The Incendiary: A Story of Mystery

by William Augustine Leahy

  CHAPTER XV.

  A TRIP TO HILLSBOROUGH.

  The life of Emily Barlow during this balmy month of summer might bedescribed as an oscillation in criss-cross between her home and thestudio in one direction, and Shagarach's office and the state prison inthe other. For in spite of Robert's protest she had returned severaltimes to pour the sunlight of her sympathy into his cell, and theconvicts, either because the latent manhood in them went out to a bravegirl doing battle for her lover, or because Dobbs had exercised hisinfluence in her behalf, offered no repetition of their first affront.

  The point of intersection between these two much-traveled routes was acertain down-town corner, where Emily was already becoming a familiarfigure to the policeman who escorted ladies over the crossing. A moredisagreeable feature of her passage of this point was the frequentappearance there of Mr. Arthur Kennedy Foxhall. But Emily, like othergolden-haired girls, was accustomed to rude glances from men, and hadlearned to tolerate them as we accept turbid weather, muddy streets andthe other unavoidable miseries of life.

  She had been riding in the steam car fully fifteen minutes before shecould determine in what direction the hostile influence lay. It couldnot be the mere uncertainty of her journey. Even if Bertha were not withthe Arnolds at Hillsborough, it did not follow that her sweetheart waslost. At first broadly pervasive, like an approaching fog, the malignpresence had gradually begun to locate itself near her, and it was witha sudden shock, like the first splash of a long-delayed shower, that sherealized she was under observation from the passenger in front.

  He had never turned around since they had left the station. To allappearances he was buried in a magazine. There was not even a sidewiseposition to indicate that he was keeping her within the field of hisvision. Yet Emily knew that every sense of the man was alert in herdirection, and that by a sort of diffused palpation, like that of theblind, he was aware of her slightest gesture. She thought of moving backto escape the oppression, or forward into another car. But the stationplatforms on either side lay in full view of the windows, and she feltthat the relief would be only temporary. He would follow her out.

  Who was the stranger? She was certain she had never seen his round,shaven face before, yet she felt that it was some one whose fortuneswere bound in with hers, some one whom she would recognize, when hisname was uttered, as a familiar. All efforts to dispel this dim fearwere fruitless. She tried to gaze out at the skimming landscape, butsome subtle force gripped her muscles and turned her head to the front.She closed her eyes, but the image still floated before her and she knewit was there to thwart her purpose and work her lover harm.

  Fully fifty minutes of the ride had been rendered wretched to Emily bythese doubts and fears, when the conductor entered to collect thetickets for Hillsborough. The man in front seemed to jerk himself out ofhis fit of absorption. He fumbled for his oblong blue card, on whichEmily espied the lettering "Hillsborough." But the hand which deliveredit struck a numbness in her heart. It was broad and fleshy, with thefingernails which are said to betray the professional criminal, and astar worked in black ink on the protuberance between forefinger andthumb. Robert had described this peculiarity in his cell-acquaintance,Bill Dobbs. If it were he, this was a strange situation in which to findthe solitary cracksman. Perhaps it was one of his "hospital days."

  "Hillsborough! Hillsborough!" came the announcement from both ends ofthe car, followed by the usual banging of doors. Emily started for therear exit, which was the nearer. Once alighted, she walked leisurelyforward along the platform. A side glance upward revealed Bill Dobbsjust leaving his seat and passing to the rear, exactly in her footsteps.When he caught her eye he smiled. It was true. He was pursuing her. Herspirits sank, and she did not quicken her pace. The engine stoodchamping like an impatient horse beside her, for she was almost abreastof the tender.

  "All aboard!" the uniformed trainmen were crying. Emily glanced around.Bill Dobbs was just entering the station door, apparently taking no morenotice of her than of the drivers soliciting his custom. But she knewthat her least movement was under his cognizance. With a quick jump sheplaced her foot on the step, and, catching a conductor's hand, remountedthe moving train. A backward glance, as she sunk into her seat,discovered Bill Dobbs sauntering up the road.

  An interval of regret seized Emily when she reviewed her conduct calmly.Had she, indeed, escaped some unknown danger? Or was she the victim of agirl's foolish illusion? She was beginning to chide herself as a prey tosuperstition when the realities of her predicament suddenly forcedthemselves upon her by the reappearance of the conductor.

  "What is the next station, please?"

  "Elmwood."

  "How far is that?"

  "Two miles."

  Two miles. To be carried two miles beyond Hillsborough into theneighboring township! Possibly the Arnold estate lay midway between, butit was more probable that she would be footsore and spent before shereached the house where Bertha was supposed to be living. There was anextra fare to pay, a brief whirling glimpse of woodland and meadow, andthen the engine slacked up again before a cottage-like, rustic station.

  A circle of 12-year-olds desisted from their romp to watch the sweetlady approaching them.

  "Little boy, could you direct me to the Arnold mansion?" she said to theoldest.

  "Arnold mansion? Don't know any Arnolds round here."

  "They live in Hillsborough. How far is that?"

  "Oh, I know," put in a tot in tires. "That's the lady that has thegardens way over on the Hillsborough line."

  "'Bout five miles from here, isn't it, Chester?" said another.

  "Can't I get a carriage to drive me there?" Emily felt equal to fivemiles or twenty, now that she was once started, but if feasible shewould have preferred to let some four-footed creature do the walking.

  "Well," said Chester, "you see the coach is up at the academy and Iguess it won't come down till the game is over. You might get a wagon."

  "Oh, well, somebody may give me a ride. Which way does Hillsboroughlie?"

  "Follow this road straight along, till you come to the bridge. That'sthe Hillsborough line and I guess anybody over there will tell you."

