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The Sturdy Oak

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"To let the people see that Mrs. Brewster-Smith and all your social friends
in this town are associated with Mike the Goat and his gang----"

Before Evans could finish, his partner stopped him.

"Yes, yes--the whole damned system of greed! The rich greed and the poor
greed--our criminal classes plotting to keep justice from the decent
law-abiding people of the place, who are led like sheep to the slaughter.
What did the owners pay that money for? Not for the dirty job that was
turned--not primarily. But to elect me, because they thought I would not
enforce the factory laws and the housing laws and would protect them in
their larceny! That money Uncle Martin collected was my price--my price!"

He was standing before his friends, rigid and white in rage. Neither man
answered him.

"And because the moral sense of the community was in the hearts and heads
of the women of the community," he went on, "those who are upholding the
immoral compact between business and politics had to attack the womanhood
of the town--and Genevieve's peril is my share in the shame. By God, I'm
through!"



CHAPTER XIII

BY MARY AUSTIN


Close on Young Remington's groan of utter disillusionment came a sound from
the street, formless and clumsy, but brought to a sharp climax with the
crash of breaking glass.

Even through the closed window which Penfield Evans hastily threw up, there
was an obvious quality to the disturbance which revealed its character even
before they had grasped its import.

The street was still full of morning shadows, with here and there a dancing
glimmer on the cobbles of the still level sun, caught on swinging dinner
pails as the loosely assorted crowd drifted toward shop and factory.

In many of the windows half-drawn blinds marked where spruce window
trimmers added last touches to masterpieces created overnight, but directly
opposite nothing screened the offense of the Voiceless Speech, which
continued to display its accusing questions to the passer-by.

Clean through the plate-glass front a stone had crashed, leaving a heap of
shining splinters, on either side of which a score of men and boys loosely
clustered, while further down a ripple of disturbance marked where the
thrower of the stone had just vanished into some recognized port of safety.

It was a clumsy crowd, half-hearted, moved chiefly by a cruel delight in.
destruction for its own sake, and giving voice at intervals to coarse
comment of which the wittiest penetrated through a stream of profanity,
like one of those same splinters of glass, to the consciousness of at least
two of the three men who hung listening in the window above:

"To hell with the----suffragists!"

At the same moment another stone hurled through the break sent the
Voiceless Speech toppling; it lay crumpled in a pathetic feminine sort
of heap, subject to ribald laughter, but Penny Evans' involuntary cry
of protest was cut off by his partner's hand on his shoulder. "They're
Noonan's men, Penny; it's a put-up job."

George had marked some of the crowd at the meetings Noonan had arranged for
him, and the last touch to the perfunctory character of the disturbance was
added by the leisurely stroll of the policeman turning in at the head of
the street. Before he reached the crowd it had redissolved into the rapidly
filling thoroughfare.

"It's no use, Penny. Our women have seen the light and beaten us to it;
we've got to go with them or with Noonan and his--Mike the Goat!"

Recollection of his wife's plight cut him like a knife. "The Brewster-Smith
women have got to choose for themselves!" He felt about for his hat like a
man blind with purpose.

The street sweeper was taking up the fragments of the shattered windows
half an hour later, when Martin Jaffry found himself going rather aimlessly
along Main Street with a feeling that the bottom had recently dropped
out of things--a sensation which, if the truth must be told, was greatly
augmented by the fact that he hadn't yet breakfasted. He had remained
behind the two younger men to get into communication with Betty Sheridan
and ask her to stay close to the telephone in case Miss Eliot should again
attempt to get into touch with her. He lingered still, dreading to go into
any of the places where he was known lest he should somehow be led to
commit himself embarrassingly on the subject of his nephew's candidacy.

His middle-aged jauntiness considerably awry, he moved slowly down the
heedless street, subject to the most gloomy reflections. Like most men,
Martin Jaffry had always been dimly aware that the fabric of society is
held together by a system of mutual weaknesses and condonings, but he
had always thought of himself and his own family as moving freely in the
interstices, peculiarly exempt, under Providence, from strain. Now here
they were, in such a position that the first stumbling foot might tighten
them all into inextricable scandal.

