Miss Hinch by Henry Sydnor Harrison (moboreader TXT) 📕

the woman lagged as if she were tired, while the clubfooted divine, supporting her on his arm, steadily kept her up to his own brisk gait.

So walking, the pair descended the subway steps, came out upon the bare platform again, and presently stood once more at the extreme uptown end of it, just where they had waited half an hour before. Near by a careless porter had overturned a bucket of water, and a splotch of thin ice ran out and over the edge of the concrete. Two young men who were taking lively turns up and down distinctly heard the clergyman warn the woman to look out for this ice. Far away to the north was to be heard the faint roar of an approaching train.

The woman stood nearest the track, and the clergyman stood in front of her. In the vague light their looks met, and each was struck by the pallor of the other’s face. In addition, the woman was breathing hard, and her hands and feet betrayed some nervousness. It was difficult now to ignore the too patent fact that for an hour they had been clinging desperately to each other, at all costs; but the clergyman made a creditable effort to do so. He talked ramblingly, in a kind voice, for the most part of the deplorable weather and his train to Newark, for which he was now so late. And all the time both of them were incessantly turning their heads toward the station entrance, as if expecting some arrival.

As he talked, the clergyman kept his hands unobtrusively busy. From the bottom edge of his black sack-coat he drew a pin, and stuck it deep into the ball of his middle finger. He took out his handkerchief to dust the hard sleet from his broad hat; and under his overcoat he pressed� the handkerchief against his bleeding finger. While making these small arrangements, he held the woman’s eyes with his own, chatting kindly; and, still holding them, he suddenly broke off his random talk and peered at her cheek with concern.

“My good woman, you’ve scratched your cheek somehow! Why, bless me, it’s bleeding quite badly.”

“Never mind,” said the woman, and swept her eyes hurriedly toward the entrance.

“But, good gracious, I must mind! The blood will fall on your shawl. If you will permit me—ah!”

Too quick for her, he leaned forward and, through the thin veil, swept her cheek hard with his handkerchief; and, removing it, held it up so that she might see the blood for herself. But she did not glance at the handkerchief, and neither did he. His gaze was riveted upon her cheek, which looked smooth and clear where he had smudged the clever wrinkles away.

Down the steps and upon the platform pounded the feet of three flying policemen. But it was quite evident now that the express would thunder in just ahead of them. The clergyman, standing close in front of the woman, took a firmer grip on his heavy stick and smiled full into her face.

“Miss Hinch, you are not so terribly clever, after all!”

The woman sprang back from him with an irrepressible exclamation, and in that moment her eye fell upon the police. Unluckily, her foot slipped upon the treacherous ice—or it may have tripped on the stout cane when the clergyman suddenly shifted its position. And in the next breath the front of the express train roared past.

By one of those curious circumstances that sometimes refute all experience, the body of the woman was not mangled or mutilated in the least. There was a deep blue bruise on the left temple, and apparently that was all; even the ancient hat remained on her head, skewered fast by the long pin. It was the clergyman who found the body, huddled anyhow at the side of the track where the train had flung it—he who covered the still face and superintended the removal to the platform. Two eye-witnesses of the tragedy pointed out the ice on which the unfortunate woman had slipped, and described their horror as they saw her companion spring forward just too late to save her.

Not wishing to bring on a delirium of excitement among the half dozen chance bystanders, two policemen drew the clergyman quietly aside and showed him the three mysterious messages. Much affected by the shocking end of his sleuthery as he was, he readily admitted having written them. He briefly recounted how the woman’s strange movements on 126th street had arrested his attention, and how, watching her closely on the car, he had finally detected that she wore a wig. Unfortunately, however, her suspicions appeared to have been aroused by his interest in her, and thereafter a long battle of wits had ensued between them—he trying to call the police without her knowledge, she dogging him close to prevent that, and at the same time watching her chance to give him the slip. He rehearsed how, in the restaurant, when he had invented an excuse to leave her for an instant, she had made a bolt and narrowly missed getting away; and finally how, having brought her back to the subway and seeing the police at last near, he had exposed her make-up and called her name, with unexpectedly shocking results.

“And now,” he concluded in a shaken voice, “I am naturally most anxious to know whether I am right—or have made some terrible mistake. Will you look at her, officer, and tell me if it is—she?”

But the fat policeman shook his head over the well-known ability of Miss Hinch to look like everybody else in the world but herself.

“It’ll take God Almighty to tell ye that, sir—saving your presence. I’ll leave it f’r headquarters,” he continued, as if that were the same thing. “But, if it is her, she’s gone to her reward, sir.”

“God pity her!” said the clergyman.

“Amen! Give me your name, sir. They may want ye in the morning.”

The clergyman gave it: Rev. Theodore Shaler, of Denver; city address, 245 East 126th Street. Having thus discharged his duty in the affair, he started sadly to go away; but, passing by the silent figure stretched on a bench under the ticket-seller’s overcoat, he bared his head and stopped for one last look at it.

The parson’s gentleness and efficiency had already won favorable comments from the bystanders, and of the first quality he now gave a final proof. The dead woman’s balled-up handkerchief, which somebody had recovered from the track and laid upon her breast, had slipped to the floor; and the clergyman, observing it, stooped silently to restore it again. This last small service chanced to bring his head close to the head of the dead woman; and, as he straightened up again, her projecting hat-pin struck his cheek and ripped a straight line down it. This in itself would have been a trifle, since scratches soon heal. But it happened that the point of the hat-pin caught under the lining of the clergyman’s perfect beard and ripped it clean from him; so that, as he rose with a sudden shrill cry, he turned upon the astonished onlookers the bare, smooth chin of a woman, curiously long and pointed.

There was only one such chin in the world, and the very urchins in the street would have known it at a glance. Amid a sudden uproar which ill became the presence of the dead, the police closed in on Miss Hinch and handcuffed her with violence, fearing suicide, if not some new witchery; and at the station-house an unemotional matron divested the famous impersonator of the last and best of all her many disguises. This much the police did. But it was quite distinctly understood that it was Jessie Dark who had really made the capture, and the papers next morning printed pictures of the unconquerable little woman and of the hat-pin with which she had reached back from another world to bring her greatest adversary to justice.