Mr. Dade proceeded as far as the middle of the block; then he crossed the street and halted before a broad, arched doorway, rather dimly revealed by a faintly luminous globe above the arch. Then he opened the door, passed noiselessly into an entryway, and the door closed behind him.
Penrod darted across the street and marked the place well, the shape of the doorway and its distance from each corner. He was certain that he could easily find it again, either by night or in the daytime, as need might arise. George B. Jashber uttered sounds of satisfaction and quiet triumph; then, stepping backward into the street and lifting his eyes as he did so, became aware of a wooden sign above the globe. Here was a means of identification indeed! Four large letters were painted upon this sign, and, though the light was dim, the tired detective was able to discern them and to comprehend their meaning with absolute certainty. They were:
Y. M. C. A.
Unerringly, George B. had tracked Mr. Dade to his lair in the Young Men’s Christian Association building.
CHAPTER X
HERMAN AND VERMAN ARE ALLOWED TO JOIN
WHEN PENROD GOT home that evening, Mrs. Schofield was standing at the front gate, looking up and down the street in the darkness. For this reason, Penrod, having seen her before she saw him, quietly entered the yard by climbing over the side fence. Then he sauntered out of obscurity into the faint oblong of light that issued from the open door, thinly illumining his mother’s anxious back as she leaned over the gate. He yawned casually, inquiring, “Whatch’ doin’ out here, Mamma?”
“Penrod!” She jumped, turning upon him sharply. “Where on earth have you been till this time of night?”
“What, Mamma?”
“Where have you been? Do you know it’s after ten o’clock?”
“No’m,” he said meekly. “I didn’t think it was late.”
“It’s disgraceful, and your father’s very angry. Where have you been?”
“Why, I haven’t been anywhere, Mamma,” he protested plaintively. “I — I haven’t lifted my little finger, but you ack like I been doin’ sumpthing wrong, and I haven’t been doin’ anything at all.”
“Where were you?”
“Just playin’.”
“With whom were you playing?”
“Why, just around,” he responded, his tone aggrieved but reasonable.
“You weren’t over at Sam Williams’s,” said Mrs. Schofield. “We telephoned, and Sam said he hadn’t seen you at all.”
“Mamma, I didn’t say I was at Sam’s, did I?” he protested. “I don’t see why you got to go and claim, all of a sudden, when I never said I was anywhere near Sam’s, and go and say I’m telling a—”
“Penrod, be quiet! I didn’t say you were telling an untruth. I only said—”
“Well, it looked like it,” he insisted accusingly. “I guess I can’t lift my little finger around here but I got to go and get accused of sumpthing I never did except just lift my little finger. I expeck there’s hardly any other boys around here their mother wouldn’t let ’em lift their little finger without scolding ’em just because I lifted my little f—”
“Oh, stop talking about your little finger!” Mrs. Schofield cried, losing patience and conscious of a vague bafflement. “You march into the house and go straight up to bed. I don’t know what your father’s going to do to you. He’s as upset as he can possibly be.”
Upon this, Penrod entered the house with some natural hesitation, but was relieved to hear the sound of a shoe dropping upon the floor of his father’s bedroom, Mr. Schofield being thus revealed as in process of disrobing for the night, and evidently not so wholly succumbed to agitation as his wife had indicated to their son. In fact, all that Penrod heard from him was a murmured question, a little later, and this came through an open transom over the closed door.
“Where’d he say he’d been?”
“Just playing in the neighbourhood,” Mrs. Schofield replied. “But it’s dreadful, his staying out till after ten. It’s no way for children to be brought up, and you must do something. I don’t see how you can lie there and go to sleep so calmly when you know how worried I was over it.”
Silence was the answer, though probably not intended as one, and, since nothing more was to be gained in that quarter, George B. Jashber, barefooted and in his nightgown, presently stole back to his own room and slid into bed.
In spite of some physical weariness, he did not at once fall asleep, but lay open-eyed, thinking exultantly. Probably a genuine, adult, official plain-clothes man, or detective, tracking a suspected person to residence in a Young Men’s Christian Association might have felt rather discouraged, might have abandoned the trail altogether. Not so with the open mind of a boy. For Penrod, it was absolutely as easy to imagine a horse-thief having his lair in the Y. M. C. A. as anywhere else in the world. Why not? And George B. would be hot upon the trail again to-morrow!
