第17章

"Don't go!" she begged."Oh, for God's sake, don't leave us here alone!""You heard a woman scream didn't you?" asked Bridge."Do you suppose I can stay in up here when a woman may be facing death a few feet below me?"For answer the girl but held more tightly to his arm while the youth slipped to the floor and embraced the man's knees in a vicelike hold which he could not break without hurting his detainer.

"Come! Come!" expostulated Bridge."Let me go.""Wait!" begged the girl."Wait until you know that it is a human voice that screams through this horrible place."The youth only strained his hold tighter about the man's legs.Bridge felt a soft cheek pressed to his knee;and, for some unaccountable reason, the appeal was stronger than the pleading of the girl.Slowly Bridge re-alized that he could not leave this defenseless youth alone even though a dozen women might be menaced by the uncanny death below.With a firm hand he shot the bolt."Leave go of me," he said; "I shan't leave you unless she calls for help in articulate words."The boy rose and, trembling, pressed close to the man who, involuntarily, threw a protecting arm about the slim figure.The girl, too, drew nearer, while the two yeggmen rose and stood in rigid silence by the window.

From below came an occasional rattle of the chain, fol-lowed after a few minutes by the now familiar clanking as the iron links scraped across the flooring.Mingled with the sound of the chain there rose to them what might have been the slow and ponderous footsteps of a heavy man, dragging painfully across the floor.For a few moments they heard it, and then all was silent.

For a dozen tense minutes the five listened; but there was no repetition of any sound from below.Suddenly the girl breathed a deep sigh, and the spell of terror was broken.Bridge felt rather than heard the youth sobbing softly against his breast, while across the room The Gen-eral gave a quick, nervous laugh which he as immedi-ately suppressed as though fearful unnecessarily of calling attention to their presence.The other vagabond fumbled with his hypodermic needle and the narcotic which would quickly give his fluttering nerves the quiet they craved.

Bridge, the boy, and the girl shivered together in their soggy clothing upon the edge of the bed, feeling now in the cold dawn the chill discomfort of which the excite-ment of the earlier hours of the night had rendered them unconscious.The youth coughed.

"You've caught cold," said Bridge, his tone almost self-reproachful, as though he were entirely responsible for the boy's condition."We're a nice aggregation of molly-coddles--five of us sitting half frozen up here with a stove on the floor below, and just because we heard a noise which we couldn't explain and hadn't the nerve to investigate." He rose."I'm going down, rustle some wood and build a fire in that stove--you two kids have got to dry those clothes of yours and get warmed up or we'll have a couple of hospital cases on our hands."Once again rose a chorus of pleas and objections.Oh, wouldn't he wait until daylight? See! the dawn was even then commencing to break.They didn't dare go down and they begged him not to leave them up there alone.

At this Dopey Charlie spoke up.The 'hop' had com-menced to assert its dominion over his shattered nervous system instilling within him a new courage and a feel-ing of utter well-being."Go on down," said he to Bridge.

"The General an' I'll look after the kids--won't we bo?""Sure," assented The General; "we'll take care of 'em.""I'll tell you what we'll do," said Bridge; "we'll leave the kids up here and we three'll go down.They won't go, and I wouldn't leave them up here with you two morons on a bet."The General and Dopey Charlie didn't know what a moron was but they felt quite certain from Bridge's tone of voice that a moron was not a nice thing, and anyway no one could have bribed them to descend into the darkness of the lower floor with the dead man and the grisly THING that prowled through the haunted chambers; so they flatly refused to budge an inch.

Bridge saw in the gradually lighting sky the near ap-proach of full daylight; so he contented himself with making the girl and the youth walk briskly to and fro in the hope that stimulated circulation might at least par-tially overcome the menace of the damp clothing and the chill air, and thus they occupied the remaining hour of the night.

From below came no repetition of the inexplicable noises of that night of terror and at last, with every ob-ject plainly discernible in the light of the new day, Bridge would delay no longer; but voiced his final de-termination to descend and make a fire in the old kitchen stove.Both the boy and the girl insisted upon accom-panying him.For the first time each had an opportunity to study the features of his companions of the night.

Bridge found in the girl and the youth two dark eyed, good-looking young people.In the girl's face was, per-haps, just a trace of weakness; but it was not the face of one who consorts habitually with criminals.The man appraised her as a pretty, small-town girl who had been led into a temporary escapade by the monotony of village life, and be would have staked his soul that she was not a bad girl.

The boy, too, looked anything other than the role he had been playing.Bridge smiled as he looked at the clear eyes, the oval face, and the fine, sensitive mouth and thought of the youth's claim to the crime battered sobriquet of The Oskaloosa Kid.The man wondered if the mystery of the clanking chain would prove as harm-lessly infantile as these two whom some accident of hi-larious fate had cast in the roles of debauchery and crime.