Thorne Duncan walked with him to the hall door.
“Too early for me; I’ll read for an hour or two,” he said. “Good night, Morton.”
A plump man in dark livery, also graying, opened the library door a few minutes after Duncan had returned to his chair and switched on the reading light beside it.
“Anything more, sir?”
“Nothing, thank you.” The master of High Acres shook his head. “You may call it a day, Ludlow — and a night.”
He opened the book he had selected after seeing his guest up the stairway, adjusted his glasses, and lost himself in the text. For half an hour the novel held him and then he closed it. Again he looked into the fire and dreamed — and out of the dreaming arose an impulse that presently lifted him to his feet. He went out into the broad, dim hall and softly climbed the staircase that had been brought to him overseas, entire, from an Old World palace.
In the upper hall he opened a door and tip-toed into a room where a night light burned. It was a very large room and in it, head to a wall along which painted sprites spread their wings and painted clowns cavorted, was a very small bed.
Thorne Duncan leaned over the sleeping figure in the bed — a little girl, brown curls all helter-skelter on the pillow, hugging close to her a battered, cherished doll with one eye gone and only half a nose remaining.
For Thorne Duncan, this was no rare expedition. In the two years since High Acres had been left without a mistress, the nightly pilgrimage to the nursery had become fixed habit with him. The small bed held everything that made his life worth living now.
He had made no sound since entering, but the child stirred. Her eyes opened and blinked sleepily. She released the doll, and the soft little arms that had held it reached up to Duncan. A pet name she had for him, her own nursery invention, shaped drowsily on her lips. He bent lower and kissed them, closed her eyes with gentle fingertips and stole away.
When he had returned to the library he found himself after a time in the grip of an unaccountable restlessness. Ordinarily, he would sit for hours by the fire; tonight it irked him to sit for minutes. He was wakeful and at the same time strangely uneasy, found himself regretting that his guest had not remained below with him.
He poked the log vigorously, trying to arouse a more cheerful blaze. Failing, he rid the lofty room of shadows by switching on the lights in the wall-brackets. When he had done that, he stopped on the way back to his chair and his book to listen.
Queer hour for visitors, but a car was coming up the main drive. Near now, it continued past the dark main door of the mansion and stopped beside the terrace outside the lighted library. In another moment some one was rapping at the library door which opened from the terrace. Thorne Duncan hesitated, then opened it.
A masked man who held a pistol confronted him.
“Don’t yelp!” he advised.
Duncan’s jaw tightened. He had lost color, but his voice was steady.
“I suppose,” he said, “you wish me to ask you in?”
“We’re coming,” the masked man confirmed briefly.
Two others, also masked, had climbed upon the terrace. Thorne Duncan could see behind them the car from which they had come — a big sedan. Unarmed and with the bell cord out of reach, he bowed to force. He stood aside as the intruders shouldered in. One of them crossed the room, opened the hall door and looked out. He turned to ask:
“Anybody else up, Duncan?”
“No one.”
“All right, then. Sit down,” said the masked leader. “You and me will have a little talk while my friends do their stuff.”
“Thanks for the invitation,” Thorne Duncan said dryly, “but I’m quite comfortable standing.” He nodded toward a square bulk covered with a tapestry. “There’s my safe — open. I hope you won’t find the contents disappointing.”
At a nod from the spokesman, the two shorter and slenderer men had started toward the hall door. Duncan called after them sharply:
“Where are you going?”
They kept on, ignoring the question.
“They’re going after what we came for. It’s nothing in your safe, Duncan. You’ve got something in this house that’s worth more to you than that safe chock full of thousand-dollar notes would be. I mean — that kid of yours!”
Duncan caught his breath. “No, no!” he cried. “You’ll have to kill me before you take her!”
He would have sprung for the gun then, but the masked man took a swift step backward.
“Don’t try anything like that, Duncan,” he cautioned. “It wouldn’t get you anywheres. I’d give you the flat of the gun alongside your ear — which’d be plenty without any shooting.”
Duncan’s legs suddenly were weak under him. He dropped into a chair. “You can’t do this!” he groaned. “Can’t do it!” He steadied himself with a heroic effort. “For God’s sake, don’t go through with it. You don’t have to. Whatever the ransom you mean to demand, you can have it now. I’ll write you my check for the money — pledge you my word of honor that I won’t stop payment and won’t ever make a move against you.”
The masked leader shook his head. “We don’t want your check, Duncan. Don’t want a cent of your money.”
“What, then?”
“Your power. Your influence. You’ve got plenty of it, and to spare. We want it swung a certain way.”
Thorne Duncan pulled himself up straight in the wing chair and stared. “I don’t understand you.”
“You will. Listen here. You’re the big finger in politics in this state, ain’t you, Duncan? You put the Governor where he is — ain’t it so? And you and him are pals, besides. If I’m wrong, stop me.”
Duncan moistened his lips. “Part of what you say is true. What then?”
“It’s up to you to pull some wires — and we keep your kid until they’re pulled, see? There don’t need to be any rumpus raised. The girl will be all right with us — unless you get a brainstorm and put the cops after us. In that case, we’ll just call everything off and get rid of the kid. You’ll never see her again. But if you keep quiet about this, use your noodle, use your influence the way we want you to use it, the kid comes back to you safe and sound. And nobody’ll try to squeeze any dough out of you, understand?”
“As far as you’ve gone, I understand. You want me to get something from the Governor. What?”
“A pardon for a friend of ours. A full pardon for Joe Veronalli. Get that name set in your mind, Duncan, because if you forget it — if you don’t make good for us — your kid’s a goner. Joseph Veronalli. He’s in the death-house at the state pen now, poor Joe is, and you’re the one who’s going to spring him. Savvy?”
Thorne Duncan sat in thought, his chin on his chest. “What,” he asked after a space, “if my influence with the Governor is not as great as you believe it to be?”
“Then it’s just too bad. But don’t be that way, Duncan. The Governor will do anything you say. That’s what we’re banking on.”
Joe Veronalli’s masked champion evidently had intended to say more, but he broke off with the speech unfinished. Some sound outdoors had caught his ear and as he listened for it to repeat Thorne Duncan listened with him.
When the sound came again the chief of the kidnaper band leaped to his feet.
“Motorcycle!” he blared. “Damn you, Duncan, have you got some secret button around here that calls cops? Remember, one word about this to the police or the papers and it’s — good-bye, kid! We’ll kill her, sure, if you squawk!”
He sprang for the hall door. Duncan followed him to see the other masked men racing down the stairs. A sob of protest escaped him. They had found the nursery. One of them was carrying a blanketed armful.