Frances was frightened, but she put on a bold face.
“Well, what’s that got to do with the man you was talking about?”
“You’re the girl that was with him the other night when I stopped him on the road, up by the roadhouse. You remember. You were trying to make a getaway.”
Frances cast a frightened glance up toward the stairs and, stepping out the door, hurriedly drew it to, lowering her voice.
“Oh, you mean Larry!” she whispered. “He’s just a kid I met that night. I didn’t know his name. He was taking me to ride. I don’t know him, honest I don’t. A friend of mine introduced us—”
“You can’t pull that off with me!” said the man gruffly. “I want to see Lawrence Ransom, and I mean to do it! You had both been drinking that night, and you had a whole case of liquor in the car—”
“Don’t talk so loud!” pleaded Frances in a whisper. “I’ve got a little sick sister, and they don’t know if she’s going to live or not. They had a consultation t’day—they said she must be kep’ quiet—”
“Very well,” said the man, lowering his voice a trifle. “I’ll be quiet if you’ll step aside and let me in. But you can’t put anything over on me.”
“You needn’t bother to keep quiet,” said a calm, stern voice over their heads. “He isn’t here, but I’ll come down and show you through the house. Frances, you come in the house and go to bed.”
Frances cringed at her mother’s voice from the window above, and ducked into the house as her mother withdrew her head from the window and came heavily down the stairs. The girl hastily reviewed the interview and wondered how long her mother had been listening. There had been an ominous sound to her voice. She slid into the parlor with a defiant fright in her eyes and tried to look nonchalant before the girls, hoping they had not heard. But Sybil left no rag of doubt about that.
“I wouldn’t stand fer that, Fran! Now’s the time ta get out!”
But with strange suddenness Mrs. Judson stood beside her.
“Yes, now’s the time ta get out!” she repeated. “You girls better run right home ta yer mothers! Frances! There’s the stairs!”
Then she turned her attention to the man who had entered in Frances’s wake.
“Will you have a chair?” Her tone was sad and formal. Then to the girls: “You girls run along!”
With defiant malice in their eyes the three visitors, chins up, sidled along the wall toward the hall, under the grilling gaze of the stranger. Suddenly the man pointed his pencil at Sybil.
“Wait! You’re another!”
His words were like sharp scissors snipping off the words.
Sybil lifted her chin, and her eyes grew hard and wicked. The sad eyes of Mrs. Judson looked at her for an instant, startled, and then glanced toward her own child with sudden understanding. She had thought these creatures were little children, and here—suddenly! What would come next? Her eyes went sternly to the frightened Frances standing huddled in her corner like a draggled nasturtium in her bright cheap draperies, and Frances quivered and slunk toward the door. But the bold black eyes of Sybil jeered at her, and Frances was forced to put up a feeble fight.
“I ain’ta going upstairs now, Ma. I got company!” she said, trying to make her voice both conciliatory and defiant, although she could see from her mother’s face that her stand would be short-lived. When her mother was really roused, there was no gainsaying her.
“Let her stay, will you, Mrs. Judson? I want to ask her some questions. And you three, you stay, too. There’s another one I want to see!”
He was pointing at Sybil. Gladys and Vivian huddled behind her with furtive glances toward the door.
Mrs. Judson sat down heavily, her stolid face blank with burden and despair. She was looking straight at Sybil as if a revelation was slowly dawning upon her.
Sybil leaned back nonchalantly against the doorframe, took out her cigarette, and lighted a match with an air of supreme contempt of the whole scene. She eyed the officer with an assumed amusement.
Then, with surprising agility for one who seemed so massive, Mrs. Judson was upon her feet and standing close to the bold-eyed girl, speaking in a calm low tone of command.
“Stop that!” she said. “You can’t do that in my house! I may be old-fashioned and ugly, but I still know what’s right, and there ain’t no little huzzy like you goin’ to overstep me. You c’n blow out that match and put that box in your pocket, but you can’t stand there and smoke in my house. I’ve always been respectable, if my husband is in jail, and I intend to keep so!”
