“So’s we can be ready to establish an alibi in case anything happens to Horace Gooch. Supposin’ some poor devil he’s made a beggar of takes it into his head to put a bullet into—What say, Marmy?”
“Oliver took my wheel and beat it for the depot,” said Marmaduke Smith happily.
CHAPTER XVIII
JOSEPHINE AND HENRY THE EIGHTH
The return of Mrs. Sage after an absence of twenty-three years was an “event” far surpassing in interest anything that had transpired in Rumley since the strange disappearance of old Oliver Baxter.
Hundreds of people, eager to see the famous Josephine Judge, crowded the station platform, long before the train from Chicago was due to arrive; they filled the depot windows; they were packed like sardines atop the spare baggage and express trucks; they ranged in overflow disorder along the sidewalks on both sides of the street adjacent. In this curious throng were acquaintances of another day, those who remembered her as the incomprehensible wife of Parson Sage when Sharp’s Field was a barren outskirt and the trains for Chicago passed through Rumley at forty miles an hour—a whistle, a rising and diminishing roar, a disdainful clanging of bells, and then the tail end of a coach that left a whirlwind of dust in its wake as it thundered away. The Morning Despatch dug up an ancient and totally featureless picture of Josephine Judge as she was at the time of her last appearance in Chicago, some twenty years before, and printed it, with rare tact on the part of the editor, in that department of the paper devoted exclusively on Saturdays—and this was Saturday—to church news and a directory of divine services. Inasmuch as this sadly blurred two-column “cut” represented Miss Judge as a svelte Salvation Army lassie, the editor may have been pardoned for giving it a prominent position on the “Church page,” notwithstanding the fact that said lassie was depicted in the act of tickling a tambourine with the toe of her left foot. In any case, a great many people who were not in the habit of reading the church section studied it with interest this morning, and planned to take half an hour or so off in the afternoon.
The train pulled in. The crowd tiptoed and gaped, craned its thousand necks, and then surged to the right. Above the hissing of steam and the grinding of wheels rose the voice of Sammy Parr far down the platform.
“Keep back, everybody! Don’t crowd up so close. Right this way, Mr. Sage—How are you? Open up there, will you? Let ’em through. Got my new car over here, Mr. Sage—lots of room. Hello, Jane! Great honor to have the pleasure of taking Mrs. Sage home in my car. Right over this way. Grab those suitcases, boys. Open up, please!”
Mr. Sage paused aghast half way down the steps of the last coach but one. He stared, open-mouthed, out over the sea of faces; his knees seemed about to give way under him; his nerveless fingers came near relaxing their grip on the suitcase handles; he was bewildered, stunned.
“In heaven’s name—” he groaned, and then, poor man, over his shoulder in helpless distress to the girl behind him—“Oh, Jane, why didn’t we wait for the midnight—”