THE BROKEN WICKET GATE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 277, 31 December 1909, Page 3

THE BROKEN WICKET GATE

SEXTON BLAKE KIDNAPS A KIDNAPPEiI. 1, "There's a lady to see you, sir!" 'her side, and the car started oil', master's bedside at half-past six one ehilly, line morning in October, and repealed the information, as the detective opened one enquiring eye at him, and then glanced at the clock. "Hang it all, Simmons," said Blake, shutting his eye again, and getting deeper into the pillow, "I've only just gone to bed! Ask her to call later.'' "She seems in great distress, sir," said Simmons respectfully, "loung, too, sir, and remarkably pretty. Should say she's a widow, sir."

Blake sat up, and pointed silently to his dressing-gown. "I'll see her in live minutes," he said, "and—well, 111 wait till I've verilied your statement, Simmons, before telling you my opinion of you." Happily for the discreet Simmons, Blake's opinion of him rose mightily the moment he set eyes on his visitor. She was certainly did not look twenty—and she was marvellously pretty, with one of those wistful, dainty faces Greuze has immortalised. And she was certainly in bitter distress, as the welling tears in her eyes, the tremulous lips, the intense pallor of temples and brow, eloquently testified. : Blake took one look at her, and made a leap for the sideboard. Next minute I Vias was holding ■ her within one arm, , while he almost forced a liqueur glass- j } iul of port wine and brandy between her i flenched teeth. Then he lifted her into ,«* deep armchair, wrapped her ,with a rug, and placed a pillow beneath her head. "Lie quite still for five minutes," he said. "1 will complete my toilet, and 10 be ready to accompany you." When he returned, he found her .standing up, her eyes bright with hope, j her whole face electrified with a new courage. ]

"That is better," he said cheerily. ''Now sit down and tell me all about your trouble." "It is very pressing," she said. "Win you not come with me at once? I can tell you in the taxi as we drive to my home in Hampstead." "Certainly i will come," said Blake, as he struggled into an overcoat and snatched up a couple of rugs and a cap and a cushion. In another two minutes he had made her cosy in a corner, and was seated by her side, and teh car started off. "My little boy of five years has been stolen during the night, Mr. Blake," she said. "When I went to bed at twc'vi he was asleep in the room next to mine. I woke up suddenly at half-past four, feeling something was wrong, i hastened into his room. -His cot was empty. The bedroom window was wide open. All his clothes were there, but the child had gone. 1 think 1 went crazy for a while." Her voice broke, and she buried her face in her hands.

"Will you tell me your name?" asked | Blake. I "My name is Eileen Carteris," she said. "All my relatives, on my side, arc dead. lam literally alone in the world, save for my boy." f "But your husband's relatives?" asked blake. "I do not even know who they are, or where they live," replied Mrs. Carteris. "I met my husband hi Sicily seven years ago. He was an artist. He told me Carteris was an assumed name, but that did not matter to me. We were so happy, and he was very successful. Then we came to Loudon and look our cottage facing the Heath. One night, or rather one October evening about five, be went out to walk to Golder's Green, and he never came back. I have never heard from him since." "You had no quarrel?" askiife- lilake gently, touched to the/soul by the" rievub. fttaMooo— in— hor— —-—~ "Never!" she replied. "We had never had a rough word, Ours was iJ?perfecfc love." Blake dared not trust himself to speak, and for several minutes they rode on through the growing light in absolute silence.

I "Yours is a most strange and sad history," said Blake. "But I bid you hope. There is not a doubt that there is a very close relationship between the disappearance of your husband and that of your child. You did most wisely in coming to me at once. There is no criminal living who can remove a child at night without leaving trace of his passage, and be it but a thread 1 will trackit to the loom from which it was spun, and thence to the tailor who sold it. You have, of course, photographs of your husband and of your child? ! "Of my child, oh yes," replied Mrs. Carteris. "But my husband never wmild be photographed. All the same"--she smiled suddenly up at hiin—"l made a little sketch of him one day, and it is very like him." ''Excellent," said Blake, "lour love's cunning will cheat all the craft of your foes. Is this your cottage?" "Yes, it is here," replied Mrs. Carj teris, "and that is my old servant at the door." Blake turned to the chauffeur.

