Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 10
CHARLIE BIGWIND deposited Harrington on shore.
"How do I make town, I wonder?" he speculated, then paused to glance curiously about at the signs of recent automobile tracks carving the lush grasses, as if like hieroglyphics they concealed while they wrote down the things he wished to know of last night's fracas and its participants.
But when he had climbed by a short cut to the level of the main road, tunneling through perennial verdure, a coupé was there, with its open window framing a face in a picture hat.
"Why, Mr. Harrington! You have had an accident!" cried a startled voice, beautiful in its concern. "I—I wasn't quite sure where I was to meet you. Besides, that telephone message was so—so laconic that it awed me."
Harrington knew in a blurred way that the door of the coupé opened and that Miss Billie Boland was advancing to him along the highway.
"Are you much hurt?" she called to him across the twenty yards that intervened.
"Not much, thank you," he called back, gazing through a rainbow-mist to where, against a background of ferns, there advanced to him a swaying grace, clad in garments as exotic as the petals of an orchid.
"But what happened?" called Miss Billie again, in a puzzled tone, as she took in the details of his rather grotesque appearance.
Harrington, unconscious now of the figure he cut, was slow in answering. He was seeing her more clearly with every step, dwelling on each new perception. Her frock was a pink foam that clung as if it loved the curves which molded it and, but for that hat, she might have been some garden nymph whose costume was a flower. Contrasts with another type of beauty were inevitable; but—here was his kind. He witnessed this to himself by quickening his stride.
"Just that I got a bang on the bean and a tumble in the water," he explained as they met. "A Siwash—man from my old platoon—pulled me out and a—another—another Siwash did me up."
"And of course those Indians learned their first-aid lessons like the others," Billie inferred, observing his bandages with professional approval.
"Hum—yes," mumbled Henry, guiltily aware that he had been vague by some kind of instinct rather than remembering to be designedly so.
But all other sensations were momentarily blotted out by Billie's young arm essaying to support him along the highway when he needed no support at all. And her whole manner was delicious. She wasn't upstage for a minute. She had come out here on this telephone call to taxi him into town just like a regular good fellow. He noted all this with deep inward trickles of delight; also that the girl's face was flushed with pleasurable excitement.
"And now?" she asked as the car was straightened out on the homeward road, "just what did happen? Something about the vault robbers, wasn't it?"
"Just a foolish break of mine, Miss Boland," apologized Henry, feeling somehow that many things were foolish—including himself—when he sat so close to this exciting presence; then he narrated, with certain studied omissions, something of what had happened.
The girl had listened gravely, much impressed. "That was big of you, Mr. Harrington," she said, "but it was rash." The blue eyes shifted to the roadway, but in the expression of her pliant lips remained the ghost of her disapproval. The mold of that disapproval made the expression altogether lovely to contemplate.
As they sped a pleasant fragrance of the forest came in from without; but there was another fragrance; subtle, elusive, delightful. It came from within—from her. It was infinitely delicate and delicately stirring. Yes—she was his kind.
"I—I am sorry that I missed the golf game," it occurred to him to say, "but—but I was overcome with drowsiness while that—that Siwash was working on me." He felt mean that having been vague at first, vagueness was required once more.
"After that terrible blow?" The blue eyes were round and lifted sympathetically to the mountainous bandages. "You poor man! I should think you would be. Don't mention it—now that I know why. But you had other appointments for the day, I believe."
"No; no other appointments," ruminated Henry; "at least nothing important."
The girl threw him a scrutinizing glance, saw that he was serious and then laughed merrily. "You didn't count Scanlon important then? How that will take him down!"
Henry started at the mention of the traitor, then experienced elation at perceiving that Miss Billie must have been quizzing her father about him last night after he left.
"You're not as impractical as that, are you," she harpooned into his mind amusedly—"to neglect a formal contract and the matter of emolument?"
"No; oh, no," Harrington disclaimed with a perplexed smile; and then, suddenly frank as a schoolboy, blurted: "In fact, I think I'm a good deal less impractical since you gave me that shot yesterday about peace-time slackers."
