SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN. Abraham Merritt
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third car I saw at the far end half a dozen marines with a second lieutenant. My pulse quickened. Here was the very opportunity I had been seeking. I made straight for them.
As I entered the car I was vaguely aware of a couple sitting in the corner close to the door. Intent upon reaching the leathernecks, I paid no attention to them.
Before I had gone five steps I heard a faint scream, then a cry of—
“Harry! Oh, Dr. Consardine! You’ve found him!”
Involuntarily, I halted and turned. A girl was running toward me. She threw her arms around my neck and cried again:
“Harry! Harry! dear! Oh, thank God he found you!”
Two of the loveliest brown eyes I had ever beheld looked up at me. They were deep and tender and pitying, and tears trembled on the long black lashes. Even in my consternation I took note of the delicate skin untouched by rouge, the curly, silken fine bobbed hair under the smart little hat —hair touched with warm bronze glints, the nose a bit uplifted and the exquisite mouth and elfinly pointed chin. Under other circumstances, exactly the girl I would have given much to meet; under the present circumstances, well—disconcerting.
“There! There, Miss Walton!” Dr. Consardine’s voice was benignly soothing. “Your brother is all right now!”
“Now, Eve, don’t fuss any more. The doctor found him just as I told you he would.”
It was a third voice, that of the other occupant of the corner seat. He was a man of about my own age, exceedingly well dressed, the face rather thin and tanned, a touch of dissipation about his eyes and mouth.
“How are you feeling, Harry?” he asked me, and added, somewhat gruffly, “Devil of a chase you’ve given us this time, I must say.”
“Now, Walter,” the girl rebuked him, “what matter, so he is safe?”
I disengaged the girl’s arms and looked at the three of them. Outwardly they were exactly what they purported to be—an earnest, experienced, expensive specialist anxious about a recalcitrant patient with a defective mentality, a sweet, worried sister almost overcome with glad relief that her mind-sick runaway brother had been found, a trusty friend, perhaps a fiancé, a bit put out, but still eighteen-carat faithful and devoted and so glad that his sweetheart’s worry was over that he was ready to hand me a wallop if I began again to misbehave. So convincing were they that for one insane moment I doubted my own identity. Was I, after all, Jim Kirkham? Maybe I’d only read about him! My mind rocked with the possibility that I might be this Henry Walton whose wits had been scrambled by some accident in France.
It was with distinct effort that I banished the idea. This couple had, of course, been planted in the station and waiting for me to appear. But in the name of all far-seeing devils how could it have been foretold that I would appear at that very station at that very time?
And suddenly one of Consardine’s curious phrases returned to me:
“A mind greater than all to plan for all of them; a will greater than all their wills—”
Cobwebs seemed to be dropping around me, cobwebs whose multitudinous strands were held by one master hand, and pulling me, pulling me— irresistibly… where… and to what?
I turned and faced the marines. They were staring at us with absorbed interest. The lieutenant was on his feet, and now he came toward us.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?” he asked Consardine, but his eyes were on the girl and filled with admiration. And at that moment I knew that I could expect no help from him or his men. Nevertheless, it was I who answered.
“You can,” I said. “My name is James Kirkham. I live at the Discoverers’ Club. I don’t expect you to believe me, but these people are kidnapping me—”
“Oh, Harry, Harry!” murmured the girl and touched her eyes with a foolish little square of lace.
“All that I ask you to do,” I went on, “is to call up the Discoverers’ Club when you leave this car. Ask for Lars Thorwaldsen, tell him what you have seen, and say I told you that the man at the Club who calls himself James Kirkham is an impostor. Will you do that?”
“Oh, Dr. Consardine,” sobbed the girl. “Oh, poor, poor brother!”
“Will you come with me a moment, lieutenant?” asked Consardine. He spoke to the man who had called the girl Eve—“Watch; Walter—look after Harry—”
He touched the lieutenant’s arm and they walked to the front of the car.
“Sit down, Harry, old man,” urged Walter.
“Please, dear,” said the girl. A hand of each of them on my arms, they pressed me into a seat.
I made no resistance. A certain grim wonder had come to me. I watched Consardine and the lieutenant carry on a whispered conversation to which the latter’s leathernecks aimed eager ears. I knew the story Consardine was telling, for I saw the officer’s face soften, and he and his men glanced at me pityingly; at the girl, compassionately. The lieutenant asked some question, Consardine nodded acquiescence and the pair walked back.
“Old man,” the lieutenant spoke to me soothingly, “of course I’ll do what you ask. We get off at the Bridge and I’ll go to the first telephone. Discoverers’ Club, you said?”
It would have been wonderful if I had not known that he thought he was humoring a lunatic.
I nodded, wearily.
“‘Tell it to the marines,’” I quoted. “The man who said that knew what he was talking about. Invincible but dumb. Of course, you’ll not do it. But if a spark of intelligence should miraculously light up your mind tonight or even tomorrow, please phone as I asked.”
“Oh, Harry! Please be quiet!” implored the girl. She turned her eyes, eloquent with gratitude, to the lieutenant. “I’m sure the lieutenant will do exactly as he has promised.”
“Indeed I will,” he assured me—and half winked at her.
I laughed outright, I couldn’t help it. No heart of any marine I had ever met, officer or otherwise, could have withstood that look of Eve’s—so appealing, so grateful, so wistfully appreciative.
“All right, lieutenant,” I said. “I don’t blame you a bit. I bet myself I couldn’t be kidnapped under a New York cop’s eye at a subway entrance. But I lost. Then I bet myself I couldn’t be kidnapped in a subway train. And again I’ve lost. Nevertheless, if you should get wondering whether I’m crazy or not, take a chance, lieutenant, and call up the Club.”
“Oh, brother,” breathed Eve, and wept once more.
I sank back into my seat, waiting another opportunity. The girl kept her hand on mine, her eyes, intermittently, on the leatherneck lieutenant. Consardine had seated himself at my right. Walter sat at Eve’s side.
At Brooklyn Bridge the marines got out, with many backward looks at us. I saluted the lieutenant sardonically; the girl sent him a beautifully grateful smile. If anything else had been needed to make him forget my appeal it was that.
Quite a crowd piled on the car at the Bridge. I watched them hopefully, as they stampeded into the seats. The hopefulness faded steadily as I studied their faces. Sadly I realized that old Vanderbilt had been all wrong when he had said, “The public be damned.” What he ought to have said was “The public be dumb.”
There was a Hebraic delegation of a half dozen on their way home to the Bronx, a belated stenographer who at once began operations with a lipstick, three rabbit-faced young hoods, an Italian woman with four restless children, a dignified old gentleman who viewed their movements with suspicion, a plain- looking Negro, a rather pleasant-appearing man of early middle age with a woman who might have been a school teacher, two giggling girls who at once began flirting with the hoods, a laborer, three possible clerks and a scattering dozen of assorted morons. The typical New York subway train congregation. A glance at right and left