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“Were you in that building?” Eliot asked her.
“We were; and I tell you, it’s hard to open doors now that the power’s off. They stick terribly.”
“What were you doing in that building? You know you shouldn’t have gone in from the street alone.”
“Sure I know,” agreed Marian blandly. “But where have we got by obeying all your nice orders?”
“What were you doing, Marian?”
“Shall we tell them, Shirley?”
“Why not?”
“Well,” said Maria
n, speaking carefully as though she might be overheard, “we decided we’d see what we could do as baits.”
“Baits?”
“Baits. The chunks of meat trappers used to put in traps, and like minnows on hooks—baits, you know. My idea.”
“Then,” said Jack generously, “it must have been a pippin. Baits. I’ve got the general underlying scheme of you girls now; go on.”
“But there’s nothing to go on to; nothing happened.”
“The fish didn’t come?”
“No nibble. No. But give us time, boy. There’s some way, we know, by which somebody still gets in and out of this city. The idea is, we hope he—or they, if they’re two of ’em—will try to grab us. We’ll go along.”
“Sabine-women stuff, Eliot,” Shirley put in.
“What?” asked Marian Jackson.
“I’ll tell you later, dear,” Shirley offered.
“Oh,” sniffed Marian. “Deep stuff! Well, anything they didn’t teach in the first six grades of the St. Louis grammar schools is lost on me. Still, you got me curious. What did the Sabine women do, Shirley?”
“They went along,” Shirley told her, “with the men from the other city that grabbed them.”
“And then what did they do, darling?”
“They stayed with them as willing little wives.”
“No stabbing after they found the way in and out?”
“No,” said Shirley. “That’s where the Sabine women were different.”
Jack Taylor whistled softly. “So that’s what you little girls were up to?” he said. “Perhaps it’s just as well we came along. But they rather show us up, eh, Eliot?”
Dinner was a moody meal in the evening of that prolonged day. The natures of the people from earth had not adjusted themselves to the increased length of both day and night; most of the people still slept, or at least went to bed, for eight hours of each twenty-four, so they dozed by day and were awake, on the average, sixteen hours of each period of darkness.
Philbin had learned that this had not been the custom among the ancient people; they had passed through the stages of evolution adapted to the long day and night; but it appeared impossible for the people from earth to acquire this adaptation.
Accordingly, after dark, there were long, restless periods; and to-night Eliot James, Jack Taylor and Peter Vanderbilt, with two more of the younger men—Crosby and Whittington—met for a midnight discussion.
Tony was not called to this informal council of his friends; nor was Ransdell; for Tony, though personally the same with all of them, yet was Chief of the Central Authority; he bore the responsibility; and if he forbade the enterprise on foot, his friends could scarcely proceed. So it was agreed not to let him know. And Ransdell, too—being charged with the security of the city—had better learn about the plan much later.
The five gathered in Vanderbilt’s quarters, which were not cramped, to say the least. There was no need in that city, constructed on its splendid scale for some two millions of people, for any one now to be niggardly of room. Each of the emigrants from earth could choose his own dwelling-place, so long as it was approved for its security.
