Instantly Bridge leaped to his feet. Without a word he tore the bed from before the door.
“What are you doing?” cried the girl in a muffled scream.
“I am going down to that woman,” said Bridge, and he drew the bolt, rusty and complaining, from its corroded seat.
“No!” screamed the girl, and seconding her the youth sprang to his feet and threw his arms about Bridge.
“Please! Please!” he cried. “Oh, please don’t leave me.”
The girl also ran to the man’s side and clutched him by the sleeve.
“Don’t go!” she begged. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t leave us here alone!”
“You heard a woman scream, didn’t you?” asked Bridge. “Do you suppose I can stay in up here when a woman may be facing death a few feet below me?”
For answer the girl but held more tightly to his arm while the youth slipped to the floor and embraced the man’s knees in a vice-like hold which he could not break without hurting his detainer.
“Come! Come!” expostulated Bridge. “Let me go.”
“Wait!” begged the girl. “Wait until you know that it is a human voice that screams through this horrible place.”
The youth only strained his hold tighter about the man’s legs. Bridge felt a soft cheek pressed to his knee; and, for some unaccountable reason, the appeal was stronger than the pleading of the girl. Slowly Bridge realized that he could not leave this defenseless youth alone even though a dozen women might be menaced by the uncanny death below. With a firm hand he shot the bolt. “Leave go of me,” he said; “I shan’t leave you unless she calls for help in articulate words.”
The boy rose and, trembling, pressed close to the man who, involuntarily, threw a protecting arm about the slim figure. The girl, too, drew nearer, while the two yeggmen rose and stood in rigid silence by the window. From below came an occasional rattle of the chain, followed after a few minutes by the now familiar clanking as the iron links scraped across the flooring. Mingled with the sound of the chain there rose to them what might have been the slow and ponderous footsteps of a heavy man, dragging painfully across the floor. For a few moments they heard it, and then all was silent.
For a dozen tense minutes the five listened; but there was no repetition of any sound from below. Suddenly the girl breathed a deep sigh, and the spell of terror was broken. Bridge felt rather than heard the youth sobbing softly against his breast, while across the room The General gave a quick, nervous laugh which he as immediately suppressed as though fearful unnecessarily of calling attention to their presence. The other vagabond fumbled with his hypodermic needle and the narcotic which would quickly give his fluttering nerves the quiet they craved.
Bridge, the boy, and the girl shivered together in their soggy clothing upon the edge of the bed, feeling now in the cold dawn the chill discomfort of which the excitement of the earlier hours of the night had rendered them unconscious. The youth coughed.
“You’ve caught cold,” said Bridge, his tone almost self-reproachful, as though he were entirely responsible for the boy’s condition. “We’re a nice aggregation of mollycoddles — five of us sitting half frozen up here with a stove on the floor below, and just because we heard a noise which we couldn’t explain and hadn’t the nerve to investigate.” He rose. “I’m going down, rustle some wood and build a fire in that stove — you two kids have got to dry those clothes of yours and get warmed up or we’ll have a couple of hospital cases on our hands.”
Once again rose a chorus of pleas and objections. Oh, wouldn’t he wait until daylight? See! the dawn was even then commencing to break. They didn’t dare go down and they begged him not to leave them up there alone.
At this Dopey Charlie spoke up. The ‘hop’ had commenced to assert its dominion over his shattered nervous system instilling within him a new courage and a feeling of utter well-being. “Go on down,” said he to Bridge. “The General an’ I’ll look after the kids — won’t we bo?”
“Sure,” assented The General; “we’ll take care of ‘em.”
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Bridge; “we’ll leave the kids up here and we three’ll go down. They won’t go, and I wouldn’t leave them up here with you two morons on a bet.”
The General and Dopey Charlie didn’t know what a moron was but they felt quite certain from Bridge’s tone of voice that a moron was not a nice thing, and anyway no one could have bribed them to descend into the darkness of the lower floor with the dead man and the grisly THING that prowled through the haunted chambers; so they flatly refused to budge an inch.
