She heard nothing. What had happened?--the child had paused. Had she heard? Lucile"s first impulse was to snap on a light. She hesitated and in hesitating lost.
There came a sudden glare of light. A child"s face was framed in it, a puzzled, frightened face. A slender hand went out and up. A book came down. The light went out. And all this happened with such incredible speed that Lucile stood glued to her tracks through it all.
She leaped toward the dummy elevator, only to hear the faint click which told that it was descending. She could not stop it. The child was gone.
She dashed to a window which was on the elevated station side. A few seconds of waiting and the lightning rewarded her. In the midst of a blinding flash, she caught sight of a tiny figure crossing a broad stretch of rain-soaked green.
The next instant, with rubbers in one hand and ulster in the other, she dashed down the stairs.
"I"ll get her yet," she breathed. "She belongs down town. She"ll take the elevated. There is a car in seven minutes. I"ll make it, too. Then we shall see."
CHAPTER III THE GARGOYLE
Down a long stretch of sidewalk, across a sunken patch of green where the water was to her ankles, down a rain-drenched street, through pools of black water where sewers were choked, Lucile dashed. With no thought for health or safety she exposed herself to the blinding tempest and dashed before skidding autos, to arrive at last panting at the foot of the rusted iron stairs that led to the elevated railway platform.
Pausing only long enough to catch her breath and arrange her garments that the child might not be frightened away by her appearance, she hurried up the stairs. The train came thundering in. There was just time to thrust a dime through the wicker window and to bound for the door.
Catching a fleeting glimpse of the dripping figure of the child, she made a dash for that car and made it. A moment later, with her ulster thrown over on the seat beside her, she found herself facing the child.
Sitting there curled up in a corner, as she now was, hugging a bulky package wrapped in oilcloth, the child seemed older and tinier than ever.
"How could she do it?" was Lucile"s unspoken question as she watched the water oozing from her shoes to drip-drip to the floor below. With the question came a blind resolve to see the thing through to the end. This child was not the real culprit. Cost what it might, she would find who was behind her strange actions.
There is no place in all the world where a thunderstorm seems more terrible than in the deserted streets in the heart of a great city at night. Echoing and re-echoing between the towering walls of buildings, the thunder seems to be speaking to the universe. Flashing from a thousand windows to ten thousand others, the lightning seems to be searching the haunts and homes of men. The whole wild fury of it seems but the voice of nature defying man in his great stronghold, the city. It is as if in thundering tones she would tell him that great as he may imagine himself, he is not a law unto himself and can never be.
Into the heart of a great city on a night like this the elevated train carried Lucile and the child.
On the face of the child, thief as she undoubtedly was, and with the stolen goods in her possession, there flashed not one tremor, not a falling of an eyelash, which might be thought of as a sign of fear of laws of nature, man or G.o.d. Was she hardened or completely innocent of guilt? Who at that moment could tell?
It would be hard to imagine a more desolate spot than that in which the car discharged its two pa.s.sengers. As Lucile"s eye saw the sea of dreary, water-soaked tenements and tumbledown cottages that, like cattle left out in the storm, hovered beside the elevated tracks, she shivered and was tempted to turn back--yet she went on.
A half block from the station she pa.s.sed a policeman. Again she hesitated. The child was but a half block before her. She suspected nothing. It would be so easy to say to the policeman, "Stop that child.
She is a thief. She has stolen property concealed beneath her cape." The law would then take its course and Lucile"s hands would be free.
Yet something urged her past the policeman, down a narrow street, round a corner, up a second street, down a third, still narrower, and up to the door of the smallest, shabbiest cottage of the whole tumble-down lot.
The child had entered here. Lucile paused to consider and, while considering, caught the gleam of light through a torn window shade. The cottage was one story and a garret. The window was within her range of vision. After a glance from left to right, she stepped beneath the porch, which gave her an opportunity to peer through the opening. Here, deep in the shadows, she might look on at the scene within without herself being observed by those within or by pa.s.sers-by on the street.
The picture which came to her through the hole in the shade was so different from that which one might expect that she barely suppressed a gasp. In the room, which was scrupulously clean and tidy, there were but two persons, the child and the old man who had visited the library.
