The Door of Dread/Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IT WAS five days later that Miss Mabel Poole, six short weeks out of her Victoria Hospital training-school, found herself alone with a patient. And the first point that made itself apparent to the young trained nurse was that this patient's room was disturbingly dark. The second point that came to her attention was that this darkness seemed crowded with cut flowers, giving it the heavy air of a hot-house. And the third fact to impress itself on her was that the bell-boy who had carried her bag down the hotel hallway had not waited for his tip. He had gone, and in going had softly closed the bedroom door behind him. In that flight, she felt, there was something disquieting and stealthy; it was like being treacherously abandoned by her last ally.
Miss Mabel Poole's apprehensions as to that tyrannical new patient of hers did not decrease as she stared across the darkened room. She was, in fact, the second nurse to be called in. The first one, she had been told at the register in Strong's drug-store, had been unceremoniously bundled back within the hour of her arrival. The sick woman had disliked her personality. And Miss Poole, being still young and ardent, did not wish to share her fate. So, nursing a human distaste for defeat, she squared her young shoulders to the situation with the solemn cheerfulness of youth.
"Wouldn't you like a little air in here?" was her gently persuasive suggestion as she turned to open her hand-bag.
The scarcely discernible figure on the bed did not move.
"Are yuh the new nurse?" asked a weak and quavering voice.
Miss Poole, as she buckled on her fragile armor of nurse's gingham, acknowledged that she was. Then she crossed to the windows. But a sudden command arrested her.
"I don't want those shutters opened!" called out the querulous-voiced woman on the bed.
The newcomer stood thoughtful for a moment or two. "But I think we could do much better with a little light," She spoke softly; but it was the rustling softness of a bocage that masks a machine-gun.
"Then switch on that wall light beside the dresser there!" was the invalid's petulant concession.
Miss Poole switched on the wall light. Her mind, as she did so, promptly reverted to restraining-sheets, for she was possessed of the dampening suspicion that she was straddled with a road actress in the twilight zone of delirium tremens. But this was only the girl's second case: and she was anxious not to fail on it.
"Did Doctor Wilson leave any instructions?" she asked, as a matter of form. For she was disagreeably conscious that the patient's head, raised from the pillow, had been studiously regarding her from the dim light of the bed-corner. The invalid, Miss Poole observed, was a somewhat younger woman than she had expected.
"I guess any instructions yuh get will be comin' from me!" was the patient's announcement. A mordant sense of humor seemed to relieve her words of their possible bruskness.
"Then supposing we see if we can't make you more comfortable," suggested the young nurse, remembering her training-school procedure.
Her patient, however, rather startled her by suddenly sitting up in bed, with a vigorous fling of the coverings that sent them over the foot-board. And the querulous whimper had completely gone from that patient's voice.
"Sit down!" she commanded.
Miss Poole, after four weeks on her feet, was not unwilling to sit down.
"Are yuh a trained nurse?"
"Yes!"
"And a Canadian?"
"Yes!"
"Where do yuh come from?"
"Lucan."
"Where's Lucan?"
"A few miles out of London."
This, and still another thoughtful inspection of the girl's face, seemed to reassure the woman on the bed.
"Was your last case a hard one?"
"Rather. It was a boy with typhoid. I had to be both day and night nurse—and he died!"
"Well, yuh won't see me follow his example! And yuh look tireder than I do, right at this moment!"
"I am tired!" acknowledged the girl.
"Then what's the matter with an easy case this time, with a room o' your own, and a three-hour taxi ride every afternoon?"
A look of alarm promptly came into Miss Poole's honest Ontarian eyes.
"I'm a trained nurse," she primly announced.
"Well, that's what I took yuh for!"
"But you are not ill," protested the girl in the striped blue and white uniform.
The woman on the bed laughed a little.
"Oh, yes, I am! I gotta be! For three or four days I'm goin' to be the sickest woman in this backwoods town o' yours. And if I'm sick I guess I've gotta have a nurse."
"I don't quite understand," protested the Canadian girl.
"What's your name?"
"Mabel Poole."
"All right, Mabel. I like your looks—and I'm some judge o' maps! Yuh pass—for yuh're as honest as daylight and I know it. And if yuh don't think the same about me, yuh can make sure o' your first week's salary by takin' a double fee from that chamois coin-bag over there on the dresser!"
"But I was sent here to take care of a patient."
"Gee, but yuh're the finicky-fingered kid! Now, honey child, yuh listen to me. Yuh're honest, and I'm goin' to be honest with yuh. That's the best way, isn't it?"
"I think so," answered the girl.
"Well, to begin with, I'm a plant. I'm a plant and nothin' more."