Bridge saw in the gradually lighting sky the near approach of full daylight; so he contented himself with making the girl and the youth walk briskly to and fro in the hope that stimulated circulation might at least partially overcome the menace of the damp clothing and the chill air, and thus they occupied the remaining hour of the night.
From below came no repetition of the inexplicable noises of that night of terror and at last, with every object plainly discernible in the light of the new day, Bridge would delay no longer; but voiced his final determination to descend and make a fire in the old kitchen stove. Both the boy and the girl insisted upon accompanying him. For the first time each had an opportunity to study the features of his companions of the night. Bridge found in the girl and the youth two dark eyed, good-looking young people. In the girl’s face was, perhaps, just a trace of weakness; but it was not the face of one who consorts habitually with criminals. The man appraised her as a pretty, small-town girl who had been led into a temporary escapade by the monotony of village life, and he would have staked his soul that she was not a bad girl.
The boy, too, looked anything other than the role he had been playing. Bridge smiled as he looked at the clear eyes, the oval face, and the fine, sensitive mouth and thought of the youth’s claim to the crime battered sobriquet of The Oskaloosa Kid. The man wondered if the mystery of the clanking chain would prove as harmlessly infantile as these two whom some accident of hilarious fate had cast in the roles of debauchery and crime.
Aloud, he said: “I’ll go first, and if the spook materializes you two can beat it back into the room.” And to the two tramps: “Come on, boes, we’ll all take a look at the lower floor together, and then we’ll get a good fire going in the kitchen and warm up a bit.”
Down the hall they went, Bridge leading with the boy and girl close at his heels while the two yeggs brought up the rear. Their footsteps echoed through the deserted house; but brought forth no answering clanking from the cellar. The stairs creaked beneath the unaccustomed weight of so many bodies as they descended toward the lower floor. Near the bottom Bridge came to a questioning halt. The front room lay entirely within his range of vision, and as his eyes swept it he gave voice to a short exclamation of surprise.
The youth and the girl, shivering with cold and nervous excitement, craned their necks above the man’s shoulder.
“O-h-h!” gasped The Oskaloosa Kid. “He’s gone,” and, sure enough, the dead man had vanished.
Bridge stepped quickly down the remaining steps, entered the rear room which had served as dining room and kitchen, inspected the two small bedrooms off this room, and the summer kitchen beyond. All were empty; then he turned and re-entering the front room bent his steps toward the cellar stairs. At the foot of the stairway leading to the second floor lay the flash lamp that the boy had dropped the night before. Bridge stooped, picked it up and examined it. It was uninjured and with it in his hand he continued toward the cellar door.
“Where are you going?” asked The Oskaloosa Kid.
“I’m going to solve the mystery of that infernal clanking,” he replied.
“You are not going down into that dark cellar!” It was an appeal, a question, and a command; and it quivered gaspingly upon the verge of hysteria.
Bridge turned and looked into the youth’s face. The man did not like cowardice and his eyes were stern as he turned them on the lad from whom during the fe
w hours of their acquaintance he had received so many evidences of cowardice; but as the clear brown eyes of the boy met his the man’s softened and he shook his head perplexedly. What was there about this slender stripling which so disarmed criticism?
“Yes,” he replied, “I am going down. I doubt if I shall find anything there; but if I do it is better to come upon it when I am looking for it than to have it come upon us when we are not expecting it. If there is to be any hunting I prefer to be hunter rather than hunted.”
He wheeled and placed a foot upon the cellar stairs. The youth followed him.
“What are you going to do?” asked the man.
“I am going with you,” said the boy. “You think I am a coward because I am afraid; but there is a vast difference between cowardice and fear.”
The man made no reply as he resumed the descent of the stairs, flashing the rays of the lamp ahead of him; but he pondered the boy’s words and smiled as he admitted mentally that it undoubtedly took more courage to do a thing in the face of fear than to do it if fear were absent. He felt a strange elation that this youth should choose voluntarily to share his danger with him, for in his roaming life Bridge had known few associates for whom he cared.
