The Bradmoor Murders
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Crime and Detective; Short Stories
Description: Further stories of Sir Henry Melville of Scotland Yard: 1: The Bradmoor Murder 2: The Blackmailer 3: The Cuneiform Inscription 4: The Hole in the Glass 5: The Phantom Woman 6: The Stolen Treasure 7: The Garden In Asia

First Edition cover

THE BRADMOOR MURDER

(UK Title The Garden in Asia)

Melville Davisson Post

1922

Contents

1: The Bradmoor Murder

2: The Blackmailer

3: The Cuneiform Inscription

4: The Hole in the Glass

5: The Phantom Woman

6: The Stolen Treasure

7: The Garden In Asia

________________

1: The Bradmoor Murder

"His right hand shall be his enemy. And the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces."

1

WE GOT some great men from England in the old day. They don't permit us to forget it...Well, we can counter on them. They got Robert Harmscourt, the present Duke of Bradmoor, from us. And he is to-day beyond question, the ablest man in the British Empire. They can say that this American family is only the English branch, and cite their court decision giving it the title, should the English line become extinct. But it won't do! The man's an American. And he would have remained an American but for the will of a god. No, the expression is correctly written: not the will of God as we are accustomed to say it— the will of a god! Keep the distinction in mind.

And it wasn't Lady Joan! True, she sent for him at once, after old Bradmoor's death, and assembled at her table the three remarkable men concerned with the mystery. But it wasn't Lady Joan that transformed this American into a peer of England. She'd have gone to America with Harmscourt— she'd already promised...You can't doubt it. It wasn't Lady Joan: it was the will of a god! You can read what Harmscourt says about it. It's the very strangest thing that was ever printed.

The Narrative

THE VERY dining room was extraordinary.

The walls were of bare stone, and the floor had originally been the tamped earthen floor of the cottage. There was a wide, smoked fireplace, and an ancient beamed ceiling.

But the room had been made over by a deft hand.

It was a transformation with a slight expenditure of material; but it was that tremendous transformation which an excellent taste is able to accomplish with even primitive material. The ceiling had been permitted to remain; but the walls had been covered with a blue-gray wash— some dye, I imagine, with a calcimine. An iron grate had been set in the fireplace, and a board floor laid. It was a floor scarcely better than the wood platform of a tent; but one saw little of it, for it was covered with old rugs— ancient, priceless rugs.

There was an immense mahogany table, a long mahogany sideboard against the wall, with silver knobs, their exterior presenting laurel wreaths inclosing a coat-of-arms carved in relief. The chairs were carved rosewood. There was no cloth on this table; but there was a gorgeous piece of brocade laid right across it, in the center of which was an immense bowl filled with roses. The silver, the glass, every article on the table was exquisite. It was the contrast between these superb furnishings and the crude room that impressed one, as though one should find a jewel mounted in the hull of an acorn.

For a moment the small-talk drifted vaguely by me. I was looking at the empty chair beyond, across the table. It was drawn back, and half-turned away, precisely as the girl had left it when she got up and went out, leaving me to her extraordinary guests, and their strange mission. Extraordinary is not a word inapplicable to them. I think if one had looked over all England, he could not have selected three men to whom that word would more appropriately apply.

To my right was Henry Marquis, Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. When one says that long, awkward sentence— with "Scotland Yard" at the end of it— one brings up the image of a conventional character in the penny-dreadfuls, or the hatchet-faced detective of Baker Street, with his hypodermic needle; a thin, lemon-colored person, with dreamy eyes, and the like. But— one would not look to see Henry Marquis.

A middle-aged Englishman, with short-cropped gray hair, and the typical figure in the hunting field. There was nothing peculiar about him except his rather long, pale face, and the strong formation of the jaw. One felt that it would be difficult to prevent this man from carrying out any plan upon which he had once determined. But— one would not associate him with mysteries. If one had been selecting a character to illustrate a personality concerned with mysteries, he would have selected Sir Godfrey Simon, who was sitting farther along to the right of the chair now empty. He was a big, old man. His head was entirely bald; there was not even a faint suggestion of a fringe of hair around the bald head.

The head was immense.

He had a large, crooked nose; shaggy eyebrows; eyes that seemed never open— they were always slits— narrow, like a cat's eyes; and a big, firm-lipped mouth. He looked like a sphinx. He was the greatest alienist in England. He spoke just then:

"The man was under a curse," he said; "that's what killed him!"

I realized suddenly that the conversation had drifted into the thing that these men had been asked here to explain to me. It had begun, and I had missed a little of it. I moved in the chair, and brought my attention swiftly back from the girl who had gone out.

