CHAPTER XV

One Return

At five o’clock the men put up the chess board. Chad stopped playing the piano, and the three of them went to the barns together.

I went into the kitchen to get supper. Danny, in spite of her headache, insisted upon helping me. She did the best she could. She managed to get the table set, in between times when she was not running to the window to see whether John was coming.

At six o’clock, though neither John nor Gaby had returned, we sat down to supper. Danny was too nervous to touch a bit of food. She kept looking out of the windows, and at her watch, and out of the windows again.

“Don’t worry, Danny,” Sam said. “John has had tire trouble, on account of the heat. They’ll come riding up the road any minute now.”

“They?” she questioned.

“Gaby togged up and went down the road to meet John, didn’t she?”

“No,” Danny’s voice curled into a wail. “No, Uncle Sam, she didn’t. Martha saw her going to the cabin. Didn’t you, Martha?”

“Martha,” Mrs. Ricker astonished us all by saying, “doesn’t know where Gaby went. She knows only where Gaby told her she was going.”

“But why should Gaby tell her a fib about it?” Danny asked.

“And why,” I questioned, “should Gaby go around the house to get to the road, instead of going right out the front way?”

Again Mrs. Ricker shocked us by speaking. “She would not go out the front way, if she wanted to keep her trip to the road a secret.”

“Mrs. Ricker,” Danny’s voice trembled, “What are you hinting? What is it that you know?”

“I know,” said Mrs. Ricker, “that there is not a man living who is not as false as sin.”

Sam growled, “Come down to facts, Mrs. Ricker, if you have any.”

I think it was the first time Sam had ever spoken unpleasantly to her. He betrayed his own anxiety by so doing. It was easy to see that she was cut to the quick.

“I have no facts,” she said, “except, that right after dinner to-day John and Gaby had a private conversation, and he decided, very suddenly, to go for the mail.”

At that minute we heard a sound for sore ears—the car coming up the driveway. Danny jumped up and ran to look out of the living-room window. “He has gone all the way around to the kitchen,” she said, when she came back. If it had not been sort of pathetic, showing how worried she had been, her impatience at having to wait another minute or so to see him, would have been funny.

She ran into the kitchen. She and John came to the door of the butler’s pantry. John was gray with dust. His brows were knitted, as they are whenever he is troubled about anything.

“He hasn’t seen Gaby,” Danny announced, with an exultation that showed plainly what she had been most anxious about. “He brought up the rock-salt. That’s why he drove to the kitchen. Come and see, Mary?”

“I’d rather see you two come and eat your suppers,” I said.

“Goodnight!” John answered. “I’ve got to go and get rid of a few tons of dirt before I can come to the table.”

“No,” Danny insisted. “Never mind the dirt, dear. Supper is all cold now. Please come and eat——”

John patted her on the shoulder, and smiled at her, and, manlike, did as he pleased. He went through the kitchen and upstairs the back way. Danny called after him, asking him to hurry. He didn’t.

When he finally did come, all slicked up, and bathed and shaved, he said it was too hot to eat, and would have nothing but some ice-cream.

Sam asked him what had kept him so long, on the trip. John said tire trouble; and that he had met Leo Saule, two miles this side of Rattail, with his flivver broken down. John had stopped to help him, and, at last, had been forced to tow him the six miles north to his place.

John has a way, when he is worried, of shutting and opening his eyes, and of tossing his head back and to the side with a quick little jerk, as if he were trying to get shed of something that was in it. All the while he was eating and talking, he kept doing this. I asked him whether his head ached.

“No,” he said. “But I think I’m sort of loco from being out in the sun.”

“Gaby kept you waiting quite a while?” Hubert Hand stated and asked.

“What do you mean?” John questioned.

“Waited for her down the road, didn’t you, and took her to Rattail in time to catch the train for Reno, or ’Frisco?”

I thought John would fly into a temper. He has a handy temper. But he only looked around at all of us, with a bewildered expression, and, “Say, are you fellows trying to put something over on me, or what?” he asked.

“Then you don’t deny——” Hubert Hand began. Sam, who has enough dander for John and himself both, when necessary, broke in.

“John doesn’t have to deny anything. Marcus will be in the office now, waiting for Twenty-one. ’Phone down. ’Phone’s handy. Ask him whether he flagged Twenty, to-day, for a passenger, or whether he is going to flag Twenty-one.”

Hubert went straight to the telephone. From his end of the conversation, we could tell that Twenty had not stopped, and that no one was waiting for Twenty-one. He looked foolish, when he turned from the telephone, and said, “Take it all back, John. My mistake.”

Sam looked mighty serious. “Well,” he drawled, “I don’t know but what as good a plan as any would be for us all to go out and have a look around for her——”

“Oh!” Danny exclaimed, sharply. “Uncle Sam, you do think that she has met with some mishap?”

“I think,” Sam said, “that she has met with another machine and ridden off in it. But, better safe than sorry; then we’ll be fine and fit for the fireworks. Eh, Martha?”

Martha, who had been drowsy all during supper, was half asleep on the davenport, and did not answer.