"Where, indeed?" echoed Penny Wise.

CHAPTER XIV

A Prophecy Fulfilled

Among the pa.s.sengers disembarking from a steamer at a Brooklyn pier was a tall, gaunt man, who walked with a slight limp.

He was alone, and though he nodded pleasantly to one or two of his fellow pa.s.sengers, he walked by himself, and all details of landing being over, he took a taxicab to a hotel restaurant, glad to eat a luncheon more to his taste than the ship's fare had been.

He bought several New York papers, and soon became so absorbed in their contents that his carefully selected food might have been dust and ashes for all he knew.

Staring at an advertis.e.m.e.nt, he called a waiter.

"Send out and get me that book," he said, "as quick as you can."

"Yes, sir," returned the man, "it's right here, sir, on the news-stand.

Get it in a minute, sir."

And in about a minute Peter Boots sat, almost unable to believe his own eyes, as he scanned the chapter headings of his father's book, detailing the death and the subsequent experiences of him who sat and stared at the pages.

He looked at the frontispiece, a portrait of himself, but bearing little resemblance to his present appearance. For, where the pictured face showed a firm, well-molded chin, the living man wore a brown beard, trimmed Vand.y.k.e fashion, and where the expression on the portrait showed a merry, carefree smile, the real face was graven with deep lines that told of severe experiences of some sort.

But the real face grinned a little at the picture, and broke into a wider smile at some sentences read at random as the pages were hastily turned, and then as further developments appeared, the blue eyes showed a look of puzzled wonder, quickly followed by horror and despair.

Peter closed the book and laid it aside, and finished his luncheon in a daze.

One thing stood forth in his mind. He must take time to think--think deeply, carefully, before he did anything. He must get away by himself and meet this strange, new emergency that had come to him.

What to do, how to conduct himself, these were questions of gravest import, and not to be lightly settled.

He thought quickly, and concluded that for a secure hiding-place a man could do no better than choose a big city hotel.

Finishing his meal he went to the desk and asked for a room, registering as John Harrison, which was the name by which he had been known on the ship that had brought him to port.

Once behind the locked door of his room he threw himself into an armchair and devoured the book he had bought.

Rapidly he flew through it; then went over it again, more slowly, until Peter Boots was familiar with every chapter of the book that his father had written in his memory.

Memory! And he wasn't dead!

The book, he saw, had gone through a large number of editions, wherefore, many people had read the tale of his tragic fate in the Labrador wild, and of his recrudescence and communications with his parents, and now, here he was reading it himself.

It is not easy to realize how strange it must seem to read not only one's own death notices but the accounts of one's return to earth in spirit form, and to be informed of the astonishing things one said and did through the kind offices of a professional medium!

A medium! Madame Parlato! And she "got in touch" with him! She succeeded in getting messages from him--and materializations!

Peter's chicory blue eyes nearly popped out of his head when he read of the "materialization" of his tobacco pouch.

"Jolly glad I know where it is," he thought; "I've missed the thing, but how did it waft itself to a professional medium! Bah! the stuff makes me sick!

"But Dad wrote it! Dad--my father! And mother's in the game! Got to read the book all over again."

And again he delved into the volume, seeming unable to take in the appalling fact of what had been done.

"They believe it!" he said at last, reaching the final page for the third time; "they believe it from the bottom of their blessed souls!

"Who is that medium person? Where'd she get the dope to fool the old folks? Let me at her! I'll give her what for! Messages to mother from her departed son! 'Do not grieve for me,' 'I am happy over here,' Oh, for the love o' Mike! what _am_ I going to do first?"

Followed a long time of thought. At first, chaotic, wondering, uncertain, then focussing and crystallizing into two definite ideas.

One, the astonishing but undeniable fact of his father's belief and sincerity, the other, what would happen if that belief and sincerity were suddenly stultified.

"Good Lord!" he summed up, "when I appear on the scene that medium will get the jolt of her sweet young life-- I a.s.sume she's young still, and Dad----

"H'm, where will he get off?"

That gave him pause. For Benjamin Crane to have written such a book as this, for it to have achieved such a phenomenal success and popularity, for it to have been the means, as it doubtless was, of converting thousands to a belief in Spiritism, then, for the whole thing to be overturned by the reappearance in the flesh of the man supposed dead, would mean a cataclysm unparalleled in literary history.

And his father? The dear old man, happy in his communications from his dead son, how would he be pleased to learn that they were not from his dead son at all, but the faked drivel of a fraudulent medium?

It was a moil, indeed.

Peter Crane had come home incognito, because he doubted the wisdom of a sudden shock to his parents. Unable to send or get news, and making his voyage home at the first possible opportunity, he had intended to learn how matters stood before making his appearance.

He had intended telephoning Blair and Shelby, and if they said all was well at home he would go there at once. But if there had been illness or death he would use care and tact in making his presence known.

For Peter Boots had had no word of, or from his people for half a year--all the long Labrador winter he had lived in ignorance of their welfare and had suffered to the limit, both mentally and physically.

And he had thought they would probably a.s.sume his death--as, by reason of this astonishing book he now knew they had done--and, what was he to do about it?

Impulse would have sent him flying home--home to his mother, Dad and Julie, and--and dear little Carly.

But--when he thought of the possibility of his reappearance being the means of making his father's name a by-word of ridicule, of heaping on the old man's fame obloquy and derision, of shocking his mother, perhaps fatally, or at least into a nervous prostration, he was unable to shape a course.

Could he tell Carly first? He glanced at a telephone book at his elbow.

No, that would never do. To hear his voice on the telephone would throw her into a convulsion. He didn't believe she stood for that spirit foolishness, but if, by any chance, she had been won over, his voice would surely give her some sort of a shock.

The boys, then. Yes, that was the only thing. He must see them, but he must telephone first and learn their whereabouts.

He could, he concluded, call in a disguised voice, and get a line on things anyhow.

So, still in a haze of doubt and uncertainty, he looked up the number and called Shelby.

As he rather expected, Shelby was not at his home, but the person who answered could give no directions save to say that Mr. Shelby would probably be home by six o'clock, and would he leave a message?