It is true that Penny, at the last moment, had prevailed on George to put
off the relief of his feelings by public repudiation of his political
connections, at least until after a conference with the police. And to
George's fear that the newspapers would get the news from the police before
he had had a chance to repudiate, he had countered with a suggestion, drawn
from an item in the private history of the chief--known to him through his
father's business--which he felt certain would quicken the chief's sense of
the propriety of keeping George's predicament from the press.

"My God!" said George in amazement, and Martin Jaffry had responded
fervently with "O Lord!"

Not because it shocked him to think that there might be indiscretions known
to the lawyer of a chief of police which the chief might not wish known to
the world, but because, with the addition of this new coil to his nephew's
affairs, he was suddenly struck with the possibility of still other coils
in any one of which the saving element of indiscretion might be wanting.

Suppose they should come upon one, just one impregnable honesty, one soul
whom the fear of exposure left unshaken. On such a possibility rested the
exemption of the Jaffry-Remingtons. It was the reference to E. Eliot in his
instructions to Betty which had awakened in Jaffry's mind the disquieting
reflection that just here might prove such an impregnability. They probably
wouldn't be able to "do anything" with E. Eliot simply because she herself
had never done anything she was afraid to go to the public about. To do him
justice, it never occurred to him that in the case of a lady it was easily
possible to invent something which would be made to answer in place of an
indiscretion.

Probably that was Martin Jaffry's own impregnability--that he wouldn't have
lied about a lady to save himself. What he did conclude was that it was
just this unbending quality of women, this failure to provide the saving
weakness, which unfitted them for political life.

He shuddered, seeing the whole fabric of politics fall in ruins around
an electorate composed largely of E. Eliots, feeling himself stripped of
everything that had so far distinguished him from the Noonans and the
Doolittles.

Out of his sudden need for reinstatement with himself, he raised in his
mind the vision of woman as the men of Martin Jaffry's world conceived
her--a tender, enveloping medium in which male complacency, unchecked by
any breath of criticism, reaches its perfect flower--the flower whose
fruit, eaten in secret and afar from the soil which nourishes it, is graft,
corruption and civic incompetence.

Instinctively his need directed him toward the Remington place.

Mrs. Brewster-Smith was glad to see him. Between George's hurried departure
and Jaffry's return several of the specters that haunt such women's lives
looked boldly in at the window.

There was the specter of scandal, as it touched the Remingtons, touching
that dearest purchase of femininity, social standing; there was the specter
of poverty, which threatened from the exposure of the source of her income
and the enforcement of the law; nearer and quite as poignant, was the
specter of an ignominious retreat from the comfort of George Remington's
house to her former lodging, which she was shrewd enough to realize would
follow close on the return of her cousin's wife.

All morning she had beaten off the invisible host with that courage--worthy
of a better cause--with which women of her class confront the assaults of
reality; and the sight of Martin Jaffry coming up the broad front walk met
her like a warm waft of security. She flung open the door and met him with
just that mixture of deference and relief which the situation demanded.

She was terribly anxious about poor Geneviève, of course, but not so
anxious that she couldn't perceive how Genevieve's poor uncle had suffered.

"What, no breakfast! Oh, you poor man! Come right out into the
dining-room."

Mrs. Brewster-Smith might have her limitations, but she was entirely aware
of the appeasing effect of an open fire and a spread cloth even when no
meal is in sight; she was adept in the art of enveloping tenderness and the
extent to which it may be augmented by the pleasing aroma of ham and eggs
and the coffee which she made herself. And oh, those _poor_ women, what
_disaster_ they were bringing on themselves by their prying into things
that were better left to more competent minds, and what pain to _other_
minds! So _selfish_, but of course they didn't realize. Really she hoped
it would be a lesson to Geneviève. The dear girl was so changed that she
didn't see how she was going to go on living with her; though, of course,
she would like to stand by dear George--and a woman did so appreciate a
home!

At this point the enveloping tenderness of Mrs. Brewster-Smith concentrated
in her fine eyes, just brushed the heart of her listener as with a passing
wing, hovered a moment, and dropped demurely to the tablecloth.

