The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 15

Then I looked back at the woman, startled by her stillness through it all. She was leaning forward, white, intent, with parted lips. In her eyes I seemed to see uneasiness and solicitude and desolation, but above them all slowly flowered a newer look, a look of vague exultation as she gazed from the defeated man gasping and choking for breath to the broad back of the s.h.a.ggy-haired dressing-gown.

I had no chance to dwell on the puzzle of this, for the man enveloped in the s.h.a.ggy-haired garment was calling out to me.

"Tie him up," he called. "Take the curtain-cords--but tie him tight!"

"Do you know this man?" something in his tone prompted me to ask, as I struggled with the heavy silk curtain-cords.

"It's Hobbs."

"I know that, but who's Hobbs?"

"A servant dismissed a month ago," was the other's answer.

"Then possibly you know the woman?" I asked, looking up.

"Yes, possibly I know the woman," he repeated, standing before her and staring into her white and desolate face. It took me a moment or two to finish my task of trussing the wrists of the sullen and sodden Hobbs. When I looked up the woman was on her feet, several steps nearer the door.

"Watch that woman!" I cried. "She's got a load of your loot on her!"

My words seemed merely to puzzle him. There was no answering alarm on his face.

"What do you mean?" he inquired. He seemed almost to resent my effort in his behalf. The woman's stare, too, seemed able to throw him into something approaching a comatose state, leaving him pale and helpless, as though her eye had the gift of some hypnotic power. It angered me to think that some mere accidental outward husk of respectability could make things so easy for her. Her very air of false refinement, I felt, would always render her viciousness double-edged in its danger.

"Search her!" I cried. "See what she's got under her waist there!"

He turned his back on me, deliberately, as though resenting my determination to dog him into an act that was distasteful to him.

"What have you there?" he asked her, without advancing any closer.

There was utter silence for a moment or two.

"Your letters," she at last answered, scarcely above a whisper.

"What are they doing there?" he asked.

"I wanted them," was all she said.

"Why should you want my letters?" was his next question.

She did not answer it. The man in the dressing-gown turned and pointed to the inert figure of Hobbs.

"What about him? How did _he_ get here?"

"He must have followed me in from the street when the door was unlocked. Or he may have come in before I did, and kept in hiding somewhere."

"Who left the door unlocked?"

"Simmonds."

"Why?"

"Because he could trust me!"

There was a m.u.f.fled barb in this retort, a barb which I could not understand. I could see, however, that it had its effect on the other man. He stared at the woman with sudden altered mien, with a foolish drop of the jaw which elongated his face and widened his eyes at the same moment. Then he wheeled on the sullen Hobbs.

"_Hobbs, you lied about her!_" he cried, like a blind man at last facing the light.

He had his hand on the bound and helpless burglar's throat.

"Tell me the truth, or by the living G.o.d, I'll kill you! You lied about her?"

"About what?" temporized Hobbs.

"You know what!"

Hobbs, I noticed, was doing his best to shrink back from the throttling fingers.

"It wasn't my fault!" he equivocated.

"But you lied?"

Hobbs did not answer, in words. But the man in the dressing-gown knew the answer, apparently, before he let the inert figure fall away from his grasp. He turned, in a daze, back to the waiting and watching woman, the white-faced woman with her soul in her eyes. His face seemed humbled, suddenly aged with some graying blight of futile contrition.

The two staring figures appeared to sway and waver toward each other.

Before I could understand quite what it all meant the man had raised his arms and the woman had crept into them.

"Oh, Jim, I've been such a fool!" I heard her wail. And I could see that she was going to cry.

I knew, too, that that midnight of blunders had left me nothing to be proud of, that I had been an idiot from the first--and to make that idiocy worse, I was now an intruder.

"I'll slip down and look after that phoning," I mumbled, so abashed and humiliated that as I groped wearily out through the door I stumbled over the Russian-squirrel bundle which I had placed there with my own hands. It was not until I reached the street that I realized, with a gulp of relief, how yet another night of threatening misery had been dissembled and lost in action, very much as the pills of childhood are dissembled in a spoonful of jelly.

CHAPTER V

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT

I sat in that nocturnal sun-parlor of mine, known to the world as Madison Square, demanding of the quiet night why sleep should be denied me, and doing my best to keep from thinking of Mary Lockwood. I sat there with my gaze fixed idly on a girl in black, who, in turn, stared idly up at _Sagittarius_.

Then I lost interest in the black-clad and seemingly cataleptic star-gazer. For I was soon busy watching a man in a rather odd-looking velour hat. My eyes followed him from the moment he first turned eastward out of Fifth Avenue. They were still on him as he veered irresolutely southward again into the square where I sat.

The pure aimlessness of his movements arrested my attention. The figure that drifted listlessly in past the Farragut Statue and wandered on under the park trees in some way reminded me of my own. I, too, knew only too well what it was to circle doggedly and sullenly about like a bell-boy paging the corridors of night for that fugitive known as Sleep.

So I continued to watch him, quietly and closely. I had lost my interest in the white-faced girl who sat within twenty paces of me, looking, silent and still, up at the autumn stars.

It was the man's figure, thereafter, that challenged my attention, for this man marked the only point of movement in what seemed a city of the dead. It was, I remembered, once more long past midnight, the hour of suspended life in the emptied canyons of the lamp-strung streets when the last taxi had hummed the last reveler home, and the first milk-wagons had not yet rattled up from the East River ferries.