Reluctantly she allowed pacifying little Mrs. Liggs to lead her from the room and back into the parlor. Burning with shame and indignation, she paced the floor for some minutes, while the older woman talked, counseling her against the reënactment of the scene in the office when she applied to Miss Longwell for her money. Presently, they had arranged it between them that Dot was to stop with her friend until word could be got to Lemuel. Within the hour, they were descending the front steps, the tuition fee in Dot’s purse, the sympathetic maid instructed to send the girl’s baggage to Mrs. Liggs’ home.
As they took their seats in a taxi, and Dot kissed sprightly fingers at Longwell’s Seminary, another machine came to a stop on the opposite side of the street. The lone passenger, on the point of getting out, stopped and stared after the other cab now whirling rapidly away. It was Lex Sangerly. He had been told at the Golden West Hotel that Lemuel had departed for Geerusalem, after presumably having entered his daughter in Longwell Seminary. Whereupon, Lex had decided to visit the girl, introduce himself through the medium of Mrs. Liggs’ friendship, and question her in the hope that she might throw some light on the mysterious disappearance of the contents of Billy Gee’s saddlebags.
From this it may be deduced that Lex had not read the sensational newspaper story that day, incriminating Lemuel Huntington in the affair. Just now, he gazed in growing amazement at the taxi speeding down the street.
“By George! If that isn’t Mrs. Liggs, I’ll——” he burst out and ended by shouting hurried instructions to the chauffeur. The next moment he had started in pursuit of the cab.
CHAPTER XIII—SINISTER FOREBODINGS
Mrs. Agatha Liggs occupied a neat cozy four-room cottage in the residential section of San Francisco, known as Richmond District. A well-kept garden, colorful with blossoming plants, flanked and fronted it; and there was a Cherokee rose which spread its wild luxuriant arms across the length of the porch and festooned it thick with its pink, floppy flowers during the early spring. Six blocks away, across a field of lupins, the waves of the blue Pacific lapped a narrow stretch of beach under the shadow of crumbling shale cliffs. The Presidio fortifications loomed here and there along the heights, frowning, formidable piles of concrete out of which peeped the grim noses of long-range guns turned seaward, reminding one of dogs of war everlastingly on the alert for the first scent of danger.
It was a mile or more from the Longwell Seminary to Mrs. Liggs’ home, and on the way there, Billy Gee’s mother found time to finish telling Dot her story, which the maid had interrupted when she came to summon the girl before the preceptress. This had to do principally with the fact that the bandit, after his escape, had written her a letter which she had received the same day Lemuel’s telegram reached her. He told her where he was in hiding and, following a night of harrowing thought—fearful that he might risk a trip to Geerusalem to see her, and be captured—she had decided to dispose of her dry-goods store and move away from Soapweed Plains. Learning that Dot was to enter school in San Francisco, and having no definite plans as to where to establish her residence, she had chosen the metropolis, happy in the knowledge, she said, that she would be near her friend whom she would see often, besides feeling certain that her outlaw son could make his home with her, secure in the crowded confines of a great city, and abandon forever his lawless calling.
Selling her store, she had boarded a train and gone south with Tinnemaha Pete, and under the guidance of the old desert prospector, had found Billy Gee’s hiding place—a lonely desert cave, in a lonelier cañon of the Calico Range. But the outlaw was absent, and though they waited several days for him, until the provisions they had brought along were gone, he did not return. At last, filled with misgivings, she had come away at the instance of Tinnemaha Pete who, after accompanying her to the nearest settlement, went back to acquaint her son with her plans when he came. Arriving in the city, she had rented the cottage and written Billy Gee, giving her new address, and had received a long letter from him the day before.
“And it’s the blessedest letter I ever got from him, Dot,” she concluded, her old eyes swimming. “I think he’s—I think he’s quit the awful life. I’m praying God every, every night, to give him strength.”
Dot made no reply. Her arm stole around the other, and she gazed ahead, an odd light in her eyes.