He turned back to the work in hand.
Pauline, spurred by terror as she realized that Wrentz was again upon her trail, had sped like a wild thing through the park paths. She could hear the heavy footsteps of her pursuer close behind. She could hear also a shouting from afar off. She made toward the shouting– the sound of any voice but the voices of the inhuman men who had planned her death was welcome to her ears.
She came out upon the cliff where it sloped steeply to the railroad yards, but not too steeply to prevent her descending. From her position, the lines of freight cars cut off from her vision the strange group of hunters who were shouting. Running, stumbling, creeping, clutching at small bushes, she scrambled down the cliff.
“Stop and come back!” she heard a menacing voice behind her. She sped on the faster.
A line of high bushes fringed the bottom of the cliff. Between the bushes and the first rails ran a ditch. Sheltered from all view from above, Pauline dragged herself along this ditch, seeking a hiding place. She knew her strength was almost gone. She was in terror of fainting. If she could hide somewhere and rest–
A single empty freight car stood on the outer track a hundred yards away. Its open door offered the only means of concealment that she had. She believed that the bushes were high enough still to shield her while she climbed into the car.
In this she was wrong. Wrentz, watching from above–for he was afraid of the voices on the tracks, below and had not followed Pauline –watched with pleasure as she crawled to the side of the car, and, after two failures, managed to drag herself through the high door. She sank exhausted. Gradually, however, her strength returned. Her mind recovered from the dazing experiences of the last few hours. She began to gain courage and to plan her further flight.
As she moved toward the car door to reconnoiter, the sense of an invisible presence suddenly possessed her. Instinctively she turned.
One glance behind her and every fiber of her body seemed to turn to stone. Fear she had known, but never terror such as this. She stood paralyzed, unable to close her eyes, unable to move. For there beside her, towering above her in horrible strength, with wildly grinning face and cruelly outreaching claws, stood the thing that gave explanation to the hunt outside and the shouting. Pauline was in the clutches of a gorilla. She fainted as she felt herself gripped in the hairy arms.
Wrentz was gloating as he stood on watch over Pauline’s hiding place. In a little while the men, would be out of the railroad yard and he would go down and finish the work. But his rejoicings were turned into amazement by the sight which now presented itself at the door of the car.
With Pauline, carried over one arm as if she had been a wisp of straw, the gorilla was crawling down to the trackside. Wrentz saw it crawl along the ditch and heard the crunch of broken bushes as the huge creature clambered up the cliff.
Wondering, scarcely able to believe his eyes, Wrentz followed at a safe distance.
Young Policeman Blount, searching for the fugitive chauffeur of the wrecked automobile and the mysterious young woman who had escaped from it, paused at the sound of heavy foot-falls. A low, guttural, snarling sound–a sound hardly human–accompanied the footsteps. He had reached the bottom of the cliff a half mile from where Pauline had found her perilous shelter. Peering up through the bushes, his astonishment and horror were a match for the astonishment and joy of Wrentz. The gorilla, with Pauline still clutched in the mighty paw, had reached almost the top of the cliff at its steepest point.
Blount blew his whistle, blast after blast. He started up the cliff, but came back at the sound of hurrying footsteps and calls; the hunters from the railroad yards had heard the signal.
“Hello! Have you seen anything of the gorilla?” yelled the first man to come up.
Blount pointed up the cliff side to where the hideous beast was just dragging Pauline over the topmost ledge.
The men stood spell-bound with pity.
“A girl!” gasped one of them. “She’s as good as dead, if she isn’t dead now. He just killed our foreman back in the yards.”
“No, thank heaven!” cried Blount, “she’s not dead. Look!”
At the top of the cliff they saw Pauline’s form suddenly quicken into life. The gorilla had released its hold upon her to make sure of its footing on the perilous ledge. Now she stood, a frail, pitiful, hopeless thing, fighting–actually assailing the beast, more mighty than a dozen men.
Their hearts sick within them they watched the brief struggle. Wrentz, too, watched it, from his hiding place on the top of the cliff. But his heart was not sick. In a moment, he was sure, his work would be accomplished for him, and his employer would be rid of Pauline Marvin in a way that could reflect no blame on any one.
Blount started up the cliff. He took it for granted that the others would follow, but looking down after gaining half the distance, he saw the circus men still huddled together in fascinated awe.
“Look! Look!” they called to him. “He’s taking her up the tree.”
Blount looked and saw the gorilla climbing ponderously the trunk of a large tree, the branches of which overhung the precipice. Blount climbed on frantically. He stopped again. The gorilla was crawling out upon one of the overhanging branches! The strange beast-brain had conceived a death for Pauline more terrible than any Raymond Owen bad ever plotted. Wrentz himself might have envied the gorilla.
