Face Cards by Carolyn Wells

Author:Carolyn Wells [Carolyn Wells]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: F
ISBN: 9788726895346
Publisher: SAGA Egmont
Published: 2021-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XI

Galley West

Scott came over Sunday morning. He looked both weary and perplexed.

"You people have got me guessing," he said, slowly, as he drew a hand across his troubled brow. "I was awake all night, most, mulling over those old papers I read, about the curse and all that."

"Then you begin to think there's something in it," Phoebe commented, with the air of an expert talking to a novice.

"Think? I don't know what to think. But I'm not allowed to think of magic and such things as a factor in this case. They've sent young Tyndall, a wide-awake chap, to track down Miss Clearman——"

"How can he? What do you mean?" Carlotta asked.

"Why, he picks up the trail at the last place she was seen,—the railroad station, you know, and he goes along to New York, asking everybody who may have seen her—and all that. What he does depends on how much brains he's got, and how much ingenuity."

"He won't find her," said Miss Phoebe, with her curls nodding.

"You're strong for the curse, then?" and Scott looked at her curiously.

"Of course I am. My family has lived in the shadow of that curse for many long years. From this window you can see the tower, one of the very things that brought the curse to us. From that time, every Clearman has feared it, and some have felt it. Stephen is gone, Lulie is gone, I am the last of the Clearman family. When I go, they will call it a mysterious death. Mysterious, ha!" Her laugh was cackling, almost uncanny. Carlotta rose and left the room, but Nan and Goring lingered, fascinated by the strange old lady.

She looked like a sibyl now, and her eyes glinted and her gray ringlets shook as she went on.

"You have all seen it. You have all known of Stephen's death, of Lulie's disappearance. To doubt the malignity back of those tragedies is to doubt your own senses. Carlotta need not run away,—she need not fear it, only a Clearman born comes under the ban! I await my time."

Her manner changed. She became quiet, and folding her hands in her lap, she sat, like some pale martyr awaiting her doom.

"Well, well, this won't do for me," Scott said a little gruffly. "I was sent here to overhaul that West. What about him, anyway? I mean, are you keeping him on?"

"Only for the present," Phoebe said, in her usual calm way. "Soon, I shall dismiss him, with first class references. He will have no trouble in getting a good position."

"Well, I don't know, ma'am. The Chief has a notion that he's the cat's whiskers, himself. Beg pardon, ma'am, I mean, they sent me to put him through a small course of sprouts."

When Scott became embarrassed, he fell into a slang diction, which he had been ordered to suppress in the company of gentlefolk.

But Nicky Goring was not startled by allusions to feline characteristics; such were in vogue at the time, and he said:

"Come on, I'll go with you.

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