At each repet.i.tion the blind man had shuddered and gripped harder the arm of the Davenport. Now he flung out a summoning hand toward his daughter. She, with her trio of eyes on their silent guest-her own blazing blue pair and the single black one of the gun-crossed and bent to her father's rasp:

"If they should force the lock-should batter down the door--"

Jane made no attempt to rea.s.sure him. At a step toward them of the stranger she retraced her steps and gestured him back with the pistol, silently but most significantly.

Pape, the while, threw a trusting smile into the three eyes, then strode straight toward them. Close to Jane's ear he whispered:

"You won't shoot me. You can't. You'd lose too much good faith."

Despite her outraged gasp, he continued toward the door that was being importuned. Another smile he threw over-shoulder to rea.s.sure her of his confidence.

And Jane didn't shoot. Probably she couldn't. No report shocked the air.

Nothing sounded except a gruff demand from the inner side of the door.

"Who's there? Wha'd'you want?"

From outside: "Old friends. We wish to see Miss Lauderdale."

"_Who_?"

"Lauderdale-Miss Lau-der-dale."

"Who in holy Hemlock directed you here, then? My name ain't Lauderdale.

Never will be. Stop the noise, will you?"

There ensued further low-voiced consultation without. A moment later footsteps began a descent of the stairs. Scroop ... screak ... screech.

Not until the musical siren announced the departure from the block of the would-be visitors, did Pape relax from his listening att.i.tude at the door. On turning he saw that Jane, too, had slumped, limp and white, into a chair, the very black and ominous something with which she had threatened him dropped into her lap. A look half-dazed, yet wholly hopeful was on her face.

"Thank Heaven-thank you, Peter Pape-they've gone!"

"But they'll come back." Her father's voice echoed none of her relief.

"Allen and Harford must have reason to suspect that you, at least, are here in the old house. Otherwise they'd not have come. If my presence, too, is suspected, it won't be long until that other pack comes to hound me down. Jane, you can't go on with this search, vital though it be.

Come what may, you shan't be sacrificed. It's no business for a girl alone and unprotected. We'll have to give it all up, dear. I'll go away somewhere-anywhere."

"But Jane ain't alone and unprotected." Pape crossed the room and faced them both. "Looks clear enough to me why I sloped out of the West and into the far East just in the nick o' time. I'm hoping the reason will soon get clear to you."

The girl's lips moved, although she did not speak. She looked and looked at him. Her father, unable to see, worded the demand of her eyes.

"Exactly what do you mean, Mr. Pape? What do you offer and why?"

"_Why_? Why not?" he asked in turn. "From this moment on, just as from the same back to that Zaza night, I am at Miss Lauderdale's service. I have a trusty bit of hardware myself-" in substantiation he drew from somewhere beneath his coat a blue-black revolver of heavy caliber-"and I am not so slow on the draw as some. If this pack you say is trailing you is determined to get itself shot up, it would be better for me to do it than for her, wouldn't it? And while we're waiting for the mix-up, I could dig for whatever it is she is looking for. Oh, you needn't tell me what that is! I've worked blind before. You folks just tell me when and where to dig and I'll _dig_!"

The girl turned to her parent. "I think, after all, I'll tell Mr.

Pape--"

"I think it is time-high time, Jane." He nodded in vehement approval.

Rising, she faced their guest; spoke rapidly, although in a thinking way.

"You've earned the partial confidence that dad wished to give you, Why-Not Pape. This old house belonged to my grandfather. He grew eccentric in later life. The more this East Side section ran down, the tighter he clung to it. Toward the end, he fitted up this top-floor flat for himself and rented out the others. From sentiment my father didn't sell the house, although we could have used the money. We are not rich like the Sturgis branch of the family."

"That is, we are not unless--"

"I am getting to that, dad." With a shadow of her former frown, Jane cut off her parent's interruption. "My grandfather's other particular haunt was Central Park. He knew it from Scholars Gate at Fifty-ninth and Fifth to Pioneers at the farther northwest corner. He played croquet with other 'old boys' on the knoll above the North Meadow, sailed miniature yachts for silver cups on Conservatory Lake and helped the predecessors of Shepherd Tom tend their flocks on The Green. He had an eccentric's distrust of banks and deposit vaults and chose a spot in the park as the secret repository for the most valuable thing he had to leave behind him. The only key to the exact spot is a cryptogram which he worked out and by which he expected my father to locate his inheritance."