The third man, seated at my left, had half turned to the fire. He had poured out another glass of whisky. When I try to describe this man, I am always embarrassed. Nature took an unreasonable advantage of him. He was the Thirteenth Earl of Dunn, and he looked like a bookmaker at Ascot, in the paddock with the sporting set.

No clothes could disguise it.

He was in the best evening clothes that one could buy in Bond Street; but he was the bookmaker from Ascot, awkwardly put into them. He was one of the most charming men in England; but there he was, with his coarse shock of hair, his red face, his heavy jaw, his large, harsh voice, and his abrupt, physical vigor. He was a big-game hunter, and one of the most noted explorers in the world...He used to say: "There's six million square miles of the earth's surface that nobody knows anything about"— then would come his harsh laugh—"except me."

He was replying now to the oracular pronouncement of Sir Godfrey Simon.

"A curse, eh! What?" he said. "It was characteristic of you, Simon, to sit perfectly still, like a joss, blink your eyes, and say the man was killed by a curse, when the thing happened. It would have been reasonable if you had meant that the outraged divinity, or hell-factor, or whatever you wish to call it, that old Bradmoor looted, had found a way to turn on him; but that was not what you meant."

Sir Godfrey did blink his eyes. They batted an instant. He added another sentence:

"I meant, of course, precisely what I said."

Henry Marquis took the conversation up then. He realized that I did not understand it, that it would have to be presented from the beginning. He touched the polished mahogany table with his fingers, as though they were smoothing out a cloth.

"I think," he said, "that you will get a more accurate understanding of this thing if we give it to you precisely as it impressed us at the time it happened: the facts, and then what we thought about them— what we still think about them...You will probably have to imagine what Sir Godfrey Simon means, if he means anything."

He laughed, and his firm, capable hand continued to smooth out the invisible cloth on the table. There came a slight, facetious note in his voice.

"I suppose, in fact, it is not essential that an alienist should mean anything. It is the pose that counts in his profession. 'The man was killed by a curse!' Sir Godfrey does not need to mean anything, provided he goes no farther...It is a fine, creepy explanation, and it precisely suits the average Briton with the Early Victorian novel in his mind. The lord of the manor was always under a curse, when the beautiful milkmaid got into trouble, in those stories...Is there a family in England that has not a curse on it?"

The big man by the vacant chair spoke again:

"This family has a curse on it."

Lord Dunn turned toward me. He made an abrupt gesture, precisely like a bookmaker sweeping aside a betting offer:

"There you have it," he said. "Set a madman to catch a madman; Simon is in the right profession; old Bradmoor was killed by a curse!"

The massive face did not change, but the mouth opened as though worked by a wire: "He was," he said.

Henry Marquis made a vague, abrupt gesture:

"Before we go again into our old quarrel," he said, "our friend here must understand the thing. It is mysterious enough, God knows— the whole awful business— when you understand as much as there is to understand about it."

He turned toward me.

"This is what we found," he said. "It was in the afternoon. It had been very dry— that long, unprecedented drought in England. Then there had been rains in the north; the streams had come up. Fishermen were beginning to get out their tackle; the water would be 'right' that evening. So the thing that old Bradmoor had been concerned with at the moment of his death was precisely what one would have expected. He was a keen sportsman, and next to Dunn, he was the best all-round explorer in the world."

The Earl of Dunn made another of his abrupt, bookmaker gestures:

"Bar nobody," he said, "old Bradmoor was the best explorer in the world, and he was a good man with a rod, none better; but he could not ride a horse. He was a damned poor hunter; he had sense enough to give it up. And he was not a firstclass shot. He could handle a heavy gun— a big double express; but he was no good with a magazine rifle...I don't know what killed him, unless it was that damned Baal from the plateau of the Lybian Desert. It's like Dunsany's story of the Gods of the Mountain— green stone Johnnies who finally came in to avenge their imitators. It might be the explanation here. How do we know? A thing does not cease to exist because some one says it isn't so. Would the Old Bailey cease to exist because a little sneak thief in Margate did not believe in it?"

Henry Marquis came back to his narrative:

"What we found," he said, "was this: Old Bradmoor was dead. He had been shot through the chest. It was a shot at the heart, but it had missed it. It was four inches to the right, and a hand's-width high; but the bullet was so big that the man was instantly killed. The bullet had gone through the back of the chair and lodged in the wainscoting. We cut it out, of course; but it was too battered up to say much about the sort of firearm it came out of.

"Old Bradmoor was sitting in the middle of the room.

"He was at least seven feet from the wall in any direction. He was facing a narrow window; in fact, it was a narrow slit cut in the wall. You know the sort of slit they made in the old days for archers. It is perhaps a yard high, and nine inches wide. The stone sloped on either side of the slit on the outside of the wall so that the archers could shoot to the right or left...You know how they are cut, and how the house stands out into the open sea."

