Waylaid by Wireless/Chapter 1
WAYLAID BY WIRELESS
CHAPTER I
THE SUSPICION
"So it still keeps on?"
"Certainly it has occurred here again."
"But this must make the third time, now, within five days!"
"Rather the twelfth, I should say," the Englishman exacted sternly after a moment's computation, "within the past three weeks—within twenty days, indeed, I make it."
"Yes." The American accepted the correction easily, though he looked up from his breakfast chop with surprise. "Of course I meant that this is now the third time it has happened in the same town with us."
"And twice, indeed, in the same inn."
"Yes."
"Quite so!" the Englishman reaffirmed. He pondered gravely a moment. "This is the third time, as you say, Mr. Preston," he reviewed, "that these extraordinary thefts have happened in the same towns with us since you—ah—joined with me. And, I say, this is the second instance of these bobry burglaries in the very inn with us!"
"Well, Mr. Dunneston?" the American urged on, expectantly, as the Briton hesitated again.
"I say, my dear fellow, don't fancy I have entertained it an instant. I've never imagined it for a moment, I assure you." The Englishman bent nearer his young companion solicitously. "But—ah—Mr. Preston, tell me, will you, how many times have you happened to encounter this extraordinary series of crimes in towns where you were stopping before we—ah—met?"
The American laid down his knife and fork and straightened stiffly; but meeting the frank and all unoffending equanimity of the Briton's curious concern for him, he controlled his first impulse and smiled in spite of himself.
The Englishman drew back at this affront. Young Preston stared at him incredulously; then laughed openly.
"I thought you had forgotten yourself, Mr. Dunneston," he returned. "So you were just remembering yourself and I had forgotten!"
"Forgotten, Mr. Preston?" the Briton repeated.
"Yes—you, you English, Mr. Dunneston," Preston explained. "If I had been travelling with any one else but an Englishman and he questioned me at the end of the week on the chances of my being a thief, I would—discourage that as an insult. But, of course, for a travelling Englishman, your query was scarcely personal. Since you have asked for the information, I have 'encountered' this series of crimes at least twice before—at Canterbury and, before that, at Chichester, though they had not yet begun to attract much attention."
"Only twice, then?" The Englishman leaned back, clearly a little relieved.
"As you haven't my genealogical table and know not a single ancestor of mine on either side, Mr. Dunneston," the American mocked on, "it was inexcusably vain of me to presume that an Englishman would hesitate to connect me with these robberies—merely from knowing me."
"But, my dear Mr. Preston," the Briton protested, "you've no idea how I have hesitated on that very point, really! And I wouldn't press it now, in spite of those additional coincidences at Canterbury and Chichester, except—" he stared down a moment at the news column beside his plate; then he studied his young travelling acquaintance across the table—"that you mentioned to me the other day, Mr. Preston," he continued, "that you were stopping in Rochester the fortnight back and in Winchester the week's end before that."
"Why, yes, I did, Mr. Dunneston."
"I thought I recalled it. So, I say, surely you must see I'm mentioning it only because some one must soon; and, besides, after jogging about half England with you, it's my lookout, too; for it would be jolly humiliating to me, wouldn't it, to lose you to the police? So, do you know that the time given for the pilferings in Rochester and Winchester corresponds exactly with the time you were in those towns?"
"What, Mr. Dunneston!" Young Preston threw down his napkin and arose in his place. But again, as he stared down, flushed, into the Englishman's perplexed and anxious face, a calmer sense of the situation overcame him and he reached an impulsive hand for Mr. Dunneston's newspaper.
"I was not fair to you a moment ago, Mr. Dunneston," he admitted, as he glanced quickly down the column the Briton had had before him. "You did not hesitate to bring these facts to me," he indicated the newspaper as he returned it, "and suggest to me the possibility of my being suspected as the perpetrator of these pilferings, as you call them. I am afraid that any chance acquaintance but an Englishman would have suggested it first to the police."
"And have the police pothering me here until the trial for my trouble? Oh, but I say, aside from that, and in spite of this array of—coincidences against you, Mr. Preston, I couldn't stop myself forming so favorable an idea of you and so hoping to still have you with me," the Englishman confessed, "that I'd drop the coincidences gladly, if I could only have some decently credible explanation for your—your certainly extraordinary actions about these little towns, sir, when you're not with me."
"So I have some extraordinary actions to explain," young Preston inquired, as he reseated himself, "entirely apart from my circumstantial connection with these crimes?" He took up his knife and fork and cut into his second thick mutton chop, hot from the ancient Ely grill. "I know that I am not exactly conventional in my ways of going about a country; but I was not aware that I have been acting so suspiciously about your little towns, Mr. Dunneston."
"You were not, sir?" the Englishman checked him. "Really, it seems you must have appreciated how you appeared to one watching you for a time like myself—particularly since you offered no explanation."
"Of what?"
"Of why you were touring these cathedral towns of ours, alone."
The American smiled again.
"I assure you it wasn't my fault you found me alone, Mr. Dunneston. And I recognize," he laughed as he glanced down at himself, "that I'm scarcely one of the sort that take the English cathedrals for their vacation. But you must mean something else. Besides being a man, in good health and spirits, and still touring the cathedral towns, what have I been doing which seemed so suspicious?"
