you— Look here. Are you sure?'
'I'm positive!'
But did anyone see you?'
'I don't know. So hurry!'
'But how could you tell it was —'
'I broke the glass.'
'Tyl, darling.'
'Oh, hurry!' she sobbed. 'Because he's in danger!'
He said, 'Yes. This is bad business, isn't it?' Now he was matter-of-fact, no longer surprised. He sounded cool and brisk and capable. 'Tyl, do you think you could take the car and go find a telephone? There's a drugstore a block down, or two blocks down—
somewhere down there. You go call the police. Call headquarters. Ask for Gahagen himself. Can you manage?'
'Yes, I can,' she said.
'While I go back and keep an eye on that house.'
'Oh, yes!' she agreed gladly. 'Oh, Grandy, that's right! Oh, yes, do! You stay and watch. Watch out for Francis.'
'That's what I'll do,' he said gently. 'Go to the drugstore, duckling. Call from a booth. We can't have this all over town.'
'Give me a nickel,' she said resolutely.
He gave her a nickel. Watching her, he knew she would obey the suggestions. She would go to the drugstore. She would ask for Gahagen. It would all take time.
Mrs. Press opened the back door suspiciously. Then she let the door go wide, recognizing him.
'What have you got to put him in?' said Grandy briskly, without introduction.
'There's a trunk,' she said.
'Get it.'
“It's upstairs.”
'Drag it down.'
Recognizing emergency, she went without saying anything more, Grandy called a number on the telephone.
'Press?'— crisply. 'Can you send a truck here in the next five minutes? Trouble. Police. Tell them to pick up a trunk.' Sharply: “If you can't do it in five minutes, there's no use.' Coldly: 'You realize what will happen if you don't, this being your house?' Calmly:
“Yes, I hoped you would. Tell them it's full of germs. Yes, germs. Typhoid. Anything.'
Grandy hung up the phone. There was a loud bumping and crashing. He went into the stair hall and helped Mrs. Press with the big old empty turtleback trunk.
The two of them went down for Francis. Even with his limbs bound, even gagged and stiff and sore as he was, they had no easy time. Francis was sick at heart. This hurry, this wild anxiety of haste, could only mean that Tyl had made contact somewhere, somehow,
and Grandy had found it out. So it was to be no good? No soap? Not even now, after she'd found him and thanked God? He would not see her face again, to thank her or to explain or just to see her face again?
He was damned if he wouldn't! The woman had great strength, and Grandy was not so weak an old man as he, perhaps, looked. They were desperate and in a hurry. They got him up the cellar steps, although all the way he bucked like a bronco. The scene in the hall was dreadful in its grim wordlessness. It was a voiceless battle of desperations. The yawning trunk was like a tomb, and the living man, in all his helplessness, refused to go.
But he fell. He fell out of their weakening grasp, and he had no arms. He struck his head. They folded him over, jammed him in, stuffed him down.
The woman, panting, said, 'Better do it!'
Grandy screeched, 'No time! No time!'
They shut the lid down. Grandy took the key and turned it in the lock. Together, they dragged again, tipped the bulky object over the front doorsill. Mrs. Press closed the door.
'With a knife,' she gasped, 'it wouldn't have taken long!'
Grandy said, 'Blood?' He sneered at her stupidity. Then he warned her, 'You don't know anything, when you're asked.' He looked no more than a trifle worried now, a bit flustered. His frenzy was gone.
'I don't know anything,' she said contemptuously. She watched him go back toward the kitchen. She heard the soft closing of the kitchen door.
The police car came wailing down the street to where Tyl stood, hopping with anxiety, on the drugstore corner. It barely stopped. It snatched her up. She showed them the way and told them as much as she could in the few brief noisy minutes it took them to swoop on, five blocks—the drugstore had been farther away than Grandy had said—down the street.
When the big, clumsy gray garbage truck came rumbling along, going in the opposite direction, the men on top, in their dusty boots and aprons and heavy gloves, looked wonderingly down. They leaned against the big trunk balanced there, the last of their load.