  Emily thanked her guides and sped off on her long trudge. Behind her sheheard the boys' shrill chirps, mingled with the light soprano ofgirlhood, running up and down the bright gamut of pleasure. Howmelodious their joyous inflections were, compared with the harshsyllables she was accustomed to hear from the children of the pavements.How much richer and deeper this country stillness than the everlastingmurmur of the city, which makes silence only a figure of speech to thedwellers within its walls.

  But is not all silence figurative and relative, thought Emily, a merehint at some magnificent placid experience, only possible in its purityto the inhabitants of outer space? Even the countryside was not still.Plump sparrows, dusting themselves in the road, never ceased theirbrawling. The shy brown thrush swerved across her path at intervals andbubbled his song from the thickets. The meadowlark left histussock-hidden nest to greet the world proudly from the pasture rock,and far away the phoebe's plaintive utterance of his lost love's namepierced the sibilance of the trees.

  "There's a loam for you," said an old gardener, spading an oval plot ona lawn. His bulbs and potted sproutings were arranged at one side."Feel. 'Twouldn't soil a queen's hands. Dry as meal and brown as aberry. Same for two feet down."

  Emily took up a handful to please the old man. It crumbled between herfingers like the soft brown sugar which grocers display in crocks,though not, as youthful customers sometimes think, to be scooped andpaddled with by idle hands.

  "I can see roses in that, miss," said the gardener, turning up a deepspadeful for her inspection. But time was precious and she shortened thecommonplaces, breaking away toward Hillsborough.

  All that was visible of Elmwood was a cluster of cottages about thestation and a few outlying farms. A brick building crowning its highesthill was probably the academy to which her guides had referred. On b
othsides the country opened out in great reaches of level fertility, grovesof dark trees rising at intervals where the pools lay that nourishedtheir roots. Now they sprung up by the roadside and overarched her withdrooping boughs.

  Looking upward, as she walked, almost alone, Emily felt herself thecenter of a greater mystery, embracing, as it were, that in which hersweetheart was entangled. Nights of vigil had begun to overstring hernerves. That strange doubling of impressions which attacks us in suchmoods, making a kind of mirage of the mind, came over her. Everythingabout her seemed familiar, as old as her infancy, as the world itself.Elmwood! She had babbled the name in her cradle days, her earliestrambles had been through its grassy paths. Yonder silver-birch, whosedelicately scalloped foliage rose and drooped in long strings, as if thefoamy spurt of a fountain should be frozen in its fall, had it notprinted itself on her memory somewhere a thousand times before? Thethree urchins passing her from behind, surely their faces were notstrange.

  It may be Emily was right about the urchins and that there was nomirage in her recollection of them. She had been present on the morningwhen Ellen's body was found and they may have stood by her side in thecrowd.

  "I'm stiff, Whistler," said one of them in the broad drawl of the citygamin.

  "Don't expect to be limber after ridin' twenty miles on a car truck, doyer, Turkey? What place is this, anyway?"

  "I'll stump yez to come over in the swamp and get some little frogs,"said urchin number three, who was no other than our crabbed youngacquaintance, Toot Watts.

  Emily wondered, as she saw them disappear down in the meadows, whetherthey had really been her fellow-passengers all the way from the city.How dingy they were! Not a point of color except the peachy cheeks ofWhistler and the golden glow at the end of Turkey's cigarette.

  When she reached the academy playground she thought she must havecovered two miles. There was a game in progress between two baseballclubs of rival academies and the sight of sportive youths and cheeringonlookers was welcome to her after so long a spell of solitude. She wasunhappily ignorant of the rudiments of that most scientific of games."Fly" and "grounder" to her were simply undistinguishable terms of abarbaric technical jargon. But the sparkle of eager eyes and the motionof active limbs, set off by graceful costumes, was, perhaps, moreapparent to her than if appreciation of the spectacle had beenoverwhelmed by interest in the match.

  What breeding in the salute, in the very tones, when one of theoutfielders, chasing a hit out of bounds, begged pardon for jostlingagainst her ever so little. For a moment, admiring the liberal swing ofhis arm, as he made the long throw home, though the most womanly ofwomen, she envied men the bodily freedom which they deny to theirsisters. Presumably the play was successful, for its result was greetedwith plaudits, and the club afield closed in toward the plate.

  Beyond the ball ground, under a clump of willows, Emily was surprisedto come upon her three fellow-passengers once more. They must have cutthrough the meadows on the other side of the academy. The grove made ascreen completely hiding them from the playground, and there was no oneelse about. Against a rocky wall three bicycles were resting.

  "Let's take a ride, fellers," said the one who had been addressed as"Turkey."

  "Cheese it. There's somebody comin'," protested the Whistler.

  "Come on. I'm sick of this. Them fellers can't play a little bit."

  "On'y a little ride around. They'll never know," added Toot.

  Turkey boldly led the way, mounting like a veteran. Toot followedquickly, and finally the Whistler, finding himself abandoned by hiscomrades, swallowed his scruples and joined them. His was a girl'swheel, but he overtook his companions easily.

  "Boys! Stop!" Emily found herself calling out a remonstrance. All threeturned their heads at this shrill command, but it only made them speedaway more rapidly. The road was downhill here, and the pedals whirledaround like the crank-shaft of a flying locomotive. Should she turn backand give the alarm? It was a good stretch for limbs already weary andwith an unknown number of miles before them. Besides, this was probablynothing worse than a boyish prank. If only city-street boys were likecountry-academy boys, she sighed. Perhaps they would be if they all hadnatty uniforms to wear and a bicycle apiece. No doubt the gamins wouldsoon turn about, although they acted as though her outcry had frightenedthem; and the last she saw of them they were pedaling for dear lifetoward the city, twenty miles away.

  Circumstances were to be greatly altered when Emily met these youngracers again.