PAGE 11
The Scarlet Car
by
“Entice them? How?” demanded Winthrop. “They’re drunk, and they won’t leave here till morning.”
Outside the engine house, suspended from a heavy cross-bar, was a steel rail borrowed from a railroad track, and bent into a hoop. When hit with a sledge-hammer it proclaimed to Fairport that the “consuming element” was at large.
At the moment Winthrop asked his question, over the village of Fairport and over the bay and marshes, and far out across the Sound, the great steel bar sent forth a shuddering boom of warning.
From the room above came a wild tumult of joyous yells.
“Fire!” shrieked the vamps, “fire!”
The two men crouching by the cellar window heard the rush of feet, the engine banging and bumping across the sidewalk, its brass bell clanking crazily, the happy vamps shouting hoarse, incoherent orders.
Through the window Sam lowered a bag of tools he had taken from Winthrop’s car.
“Can you open the lock with any of these?” he asked.
“I can kick it open!” yelled Winthrop joyfully. “Get to your sister, quick!”
He threw his shoulder against the door, and the staples flying before him sent him sprawling in the coal-dust. When he reached the head of the stairs, Beatrice Forbes was descending from the clubroom, and in front of the door the two cars, with their lamps unlit and numbers hidden, were panting to be free.
And in the North, reaching to the sky, rose a roaring column of flame, shameless in the pale moonlight, dragging into naked day the sleeping village, the shingled houses, the clock-face in the church steeple.
“What the devil have you done?” gasped Winthrop.
Before he answered, Sam waited until the cars were rattling to safety across the bridge.
“We have been protecting the face of nature,” he shouted. “The only way to get that gang out of the engine house was to set fire to something. Tommy wanted to burn up the railroad station, because he doesn’t like the New York and New Haven, and Fred was for setting fire to Judge Allen’s house, because he was rude to Beatrice. But we finally formed the Village Improvement Society, organized to burn all advertising signs. You know those that stood in the marshes, and hid the view from the trains, so that you could not see the Sound. We chopped them down and put them in a pile, and poured gasolene on them, and that fire is all that is left of the pickles, fly-screens, and pills.”
It was midnight when the cars drew up at the door of the house of Forbes. Anxiously waiting in the library were Mrs. Forbes and Ernest Peabody.
“At last!” cried Mrs. Forbes, smiling her relief; “we thought maybe Sam and you had decided to spend the night in New Haven.”
“No,” said Miss Forbes, “there WAS some talk about spending the night at Fairport, but we pushed right on.”
II
THE TRESPASSERS
With a long, nervous shudder, the Scarlet Car came to a stop, and the lamps bored a round hole in the night, leaving the rest of the encircling world in a chill and silent darkness.
The lamps showed a flickering picture of a country road between high banks covered with loose stones, and overhead, a fringe of pine boughs. It looked like a colored photograph thrown from a stereopticon in a darkened theater.
From the back of the car the voice of the owner said briskly: “We will now sing that beautiful ballad entitled ‘He Is Sleeping in the Yukon Vale To-night.’ What are you stopping for, Fred?” he asked.
The tone of the chauffeur suggested he was again upon the defensive.
“For water, sir,” he mumbled.
Miss Forbes in the front seat laughed, and her brother in the rear seat, groaned in dismay.
“Oh, for water?” said the owner cordially. “I thought maybe it was for coal.”
Save a dignified silence, there was no answer to this, until there came a rolling of loose stones and the sound of a heavy body suddenly precipitated down the bank, and landing with a thump in the road.