CHAPTER X
SUSPECTED
It seemed a miracle to Jane when she thought of it afterward that Mr. Powell had not been more seriously injured. The other two men who had been taken from under the ruins of the wall were much more badly hurt. It was rumored that one might die and that the other would be forced to keep to his bed for many weeks to come.
Doctor Pendleton, a busy physician and surgeon, dressed Mr. Powell’s injured hands. He looked grave when the work was done.
“The bruises on your body will get well quickly,” he told him. “But the hands are a different matter. Some of the small bones are broken, the tendons are stretched. You will have to give your hands a good long rest before they will be of any use to you again.”
They went home then, although the fire was still blazing and sparks from it, despite all the precautions of the firemen, had set fire to the roof of the building nearest it.
“Looks as if the whole town might go,” muttered Mr. Powell unhappily, as he allowed his wife and Jane to lead him homeward.
“I don’t care if it does,” said Mrs. Powell, “as long as you are safe——”
“And out of a job,” said the man, with a short bitter laugh. “Don’t forget that, Lou!”
“I’m not forgetting it,” returned Mrs. Powell stoutly. “But even if you had a job you couldn’t work at it with those poor hands. As soon as you’re well there will be plenty more jobs for you.”
She spoke bravely, far more bravely, Jane imagined, than she felt.
Jane was very thoughtful during the rest of the walk home and afterward when she sat by the one window in her room, watching the flames paint strange pictures in the sky.
“If Uncle Dink has no position and couldn’t possibly work at one if he had it until his hands are well, I wonder what we’ll do?” she asked herself. “I don’t suppose Aunt Lou has much money laid by, and even if she had, it wouldn’t last long with nothing coming in. And I’ll just be an extra expense to them. Oh, dear, Jane, I wish you could think of something!”
So it came to pass that two girls in Greenville, one the girl they called “Plain Jane,” the other, “Pretty Betty,” spent that night in anxious wakefulness, pondering in their different ways the same puzzling question, “What does one do when one has no money?” To neither of them then came the only answer, the very simple answer, really, to the query.
As the first gray light of dawn dimmed the fire-reddened sky, the firemen conquered the blaze. An early sun rose upon an ugly, blackened scene of desolation.
The two buildings adjoining Martin and Hull’s were almost as badly damaged as their neighbor’s. The actual loss in dollars had not been figured as yet, but one could guess that it would be enormous, for the insurance companies had only lately refused to carry the risk on these buildings.
Those most interested in the calamity, having retired for a few hours of much-needed rest, returned, one after another, to the scene of desolation.
A crowd gathered, gesticulating, speculating.
Poor Mr. Martin, of Martin and Hull, was wandering about the ruins in a dazed way. He seemed only to half realize the extent of the calamity, yet could not drag himself away from the scene of it. He answered questions put to him vaguely—if he answered them at all.
After vainly trying to exact some plausible explanation of the fire from him, Mr. Browning went in search of Hull.
“Maybe I can get some sense out of him,” he muttered. “Though I doubt it.”
Mr. Browning did not know that Betty was following him. If he had, he would, in all probability, have ordered her back home again for fear that she would realize too soon the extent of the misfortune that had come to the house of Browning.
But Betty was following somewhat after the manner of a Persian kitten at the heels of a mastiff, and those who saw her wondered that she should be there at all.
Though her face was unnaturally pale and her eyes unnaturally large, Betty Browning made a very pleasing picture in a woolly white sport coat and a white felt hat pulled down close over her golden bobbed hair.
Many of the curious who were among the crowds at the scene of the fire nudged each other as the pretty girl passed, and speculated as to what would happen if the rumor, already mysteriously spreading about town, that Mr. Browning had lost his money should prove true.
Meanwhile Betty was unconscious of the curious scrutiny of these people. Her eyes were only for her father, for the unremembered lines in his handsome face, for the unaccustomed stoop of his broad shoulders.
If it had not been for these things, Betty might have thought she had dreamed that conversation last night between her father and mother. She was bewildered, frightened, but, more than anything else, incredulous. She had been so long accustomed to think of money as something that was her right, as something as certain as the rolls and coffee that were served to her in her bedroom each morning, that she could not imagine herself without it.
Only the change in her father fed the bewilderment and fright in her heart and fought the incredulity.
So Betty Browning followed where her father went, stopped when he stopped, watching him always with puzzled eyes, while her anxiety grew.
Mr. Browning found the junior partner of Martin and Hull in the remains of what had once been an office and was now only a dreary ruin of sodden débris.
Hull had been searching for something. He straightened up as he saw Mr. Browning and his face became a dull red. He turned away, fiddling futilely with the remains of an old leather case.
“I’m sorry, Browning,” he muttered. “There was a bare chance that I might recover some at least of those securities of yours——”
“But you haven’t?”
From a distance where she could see but not hear, Betty could see her father’s broad shoulders sag, noticed his hand go out gropingly like a blind man feeling for support.
“The small safe is gone completely,” Hull said dully. “Melted, I suppose by the intense heat of the fire. I was going to take your thirty thousand up to the city to-day, Browning. Couldn’t possibly get away before.”
“To-day is too late!” said Clyde Browning in a hard voice.
Mr. Hull looked up. There was something pathetic in the helpless appeal of his voice.
“I’m sorry! I can’t say more. After all I had no reason to anticipate the ruin of my business before to-day——”
Mr. Browning cut him short with an impatient gesture.
“How about yourself?” he said. “Are you insured?”
“Partly,” replied the grain dealer. “You know the insurance company pulled in on us. Although my loss will be a heavy one. I doubt,” he added, with a quiver in his voice, “whether either Martin or I will have the courage to start all over again.”
There was a momentary silence between the two men.
“Have you any idea as to how the fire started?”
Hull looked at his questioner’s shaggy white eyebrows lowering over wrathful eyes.
“I think it was that young fool, Billy Dobson!” he said.
Mr. Browning started and looked more closely at the other man.
“Billy Dobson! Why, I have always said that boy was honest as the day——”
“I never said he wasn’t honest, did I?” the older man protested testily. “But he’s a fool just the same—a visionary young fool. And a temper with a dangerous flash and bang to it, let me tell you.”
“He came in here asking me to finance some invention or other,” continued the grain dealer, while Mr. Browning listened with absorbed interest. “Offered to make a million for me in a year or two. I reckon he expected there’d be several millions in it for himself, young fool——”
“And you laughed at him, I suppose,” broke in Mr. Browning’s cool, curt voice.
“Of course I did! Who wouldn’t? I told him to take his child’s toy elsewhere and be quick about it. The lad went but his parting words were a promise that I’d be ‘sorry some day.’”
“H’m—I see! Well, come along, Hull. Something tells me this hunch of yours will bear looking into!”