The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
Forewarned
THE thing was managed with an ingenuity that Alan termed devilish: it was indisputably Machiavellian.
The lovers had come down from the North in hot haste and the shadow of death. Two days of steady travelling, by canoe, by woods trail, by lake steamer, wore to a culmination through this endless afternoon on the train from Moosehead Lake. No sort of privacy or comfort was attainable in cars crowded to suffocation with fretful, sweating people, homeward bound from a week-end holiday over the Fourth.
Nor was it possible to discriminate, to guess whether or not they rode in the company of spies and enemies. Chin in hand, indifferent to discomfort, Alan brooded, his eyes fixed on this woman whom he loved, who had taken her life in her hand to save his life.
She lay back listlessly in the chair beside his, visibly wilting in the heat blast, her hair in disarray, her eyes closed, fair cheeks faintly flushed, pulses slowly throbbing in that exquisite, immaculate throat. …
He would have given worlds to be able to try and comfort her. But with all those abominable people
No matter, the longest afternoon must have its evening; an hour or so more and they would be in Portland, surrounded by all the conveniences and safeguards of civilization, free at last to draw breath of ease in the land of law, order, and sane living.
The train had paused at the last hill station. Then as the trucks groaned and moved anew, a lout of a boy came galloping down the aisle, brandishing two yellow envelopes and blatting like a brazen calf.
"Mista' Lawr! Mista' Lawr! Tel'grams for Mista' Lawr!"
Alan snatched the envelopes, tipped the boy, and hoped to heaven he might break his sunburned neck as he tumbled off the rear steps.
He had been expecting a reply to his wire for reservations on the night express from Portland to New York. But why two envelopes superscribed "Mr. A. Law, Kineo train southbound, Oakland Sta?"
He tore one open, and grunted disgust with its curt advice; opened the other and caught his breath as he withdrew—part way only—a playing card—a Trey of Hearts.
Thrusting it back, he tore both envelopes into a hundred fragments and scattered them from the window. But the fiendish wind whisked one small scrap back into the lap of the woman he loved. The silken lashes trembled, lifted slightly, disclosing the dark glimmer of questioning eyes. And as she clipped the scrap of card-board between thumb and forefinger, he silently took from her one corner of the Trey of Hearts.
She nodded acknowledgment of his dumb solicitude but made no direct comment.
"The Pullman agent at Portland wires that there are no reservations available on any New York train in the next thirty-six hours," he said with lowered voice. "We'll have to rest up overnight, I guess."
"Couldn't we catch the New York boat to-night?"
"No. It leaves before we get in."
She said, "Too bad," abstractedly, reclosed her eyes, and apparently lapsed anew into semi-somnolence, but without deceiving him who could well guess what poignant anxiety gnawed at her heart.
He could have ground his teeth in exasperation: the impish insolence of that warning. To think that this was America, this the twentieth century, and still a man could be hunted from pillar to post, haunted with threats, and that by a slip of a girl with the cunning of a madwoman, the heart of a thug, the face the beloved woman that sat beside him.
A surmise slowly settled into conviction that the woman Judith Trine, sister to the Rose he loved so well, was as mad as that monomaniac, her father, who sat helpless in his cell of silence and shadows in New York, impatient for the word that his vengeance had been consummated by the daughter whom he had inspired to execute it. …
In the dusk of evening the train lumbered into Portland station; and, heart in mouth, Alan helped Rose through the crowd and into a taxicab.
"Best hotel in town," he demanded. "And be quick—for a double tip."
He did not dare plume himself on a new escape. He dared not even trust this public chauffeur. Yet that one he distrusted, it seemed, without reason: shortly the cab stopped before a hotel of tolerable pretensions on a quiet street.
He had communicated his scheme to the girl en route, receiving her endorsement of it. Now, having registered for her and seen her to the door of the best available room in the house within call of the public lobby and office, he washed, gulped a hasty meal, and hurried away into the night with only the negro driver of a fortuitous hack for his guide.