In the meantime two sorely perplexed citizens were grappling with the
problem of the disappearance of two highly respectable women from their
homes under circumstances calculated to give the greatest anxiety to
faithful "party" men. It hadn't needed Penny's professional acquaintance
with Chief Buckley to impress the need of secrecy on that official's soul.
"Squeal" on Noonan or Mike the Goat? Not if he knew himself. Naturally Mr.
Remington must have his wife, but at the same time it was important to
proceed regularly.

"And the day before election, too!" mourned the chief. "Lord, what a mess!
But keep cool, Mr. Remington; this will come out all right!"

After half an hour of such ineptitudes, Penfield Evans found it necessary
to withdraw his partner from the vicinity of the police before his
impatience reached the homicidal pitch.

"Buckley's no such fool as he sounds," Penny advised. "He probably has a
pretty good idea where the women are hidden, but you must give him time to
tip off Mike for a getaway."

But the suggestion proved ill chosen, at least so far as it involved a hope
of keeping George from the newspapers. Shocked to the core of his young
egotism as he had been, Remington was yet not so shocked that the need of
expression was not stronger in him than any more distant consideration.

"Getaway!" he frothed. "Getaway! While a woman like my wife--" But the bare
idea was too much for him.

"They may get away, but they'll not get off--not a damned one of them--of
_us_," he corrected himself, and with face working the popular young
candidate for district attorney set off almost on a run for the office of
the Sentinel.

Reflecting that if his friend was bent upon official suicide, there was
still no reason for his being, a witness to it, Penny turned aside into
a telephone booth and called up Betty Sheridan. He heard her jump at the
sound of his voice, and the rising breath of relief running into his name.

"O-o-oh, Penny! Yes, about twenty minutes ago. Geneviève is with her....
Oh, yes, I'm sure."

Her voice sounded strong and confident.

"They're in a house about an hour from the factory," she went on, "among
some trees. I'm sure she said trees. We were cut off. No, I couldn't get
her again.... Yes ... it's a party line. In the Redfield district. Oh,
Penny, do you think they'll do her any harm?"

It was, no doubt, the length of time it took to assure Miss Sheridan on
this point that prevented Evans from getting around to the _Sentinel_,
whose editor was at that moment giving an excellent exhibition of
indecision between his obligation as a journalist and his rôle of leading
citizen in a town where he met his subscribers at dinner.

It was good stuff--oh, it was good! What headlines!

PROMINENT SOCIETY WOMEN KIDNAPPED

CANDIDATE REMINGTON REPUDIATES PARTY!

It was good for a double evening edition. On the other hand, there was
Norton, one of his largest advertisers. There was also the rival city of
Hamilton, which was even now basely attempting to win away from Whitewater
a recently offered Carnegie library on the ground of its superior fitness.

Finally there was the party.

The _Sentinel_ had always been a sound party organ. But _what_ a scoop!
And suppose it were possible to save the party at the expense of its worst
element? Suppose they raised the cry of reform and brought Remington in on
a full tide of public indignation?

Would Mike stand the gaff? If it were made worth his while. But what about
Noonan and Doolittle? So the editorial mind shuttled to and fro amid the
confused outpourings of the amazed young candidate, while with eyes bright
and considering as a rat's the editor followed Remington in his pacings up
and down the dusty, littered room.

Completely occupied with his own reactions, George's repudiation swept on
in an angry, rapid stream which, as it spent itself, began to give place to
the benumbing consciousness of a divided hearing.

Until this moment Remington had had a pleasant sense of the press as a fine
instrument upon which he had played with increasing mastery, a trumpet upon
which, as his mind filled with commendable purposes, he could blow a very
pretty tune,--a noble tune with now and then a graceful flourish acceptable
to the public ear. Now as he talked he began to be aware of flatness, of
squeaking keys....

"Naturally, Mr. Remington, I'll have to take this up with the business
management..." dry-lipped, the tune sputtered out. At this juncture the
born journalist awaked again in the editorial breast at the entrance of
Penfield Evans with his new item of Betty's interrupted message.

Two women shut up in a mysterious house among the trees! Oh, hot stuff,
indeed!

Under it George rallied, recovered a little of the candidate's manner.

"Understand," he insisted. "This goes in even if I have to pay for it at
advertising rates."

A swift pencil raced across the paper as Remington's partner swept him off
again to the police.

Betty's call had come a few minutes before ten. What had happened was very
simple.

