The Argosy, Vol. 90 No. 1 — page 172: what you’re looking at

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

166 remedy of her cwn making, and he is soothed.” “And the senora?” The woman hesitated visibly. ‘‘ She—she sits all day by her fire and talks but seldom, yet she seems well.” ‘They understand why I have not been to see them?” Willa eyed her narrowly, for the woman’s agitation boded ill. “Yes. They ask when you will come, but they know it must not be for a time.” Senora Lopez paused, and then added in a swift rush: ‘ My mother bakes for them tortillas and they are pleased together. José begs my mother to tell him of Spain, but the old sevora, she has not the interest. It is always as if she waited, but she is con- tent.” Willa nodded. The description was such as she had anticipated, yet, despite the vol- ubility of the other’s assurance, the sugges- tion of something odd and furtive remained. ‘“* 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 eye- lids 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 came as an amigo, a compaiero of José; he desired to know where he might be found, but he, also, was unsatisfied. We are the Lopezes, what have we to do with the Senora Reyes or Josée?” Her tone of bland candor was inimitable, but it did not eradicate the consciousness of anxiety and unrest that was 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 bank-notes. THE ARGOSY. 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 assist her into the car, “I don’t know how it is going 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 Sec- ond Place, Brooklyn, without being fol- lowed. 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 jour- ney. To Willa, who, aside from her infre- quent visits to the cottage on the parkway, had seen little of New York and its en- virons save in the beaten path of the con- ventional social road, it was a revelation. They tore through crooked, teeming side streets whose squalor was veiled in the fall- ing curtain of snow, and shot across broad avenues with gleaming vistas of light stretching interminably in either direction. They dashed sharply about a corner and off through a lane of cafionlike factories and sweat-shop 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 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 sub- dued rattle of occasional traffic. oO comicbool< CO