She saw through it all now. He had thought she would immediately accept his suggestion yesterday morning and come up to this place; so sure had he been, that he had lured Mrs. Johnson up here while she was out with Louis Hammond. Then—then when she had refused unless he explained, he had hired that hateful, horrible Indian and his band to carry her off by force. When she next saw Acey Smith—well, he’d know a piece of her mind about it!
But the elder woman was proceeding: “When the afternoon passed and you didn’t come, I began to feel worried, Josie, until word was brought up by one of the Indians that you couldn’t come till this morning. I was a little nervous in that big house all alone except for those Indians, but they seemed ready to do everything for me and I kept the electric lights going all night. Really, dear, it’s a wonderful place. Like something you’d read about in a story-book—old, old furniture, great big rooms and huge fire-places and wall mirrors. And away off in one wing is a library full of queer books, and back of it again is a laboratory such as scientists use. But it’s locked up and you can see through the glass door that there’s dust over everything and it hasn’t been used for years.”
But Josephine Stone was too exhausted by her exciting morning’s experience to talk, let alone go about exploring the house. Her limbs seemed trembling under her as she entered the door. The reaction of a sleepless night and the events of the morning were commencing to tell on her. So, directly after Mrs. Johnson had procured her a hot cup of tea, she went direct to the room in the western end of the building which the elder woman said had been set aside for her. She flung herself on the bed without troubling to even take her shoes off, and pulling the coverlet over her dropped off to sleep immediately.
II
It was two hours later—almost eleven o’clock—when she awoke, quite refreshed. There was a light tapping at her chamber door. She leaped from the bed, adjusted her rumpled hair by the glass and smoothed out her skirt. She opened the door to find Mrs. Johnson in the hall accompanied by two Indians bearing a hamper. The Indians, at Mrs. Johnson’s direction, carried the hamper into the room and departed.
To her delight, Miss Stone found it to contain, neatly packed, her wardrobe from the cottage at Amethyst Island as well as her toilet articles and other personal effects.
“That awful-looking Indian and the two that just went out brought it,” explained Mrs. Johnson, which set Josephine Stone pondering over the sagacity which the wily Ogima Bush must have employed to revisit the island and safely spirit away her belongings under the very noses of the police.
While she was dressing, Miss Stone told the elder woman as much as she thought it policy to tell her of the events in connection with her forcible removal from Amethyst Island to the Cup of Nannabijou.
Mrs. Johnson listened with growing amazement. “I had thought—in fact, I was sure—that it was an arrangement between you and Mr. Smith,” she gasped. “I had no idea—”
“Oh, it was—in a way, pre-arranged,” hastily replied the girl. “But it was not entirely according to what I had planned. Do you think there is any way we could make our escape—at night, for instance—if we found it necessary?”