Читать книгу The Thirteenth Ring: Mystery Stories for Girls - Roy J. Snell - Страница 7

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Since the hour was very late when the two girls had completed their plans regarding the thirteen wedding rings, Florence consented to share her new-found friend’s bed for the night.

“How is it that you live here by the river?” she asked as she prepared to disrobe.

“Father is the engineer here. The rooms go with the job,” replied Betty. “But that’s not the only reason. He is a fine engineer. He could get a position in another part of the city. We could have other rooms. But Father likes the river. So do I. He used to be on boats. He says the river gives him the feel of water under him. Many times I’ve seen him sitting before his boilers and swaying gently back and forth as if he were on a ship in motion.

“I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else,” she went on quickly. “Not I. I love the old river too much.”

“Surely,” thought Florence as she crept beneath the covers and glanced through the open window at the broad sullen sweep of the river, “surely it’s a strange place to live.”

Across the river, a dark skeleton against the sky, the unfinished building stood. She shuddered as she thought of her wild race across those iron beams, of the swing and the drop. She thought of the beady-eyed Chinaman, and shuddered again. What was to come of this affair? Would their story be published? Would the pictures of the rings be printed? If so, what would follow?

“Perhaps nothing,” she told herself. “People easily drop from sight in this great sea we call the world. Perhaps the owners of those rings have dropped from sight. They may be dead. Besides, the paper only reaches a million people. There are a hundred million in this great country of ours.”

As she attempted to imagine the vastness of the land in which she lived, she felt, as she had many times before, her insignificance.

“I don’t count,” she told herself, “don’t count at all.

“And yet I do!” she insisted a moment later. “I count with the boys and girls at the playground. I count with my mother, my father and my cousins. And I count with this strange little Betty Bronson. Great God in your high Heavens, help me to forget the millions who do not know me and help me to always be true to the ones with whom I really count.” With this little prayer she fell asleep.

As for Betty, she did not fall asleep at once. Her head was awhirl with plans. She believed in the story of the thirteen used wedding rings, believed that it contained the human interest appeal that goes far toward making a newspaper story.

“But can I make some one else see it?” she asked herself. “I’ve got to find some one, just the right person.”

“It’s strange,” she mused, “the way people think of a newspaper. They don’t think of it as if it were human. They think of it as if it were a machine. It is human, every bit human. If I have a story I don’t run with it to the City Editor, who doesn’t know me at all. I sit down and think, ‘Whom do I know? Who will help me get the story across? Who is my friend?’ Friends, that’s what they are. Human friends.

“This time it can’t be Mrs. Brookins. She’s not in the big news room.”

As she closed her eyes a thrill ran up her spine. It was always so when she thought of the big room upstairs where all the news stories were written. At the head of the room sat the City News Editor, a short, gray-haired man with quick, dreamy eyes. Back of him was a small room. That was the great Editor’s room. At times he stepped through the door, but generally he sent for people. But the City Editor was always calling men to his desk to start them hurrying away. There were other desks in the room, desks without end and typewriters clicking in every corner.

Out of all this confused, blurred impression of something big and rather terrifying, one image stood clear. A pair of smiling eyes, hid by thick glasses. The eyes belonged to Terry Brown. Terry was short, very short, and seemed a bit dried up for twenty, but his eyes shone.

“Like a light burning from within,” she told herself. “Terry will understand. He will see my story, the story of the thirteen rings. He’ll help me put it across, too, for Terry is my friend.

“It’s strange about friends, especially the friends of a newspaper. It seems sort of——”

Just then she fell asleep.

Terry Brown—some called him Terrier because he had such a way of digging out hidden mysteries—turned sleepy eyes on Betty next morning at nine. He had been out late the night before on a strange robbery that baffled the police. The case had provided material of unusual interest. Providence had given Terry an unusually large part in the final solution. Little wonder then that he turned a half attentive ear to a story of wedding rings and an auction sale. Weren’t there weddings, a thousand of them, every day? And auction sales every day in the week? What of wedding rings and auctions? He was sorry that he couldn’t see it.

“But there’s the Chinaman, that mysterious Chinaman!” Betty exclaimed in despair. “Sure there——”

“What mysterious Chinaman?” Terry’s eyes were bright now. “You haven’t told me anything about a Chinaman. Go on. Tell me.”

