“Jo, we must find her at once. Let’s go to Westcott’s the quickest way we can.”
“What is it, Marta?”
“That Mr. Hebler who is visiting here, you know,” said Marta breathlessly. “Well, he missed a diamond ring. He left it on a table near his door—I saw it. When we came back from our walk last night, I went to Miss Lamont’s room. His door was open. A great whopping diamond ring was on the table—and—”
“Yes, Marta,” he said encouragingly, as she paused.
“When she found it was gone, she told Mr. Walters and Mr. Hebler that she took it, so as to protect me. That’s why she has gone.”
“She’s a trump! Read me her note, Marta.”
“DEAR LITTLE MARTA:
“You must do just as I say. I told Mr. Walters and Mr. Hebler I took the ring. Give it to Mr. Hebler and tell him I left it with you to hand to him. Never do it again, Marta. Jo is worth a whole mine of diamonds. When I am safely and far away, will let you hear from me.
“With Love,
“PEN.”
“Some girl!” exclaimed Jo. “But she isn’t as keen as I thought, or she’d have known you didn’t take the ring.”
“Jo, do you believe—”
“Shucks, honey! I know you didn’t. I wouldn’t believe you did if I saw you take it. Here, little girl—”
He stopped, put his arm around her, lifted the little face and kissed the tears from it.
“What’s matter with you?”
“Jo, I didn’t take it!”
“Don’t I know you didn’t, honey!”
“It’s nice in you to know it, Jo. But—suppose, I had taken it—”
“I’d have given it back and rustled around till I could have bought you the biggest diamond in Chicago.”
“Who do you suppose did take it, Jo?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he never lost it.”
“Wasn’t it grand in her to take the blame?”
“Yes,” he admitted grudgingly, “but I don’t like her thinking you took it.”
“But, Jo. Of course she would think it was I, and—I remember now—when I saw that diamond I thought how easy it would be for anyone to lift it, and then when I was in her room, I hardly heard a word she said because I was thinking, ‘It’s Jo! It’s Jo’s love that’s made me different,’ and then I got scared thinking that I might want to take it, and how awful it would have been if I had never met you and loved you. I got up and walked right out of the room so I could be alone and think about you. It must have looked queer to her the way I acted—till she found the ring had been taken.”
“I’ll see Kurt,” said Jo, “and tell him about it, and he will find her.”
“What’s that sound?” interrupted Marta, looking about her in a puzzled way. “I’ve heard it before somewhere. Oh, I know! It’s an airship.”
They looked up and, for the moment, lost all interest in things below.
“Holy Smoke!” exclaimed Jo. “First one I ever saw! Gene said there was one in town a few days ago. Look! It’s coming down corkscrew style! It’s going to land there by Westcott’s!”
* * *
CHAPTER XIV
Down the road from the corral, Kurt chugged homeward in his crude little car. He had the manner of one whose heart is heavy, but whose resolution was still invincible.
A strange unaccustomed sound, a faint, far-away buzzing made him glance upward. Two sharp winged points were skimming through the air. He felt a thrill—the thrill of the unknown. He knew it must be one of the craft, foreign as yet to the hill country. In the distance he saw it swirl, loop and maneuver, spiral gracefully downward, skim the earth lightly, rise again and then descend from sight hidden by one of the hills.
In a few moments he saw it ascending again. It passed over him—so high up that it seemed but of bird size.
He was startled—lifted momentarily and dazedly from his plodding existence.
He had read of these ships of the air, but their reality had not been borne in on him until now.
He went on to the house. Three children rushed at him with football fury.
“Attaboy!” he cried, catching up Billy. “What is it?”
“Mother is in town with father and Mr. Hebler. Father just telephoned—”
Kurt had the feeling of something lifted—of help at hand.
“And,” continued Francis placidly, “father said you were to take us to town in the big car and we’ll all have dinner at the hotel and come back together. And he said to bring Aunt Pen. But you can’t now.”
