie," she informed me.
"We didn't want Mr. von Inwald to have a wrong idea of American society,
especially after Mr. Carter's ridiculous conduct this afternoon, and
I wonder if you'll be sweet enough to start the phonograph in the
orchestra gallery as we go in—something with dignity, you know—the
wedding march, or the overture from Aida."
"Aida's cracked," I said shortly, "and as far as I'm concerned, Mr.
von Inwald can walk in to his meals without music, or starve to death
waiting for the band."
But she got the phonograph, anyhow, and put the elevator boy in the
gallery with it. She picked out some things by Caruso and Tetrazzini
and piled them on a chair, but James had things to himself up there, and
played The Spring Chicken through three times during dinner, with Miss
Cobb glaring at the gallery until the back of her neck ached, and the
dining-room girls waltzing in with the dishes and polka-ing out.
Mr. Moody came out when dinner was over in a fearful rage and made for
the news stand.
"One of your ideas, I suppose," he asserted. "What sort of a night am
I going to have after chewing my food to rag-time, with my jaws doing a
skirt-dance? Why in heaven's name couldn't you have had something slow,
like Handel's Largo, if you've got to have music?"
But dinner was over fifteen minutes sooner than usual. James cake-walked
everybody out to My Ann Elizer, and Miss Cobb was mortified to death.
Two or three things happened that night. For one, I got a good look at
Miss Julia Summers. She was light-haired and well-fleshed, with an ugly
face but a pleasant smile. She wore a low-necked dress that made Miss
Cobb's with the yoke out look like a storm collar, and if she had a
broken heart she didn't show it.
"Hello," she cried, looking at my hair, "are you selling tobacco here or
are you the cigar-lighter?"
"Neither," I answered, looking over her head. "I am employed as the
extinguisher of gay guests."
"Good," she said, smiling. "I'm something fine at that myself. Suppose
I stay here and help. If I watch that line of knitting women I'll be
crotcheting Arabella's wool in my sleep to-night."
Well, she was too cheerful to be angry with. So she stayed around for a
while, and it was amazing how much tobacco I sold that evening. Men who
usually bought tobies bought the best cigars, and when Mr. Jennings came
up, scowling, and I handed him the brand he'd smoked for years, she took
one, clipped the end of it as neat as a finger nail and gave it to him,
holding up the lighter.
"I'm not going to smoke yet, young woman," he said, glaring at her. But
she only smiled.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I've been waiting hungrily until some
discriminating smoker would buy one of those and light it. I love the
aroma."
And he stood there for thirty minutes, standing mostly on one foot on
account of the gouty one, puffing like a locomotive, with her sniffing
at the aroma and telling him how lonely she felt with no friends around
and just recovering from a severe illness.
At eight o'clock he had Mrs. Hutchins bring him his fur-lined coat and
he and Miss Julia took Arabella, the dog, for a walk on the veranda!
The rest of the evening was quiet, and I needed it. Miss Patty and Mr.
von Inwald talked by the fire and I think he told her something—not
all—of the scene in the spring-house. For she passed Mr. Pierce at the
foot of the stairs on her way up for the night and she pretended not to
see him. He stood there looking up after her with his mouth set, and at
the turn she glanced down and caught his eye. I thought she flushed,
but I wasn't sure, and at that minute Senator Biggs bought three
twenty-five-cent cigars and told me to keep the change from a dollar.
I was so surprised at the alteration in him that I forgot Miss Patty
entirely.
About twelve o'clock, just after I went to my room, somebody knocked at
the door. When I opened, the new doctor was standing in the hall.
"I'm sorry to disturb you," he said, "but nobody seems to know where the
pharmacy clerk is and I'll have to get some medicine."
"If I'd had my way, we'd have had a bell on that pharmacy clerk long
ago," I snapped, getting my keys. "Who's sick?"
"The big man," he replied. "Biggs is his name, I think, a senator or
something."
I was leading the way to the stairs, but I stopped. "I might have known
it," I said. "He hasn't been natural all evening. What's the matter with
him? Too much fast?"
"Fast!" He laughed. "Too much feast! He's got as pretty a case of
indigestion as I've seen for some time. He's giving a demonstration
that's almost theatrical."
