As the mystery of Jane and Jane’s tactics decreased, however, the correlative mysteries increased—of the selective robbery, the lied-about ’phone wires, the park as a cemetery for something literally “lost” and the direction, or mis-direction of the chief mourner’s search.
A culminative interrogation point to add to his collection was her next lead. She entered the Traverse quite as his trailing sense had foretold at a spot where the wall was easily negotiable. There he waited, assuming that the rest of her route home would be direct and planning, now that he had been assured of her presence in town, that later in the evening he would telephone the most direct and forceful plea of which he was capable for an immediate interview.
But again she upset his calculations.
Instead of following the asphalted footpath that hemmed the cobbles on one side of the cut, she picked her place and scaled the south wall. Although the section confronting him was higher, Pape lost no time in following her example and gained the top to see her dodging past one of the scattered lights. Darkness had settled. Appreciating how easily he might lose her in that unfamiliar section of municipal tumble-land, he decreased the gap between them.
A veritable butte loomed in her path, but this she took like a mountaineer. To Pape she appeared to be executing some sort of an obstacle race with herself. In his self-appointed capacity of rear-guard there was nothing for him but to follow. Being something of a climber himself, he reached the top just behind her, despite her advantage of a trail which he had not been able to find. Rounding one of the bowlder-formed crags that gave picturesqueness to the baby mountain, he pulled up short.
Jane was standing some few yards ahead, her bent back toward him, a quaint, distinct silhouette in the reflected light from Fifty-ninth Street. As she did not once glance over-shoulder, she evidently considered his pursuit thrown off. She may have paused to steady the pulses disturbed by her lively climb; perhaps was enjoying the electrical display which so fascinated him.
Indeed it was worth a long-time look, that fairyland of The Plaza, as seen through the framing fringe of trees, with its statues and fountains agleam; the hotel-house of fifty-thousand candles, all lit; the lines of Fifth Avenue’s golden globes stretching indefinitely beyond; on all sides, far and near, the banked sky-line of bright-blinking, essentially real palaces of modernity which yet were so much more inconceivable than Munchausen’s wildest dream. And that foreground figure of an old woman on the crag—it might have been posed as a fanciful conception of the Past pausing to realize the Present—straining to peer into the Future.
Into this picture, changing and marring it, intruded a man. Up over the far side of the abutment and straight toward the girl, as though expected, he came. His appearance was the most distinct shock of the evening to Pape.
“A rendezvous!” he told himself with sinking heart. “She had to get rid of me—she had to hurry—in order to keep a rendezvous.”
Her irregular course, her disregard of traveled paths, her assault of this rock heap—everything in the adventure except how she came to be rooting among the poplars now seemed explained. Mentally he flayed himself for his stupid assumptions and sense of personal responsibility for her safety. He turned to descend the way he had come—no need for her to know what a following fool he had made of himself.