The difference between a man’s way of thought, in such matters, and a boy’s was exemplified at the lunch-table several days later, when Mr. Schofield once more dwelt grumpily upon the subject of Mr. Dade.
“Papa, you’re just unreasonable!” Margaret protested, after a discussion that had brought evidence of some emotion into her voice and expression. “Why can’t I go walking with him?”
“Because we don’t know who he is.”
“But he goes to everybody’s house, and everyone likes him,” Margaret said. “Why, he’s been here to dinner in your own house, Papa!”
“Well, I didn’t ask him,” her father retorted.
“Papa, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you like him?”
“I’ve told you.”
“Well, what do you want to know about him?”
“I’d like to know one thing that I should think even you might consider fairly important,” Mr. Schofield returned, with satire. “I’d like to know where he lives.”
Margaret’s eyes glowed sudden triumph. “He lives at the Y. M. C. A.”
“What?”
“He lives at the Young Men’s Christian Association,” she said, laughing lightly.
“How do you know?”
“He told me the other evening that he’d taken rooms there, and he telephoned me from there this morning. I met him at the church bazaar, and he lives at the Young Men’s Christian Association, Papa.”
Mr. Schofield’s expression, after a moment of incredulity, had become one of simple and unmanly disappointment. Margaret’s, following an opposite course, now offered a charming contrast of liveliness.
“Is there anything more you want me to find out about him, Papa?”
The defeated man made no reply other than to eat morosely; whereupon his wife laughed aloud. “You can go for that walk, dear,” she said to Margaret. “Papa’s a funny man when he decides to take prejudices; but it looks as though he’d have to give this one up.”
Mr. Schofield said nothing for a time; then he set his napkin beside his plate, rose, and, not looking at his wife or daughter, uttered the reluctant words: “Well, you may be right — for once.”
Instantly they broke into peals of laughter, and then, as he left the room, the happy and suffused Margaret pointed across the table at her brother, and shouted: “Look at Penrod!”
Penrod was worth looking at, though he was doing nothing except with his countenance. However, Mrs. Schofield found his action more disquieting than amusing.
“Stop doing that with your face, Penrod!” she exclaimed. “You’ll ruin your eyes, and you’ll be all wrinkled before you’re twenty years old. You must get out of that habit; it’s awful!”
Penrod, slightly discomfited, relaxed, and, breathing heavily, left the table, followed by continued admonitions from his mother and absurd manifestations of pleasure on the part of Margaret. Disposing of these insulting sounds by closing a door upon them, he went out to the office of George B. Jashber’s private detective agency in the carriage-house of the stable, and presently, seated in the wheelbarrow, held an important
conversation with an imaginary client. He spoke in a low voice, yet audibly.
“All right, missuz; you say your ole horse got stolen? All right, missuz; I bet I get him back for you in no time! Answer one question, please: Who was it stole him? I bet it was ole Dade, wasn’t it? I thought so; I thought so! Pray take a seat, missuz. I got to get some o’ my men up here.” (Penrod used an imaginary telephone.) “Hello! Gimme number Two hundred and eighty-nine. Hello! Is that you, Bill? Bill, send Jim up to my office; I want him. We got a big case goin’ on up here now, Bill.” (He hung up the receiver, placed the stub of a lead-pencil in the corner of his mouth to serve as a cigar; then, rising, he rapped upon the wall of the harness-closet, listened attentively, rapped again, and returned to the wheelbarrow.) “That’s Jim. He’s one o’ my best men. Come in, Jim. Jim, this lady here’s mad at the Dade gang because they stole her horse and everything. We got to help her, Jim. You got your ottomatick with you, Jim? All right. Now, missuz, you go on downtown with Jim to where it says Y. M. C. A. over the door, and you go on around in the alley that’s behind there, and keep lookin’ and lookin’, and when your ole horse comes along, you tell Jim which one it is, and Jim’ll grab him and make them give him up. Fifteen dollars, please. Good-day, missuz. Jim, come back here soon’s you get the ole horse for her, because we got some more cases about the Dade gang, and I got to—”
Penrod paused abruptly; he started and rose to his feet, staring widely at the thin partition-wall of the harness-closet, while several small but lively chills twittered down his spine. From the invisible emptiness beyond that partition there had come sounds impossible for rats, cats or dogs to make. Unmistakably, these sounds were of human construction; they consisted of muffled gaspings and of profound, irrepressible chokings — and they continued, becoming louder. Penrod stood it for perhaps eight seconds; then he nervously threw an old rake-handle at the wall of the harness-closet, and, uttering one loud cry of alarm, ran out into the yard.
