“We’d ought to look this up. There’s a big reward offered.”
While Ram Juna slept, lying in all his day clothes, some subtle subconsciousness kept watch, became aware of disturbance, and roused his body to attention. He got up, tiptoed to the open window and looked out at the group of men standing below in the darkness.
“Aw, shut up, Sal,” one of them was saying to an angry woman in the doorway. “We ain’t goin’ to raid ye, though Lord knows you wouldn’t have no kick comin’ if we did. What we want is that black feller that come to-night. We suspect he’s one of a gang of counterfeiters that the St. Etienne police are after; and we ain’t goin’ to lose the chance of the reward. You fellers keep right under the window, and I’ll take you six up stairs with me. He’s big and he may show fight. Get your guns ready. Don’t shoot to kill. We want to deliver him alive. But you needn’t be afraid to use a ball on him.”
Ram Juna drew away from the window and smiled his old Buddha smile. With clumsy creaking precautions they mounted the stair. The moment for the climax came; there was a rush all together, a breaking down of the shaky door. The crew burst into the room—an empty room—and stared puzzled and stupefied at the walls and at each other.
“Well, if that don’t beat all!” ejaculated the sheriff. “Where in —— has that fellow disappeared to?”
“They say,” said Josiah Strait, a lank westernized Yankee, “that them Hindu jugglers and lamas, and so forth, has supernatural gifts, and I begin to believe it.”
Something over a month later, Mr. Early burst in on Mr. and Mrs. Percival as they dawdled over the breakfast-table.
“It’s no time to be paying calls, I know,” he apologized, “but I’ve had such a sensation this morning that I had to come over and share it. Yes, there are times when a man wishes that he had a wife to talk to!”
“What is it, Early?” Dick asked indifferently.