, boarded, or bearing
between lowered shade and dusty pane the significant parti-coloured
placard warning the honest thief, stared out at the heated park or, in
the cross streets, confronted each other with inert hauteur, awaiting
the pleasure of their absent owners.

The humidity increased; the horses' heads hung heavily under their
ridiculously pitiful straw bonnets. When the sun was vertical nobody
stirred; when the bluish shadows began to creep out over baked
sidewalks, broadening to a strip of superheated shade, a few stirred
abroad in the deserted streets; here a policeman, thin blue summer tunic
open, helmet in hand, swabbing the sweat from forehead and neck; there
a white uniformed street sweeper dragging his rubber-edged mop or a
section of wet hose; perhaps a haggard peddler of lemonade making for
the Park wall around the Metropolitan Museum where, a little later, the
East Side would venture out to sit on the benches, or the great electric
tourists' busses would halt to dump out a living cargo--perhaps only
the bent figure of a woman, very shabby, very old, dragging her ancient
bones along the silent splendour of Fifth Avenue, and peering about the
gutters for something she never finds--always peering, always mumbling
the endless, wordless, soundless miserere of the poor.

Quarrier's huge limestone mansion, looming golden in the sun, was
tenantless; its owner, closing even The Sedges, his Long Island house,
and driven northward for a breath of air, was expected at Shotover.

The house of Mrs. Mortimer was closed and boarded up; the Caithness
mansion was closed; the Ferralls', the Bonnesdels', the Pages',
the Shannons', Mrs. Vendenning's, all were sealed up like vaults. A
caretaker apparently guarded Major Belwether's house, peeping out at
intervals from behind the basement windows. As for Plank's great pile of
masonry, edging the outer Hundreds in the north, several lighted windows
were to be seen in it at night, and a big yellow and black touring-car
whizzed down town from its bronze gateway every morning with perfect
regularity.

For there was a fight on that had steadily grown hotter with the
weather, and Plank had little time to concern himself with the
temperature or to mop his red features over the weather bureau report.
Harrington and Quarrier were after him, horse, foot, and dragoons;
Harrington had even taken a house at Seabright in order to be near in
person; and Quarrier's move from Long Island