He made a gesture toward the fireplace— toward the great house across the road to the south.

I nodded. I knew all about the house, and especially that wing of it. The sea had come sheer in against it. It had tunneled in a deep eddy, against the wall. The dead Duke of Bradmoor had been forced in his time to supplement the foundation by putting in another wall straight down to the rock bed of the shore. That stopped the sea current from chiseling out the foundation; but it bored in here against the wall, on its stone floor. There was a sheer wall of fifty feet from the room with the archer's slit, to the open sea.

I understood exactly the description Marquis was giving me. I could see precisely what they had found. He went on making every detail visible. "Bradmoor was facing this window; his chair was in the center of the room, almost precisely in the center of it. There was very little furniture in the room. It was more a sort of storage room where he kept the junk gathered up on his explorations. There were maps on the wall, and a lot of tin boxes about, a theodolite, a compass or two— in fact, the traps an explorer would carry about with him. Bradmoor kept his fishing gear in this room— all sorts of rods, flies and the like.

"As I have said, he was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, facing this narrow slit in the wall; he was exactly ten feet away from it, and he was almost an equal distance from the door and the walls in every other direction. He had a fishing rod in his hand— in his right hand. It was tightly clutched in his hand. It was a long, heavy rod, fitted with a reel and line. He had some flies in his left hand; the thumb and finger of his left hand were closed on a particularly brightcolored fly. The man was in the act of attaching this fly to the line. His hat was on the floor beside him, with a number of flies hooked in it. There was a book of flies open on his knee.

"It was perfectly clear that the man had been killed suddenly, without warning, while he sat unconscious of any danger, engaged simply with the selection of a fly.

"The door to the room was locked, and it was bolted on the inside. All the windows in the room were closed, and had not been opened. No one of them had been opened. We were able to tell this on account of the metal fixtures. They had been turned to hold the windows firmly closed, and they had rusted in that position. The windows could not have been opened unless they were turned, and if they had been turned, the rust would have been disturbed.

"We sent an expert down to make sure.

"He went over it very carefully with a glass. It was certain the windows had not been opened. Besides, when we did open them, we were able to do it only with difficulty, because they had remained so long closed.

"The markedly strange thing about the situation, so far as Bradmoor was concerned, was that the door had been so carefully fastened on the inside. Of course, whatever it was that ejected Bradmoor out of life, may thus have fastened the door. But if so, how did it get out of the room? The bolt does not connect with the lock. It is at least two feet above the lock. It is a heavy oak door. The hinges were sound— the door had not been tampered with; the lock was right, and solid. The door had simply been strongly secured on the inside, and that was all there was about it. The key was in the lock on the inside.

"There was no way to get into this room, or to get out of it.

"The walls were all solid. It is true that the walls were wainscoted, paneled in heavy oak; but there was no chance of a secret exit; we took the panels all out, and went over every inch of the floor and ceiling. We could not have been mistaken— there was not any way to get into that room, or out of it, that we could conceive of; and yet here in the center of the room, on this hot afternoon, sat Bradmoor in a chair, shot through the chest— with a fishing rod in one hand, and a bright-colored fly in the other.

"Of course, we took the rod to pieces.

"But it was an absurd thing to do. It was the usual big fishing rod, about twelve feet long, and rather heavy. There were not any secret rigamajigs about the rod, nor about anything else connected with the dead man, that we could find. He had simply been preparing for an evening's sport, when something killed him!

"You will not have failed to notice that I keep saying 'something,' and I suppose we shall have to keep on saying 'some thing'— the curse of Sir Godfrey, over there, or Dunn's God of the Mountain out of the Dunsany story...I don't know what it was!

"We had no clue to any assassin. Bradmoor had been pretty hard up, at the end— no one realized how hard up, until the complete collapse after his death. The servants had gone into the village. Of course, we looked them up— the cook, to visit her daughter who was ill, and the old butler to do the marketing. There was no one about the place, except the butler's mother, in a little cottage in the garden— an old woman, practically unable to move from her chair.

"She was the only witness we had to anything; and her evidence included two features only: she had heard a sound, which she thought was the back-fire of a motor car— that, of course, was the sound of the shot that killed Bradmoor; and she had heard something leap into the water.

"Of course, she had a theory.

"All old women of her type have theories to explain mysterious happenings: the Devil did it! She heard him leap into the sea! Of course, she gradually supplied details, as such persons invariably do— details that could not possibly have had any basis in fact! The Devil climbed the wall, shot Bradmoor and leaped off into the sea. Well, no one but the Devil could have climbed it; it is a sheer, smooth wall, and descends fifty feet from the window to the water.