Chief Blake, who was driving himself, dodged by with a skillful twist and a brief snarl of his siren.
The car came to a skidding stop. One uniformed man went in a jogging run down the drive to the back of the house. Chief Blake and the other went up on the front porch. Tyl slid off Gahagen's lap, where she scarcely knew she'd been sitting, hit the ground with both feet. Grandy was nowhere to be seen.
'Got the right house?'
'Oh, yes! Yes!' She looked for him on all sides.
Then Grandy rose up out of the shrub border there by the driveway. He had old leaves in his hair. A smudge of earth streaked across his cheek. He came toward them. He was beaming.
'Lurking Luther never took his eye off!' His thin lips smiled out the silly words. 'It is there as it was there!' He made a flat triumphant sweep with his palm. 'Not a soul stirred. Not a soul saw me. I lay low, by gum, I did! What an afternoon, at my age! I had no idea how fascinating it is to put ones ear literally to the ground. Oh, cowboys! Oh, Indians!'
Gahagen grinned. 'Your little girls upset.'
'But the marines are landing' said Grandy, 'eh? Now, how do you do this, Tom? Tins is most fascinating. Beard em, don't you? Do we break down the door? I'd like to see that. I never believe it in the movies.'
Mathilda's heart ached. She felt tired out, all of a sudden. Grandy could set a mood; he always did. But this mood struck her wrong. It jangled. It hurt.
'We try ringing the front doorbell first,' said Gahagen. 'Come on.
Chief Blake said, 'How d'ya do, Mr. Grandison? What goes on here?'
'That's what we wonder,' said Grandy, 'and we do wonder, don't we?'
The chief was a big solid fellow, the type to be slow and sure—especially sure. 'We'll find out,' he promised.
A thin woman opened the door and stood looking hostilely at them. 'Well?' Thin and drab and sour, she wasn't afraid of them or even particularly interested. 'Well?' she snapped.
'We want to look in your cellar,' said Blake, in all his huge simplicity.
'What for?'
'This young lady saw a man tied up down there.'
The woman's eyes were not so drab as the rest of her. They examined Tyl with contempt and curiosity. 'There's nobody in the cellar,' she said. 'I don't know what you're talking about.”
'But there is!' began Tyl.
Grandy's hand warned her to keep calm, reminded her that they were among the officers of the law and all would proceed in due order.
'Well take a look, if you don't mind,' said Blake, and one felt that it would come to pass as he had said.
The woman surrendered to that certainty. 'I guess I can't stop you' she said ungraciously.
The other uniformed man stood on guard where he was, there at the front door. The rest of them followed the woman into the house, down the dingy brown hall, past the doors to the sitting room, past a dining-room door. The cellar steps went down opposite here.
The woman opened the door and snapped on a light for them as if she said, 'You fools!'
Tyl went down too.
There was a little furnace room, cluttered with old boxes, not neat. It smelled of stale wine and coal gas. Tyl looked up and saw the woman, standing above them with her hot, angry eyes fixed on Chief Blake's burly back.
There were two doors out of here, one to a laundry. Gahagen opened that and peered in, closed it again. They all turned to the second door. It was not locked. It led to a perfectly empty room.
'Any more rooms down here?' the chief said. His voice boomed.
'The cellar don't go under the hull house!' the woman called shrilly. 'There's nobody down there! I told you!'
Mathilda stood in the empty little room and looked around at the stone walls. It was gloomy. Someone found the light. She blinked as the bare bulb sprang into glowing life.
'Where would the place be?' Chief Blake looked down at her. 'Which side of the house, Miss Frazier, eh?'
'Mrs. Howard,' said Grandy softly.
She felt her heart sink down—that sick, falling feeling. The taste of fear rose in her throat. Why did Grandy put that in? The fiction of her marriage? Why did he want them to think— She couldn't understand.
She moistened her lips. 'It was right here,' she said. Her voice was too thin. It piped up like a child's voice. 'Here,' she repeated, “because, don't you see, that's the window I broke?'
They all looked up. Sure enough. The window was broken.
'Now—uh—you say you saw him?' Chief Blake shifted
