"Stop that car," he roared, "or I'll send you up for contempt of court!"
Yielding to superior forces, Tod stopped the machine. Mr. Cooley came up with a police officer. Pointing at Paula, the lawyer cried:
"That's the young lady. She is attempting to evade an order of the Court." Producing a legal paper, he added: "Here is the order committing her to my custody."
Paula again screamed and clung to her companion. The policeman, puzzled, glanced at the Court order. A crowd began to gather. Finally the officer, addressing Paula, said respectfully:
"Do you acknowledge that you are Paula Marsh, the person named in this paper?"
White as a sheet, ready to swoon from terror, the girl nodded faintly:
"Then you must go with this man," said the officer, pointing to Mr. Cooley.
"No, no! I won't-- I won't!" she cried, clinging to Tod's arm.
"You had better go with him," he whispered gently. "It's best to avoid a scene. It won't be for long. Leave it to me. We'll soon get you out again. I'll see Ricaby at once, and to-morrow we'll swear out a _habeas corpus_. You'd better go quietly with him."
With an unobserved pressure of the hand, which he felt was returned, Tod silently said good-by. Paula slowly descended from the automobile. Turning to Mr. Cooley, she said, in a deliberate, dignified manner:
"Very well, Mr. Cooley, I am ready to accompany you."
Among the unspeakable crimes which man, in the name of humanity, has perpetrated against his fellow man, none has been more gruesome, more merciless, more fiendishly cruel than the abuse of the private sanitarium.
There is a hazy notion in the public mind that the private insane asylum, the horrors of which were so vividly depicted by Charles Reade, Edgar Allan Poe, and other writers, are things of the barbarous past, and that in our own enlightened, humane, practical twentieth century, when the liberty of the individual was never so jealously safe-guarded, it would be impossible for any unscrupulous person, actuated by interested motives of his own, to "railroad" a perfectly sane relative to an institution, and retain him there indefinitely against his or her will. The startling truth, however, is that, under our present lunacy system, nothing is easier.