Miss Fitzhugh looked slightly bewildered. “Very well,” she said. “On your head be it. Now we must see about getting a ship.”
“A ship!” Caruth leaned forward. All through the conversation he had lain back in his chair, listening but not uttering a single word. The girl seemed entirely competent to manage things, and he felt no call to intervene, though he shivered once or twice when she spoke so openly to this plainsman, who frankly confessed that he was ready to play traitor for a sufficiently large reward. But his chance had come around at last.
“A ship!” he echoed. “Don’t worry about that. I have a thousand-ton yacht eating its head off down the bay. I’ll be delighted if you will use it as your own. When shall we sail?”
CHAPTER NINE
PROFESSOR SHISHKIN spent the next ten days after Maxime’s cataclysmal visit in worrying over what he had to do and in trying to devise some way of eluding at least that part of his orders that required him to take Olga with him. Knowing the methods of the Brotherhood, he guessed that, if need be, they would not hesitate to use the girl in accomplishing their ends, at whatever peril to her. On the other hand, he was resolved that she should never go back to Russia. But how to avoid the necessity he could not see. He worried himself sick over it.
He was in this state of mind when Marie Fitzhugh notified him by the long-distance telephone—for she did not wish to be seen in his company or at his house—to send the notice of his impending departure on Mr. Caruth’s yacht to the papers, and to be ready to sail in four days.
It was not difficult to get the announcement printed. The Professor’s scientific achievements, while they had never brought him wealth, had brought him the homage of the intellectual of all lands. He had even been discovered by the New York Sunday papers and had had his achievements attractively described in a syndicate letter written by a special writer, who criticised—and disproved—the Professor’s famous theory of rising sea-floors by the sole light of information derived from the books of the Professor himself.
In spite of this, the Professor was a friend to newspaper men, and was always willing to be interviewed on almost any subject connected with his work. So when he desired to give out the news of his coming trip, he had only to choose to which newspaper friend he would send it.
Finally he picked out Bristow, for much the same reasons that had led Caruth to consult that well-informed individual. He had first met the reporter on his arrival from a trip to Europe several years before, and had been attracted to him by the able and intelligent account which the reporter had printed concerning certain scientific discoveries he had made on his trip. This good impression was confirmed on several later occasions. Further, the reporter naturally occurred to him, because that young man had recently become a somewhat constant caller at the New Jersey cottage. (The Professor was slightly bewildered by his apparent assiduity in the pursuit of science, but did not suspect that his daughter might have something to do with it.) Further, as ship-news reporter for the Consolidated Press, Bristow was not only the exact man to handle such an item, but was best adapted to give it the wide publicity desired by its publication in the papers served by that great news organization.
Bristow put the item “on the wires,” and then hurried down to East Orange at the first possible moment. He did not, however, go straight to the Professor himself, but to that gentleman’s daughter. Moreover, he addressed her as Olga, from which it might be suspected that matters had progressed further than the Professor imagined.