“Run up to her room, Francis, and tell her I want to speak to her.”
“Aunt Pen has gone,” said the boy soberly.
“Gone! When—where?”
“I don’t know. She kissed us good-bye and she gave me a letter to give to you at dinner time.”
“Give it to me now, Francis.”
“No; she said she trusted me, and I told her I wouldn’t give it to you till she said.”
“Come with me, Francis,” said Kurt, drawing him away from the other children. “I want to talk to you as man to man. We must always protect women, you know. Your Aunt Pen went away because she thought it best for her. It isn’t best. Your mother is her best friend, and if she had been here, she wouldn’t have let her go. If I had the letter, you see, I might be able to find where she had gone. Then I could ask her to come back.”
Francis looked up at him oddly and said in his little, old-man fashion:
“Maybe it would be best, but father says that a real man never breaks his word to a woman.”
Kurt flushed slightly.
“I take off my hat to you, Francis. You are right.”
Not believing that Pen would start out on foot, he went down to the garage. The cars were all accounted for. A visit to the stables proved the same as to the horses.
On his way back to the house, he met Betty, who said to him in a stage whisper.
“Uncle Kurt, Aunt Penny is going to France. She went by way of Westcott’s. Is that the way to France? Don’t tell Francis I told. She is going to help the French and the Beligum babies.”
“Thank you very much, Betty.”
This was a clue. She had doubtless started toward Westcott’s expecting to get a lift to town. If no one had picked her up en route, he could easily overtake her in the big car, which Gene had now repaired.
“Go and tell the boys to get ready, Betty.”
Betty sped gleefully away.
“Oh, Mr. Walters!” hailed Mrs. Merlin, coming from the house, “when you see Mr. Hebler, tell him I put his diamond ring away. I’m awfully forgetful. I—”
“You put his diamond ring away? Where?” asked Kurt faintly.
“It was like this. I couldn’t get to sleep last night because a window was rattling in the hall, so I got up and went out to fix it. When I passed by Mr. Hebler’s door, I saw his diamond ring on a table near the door. Ain’t it awful how careless folks are! I opened a drawer in the table and slipped it in, and I clean forgot all about it till a little while ago. Maybe he’s got it on by this time, though.”
“All right, Mrs. Merlin, I’ll tell him,” said Kurt, hastily going in and up to Hebler’s room. The diamond fairly blazed at him in accusation as he opened the drawer.
And yet Hebler had told him that he had the ring! He hadn’t been in the house after he had said the ring was missing. And why had Pen said she took it? Maybe she had taken that method of returning it.
He went downstairs, pondering over the mystery. This time Marta stopped him, excitedly.
“Oh, Mr. Walters, Jo and I have been looking for you! Miss Lamont didn’t take the ring.”
“I know she didn’t. I just learned, Marta, that Mrs. Merlin saw it on the table and put it away.”
“Find Miss Lamont and tell her!” cried Marta in distress. “You see she thought I took it. She had reason to think so—the way I acted. She was protecting me.”
“I see,” he said despairingly. “I made her thi
nk you had taken it.”
“Come outside and see Jo.”
“Jo,” he asked desperately, when he had joined him, “do you know where she is? She has gone. I must know.”
“Kurt, you might as well try to catch a piece of quicksilver as Penny Ante, if she don’t want to be caught.”
“Have you the slightest idea as to where she has gone or where she might have gone?”
“Maybe I could venture a guess. I’ll have to know first why you want to know.”
Something more compelling than any emotion he had yet known kept down the anger that otherwise would have risen at being thwarted.
“I love her, Jo,” he said quietly.
“For how long, Kurt, have you loved her?”
“Since the first night I met her,” he said slowly and reminiscently. “When we camped on the trail. She lay asleep in the moonlight.”
“Have you forgotten what you warned me against that day I told you about Marta—about marrying a thief.”
“I was a simp, then, Jo. I had never been in love.”
