But when Achilles presented his ticket for the boy, at the hospital door, it was a woman of his own race who met him, dark-eyed and strong—­and smiled at him a flash of sympathy.  “Yes—­he is doing well.  They operated at once.  Come and see.  But you must not speak to him.”  She led him cautiously down the long corridor between the beds.  “See, he is asleep.”  She bent over him, touching the bandage.  Beneath it, the dark skin was pallid, but the breath came easily from the sleeping lips.

She smiled at Achilles, guiding him from the room, ignoring the tears that looked at her.  “He is doing well, you see.  It was pressure that caused the fever, the bone was not injured.  He will recover quickly.  Yes.  We are glad!”

And Achilles, out under the clear sky, raised his face and caught the sound of the city—­its murmured, innumerable toil and the great clang of wheels turning.  And he drew a deep, quick breath.  A city of power and swift care for its own.  The land of many hands reaching out to the world.  And Achilles’s head lifted itself under the sky; and a mighty force knit within him—­a deep, quiet force out of the soul of the past—­pledging itself.

XV

THE POLICE MOVE

Life was busy for Achilles.  There were visits to the hospital—­where he must not speak to his boy, but only look at him and catch little silent smiles from the bandaged face—­and visits to the great house on the lake, where he came and went freely.  The doors swung open of themselves, it seemed, as Achilles mounted the steps between the lions.  All the pretty life and flutter of the place had changed.  Detectives went in and out; and instead of the Halcyon Club, the Chief of Police and assistants held conferences in the big library.  But there was no clue to the child!...  She had withdrawn, it seemed, into a clear sky.  James had been summoned to the library many times, and questioned sharply; but his wooden countenance held no light and the tale did not change by a hair.  He had held the horses.  Yes—­there wa’n’t nobody—­but little Miss Harris and him....  She was in the carriage—­he held the horses.  The horses?  They had frisked a bit, maybe, the way horses will—­at one o’ them autos that squirted by, and he had quieted ’em down—­but there wa’n’t nobody....  And he was the last link between little Betty Harris and the world—­all the bustling, wrestling, interested world of Chicago—­that shouted extras and stared at the house on the lake and peered in at its life—­at the rising and eating and sleeping that went on behind the red-stone walls.  The red-stone walls had thinned to a veil and the whole world might look in—­because a child had been snatched away; and the heart of a city understood.  But no one but James could have told what had happened to the child sitting with her little red cherries in the light; and James was stupid—­and in the bottomless abyss of James’s face the clue was lost.