So unassuming, so uncomplaining, so grotesque in his wrinkled evening clothes and sheik-like headgear, and so gravely unaware was he, Billie had been quite unable to keep from laughing at this naive young man; but at this remark she was instantly all serious. "You mean that just from my chance word you've decided to get busy—at least to get busier?" She asked the question admiringly, making plain that she had exactly the same passion as her father to see everybody up and doing—to make two volts of energy crackle with human effort where only one had sizzled before.
Henry flushed up—he who was so unaccustomed to flushing—and felt an embarrassed desire to evade those questioning violet rays, but they pinned him helplessly. "Why, yes. It seems absurd—it sounds like bunk to be telling you this, Miss Boland; and perhaps it's only a coincidence, but, right after seeing you, I decided to be less impracticall. I went down to my office and registered a whole lot of new resolutions."
Charming curiosity and sly pleasure were both figured on Miss Boland's face, but the latter was too furtive for Henry to discern it. "What sort of resolutions?" she inquired interestedly.
But Harrington was flustered and evasive, wondering why on earth he had said this to her at all. "Oh, just the usual kind," he hedged.
"Oh, not to smoke or drink or play poker, I suppose."
"Oh, no, believe me," pleaded Henry, and smiled wretchedly, seeing now that he would have to muddle through. "Just the usual thing for a caseless lawyer who sort of wakes up. Resolved to make more money for one thing, but resolved to hold fast to the—the spiritual element in my profession at the same time."
Miss Boland honored these avowals with an appreciative glance; yet chose to reflect upon his stammering distress in silence.
Harrington, too, was silent. Why was he making such an ass of himself about what had seemed such a perfectly rational and normal thing to do? Why did this gir] so thrill him and at the same time throw him off his stride? He was angry with himself and desperate. He didn't propose to remain thus ill at ease with anybody.
"Miss Boland," he demanded, as if she might hold the key, "what makes me so foolish, babbling this stuff to you?"
"Foolish?" The blue eyes threw him a glance of the gentlest reproof, utterly demolishing. "It seems very fine to me—as far as I understand it."
The young man gazed quite rapt. Hers was an angel face, an angel voice; he was beside himself, out of himself!
"Miss Boland?" he inquired in a startled tone, his hand involuntarily upon her arm, his expression one that mingled honest doubt with glorified joy. "Could it be that I am in love with you? . . . Could it?"
The look Billie gave him was complex. If she laughed, he was done for.
"You should know, Mr. Harrington," she suggested.
"But I don't," confessed the man helplessly.
Then she did laugh, but not derisively; her manner lightly mischievous. "Are you—are you more than usually susceptible where womankind is concerned?"
"By Jove, I thought I wasn't," declared Henry, then smiling weakly; "but I must have been mistaken. Strange things have been done to me. The world was gray yesterday morning; before evening it was all lit up. Life was—just—just wiggling along; but within an hour it had become exciting, a thing to be rushed at.
"That's why I did that fool thing about the rope. That's why I stepped into this movie stuff with the vault robbers. That's why I made all those exalted resolutions. Life seemed all at once so big and vital that I wanted to rush right at it, to tackle anywhere, high or low, and throw it and sit on top. It must—it must be you, don't you think?" He smiled, this time, with engaging frankness; then went on:
"Just now as I've been sitting here, you seemed to me all at once—no, not all at once! You've been growing on me—off and on—through all these twenty-six hours I've known you, until you seem just the biggest, grandest adventure that ever was. I want to fling myself right at you."
The man was so serious that Miss Boland had to be.
"Do you think it could be that—that I am in love with you?" he persisted, gray eyes big and honest.
The corners of Miss Boland's mouth twitched, but she made them behave. It seemed to be a case wherein she was expected to assist. "It may be only infatuation," she speculated demurely.
"I—I can't believe it," said Henry, so desperate that he had quite lost his sense of humor.
"Or it might be that blow on the head."
"No!" he insisted. "When I look at you, Miss Boland, I know that if I have been able to fall in love with you my mind must be at its sanest."
"Your tongue is certainly at its glibbest," she rallied him; but all at once he was struck with a new compunction.
