Time passed, but slowly. Very slowly. You’d think that in a spot like that, you’d have enough to worry about to keep you from getting bored. But after an hour or two, you haven’t. You can be worried, or afraid, or mad, just so long and no longer. It begins to taper off; an hour or two passes like a year or two, and you begin to wish something would happen, almost anything. Time becomes an unendurable vacuum.
I don’t know how long it was before I got the idea of opening communication with the girl beside me in code. But suddenly I thought of the old idea of communicating by taps or touches; one for A, two for B, three for C and so on through the alphabet. If she got the idea—
I wriggled over a few inches until my right elbow touched her left. By nudges, I spelled out C-A-N U U-N-D-E-RS-and she saved me from spelling out the rest of the “understand” by cutting in with Y-ES.
It was a slow and painful method of communication, and I prefer talking and listening, but it helped pass the time and it didn’t matter how slow it was, because we had more time than we knew what to do with. And often we could shorten it by interrupting a question in the middle as soon as there was enough of it to guess the rest.
It didn’t take long to find out that neither of us could make any intelligent guess as to the motive and purpose of our captors. We decided that if a reasonable chance of escape should offer itself, we should take it rather than trust too completely to Workus’ stated intention to let us go the next day. But that for the present, we’d better make the best of it.
Then—for chivalrous, if unromantic, reasons—I moved farther away from her. I had discovered that I entertained other company. Undoubtedly, I was too near the monkey cage, and undoubtedly Workus was too stingy with his flea powder. I probably got only a couple of them, but they moved around and gave the impression of a legion.
But time did pass, and after a while I heard Workus closing up the shop and pulling down the shades. He didn’t leave, though, but remained up front, still looking in on us occasionally. The man who’d gone up or down the stairs rejoined Workus; then first one and then the other left by the back door and returned after a while. Probably they had gone out to eat; one at a time, while the other remained on guard.
After a while my trained fleas seemed to have left me, and it was lonesome alone, so I slid over next to the girl again. I spelled out O-K and tried to figure out how to put a question mark after it and couldn’t, but she spelled back Y-E-S W-H-E-R-E W-E-R-E-, U, and I spelled F-L-E-A-S, and she came back N-O T-H-A-N-KS, which didn’t make sense, but then probably my answer hadn’t made sense to her.
Then—it must have been close to nine o’clock—the two men came into the back room together. One of them took my shoulders and one of them my feet and I was carried out the back door and into what I judged to be Workus’ truck; a light delivery van with a closed body. A minute later the girl was put in with me and the back door of the truck closed and latched.
The engine started and I hit my head a resounding thump as the car jerked into motion.
It lurched through the roughly paved alley. Out on the streets, the motion wasn’t so bad. But from time to time we hit bumps and went around corners. I tried to brace myself, sitting up and leaning against a side of the truck body, but it didn’t work. The only way to avoid frequent head thumpings was to lie flat.
Apparently the girl had made the same discovery, because I found her lying beside me, and we found that by lying close together we minimized the jouncing and rolling. We didn’t try our code of signaling, because the joggling of the moving truck would have made it impossible.
After an hour or so the truck hit a rough driveway again, went along it what seemed quite a distance, and stopped. From the time we’d been traveling, I judged that we were well out in the country somewhere; but I couldn’t have made the wildest guess as to our direction from town.
Then the ignition went off, and the truck stopped and stood still. I heard the doors on either side of the truck cab slam, but Miss Weyburn was spelling out something by nudging my elbow and I concentrated on that and got: R U A-L-L R-I-T-E, and answered Y-E-S, and then it occurred to me that spelling out that question and answer had taken quite a bit of time, and why hadn’t Workus and the other chap opened the back of the truck to take us out?
But maybe they weren’t going to. Maybe they intended merely to leave us here in the truck while they accomplished their business—whatever it was—in this place, and they’d get rid of us later.
And that meant that we might have quite a bit of time here.
There was one possible way of our getting loose from those all-too-efficiently tied cords around our wrists. A way I’d thought of, but which hadn’t been practicable in the back room of Workus’ pet shop, with him looking back at us frequently. But now—
As quickly as I could, I spelled out: L-I-E O-N S-I-D-E W-I-L-L T-R-Y U-N-T-I-E.
She got the idea, for instead of trying to answer, she immediately rolled over with her back toward me and held out her bound wrists.
My fingers were almost numb from lack of proper circulation, but I started right in on the knotted cord about her wrists, and the effort of trying to untie it gradually restored my hands to normal.
It was a tough knot; we’d been tied with ordinary heavy wrapping twine, I found. Several turns of it, and then a knot that was made up of four square knots, well tied; each had been pulled as tight as possible before the next one was made.
But one at a time, they gave way. It was slow business, because my own wrists were tied crosswise and I could reach the knots of the girl’s bindings with the fingers of only one hand at a time. It must have taken me nearly half an hour before the inner knot gave way and I felt the cord itself slip as she pulled her wrists apart.
A moment later she took off my gag and blindfold and then whispered, “I’ll have you loose in a minute, Mr. Evans.”
“Phil, now,” I whispered back, as she started work on the cords on my wrists. “What’s your name?”
“Ellen.” With both her hands free, she could make faster progress than I had on her bindings. “Got any idea where we are?”
“No, but it must be way out in the country. No street lights or anything. And listen; isn’t that frogs?”
It was dark inside that truck, but when my wrists came free and I sat up to start on the knots at my ankles—while Ellen did the same with hers—I could see a dim, gray square that was the back window of the truck.
“Listen,” Ellen said. “Did you hear—”
It was the distant yowling of a cat. Of several cats. Once my ears were attuned to the sound, I could hear it quite plainly.
I whispered, “Is it Cinder? Can you recognize his…uh…voice?”
“I think so. I’m almost sure. There—my ankles are—”
The cords on my own ankles came loose at the same moment, and I crawled to the back of the truck. The twin doors were latched from the outside, and I reached through the barred window, but I couldn’t get enough of my arm through to reach down and turn the handle.
Ellen joined me, and her more slender arm solved the problem.
We stepped down, cautiously, into the unknown. We stood there, listening.
Frogs. Crickets. And cats.
There was a thin sliver of new moon playing hide and seek among high cumulus clouds, fast drifting, although down on the ground there didn’t seem to be a breath of wind.
We were standing on grass between two wheel ruts that were a crude sort of driveway. It led, ahead past the front of the truck, to what looked like a big, ramshackle barn.