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The buzz of conversation on the porch suddenly ceased. Joe put his revolver in his pocket and went quietly down the stairs. The crowd parted to let him through. Carlotta, crouched in her room, listening, not daring to open the door, heard the sound of a car as it swung out into the road. On the evening of the shooting at Schwitter's, there had been a late operation at the hospital.
There seemed to be mischief in the very air. Tillie was gone. Oddly enough, the last person to see her before she left was Harriet Kennedy. On the third day after Mr. Schwitter's visit, Harriet's colored maid had announced a visitor. Harriet's business instinct had been good. She had taken expensive rooms in a good location, and furnished them with the assistance of a decor store.
A red mist spread between him and the line of electric lights. He knew Schwitter's, and he knew Wilson. He flung himself into his car and threw the throttle open. The car jerked, stalled. "You can't start like that, son," one of the men remonstrated. "You let 'er in too fast." "You go to hell!" Joe snarled, and made a second ineffectual effort.
When, a week after Schwitter's visit to the "Climbing Rose," an installment van arrived from town with the new furniture, Tillie moved out to what had been the harness-room of the old barn and there established herself. "I am not leaving you," she told him. "I don't even know that I am blaming you. But I am not going to have anything to do with it, and that's flat."
Thus adjured, the men offered neither further advice nor assistance. The minutes went by in useless cranking fifteen. The red mist grew heavier. Every lamp was a danger signal. But when K., growing uneasy, came out into the yard, the engine had started at last. He was in time to see Joe run his car into the road and turn it viciously toward Schwitter's.
The hours he had spent alone in the little room had been very bitter, and preceded by a time that he shuddered to remember. K. got it by degrees his descent of the staircase, leaving Wilson lying on the landing above; his resolve to walk back and surrender himself at Schwitter's, so that there could be no mistake as to who had committed the crime.
The narrow porch was filled with small tables, above which hung rows of electric lights enclosed in Japanese paper lanterns. Midweek, which had found the White Springs Hotel almost deserted, saw Schwitter's crowded tables set out under the trees. Seeing the crowd, Wilson drove directly to the yard and parked his machine. "No need of running any risk," he explained to the still figure beside him.
He'd get away to Cuba if he could and start over again. He would forget the Street and let it forget him. The men in the garage were talking. "To Schwitter's, of course," one of them grumbled. "We might as well go out of business." "There's no money in running a straight place. Schwitter and half a dozen others are getting rich." "That was Wilson, the surgeon in town.
He put an arm over her shoulders and drew her up, facing him. "Suppose we go into the parlor and talk it out. I'll bet things are not as bad as you imagine." But when, in the parlor that had seen Mr. Schwitter's strange proposal of the morning, Tillie poured out her story, K.'s face grew grave. "The wicked part is that I want to go with him," she finished.
Ed's square tread in the hall; with Tillie rocking her baby on the porch at Schwitter's, and Carlotta staring westward over rolling seas; with Christine taking up her burden and Grace laying hers down; with Joe's tragic young eyes growing quiet with the peace of the tropics. "The Lord is my shepherd," she reads.
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