“Ah, a spark!” thought Betty as a thrill of hope trembled through her being. At once, with the mysterious Chinaman as the central figure, she told her story anew. This time it carried interest and conviction.

Terry was all ears. “He did! She did! By Jove! There’s something to it. Makes a capital mystery. Wants the ring. Which ring? Why? Something about Tongs, I’ll bet. Some hidden secret. Terrible secret societies, those Chinese Tongs. Kill a man soon as look at him.”

“No, he didn’t!” he exclaimed. “Followed her right out on the steel frame? And she? Jumped from a rope forty feet into the river? Good for her! Sure, there’s a story. Have a picture. See!” He sketched roughly a steel frame, a man leaning over, a moon, a swinging rope, a leaping girl.

“Dots show where she went down,” he added.

“But you’ll have to see her first,” Betty expostulated. “She—she might not like——”

“See your friend Miss Huyler? You bet we’ll see her. Make a great story.” Terry raced for the locker. “Where will I find her? Wait till I get my coat. Where’d you say?”

“You—you’ll use a picture of the rings and their story?”

“Yes, the rings. Sure, you do that. See Blair. Get the picture. You write the story. I’ll work it over. Sure! The rings, that’s it. A picture of the rings. We’ll use them as a decoy. Your Chinaman will see the picture. Sure to. I want to have a look at him. Trail him. We’ll get his story. Promise the public a revelation. Tong war secret and all that. Nothing like a revelation. See you in an hour. Thanks for letting me in.”

Terry went racing away. Betty, with fear in her heart, fear that she had lost a valuable friendship by talking too much, whistling to keep up courage, and hoping for a wonderful story and other strange and mysterious ones to come, made her way to the art department where photographs of the rings, entrusted to her care, were made. Then she sat down to type her story of Thirteen Used Wedding Rings.

When the weary throng of city dwellers crowding the street cars and jamming elevated trains opened their evening papers that night they were greeted by a startling picture of a girl in bloomers leaping from a great height into the river. The hour, so the caption told them, was midnight.

Some read the story of Florence’s daring leap and the thirteen used wedding rings and smilingly said, “It’s only a newspaper story. It never happened. Thirteen used wedding rings lost in the mail! It would not happen in a million years.”

Others saw the photograph of the thirteen rings and were convinced. Some of these spent an interesting half hour attempting to remember the designs of all the used wedding rings they had known, comparing each of these with those shown in the picture. For some others, a very few, the affair held a tremendously vital interest. In a very expensive apartment, or rather house, at the top of the city’s most fashionable hotel, a very beautiful woman, dressed in a clinging silk gown and gorgeous satin slippers, received the paper from the hand of her maid.

At first, with a slightly amused expression on her face, she read the account of a midnight adventure. Having arrived at the part telling of the thirteen rings, she glanced at the picture of the rings.

Then, like a flash, her expression changed. Her gaze became fixed. She was staring with all her eyes at a picture, at one of the thirteen rings.

For four full minutes by the ancient Italian clock on the mantel, her eyes did not waver. Then, of a sudden, she threw the paper on the floor, to turn and gaze moodily at the wood fire that burned on the grate.

“The ring!” she murmured. “The ring!”

It is strange that her words should have been exactly those of the mysterious Chinaman. Yet such they were.

On the veranda of a very comfortable suburban home, a man in a long black coat adjusted pince-nez glasses to his eyes and as the others had done, began reading the story. Like the others, he turned at last to the picture of the rings. Then he, too, started up in surprise. Unlike the others, he went into immediate action. To all appearances the pictures of a ring had loosened a spring that set him going. Having made three hasty telephone calls, he banged down the receiver, dragged on his hat and dashed from the house.

Down at the heart of the city is a very long, very high and very dingy office building. In the smallest and dingiest office of them all there sat a little dried up man with pin point eyes. He, too, read the story. He, too, registered increasing interest. At last as the story was finished he, too, stared at the rings. At last he muttered:

“That’s Chow Ming. Can’t be another. And that’s the ring.” As he said this a vision floated before his eyes, a vision of dollars, many, many Chinese dollars.

So the story of Thirteen Used Wedding Rings went its rounds, and twilight deepened into night. The city slept, but not quite all.