Immediately arming himself with a clothes-prop, he returned as far as the open double doors of the carriage-house. “Hey, you!” he shouted, in a trembling voice. “You get out of our harness-closet, you ole tramp, you! You better get out o’ there — my father’s a policeman!”
The gasping and choking forthwith became a penetrating, silvery African giggle interrupted by sputterings and guffaws; whereupon Penrod, immensely reassured but enraged, entered the carriage-house and poked his clothes-prop savagely into the darkness of the harness-closet.
“You get out o’ there, you ole niggers you!” he stormed. “I’ll show you who you’re laughin’ at in there!”
Hysteric calls for mercy preceded the issuing-forth into the light of Herman and Verman. They were weak with laughter and in no condition to resist the clothes-prop.
“Lemme ‘lone!” Herman begged, feebly defending himself. “Don’ hit me no mo’ — please don’! We ‘uzn’t doin’ nothin’ to you, Penrod. We ‘uz dess liss’nun’!”
“Listenin’ to what?” Penrod shouted fiercely.
“Liss’nun’ to you,” said Herman. “Me and Verman, we all time out in our alley hyuh you talk so much to youse’f ev’y time you come out in stable, we say, ‘Whut ‘at ole boy all time talkin’ to hisse’f?’ So whiles you in house eatin’, we git in closet, an’ when you c’mence talkin’ so big wif ‘iss here missuz an’ Bill an’ all ‘at Dade talk, Verman went an’ begin to laugh an’ cut up. Couldn’ he’p it, ‘cause you playin’ so funny!”
“Playin’!” Penrod echoed scornfully. “I guess I’ll show you that wasn’t playin’! I guess if I told you once what it was about, your ole eyes wouldn’t stick out! Oh, no!”
He frowned bitterly as he spoke; but Verman so far lacked in impressionableness as to burst anew into shrill laughter.
“Hay!” he shouted. “Hay hake a heek, mihhuh!”
Penrod correctly interpreted this as “Pray take a seat, missuz”, and the mockery was the more unbearable because Verman thought fit to illustrate it by projecting his plaintively insignificant abdomen and patting it pompously.
“Hay hake a heek, mihhuh!” he gurgled, and strutted grotesquely; but his burlesquing ended in a shriek, as the outraged Penrod, unable to bear further insult in patience, swung the clothes-prop in an extensive semicircle that culminated at a point identical with a patch upon Verman’s thin trousers.
“Oo hop ak!” Verman remonstrated.
“All right then,” said Penrod. “You stop bein’ so smart about sumpthing you don’t know what it’s about, then. I tell you, this is sumpthing perty danger’s, and I guess you’d like to have a chance to get sumpthing to do with it if I was to let you, only I wouldn’t.”
“Whut ‘at?” Herman asked. “Whut all ‘iss here talk you makin’?”
“You see that?” Penrod demanded, pointing to the sign painted upon the harness-closet; and Herman and Verman examined with some interest the symbols of George B. Jashber’s profession and location.
“Who is all ‘iss here Jaspuh?” Herman inquired. “Whut all ‘iss deteckatuff writin’ mean? Whaibouts any Mist’ Jawge B. Jaspuh?”
“It’s me,” said Penrod simply.
“Who?”
“Me.”
“Whut you talkin’ about, whi’ boy? You ain’t no Mist’ Jaspuli. You Penrod.”