"Go as fast as you can," he said, "and bring me back the best bicycle you can lind. Here are three fivers. If you can't hire one, buy one. Come back with it at once. I engage you for the day." "Right-ho!" said the chauffeur jovially. Blake followed Mrs. Carteris into the cottage. ' II 1 . | "I hope your servant has not been into the room," said Bloke anxiously, as he joined his client under the porch. '.'J locked the door," said Mrs. Carteris, "the moment I thought of coim.ig to. y,ou"

Blake hodded abstractedly. His f.-iize was fixed on a path running \a< the side oi the house remote from Die Heath, a path overgrown with moss that was heavy with dew. "Does that path lead past your sons window?" he asked.

"Yes," she replied. "It goes beneath j it and through the garden to a wicketgate giving on to the Heath to the IcH. and o a narrow lane on the right. The lane runs back into the road. We 'pagsed the entrance three doors before mv front gate," : '"I will look at that first," said make. "Please go up to your sou's room, but be careful to touch nothing." I He strode towards the path, in which jiis keen eyes had noted various impressions at regular intervals. As he bad (bought, they were imprints of a particularly ' neat, slender, pointed 1 j-nl. [[j- followed their I'rai-k lo below- llio window, where >|rs. Carteris was standing, after he had carefully noted and verified their measurements, there the prints were confused; but these was no trace of any child's foot.

Ho pas'sed on, following tlic trail, heavier and more hurried now, till it brought him to the wicket-gate of which Mrs. Carteris had spoken. An exclamation of delight escaped | him, as he observed that a salf-side of the'lower panel had been kicked out. 1 leaving a great open gap. The reason fis obvious pnougli, since the top of e gate was furnished with n sciried row of spikes. He bent forward, examining the jagged edges of the broken panel, from one of 1 which floated a strip of pink flannel,! while from another hung a shred of fine j blue Sorgo. Ho picked off both, nut) }ikm] them in his pocket-boßk, He wan creeping through the hole when the glimmer of something shining in the long grass drew his attention. He darted at it, and drew his breath with a keen hiss, as he saw that it was a waistcoat but-

ton of a peculiar shape, and made out of some pebble resembling a cat's-eye. He sought carefully, but no other find 'rewarded his efforts'. Passing through 'the hole, h/s traced the trail to the path leading back to th'e Viiad. it was an asphalt path and greasy with t!|c night mist, and the trail held good on it, taking him to road, across it, past the pond, and to the track of a large motorcar with studded tyres, whose nose had been pointed towards Frognal. He pelted back to the house and up to the room where Mrs. Carteris awaited ton. 1 ■ I"Ib that » part of your son's night-

gown?" he asked, showing her the pink llunucl. , She paled and nodded, unable to speak. I ''Don't be afraid," he said, "ihey .wouldn't have taken him away had they j meant to harm him. 1 can do no more here. Ah!" He i-nill'ed at the air, I'darted to the pillow and pressed it against his face. "Die brutes drugged 'him," he muttered, "(jive me the photograph and the portrait, please, Airs. Carteris; i hear the taxi coming. You nuiai, pack a few things, take your servant, shut up the house, and go and wait for me at my rooms. Tell my manto get your breakfast. I may not be hack till late in the morning." Blake almost snatched tne portraits from her, rushed down the suirs, grabbed the bicycle from the chauffeur,, jand rode oil', shouting to him to wa; where he put down tne lady. It was an off-chance of a desperate hope that he was taking, and lie knew it. For the morning traffic was already j astir. But he trusted to his practised j eyesight to pick out the track of those I •monster wheels among all the as vet thin criss-cross of calls and 'lnises audi vans; and every indication, however Bmall, was of iniinite value to him at sucli a stage of enquiry. But such indication as he got was of | the vaguest. He tracked the car across i 'Hampstead and down the Wellington •Road. But opposite St. John's Wood Station all trace of it was swallowed up in the deluge of traffic. The policeman on point duty remetn'bercd having seen a big, dark car—'brown, he thought—sweep past in the early hours of the morning, going townwards, but that was all. Blake pressed him for the number. But beyond remembering that the lettering commenced ZQ, he could give no information,

