CHAPTER VI.

HELEN WIER IS KIDNAPED.

Before Renfro Horn had been awake three minutes the next morning he heard sounds of great confusion coming up from downstairs. His father was talking in a loud excited voice, his mother after giving a half tone scream began asking questions and even Mary was making her share of the confusion.

“Another bursted pipe,” Renfro saw the heavy frost on the window, drew his conclusion and turned over to sleep until they called him.

Mary’s heavy winter shoes clattered up the stairway, crossed the hall and came straight to his door. She peeped cautiously into his bedroom, her head encased in a pink breakfast cap thru which were run blue ribbons. Her mouth was half open, her eyes big and her whole face a map of mingled surprise, interest and horror.

“Renny--Renny,” she called softly and then changed, “Hooch--oh, Hooch--your pa just brought in the morning paper and Helen Wier was kidnaped last night right out of her pa’s own home and she aint been brought back or they don’t know nothin’ about it and--”

Renfro was sitting bolt upright in bed. “What did you say, Mary?” he demanded. “Helen Wier kidnaped. When? And how did they find out? Now answer my questions first.”

Observing directions, Mary told him. Helen Wier, the judge’s twelve year old daughter had been studying in the little east library, as was her custom when the family and two guests went into the back of the house for coffee and a late lunch. She had been sitting at the table when they left; when they came back she was gone. That was all Mary knew.

The paper told Renfro a little more. There had been no outcry on Helen’s part--no sound that anyone had heard. The room showed no evidence of a struggle except that a vase of flowers on the table was upturned and the books she had been studying, all were on the floor.

When the family had come back into the library Helen was not there. Her mother, thinking that she had gone upstairs to bed, had commented on her going without being told and began to talk of other things when she noticed the books on the floor and became suspicious.

Helen Wier loved her books as she did her friends. She was very careful of them. She never would have left them on the floor behind her, open with their backs bent to the breaking point as were these. And the papers out of her notebook were scattered around and under the table.

Mrs. Wier muttered something to the rest about being sure something was wrong with Helen, rushed upstairs to her room and then had begun the search. That she had been kidnaped was an assured fact. The problem before the police who had been almost instantly summoned was to find out who did it and where the child had been taken.

“Weren’t there no note wanting money?” Mary asked the question.

Mr. Horn who was reading the story shook his head. Mary in turn shook hers tho more wisely. “Then they’ll be hearin’ from the kidnapers before night”, she said with conviction. “They’ll be telling how much they want for her return and where to put it and giving all the directions. The book I studied in that home correspondence course said that was the way it always went.”

She ended her speech triumphantly, but noticing about the same time that no one was paying any attention to her backed thru the dining room into the kitchen, where she talked to herself about the “ignorance of some people”.

Renfro, after reading the short, and to him, decidedly unsatisfactory story, followed Mary out into the kitchen. “The paper didn’t say anything about whether or not the telephone wires were cut,” he began.

Mary’s homely fat face beamed. She liked to be taken into some one’s confidence. “Them detectives which are huntin’ for a clue know mighty little,” she said hotly. “Now what course have any of them ever studied? They just happened to be in on the side of the political party which won at the last election, and when the city hall jobs gave out they just put them on the detective force.”

Without any doubt Renfro was in a state of confusion. He didn’t know whether or not to go around to Judge Wier’s house and tell the Judge what he had seen on the two successive nights when he had been carrying his papers past their house, or to take his story to the police. But he did know enough to keep still until he decided what course to follow.

But he had come to the kitchen to ask a request of Mary, “For heaven’s sake, Mary,” he begged, “don’t ever let mother know that place is on my paper route or it would be goodbye to that route and my new turkey customers. You won’t, will you?”

Mary shook her head. “But are you working on some clues, Ren--Hooch?” she asked. “Now if you are, I could help you a lot with my book learning on detective work.”

“Oh, I will need you all right,” Renfro laughed. “Just you wait, Mary, and keep still a little while and then your chance will come.”

It was hard work for Renfro at the breakfast table just to ask enough questions and talk enough about the kidnaping to avoid suspicion, without telling his parents anything he knew, or ask any of the questions in his mind. He went directly to the police station from the breakfast table. He found the chief of detectives a very busy man.