Blount drew his revolver. He was not more than a hundred feet below them now. “It’s the chance of hitting her against the chance of saving her,” he muttered. He fired. With a snarl of pain the gorilla turned and bit savagely at its shoulder. Blount rushed on. He stopped again and fired. He was at the verge of the cliff. He could blaze away now with no danger of hitting Pauline, for he was a sure marksman.
With a great throb of joy in his heart the gallant young fellow saw the beast turn, and, leaving Pauline with her arms around the limb, her eyes shut against the dizzy depths below, move back and scramble down.
Blount was on the cliff-top as the gorilla reached the ground. The beast charged. Blount fired again. Again the gorilla, snarling, bit at its wounded side, but it came an as if a dozen lives vitalized the gross body.
Blount backed away from the cliff, but the monster was upon him. It clutched him, hurled him to ground, dragged him back to the dizzy verge.
Slowly Blount was pressed over the precipice. The watchers below saw him in his last struggle writhe in the deathly grasp, twist his revolver and fire three shots into the heart of the gorilla.
Down the long fall to the jagged rocks went the beast.
Pauline was bending over the bleeding, battered form of the young officer when the circus crew reached them.
“Oh, you are brave, brave!” she cried.
He opened his eyes and grinned merrily. “If I’m brave, I’d like to know what you are.”
“Oh, I’m not brave, I’m nothing but a selfish little pig,” cried Pauline. “I’ve treated the dearest fellow in the world shamefully. He’s forgiven me over and over, but he won’t forgive me this time.”
“He’ll forgive you anything, Mim,” Blount assured her, “for the sake of getting you safe back. But I shouldn’t like to be the man who got you into this, when he hears of it.”
“The man’s safe enough,” said Burgess, who had just up in time to hear Blount’s last words.
“No, he didn’t escape that way,” as Blount uttered an ejaculation of disgust. “He ran full tilt into me and when I tried to arrest him he drew his revolver on me. By good luck I got him first–yes, Jo, he’s dead.”
“Dead,” repeated Pauline in a low tone. “How horrible to go out of life a moment after you had tried to commit murder.”
“It’s not his first,” Burgess said coolly. “We’ve been after him and his gang these six months. It was Wrentz, Jo, and I made a haul of papers that’ll get somebody into trouble.”
“Oh, don’t hurt the young one,” cried Pauline. “He tried to help me.”
“Rocco? He was dead when they picked him up. And, now, Miss Marvin, hadn’t I better get you a taxi?”
“Yes, thank you, but,” with irrepressible curiosity, “how did you know me?”
Burgess smiled. “How did I know you? I beg your pardon, Miss, but for nearly a year your picture’s been in every paper, more or less, in the United States. You’re a big head-liner–it’s an honor to meet you, face to face. But it’s Blount has all the luck. He’s saved you–he’ll be a head-liner himself tomorrow.”
The hot color rushed over Pauline’s face. “A head-liner”–so that was what she meant to the public, to the man on the street.
“Please, Please, don’t let this get into the Papers,” she begged. “I’ll do anything in the world for you if you’ll just keep it out of the papers.”
“Will you tell us about those other adventures?”
Burgess asked eagerly. “It’s a sure thing that somebody’s been pulling the wires, making you walk the tight rope, and somebody that knows everything you do. Any man on the force who could spot him would be made.”
“No, no,” Pauline insisted, an uneasy remembrance of Harry’s suspicions lending emphasis to her denial. “Some of those things were done before anybody out of the house could know.”
“Just as I said,” Burgess agreed triumphantly.
“It’s somebody in the house. Why he knew about your bull terrier, and the papers had it had just been given you the day before–darned clever little dog to give your folks the clue.”
“Cyrus?” Pauline’s face broke into smiles and dimples. “He’s the cleverest, dearest, most beautiful dog in the world.”
“Fine dog, yes Miss, if he’s like the picture the reporters got.”
Pauline’s face clouded–for the moment she had forgotten the horrors of publicity.
“You won’t put this in the papers?” she pleaded.
“He shan’t,” Blount raised himself weakly on his elbow. “If the reporters haven’t got it already, we’ll keep you out of it anyhow, Miss.”
“Keep a scoop like this out of the papers?” Burgess laughed aloud. “You’re talking through your hat, Blount, it can’t be done.”
In one terrible flash Pauline saw her name in capitals, her photograph almost life-size, photographs of her trunk, the gorilla, Blount, in head-liners, too, and Harry, furious, too far away for moral suasion; stern, cold, unforgiving, worse still, disgusted. She realized as she had never realized before that Harry was what counted most, Harry was the one thing she could not live without. To the terrors of these hours was added the terror of losing him.
