Chapter V
ROBBER’S ROOST, UNINCORPORATED
FROM a roadhouse two miles away Thaxton called up Mrs. Horoson, his housekeeper. Without giving her a chance to protest he told her there would be six, besides himself, for dinner that night and that a Mr. and Mrs. Mosely were occupying the violet room.
He bade her break the news to Miss Gregg, on the latter’s imminent return from Stormcrest, and to Miss Lane. Then he hung up, precipitately, and rejoined Chase in the road.
“Let’s hustle!” he adjured. “She may find where we are from Central and follow us. I can count on Horoson not to decamp even if the servants do. But every now and then I feel toward her as I used to when I was a kid and she caught me stealing Uncle Oz’s cigarettes. Hurry!”
It was within a half hour of dinner time when Vail and Chase, by devious back ways, returned to Vailholme and let themselves in at a rear door, preparatory to creeping upstairs to their rooms to dress for the seven-o’clock meal.
The dinner ordeal was one of unrelieved hideousness. But for gallant old Miss Gregg, the situation must have fallen asunder much sooner than it did. Thaxton Vail, at the table’s head, writhed in misery. He had absolutely no idea how to handle the unhandleable situation.
It was Miss Gregg who, unasked, took control of everything. Being wholly fearless, she had no normal terror of the austere Horoson or of the ever-sourer-visaged Vogel.
During the endless wait before dinner was announced she slipped out to the dining room. Thaxton was there, flustered and curt, trying to coerce his rebellious upper servants into setting the wheels of domestic machinery into motion.
Vogel already had given warning, proclaiming briefly but proudly the list of his former super-excellent positions, and repeating, as a sort of eternal slogan of refrain that he was a butler and not a boarding-house head waiter.
It was at this point that Hester Gregg took charge.