Miss Hinch, Henry Sydnor Harrison [easy novels to read txt] 📗

friend, you seem to anticipate all my own wants? Your mentioning something to eat just now reminded me that I myself was all but famishing.” He glanced at his watch, appearing to deliberate. “Yes, there is still time before my train. Come, we will find a modest eating-place together.”

“Oh. sir,” she stammered, with a blush, “but—you wouldn’t want to eat with a poor old woman like me, sir.”

“And why not? Are we not all equal in the sight of God?”

They ascended the stairs together, like any prosperous parson and his poor parishioner, and, coming out into Fourteenth Street, started west. On the first block they came to a restaurant, a brilliantly lighted, tiled and polished place of the quick-lunch variety. But the woman timidly preferred not to stop here, saying that the glare of such places was very bad for her old eyes. The kindly divine accepted the objection as valid, without argument. Two blocks farther on they found on a corner a quieter resort, an unpretentious little haven which yet boasted a “Ladies’ Entrance” down the side street.

They entered by the front door, and sat down at a table, facing each other. The woman read the menu through, and finally, after much embarrassed uncertainty, ordered poached eggs on toast. The clergyman ordered the same. The simple meal was soon despatched. Just as they were finishing it, the woman said apologetically:

“If you’ll excuse me, sir—could I see the bill of fare a minute? I think I’d best take a little pot of tea to warm me up, if they do not charge too high.”

“I haven’t the bill of fare,” �said the clergyman.

They looked diligently for the cardboard strip, but it was nowhere to be seen. The waiter drew near.

“Yes, ma’am! I certainly left it there on the table when I took the order.”

“I’m sure I can’t imagine what’s become of it,” repeated the clergyman, rather insistently.

He looked hard at the woman, and found that she was looking hard at him. Both pairs of eyes fell instantly.

The waiter brought another bill of fare; the woman ordered tea; the waiter came back with it. The clergyman paid for both orders with a dollar bill that looked hard-earned.

The tea proved to be very hot: it could not be drunk down at a gulp. The clergyman, watching the woman intently as she sipped, seemed to grow more and more restless. His fingers drummed the tablecloth; he could hardly sit still. All at once he said: “What is that calling in the street? It sounds like newsboys.”

The woman put her old head on one side and listened. “Yes, sir. There seems to be an extra out.”

“Upon my word,” he said, after a pause, “I believe I’ll go get one. Good gracious! Crime is a very interesting thing, to be sure!”

He rose slowly, took down his shovel-hat from the hanger near him, and, grasping his heavy stick, limped to the door. Leaving it open behind him, much to the annoyance of the proprietor in the cashier’s cage, he stood a moment in the little vestibule, looking up and down the street. Then he took a few slow steps eastward, beckoning with his hand as he went, and so passed out of sight of the woman at the table.

The eating-place was on the corner, and outside the clergyman paused for half a breath. North, east, south, and west he looked, and nowhere he found what his flying glance sought. He turned the corner into the darker cross-street, and began to walk, at first slowly, continually looking about him. Presently his pace quickened, quickened so that he no longer even stayed to use his stout cane. In another moment he was all but running, his clubfoot pounding the icy sidewalk heavily as he went. A newsboy thrust an extra under his very nose, and he did not even see it.

Far down the street, nearly two blocks away, a tall figure in a blue coat stood and stamped in the freezing sleet; and the hurrying divine sped straight toward him. But he did not get very near. For, as he passed the side entrance at the extreme rear of the restaurant, a departing guest dashed out so recklessly as to run full into him, stopping him dead.

Without looking at her, he knew who it was. In fact, he did not look at her at all, but turned his head hurriedly east and west, sweeping the dark street with a swift eye. But the old woman, having drawn back with a sharp exclamation as they collided, rushed breathlessly into apologies:

“Oh, sir—excuse me, sir! A newsboy popped his head into the side door just after you went out, sir, and I ran to him to get you the paper. But he got away too quick for me, sir, and so I—”

“Exactly,” said the clergyman in his quiet deep voice. “That must have been the very boy I myself was after.”

On the other side, two men had just turned into the street, well muffled against the night, talking cheerfully as they trudged along. Now the clergyman looked full at the woman, and she saw that there was a smile on his face.

“As he seems to have eluded us both, suppose we return to the subway?”

“Yes, sir; it’s full time I—”

“The sidewalk is so slippery,” he went on gently, “perhaps you had better take my arm.”

The woman did as she was bidden.

Behind the pair in the dingy restaurant, the waiter came forward to shut the door, and lingered to discuss with the proprietor the sudden departure of his two patrons. However, the score had been paid in full, with a liberal tip for service, so there was no especial complaint to make. After listening to some markedly unfavorable comments on the ways of the clergy, the waiter returned to his table to set it in order for the next customer.

