"Have there been any inquiries for them here?"

The woman smiled in obvious relief, and spread out her hands.

"But yes! You spoke truly, Senorita, when you warned me of those who would seek them. In the evening just after you were here last a gentleman--an Americano--came asking for the Senora Reyes. I knew nothing of her." She drew down her eyelids, significantly. "Next morning, there came a young man of our country. He said that he was from Mexico, but he lied; the speech of the Basque was on his tongue.

The Senora Reyes was his aunt, and he came to tell her that he had found her lost son, his cousin. He, too, departed. Yesterday it was a boy. He was an amigo, a companero of Jose; he desired to know where he might be found, but he, also, was unsatisfied. We are the Lopez--what have we to do with the Senora Reyes or Jose?"

Her tone of bland candor was inimitable, but it did not eradicate the consciousness of anxiety and unrest in her bearing at first. Nothing more was to be learned from further parley, and Willa presently departed, leaving behind her a substantial roll of banknotes.

Her mind was far from easy, and as she descended the dark steep stairs she came to an abrupt decision. Something was wrong and despite the hirelings of Starr Wiley she must know.

"Dan," she began when he sprang down to a.s.sist her into the car, "I don't know how it is to be done, but we have got to lose those trailers. I don't care how long it takes or how many miles we cover doing it, but we must manage to get to Second Place, Brooklyn, without being followed. Do you think you will be able to make it, or shall I try to give them the slip by taking the subway?"

Dan reflected.

"There's more than one in the big car and you'd be trailed sure, Miss.

Better take a chance with me, and I'll get you there safely without them knowing if we ride till morning!"

Then began a strange and devious journey. To Willa, who, aside from her infrequent visits to the cottage on the Parkway, had seen little of New York and its environs save in the beaten path of the conventional social round, it was a revelation. They tore through crooked teeming side-streets whose squalor was veiled in the falling curtain of snow and shot across broad avenues with gleaming vistas of light stretching interminably in either direction, to dash sharply about a corner and off through a lane of canyon-like factories and sweatshop hives. Once they skirted huge railroad yards and twice they circled along the river's edge between towering warehouses, with the tang of salt winds swirling the flakes about them and a forest of tall masts looming up ahead.

Dan Morrissey knew the city as only one can who has grown up practically on its streets and he was following a well-defined route in his mind as he wove back and forth through the myriad threads which held together the vast and varied pattern on the loom which was New York, drawing ever nearer the great bridge. The runabout had been left behind, but the larger car still trailed and the sharp exhaust of the motor-cycle reached their ears tauntingly above the subdued rattle of occasional traffic.

All at once Dan commenced to chuckle and Willa could feel his shoulders shake beside hers.

"What is it?" she demanded with a quick glance at him.

"I've just thought of something, Miss. If Delehanty is on his station now, watch us lose the laddy-buck on the motor-cycle!"

They had reached a corner on lower Broadway, whence the home-going stream of humanity had long since disappeared like ants into the burrow of subway entrances, but where a burly traffic policeman still loomed bulkily in the middle of the thoroughfare.

Dan drew the car up at the curb, leaped out and approached the minion of the law. A short colloquy, and he had returned and the car shot down Broadway. "You can look back now, Miss," suggested Dan. Willa turned. The motor-cycle had been halted in mid-pursuit, its rider gesticulating in futile rage and vexation while the obdurant bluecoat held him fast.

"How did you do it, Dan?" Willa asked.

"Delehanty's death on motor-cyclists since one ran him down last summer. I told him this feller was a chauffeur in the same garage as me, and trailing me now on a bet, but that the license on his machine was phony. We'll be there and back before he gets through explaining at the station-house."

Once across the bridge, Dan led the big car far out to a spa.r.s.ely built-up section of Flatbush and there at last his object was achieved.

A loud report echoed behind them and glancing over her shoulder Willa saw the big car swerve and come to an abrupt halt in the ditch.

"Tire burst!" she announced. "Luck is with us, Dan!"

"It was, in the shape of some broken gla.s.s!" Her ally retorted grinning. "I said a prayer myself as we went over it. The way is clear now!"

Second Place was a dull row of somber brick dwellings with prim muslin curtains behind each window pane, and an air of bearing its indubitable respectability self-consciously.

The car halted before a house midway the block, and Willa was up the steps in a flash and pealing the bell.

A swarthy middle-aged woman, with a white ap.r.o.n over her ample silk gown, presented herself and stammeringly bade the girl welcome.

"The Senora Reyes and Jose? I must see them, Senora Rodriquez. I have come from your daughter."

