The Crime Doctor Part 25

THE DOCTOR'S a.s.sISTANT

The doctor was coping with his Sunday meal when the telephone went off in the next room. On his ears the imperious summons never fell without a thrill; in his sight, the tulip-shaped receiver became a live thing trumpeting for help; and he would answer the call himself, at any hour of the day or night. It was necessary at night, with the Bartons asleep in the bas.e.m.e.nt like a family in a vault, but it was just the same when they were all on duty, as at the present moment. Back went the Cromwellian chair, at the head of the bare and solitary trestle table.

An excited personage, who might have been just outside the window, was expeditiously appeased in monosyllables. And Dollar returned with an appet.i.te to what had been set before him.

"Send Bobby round to the garage, Barton, to order the car at once. He can tell Albert I shall be ready as soon as he is, but to take his headlights and fill up with petrol." This was repeated with paternal severity in the wings. "Now, Barton, my little red road-book, and see if you can find Pax Monktons in the wilds of Surrey. It can't be more than a hamlet. Try the Cobham country if it's not in the index."

This took longer--took a survey map and two pairs of eyes before Pax Monktons Chase was discovered in microscopic print, and the light green peppered with dots signifying timber three hundred feet above sea-level.

"Never heard of it in my life before," said Dollar, as he laced brown shoes before his coffee. "Or of the man either, or his double-barreled name for that matter. You might see if there's a Dale-Bulmer in _Who's Who_."

But again Barton was unsuccessful; and here his services ended, though through no fault of his own, or failure of unselfish zeal for one of those more than probable adventures which made him hate the chauffeur who was always in them, and curse the duties that kept other people out.

"Will you take your flask, sir?"

"Lord, no! I'm not going to the North Pole."

"Or your--or one of those revolvers, sir?"

"What on earth for? Besides, they're not mine; they ought to be in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard." The nucleus of a branch exhibition was forming itself in Welbeck Street. "Don't you give way to nerves, Barton!

I'm only going down to see a man who seems anxious to see me, but I shouldn't be going to him if we had anybody up-stairs. You three make an afternoon of it somewhere; never mind if I'm back first; go out and enjoy yourselves."

And he was off as if on a deliberate jaunt; but an involuntary chuckle in the voice over the telephone, the hint of a surprise, the possibility of a trick, made lively thinking after the doldrums of the dog-days; and the fine September afternoon seemed expressly ordered for motorists with time upon their hands. Dollar had only been thinking so when the call came through, to supply just the object which gives a run its zest, and nothing else mattered in the least. However frivolous the end and errand, the means and the meantime were so much to the good on such a day.

It was warm, yet delightfully keen at thirty miles an hour; clear as crystal within rifle-shot, and deliciously hazy in the distance; the bronze upon the trees seldom warming to a premature red, often lapsing into the liquid greens of midsummer; but all the way an autumnal smear of silver in the sunlight. Dollar divided his mind between a sensuous savoring of the heavenly country, and more or less romantic speculations on the case in store. Some people's notions of a crime doctor's functions were so much wider even than his own; ten months out of the twelve, he could not have afforded to come so far afield without a distastefully definite foreword about fees.

This afternoon he was prepared to do almost anything for next to nothing: and after twenty sedentary miles he was on his legs as often as not in the next two or three, asking his way at likely lodges, or from strolling bands of shaven yokels, all Sunday collars and cigarettes.

"Pax Monktons Chase?" at last said one who seemed to have heard the name before. "Straight as ever you can go, and the first lodge on the left.

But there's no one there."

"No one there!" echoed Dollar. "Do you mean the place is empty?"

"I believe there's workmen there on week-days, but you won't find anybody now, unless the chap that's bought it's motored over."

"Isn't he living there, then?"

"Not yet; there's alterations being made; and I don't know where he does live, or anything at all about him, except that he motors over sometimes on a Sunday."

