CHAPTER V

THE ARROW OF SUSPICION

The first excitement having worn away, the Council of War was now organized. Colonel Brack had gathered together those men best fitted to form a working committee--and likewise best able to finance any scheme decided upon for the keeping open of Pinewood Inn.

The situation was already thoroughly canvassed. No other hotel in the vicinity was open. To escape from the place by either motor or train--at least for some hours, if not days--was impossible. Local residents could not take in the hotel guests had they so desired. Here were women and children used to every luxury who were threatened with dismissal from the hotel at once. As the colonel loudly said, it was brutal.

The track to Pinewood was for the accommodation of freight for the most part. For the very reason that the owners of the Barnaby property wished to keep the hotel exclusive, they had fought any improvement in railroad accommodations.

At this time of night even the station telegraph office was closed; and George had already informed the guests that there had been a break in the long-distance telephone service since dark.

Any such thing as a special train to transport the guests to New York could not be arranged for until the following day.

"And we'd have to put up with vile accommodations from here to the Junction," explained the excitable Jimson. "Do you realize that this spur-track roadbed is scarcely fit to pull coal cars over? My wife couldn't stand it, I am sure."

"How about getting across to the island and to the regular railroad station at Barr?" John Ryder asked.

"That bridge is practically a wreck. Do you know the bus slumped clear through it, and will have to be raised by a derrick? And the road to any other station is impossible for autos. No, we can't get away and that's all there is to it."

This was the consensus of opinion. The disorganization of the hotel employees which would follow the closing of the doors of the house and its abandonment by the guests would make it unsafe to leave personal property in the hotel. There were half a hundred reasons, and all very good ones, that proved the guests must remain.

"And in union there is strength," quoted Mr. Jimson.

"We must hang together," declared another.

"Speaking of hanging," observed one, "how would it do to begin with Bangs? I'd like to see him dangling at the end of a rope."

"Better starve him," murmured another.

But these futile remarks were cut off when John Ryder began to speak seriously. He suggested that a committee be appointed to confer in a quiet way with Bangs and try to pacify him if possible--even if it cost some money. Some arrangement should be made, too, for the retention of the servants.

Ryder was at once elected by acclamation to head this committee. The colonel refused to be a member.

"You want cool men--calm men, suh," said the bristling old fellow. "I am a fire-eater. I'd rather wring that skunk's neck than take a drink!"

"Oh, Colonel!" exclaimed Jimson, "that is a very strong statement."

"I know it. But it's a fact. I know my weaknesses," said the colonel modestly.

First the committee were to make sure of the truth of the manager's statement regarding the coal supply. Then they were to sound the help through the steward, Al, to find out how many would remain. To learn what the prospect was for feeding the people in the house, including the help, was likewise important.

"If the coal gives out," Ryder said, "there is surely coal in the village here that may be bought. Perhaps not tonight, but early in the morning. We should be able to find oil lamps and heaters in that big store which I see is still open for business. The town has no gas plant, I understand. We are dependent upon the hotel's lighting plant."

The committee divided to attend to several of these matters before going to see Bangs, agreeing to meet at the desk in ten minutes.

"I must not leave Ruth alone any longer," thought John Ryder, pulling himself up short. "By thunder! there must be something more important for a bridegroom to do on his wedding night than running about as I am, shouldering other people's troubles. I must go and take a peep at the dear girl and cheer her up a bit. She'll be frightened by my remaining so long away, perhaps. No doubt she has heard by this time of the manager's threat."

As his suite was on the second floor he did not use the elevator, but ran up the broad, main stairway which led out of the office. Here the hotel seemed to be running in its usual quiet way.

A white-capped and aproned maid passed him; a bellboy bustled by with a tray of pitchers in which the ice tinkled; he heard the dull whir of the elevators. He walked along the broad, central corridor and turned off at his own proper "alley."

He saw that the door of his suite was open. There were voices which reached his quickened ear--a man's deep tones and then (and this startled him) a woman's sharp cry.

He was not yet sufficiently familiar with Ruth's voice to recognize its tone under stress of emotion. But he felt, somehow, that it was her cry.

He quickened his step. There was a man standing in the doorway of the suite. Instantly, from the side view Ryder obtained of his face, he knew him to be the stranger who had come last to the hotel on this fateful evening.

"The bungling fool!" thought John Ryder. "Is he going from room to room in this hotel looking for his friends? Maybe he is not honest. The disturbed state of the hotel guests would open very easily the way to business for an industrious burglar."

"I--I don't know you," Ruth said just as Ryder reached the spot.

She stood within the room, clinging with both hands to the edge of the door and staring at the stranger with such a wild look in her eyes that her husband was frightened. He turned on the man furiously.

"What do you want? What are you disturbing this lady for?"

"I--I beg your pardon," stammered the stranger, backing away from both John Ryder and the open door of his suite, his face now displaying nothing but pain and anxiety. "I have made a mistake--a terrible mistake."

"Oh, I am so glad you have come," Ruth said quickly to Ryder. "I--I thought you were lost--or something had happened. And then this man came----"

She was still staring at the stranger with eyes in which lurked actual terror. Ryder's fierce aspect seemed to trouble the strange man.

"I--I beg your pardon--and the lady's," he murmured. "I thought I was acquainted with her. It--it is a mistake."

"I never saw him in my life!" gasped Ruth.