Through the grate of a small stove a fire gleamed. Before this fire, all unabashed, the child stripped the water-soaked clothing from her meager body, then stood chafing her limbs, which were purple with cold.
The old man appeared all absorbed in his inspection of the book just placed in his hands. Lucile was not surprised to recognize it as the second Shakespeare. From turning it over and over, he paused to open it and peer at its inside cover. Not satisfied with this, he ran his finger over the upper, outside corner.
It was then that Lucile saw for the first time the thing she had felt while in the library in the dark. A small square of paper, yellow with age, was in that corner, and in its center was a picture of a gargoyle. A strange looking creation was this gargoyle. It was with such as these the ancients were wont to decorate their mansions. With a savage face that was half man and half lion, he possessed the paws of a beast and the wings of a great bird. About two sides of this picture was a letter L.
"So that was it," she breathed.
The next moment her attention was attracted by a set of shelves. These ran across one entire end of the room and, save for a single foot of s.p.a.ce, were entirely filled with books. The striking fact to be noted was that, if one were able to judge from the appearance of their books, they must all of them be of great age.
"A miser of books," she breathed.
Searching these shelves, she felt sure she located the other missing volume of Shakespeare. This decision was confirmed at last as the tottering old man made his way to the shelf and filled some two inches of the remaining vacant shelf-s.p.a.ce by placing the newly-acquired book beside its mate.
After this he stood there for a moment looking at the two books. The expression on his face was startling. In the twinkling of an eye, it appeared to prove her charge of book miser to be false. This was not the look of a Shylock.
"More like a father glorying over the return of a long-lost child," she told herself.
As she stood there puzzling over this, the room went suddenly dark. The occupants of the house had doubtless gone to another part of the cottage to retire for the night. She was left with two alternatives: to call a policeman and have the place raided or to return quietly to the university and think the thing through. She chose the latter course.
After discovering the number of the house and fixing certain landmarks in her mind, she returned to the elevated station.
"They"ll not dispose of the books, that"s certain," she told herself.
"The course to be taken in the future will come to me."
Stealing silently into her room on her return, she was surprised to find her roommate awake, robed in a kimono and pacing the floor.
"Why, Florence!" she breathed.
"Why, yourself!" Florence turned upon her. "Where"ve you been in all this storm? Five minutes more and I should have called the matron. She would have notified the police and then things would have been fine. Grand! Can you see it in the morning papers? "Beautiful co-ed mysteriously disappears from university dormitory in storm. No trace of her yet found.
Roommate says no cause for suicide.""
"Oh!" gasped Lucile, "you wouldn"t have!"
"What else could I do? How was I to know what had happened? You hadn"t breathed a word. You--"
Florence sat down upon her bed, dug her bare toes into the rug and stared at her roommate. For once in her life, strong, dependable, imperturbable Florence was excited.
"I know," said Lucile, removing her watersoaked dress and stockings and chafing her benumbed feet. "I--I guess I should have told you about it, but it was something I was quite sure you wouldn"t understand, so I didn"t, that"s all. But now--now I"ve got to tell someone or I"ll burst, and I"d rather tell you than anyone else I know."
"Thanks," Florence smiled. "Just for that I"ll help you into dry clothes, then you can tell me in comfort."
The clock struck three and the girls were still deep in the discussion of the mystery.
"One thing is important," said Florence. "That is the value of the Shakespeare. Perhaps it"s not worth so terribly much after all."
"Perhaps not," Lucile wrinkled her brow, "but I am awfully afraid it is.
Let"s see--who could tell me? Oh, I know--Frank Morrow!"
"Who"s Frank Morrow?"
"He"s the best authority on old books there is in the United States to-day. He"s right here in this city. Got a cute little shop on the fifteenth floor of the Marshal Annex building. He"s an old friend of my father. He"ll tell me anything I need to know about books."
"All right, you"d better see him to-morrow, or I mean to-day. And now for three winks."
Florence threw off her kimono and leaped into bed. Lucile followed her example and the next instant the room was dark.