"She did not tell you, then, Senorita?" The woman raised her fat hands in expostulation. "Heaven is my witness, it was not my fault! I did not think to watch her, she did not even glance toward the window!

Could I know what she meditated?"

"What is it?" Willa seized the woman's arm and shook it convulsively.

"What has happened to Senora Reyes? Tell me!"

All at once a frail, crooked little form catapulted itself down the stairway and fell, sobbing, at the girl's feet.

"Senorita! Senorita Billie! The grandmama has vanished! She rose and went from the house in the dawn, when all were sleeping! She is gone!"

CHAPTER XVI

THE POOL OF THE LOST SOULS

Willa went home at last in a daze of consternation which took no note of the heightened storm. The unexpected catastrophe was a death-blow to her long-cherished plan, but even that faded for the moment before the stern anxiety for Tia Juana's safety.

The story which Willa succeeded in dragging from the Rodriguez woman and Jose was simple on the face of it, yet many possible complexities presented themselves to the girl's vivid imagining. Tia Juana had seemed contented enough in her new abode for the first day, taking a childish pleasure in the novelty of her surroundings, but later she had become depressed and sunk into a moody silence save that now and then she muttered ominously to herself and made strange gestures with her claw-like hands.

Jose she had driven from her harshly, only to seize and draw him close, and on the previous day she had eaten nothing, but crouched through the long hours before the glowing coals of her grate. At twilight she had demanded a large cooking pot which she placed upon the fire, and with an earthenware jar of liquid and sundry packets of herbs from the conglomerate heap of her luggage, she had brewed a concoction that piqued her landlady's curiosity.

It had not pleased Tia Juana, however, and after glowering darkly into its depths, she had flung it, pot and all, from the window down into the back yard.

She had retired pa.s.sively enough, but when the Senora Rodriguez came with her morning coffee, the room was empty. There were no signs of a struggle, the silence had remained unbroken throughout the night, and the front door was found to have been unfastened from the inside, although the Senora Rodriguez a.s.serted that she had locked and bolted it before retiring.

This argued that Tia Juana had of her own volition slipped away from the house on some unknown mission, but to Willa such an hypothesis seemed unlikely. In the first place, the old woman was heart and soul in the plan in which Willa herself was the moving spirit, and well content to leave all things to the guidance of her idolized young friend. Then, too, she had the dread of the strange new city of one who had followed a long and open trail and would scarcely in her right mind have ventured forth to brave it on her own initiative. Had some cajoling or threatening message reached her which induced her to play into Wiley's hands, or could it be that Senora Rodriguez had been bribed to aid in her abduction?

Fierce and implacable as Tia Juana's will was, age had taken its toll of her mental strength and resiliency, and Willa shuddered to think of the coercion which might be brought to bear upon her bewildered and shaken sensibilities.

Dan noted his mistress' profound despondency, but ventured no remark until she addressed him just as they reached the bridge once more.

"Dan, you drove a car once for a detective agency, you told me. Did you ever do any detective work yourself? Do you know anything of their methods?"

"I do, Miss!" he responded promptly, a sparkle dawning in his eyes.

"Not that I ever did any of it, but I used to watch the other fellers at work and I'm thinking I could go them one better at it. I've seen them make some bonehead plays, in my time, and some wonderful hits, too, I'll admit that."

"Do you want to try a little of it for me?" Willa asked. "An old Spanish woman disappeared early this morning from that house back on Second Place, and I want her found without delay. It's she whom those other men are after; she used to live with her grandson, a hunchback, in that cottage upon the Parkway. There will be double wages in it for you while you're working on it, and a thousand dollars reward if you find her and bring her to me."

She went on to describe Tia Juana, and Dan listened in rapt attention to every detail, fired with instant enthusiasm for the new job.

"You leave it to me, Miss!" he announced confidently when she had finished. "I'll get into that house to-morrow, one way or another, and have a talk with the landlady and the kid. I'll soon find out if they know more than they've told. In the meantime, I'll make the round of the hospitals to-night and have a look-in at headquarters to see if she's turned up missing. Those fellers trailing us this afternoon don't make it look as if they or the man they're workin' for could have got hold of her already and there's a chance that she just wandered off, like, on her own hook. I'll let you know the minute I've got a line on her. Wish I spoke her lingo!"

"Oh, Tia Juana understands English well enough when she wants to, and speaks it, too, but only when necessity compels it. She hates everything American but me. I--I could not bear to think of her wandering about, dest.i.tute and dazed and freezing in this storm! Dan, you must find her for me!"

The erstwhile chauffeur promised, with extravagant protestations of a.s.surance, and it was evident that he was in thorough earnest, with illimitable faith in his own powers.