"It's all right. Mistakes will happen," said Ryder, and entered the room, shutting the door abruptly in the man's face. He caught Ruth quickly in his arms with a sort of fierceness this time that was his man-way of claiming possession, as well as a desire to defend her from annoyance. "Were you frightened, dearie?" he asked.

"Yes. He--he startled me so. He is a strange looking man. Do you think him quite--quite right?"

"Not right to come bungling up here and disturbing you," Ryder responded, tenderly.

She blushed, slipping out of his arms suddenly. "Here, dear," she said softly. "I have a visitor."

Ryder looked down the room and saw for the first time a large, smiling woman sitting in a chair beyond the line of half-unpacked trunks. She was a person whom he knew he had never seen before, and he was not particularly happy to see her now.

She was a richly dressed--indeed a gaudily dressed--person wearing many jewels and lacking that quiet demeanor and appearance that Ryder admired most in womankind. Nevertheless, he walked in with as good a grace as he could summon while Ruth introduced him.

"This is my husband, Mrs. Judson," she said, and there was a thrill of pride in her sweet voice that delighted the man. "Mrs. Judson has been telling me how dreadfully this Mr. Bangs, the hotel manager, is behaving. Are they actually going to close the hotel? Mrs. Judson is all upset about it. Being alone here with only a maid, she doesn't know what to do."

"A committee of the older guests is trying to arrange now to keep the house open in spite of Bangs," said John Ryder. "But Bangs is a sharper. He may have fixed things so that we shall be without light or heat for a part of the night. But to-morrow----"

"Oh, dear!" broke in the large lady in horror. "I'll never dare stay in my rooms in the dark. And all stark alone. What _shall_ I do? You know how very helpless we widows feel, Mister--er----" She did not speak the name, which evidently had escaped her, but her smirk caused Ryder a feeling of sudden nausea.

"You don't look helpless," he thought, with much disapproval of the visitor. Mrs. Judson gave one the impression of being a woman amply able to take care of herself in any emergency. Aloud he said:

"There are men now seeing about obtaining candles and lamps. Perhaps heat may be furnished some of the rooms with the aid of oil stoves. Of course, the furnace fires are not out yet."

"It is not cold in here," Ruth said brightly.

"But it will be if what Bangs says is true. He hasn't coal enough to last until midnight. Oh, he was ready weeks ago for this trick, without any doubt."

"And we can't get away!" wailed the heavy woman in the armchair. "When poor, dear Horace was alive nothing like this ever happened to me. And an oil stove! Horrid, smelly things! Oh, I never could sleep with one in my room! I am delicate, you know, quite delicate! Dear Horace always took the greatest care of me!"

Ryder looked at the huge, over-fed woman before him, and had some difficulty to keep from snorting aloud at her claim of delicate health.

"And candles!" she wailed on. "You surely can't expect a woman to dress and undress by the aid of candle light! Oh, it's all horrid--perfectly horrid!"

She seemed on the verge of tears, and from her size Ryder expected nothing less than a deluge. He made for the door.

"I'll see what can be done about it," he whispered to Ruth, who followed him swiftly, to squeeze his hand in both her own. "Don't you be troubled, dearie. I will not remain away long."

"I was troubled," she confessed in the same tone. "Then I sent a bellboy to page you and he couldn't find you anywhere."

"The stupid! I was right down there in the foyer. We'll be all right when this tangle is straightened out. But, for the beginning of a honeymoon----"

"Yes," she suddenly giggled. "Isn't it just too _funny_? Shall we really stay?"

"To be sure. Dispossessing a manager who won't pay his rent is all right; but to try to dispossess a guest who is ready and willing to pay is quite another matter. It can't be done."

"Then shall I continue to unpack my trunks?"

Ryder smiled at her, then glanced back at the boxes. They were more than half empty already and the open wardrobe doors gave him a view of a number of pretty gowns which Ruth had shaken out and hung away.

"Go ahead," he said, easily. "You'll want the furbelows out of the boxes, anyway. They look as though they'd muss pretty easily."

She glanced at him sidewise with a little blush, and squeezed his hand again. "Don't you think they're _sweet_?" she whispered. "I made them almost all myself."

"Is that so?" responded Ryder, with another curious glance at the gowns in display. Then he went out and she closed the door after him. When he had walked half the length of the corridor he halted and came near going back to the suite again. Two startling facts had finally made an impression on his busy mind.

One was the nature of Ruth's wardrobe. Ryder was not much versed in women's apparel, and all those pretty, dainty, gray and cream colored dresses could mean but one thing. To his mind, they were bride's gowns.

He had met his wife first aboard the _Minnequago_ and had known her just seven days before they were married. He had seen her wear no dress on shipboard like these she had brought out of her trunks. Indeed, Miss Mont had been gowned with severity and with no more style than the average English woman displays.

"Why," muttered Ryder, "she has a complete bridal outfit--or, it seems so to me. How could she have got those dresses? And she says she made them herself!"

He turned back, but bethought him of Mrs. Judson. He could have no private word with Ruth now. So he walked slowly on toward the main stairway, and his mind reverted to the second puzzling circumstance he had noted. There were few if any labels on his wife's trunks.

No trunk can cross the ocean without being plastered over with the various marks and stamps of the European agencies, and of the steamship companies. It was a small matter, perhaps--this lack of the usual labels--but it continued to puzzle John Ryder until he had descended to the office once more and found himself again in the thick of the circumstances connected with the attempt of the hotel manager to turn his guests out of house and home.