Dollar felt dashed until he remembered to appreciate one of the few possibilities for which he had not come quite prepared. There was some promise in a surprise thus early and so complete. But it made Pax Monktons Chase fall a little flat when found. It robbed the dreary lodge of all its value as an eye-opener; it made the chase itself look vast and desolate for nothing, and a n.o.ble pile of seasoned stone fling but drab turrets and ineffective battlements against a silver sky, which the sun had ceased to polish in the last tortuous mile.

It was all the pleasanter to find a ruddy, genial, bearded face, mounted on a spotted tie that went twice round a nineteen-inch neck, smiling a welcome under the entrance arch. The man introduced himself as Dale-Bulmer, bolting a mouthful made for rolling on the tongue. Dollar was much taken with the humor and simplicity of his address and bearing.

A smart chauffeur waited with a plutocratic car in the sweep of the drive. And there was no third sign of life about the place.

"Awfully good of you to come," said Dale-Bulmer, with apologetic warmth.

"I thought you might, from what I'd heard of you, and you seemed to jump at it when I rang you up. I haven't known anybody take so kindly to a trip since I left the bush."

"An Australian?" asked the doctor, with all a doctor's readiness to make talk; but he was more curious than ever to learn the secret of his summons.

"Yes! I come from that enlightened land, where Labor runs the show and Women have the Vote. In fact," the big man added, with the fat chuckle heard over the telephone, "that's precisely why I _have_ come from Australia--as I was fool enough to say the other night at a meeting in these parts. But I seem to have jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire."

[Ill.u.s.tration: There was no sign of life]

"I'm sorry to hear that," observed Dollar, with polite forbearance.

"Well, not quite into the fire, as it happens," said Dale-Bulmer, chuckling again in his n.o.ble neck. "Come inside, and you'll see." He led the way into a broad central corridor, choked with ladders and builders'

tools, pipes and tubing, curtain-rods, and a stack of boards; but a model of order compared with the chaos visible through an open door at which he paused. Here were more bare joists than navigable floor, and a forest of scaffolding therefrom to the crisscrossed plaster ceiling.

"Look you here!" said the man from Australia, and pointed to a heap of shavings on a remnant of the floor.

"The British workman's such a careless dog," sighed Dollar, shaking a sententious head, for a box of vestas had been spilt about the place.

"British workman be hanged!" cried the other bluntly. "The British workman's got a job here that will keep him in beer and betting-money till Christmas, and as much longer as he can spin it out. This is the little game of another sporting type--the British lady burning for the vote!"

"So that's it! But are you sure?" asked Dollar, though he wanted to ask if that was all.

"Certain. I met a flaming brace of 'em on bicycles, just outside my boundary. This is what I was to get for speaking out about them the other night."

"I don't see their literature, and I can't smell their paraffin."

"It's in that bottle on the mantelpiece. Something must have scared them at the last moment--all but one sportswoman."

"What about her?"

"I've got her," said Dale-Bulmer, with sepulchral excitement.

"Got her prisoner?"

"I should hope so! Why, I caught her on the very point of setting fire to that very heap of shavings--and me without a hose-pipe in the house!

Those are her matches on the floor; _she_ wasn't going to turn tail till she'd done her job--and didn't till I nearly trod on it! You could hardly expect me to bow her out of the front door after that!"

Dollar could only stare into the jovial face wreathed in rubicund grins, but no longer free from a certain serio-comic compunction and concern.

"But, my dear sir----"

"Don't pitch into me!" pleaded Dale-Bulmer, pathetically. "I had to do something; if I hadn't thought of you, and one or two things I've heard about you, doctor, I should only have telephoned to the police; and what's the good of putting these young women in the jug, to be poured out again within a week? I heard you ran a nursing-home for criminals, worth all the prisons in the world."

"But I don't run people into it," said the doctor; "they've got to come in of their own free will. What have you done with this young woman?"

"I? Nothing; it's her own doing entirely. She chose her cover--I only turned the key."

"You've locked her up in some room?"

"Yes--more or less--rather more."

And Dale-Bulmer laughed a rather nervous, guilty laugh.

"Up-stairs somewhere?"