CHAPTER XVIII
THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT
"Where is Philip?"
Margaret put the question in a low, tense voice to Mrs. Pennybacker who had followed her.
"He was down there at the spring just a moment ago."
He was not there now, and Margaret went quickly down the steps and looked up and down the avenue in front of the hotel and down to the pier. He was nowhere in sight. She turned into the walk leading west, motioning Mrs. Pennybacker to take the other direction.
"Well, my audience seems to have melted away. What's the occasion, I wonder. I have almost lost the thread of my discourse."
"You were talking about the Pinkertons," said Bess, who was herself consumed with anxiety, but kept up her end of the log bravely. "I think they are looking for Philip." It had been a relief to them all to drop his aliases. "Suppose we walk up towards the station. Perhaps he is there."
Mr. Harcourt's little piece of news had thrown Margaret into the greatest alarm. What but a purpose, and that a menacing one, would bring a detective from Washington to We-que-ton-sing? She had no faith in Smeltzer's change of residence. She was wondering as she hurried on whether she would know him if she should come upon him. There was nothing she could recall about his appearance except that he wore a gray suit and had a big mustache—black, she thought.... Where was Philip? What if this man should have spirited him away already?
Her fears proved groundless, however, for as she peered anxiously up the first grass-grown avenue on which foot of beast was not allowed to step, there just beyond where the spring—set round with ferns—bubbles from its cement confines, she saw him standing in front of a tiny bungalow. It was a modest, unpretentious place, but she had noticed it before, for such a luxuriance of plant life enveloped it that it stood out with a distinction all its own, even in this place of beautiful homes.
A curtain of climbing nasturtiums veiled the south end of the piazza, a riotous growth of scarlet geraniums and foliage plants and trailing green things made a hanging garden round the porch, and the delicate Alleghany vine twined itself about a hardier colleague and ran races with it up the posts and round the eaves, and then—grown tired—dropped down again in graceful sprays that responded to every wooing breeze.