“You’re not the miscall, are you?”
“The what?”
“The party that called and then took the subway instead. That’s why I’m a dead-head.”
Their eyes met and stared gravely. Gwen was the first to appreciate the situation.
“I still don’t know what a dead-head is,” Gwen protested, “But how could I have called a taxi and then taken the subway and still be here?”
“That’s right,” he admitted. “You see a dead-head is—”
“I know—it’s a man that takes drugs.”
“No, that’s a hop-head,” he corrected her. “A dead—”
“I think we ought to start,” she suggested primly.
“Oh, that’s right.”
Obediently he climbed in the driver’s seat again. But as they started off he was constrained to turn around once more.
“I might as well tell you frankly: This is the first time I’ve ever driven a cab. Oh, don’t be scared,” he added at her alarmed expression, “I didn’t say a car, I said a cab. It just happens it’s my first day—you’ve got to start somewhere.”
Still perturbed Gwen demanded as they drove off.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen—I mean eighteen—” He looked back at her quickly, dodging a milk wagon, “I’m sixteen, if you want to know. I’ve got a driver’s license but the company only takes you at eighteen, so I said I was eighteen to get the job.”
After a few miles they reached the first outlying apartment houses, first an isolated sextet of green-gray brick, then two forlorn streets on an ambitious scale save that where they should have led into a public square and a fountain, they slipped coyly into a rubble field, as though they had suddenly forgotten. In one of these rural intervals he volunteered:
“You asked me what was a dead-head. Well, I’ve just got it straight myself. It’s when you report that you’re going somewhere without a passenger or else when they send you where there might be a passenger and you have to wait and see. I didn’t know but what they might be kidding me this morning because I was a new driver, sending me out there. And on my first day I didn’t want to be wasting time—”
“Yes,” Gwen said.
She was not listening. For several minutes her eyes had focused straight before her, but not on this morning’s dream of endless peregrination.
“—They seem to mean two things by it,” the young driver continued, “They mean—”
Gwen reached down suddenly and drew it up over her knees. At first she had taken it for a robe; but it didn’t look like a robe. And when she saw the jeweled ornament pinned at the shoulder and felt the indescribable softness of it, she knew she was holding a chinchilla cape worth several thousand dollars.
III
She hummed a bar from “Goody-Goody” to conceal the slight swish it made as she dropped it to the floor of the car again. Two ideas occurred to her. This nice young man might, for all she knew, be a crook who had forgotten he had left it in the car. He had told her it was his first trip as a driver.
—and second that it might not be real after all.
She settled back in the corner of the cab, pushing at the cloak with her feet to keep it out of sight, and picked up his voice again.
“—I’m probably talking too much, but I haven’t talked to anyone in a week except one hard-boiled guy that trains the new drivers. Look at me, the completed product.”
“You said something about college.”
“Oh, I’ll shut up.” He was a little hurt—she could see it even from behind in the grim slant of his young cheek.
“I only said I wanted to go to Williams College and I had a teacher who thought I could so I passed three College Boards examinations. But shucks, there’s so many fellows trying to work their way through. I thought if I could make something out of this I might try it.”
“Williams,” she said vaguely.
“Yes, it’s one of the best colleges.”
He turned his head around rather defiantly. “My teacher went there.”
“Stop here,” Gwen said suddenly.
“Where? Why?”
“Here. Right in front of this church.”
He put on his brakes forcibly as he continued.
“Williams College is—”
“I know what it is,” said Gwen, made impatient with her secret. “I know some girls whose brothers go there. But you look at this.”
“At what?”
She shook it at him.
“This!”
He got out and standing beside the cab regarded it wonderingly as she turned it here and there.
“It’s a fur,” he remarked at last.
“A fur? It’s a chinchilla, I think. I didn’t know at first whether to tell you. I thought you might be a gangster. But when you said you were going to Williams I thought I’d tell you.”
“I didn’t say I was going to Williams. I said I wanted—”
“Well what about this then? What do you think about it?”
“It’s no coonskin,” he said appraisingly.
“I mean what is it doing here?” Gwen demanded. “Do you suppose somebody just threw it in?”
He considered.
“I never did look in back. I took over the cab from a fellow named Michaelson—and he said he’d been a dead-head at the Grand Central since three o’clock—”
“Oh, stop talking about dead-heads.”