"Of course, we went over the wall. We scaffolded up from the bottom, and examined, carefully, every inch of it. There was not a mark on the wall! It is bare of vines, to begin with— and there is a thin green fungus over the whole of it. I do not mean a lichen. I mean the thin fungus that presently covers a damp stone. If there had been any attempt to scale this wall, we would have found the marks— and we did not find the marks; there was not a mark on it in any direction.

"We did not stop at the sill of the window. We went up to the roof. Nothing could have descended from above. There was a lot of dust on the roof— it had been long dry, and one could have made a mark on the tiles of the roof and on the gutters. We were minutely careful.

"There was not a mark or a scratch, either above or below that narrow slit of a window. No human creature could have climbed the wall and killed Bradmoor. The old woman's theory was as good as any— it must have been the Devil.

"But she was profoundly disappointed that we did not find seared hoofprints on the wall. They must be there. We had not looked close enough! She wished to be carried out in her chair, so that she could examine it herself. She stuck to her theory. Of course, she could be persuaded out of her details— her amplifications of the thing. But she held stoutly to one fact— she had heard the Devil leap off into the sea!

"I put some of the best men from the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard on it at once; and they gave it up. Of course, we tried to get at it by the usual method of elimination. One had to consider every theory and see how it fitted the facts. How could anyone have murdered Bradmoor when it was impossible to get out of the room after having done it, or to get into the room if Bradmoor had himself locked the door?

"And how could the man have taken his own life?

"There was no weapon to be found; his right hand was clutched around a fishing rod; and his left hand was full of flies— with a bright-colored one between the thumb and finger. These things must have been in his hand before his death, and at the time of his death, for they were still clutched in his convulsed fingers.

"The wound was hideous. The man must have died instantly. He could not have moved after the thing happened. Every nerve must have been paralyzed. It was clearly beyond reason to formulate any theory which would have depended upon any movement of the man after the wound was made. The surgeons simply laughed at the idea.

"He could not have moved after the bullet struck him; and there he sat with his fishing tackle gripped in his hands. There could not have been anything else in his hands; and as I have said, there was no weapon.

"I don't think we omitted anything in our efforts to get at a solution of the mystery.

"Everybody in the country about was put in inquisition. There had been no one in the neighborhood of the house on that afternoon. We knew the names of each person, and his mission, who traveled the road that afternoon. We knew every motor car that went over it, and every workman that walked along it. We knew where every man, woman and child in the community was that afternoon. There was simply no clew to an assassin...And there was no explanation."

Sir Godfrey Simon's eyes batted again.

"Except mine," he said.

Marquis laughed. "Or Dunn's— the Stone God stumping down out of the mountain; or the old woman's theory. The country accepted that. It was even more popular than the theory Sir Godfrey advances.

"We have had a variety of mysteries at Scotland Yard during my time as Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, and from Mayne's time down; but the Mystery of the Letts, the Rising Sun postcard, or the affair of the Chinese Embassy were nothing to this.

"In every other mystery with which we have been concerned, there was always some possible explanation. One could make a hypothesis that did not outrage the human understanding; but one could not form a hypothesis in this case that did not outrage it.

"Now, that is an appalling thing when you stop to think about it! The human mind is very clever, very ingenious. When you present a mysterious case, it will furnish you with some solution; but it can't furnish a solution for this case.

"Arrange the facts before you, and try it!

"A man is found dead in a locked room; there is no weapon; the fingers of both of his hands are gripped about objects that could have had nothing to do with his death. There is no way into, or out of, the room. There is a great, ragged hole in his chest. The sound of the shot is heard; and there you are.

"If you can formulate an explanation, you will be cleverer than the whole of England. There is nothing that the British public loves like a mystery; and when the details of one are given to them, every individual in the kingdom sits down to formulate an explanation. You can't stop him— it's an obsession. It's like a puzzle. He goes on doggedly until he gets a solution. That's the reason why, when Scotland Yard wishes to remove a mystery from public notice, it gives out a solution. The whole interest of the country lies in solving the mystery; once solved, it is forgotten.

"But even our best experts could not give out an explanation in this case; we wished to do so because we wished to keep the thing quietly in our hands until we could work it out. But we could not put out a solution; there wasn't any!" He paused in the narrative, and selected a cigarette from an open box on the table but did not at once light it.

"When it became certain," he went on, "that no assassin could be connected with this incomprehensible tragedy, we turned back upon the details of the only witness who was able to furnish us any fact whatsoever. But with every day's delay, and with each complication of the matter, the old woman's story had become more involved. It was so decked out with fanciful imaginings that it became difficult to realize that the whole extravaganza was pure fancy, outside of two evidences.

