The Million-Dollar Suitcase, Alice MacGowan [free ebooks romance novels .TXT] 📗

of gay lanterns, winking ruby tail-lights of machines parked in front of it, the glare from its windows, and the strains of the orchestra in its ballroom, playing "On the Beach at Waikiki." When she heard it, Barbara thanked God with,

"We're in time!"

I took that machine up to the front steps over space never intended for automobiles, at a pace not proper for lawns or even roads, and only halted when I was half across the walk. Bill rolled from the tonneau door and stood by it. I jumped down and came around.

"Lift me out, and put me on my feet," Barbara ordered. "Help me—one on each side. I can walk. I must!"

We crossed a deserted porch; the evening's opening event—the grand march—had drawn every one, servants and all, inside. So far, without challenge, meeting no one. We had the place to ourselves till we stood, the three of us alone, before the upper entrance of the assembly room. In there, the last strains of Waikiki died away. I looked to Barbara. She was in command. Her words back there in town had settled that for me.

"What do we do now?" I asked.

White as the linen she wore, the girl's face shone with some inner fire of passionate resolution. I saw this, too, in the determined, almost desperate energy with which she held herself erect, one clenched hand pressed hard against her side.

"Take me in there, Mr. Boyne. And you," to Capehart, "find a man you can trust to guard each door of the ballroom."

"What you say goes." Big Bill wheeled like a well trained cart-horse and had taken a step or two, when she called after him,

"Arrest any one who attempts to enter."

"Arrest 'em if they try to git in," Capehart repeated stoically. "Sure. That goes." But I interrupted,

"You mean if they try to get out."

At that she gave me a look. No time or breath to waste. Bill, unquestioning, had hurried to his part of the work. I took up mine with, "Forgive me, Barbara. I'll not make that mistake again"; slipped my arm under hers to support her; dragged open the big doors; shoved past the hallman there; and we stepped into the many-colored, moving brilliance of the ballroom.

CHAPTER XXVIII THE COUNTRY CLUB BALL

The ballroom of the country club at Santa Ysobel is big and finely proportioned. I don't know if anything of the sort could have registered with me at the moment, but I remembered afterward my impression of the great hall fairly walled and roofed with fruit blossoms, and the gorgeousness of hundreds of costumes. The mere presence of potential funds raises the importance of an event. The prune kings and apricot barons down there, with their wives and daughters in real brocades, satins and velvets, with genuine jewels flashing over them, represented so much in the way of substantial wealth that it seemed to steady the whole fantastic scene.

Barbara and I entered on the level of the slightly raised orchestra stand and only half a dozen paces from it. Nobody noticed us much; we came in right on the turn of things—floor managers darting around, orchestra with bows poised and horns at lips, the whole glittering company of maskers being made ready to weave their "Figure of Eight" across the dancing floor. My poor girl dragged on my arm; her small feet scuffed; I lifted her along, wishing I might pick her up and carry her as Bill had done. I made for an unoccupied musicians' bench; but once there, she only leaned against it, not letting go her hold on me, and stood to take in every detail of the confused, moving scene.

The double doors had swung closed behind us; the hallman there who held the knob, now reinforced by a uniformed policeman. The servants' way, at the further end was shut; men in plain clothes set their backs against it. And last, Big Bill himself in overalls, a touch of blunt blue realism, came fogging along the side-wall to swing into place the great wooden bar that secured the entire group of glass doors which gave on the porch. Barbara would have seen all these arrangements while I was getting ready for my first glance, but I prompted her nervously with a low-toned, "All set, girl," and then as she still didn't speak, "Bill's got every door guarded."

She nodded. The length of the room away, in the end gallery, was the cannery girl queen and her guard. Even at that distance, I recognized Eddie Hughes, in his pink-and-white Beef Eater togs, a gilded wooden spear in his hand, a flower tassel bobbing beside that long, drab, knobby countenance of his. There he was, the man I'd jailed for Thomas Gilbert's murder. Below on the dancing floor, were the two, Cummings and Bowman, who had put Worth behind the bars for the same crime. At my side was the pale, silent girl who declared that Clayte was the murderer.

Whispered tuning and trying of instruments up here; flutter and rush about down on the dancing floor; and Barbara, that clenched left hand of hers still pressed in hard against her side, facing what problem?

Crash! Boom! We were so close the music fairly deafened us, as, with a multiplied undernote of moving feet, the march began. On came those people toward us, wave behind wave of color and magnificence, dotted with little black ovals of masks pierced by gleaming eye-holes. I could sense Barbara reading the room as it bore down on her, and reading it clearly, getting whatever it was she had come there for. Myself, I was overwhelmed, drowned in the size and sweep of everything, struggling along, whispering to her when I spotted Jim Edwards in his friar's robe, noticed that the Roman soldier who must be Cummings, and Bowman, the Spaniard, squired the Thornhill twins in their geisha girl dresses; the crimson poppies of a Lady of Dreams looked odd against Laura Bowman's coppery hair.

