She must have left the bag in the entrance-way where she had stopped to rest, Katherine decided, and, forgetting all about the weakness of a half hour ago, she ran swiftly across the street and up the steps of the church. She felt over every inch of the floor in the darkness, but the bag was not there.
Had she brought it with her out of the auditorium? Yes, because she had dropped it in the lobby, and in stooping to pick it up had felt the first touch of that dizzyness which had overpowered her so soon afterward. She must have lost it in the street. She retraced her steps back to the concert hall, now dark and deserted, carefully searching all the way. Her search, however, was unavailing; and with a sinking feeling she realized that either someone had picked it up, or else she had been deliberately robbed while she slept; in either event, the bag was gone, and with it Nyoda’s watch.
It seemed to her that she could never go home and tell Nyoda that it was lost; she wished the earth would open up and swallow her where she stood, thus releasing her, at one stroke, from her distressful position. She bitterly reproached herself for having stayed in town that evening,—if she had gone home on the five-fifteen train this wouldn’t have happened. Nyoda had given her precious watch into her keeping, trusting her to bring it back safely, and she had betrayed that trust; had proved herself unreliable. Nyoda would never trust her with anything valuable again; would never send her on another errand. True, it was not exactly her fault that she had lost the bag; but if she had not been foolish enough to eat all those lobster croquettes after eating shrimp salad she would not have had any dizzy spell to distract her attention from her responsibility.
For fully five minutes she stood still and called herself every hard name she could think of, and ended up by making an emphatic resolution in regard to the future attitude toward lobster croquettes. In the meantime, she decided, she had better notify the police about the watch. A block ahead of her the green and blue lights of a drug store shone blurred but unmistakable through the misty atmosphere, and she splashed her way toward it, only to find on arriving that the place was closed. She walked several more blocks, searching either for an open drug store where she could telephone, or a corner policeman, and finding neither. A street clock pointed to eleven, and from somewhere in the darkness behind her came the subdued tone of the steeple chime.
The rain had stopped now, and it was growing colder; the puddles on the sidewalk began to be filmed over with ice. The wind took on a cutting edge and came sallying forth in great gusts, shrieking along the telephone wires and setting the electric arc lights overhead swaying wildly back and forth, until the rapidly shifting lights and shadows below gave the street the look of a tossing lake. Now billowing out like a sail, now wrapping itself determinedly around her ankles, Katherine’s long coat began to make walking a difficult proceeding. Then, without warning, the arc lights suddenly went out, plunging the world into utter blackness. With that, Katherine abandoned her intention of searching for a telephone and decided to get down to her train as fast as she could. With every other step she went crashing through a thin coating of ice into a puddle, for in the darkness it was impossible to see where she was going, and once she tripped over an uneven edge of flagging and went sprawling on her hands and knees. Thereafter, she felt her way, like a blind person, with the point of her umbrella.
It was gradually borne in upon Katherine, as she floundered on through the puddles, that she was not retracing her steps toward the carline, but was proceeding in a new and entirely unknown direction. The store fronts which loomed indistinctly through the darkness were not the same ones she had passed before; surely those others had not been so shabby and disreputable looking. But so intense was the blackness of the night that she could not be sure about anything; she might be on the right track after all. Undoubtedly the next turn would bring her back to the lighted drug store, and from that point she could easily locate herself. No green and blue lights appeared when she turned the next corner, however; as far as she could see, there was only gloom in the distance. Katherine tried street after street with no better success; they all led endlessly on into darkness. She met no one from whom she dared ask the way; for there was only an occasional passer-by, and he usually looked tipsy. It was evidently a factory district Katherine had wandered into, for all around her were great dark buildings with high chimneys, long, dim warehouses, box cars standing on sidings, silent, gloomy freight sheds; there seemed to be no end of them anywhere; in all directions they stretched out, like Banquo’s descendents, apparently to the crack of doom. The nightmare of the “Fata Morgana” had come true, and she was lost in the wilderness of a strange city.
For a long time Katherine had not heard the rumble of a street car, and this phenomenon finally became so noticeable that she realized what must have happened—the traction power had been cut off as well as the lighting current. With that realization her last hope of getting down to the station went glimmering—unless she could get a taxicab. But where was one to find a taxicab in this district? A faint light gleaming in the window of a small shop that crouched between two tall factories lured Katherine on with the hope that here was a telephone, or at least someone about who could tell her the way. She hastened toward it, but her heart turned to water within her when she saw that the lettering on the window pane was Chinese. More than anything else in the whole universe, Katherine feared a Chinaman; she was so afraid of the little yellow men that even in broad daylight she could never go by a Chinese laundry without holding her breath and shuddering. Even the picture of a Chinaman gave her the creeps. When she discovered that she was in a Chinese neighborhood after eleven o’clock at night, with the street lamps all out, a hoarse cry of terror broke involuntarily from her lips, and she began to run blindly, she knew not where, penetrating deeper and deeper into that jungle of factories which flanks the railroad on both sides for miles.
Out of breath finally, she came to a stop, and for a few moments stood gasping, with a hand to her side. Not far ahead of her a light from a building shone across the darkness of the street, and loud sounds of revelry coming from the direction of the light told her that the place was a saloon. She stood still for another moment, trying to get up courage to pass it; decided at last that with Chinamen in the other direction it was the lesser of two evils, and walked on, praying fervently that none of the revellers inside would come out at the moment she was going by. She had hardly gone a few steps when a figure appeared on the lighted sidewalk in front of the place with a suddenness which left no doubt of his having come from within. In the bright glare Katherine recognized the long light coat and visor cap of the man who had stood beside her that evening in the flower shop where she had purchased Veronica’s violets, and who had looked with such a covetous eye upon the roll of bills she had taken from her inside coat pocket. The bills were still there, and it seemed to her now that they made a very telltale bulge over her right breast. The man was coming toward her; in a few minutes he would see and recognize her, and then——
Katherine darted into an alleyway which opened near her, and on through a half-open gate in a low, solid wooden fence, and crouching there behind the fence in the darkness, she waited until the footsteps had gone past,—creak, creak, creakety-creak, with a rhythmic squeaking of shoes. Not until the sound had died away completely did she venture forth from her hiding place, and then she stood perfectly still and looked cautiously about her in every direction before she made a move to proceed. With the knowledge that the danger had passed, her feeling of panic began to leave her, and her native coolness began to assert itself. She took a careful stock of her situation and tried to think up a way to escape from her predicament. That she was hopelessly lost in this wilderness of streets whose names meant nothing to her, even if she had been able to see the sign boards, she realized full well; instinct warned her not to betray her situation to anyone she might meet in this neighborhood—providing she met any one, for the wind seemed to have blown all pedestrians off the streets; and the lateness of the hour made it extremely unprobable that she would find a telephone. She stood on one leg in the storklike attitude which always indicated deep thought with her, and pondered all the phases of her dilemma with the calm deliberation which invariably came to her in moments of great stress. “The only time Katherine is composed,” Sahwah had said once, “is when she is in a pickle.” And if Katherine was now in the biggest pickle she had ever experienced, by the same token her brain had never worked so coolly and logically before.
“When lost in the woods,” she said to herself, going over in her mind her knowledge of woodcraft, “the first thing to do is to climb a tree and get your bearings. That’s all right for the woods, but there aren’t any trees here to climb. I might climb a telegraph pole,” she thought whimsically, as her eye fell upon one nearby, “and see if I can locate myself. No, that wouldn’t do, either, for the whole city is dark, and I couldn’t see anything if I did get up. So much for rule number one.