And, strange to say, Sybil obeyed her. She did it with an air of contempt, but she did it. Frances was amazed. She drooped in her corner and wondered what awful thing would come next.
Then spoke the officer.
“You kids had better look out,” he warned. “If you keep up the pace you’re going, you’ll all be landed in jail in another week. I know what I’m talking about, and you’re headed straight downhill!”
The girls were frightened. Frances’s face grew white, and she watched her mother with a sideways glance, but Sybil stood her ground contemptuously.
“It’s none of your business what we do,” she said to the man boldly. “And you’ve got no right to make us stay here. I don’t know anything about your Mister Ransom, if that’s what you call him, and I’m going where there’s some fun.”
“You’re not going until you’ve answered me a few questions,” said the man firmly, and he flashed a badge from under his coat. “You’re the girl that was in that seven-passenger Cadillac that was stolen from Seventh and Broad the other night. You got away then by lying, but you don’t get away now. I’ve got this house watched back and front, and it won’t do any good for you to try to slip out. If you answer my questions straight, you can go where you like, but if you try to put something over on me I’ll have you taken to headquarters. Now, what’s your full name?”
“Sybil Mary Johnston,” answered the girl sullenly.
“Where do you live?”
“Thirty-two Maple Street.”
“Is that your parents’ home?”
“No. I live with my grandmother.”
“I see. And where do you go to school?”
“Oh, I quit school ages ago. I work in the silk fac’try.” There was a swagger to Sybil Mary’s voice now. She felt that she was going to “get by” after all.
“I see. And do you go out every evening in the week? Does your grandmother approve?”
“Oh, sure! Nobody can’t keep me in. Let ’em try. I never ast her could I go. I just go.”
“I see. And how early do you leave home?”
“It seems to me you’re mighty nosey. I’m sure I don’t know. I go when I like!”
“And where you like, I suppose. Well, do you happen to remember just what time you started out last Thursday night and where you went?”
“I don’t recall,” said the girl insolently.
“Well, recall!” said the officer in a compelling tone. “You left your home somewhere about seven-thirty and went to the drugstore at the corner of Third and Pine Streets. You had several sodas and a sundae, and then walked down the street toward Fourth in company with the two girls who stand behind you, where you met this other girl”—he looked toward the shrinking Frances—“and all of you stood on the corner until four boys came along. Now, from there, Miss Johnston, will you continue?”
Sybil Mary’s eyes had been getting less and less bold as he told crisply the tale of her doings, and the other three girls were plainly shaking with fright and looking at one another aghast. Frances put her face down on her arm and began to cry. She did not dare look at her mother. Sybil looked from one to the other of her partners in crime, helplessly, like a wild thing suddenly cornered. Then her eyes glinted hardly, and she tossed up her chin.
“Why, one of the fellas said his uncle left his car round the corner a little piece and said he might use it for the evening, and he ast us if we didn’t all wa
ntta go fer a ride. Ain’t that so, girls?”
The girls hurriedly chorused, “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed! That was so.”
“Which of the boys was it said that?” asked the officer, his keen eyes taking in each girl with surprising understanding.
“Oh, I couldn’t say,” said Sybil Mary airily. “I really don’t remember. Do you, Fran? Was it Bob or Timmy? I didn’t pay attention. I just heard the word ride, and that was all I cared.” She laughed jauntily.
“It wasn’t Lawrence Ransom, was it?” quizzed the officer.
“Lawrence Ransom?” repeated Sybil thoughtfully. “I don’t think I know him. Mebbe he was one of the strange fellas that was along with Bob and Timmy. I really didn’t pay attention to their names. I never do when I’m introduced. It’s too much trouble. We always give them nicknames anyway.”
“I see,” said the officer, writing something down. “And now, could you just tell me where you went after you got into the car?”
“Why—” Sybil Mary paused thoughtfully and bit her vivid lips as if she were trying to recall. “Why, I don’t really just remember. We go on so many rides. It mightta ben to the park, and it mightta ben out Fielding Road. It was real dark that night, and I don’t recall.”