"A plant?" echoed the girl in the uniform. She was beginning to see daylight. Here, after all, was dementia with delusions. Here was a human being calmly asserting herself to be a member of the vegetable kingdom.
"I mean, Mabel, I'm in this bush-league burg o' yours on secret service."
"On secret service?" repeated the girl.
"Yuh ain't hep to what that means?"
The head under the nurse's cap moved slowly from side to side.
"D'yuh know what a gumshoe is?"
"No."
"Well, I'm one," answered the woman on the bed. "I mean I'm here actin' for the federal authorities at Washington. And in our country, Mabel, that's about the same as actin' for the king and queen of all the British Empire."
"And what must you do?" asked the girl, studying the woman on the bed with interested but still uncompromising eyes.
"I gotta stay buried!"
She smiled at the girl's returning look of alarm. "I gotta stay buried in this hotel until four or five o' the biggest crooks that ever wore shoe-leather sneak into this town for a secret conference."
"That sounds like moving pictures," said the young nurse, with her contemplative eyes still skeptical.
"It's got movin' pictures stung to death, for that bunch is so bad they daren't all get into one town, in our country, without bein' smelt out. So they've had to beat it up across the border, some from the East and some from the West. And I've had the straight tip that they're goin' to meet here, right here in this hotel. As I say, they were leery o' bunchin' up anywheres in the States. And little Sadie is goin' to gather 'em all in. She's goin' to do it with her little hatchet, first crack out o' the box. And when Wilson and Daniels and the other big guns are gerry to what I've done they're goin' to melt down enough bar gold to strike me off a Service medal the size of a soup-plate!"
There were moments when the younger woman's mind seemed unable to follow the Gargantuan footsteps of her companion.
"Do you mean you are going to arrest all these men?"
"I'm goin' to do more'n arrest 'em. I'm goin' to extradict 'em and have 'em go home with irons on, and get the life sentence they've been workin' overtime to earn."
The alarm on the young nurse's face did not appreciably decrease.
"And what am I to do with all this?"
Sadie Wimpel sat on the edge of the bed, swinging her feet. She even smiled a little, for she felt sure that she knew her woman.
"Yuh're goin' to be my gay-cat."
"Your what?"
"Yuh're goin' to act as my stick-up. And that needn't give yuh cold feet, dearie, for it won't be any harder'n what yuh're doin' at this moment. All yuh gotta do is wear a uniform and put me cut flowers out in the hall ev'ry night and stand between me and the wide, wide world. I mean yuh gotta keep me from bein' seen. Ev'ry gink in this Indian-sign hotel's gotta think I'm a real patient. For Gawd only knows when the first o' that gang 'll be bobbin' up here. And if he smelt a rat the whole bunch 'd beat it for the tall timber. All yuh gotta do is answer the door and order meals and use the phone for me. I've been up talkin' with that nice kind-eyed old Crown Attorney o' yours and makin' depositions and havin' a couple o' pow-wows with your city magistrate. So to-morrow yuh'll have to drop round and get a bunch o' papers from them for me to sign up. That's to oil the extradictin' process and have the gang held here until the Amurican authorities are ready to take 'em over."
Miss Poole sat down in a chair beside the dresser. She was too interested to be afraid.
"But I don't see how you, how any woman, can actually arrest four or five men, especially men of the kind you mention."
Sadie, as she thrust her toes into her bedroom slippers, laughed quietly.
"Why, honey child, I don't have to handle 'em. There'll be four or five cops from your city force to do the navvy work. And that strong-arm squad 'll be waitin' and ready in a room in this hotel, watchin' for me to give 'em the signal. And if there's any hitch in that I've doped out a scheme for sendin' a push-bell signal to the house-engineer down-stairs, so's he can shut off the power and get the bunch between floors in the elevator, once they try to make a break for the open. Yuh see, all I gotta do is make sure I got my gang together. And that reminds me: Yuh're goin' to have the room directly above this one. In a day or two I'm goin' to be moved up to that room. I'll have to make a kick about the noise—and there's sure ground for it, with them Grand Trunk engine-bells goin' all night and them street-cars poundin' across the station-rails all day!"
"But why change rooms?" asked the young nurse.
"Because this is the room where that gang is goin' to sit down and have its secret conference. They're goin' to sit down at that round table there, right under that old-fashioned chandelier, and imagine they're gettin' their money's worth because they're lit up by the heaviest brass-work east of Keokuk!"
Still again the younger woman seemed unable to follow her older companion.
"But how can you be sure they will come to this room?"
Sadie paused in the act of dropping a skirt over her head.