“I’ll show you who I am!” Penrod retorted hotly. “You just looky here once, and I guess you’ll see.” And throwing back the breast of his jacket, he displayed, pinned near his left armpit, the little metal shield he had bought from Della’s Jarge.
This time it was a triumph without any anticlimax whatever; the effect upon Herman and Verman was definite and complete in every way. In their altered attitudes, in their silence, in their almost protuberant eyes, they showed it. To them, such a badge was official; there was no denying such a thing. The contrast between the visible person of Penrod Schofield and their preconceived notions of a detective mattered nothing. This white boy, always a little mysterious, was unquestionably, unsuspectably Number One Hundred and Three. The glittering shield said so. Herman and Verman were overwhelmed.
“I guess you got gumption enough to know who I am now!” said the insufferable Penrod.
“Huccome — huccome all ‘iss here?” Herman faltered. “Huccome it?”
“Hi!” Verman murmured faintly.
Penrod’s expression at this moment was so profound that his mother could barely have borne it. “Looky here,” he said slowly, “I’m shadowin’ the Dade gang—”
“Whut ‘at shad?” Herman asked.
“Shadowin’,” Penrod explained impatiently. “It means followin”em around wherever they go, and — my goodness, haven’t you ever been to a movie show, Herman?”
“Plenty!”
“Well, the Dade gang are the worst crooks there is, and I’m after ’em. You be Rill, Herman; and Verman, you can be Jim. I’ll let you work for me, and I’ll tell you all what to do, because you’ll be my men. You must always call me ‘George’, or else ‘Number Hunderd and Three’. Well, come ahead, Bill and Jim; we better start downtown, because we—”
“‘Downtown’?” Herman echoed vaguely. “Whu’ fo’ we got to go on downtown?”
“My goodness! We can’t sit around here all day and shadow anybody, can we? I’ll tell you what to do while we’re walkin’, won’t I? We’ll keep in the alleys all the way down, because we don’t want anybody to know who my men are or about me bein’ Number Hunderd and Three. Come on, Bill; come on, Jim! I guess we got a perty danger’s job on our hands this time, men!”
Herman and Verman had joined, whether they knew it just at that time or not. Penrod and his badge swept them off their feet. And a moment later, the two smallish figures, and the third very small and raggedy one, might have been seen hurrying down the alley. Penrod talked continually in a low, important voice, and Herman and Verman listened with eagerness.
CHAPTER XI
THE MAN WITH THE FALSE WHISKERS
IT WAS ONLY a f
ew days after this that Mr. Dade commented upon a singular phenomenon he had observed as a characteristic of life in that town. He and Margaret were sitting upon the steps of the verandah, enjoying the evening silence, when a curious hooting, somewhat like an owl’s, came from some shrubberies in a corner of the fence. This sound was responded to by a melancholy but wholly undoglike series of barks out of other bushes more remote.
Mr. Dade made a gesture of discomfort. “What is that?” he said.
Margaret laughed. “Only Penrod and some boys, playing.”
An odd voice issued from the fence corner. “Oh Mihhuh Habe hippum om hump hep!” it cried. “He hippum om hump hep wi mow!”
“What’s that?” Mr. Dade asked nervously.
“It’s only Verman,” Margaret answered, laughing again. “What!”
Margaret spelled the name. “He’s a little tongue-tied darky boy,” she added. “He lives in our alley.”
“Well, that’s curious,” the visitor observed thoughtfully. “I’ve stumbled over a hundred coloured boys downtown in the last few days. It seems to me that the coloured boys in this town have an actual habit of getting between people’s feet; but the odd thing about it is that if I have stumbled over a hundred, at least fifty of ’em were tongue-tied.”
As Mr. Dade’s significant remark to Margaret amply indicates, Verman — otherwise “Jim” and later, “Number Hunderd and Five” — was of incomparable service to George B. Jashber. His value must be esteemed greater than Herman’s, though the latter was both faithful and intelligent, for Verman’s impediment of speech made him (to put his virtue in a word) probably the most efficient assistant detective that the world has seen. This defect of his, which he ever regarded less as a misfortune and more as a gift, made it possible for him to give secret information to his associates at any time, in the most public places, and in the loudest and frankest manner.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 442