"What? Almost everything! I have had to go about these towns to comply with the bally entail, as I told you, so I had observed you even before you joined with me. And how would you do? You would burst into the hotels and inns, where you Americans stop, and stand about glancing over new arrivals. You would search through all the bookings and trace the lists of the travelling Americans, and even look them up at the banks. Then, instead of showing any sort of interest in the cathedrals, to see which your countrymen and, particularly, your countrywomen tour through these towns, you seemed merely to be estimating the visitors to them. The remainder of the time you would mope about—planning or plotting, it might appear—and that night some rich American, carefully chosen from the travellers in the inns, would be most skilfully plundered—and you would move on. And then—"
But the Englishman had suddenly become conscious, as he elaborated his description, that the young American's incomprehensible sense of humor was conquering him again. Before the Briton had checked himself, Preston was laughing at him outright.
"Is not that a fair account of how you appeared—and still appear at times, sir?" Dunneston demanded.
"I suppose—yes, of course it is, Mr. Dunneston!" Preston admitted. "So that was what first set your suspicions against me?" he cried.
"Obviously!" the Englishman replied. "So when I was confronted with this statement—" he tapped his newspaper—"I thought it might be the part of even a travelling acquaintance to warn you of its apparent purport!"
"If I appeared that way, I certainly can't blame you at all!" the young American's humor had now entirely restored itself. "And I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Mr. Dunneston. Tell me the rest. Please go on!"
"That was quite all!" the Englishman returned, applying himself to his breakfast tea and chop. He rattled over the newspaper till he found the editorial and read it slowly.
The American reached over to a neighboring table for another copy of the newspaper in which the Briton was absorbed. He glanced across, hopefully, before he spread it beside his plate; but the Englishman gave no encouraging sign.
He was a tall and thin Briton, obsessed by an ancient and exalted ancestry, and with heredity heavy upon him. Not only must his heavy, sombre features and gray eyes and dull black hair have been determined for him by some eminent progenitor at least six centuries before, but even their expression must have been decided and established then.
Young Preston could almost see his companion carefully copying the stern facial arrangement of that founder of the family who, sometime in the Middle Ages, had perfected the best expression for that countenance, perpetuated his triumph in a portrait and handed it soberly down for his descendants to profit by. This particular descendant was devoid of a mustache; but either the founder must have worn one, or mustaches must have been prevalent somewhere in the direct line, for whenever he was absent-minded or annoyed, an hereditary habit seemed to hold this Dunneston; he brushed his shaven upper lip with his finger-tips and carefully twisted and arranged the atmosphere about an inch from his face.
Once in a while, as when with sudden interest in the column he was reading he involuntarily tipped his teacup too high, he was startled out of his ancestral expression. But, having wiped his lips and carefully dried his imaginary mustache, he regained his lineal sternness at once, and met the young American's gaze severely.
Preston laughed again with the delight of his irresponsibility. He was young, in most excellent health, and decidedly well looking. For three hard years, since graduating from his university in Massachusetts, he had been working without rest or vacation in the West. And now, after those long thirty-six months of daily toil pushing the tracks of a railroad over the last virgin prairie, he had applied for a week's leave in June to attend his class triennial reunion.
With the grant of three accumulated months' vacation—with promotion promised at the end—he had "bounded," as he said, from his reunion aboard the first ship out of Boston to spend the summer in England, "roughing it in civilization."
The close constraint of three years with grading gangs and cantalever bridges fell from him with his flannel shirts and corduroys. He smiled as he thought of the first time he went West, looking to the prairies to give him an interesting outlet to his disposition for excitement and activity. But he knew now what it meant to be "free" to do anything—but with nothing to do and, what was worse, without a kindred soul to share an experience with him.
He told himself that his longing, as he left, was for no especial one—least of all, a girl. He merely wished to be with people again, civilized, interesting, and interested people. So he had taken himself to England as the country containing the most concentrated civilization and characteristics most in contrast to his prairies.
Three or four times, when he was a boy, his mother and older sisters had taken him with them to this England and toured him with most eminent propriety through all the cathedral towns. But this time he had come to see England of himself and aright, at last; and he was not to tour the cathedral cities.
In fact, when he got on the boat, he waited with unholy glee for the Mrs. Varris and her daughter, who had places beside his in the dining-salon, to confess their plan of touring those towns. Mrs. Varris was so very like his own mother that he was sure of her as soon as he saw her; so when they became acquainted and she confessed, he was very clever and satirical. But she only laughed and asked him if he played bridge. He did, of course, though he laughed long and merrily at himself that night for having fled from his own mother and sisters. At least he could have done the French châteaux this summer with them; while here he was, after three years of exile, seriously contemplating a tour of the cathedral towns once more with—some one else's mother!
Very early the next morning he sought out that mother and her daughter to say the few final things which would make it impossible for him to find himself touring those towns again. And every day of the succeeding six to Southampton he had told them bravely of the superior things he would do and particularly of the glory of "roughing England" free from women and—with ultimate particularity—free from the cathedral towns. So as he saw them on the train at Southampton for Winchester, he had bid them a very superior farewell. But when their carriage had disappeared, he had looked down at himself to try to recall exactly what his idea of seeing England, of himself and aright, had been.
He had recalled it with an effort and started boldly off; and then—he laughed now honestly at himself as he considered the fairness of the description the Englishman had just given of his subsequent behavior. For—with a few shamed intermissions—during the past three weeks since he landed, he had found himself bursting into the cathedral towns almost precisely as the Briton had said; and—doing the rest, as Mr. Dunneston had sketched to him.
And though he had not yet found them, for a healthy person who still retained some sense of humor, the cathedral towns had not been entirely without compensations. The first and greater was the Briton watching him sternly from across the table. The other? Young Preston applied himself to his newspaper.