Just then I was determined that my companion should not stray back to
the wreck, and to that end I was determinedly facetious.
“Do you know that it is Sunday?” she asked suddenly, “and that we are
actually ragged?”
“Never mind that,” I retorted. “All Baltimore is divided on Sunday into
three parts, those who rise up and go to church, those who rise up and
read the newspapers, and those who don’t rise up. The first are
somewhere between the creed and the sermon, and we need not worry about
the others.”
“You treat me like a child,” she said almost pettishly. “Don’t try so
hard to be cheerful. It—it is almost ghastly.”
After that I subsided like a pricked balloon, and the remainder of the
ride was made in silence. The information that she would go to friends
in the city was a shock: it meant an earlier separation than I had
planned for. But my arm was beginning again. In putting her into a cab
I struck it and gritted my teeth with the pain. It was probably for
that reason that I forgot the gold bag.
She leaned forward and held out her hand. “I may not have another
chance to thank you,” she said, “and I think I would better not try,
anyhow. I cannot tell you how grateful I am.” I muttered something
about the gratitude being mine: owing to the knock I was seeing two
cabs, and two girls were holding out two hands.
“Remember,” they were both saying, “you have never met me, Mr.
Blakeley. And—if you ever hear anything about me—that is not—pleasant,
I want you to think the best you can of me. Will you?”
The two girls were one now, with little flashes of white light playing
all around. “I—I’m afraid that I shall think too well for my own good,”
I said unsteadily. And the cab drove on.
CHAPTER XI.
THE NAME WAS SULLIVAN
I had my arm done up temporarily in Baltimore and took the next train
home. I was pretty far gone when I stumbled out of a cab almost into
the scandalized arms of Mrs. Klopton. In fifteen minutes I was in bed,
with that good woman piling on blankets and blistering me in
unprotected places with hot-water bottles. And in an hour I had a whiff
of chloroform and Doctor Williams had set the broken bone.
I dropped asleep then, waking in the late twilight to a realization
that I was at home again, without the papers that meant conviction for
Andy Bronson, with a charge of murder hanging over my head, and with
something more than an impression of the girl my best friend was in
love with, a girl moreover who was almost as great an enigma as the
crime itself.
“And I’m no hand at guessing riddles,” I groaned half aloud. Mrs.
Klopton came over promptly and put a cold cloth on my forehead.
“Euphemia,” she said to some one outside the door, “telephone the
doctor that he is still rambling, but that he has switched from green
ribbons to riddles.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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