“I explained it to you—”
“I’ve got to get back to my hotel and we’ve got to do something about this.”
“Don’t lose your temper!” he said.
“What?”
“I mean don’t let’s fight about nothing. Do you think it’s really a valuable coat?”
He shook it out in the sunlight and looked at it.
“—maybe it is. Must have been left in the taxi last night. The thing is to go to the home office and see if there’s any inquiry about it. Maybe there’s a reward.”
He threw the coat back into an ignominious heap at the bottom of the cab.
“Let’s go there then,” Gwen said, “Honestly, I’ve got to get back to my hotel. They’re probably starting lunch by this time, and they’ll think I’ve been murdered.”
“Shall I drive you to your hotel? Let’s see, it was—” He fumbled once more for the little red book.
“No, to your garage.”
“I’ll go to the main one. The dispatcher out at 110th Street is kind of disagreeable.”
“What’s your name?” asked Gwen as they drove off.
“I think it’s Callahan or something.”
“Don’t you know your own name?”
“Oh, my name—my name’s Ethan Allen Kennicott. See, it’s on my card here with my picture.”
They talked on the way downtown. There was a sort of bitter amusement in him, as if life had flung him about so carelessly that he preferred to stand a little apart and ask “What’s next.” His family had been comfortably off in a small-town way, until two years ago. In reciprocation of his confidence Gwen told him about how her father could no longer afford to do the things they had once done, and about the disappointment of the black pearl. She realized though that beside his difficulties, her own were trivial.
“Girls have to wait for a break,” he said suddenly, “men have to make their own breaks my teacher used to say.”
“So do girls,” Gwen said.
“Yes, they do,” he scoffed. “Catch a girl doing something she isn’t told to do—by somebody.”
“That isn’t true,” said Gwen, loyal to her sex, “Girls start lots of things.”
“When some man’s behind them.”
“No, all by themselves.”
“Sure, they find a fur—if you call that starting something.”
She withdrew disdainfully from the argument. When they reached the garage on Forth-sixth Street he parked outside and went in. Emerging five minutes later he announced:
“It’s wanted all right. Who do you suppose it belongs to?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Peddlar TenBroek.”
“Whew!”
“It’s probably worth a fortune—I heard the dispatcher saying the TenBroek family own the land the garage is on.” He frowned. “Michaelson was in there too.”
“Who’s Michaelson?”
“He’s the man who drove this car last night. The notice says where the coat was lost and it’s got him thinking maybe he drove the party that lost it. He asked me if I found it and I told him no.”
“Why did you tell him that?”
“Well, you found it, didn’t you? Anyway he’s a tough guy and he might make trouble. He might claim the reward.”
“Well, he certainly didn’t find it,” said Gwen, “But I don’t want any reward.”
But while he was in a drugstore looking up Mrs. TenBroek’s address she realized she wouldn’t mind a reward one single bit.
“Anyway it’ll be half yours if we get one,” she said when he came out, “Maybe it would help you go to Williams College.”
Ten minutes later they waited impressed at the door of a Fifth Avenue Chateau. A very old butler glided out between great white pillars and when he heard Gwen’s story quavered:
“You may leave the fur with me.”
“No, I want to see Mrs. TenBroek.”
“You’d far better leave it with me,” the butler wheezed—he put out his hand for the garment, whereupon Ethan Kennicott reached forward gently and separated his fingers from it.
“Where is Mrs. TenBroek?” Gwen demanded.
“She is not at home. I’m not permitted to give out any information to strangers.”
Gwen considered. It was after two—in a few minutes Mrs. Tulliver and her charges would be watching the curtain rise on the first act of “Oh, Mr. Heaven.” In a minute she made her decision.
“We’ll sit right out here in the taxi till she gets home. She’ll have to pay the taxi fare, though.”
As they went down the steps there was a sudden commotion behind the butler—the hall seemed suddenly full of boys, and one of them put his head over the butler’s shoulder and called to her in a decidedly English voice:
“I say—what have you got to sell?”
She turned back.
“Do you live here?” she asked.
“Most of the time. I say, is that the cape Alicia Rytina lost?”
“It belongs to Mrs.