At the head of the procession as they swung around, leading it with splendid dignity, came a pair who might have been Emperor and Empress of China—the Vandemans. To go on with affairs as if nothing had happened—though Worth Gilbert was in jail—had been the laid-down policy of both Vandeman and his wife. I'd thought it reasonable then; foolish to get hot at it now. The great, shining, rhythmically moving line deployed, interwove, and opened out again until at last the floor was almost evenly occupied with the many-colored mass. I looked at Barbara; the awful intensity with which she read her room hurt me. It had nothing to do with that flirt of a glance she always gave a printed page, that mere toss of attention she was apt to offer a problem. The child was in anguish, whether merely the ache of sorrow, or actual bodily pain; I saw how rigidly that small fist still pressed against the knitted wool of her sweater, how her lip was drawn in and bitten. Her physical weakness contrasted strangely with the clean cut decision, the absolute certainty of her mental power. She raised her face and looked straight up into mine.

"Have the music stopped."

I leaned over and down toward the orchestra leader to catch his eye, holding toward him the badge. His glance caught it, and I told him what we wanted. He nodded. For an instant the music flooded on, then at a sharp rap of the baton, broke off in mid-motion, as though some great singing thing had caught its breath. And all the swaying life and color on the floor stopped as suddenly. Barbara had picked the moment that brought Ina Vandeman and her husband squarely facing us. After the first instant's bewilderment, Vandeman and his floor managers couldn't fail to realize that they were being held up by an outsider; with Barbara in full sight up here by the orchestra, they must know who was doing it. I wondered not to have Vandeman in my hair already; but he and his consort stood in dignified silence; it was his committee who came after me, a Mephistopheles, a troubadour, an Indian brave, a Hercules with his club, swarming up the step, wanting to know if I was the man responsible, why the devil I had done it, who the devil I thought I was, anyhow. Others were close behind.

"Edwards," I called to the brown friar, "can you keep these fellows off me for a minute?"

Still not a word from Barbara. Nothing from Vandeman. Less than nothing: I watched in astonishment how the gorgeous leader stopped dumb, while those next him backed into the couple behind, side stepping, so that the whole line yawed, swayed, and began to fall into disorder.

"Cummings," as I glimpsed the lawyer's chain mail and purple feather, "Keep them all in place if you can. All."

In the instant, from behind my shoulder Barbara spoke.

"Have that man—take off his mask."

A little, shaking white hand pointed at the leader.

"Mr. Vandeman," I said. "That's an order. It'll have to be done."

The words froze everything. Hardly a sound or movement in the great crowded room, except the little rustle as some one tried to see better. And there, all eyes on him, Bronson Vandeman stood with his arms at his sides, mute as a fish. Ina fumbled nervously at the cord of her own mask, calling to me in a fierce undertone,

"What do you mean, Mr. Boyne, bringing that girl here to spoil things. This is spite-work."

"Off—take his mask off! Do it yourself!" Barbara's voice was clear and steady.

I made three big jumps of the space between us and the leading couple. Vandeman's committee-men obstructed me, the excited yip going amongst them.

"Vandeman—Bronse—Vannie—Who let this fool in here?—Do we throw him out?"

Then they took the words from Edwards; the tune changed to grumblings of, "What's the matter with Van? Why doesn't he settle it one way or another, and be done?"

Why didn't he? I had but a breath of time to wonder at that, as I shoved a way through. Darn him, like a graven image there, the only mute, immovable thing in that turmoil! I began to feel sore.

"You heard what she said?" I took no trouble now to be civil. "She wants your mask off."

No flicker of response from the man, but the Empress of China dragged down her mask, crying,

"Heard what she said? What she wants?" Over the shoulders of the crowd she gave Barbara Wallace a venomous look, then came at me.

A little too late. My hand had shot out and snatched the mask from the face of China's monarch. A moment I glared, the bit of black stuff in my grasp, at the alien countenance I had uncovered. Crowding and craning of the others to see. Jabbering, exclaiming all around us.

"Corking make-up; looks like a sure-enough Chinaman."

"No make-up at all. The real thing."

"What's the big idea?"

"Why did he unmask, then?"

"Didn't want to. They made him."

And last, but loudest, repeated time and again, with wonder, with distaste, with rising anger,

"The Vandeman's Chinese cook!"

For with the ripping away of that black oval, I had looked into the slant, inscrutable eyes of Fong Ling. Hemmed in by the crowd, he could but face me; he did so with a kind of unhuman passivity.

And the committee went wild. Their own masks came off on the run. I saw Cummings' face, Bowman's; Eddie Hughes slid from the balcony stair and bucked the crowd, pushing through to the seat of war. The grand march had become a jostling, gabbling chaos.

Barbara, up there, above it all, knew what she was about. I had utter confidence in her. But she was plainly holding back for a further development, her eyes on the entrances; and what the devil was my next move?

Ina Vandeman wheeled where she