All Story Magazine, December 1913 — page 116: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

826 “What the dickens!” I began, ap- proaching the chauffeur. ‘ Didn't I give you—” I stopped. id Our chauffeur’s hand came out to me, palm downward. “ 'There’s nae chairge, ye sassenach. Gude keep ye baith. Gude nicht.” Campbell! CHAPTER XXXV. RIDING INTO DANGER. BrEForE I had time to take stock of anything more than the miserable black mustache that covered his upper lip the cab was moving away. For one gasping second J] thought he was carrying my bride away, and the next found her at my elbow trying to smile as I stood blinking down at her and after the podgy vehicle rat- tling off toward Fifth Avenue. How Campbell had managed it I could not imagine, but I quickly ap- preciated.that nerve was the principal ingredient toward his success; and re- membering the horde of policemen and detectives that had been all about the cab, the thing became funny, or ludicrous, if you will, and serious as everything was I could barely restrain my enjoyment of the “ joke.” “Let's go somewhere and have your eye fixed,” JI heard Margaret whisper. “You can’t go into the hotel lke that.” “No; IE agreed.” “Can't go in at all without baggage. What the deuce did he drop us here for?” “Everything’s here,” she mur- mured, moving away from the ques- tioning scrutiny of the starter and a passer-by. ‘ Mr. Campbell had it moved from your old place to-day— mine too. There is a drug-store across the street.” We went across to the chemist’s, and one of the chaps there doctored my eye and sold me a patch to cover its unsightliness; after which, with my THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. head hardly less painful than it had been, thought I stoically kept my hat at a respectable angle, we repaired to the hotel, where we found that Campbell, in his arrangements to defeat all of Rollins’s schemes, had left nothing undone, even to the last detail of en- gaging a suite for us. As we ascended in one of the eleva- tors I came to the unhappy conclusion that Margaret and I had been but pawns in a game that had necessarily to end with the social or physical anni- hilation of one of the players. The ending was written in Marga- ret’s face, and the moment we were alone she lurched, rather than walked, to a chair, and, cowering into its friendly depths, shook from head to foot in a paroxysm of fear and horror —with her fingers in her ears. I went to her at once, and, putting my arms about her, tried to comfort her and lead her mind away from the ghastly memory upon it. But still she shivered, tearless and white—with her fingers in her ears, “IT can—hear him—scream!” she whispered. The morning papers were full of it —of the murder, the mob, the melo- dramatic escape of the leader of the notorious Rob Roy gang, the “ ineffi- ciency of the police,’’ the histories Of Della, her father, and his victim, and of our marriage and Alice’s explana- tion of it. The accounts were hopelessly jum- bled, so that the “ man in the street ” had about a dozen stories from which to pick and choose and draw his own conclusions of a very tangled affair. But old man Borrowman’s’ reason for the shooting was always the same. It told plainly, with the addition of several reportorial frills of what Rol- lins had been guilty, and every news- paper, without a _ single exception, made the circumstance agree with the ~ “ something ” of which Alice had said her uncle was afraid. My morning was rather restless, comlicloooks.com