CHAPTER XX “KIDNAPED”

Jimmie went at once for the watchman. He was some time in finding him. At last he stumbled upon him in the front corridor.

“Some one’s been tryin’ the door. Don’t know what it was about. Gone now, I guess. I—”

“Listen!” Jimmie broke in. “A terrible thing’s happened. The girl’s gone!”

“Who’s gone?”

“Jeanne!”

“Where to?”

“Who knows?” Jimmie spread his arms excitedly. “Who can tell? She’s been carried off, I tell you! Devil’s got her, like as not. Never did like that Fire God thing; gypsies and devils, witches and all that.”
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“Don’t lose your head, son!” The watchman laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “She’s about the place somewhere. We’ll find her.” He gave a hitch to the big gun he always carried under his left arm and led the way.

Petite Jeanne was not “about the place somewhere.” At least, if she was she was securely hidden. They did not find her.

At last in despair Jimmie called Angelo.

“She’s gone!” he said over the telephone. “Vanished, and the Fire God thing has gone with her. She screamed once after the light blinked out. Some one threw the master-switch. She’s gone I tell you!”

Angelo called Florence. Half an hour had not passed before they were at the theatre. The police had also been notified. Three plain clothes men were there.

Between them they only succeeded in discovering that a side door was open and that Jeanne was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, gone.
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When all hope of discovering the little French girl’s whereabouts deserted them, they left the place to the police, to spend a miserable hour before the fire in the studio. Without Jeanne, the place was dead. Without Jeanne—no one said it, but everyone thought it—the light opera, which had cost so much labor, and upon which so much happiness and success depended, was a thing of the past. Jeanne’s part was written for her. Not another person in all the world of stage people could play it.

“She’s gone!” Angelo rose and paced the floor.

“Kidnaped!” Dan Baker’s face looked gray and old.

“Do you really think so?” Florence looked the picture of despair.

“Not a doubt of it.”

“But why?”

“Ransom, perhaps.”

“Ransom!” The girl laughed. It was not a happy laugh. “Who’d pay it, you or I?” She went through the gesture of emptying her pockets.

“They’d hope the manager might. There’s been a lot of things done to stage people these last years. Blackmail. Graft. No end.”

“There’s the gypsies,” said Swen. “Where’d she get that God of Fire?”
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“Bought it. Seventy-five cents.”

“Seventy-five cents!” Swen stared.

Florence told him the story of the Fire God. “There’s something in that,” said Swen. “They’re a queer lot, these Romanies. I’ve been studying them in their flats over by the big settlement house. Picked up some fantastic bit of music for the play. Got their own laws, they have. Don’t care a rap for our laws. If they wanted Jeanne and her god, they’d take her. That’s their way.”

In the meantime the hour was growing late. The manager and director must be faced in the morning. An important rehearsal had been set for nine A. M. Angelo could shut his eyes and picture the director’s rage when Jeanne failed to show up.

“He’ll have to be told,” he said.

“Yes,” Dan Baker understood, “he will. What is worse, he’ll have to know how and why. We can’t tell him why. But when we tell him how it all came about and just what she was doing at the time, then may the good Father be kind to us all!”
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“We’ll face it all better if we have a little sleep.” Florence moved toward the door. The party broke up. A very sad party it had been.

As Florence rode home she closed her eyes and allowed the events of the past weeks to drift through her mind. These had been happy, but anxious weeks. To her, as to millions of others during this time of great financial depression, when millions were out of work and hunger stalked around the corner, there had come the feeling that something great, powerful and altogether terrible was pressing in upon her from every side.

The loss of her position had depressed her. Still, hope had returned when she secured part-time work at night.

Most of all she had been concerned with the success of the little French girl. Having induced her to come to America, Florence felt a weight of responsibility for her. Her continued success and happiness rested heavily upon Florence’s shoulders.

“And now—” She sighed unhappily.
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But after all, what could have happened? She thought of the dark-faced gypsy Jeanne had spoken of; thought, too, of the Fire God that had fallen from some planet, been forged beneath the palms in some tropical jungle, or in one way or another had found its way into the wayside camps and the superstitious hearts of the gypsies.

“There might be many who would risk life itself to come into possession of it,” she told herself.

She thought of the curious phenomena that twice had frightened the little French girl.

“Wings,” she whispered. “Wings! The flutter of wings!”

The conductor called her station. Startled out of the past by the needs of the immediate present, she dashed off the street car, only to find herself thinking of the future.

“To-morrow,” she murmured, “what of to-morrow?”

How many millions had asked that same question during these trying times! And how varied were the answers!