"But could love be worth anything," he demurred, ridiculously grave, "love that broke out in, say, less than twenty-six hours?"
"I believe that even measles require a longer period of incubation," teased Miss Boland; "which reminds me that I am on the way to a hospital with a wounded man."
"No, no," protested Henry quickly. "Just drop me at the hotel, please. I'll have Doc Austin come there and replace this turban effect with a piece of court-plaster the size of a postage stamp."
"As you will," said Billie, and with a flashy turn, drew up at the curb in front of the Hotel Gregory. Henry had scarcely noticed where they were and had a dismayed feeling that the drive had ended too soon. There was something not—not yet settled.
"Thank you for bringing me in," his lips were saying.
"It was a perfectly exciting pleasure," she sparkled. "If your hurt proves as slight as you think, perhaps you can make good on that golf game tomorrow."
Tomorrow! She had said tomorrow. "Even though I totter and fall down after every drive," affirmed Henry, seizing her hand rather violently.
"That will be very sporting of you," declared Billie.
"Good afternoon, Miss Boland!" said a voice right over Henry's shoulder.
Scanlon! Harrington's pose instantly stiffened; he controlled himself with an effort; for it was the voice of the traitor—those same throaty, powerful tones that he had heard last in the darkness of this early morning yonder by the decayed boat landing—the identical tones!
But when he turned, the speaker was not Scanlon at all. He was a man as large, but younger—not more than thirty-five. Burly of head and shoulders, with close-clipped yellow mustaches and a V-shaped patch of the hirsute upon his chin; with eyes abnormally bright and areas immediately beneath them abnormally dark and faintly seamed, a foreign-looking type or at least a cosmopolitan one.
Harrington's mind was groping. It was the very voice—yes; and the fellow, with all his silk hat and frock coat and spats, looked the villain underneath; looked the master mind of almost any sort of plot that was nefarious and evil and profit-promising. He looked a smarter, keener, more merciless and unscrupulous Hornblower! Yet he had addressed Miss Boland as if he were upon terms of familiar acquaintance with her. He was a stranger to Edgewater; how should he know Miss Boland then?
"Ah, Count Eckstrom!" Billie exclaimed in the tones of pleasant surprise. "Count Eckstrom—my friend Mr. Henry Harrington."
And Count Eckstrom bore himself like a thoroughbred, proffering a hand with such deference as he would have shown at meeting a cabinet minister, whereas Henry Harrington looked like a bandaged and bearded hang-over from some all-night debauch. Noblesse oblige. Henry must take it. He found it soft, albeit with sinews of steel.
"Pleased, I'm sure!" Harrington declared, and he really was—pleased as the trailing hound when for an instant he sights the fox.
"Most happy!" professed the nobleman with a bend from the hips and a smile that was wide and toothful, yet, to Henry's eye, expressionless as the grin of an opossum.
"And have you known Count Eckstrom long, Miss Boland?" he inquired, as with suave courtesy.
"Oh, ages and ages!" sparkled Billie, with a light of favor in the glance she bent upon the Count, which made Harrington hate him the more. "I met him three months ago in Paris, and two months ago in London and one month ago in New York; and to my surprise ran across him in Seattle last week where he had entrenched at the New Washington after traipsing up and down through our Northwest, looking at mountains and waterfalls, whipping out salmon waters and trying, I believe, even a cougar hunt. Four meetings—in four worlds—that makes us old acquaintances, doesn't it?"
The Count bowed a flattered assent, lifting his silk topper gravely.
"She doesn't know a darned thing about him," perceived Henry, thinking lightning-fast. "He's a crook—maybe one of these international and cosmopolitan crooks that you read about. . . . Cougars, eh! He's a big-game hunter, that fellow!"
"Promise to telephone me the moment Doctor Austin has concluded his examination," Billie adjured with one of her most fascinating looks of concern; and then reversed its English by adding: "Father will want to know."
Henry, wild with jealousy and bitter in his wrath, watched Count Eckstrom ride away in the seat he had vacated.
"With apologies to Tom Scanlon!" he said almost aloud and, turning, bumped into Scanlon himself.