“Could it by any possibility have been toward Pine Woods Inn?”
“I—don’t—think—so.” She drew her brows thoughtfully. “I’ve never been there much.”
Suddenly the interrogator turned to Frances.
“Which one of the men waited on you at your table that night, Miss Frances? Did they call him Jim or Joe?”
Sybil was raising her eyebrows at Frances and signaling all sorts of warnings, but the miserable Frances was beyond using subterfuges.
“Joe, I think,” she answered with quivering lips, and then she saw what she had done and, putting her head down, sobbed bitterly to hide the angry glances of her friends.
“That will be about all, thank you,” he said to Mrs. Judson as he closed his little notebook and put it in his pocket. “I’ll leave your daughter in your hands, Mrs. Judson. I’m sure you know what is best to be done for the present, and if all goes well, I hope we sha’n’t have to trouble you again. I shall have to ask these other three girls to take a little ride with me. There is an automobile waiting outside, and it isn’t a dark night tonight.”
The three girls looked at each other with frightened glances, and Frances stopped sobbing and held her breath.
“Oh—I—gotta date—” began Sybil Mary.
“That’s all right,” said the officer. “This date comes first. Just step right outside.”
“But my grandmother will worry,” persisted Sybil Mary.
“You should have thought of that sooner,” said the officer, taking firm hold of the shrinking girl’s arm. “If it becomes necessary, we’ll see that your grandmother is informed where you are.”
“I’ll tell you where Lawrence Ransom is if you leggo of my arm!” she ventured at last as the man opened the door.
The officer led her on grimly silent.
“He’s arrested,” affirmed Sybil Mary anxiously. “You don’t need me. They got him half an hour ago.”
But the officer herded the girls out and closed the door behind them.
It was not until the sound of the automobile outside had died away among the city noises that Mrs. Judson turned to her cringing daughter.
“So it seems we have two fools in the family,” she said dryly. “It ain’t just the time I should ha chose to find it out, but I s’pose it don’t matter. It’s well to know just what one is up against.”
There followed a pause, during which Frances’s slender young shoulders shook pitifully under their flimsy silk covering.
“So that’s what you ben doin’ all these evenin’s when I thought you was staying overnight with Mary Johnston studying stenography so’s you could help pay for Wilanna’s operation!”
The shoulders shook still harder.
“I never thought my girl would disgrace me!”
The mother’s voice was dry and empty.
“One woulda thought you’d had enough of drinkin’ with your Pa takin’ them spells. But I s’pose it’s in the blood somehow and just came natural. I tried to do my duty by you, but it seems I ain’t. Well—it ain’t too late to begin. Frances May Judson, I ain’t never spanked you enough. I know that. You was such a kinda pretty little thing. I never thought you’d grow up to be bad! I done wrong. I can see it now. But I’m gonna give you one good spankin’ yet that you’ll remember all your days. After that ef you wantta leave home as that bold-eyed huzzy told you, I s’pose you can go, but you’ll have that spankin’ to remember wherever you go, and mebbe p’raps it’ll remind you what you oughtta ben. But anyhow you ain’t gonta have no more such carryin’s on while you stay in your home! You can just make up your mind to that. Now you can go upstairs to my room and take off that silly rag you’ve got on and get ready, and when I come up, I’ll tend to you.”
“But, Mamma”—Frances lifted a woebegone face—“I ain’t never done anything dreadful. I didn’t steal any car, nor have anything to do with any folks that did—Larry was tryin’ a car to buy—”
“Ain’t it bad enough to go with a young man that drinks and carries whiskey round in his car? I ask you, Frances May Judson, was you brought up to do things like that? You, a baby, that oughtta be goin’ to school yet, runnin’ round in the night to hotels in the woods, dancin’ with men you don’t know their names! I ain’t got words to tell you what I feel about it. It’s no use.”
“But Mamma, he’s a real classy young man, and his car was something swell. We didn’t have whiskey either. It was a real refined kind of wine!”
