Page:Frank Packard - The Adventures of Jimmie Dale.djvu/166

162 linger in caress on the tousled golden hair of a little girl of perhaps two years of age—and something seemed to choke suddenly in Jimmie Dale's throat—the sweet, innocent little face, upturned to his, was smiling at him as she slept.

Jimmie Dale turned away his head—his eyelashes wet under his mask. "Beneath the mattress of the child's bed," the letter had said. His face like stone, his lips a thin line now, Jimmie Dale's hand reached deftly in without disturbing the child and took out a package—and then another. He straightened up, a bundle of crisp new hundred-dollar notes in each hand—and on the top of one, slipped under the elastic band that held the bills together, an unsealed envelope. He drew out the latter, and opened it—it was a second-class steamship passage to Vera Cruz, made out in a fictitious name, of course, to John Davies, the booking for next day's sailing. From the ticket, from the stolen money, Jimmie Dale's eyes lifted to rest again on the little golden head, the smiling lips—and then, dropping the packages into his pockets, his own lips moving queerly, he turned abruptly to the door.

"My God, the shame of it!" he whispered to himself.

He crept down the corridor, past the open door of the room where the young woman still sat fast asleep, and, his mask in his pocket again, stepped softly into the vestibule, and from there to the street.

Jimmie Dale hurried now, spurred on it seemed by a hot, insensate fury that raged within him—there was still one other call to make that night—still those remaining and minute details in the latter part of her letter, grim and ugly in their portent!

It was close upon one o'clock in the morning when Jimmie Dale stopped again—this time before a fashionable dwelling just off Central Park. And here, for perhaps the space of a minute, he surveyed the house from the side-walk—watching, with a sort of speculative satisfaction, a man's shadow that passed constantly to and fro across the drawn blinds of one of the lower windows. The rest of the house was in darkness.