The beams of the little electric lamp, moving from side to side, revealed a small cellar littered with refuse and festooned with cob-webs. At one side tottered the remains of a series of wooden racks upon which pans of milk had doubtless stood to cool in a long gone, happier day. Some of the uprights had rotted away so that a part of the frail structure had collapsed to the earthen floor. A table with one leg missing and a crippled chair constituted the balance of the contents of the cellar and there was no living creature and no chain nor any other visible evidence of the presence which had clanked so lugubriously out of the dark depths during the vanished night. The boy breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief and Bridge laughed, not without a note of relief either.
“You see there is nothing,” he said— “nothing except some firewood which we can use to advantage. I regret that James is not here to attend me; but since he is not you and I will have to carry some of this stuff upstairs,” and together they returned to the floor above, their arms laden with pieces of the dilapidated milk rack. The girl was awaiting them at the head of the stairs while the two tramps whispered together at the opposite side of the room.
It took Bridge but a moment to have a roaring fire started in the old stove in the kitchen, and as the warmth rolled in comforting waves about them the five felt for the first time in hours something akin to relief and well being. With the physical relaxation which the heat induced came a like relaxation of their tongues and temporary forgetfulness of their antagonisms and individual apprehensions. Bridge was the only member of the group whose conscience was entirely free. He was not ‘wanted’ anywhere, he had no unexpiated crimes to harry his mind, and with the responsibilities of the night removed he fell naturally into his old, carefree manner. He hazarded foolish explanations of the uncanny noises of the night and suggested various theories to account for the presence and the mysterious disappearance of the dead man.
The General, on the contrary, seriously maintained that the weird sounds had emanated from the ghost of the murdered man who was, unquestionably, none other than the long dead Squibb returned to haunt his former home, and that the scream had sprung from the ghostly lungs of his slain wife or daughter.
“I wouldn’t spend anudder night in this dump,” he concluded, “for both them pockets full of swag The Oskaloosa Kid’s packin’ around.”
Immediately all eyes turned upon the flushing youth. The girl and Bridge could not prevent their own gazes from wandering to the bulging coat pockets, the owner of which moved uneasily, at last shooting a look of defiance, not unmixed with pleading, at Bridge.
“He’s a bad one,” interjected Dopey Charlie, a glint of cunning in his ordinarily glassy eyes. “He flashes a couple o’ mitsful of sparklers, chesty-like, and allows as how he’s a regular burglar. Then he pulls a gun on me, as wasn’t doin’ nothin’ to him, and ‘most croaks me. It’s even money that if anyone’s been croaked in Oakdale last night they won’t have to look far for the guy that done it. Least-wise they won’t have to look far if he doesn’t come across,” and Dopey Charlie looked meaningly and steadily at the side pockets of The Oskaloosa Kid.
“I think,” said Bridge, after a moment of general silence, “that you two crooks had better beat it. Do you get me?” and he looked from Dopey Charlie to The General and back again.
“We don’t go,” said Dopey Charlie, belligerently, “until we gets half the Kid’s swag.”
“You go now,” said Bridge, “without anybody’s swag,” and he drew the boy’s automatic from his side pocket. “You go now and you go quick — beat it!”
The two rose and shuffled toward the door. “We’ll get you, you colledge Lizzy,” threatened Dopey Charlie, “an’ we’ll get that phoney punk, too.”
“‘And speed the parting guest,’” quoted Bridge, firing a shot that splintered the floor at the crook’s feet. When the two hoboes had departed the others huddled again close to the stove until Bridge suggested that he and The Oskaloosa Kid retire to another room while the girl removed and dried her clothing; but she insisted that it was not wet enough to matter since she had been covered by a robe in the automobile until just a moment before she had been hurled out.