“Well,” pursued Jo, “why didn’t you tell her you loved her in the first place? Maybe it would have helped. It isn’t much of a compliment to a girl to hang around and not say anything.”
“Think, Jo. I supposed until Marta came, that Pen was your girl. I brought her up here to see if she could be reformed for you. I sent you away to Westcott’s until I could tell if she were worthy of you.”
“Say, Kurt, I am the simp. I never thought of that. She didn’t think you really cared. Leave it to me. I’ll tell her.”
“But where is she? Don’t let the boys know, but Betty leaked the fact that she was going to France. I can’t think she was in earnest.”
Jo whistled.
“I am beginning to get glimpses on a dark subject. I’ll bet that is where he is making for, too.”
“He? Who?” he asked quickly. “Hebler?”
“Hebler! She’d rather dodge him than you. No; I mean that aviator who landed over toward Westcott’s a little while ago. I heard one of those fliers had been in town giving an exhibition. He was down to earth just about long enough to pick some one up. That was what she meant in the note she left for me when she said she was going by the Excelsior route.”
“How would she know him, and how would she get word to him to come out here?”
“She told me she spent the day in town—let me see—day before yesterday, I think it was. Said she met a man there she used to know.”
“She told me, too, she had been to town, but I thought she was only joking. I didn’t believe her.”
“There’s a lot you could hear about her, Kurt, that you wouldn’t believe right off the bat; but it’s not me who’s going to put you wise. Talk to Mrs. Kingdon about her. You’ll not get the chance to interview Penny Ante very soon, I imagine. In the craft she must be traveling in, there’s nothing about this ranch that can overtake her, but I’ll do my level best. Let me see! She won’t go to town. She’ll want to keep out of Hebler’s reach, of course.”
“Why?” asked Kurt. “Do you know?”
“I know more than you do about her. A girl has to have some one to confide in and Little Penny Ante chose me. You scared her out, you know.”
Kurt winced.
“They will naturally go in an opposite direction,” pursued Jo. “They may fly over to the next station and take the east-bound. I’ll take your car.”
“No; you take the children to town, and I’ll go in pursuit—”
“That’ll never do. She won’t try to dodge me.”
* * *
CHAPTER XV
In the little valley by Westcott’s, Pen stood waiting and staring upward. At last she heard the sharp sound of an engine and saw the plane describing a sweeping circle. It came gently down, the little wheels rolling along the grass.
“I’m in debt to Hebler,” said Larry. “It was only your fear of him that overcame your fear of flying.”
Then looking at her, he continued, confidingly, “I wouldn’t take up the average girl, Pen, and especially one who owned up to being afraid. But I know you. You’ll forget fear in the thrills. All you’ve got to do is to sit still, hold on and look out on the level. We won’t do any swivels; just straight stuff, and you’ll be as safe as you would any place.”
She put on the hood and goggles and was adjusted to the seat.
“Now where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Anywhere to lose myself. Hebby is in town and so—are others. Let us take the opposite direction and you can land me at some place where the east-bound stops and I can get some more luggage. Then we’ll make plans.”
“Suits me. First thing we’ll do is to have a grand flight. Then I’ll leave you at a nice, little, sky-high inn I know up in the clouds. I’ll fly back to town, pay my bill, pack my traps and join you by train.”
He started the engine. The plane skipped along for a few paces, then arose, it seemed to Pen, to great and dizzy heights. In spite of her instructions she ventured to look down. Everything earthly was disappearing. They dodged the clouds, went above them and then slid down to the splendors of the sunlight. Over the hills at full speed they swept along, Larry’s air-wise, lightning-swift sensibilities making naught of change of currents and drafts. Then came the joy and thrill of a sixty-mile straightaway spurt.
It was wonderful, but the most wonderful part of it to Pen was that she had not even a second of fear, although always this thought of being shot up suddenly straight into an unknown realm had been most terrifying.