"These two evidences stood alone as the only concrete features in the case; one, that she had heard a sound, which could have been the explosion of a weapon; that she took it for the back-fire of a motor car at some distance away indicated that it was a loud explosive sound.

"This fact seemed to be unquestioned.

"Bradmoor had been killed by a shot, and the sound of the shot had been heard. Of this we were certain; but that something had leaped off into the water was an evidence more in doubt. We were convinced that the woman had heard the sound of the shot that killed the old Duke, but we were by no means convinced that she had heard a splash in the water. That element of her story seemed always too closely associated with her theory— that the whole tragedy was at the hand and instigation of the Devil. Around that idea she presently built up her fantastic explanation.

"With every interrogation of her, she became more elaborate, more profuse in her details, and more extravagant in her assurance. She had heard the Devil leap into the sea. It was not a heavy splash— such as the body of a man would make; it could not have been the body of a man. It was a thin, slight, sharp splash, precisely what the slender body of a Devil's imp would make as it leaped lightly from the edge of the window into the water— its pointed feet descending, its arm up." Henry Marquis laughed!

"She had every detail of it now. It must have given her an immense interest in life. Imagine that startling melodrama cutting into the monotony of uneventful days in a padded chair by a window. And from being a neglected and forgotten derelict, she was presently the heroine of a vivid romance, a person of importance to the countryside. The cottage was crowded, and she had the glory of a story-teller of Bagdad.

"The result was, of course, that she presently became useless so far as any further inquiry was concerned. That was clear. She was of value to us for two facts only— and one of them in doubt. That she had heard the shot was certain. We felt we could depend on that; but the splash was likely fancy. And the more we considered that element of the case, the more we were convinced that this was one of the colored details requisite to her theory.

"There was no ledge to the window. There was no way in which an assassin could have climbed there in order to leap off into the sea after the crime had been committed. There was no place beyond that window from which the shot could have been fired. There was only the open sea lying beyond it.

"Of course, there were improbabilities suggested— one of them was that the shot had been fired from the high mast of a sailing ship; but there had been no sailing ship on that afternoon. The officials of the Coast Service were able to assure us of that; they kept a record of everything. No sailing ship had been on the open sea on that afternoon inside of this point.

"Of course, we considered everything.

"Some crank sent us an anonymous letter, saying that the shot had been fired from an airplane, or a seaplane; and we looked into that. But there had been no such craft in the neighborhood on that afternoon. So those possibilities were excluded. They were so unlikely that it seemed almost absurd to inquire into them. But when you stop to think about it, they were the only theories that in any way indicated a rational solution of the matter; and that they were not the solution, there was, as it happened, conclusive evidence. There had been no sailing ship, and no aircraft, near the place on that afternoon."

Marquis paused again. He lighted his cigarette at one of the candles on the table, drew the smoke through it an instant, and then came back to his narrative.

"I have been giving you this case in extended detail," he said, "because I am trying to make you realize the difficulties that it presented, and how carefully those difficulties were considered. I wish you to understand, as we presently came to understand, how incapable the thing was of any solution. We returned again and again to it, as I have returned here in my narrative again and again to it, because we were constantly assailed with the belief that we had overlooked something. There must be some evidences that had escaped us— a way into that room, or a way out of it, by which an assassin could have encompassed Bradmoor's death. But we got no further. There was no way into that room, nor any way out of it, and there was no way from above it in which an assassin could have killed Bradmoor; and yet there he was, shot to death in his chair!"

Henry Marquis laughed. It was an ironical chuckle of a laugh.

"The butler's mother was the only person with a theory, and by Heaven, there were evidences to support it. She assembled them and fitted them together. She convinced the countryside. The very impossible things we found connected with the irrational explanations of the matter, were the strongest evidences of her theory.

"One had to consider them, no matter how practical one was.

"The very fact that we were able to show that old Bradmoor could not have been killed by any human agency of which we had any knowledge, proved, as she pointed out, that he could have been killed by a supernatural agency only. Certainly only a Devil's imp could leave no marks on a wall, and could leap off, disappearing into the sea. Besides, Bradmoor had been afraid of the Devil!"

Henry Marquis hesitated a moment. He broke the cigarette in his fingers into fragments, crumbling them on the table.

"Now, there," he said, "one came upon a series of evidences that had to be admitted. Bradmoor had been noticed to act queerly for some time. It was only after his death that the various trivial instances were precisely recalled, and fitted together. But they had been beyond doubt observed, and, now when they were connected up, they took on an unquestioned significance.

"The man had been afraid of something!

