The Gray Mask/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
GARTH BUYS A BOUTONNIÈRE
GARTH wondered if relief would ever come. He was afraid that the slip of frayed white paper must have gone astray. Otherwise, it seemed to him, it would have brought help even before he had sounded his shrill alarm.
He glanced at Nora. She had placed her hand on his arm. She gazed at the open door.
"I thought I heard—"
Then Garth heard, too—a tramping in the house, a struggle outside the door, a voice whose roar betrayed excitement and triumph.
"Where's Garth?"
The door filled with men in uniform.
Nora covered her face with her hands and turned away. With a start Garth grasped the reason. Planning vaguely, he arose and leaned over the prostrate figure of George. The man breathed. The wound was in the shoulder and appeared of little real consequence. He straightened to find the inspector standing over him with a look of pleasure. It hurt Garth to think of that expression's vanishing for one of unbelief and revolt.
"This fellow will stand his trial," he said.
He added gently:
"For the murder of Joe Kridel. It was here, you know."
The inspector puffed.
"Garth, I'm proud of you."
His eye caught the figure of Nora, crouched against the safe. His voice grew hard and business-like.
"Bring that woman here."
Slim, bound and at the door, laughed.
Garth grasped the inspector's arm.
"Don't," he said. "Don't bother about her. Let her go."
But the inspector strode to the safe, raised Nora, and drew her hands from her face.
He gasped and leaned heavily against the divan. All at once he appeared old.
Garth sprang to his side. He knew the inspector must not speak now.
"I'll tell you," he cried. "You have to thank Nora as much as me."
He glanced at the girl.
"That is, we put it over together. It was a winning combination, but we didn't have the nerve to put you wise."
The color rushed back to Nora's cheeks, but the inspector's face did not alter. He looked doubtfully from one to the other. At last he seemed to gather his emotions in a volley of wrath for Garth.
"You dragged a woman in this! You ought to be horsewhipped. Dragging my daughter into this hell!"
Garth took the girl's hand.
"Cheer up, chief," he said, "because if you and she would only let me I'd drag her into a lot worse than that."
He turned to her anxiously. There were tears in her eyes. He questioned if they had sprung from pity for him. She touched his hand. He looked away, for the quick pressure expressed only thanks, and a friendship troubled by his persistence.
During the next few days Garth saw little of Nora, meeting her only once or twice by chance in her father's office. He was not inclined, indeed, to urge a more intimate opportunity. He had let her see rather too much of his heart, and he shrank from an appearance of seeking advantage from her gratitude.
That gratitude existed abundantly, and the inspector shared it. The affair of the gray mask had altered a good deal for Garth. It had placed him all at once apart from his fellows in the bureau. The newspaper publicity, which, unlike most of his kind, he would have preferred to avoid, had swept his reputation far beyond the boundaries of his own city. He acknowledged a benefit in that. Such notoriety might deter the desire for revenge of any of the friends of Slim and George who remained at large.
A very real danger for Nora and himself lay there. It created, too, a tie that the inspector visualized with an increasing friendliness and confidence.
"If Slim and George go to the chair," the big man said on one of those mornings when Garth had stumbled into Nora in the office, "you two are probably safe enough. With those birds salted away the weaker brothers aren't likely to take any wild chances, at least until the thing has been pretty well forgotten."
Apprehension clouded his sleepy eyes.
"But, young people, if Slim and George escaped conviction or managed a getaway, I'd look for a new first-class detective, and—"
He took Nora's hand and studied her face, whose dark beauty remained unafraid.
"I guess I'd need another daughter, which I couldn't very well have."
He laughed brusquely.
"Slim and George are tight enough now, so why borrow trouble."
Garth saw the foreboding of his chief's eyes turn to curiosity, a trifle groping.
"Wish you'd kept out of it, daughter."
"Don't scold," she laughed. "You did enough of that the other night."
"I'm not," he grumbled, "I'm only wondering where you got the nerve, and the brains."
"Some from you, father."
"Not as much as all that. I guess your mother gave you a little that we hum-drum New Yorkers don't quite understand."
"If," Garth said, "anything develops, you'll have to send Nora away."
"If there's time," the inspector agreed.
He turned back to his papers, shaking his head.
It is, perhaps, as well, when one fears, that the march of routine brings new and destructive demands. It was only a few days afterwards that Garth and Nora were involved in events that drove their minds for the time from the threat, which they should never have quite lost sight of. Yet the Elmford murder didn't leave room in one's mind for much else.
On the afternoon before that tragedy Garth, leaving headquarters, made an unaccustomed purchase. Not long ago such affectation would have appealed to his sturdy, straightforward mind of a detective as trivial, possibly unmasculine. He reddened as he handed his ten cents to the shapeless Italian woman whose fingers about his coat lapel were confusingly deft. He had no illusions as to the source of this foppish prompting. The inspector had called him in and told him that Nora would welcome him at the flat for dinner that evening. The event appeared a milestone on the amorous path he sought to explore hand in hand with the girl. He realized his desired destination was not yet in view, but such progress required a deviation from the familiar—some peculiar concession to its significance. So he turned away from the cheap sidewalk stand, wearing, for the first time in his life, a flower in his button hole—a rose of doubtful future and unaristocratic lineage.
Before following Garth with his blushing decoration it is serviceable to know what happened at Elmford.