“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.”
165
“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.
166
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?”
167
“Bought it. Seventy-five cents.”
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