This was so obvious that it left the men nothing to say. They fell in surlily on either side of her, and without any show of resistance she walked calmly back toward the house. Pudge lingered, uncertain of his cue.
"Beat it, you putty-face!" Mike snarled at him, showing a yellow fang. "If you ain't off the premises in about two shakes, you'll get what's comin' to you. See?"
Pudge walked with as much dignity as he could muster in the direction of the public road. He could see nothing of Mrs. Remington in either direction; now and then a private motor whizzed by, but there was no other house near enough to suggest a possibility of calling for help.
He concealed himself in a group of black locusts and waited. In about half an hour he heard a car coming from the house with the mansard roof, and saw that it held three occupants, two men and a woman. The men he recognized, and he was certain that the woman, though she was well bundled up, was not E. Eliot.
The motor turned away from the town and disappeared in the opposite direction. Pudge surmised that Mike was making his getaway. He waited another half hour and began to be assailed by the pangs of hunger. The house gave no sign; even the smoke from the chimney stopped.
He was sure Miss Eliot was still there; imagination pictured her weltering in her own gore. Between fear and curiosity and the saving hope that there might be food of some sort in the house, Pudge left his hiding place and began a stealthy approach.
He came to the low stoop and crept up to the closed front door. Hovering between fear and courage, he knocked. But there was no response. With growing boldness he tried the door. It was locked.
The rear door also was bolted; but, creeping on, he found a high side window that the keepers of this prison in their hasty flight had forgotten to close. With the aid of an empty rain barrel, which he overturned and rolled into position, Pudge scrambled with much hard breathing through the window and dropped into the kitchen. Here he listened; his ears could discern no sound. On tiptoe he crept through the rooms of the first floor—but came upon neither furtive enemy nor imprisoned friend. Up the narrow stairway he crept—peeped into three bedrooms—and finally opening the door of what was evidently a storeroom, he found the object of his search.
E. Eliot sat in an old splint-bottomed chair—gagged, arms tied behind her and to the chair's back, and her ankles tied to the chair's legs. In a moment Pudge had the knotted towel out of her mouth, and had cut her bonds. But quick though Pudge was, to her he seemed intolerably slow; just then E. Eliot was thinking of only one thing.
This was the final afternoon of the campaign and she was away out here, far from all the great things that might be going on.