Up there above the hills and in the clouds, she felt entranced, spiritualized. It was with a feeling of depression that she saw they were spinning down until they hovered over a field, scudding smoothly and slowly along.
“You weren’t afraid!” exclaimed Larry triumphantly, as they walked along toward a little inn resting at the base of one of the undulating hills.
“No;” she answered, “only awed.”
“Was it anything like you expected?”
“No,” she replied.
A man came out of the inn to meet them.
“Halloa, Larry! Too bad I couldn’t have had a full house to see. The last tourist left on the train to-day.”
“Then you’ll have more room for us. This is Miss Lamont, Nat. Mr. Yates, the proprietor,” he explained to Pen. “Can you give us supper and put Miss Lamont up for the night? I have to fly back to my hotel. I’ll return by train in the morning.”
“Sure thing! House is yours.”
He showed Pen to a neat little room and told her “supper’d be on in a jiffy.”
She sat down dazedly. Presently she was roused to her surroundings by Larry’s “Oh, Pen!” from below.
When she came down to the dining-room, Larry’s clear young eyes looked at her keenly.
“Not down to earth yet, Pen? I know how you feel. First time I made the sky route, I went off by myself for a day.”
“Larry, I can’t talk about it yet. I will tell you now why I joined you. I thought I would like to go to France—with you. I thought I might be useful some way, but now—”
“We won’t think of plans now. We’ll talk it all over in the morning when I am back. You’ll be safe here. Nat would as lief shoot Hebby or anyone else who trailed you. Supper’s on the table, so come on.”
Throughout the meal Larry did most of the talking, Pen scarcely responding. Then he was off, steering in great circles toward town, Pen watching with the quickening of pulse and a renewal of the elation she had felt when taking the air. When he was but a mere speck in the sky, she went up to her little room.
“You’ll never look quite so high or so wonderful to me again,” she thought, as she looked out on the hills. “It’s because I’ve looked down on you, I suppose—the law of contrast. I learned a great deal up there—in the vapors. I put out my feelers, something I never did before. I see I’ve always faked my sensations. But my wings are pin feathers as yet. I have to look at everythin
g from a new angle of vision. All my life I’ve been longing for thrills—real thrills, my own thrills; not other peoples. I had a few little shivers when I was riding to Top Hill that morning; a few more last night—but my first true thrill of rapture came when I was challenging the sky, an argonaut.”
It was a hard struggle for Pen to adjust her new self that she had found up in the high altitudes where all the tepid, petty things of life had dropped from her—where she had found the famous fleece, the truth. In the vastness of that uncharted land, like a flash in the dark something had leaped at her. Her dream of a dream had come true. She had learned the great human miracle, the meaning of a love that had the strength to renounce. A god-made love, sweet and strong, conceived on earth, but brought forth on high where the call of destiny had sounded with clarion clearness. She knew now what she had missed; that he was not of the world of miniature men who exact and never return.
She was roused from her visions of the new and radiant world which had been opened unto her by a knock at her door.
“Yes,” she answered vaguely.
“There’s a man downstairs to see you,” said the proprietor.
She was at once alert and on the defensive, thinking of an encounter with Hebler.
“Do you know who he is?” she asked apprehensively.
“He said to tell you ’twas Jo.”
Joyfully she hastened down to the deserted office of the little inn.
“Jo, I am so glad it’s you!”
“So am I. Come outside and take a walk with me.”
“How did you ever track me up here, Jo?” she asked as they walked up a hillside.
“Not hard to track the first skycraft that ever came up to these parts. I saw one land near Westcott’s, and I had a hunch it was lighting for you. Then I thought no more about it until things happened that made it up to me to find you. I inquired around and about and found a big balloon had come this way, so I figured this was about your goal for a train.”
“Why was it up to you to find me, Jo?”
“Well, Miss Penny Ante, I am a little interested in you, seeing as it was you who brought Marta to me. And I knew you would be interested in knowing Marta didn’t take the ring.”
Penny of Top Hill Trail Page 12