Pape filled the pause which, evidently, was for the weighing of further information. "So this cryptogram or map was in the stolen heirloom snuff-box the night that I-that we--"

"Yes. My grandfather, on his death bed, tried to tell me where he had hidden it, but he waited a moment too long. For years father and I hunted in vain. Not until the other day-the day of the night on which you and I met, Peter Pape-did I come upon it quite by accident in the attic s.p.a.ce of this house. It was in the old snuff-box. I took both to Aunt Helene's that night, hoping to find time to study and decipher it.

And I did read it through several times, memorizing a verse or two of it and some of the figures before the opera. I asked my aunt to put the box in her safe, not telling her its contents. The rest you know."

Although Pape felt the danger of his "little knowledge," he drove no prod; simply waited for her to volunteer.

"A number of people knew of our long search for grandfather's covered map, among them an enemy through whom we have been deprived, but whose name we do not know. How he could have been informed just when I found or where I placed it, I cannot conceive. Possibly the safe has been under periodic search, although we never suspected. Possibly some one within the house is in the employ of this unknown enemy and saw me give it to my aunt for deposit or heard that I had turned over some valuable.

I was unforgivably careless."

"An inside job?" Pape queried. "I thought so."

"But not through Jasper-I'd stake anything on that!" the girl exclaimed.

"He was our own butler in better days and is loyal, I know. Since that disastrous night, I've been trying to work out the verses of the crypt from memory before its present possessor would get the key to a translation. 'To whispers of poplars four' was the second line of one of the verses. That is why--"

The rising of Curtis Lauderdale interrupted her. He crossed, with a nervous clutch on this chair and that, to where Pape stood in the room's center.

"There's very great need of haste," he said. "Now that they are watching Jane's movements-Since they've trailed her here-Mr. Pape, I cannot afford to mistrust you, even were I inclined to do so. My dear girl here blames me for trusting people, but since I must trust her to some one, I'd rather it should be you. I accept and hold you to your offer to see her safely through to-night. Much more than you could imagine hangs in the balance. This may be our last chance."

"I never acknowledge any chance as the last until success, sir." Pape again grasped the forward fluttering right of the blind man. His left hand he extended to the girl. "I'll try to deserve your father's confidence-and yours, Jane."

"Near the four poplars, then, at dusk," she consented.

Also she gave him a smile, all the lovelier for its faintness and rarity.

That moment of au revoir, in which they formed a complete circle, palms to palms, Pape felt to be his initiation into what was to him a divine triumvirate. "At dusk!" There was nothing-quite nothing which he could not accomplish for the common, if still unknown cause that night, then, at dusk.

CHAPTER XVII-POPLARS FOUR

HAD Peter Pape been at home in h.e.l.lroaring the late afternoon of this crowded day in New York, he doubtless would have saddled Polkadot and climbed to some lonely mesa for meditative fingering of the odd chain into which he had forged himself as a link. Instead, he locked himself in the Astor suite, little used hitherto except for sleep. The telephone he silenced with a towel wrapped around the bell. He closed the windows against distractions from the street and switched off the electric fan, the whirr of which sounded above the traffic roar.

Yet with all these aids to concentration, his resume of facts newly given out in the affairs of his self-selected lady reached no conclusion. Varying the metaphor, no point or eye could he see to that needle, greater than Central Park itself, which would sew the fate of the Lauderdales. The best he could do in preparation for contingencies ahead was to throw a diamond hitch around his resolve to do and dare unquestioningly in the service to which he now was sworn-to advance from initiate into full membership of the triumvirate.

He planned by the clock. At six sharp, he rang for dinner upstairs.

Seven found him again in the garb worn from the West, which appealed to him as more suitable than any of the "masterpieces" tailored for less important functions than that of to-night.

The blond floor-clerk, whose hall desk stood near the entrance door to his suite, awaited his approach with an "Indian sign" of warning. But she and he couldn't have come from the same tribe; at least he did not grasp its import until later developments translated it for him.

"Oh, Mr. Pape," she lisped, as, actually, he was about to pa.s.s her by without his usual breezy greeting, "you've had three calls s'evening.