She burst into wild sobs.
“I want Harry, I don’t want anything in the world but Harry! Oh, take me home, please take me home!”
Burgess got a taxi and went with her to the hotel, where She was put to bed, a doctor sent for, and where at last she fell asleep.
But it was not until noon the next day that she was able to take the train for New York. And then began, two hours and a half that Pauline remembered to the last hour of her life. Her photograph stared at her from the front page of every daily paper–even the glasses and thick veil she wore to conceal her identity could not soften the conspicuous pictures. Newsboys called her name, and the gorilla story, Wrentz, and Blount’s names, together–every passenger in the car, it seemed to her, men, women, and children, were discussing her. There were silly jokes, contemptuous criticism, half-laughing suggestions that there was something “queer about Miss Marvin.” just behind her, she heard one woman say to another, “But, then, my dear, what could you expect of any girl whose mother was an Egyptian” as if this equaled breaking the whole Decalogue.
Though she had wired Owen, the motor did not meet her, and feeling more than ever forlorn and forsaken, Pauline got into a taxi. Never had the old place looked so beautiful as today when she felt that it could never be her home again–she must tell Harry that her mother was an Egyptian and then even if he could forgive her this last adventure he would never marry her. Oh, how could she have been so silly, so conceited, so cruel to Harry! And what a fool she had been to go in search of experience in order to write. If she couldn’t write with all this beauty spread out before her, if she couldn’t write by living a real, human, everyday life, the sort of life that brings you close to normal people, how could she ever hope to write by living on excitement –on abnormal excitement and with abnormal people and situations?
She paid the driver and was walking slowly up the steps of the veranda, when, suddenly, she halted as if she had been struck. What was that? It couldn’t be–yes, it was–funeral streamers hanging from the door-knob!
With a scream that rang through the closed door, Pauline fainted. When she recovered consciousness she was in the library. Bemis and Margaret were bending over her, and strong, tender arms were around her.
“Harry,” she murmured instinctively.
“Don’t try to talk, my darling, drink this. You go,” to Bemis and Margaret.
“Oh, Harry, I thought you were dead.”
“I’m very much alive,” Harry said with a tremulous laugh.
“But Harry, what does all that black on the door mean?”
“It means,” said Harry, savagely, “that though the mills of the gods grind slowly they grind surely–Owen’s dead.”
“Owen!” Her eyes large with terror, Blount’s words ringing in her ears– “I shouldn’t like to be the man at the bottom of this when Mr. Marvin hears of it.” “‘Owen,” she repeated in a breathless whisper.
“Harry, you didn’t kill him?”
“He didn’t give me the chance. He was dead when I got here–overdose of morphine Dr. Stevens said. Seems he was a drug fiend.”
“Why that was the reason,” Pauline said, her filling with tears. “He was crazy, he didn’t know what he was doing. Poor Owen, poor Owen”– then turned hastily to safer topics. “But I thought you went to Chicago for a week.”
“I did, but, you’ll laugh, Pauline–I know it sounds fool–the Mummy came to me just as she came to me in Montana. I took the first train home. I knew you were in danger–I knew it was a warning. I’ll ever trust, you out of my sight again–you’ve got to marry me now.”
Pauline shrank back from his kisses. “No, no, Harry I can’t–I won’t –there was a woman on the train said my mother was an Egyptian.”
Harry broke into a peal of laughter and caught her in his arms.
“Is that the only reason you won’t?”
“Harry, is it true?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care–what difference does it make who your mother was? You are you, that’s all I care for.” His voice shook. “I love you so, Pauline, that I can’t stand this life any longer–another adventure–“
Pauline silenced him with a kiss.
“I’m all through with adventures,” she declared. “Harry, I’m going to–“
“Marry me? Polly, do you mean it?”
“Yes, yes. Oh, my dearest, I’ve been a selfish, silly, conceited little pig, but I’m cured, I’m cured at last.”
As he clasped her in his arms, the shutter swung violently to, and the case containing the Mummy fell with a clatter to the floor. Harry ran and lifted it as tenderly as if it had been a little child.
“I suppose we can hardly keep her here,” he said regretfully, “but we’ll give, no, I can’t give her up entirely, we’ll lend her to the Metropolitan Art Museum where she’ll receive due honor. She’s been a faithful friend to us, Polly.”
“And here’s another,” exclaimed Pauline, as Cyrus ran frantically into the room, and leaping upon the couch with ecstatic barks of welcome, threatened again to take the place that belonged by right to Harry. But this time Harry joined in Pauline’s caresses.
THE END