“Fiddlesticks end! Don’t talk like a fool! As if liquor wasn’t liquor! You can’t refine the drunk out of it, can you? Ain’t it breakin’ the law jus the same if it’s refined or not refined? Whadda they have a law for ef it ain’t the best thing to keep it, d’ya s’pose, Frances May? And waddaya think a classy young man wants with a girl like you outta that ten-cent store, an’ her papa runnin’ a truck? You don’t s’pose he was meanin’ to make real friends with you, did you? Them kind don’t. They wouldn’t wipe their feet on you before their own home folks. They just run with you to act crazy, and then they throw you away and don’t care what becomes of you. Talk about classy young men, Frances Judson! There’d be some class to you ef you kep up that sortta thing. You wouldn’t be even in the workin’ class. You’d be outside where folks don’t count you at all. There ain’t never any of our family been like that, child. We’ve always ben respectable, an’ that’s a sight cleaner an’ better than bein’ classy. Some time you’ll find that out. Now go upstairs, and I’ll do my duty by you.”
Sobbing bitterly, Frances went slowly upstairs, the tears making long streaks on the bright flimsy silk, the pretty little streamer that was meant to go around her neck straggling down her back at halfmast and dragging on the stairs unheeded.
Into her mother’s bare room she crept in the dark, still sobbing, and on the other side of the thin wall her little invalid sister Wilanna lay in her bed and prayed.
“Dear God, don’t let my sister get drunk and get in jail. Please don’t let her! ‘For Jesus’ sake,’ like my Sunday school teacher said. And please, dear God, if You’ve got any more time you can spare, won’t You see what’s the matter with our home? It’s got something the matter all through. Amen, and I thank You.”
Then Wilanna closed her eyes and tried to think of her prayer going out the window and up through the skies on wings like a bird to heaven. Wondered if it would have trouble finding the way in and how it would ever get to God with all the singing of the angels, and how He would know it was hers.
But her sad little heart was comforted with the thought that she had done all she knew how to do, and her teacher with the pretty dress had said God would hear.
Mrs. Judson came heavily up the stairs after locking up the house, and grimly performed her d
uty by her eldest child. With set face and dry eyes, she chastised the shrinking Frances, utterly subdued now and thoroughly frightened. Mamma seemed suddenly a new strange person whom she did not know, whom she had vastly sinned against without knowing.
And when the sad rite was over—which might as well have been performed upon Wilanna’s poor little suffering body so fully did she bear the pain for her sister—Frances slunk away to the next room and shrunk sorrowing into the other side of her sister’s bed, still quivering with sobs. Then a little skinny hand, hot and nervous, slid softly over and lay upon the heaving shoulders with a little patting motion on the coarse nightgown.
Its comfort reached to the repentant young sinner, and gradually she turned to the little sister till their arms were about one another, and their tears mingling together. And so they slept.
But in the bare front room at the window the sad-eyed mother sat, staring out across the roofs of the opposite houses, past towers and steeples and tall buildings, to where in the distance like a battlement against the sky the grim walls of the jail arose.
So she sat the long night through and thought her sorrowful thoughts, visualizing the man who sat alone and awake in his dark little cell, sober and repentant now. She thought of him as he was years ago when she gave up a good home and parents who loved her to try the world with him. His hair had a glint of gold then where it turned into curls about his brow, and his eye was Irish blue with a twinkle. The world had looked good to her when she left her world for his. She was not so bad-looking herself in those days, with a pink dress and her black hair braided smooth and bound around her head. And when the little baby Frances came, how proud they had been to see her father’s twisted smile in miniature and her cute little ways! And now here! He in jail! And Frances—what?
She held her hands together hard where they smarted from the pain she had administered, and her heart ached with the horror of it all! She thought bitterly of the rich man who had financed the saloons where her husband got the drink, and kept them protected and going in spite of the law, and wondered again dully, as she had wondered many a time before, why God didn’t kill the devil, and why such rich men had to be in a world with poor people who couldn’t help themselves.