"He would lock himself into his room at night; he never sat long in one position; he would not stand before a window, nor sit with his back to an open door. It was recalled that he had been clever with an explanation of these idiosyncrasies— extremely clever. It was a draft he avoided before an open door. Or his eyes were sensitive to the strong light of a window; or he was nervous— too many pipes— he must find a milder tobacco, and so forth.

"The explanations covered the peculiarities while the man was living, and there was nothing to create a suspicion of some unusual motive; but after his death they became signboards that all pointed in one direction— the morale of the man had been gradually breaking down under an increasing monomania of fear!

"These evidences were all bright-colored threads for the Devil theory. Bradmoor had been afraid of the Devil! And he had not been afraid without a reason! The butler's mother had a fine, lurid theory that pleased the countryside."

Henry Marquis suddenly smote the table with his hand.

"But it could not be considered by us. There is only one thing of which I am absolutely certain, and that is that the supernatural does not exist. This is a physical world. Every problem in it has an explanation. The Devil is a myth.

"There was one thing only to do now," he pursued, "and that was to go back over the man's life to see if it contained any adventure that might be in any way connected with the tragedy. We began to investigate his life."

The face of Sir Godfrey Simon beyond him at the table lifted unmoving, like a mask:

"There is where you made a mistake," he said; "it was not enough to go back over Bradmoor's life; you had to go farther than that."

"Farther than Bradmoor's life?" Marquis interrogated. "How could we go farther than that? What was farther than his life?"

A faint smile appeared on Sir Godfrey Simon's face, but he made no reply.

Henry Marquis was annoyed.

"You mean the curse that killed Bradmoor!"

"Precisely that," replied Sir Godfrey, his face unmoving.

"If you had come to me, I could have predicted what would happen to Bradmoor. He could not escape it."

Marquis interrupted.

"Then you knew it was going to kill Bradmoor?"

"Surely," he said. "Had it not killed his father and his grandfather?"

"But his grandfather was drowned on the Northwest Coast," continued Marquis. "He was shooting brant, and the plug came out of the boat." "Some one pulled the plug out," replied Sir Godfrey.

"And his father fell from the steeple of the chapel here."

Again that vague smile, like a bit of sun on a painted image's face.

"Did he fall?"

Henry Marquis swore under his breath. "Damn it, man," he said, "you are a companion for the butler's mother, only the old woman is more satisfactory; she gives an explanation with her theory, and you never give an explanation. If you know what killed old Bradmoor, why don't you tell us how it killed him?"

Sir Godfrey Simon looked calmly across the table at the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. The mask of his face had now the expression of a man of experience regarding the futile chatter of a child.

"Marquis," he said, "you sometimes profoundly annoy me. Because one understands one feature of a matter, does it also follow that one must understand equally every other feature of it? I have made this explanation until I am monotonously weary of it: I know what killed the old Duke; I do not know how it killed him. You do not see the interest in this case as I see it. The interest to me lies exclusively in the fact that it did kill him. I am not concerned about the means it took. I don't care. I am not interested. That is for you to find out, if you care."

He took up the glass of whisky beside him, tasted it, and put it down again. He acted to me like an amused man, at a quarrel among children.

"If you find out how the old Duke was killed, you will see that I am right— if you ever find out."

Marquis shrugged his shoulders. He turned again to me and said: "We finally reached the dead point. There was no solution to the thing!"

2

LORD Dunn now took up the narrative. He had been silent in his chair, moved back from the table. He had lighted a cigar, and enjoyed it while Henry Marquis had been talking; but he enjoyed it like a bookmaker. It was tilted at a rakish angle in his mouth; and he blew the smoke about him like a stableboy. He now took the cigar out of his mouth, and threw it into the fireplace.

"But there was something in his life," he declared.

"It was the last exploration old Bradmoor undertook, the one that used up the remnant of his fortune. I mean that terrible push into the Lybian Desert. He was too old to undertake it, and he was too poor. It broke him down in every direction. The man came out a wreck— a worse wreck than we realized; one could see the physical evidences on him."

He made a big, awkward gesture with his hands, precisely like a bookmaker rejecting a bet.

"I don't ask anyone to believe it," he said. "I don't know that I believe it. I judge, in fact, that I don't believe it. Of course, it's a crazy notion; but this whole business is full of crazy notions— nothing but damned crazy notions."

He paused to light another big cigar.

"Anyway, I know the facts, and what happened. I know them better than any other living person, because I considered that expedition before Bradmoor did. The German came to me first; then he went to the old Duke. I was not interested in the Lybian Desert just then. Deserts don't amuse me. Women go through them and write books about it. I was going into Yucatan, so I sent the German to Bradmoor.