But still he managed to take time to see Renfro and talked a little until Renfro began to tell of the man he had seen lurking in the Wier neighborhood and then he banged his hand on his desk. “You’re the fifth boy who saw some suspicious looking person lurking in that neighborhood,” he laughed but there was a note of impatience in his laugh. “I’ve heard of everything from a colored wash woman to the judge himself.”

After storming about how busy he was and how people who bothered busy people should be given jail sentences, the chief pointed toward the door thru which he intended Renfro to leave. “If you kids would read your school books,” he said solemnly, “instead of a lot of detective stories written by old maids afraid to go out at night, you would have more sense about clues and everything else in general.”

Outside Renfro pursed his lips. “All right, Mr. Chief,” he thought to himself, “I’ll work on my own clue. I’ve one and I hope your men don’t find out a thing without it.”

He found the entire Grant School aroused by the kidnaping. Girls, who had been brought to the building by their fathers under orders not to leave the building until they came after them, stood in groups inside the hall and would not have ventured outside the building for a fortune. Some of the people seemed to think that Helen Wier was the first one to be taken in a kidnaping plot which was to rob Lindendale of all its girls.

Miss Turpin, the English teacher, allowed the members of her classes to discuss the affair. All sorts of reasons, were offered for the kidnaping, most of them being that of a ransom. But Renfro kept still. Judge Wier didn’t have a fortune nor did he have resources to raise one in a hurry. Unlike Mary he didn’t believe that a note would come in a few days demanding money, telling under what particular forest log to hide it and the conditions governing its hiding.

Miss Turpin herself ventured a suggestion. She too knew that Judge Wier was far from being a rich man. Now there was soon to come before the judge for trial a number of men charged with a series of election frauds. She wondered if they could have taken this course to frighten Judge Wier from giving them stiff sentences.

“Well,” Abie Lubin remembered his fine for speeding his father’s car, “Anybody can’t scare Judge Wier by nothing.”

That afternoon the chief of detectives, having heard of Miss Turpin’s suggestion telephoned the Grant building for her to come to his office after school. Renfro, too, received a telephone message. It was from Route Manager Morrison of the Evening Globe. He offered to send an extra boy to help Renfro carry his route in case he should feel uneasy.

Now that was the last thing Renfro wanted so he laughed at the suggestion and by so doing rose several notches in Morrison’s mind. He went directly to the Circulation Manager with his praise. Mr. Bruce in turn smiled, “I said that boy would make good,” he smiled. “Of course he won’t make any money on Old Grief, but as soon as we’re sure he’s what we think he is we’ll give him a regular route. And I shall have the pleasure of telling his father that he was wrong in his prediction, and I was right in mine.”

Renfro fairly rushed along his route that afternoon. Still he searched for new subscribers. It would be foolish he knew to go out to the big Hall house and the little shack adjoining it until it was dark. Yet he was going.

It was very quiet at Judge Wier’s house. The people who crowded there in the morning had gone home. The house was darkened so that Mrs. Wier could be kept quiet.

Renfro rolled his copy of the Evening Globe, started to throw it onto the porch and then stopped. Why not take it around to the back door? That would give him a chance to pass the shrubbery and the window thru which the man had peeped on two successive nights. He decided to do so.

The shrubbery was intact. The inside of the window was covered with a heavy coat of frost. Renfro looked thru it but could see only the green blind which had been pulled to the very sill. And then he saw something on the outside of the pane.

He stepped close to the window, and looked up at the two strange looking things. They were about two inches apart, white and stiff and made up of--?

And then Renfro almost shouted. They were part of a pair of a man’s eyebrows. Memory of the frozen pipe with his boyish tongue stuck against it, and the red skin left fast to the pipe, made him understand this situation. The man who had stood close to the window pane had pressed his face against the cold glass while he watched the scene inside the house, his eyebrows had been frozen to the pane more firmly than he had thought and when he, suddenly frightened, had pulled away from it he had left these portions of his eyebrows behind him.

“My first clue” Renfro told himself and reached into his pocket.