Chapter XL: Bewildering Facts

It was but a momentary glimpse, for the crowd, seized with a panic at the approach of a number of policemen, fled in a body, and the busher was whirled out of sight in an instant. But it was enough. Locke knew that face too well to be mistaken. It was Savage――the man he had left sixty miles away behind iron bars, with no chance of a trial within the week at least.

The thing was incredible. It was on a par with that fantastic story of the jumping horse, and for a moment Locke felt his brain reeling. He pulled himself together to answer a question of Janet, then set about reasoning it out more calmly.

There must be some natural explanation, of course. The fellow was here in Webster. That much was beyond any doubt. There were only two possible ways of his getting out of jail――either he had broken out, or in some inexplicable manner he had been released. The southpaw found it difficult to understand how either of these things could have happened. After a most uneasy ten minutes, he excused himself, and left the box to seek a long-distance telephone.

He had some difficulty in getting the Tulane jail, but when he finally did so the connection was so good that he recognized at once the voice of Joe Warren, the assistant keeper, an ardent fan who had spent most of his off hours at the ball park.

“Joe, this is Locke,” Lefty said quickly. “I wanted to ask you about Savage. Is he――still there?”

“Here!” The man’s voice vibrated over the wire with sudden shrillness. “I should say nit! The old man chased him as far as the station, and then lost him. Reckon he must have jumped the fast freight that went through a couple of minutes before.”

Locke’s eyes narrowed. The explanation was very simple, after all.

“Broke out, did he?”

“You bet! Lord knows how he done it, but he cut his way through the roof of the calaboose. Couldn’t even wait till dark, an’ of course he was seen. It ain’t twenty minutes since old Mose Peters piped him climbing through the hole he made, an’――”

“_What?_”

“I say, it ain’t more’n twenty minutes ago that he broke out. Mose Peters lives in that――”

“But that’s impossible!” protested Lefty dazedly. “Stop kidding, Joe, and tell me the story straight.”

“I ain’t kidding!” Warren’s voice took on a slightly injured tone. “It might be twenty-five minutes by now, but not a second more. Peters seen him through his back winder, an’ hustled over as fast as his rheumatics would let him. Bob took it on the run without even waitin’ for his hat. Got a glimpse of the feller duckin’ out of Main Street toward the station, but that was the last he seen of him. By hard runnin’, he jest about had time to hook on to the freight above the station, an’ that’s what we reckon he done. I ain’t seen Bob since. He ’phoned from the station for me to send down his hat an’ gun, an’ that’s when I heard about it. I hadn’t no more’n hung up before you rung.”

Lefty drew a long breath, and passed one hand dazedly across his forehead. Visions of high-power motor cars, of aëroplanes even, flitted through his mind; but the speediest of them could not make three miles a minute. By changing from the freight to the down train, which came along within the half hour, Savage could reach Webster around half past four at the earliest. But he was here now――somewhere out in that vast crowd swarming around the track. At least, the pitcher had been positive of that until this moment; now his mind began to waver. He might have been mistaken by a chance resemblance――it was within the bounds of possibility. Through the thin partition before him the muffled shuffling of many feet and the rasping sound of many voices came to him from the betting shed. Then he realized that Warren was speaking:

“Hello! Hello! Are you on yet, Mr. Locke? Say, how the mischief do you happen to know anything about the escape? Bob ain’t ’phoned you, has he?”

“N-o.” The pitcher’s face had suddenly become curiously altered. The lips were firm, the muscles of the jaw had hardened. “No, Joe,” he repeated more briskly, “Bob didn’t ’phone. I――thought I saw Savage in the crowd on the track just now, but of course that’s――impossible. Yes, sure! I guess you’ll pinch him all right. We’ll be back by to-morrow noon, I reckon. Sure, we licked ’em――four to one. I’ve got to get back for the race. Good-by.”

Returning to the box, Lefty found that order had at last been reëstablished, and that the first race was about to start. After all the preliminary excitement, the actual events seemed rather tame. The party sat through two of the races, then Miss Berkeley suggested that they drive back to the hotel to have an early dinner before the rush.

The southpaw was still unusually quiet, and more than once Janet jokingly commented on his preoccupation. He laughed it off, but when they reached the hotel and the girls went to their rooms to dress for dinner, the thoughtful pucker flashed instantly back into his forehead.

“Well, suppose we improve the shining hour with a nip or two of bourbon,” suggested Ted Berkeley. “I’ve got some good stuff in my bag. You’ll join us, won’t you, Locke?”

Lefty smilingly shook his head. “I can’t. We have to keep pretty strict training, you know. I’ll come along, though, and watch you punish it.”

Berkeley, laughing, acquiesced, and led the way toward the elevators. Already the lobby was filled with a heterogeneous assemblage and as they pushed their way through Locke’s roving eyes suddenly lit up at the sight of a figure moving along a cross corridor toward the side entrance.

With a hurried apology and a promise to come up later, he fairly flung himself in the direction the fellow had taken. Halfway down the corridor the young man glanced back, and, instead of stopping, jerked his hat over his eyes and sped on almost at a run. A moment later he became mixed up with an entering crowd. Before he could extricate himself, Lefty reached him and caught his shoulder.

“Hold up a minute, Savage!” he said quietly. “I want to talk to you.”

With no reply save a defiant movement of his head, the busher turned and faced him. For a tense moment their glances clashed. Then Lefty broke the awkward pause.

“I know all about it,” he said, in that same quiet, restrained tone. “Suppose we go up to my room and talk it over?”

Savage hesitated momentarily. Then, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, he followed Lefty back through the hallway. A few seconds later the metal gate of the elevator shaft clanged shut behind them.