"I could not determine whether he was a liar, building on some facts, or whether he had been with Rohlfs' expedition. You know about that— or has everything that happened before the Great Mad War been forgotten? Rohlfs persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm to fit him out with an expedition to explore the plateau of the Lybian Desert. Rohlfs had a theory that the country now desert had been once well watered— the theater of an immense civilization, antedating the later civilizations of which we have any knowledge. He got the professors to back him up. They prepared a monograph for him, and it was published everywhere.

"Rohlfs persuaded the Kaiser to send him in.

"Of course, we don't know how much bluff the Germans were putting up. It is possible that the Kaiser was merely taking a look at Egypt, and the English possessions beyond it, and that the expedition was a scouting party. That would be an explanation of the wide publicity given to the monograph the professors put out, and the money the German Government spent on the expedition. But I don't believe that was Rohlfs' motive. I think Rohlfs was really on the trail of a civilization, and that he was sincere about it.

"Anyhow, the expedition went in, and everybody knows what happened to it, and where it broke down. Rholfs went on with a fragment of what he could get together, and he found some evidences of what he expected to find— not a civilization like that of the Egyptian Nile, but something more like what I found in Yucatan. At least, that's the story the German came to me with. I mean Slaggerman. He turned up here, a sort of roustabout on a North German Lloyd ship; and he hunted me up.

"I suppose he saw the name in the newspapers.

"I sent him to Bradmoor," Lord Dunn went on. "He had a drawing— very well done. He said Rohlfs made it. It showed a path along a stone ledge. There was one strange feature about the path that he pointed out. He would hold a glass over it, and then he would get excited, and fall into the German language. The path was sunk in the stone of the ledge, but it had not been cut there; it had been worn there. It must have been eight or ten inches deep, and wide enough for a man to pass along it.

"And it was worn into the ledge!

"'Ach,' he would say, 'it was feet, human feet that wore that path down. How long did it take— one thousand, two thousand, five thousand years? And how many feet— how many generations of feet— and why did they travel on that path, and where did they go?'

"He said that Rohlfs, after the expedition had gone to pieces, had escaped from the surveillance of the desert sheiks, and had gone on, with only Slaggerman, disguised as an Arab cook. They had pushed on for a fortnight before they were overtaken and brought back. He said they reached the peak of a mountain, ascending out of the sand to the southwest.

"It was not a range that extended like a geological formation across the whole plateau. It stood up abruptly out of it, as though a peak of mountain had thrust up suddenly from below. He said that it was possible to travel around it, that the native tribes did, in fact, travel around it. There was no reason for anyone undertaking to ascend it, in the opinion of the desert tribes.

"It was evidently a peak of barren rocks, without water or vegetation. The stone was hard, and rose-colored. The sharp peaks at a distance, the German said, with the sun on them, looked like a beautiful rose-colored cathedral. There was a certain harmony in the outline at a distance. Rohlfs thought it was a mirage. Neither of the two men had any other idea until they finally arrived at its base. They had time enough to go entirely around it before they were overtaken.

"There was no way to ascend it; in fact, they did not think of the possibility of anyone going up until by chance Rohlfs discovered this path. They were amazed, but they had no opportunity to follow the thing up. They were overtaken by the desert tribes and hurried out of the region. Rohlfs made a drawing of the path that night, while the memory of it was fresh in his mind. It was correct, Slaggerman said. He helped him with the details."

Lord Dunn put his cigar on the fruit plate before him. It was half burned out; the long ash crumbled, and a thin line of smoke ascended, rippling at the top like a fantastic flower. He seemed to reflect on the story he was telling. His voice was firmer, less harsh.

"When you come to think about it," he said, "there could have been nothing that would so pique the curiosity as that bit of drawing. There was just enough of it. One's imagination winged off at once with every sort of extravaganza. In the waste places of the earth two things have an unfailing fascination for the lone explorer— a human footprint, and a path. If one finds a human footprint, or a path, one can never turn aside from it; one must find out whither it leads.

"I remember the effect on me when the German got out his drawing.

"I was not much interested before that. I was considering a method to dismiss him. But that fragment of drawing attached my interest. The whole picture at once came up in vivid detail, with its absorbing enigma!

"Well, as I have said, I sent him on to old Bradmoor. We know what happened. The old Duke went bankrupt on an expedition to go in; and he did go in. It took a lot of time, and endless negotiations. He had to get the permits from the English Government, and from the Egyptian authorities, and the rights to pass, from the sheiks of the desert tribes. The English Government was willing to help him. They wished to verify Rohlfs' narrative. The report had not been translated into English; but it was in the German language, in the bulletins issued by the learned societies at Berlin.