The two women had been given breakfast, for which their hands had been
momentarily freed. When the bonds had been tied again it had been easy for
E. Eliot to hold her hands in such a position that she was left, when their
keeper withdrew, with a little freedom of movement.

By backing up to the knob she had been able to open a door into an
adjoining room, in which she had been able to make out a telephone on a
stand against the wall.

This room also had locked windows and closed shutters, but her quick wit
had enabled her to make use of that telephone.

Shouldering the receiver out of the hook, she had called Betty's number,
and, with Geneviève stooping to listen at the dangling receiver, had called
out two or three broken sentences.

Guarded as their voices had been, however, some one in the house had been
attracted by them, and the wire had been cut at some point outside the
room. E. Eliot and Geneviève came to this conclusion after having lost
Betty and failed to raise any answer to their repeated calls. Somebody came
and looked in at them through the half-open door, and, seeing them still
bound, had gone away again with a short, contemptuous laugh.

"No matter," said E. Eliot. "Betty heard us, and the central office will be
able to trace the call."

It was because she could depend on Betty's intelligence, she went on to
say, that she had called her instead of the Remington house--for suppose
that fool Brewster-Smith woman had come to the telephone!

She and Geneviève occupied themselves with their bonds, fumbling back to
back for a while, until Geneviève had a brilliant idea. Kneeling, she bit
at the cords which held Miss Eliot's wrists until they began to give.

* * * * *

What Betty had done intelligently was nothing to what she had done without
meaning it. She had been unkind to Pudge. Young Sheridan was in a condition
which, according to his own way of looking at it, demanded the utmost
kindness.

Following a too free indulgence in _marrons glacés_ he had been relegated
to a diet that reduced him to the extremity of desperation.

Not only had he been forbidden to eat sweets, but while his soul still
longed for its accustomed solace, his stomach refused it, and he was unable
to eat a box of candied fruit which he had with the greatest ingenuity
secured.

And that was the occasion Betty took--herself full of nervous starts and
mysterious recourse to the telephone behind locked doors--to remind him
cruelly that he was getting flabby from staying too much in the house and
to recommend a long walk for his good.

It was plain that she would stick at nothing to get her brother out of the
way, and Pudge was cut to the heart.

Oh, well, he would go for a walk, from which he would probably be brought
home a limp and helpless cripple. Come to think of it, if he once got
started to walk he was not sure he would ever turn back; he would just walk
on and on into a kinder environment than this.

After all, it is impossible to walk in that fateful way in a crowded city
thoroughfare. Besides, one passes so many confectioners with their mingled
temptation and disgust. Pudge rode on the trolley as far as the city
limits. Here there was softer ground underfoot and a hint of melancholy in
the fields. A flock of crows going over gave the appropriate note.

Off there to the left, set back from the road among dark, crowding trees,
stood a mysterious house. Pudge always insisted that he had known it for
mysterious at the first glance. It had a mansard roof and shutters of a
sickly green, all closed; there was not a sign of life about, but smoke
issued from one of the chimneys.

Here was an item potent to raise the sleuth that slumbers in every boy,
even in such well-cushioned bosoms as Pudge Sheridan's.

He paused in his walk, fell into an elaborately careless slouch, and tacked
across the open country toward the back of the house. Here he discovered a
considerable yard fenced with high boards that had once been painted the
same sickly green as the shutters, and a great buckeye tree just outside,
spreading its branches over the corner furthest from the house.

Toward this post of observation he was drifting with that fine assumption
of aimlessness which can be managed on occasion by almost any boy, when he
was arrested by a slight but unmistakable shaking of one of the shutters,
as though some one from within were trying the fastenings.

The shaking stopped after a moment, and then, one after another, the slats
of the double leaves were seen to turn and close as though for a secret
survey of the field. After a moment or two this performance was repeated at
the next window on the left, and finally at a third.

Here the shaking was resumed after the survey, and ended with the shutter
opening with a snap and being caught back from within and held cautiously
on the crack. Pudge kicked clods in his path and was pretentiously occupied
with a dead beetle which he had picked up.

All at once something flickered across the ground at his feet, swung two or
three times, touched his shoe, traveled up the length of his trousers and
rested on his breast. How that bosom leaped to the adventure!

