"How should I know?"
He made the scraps into a little pile on the floor of the car, set fire to them, and ground them to ashes with his heel. For he knew only too well. That gray parrot face, that sharp, ignorant, cold voice in the sunny table d'hôte! "I want you should clear out from here, young man. I'd oughta know Dagoes; I married one." Yes, that was it! Wasn't it Stanley who wanted to know what hold such people had on Chris? "My girl's good Yankee—fair as any one. I brought her up so fine—" As they turned down still unawakened Broadway to his rooms Herrick looked into the light that was like darkness with eyes that made nothing of the first pale blush of peach blow nor the first hint of vaporous blue.
Till he heard Stanley say, "And if that Pascoe Arm-of-Justice gang have run away and yet come back, where did they run to?"
Through all his preoccupation Herrick was aware of an immense stupidity. "You're right. We went over that place inch by inch. And you know, when they left, they must have tumbled into their car and off—no time for anything. They packed nothing, they took nothing. Well, then, Stan, where was Justice's typewriter? And in what room or garret or cellar was the printing-press?"
Stanley gaped.
"Agreed—there wasn't any. And so that never was their real shop. Only a blind. Their real place of business, Stan, their fortress, their retreat, we've never found at all!"
This was the net result of town and country in their search for a missing girl, twenty-four hours after Christina had disappeared.
The anxiety of her friends would have been scarcely more enlightened, or even more relieved, had the search not happened to miss one accident of that cross-wired night.
At about eleven o'clock, more than an hour before Herrick had forced an entrance, the since damaged touring-car, returning from its expedition of the morning, had drawn up before the gate of the yellow house. The night world was then still a world of wind and rain; the car was splashed as though it had passed through a flood, and Nicola, stiff, muddy and drenched, was not in a very good humor when he got no reply to his knock at the kitchen door. He had driven quietly and knocked quietly, but now he lost control of himself and began to hammer; catching hold of the knob impatiently, he felt it turn in his grasp and entered. The door had not been locked, though the kitchen was lighted. He thought he could hear, somewhere, some one knocking. He took the lamp and went up the back stairs; then it seemed to him that the knocking came from the front of the house. He retraced his steps. Yes, there was a light in the hall and the knocking came from the closet under the stairs.