“Then, after you are warmed up,” said Bridge, “you can step into this other room while the kid and I strip and dry our things, for there’s no question but that we are wet enough.”
At the suggestion the kid started for the door. “Oh, no,” he insisted; “it isn’t worth while. I am almost dry now, and as soon as we get out on the road I’ll be all right. I — I — I like wet clothes,” he ended, lamely.
Bridge looked at him questioningly; but did not urge the matter. “Very well,” he said; “you probably know what you like; but as for me, I’m going to pull off every rag and get good and dry.”
The girl had already quitted the room and now The Kid turned and followed her. Bridge shook his head. “I’ll bet the little beggar never was away from his mother before in his life,” he mused; “why the mere thought of undressing in front of a strange man made him turn red — and posing as The Oskaloosa Kid! Bless my soul; but he’s a humorist — a regular, natural born one.”
Bridge found that his clothing had dried to some extent during the night; so, after a brisk rub, he put on the warmed garments and though some were still a trifle damp he felt infinitely more comfortable than he had for many hours.
Outside the house he came upon the girl and the youth standing in the sunshine of a bright, new day. They were talking together in a most animated manner, and as he approached wondering what the two had found of so great common interest he discovered that the discussion hinged upon the relative merits of ham and bacon as a breakfast dish.
“Oh, my heart it is just achin’,” quoted Bridge,
“For a little bite of bacon,
“A hunk of bread, a little mug of brew;
“I’m tired of seein’ scenery,
“Just lead me to a beanery
“Where there’s something more than only air to
chew.”
The two looked up, smiling. “You’re a funny kind of tramp, to be quoting poetry,” said The Oskaloosa Kid, “even if it is Knibbs’.”
“Almost as funny,” replied Bridge, “as a burglar who recognizes Knibbs when he hears him.”
The Oskaloosa Kid flushed. “He wrote for us of the open road,” he replied quickly. “I don’t know of any other class of men who should enjoy him more.”
“Or any other class that is less familiar with him,” retorted Bridge; “but the burning question just now is pots, not poetry — flesh pots. I’m hungry. I could eat a cow.”
The girl pointed to an adjacent field. “Help yourself,” she said.
“That happens to be a bull,” said Bridge. “I was particular to mention cow, w
hich, in this instance, is proverbially less dangerous than the male, and much better eating.
“‘We kept a-rambling all the time. I rustled grub, he rustled rhyme —
“‘Blind baggage, hoof it, ride or climb — we always put it through.’ Who’s going to rustle the grub?”
The girl looked at The Oskaloosa Kid. “You don’t seem like a tramp at all, to talk to,” she said; “but I suppose you are used to asking for food. I couldn’t do it — I should die if I had to.”
The Oskaloosa Kid looked uncomfortable. “So should—” he commenced, and then suddenly subsided. “Of course I’d just as soon,” he said. “You two stay here — I’ll be back in a minute.”
They watched him as he walked down to the road and until he disappeared over the crest of the hill a short distance from the Squibbs’ house.
“I like him,” said the girl, turning toward Bridge.
“So do I,” replied the man.
“There must be some good in him,” she continued, “even if he is such a desperate character; but I know he’s not The Oskaloosa Kid. Do you really suppose he robbed a house last night and then tried to kill that Dopey person?”
Bridge shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said; “but I am inclined to believe that he is more imaginative than criminal. He certainly shot up the Dopey person; but I doubt if he ever robbed a house.”
While they waited, The Oskaloosa Kid trudged along the muddy road to the nearest farm house, which lay a full mile beyond the Squibbs’ home. As he approached the door a lank, sallow man confronted him with a suspicious eye.
“Good morning,” greeted The Oskaloosa Kid.
The man grunted.
“I want to get something to eat,” explained the youth.
If the boy had hurled a dynamite bomb at him the result could have been no more surprising. The lank, sallow man went up into the air, figuratively. He went up a mile or more, and on the way down he reached his hand inside the kitchen door and brought it forth enveloping the barrel of a shot gun.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 435