Having slipped from the slowly moving police car, he had mounted the running board of the vast lumbering van. From this point he slid to a position beside the driver. As he did this he prodded the driver in the ribs with an automatic and whispered, “You will drive as I say and where I say, or you are a dead man!”
The driver never took his eye from the road. He drove straight on.
* * * * * * * *
The message Johnny Thompson received after the second ringing of the bell was but a repetition of the first, so his mind was soon put to rest. He was left with plenty to wonder about, for all that.
But dawn was now breaking. Like departing fairies, the Whisperer had other business that must be attended to. He was heard next in Grace Krowl’s little parlor on Maxwell Street.
“Christmas Eve will be here in three more days,” he was saying. “On Christmas Eve everyone is in a mellow mood. That is the time for confiding secrets. On that evening, my friend Grace, you are to invite Nida McFay to your room, seat her beside your table and induce her to tell her story. I shall be looking in upon you from my high tower a mile away.”
“High tower, a mile away!” she thought. “How can one see that far? And the shade is always half drawn. It is impossible!” And yet, the Whisperer had more than once convinced her that he did see her face.
“But Christmas Eve!” she exclaimed indignantly. “How can one ask another to bare her life’s secrets at such a time?”
It was a sober-faced Grace Krowl who seated herself before the table for a few moments of quiet thought. In the days just past she had tried out her plan of writing to people whose stories she had found in lost trunks. She had offered to return all their little treasures without cost. The results had been disappointing and disheartening. Their attitude she had found difficult to understand. In their letters they seemed to say, “You have all the things in my trunk. You have a right to none of them.” She had returned the pictures and letters from six trunks. She had paid the express charges out of her own meager funds. Not one of them all had made an effort to repay these charges.
“Not one returned to thank me.” She stared at the wall. “Can it be that uncle is right? That I am merely letting myself get ‘soft’?”