The Automobile Girls Along the Hudson Part 15

I must have a hat also."

He disappeared through the window and returned in a moment with a broad-brimmed felt hat he had found in the hall. Mollie handed him her pink scarf with a border of wild roses, and walking composedly up to the end of the long piazza he stood perfectly still, waiting for the music to begin. Jimmie struck up a Spanish dance with the sound of castanets in the ba.s.s.

"How's that for a tune?" he called out.

"Very good, very good," answered Jose. Then he started the strange dance while the others watched spellbound.

The boys, who had been rather scornful of a man's dancing fancy dances, confessed afterwards that there was nothing effeminate in Jose's dancing, no pirouetting and twisting on one toe like Jimmie Butler's one accomplishment in ballet-dancing. They gathered that it was a sort of bullbaiting dance. It began with a series of advances and retreats, with a springy step always in time to the throb of the music.

The young Spaniard was very graceful and lithe. He seemed to have forgotten that he was on the piazza of foreigners in a strange country.

The dance grew quicker and quicker. Suddenly he drew a long curved dagger from his belt and made a lunge at some imaginary obstacle, probably the bull he was baiting.

Bab, who was nearest the dancer, rose to her feet quickly, and then sat down rather limply.

"The knife, the knife!" she said to herself. "It is the highwayman's knife!"

And now the handsome dancer was kneeling at Mollie's feet offering her the scarf.

He had risen and was bowing to the company, when whir-r-r! something had whizzed past his head, just scratched his forehead and then planted itself in the wooden frame of the window behind him.

Was Barbara dreaming; or had she lost her senses?

The knife in the wall was the same, or exactly like the knife Jose had been using in the dance.

In a moment everything was in wild confusion.

"Go into the house, ladies!" commanded the major.

The four boys leaped from the piazza, to run down the a.s.sa.s.sin, so they thought, but the figure vaguely outlined for an instant in the shadows of the trees, was as completely hidden as if the earth had opened and swallowed it up.

Jose, in a big chair in the drawing room, was being ministered to by Miss Sallie and the girls, while the major, with a gla.s.s of water, was standing over him on one side and the housekeeper, on the other, was binding his head with a linen handkerchief.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Whir-r-r! Something Whizzed Past His Head.]

"Major," Miss Sallie was saying, "this country is full of a.s.sa.s.sins and robbers. I believe we shall all be murdered in our beds. I am really terribly frightened. We have had nothing but attacks since we left New York. And, now, this poor young man is in danger. Who could it have been, do you suppose, and what good did it do to hurl a knife into the midst of a perfectly harmless company like that!"

"The country is a little wild, Sallie," replied the major apologetically, "but I have never heard of anything like this happening before. Of course, there are highwaymen everywhere. There are those Gypsies in the forest. Perhaps it was one of them."

Just then the boys returned, and the attention of the others was distracted from Jose, who still sat quietly, his lips pressed together.

Barbara, who had been standing a little way off, turned to him quickly.

"The knife?" she asked, but stopped without finis.h.i.+ng, for Jose had fixed her glance with a look of such appeal that she could say no more.

"By the way," observed Jimmie Butler, "where is the knife?"

"Sticking in the wall of course," replied Stephen.

The two boys ran out on the piazza, but returned empty-handed.

"Mystery of mysteries!" cried Jimmie, "the knife is gone!"

"It is impossible," exclaimed the major. "We have not left this room. We could see anyone who came upon the piazza."

"Well, it's gone," said Jimmie. "While you were nursing Jose, somebody must have crept up and got it."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Miss Sallie. "Do you mean to say that the murderer has been that close to us again? Do close those windows and draw the curtains."

"Yes, do so," said the major. "Mary," he continued to the housekeeper, who was entering at that moment with a basin of water, "I wish you would have all the men on the place sent to me. Some of them may be asleep, but wake them up. We shall scour every part of the estate to-night. If there's anybody hiding around here we shall rout him out."

Mary hurried off to deliver her orders, while the boys ran to their rooms to get on tennis shoes and collect various weapons.

"I am sorry Jose was scratched," Martin confided to Alfred, "but-well, this is pretty good sport, old man. Don't you think so?"

"By Jove, it is," replied Alfred with enthusiasm. "If that a.s.sa.s.sin should leap at us in the dark I should like to give him a nip with this s.h.i.+llalah. What a beastly coward he was to attack a man when his back was turned!"

And with that, he waved a big knotted club, one of Stephen's possessions, around his head, and glared ferociously.

"Come on, boys," called Stephen. "We haven't a moment to lose. The man will be well away if we don't hurry. We are going to ride in twos and divide the place in sections."

In another ten minutes a company of hors.e.m.e.n rode off in the moonlight, two by two, while the frightened maid-servants locked and barred the house doors and windows.

Jose had begged to be allowed to go along, but the major had silenced him by saying that Miss Sallie and the girls needed a protector, and that under the circ.u.mstances it was better for him to stay at home and look after them. Even the old major was rather enjoying the zest of a man-hunt, and his eyes flashed with a new fire under his grizzled eyebrows.

But nothing happened and the a.s.sa.s.sin remained at large. The hunters scoured the country, searched the forest on the outskirts of the Ten Eyck estate, and woke the sleeping Gypsies to demand what they knew. The Gypsies knew nothing, and at midnight the hors.e.m.e.n returned.

The house was silent. Everyone had gone to bed except Jose, who sat in the library listening for every sound that creaked through the old place. He met Major Ten Eyck and the boys at the front door, holding a candle high and peering anxiously into the dark to see what quarry they had brought home.

And, when he saw they had no prisoner bound to the horse with the ropes that the major had ordered his man to take along, a look of strange relief came into the Spaniard's face. He breathed a deep sigh, smiled as he thanked them, said good-night and went up the broad stairway with the same smile still clinging to his lips.

In the meantime Bab was stretched out beside the sleeping Ruth, wide awake, going over the events of that tumultuous day.

She felt that these events had no connection with each other, and yet deep down in her inner consciousness she was searching for the link that bound all the strange happenings together. She was not quite sure now whether she had seen the face in the library or not. She had been so tired and hot. It might, after all, have been a dream. But the footsteps in the dust on the attic floor, coming from the wall, what of them?

And last, though most strange and mysterious of all, the two daggers?

Jose had been saved just in time from the stigma of suspicion by the appearance of the other dagger, for, in the moment she had seen the two, Bab had realized they were absolutely alike.

She could not believe Jose was a highwayman, and yet there were certain things that looked very black. It was true he had not known where they were going, but she imagined he could have found it out.

Was it his figure she had seen behind the curtain that morning, listening? Whoever it was heard the exact route of their trip, with explicit directions from the major. Undoubtedly, Bab believed, the eavesdropper was the highwayman.

Furthermore, what did they know about Jose? It is true he had come bearing credentials, but such things were easily fixed up by experts, and the major was a simple old fellow who never doubted anybody until he had to.

On the other hand, Jose had every appearance of being a gentleman. He had proved himself to be brave by knocking down the tramp twice his size at Sleepy Hollow. There was an air of sincerity about him which she could not fail to recognize. He was graceful and charming. Everybody liked him, even those who had been inclined to feel prejudiced at first.

Would the Spaniard have dared to use the same dagger in the dance that he had used to slash their tires with? It was a.s.suredly amazingly reckless, and yet he might have trusted to the darkness and risked it.

But the look he gave her when she started to speak of the twin daggers!

What could that have meant? Was he trying to s.h.i.+eld his own enemy?