On the floor in the carpeted aisle between tables lay a white rectangle of cardboard, which his familiar eye easily recognized as one of his own bills of fare, face downward. He stooped and picked it up. On the back of it was some scribbling, made with a blue lead-pencil. The handwriting was very loose and irregular, as if the writer had had his eyes elsewhere while he wrote, and it was with some difficulty that the waiter deciphered this message:

Miss Hinch 14th St. subway Get police quick

The waiter carried this curious document to the proprietor, who read it over a number of times. He was a dull man, and had a dull man’s suspiciousness of a practical joke. However, after a good deal of irresolute discussion, he put on his overcoat and went out for a policeman. He turned west, and half way up the block met an elderly bluecoat sauntering east. The policeman looked at the scribbling, and dismissed it profanely as a wag’s foolishness of the sort that was bothering the life out of him a dozen times a day. He walked along with the proprietor, and as they drew near to the latter’s place of business, both became aware at the same moment of footsteps thudding nearer up the cross-street from the south. As they looked up, two young policemen, accompanied by a man in a uniform like a street-car conductor’s, swept around the corner and dashed straight into the restaurant.

The first policeman and the proprietor ran in after them, and found them staring about rather vacantly. One of the breathless arms of the law demanded if any suspicious characters had been seen about the place, and the dull proprietor said no. The officers, looking rather flat, explained their errand. It seemed that a few moments before, the third man, who was a ticket-chopper at the subway station, had found a mysterious message lying on the floor by his box. Whence it had come, how long it had lain there, he had not the slightest idea. However, there it was. The policeman exhibited a crumpled white scrap torn from a newspaper, on which was scrawled in blue pencil:

Miss Hinch Miller’s restaurant Get police quick

The first policeman, who was both the oldest and the fattest of the three, produced the message on the bill of fare, so utterly at odds with this. The dull proprietor, now bethinking himself, mentioned the clergyman and the old woman who had taken poached eggs and tea together, called for a second bill of fare, and departed so unexpectedly by different doors. The ticket-chopper recalled that he had seen the same pair at his station; they had come up, he remembered, and questioned him closely about trains. The three policemen were momentarily puzzled by this testimony. But it was soon plain to them that if either the woman or the clergyman really had any information about Miss Hinch—a highly improbable supposition in itself—they would never have stopped with peppering the neighborhood with silly little contradictory messages.

“They’re a pair of old fools tryin’ to have sport with po-lice, and I’d like to run them in for it,” growled the fattest of the officers; and this was the general verdict.

The little conference broke up. The dull proprietor returned to his cage, the waiter to his table; the subway man departed on the run for his chopping-box; the three policemen passed out into the bitter night. They walked together, grumbling, and their feet, perhaps by some subconscious impulse, turned eastward toward the subway. And in the middle of the next block a man came running up to them.

“Officer, look what I found on the sidewalk a minute ago. Read that scribble!”

He held up a white slab which proved to be a bill of fare from Miller’s restaurant. On the back of it the three peering officers saw, almost illegibly scrawled in blue pencil:

Police! Miss Hinch 14th 5t subw

The hand trailed off on the _w _as though the writer had been suddenly interrupted. The fat policeman blasphemed and threatened arrests. But the second policeman, who was dark and wiry, raised his head from the bill of fare and said suddenly: “Tim, I believe there’s something in this.”

“There’d ought to be ten days on the Island in it for thim,” growled fat Tim.

“Suppose, now,” said the other policeman, staring intently at nothing, “the old woman was Miss Hinch herself, f’r instance, and the parson was shadowing her while pretendin’ he never suspicioned her, and Miss Hinch not darin’ to cut and run for it till she was sure she had a clean getaway. Well now, Tim, what better could he do—”

“That’s right!” exclaimed the third policeman. “Specially when ye think that Hinch carries a gun, an’ll use it, too! Why not have a look in at the subway station anyway, the three of us?”

This proposal carried the day. The three officers started for the subway, the citizen following. They walked at a good pace and without more talk; and both their speed and their silence had a subtle psychological reaction. As the minds of the four men turned inward upon the odd behavior of the pair in Miller’s restaurant, the conviction that, after all, something important might be afoot grew and strengthened within each one of them. Unconsciously their pace quickened. It was the dark, wiry policeman who first broke into an open run, but the three other men had been for twenty paces on the verge of it.

However, these consultations and vacillations had taken time. The stout clergyman and the poor old woman had five minutes’ start of the officers of the law, and that, as it happened, was all that the occasion required. On Fourteenth Street, as they made their way arm in arm to the station, they were seen, and remembered, by a number of belated pedestrians. It was observed by more than one that