"They gotta come here, dearie, b'cause I'm goin' to have this room rigged up special for 'em. If I can't work it any other way, I'll engage ev'ry other empty room in this whole dump and pay for it in advance. And that'll leave 'em only this one to crawl into. But that ain't the important point." Sadie, having hooked her skirt and locked the door, switched on the rest of the light. "Did yuh ever go to a county fair and see the rubes crowdin' in to what they called a camera ohscura?"
"I think I have!"
"Of course yuh have! Well, I'm carryin' our War Department's improvement on that, an improvement that was first worked out for our submarine periscopes. Yuh see the brass globe on the bottom o' that old chandelier that looks as if it come out o' the Ark? Well, I'm goin' to take off that globe and set my glass lens in there. It'll blend in with the ornamental work and couldn't be spotted with a microscope. Then after I've had a hole cut in the floor up in your room, I'm goin' to set up my refractin' mirrors. Then all I gotta do is adjust my white glazed dial. It may be too small to show ev'ry one sittin' 'round this table at once, but by revolvin' the dial I can bring most any figure in the room on it. But that ain't all. Yuh see that nifty oil paintin' o' seven bilious cows eatin' zinc quartz off'n a hillside that's been overrun with what looks like a carload o' German mustard? Just pipe that picture and that five-inch plaster-of-Paris gilt frame, and tell me if yuh see anything special about it."
The girl in the uniform studied the picture on the wall.
"All I can see is that it seems an especially stupid bit of painting."
"The paintin' may be stoopid, but the plaster-of-Paris frame ain't, not by a long shot. For if yuh stand on that chair and study them gilt-covered upperworks yuh'll see where one o' them three-inch scrolls is cut away. Where that scroll oughtta be is the annunciator of a dictaphone covered with gilt. And them picture wires that go up to the moldin' there are covered with silk fiber. But instead o' stoppin' at the moldin' they go right up through the ceilin' and are waitin' to be connected with a receiver and dry-cell to-morrow when I get up there. That means I can sit up in that room, like a firin' line listener. I can sit back with a watch-case receiver at my ear and pick up what I want to pick up, for if any one o' that bunch doesn't show up, I sure want to know where he's at."
"But still I don't quite see—" began the other.
"Well, I'll show yuh. To-morrow I'm goin' to be a pretty sick woman. So we'll have an electrician string a private wire over to Doctor Wilson's office. This hotel knows I've got money to burn, but they don't know it's comin' out o' your Uncle Sam's pocket. That electrician'll do the work the way I tell him and he'll carry the wires up through that floor. Where we stop 'em after that won't be any o' his or anybody else's business. Then we'll move up above and get ready. I'll powder up till I look like a last-gasper and yuh'll have 'em carry me up on a stretcher—for we're goin' to do this thing right. Then, as soon as we see the bunch is beginnin' to show up, I'm goin' to get worse. I'm goin' to get so bad that yuh'll have to send a wire to Noo Yawk. That's me home town. Yuh'll telegraph for a specialist to beat it up here as quick as a train can bring him. Yuh'll have to wire to Doctor Wilsnach to come at once. And yuh may even send a wire for Doctor Kestner."
Sadie stopped speaking and stared wide-eyed at the wall opposite her. "And although they're both pretty clever specialists in their way, they're goin' to arrive just a little too late for this operation. For the case is sure goin' to be wound up b'fore them big guns get their kit laid out!"
"But won't there be danger? Won't—"
Again Sadie cut the other short.
"For yuh?" she demanded. "Or for me?"
The Canadian girl blushed.
"I'm afraid I was thinking more about myself," she had the honesty to acknowledge.
"And yuh're gettin' cold feet?"
"It's not so much a matter of cold feet, as you call it. But it's all so—so new to me. And I rather wish you—you hadn't taken me into your confidence in this way."
Sadie sat regarding her. She studied with contemplative and not unfriendly eyes the tired young face opposite her.
"No, dearie, there won't be anything new about it. All yuh've gotta do is be what yuh are, a trained nurse and a nice clean-livin' girl. If there was anything more'n that in it I wouldn't try to drag a decent skirt into it. It's secret work, and it's gotta stay secret, and the lord-mayor o' Lucan'll never even know yuh've been gay-cattin' for a gumshoe expert. And if yuh're a quitter I've sure made the mistake of my life!"
Still again the younger woman blushed a little.
"I don't think I'm what you call a quitter. But there's your own side of the case. Isn't a thing like this dangerous for you?"
"Hully gee, child, I gotta eat danger in a callin' like mine! That's my job, takin' chances. And the only thing that's worrying me is whether yuh're goin' to stick it out or not."
"I think you can count on me," the Canadian girl very quietly announced.
A sigh of relief escaped Sadie.
"Then s'posin' we get down to cases," she said, as she seated herself with a telephone directory on her lap. "For I sure don't want any loopholes in those extradiction proceedin's!"