He fished hurriedly in his pocket and brought up a small round mirror. It
had still attached to its rim a bit of the ribbon by which it had been
fastened to his sister's shopping bag, from which, if the truth must be
told, he had surreptitiously detached it.

Pretending to consult it, as though it were some sort of pocket oracle,
Pudge flashed back, and presently had the satisfaction of seeing a
bright fleck of light travel across the shutter. Immediately there was
a responsive flicker from the window: one, two, three, he counted, and
flashed back: one, two, three.

Pudge's whole being was suffused with delicious thrills. He wished now he
had obeyed that oft-experienced presentiment and learned the Morse code; it
was a thing no man destined for adventure should be without. This wordless
interchange went on for a few moments, and then a hand, a woman's hand--O
fair, imprisoned ladies of all time!--appeared cautiously at the open
shutter, waved and pointed.

It pointed toward the buckeye tree. Pudge threw a stone in that direction
and sauntered after it, pitching and throwing. Once at the corner, after a
suitable exhibition of casualness, he climbed until he found himself higher
than the fence, facing the house.

While he was thus occupied, things had been happening there. The shutter
had been thrown back and a woman was climbing down by the help of a window
ledge below and a pair of knotted window curtains.

Another woman prepared to follow her, gesticulating forcibly to the other
not to wait, but to run. Run she did, but it was not until Pudge, lying
full length on the buckeye bough, reached her a hand that he discovered her
to be his sister's friend, Geneviève Remington.

In the interval of her scrambling up by the aid of the bent bough and such
help as he could give her, they had neglected to observe the other woman.
Now, as Mrs. Remington's heels drummed on the outside of the fence, Pudge
was aware of some commotion in the direction of the house, and saw Miss
Eliot running toward him, crying: "Run, run!" while two men pursued her.
She made a desperate jump toward the tree, caught the branch, hung for
a moment, lost her hold, and brought Pudge ignominiously down in a heap
beside her.

If Miss Eliot had not contradicted it, Pudge would have believed to his
dying day that bullets hurtled through the air; it was so necessary to
the dramatic character of the adventure that there should be bullets.
He recovered from the shock of his fall in time to hear Miss Eliot say:
"Better not touch me, Mike; if there's so much as a bruise when my friends
find me, you'll get sent up for it."

Her cool, even tones cut the man's stream of profanity like a knife. He
came threateningly close to her, but refrained from laying hands on either
of them.

Meantime his companion drew himself up to the top of the fence for a look
over, and dropped back with a gesture intended to be reassuring. Pudge rose
gloriously to the occasion.

"The others have gone back to call the police," he announced. Mike spat out
an oath at him, but it was easy to see that he was not at all sure that
this might not be the case. The possibility that it might be, checked
a movement to pursue the fleeing Geneviève. Miss Eliot caught their
indecision with a flying shaft.

"Mrs. George Remington," she said, "will probably be in communication with
her friends very shortly. And between his wife and his old and dear friend
Mike it won't take George Remington long to choose."

This was so obvious that it left the men nothing to say. They fell in
surlily on either side of her, and without any show of resistance she
walked calmly back toward the house. Pudge lingered, uncertain of his cue.

"Beat it, you putty-face!" Mike snarled at him, showing a yellow fang. "If
you ain't off the premises in about two shakes, you'll get what's comin' to
you. See?"

Pudge walked with as much dignity as he could muster in the direction
of the public road. He could see nothing of Mrs. Remington in either
direction; now and then a private motor whizzed by, but there was no other
house near enough to suggest a possibility of calling for help.

He concealed himself in a group of black locusts and waited. In about half
an hour he heard a car coming from the house with the mansard roof, and saw
that it held three occupants, two men and a woman. The men he recognized,
and he was certain that the woman, though she was well bundled up, was
not E. Eliot.

The motor turned away from the town and disappeared in the opposite
direction. Pudge surmised that Mike was making his getaway. He waited
another half hour and began to be assailed by the pangs of hunger. The
house gave no sign; even the smoke from the chimney stopped.

He was sure Miss Eliot was still there; imagination pictured her weltering
in her own gore. Between fear and curiosity and the saving hope that there
might be food of some sort in the house, Pudge left his hiding place and
began a stealthy approach.

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