Well, he insisted it was indigestion, although I argued that it wasn't
possible, and he wanted ipecac.
"I haven't seen a pharmacopoeia for so long that I wouldn't know one if
I met it," he declared, "but I've got a system of mnemonics that never
fails. Ipecac and colic both end with 'c'—I'll never forget that
conjunction. It was pounded in and poured in in my early youth."
Well, the pharmacy was locked, and we couldn't find a key to fit it. And
when I suggested mustard and warm water he jumped at the idea.
"Fine!" he said. "Better let me dish out the spring-water and you take
my job! Lead on, MacDuff, to the kitchen."
Although it was only midnight there was not a soul about. A hall leads
back of the office to the kitchen and pantries, and there was a low
light there, but the rest was dark. We bumped through the diet kitchen
and into the scullery, when we found we had no matches. I went back for
some, and when I got as far as the diet kitchen again Doctor Barnes was
there, just inside the door.
"Sh!" he whispered. "Come into the scullery. The kitchen is dark, but
there is somebody in there, fumbling around, striking matches. I suppose
you don't have such things as burglars in this neck of the woods?"
Well, somebody had broken into Timmons' candy store a week before and
stolen a box of chewing-gum and a hundred post-cards, and I told him so
in a whisper.
"Anyhow, it isn't the chef," I said. "He's had a row with the bath man
and is in bed with a cut hand and a black eye, and nobody else has any
business here."
We tiptoed into the scullery in the dark: just then somebody knocked
a kettle down in the kitchen and it hit the stove below with a crash.
Whoever was there swore, and it was not Francois, who expresses his
feelings mostly in French. This was English.
There's a little window from the kitchen into the scullery as well as
a door. The window had a wooden slide and it was open an inch or so. We
couldn't see anything, but we could hear a man moving around. Once he
struck a match, but it went out and he said "Damn!" again, and began to
feel his way toward the scullery.
Doctor Barnes happened to touch my hand and he patted it as if to tell
me not to be frightened. Then he crept toward the scullery door and
waited there.
It swung open slowly, but he waited until it closed again and the man
was in the room. Then he yelled and jumped and there was the sound of
a fall. I could hardly strike the match—I was trembling so—but when I
did there was Mr. Dick lying flat on the floor and the doctor sitting on
him.
"Mister Dick!" I gasped, and dropped the match.
"Something hit me!" Mr. Dick said feebly, and when I had got a candle
lighted and had explained to Doctor Barnes that it was a mistake, he
got off him and let him up. He was as bewildered as Mr. Dick and pretty
nearly as mad.
We put him—Mr. Dick—in a chair and gave him a glass of water, and
after he had got his breath—the doctor being a heavy man—he said he
was trying to find something to eat.
"Confound it, Minnie," he exclaimed, "we're starving! It seems to me
there are enough of you here at least to see that we are fed. Not a bite
since lunch!"
"But I thought you had the basket," I explained. "I left it at the
spring-house, and when I went back it was gone."
"So that was it!" he answered. And then he explained that just about the
time they expected their supper they saw a man carry a basket stealthily
through the snow to the deer park. It was twilight, but they watched him
from the window, and he put the basket through the barbed-wire fence and
then crawled after it. Just inside he sat down on a log and, opening
the basket, began to eat. He was still there when it got too dark to see
him.
"If that was our dinner," he finished savagely, "I hope he choked to
death over it."
Doctor Barnes chuckled. "He didn't," he said, "but he's got the worst
case of indigestion in seven counties."
Well, I got the mustard and water ready with Mr. Dick standing by hoping
Mr. Biggs would die before he got it, and then I filled a basket for the
shelter-house. I put out the light and he took the basket and started
out, but he came back in a hurry.
"There's somebody outside talking," he said. I went to the door with him
and listened.
"The sooner the better," Mike was saying. "I'm no good while I've got it
on my mind."
And Mr. Thoburn: "To-morrow is too soon: they're not in the mood yet.
Perhaps the day after. I'll let you know."
I didn't get to sleep until almost morning, and then it was to dream
that Mr. Pierce was shouting "Hypocrites" to all the people in the
sanatorium and threatening to throw glasses of mustard and warm water at
them. |