; Still, such as it was, it was something. A dark, probably brown, car, ■with the letter-number ZQ, was wori.» a long day's hunt, thought Blake. And, turning his bicycle townward, he pedalled hard for Euston. There he sent a long telegram to Mrs. Carteris, left his bicycle in the parcels office to be forwarded to Messenger Square, and five minutes later was in an express bound for Birmingham. 111. At nine o'clock that evening Albert, Carteris Waverley, nephew and heir to 'the aged Baron Moreton, of Moreton I Towers, Shropshire, and Moreton House, 'Park Lane, rose from dinner at his club, and for the twentieth time sent the boy to see if a telegram had come for him. For the aged baron was dying, and his demise was only a matter of ■hours. And his nephew and heir was exceedingly anxious that the time should come which would seat him in so honorable a position and make him master of more thousands a year than he now had halfpence in capital. The boy returned beaming, and bearing on a tray not one but two telegrams. Waverley snatched them up and tore one open. He gave one"glftflge> and ;■ great sigh of relief escaped him, It was from the family solicitor at Mbt«; ton Towers, and ran "Inform your lordship that the baron passed pcaeefully away seven-thirty this evening." It was with a more languid gesture that the new baron turned to the second telegram. But if his gesture was languid, the contents of the telegram galvanised him to such an expression of ferocity that the beaming "buttons" lied in terror. For the second message read, "Child missing. Come at once.—Flood." Waverley reeled rather than walked frdm-thejjub and down into the street. He walkedXjittlc before taking a taxi. Then, choosing one passing, he bade the chauffeur drive to "BTaniyrestrwt, Chelsea. He stopped the car at the end of the street, and, dismissing it, made his way to a small house of sinister aspect, lying far back at the end of a ragged garden, thick with gloomy 'trees. Opening the gate with a latchkey, he passed up the drive, and knocked in a peculiar fashion at the tall door.

It was opened an inch, and a husky voice asked: "That you, guv'nor?" "Who "else, idiot?" was his lordship's reply. ( The door was opened just wide enough 1 for him to enter, then closed to again,' leaving him standing in utter darkness. "Will you strike a match, said the same husky voice. mine coining along to open." Waverley struck a matcli.'ButT^^B ii iii' iljfflr'' --—;--' ''"rfl^B was snapped round his wrists, electric torch shovrefriiiTJ/Elle featuß of Sexton B-ake. '^^\ "For so clever a man you walked" easily enough into my telegram trap," said Blake. "I hold you for sequestration and kidnapping. I got your accomplice this afternoon. This way, my man!"

Blake spoke with an almost savage intensity foreign to his usual character. "Here is the man, Mr. Carteris," he said, addressing a handsome though sadly-wasted man who, with a goldenhaired boy on his knee, sat on a form against a" bare and grimy wall. °"My cousin Waverley!" gasped Mr. Carteris. "Himself!" said Blake. •

"How on earth did you trace him down?" asked Carteris, after a long silence, during which he stared curiously at the sullen, vindictive face of his cousin.

; "He was unwise enough to leave a eat's-eye button on the ground below the broken wicket-gate thifnfgh which he bore you son there last night," said 'Blake. "I traced the button to Shald, the Bond Street, tailor, who recognised lit at once as one of an unique set he had sold to Mr. Carteris Waverley. The 'name inspired me to show him a pencil portrait your wife had made of you. and he immediately recognised you as | Baron Moreton'a missing son. The rest I was easy.' I found the garage from which Waverley had hired the big brown Mercedes ZQO43. I traced the car after much trouble to this house, and by a ruse overcame the fellow Flood, who has acted as your gaoler for so long. Then I sent a wire to Waverley, in Flood's name, intimating that the child was missing. And here he is. Twenty vcars is the maximum. And if I cai help it, he won't get less."

It was half an hour later that Blake J led the new Baron Moreton and his son' up the stairs to his rooms in Messenger square. He opened the door quietly. Mrs. Carteris sprang to her feet. "You have good news'." she cried. "Better than you could dream!" said Blake softly. "1 have brought them both back to you." ••Both'" she cried, her eyes ablaze with a white light. "Oh, both, Mr. Wnkc!" Blake pushed the man and the child into the room, and, gently closing the door, walked with quick, uneven strides out into the night.—Answers.

GWE IT A THOUGHT. lllow little it costs if we give it a thought To make happy some heart each day! •just one kind word or a tender smile, As we go on our daily way, Perchance a look will suffice to clear The cloud from a neighbor's face, And the press of a hand in sympathy, A sorrowful tear efface.

One walks in sunlight, another goes All weary in the shade; One treads a path that is fair an.l smooth j Another must pay for aid. |lt coats so little! I wonder why We give it so little thought? A smile —kind words'—a glance n I . And wliat magic may be wrought!