"It took a lot of money.

"In fact, as we know, it cleaned old Bradmoor out, and encumbered his estate as it now stands— on the verge of the bankrupt court. But the old Duke had the patience of every great explorer; once on the way, once taken with the big idea, he stopped at nothing.

"Of course, everybody knows what he found. It's in the monograph he furnished the Royal Society; but everybody does not know all that he found. Bradmoor talked it over with me when he returned. He came to see me. He was very much perplexed. He asked me what he ought to do. I told him to make a conventional report to the Royal Society, covering what the exploration discovered, and omit the remainder of it— keep it to himself.

"My reason for urging Bradmoor to this decision was not only in the interest, as I pointed out, of his own reputation, but it was in the interest of the reputation of all persons engaged in exploration. It was necessary to retain the public confidence in the accuracy of our explorers. Anything taken to be incredible, or improbable, or fantastic, would not only injure Bradmoor before the great English reading public, but it would injure every other man who undertook a like exploration.

"We talked it over.

"The result was that the old Duke's monograph contained only the journal of the expedition, and the general verification of what Rohlfs had reported— that is to say, no evidence of any ancient civilization on the plateau.

"He found precisely what one would have expected him to find in the desert.

"The only unusual thing which his monograph indicated was the peak of rosecolored stone which stood up out of the plateau; and this, under my suggestion, he described from the unimaginative view of the geologist.

"He tells us that he found this stone formation precisely where Rohlfs said it was, and with the physical characteristics set out in the German report. He had the same difficulty that confronted Rohlfs; the desert tribes would not permit him to make any very careful examination of it. It was only with extreme difficulty that he was permitted to approach it. He was not able to learn why they objected to this inspection. He was impressed that it was merely the accumulated suspicion which would attach to any expedition going into that region— only one or two white men had ever entered it.

"He reported also the death of Slaggerman on the way out. He had strayed from the expedition, and been killed. And that was all!" Lord Dunn leaned over in his chair, got the half-burned cigar out of the plate, and relighted it.

"But that was not all: Rohlfs' drawing was genuine, and Slaggerman had told the truth. Bradmoor said that when the peak of stone began first to form itself before him, he was amazed beyond any words to express it. The thing did look like a cathedral, like an airy rose-colored Gothic thing in the sky. In spite of Slaggerman at his elbow, he was quite sure, as Rohlfs had been, that the thing was a mirage. It could not be anything else.

"It was too delicate, too artistically perfect to be anything real.

"It was a fairy mosque, raised by some enchantment— like a Bagdad story; and as they traveled toward it, it grew more clearly outlined. It was only at the very base of the thing that one lost the illusion; then it became the peak of a mountain thrusting up through the desert sand, composed of some hard, reddish stone.

"Bradmoor said they had only a day; the sheik of the desert tribes treated him precisely as he had treated Rohlfs— he gave him a day. But he was luckier than Rohlfs. He did not put in the time traveling around this stone formation. He set out with Slaggerman alone, leaving a guard in his camp.

"Bradmoor said that the German went at once to the path he and Rohlfs had discovered. It was there precisely as the drawing showed it.

"They at once set out on this path.

"It was narrow, worn into the stone, as Rohlfs' drawing showed. The wearing was uneven, as though the rock had been softer in places; but the path was at no point worn in the stone to a less depth than eight or ten inches. Bradmoor was able to go along it, but the big German traveled with extreme difficulty.

"Bradmoor thought the path had been made by persons of a smaller stature than the modern European.

"The path wound about among the peaks of stone until it reached a beetling ledge at the top."

Lord Dunn paused, ground out the lighted end of the cigar on the plate, and put it down.

"I forget the precise details," he said. "Bradmoor had them minutely. I suppose by the very accuracy of his detail he hoped to make the story so realistic that it could not be doubted. Anyway, what he found was a small chamber, cut out in the highest peak of stone, and an image on a sort of stone bench.

"Bradmoor said this image was carved out of blue ivory. Of course, there isn't any such thing as blue ivory, and there could have been no piece of ivory in the world large enough. The image was about four feet high, and in proportion.

"He said the thing profoundly puzzled him. He could not understand where a piece of ivory that size could have been found in any age of the world. And then, when he began to examine it carefully with a magnifying glass, he found that it was made of a number of pieces, fitted together so that they interlocked.

"He thought the ivory had been dyed. But it was a dye of which we have no knowledge, for it had entered the grain of the ivory, and soaked through it. Bradmoor thought it was blue all the way through— at any rate so far as he could determine by scratching it with any implement that he had. He said that the image sat on a sort of bench cut out of the red stone, with its hands together, the palms up, extended between its knees. He said that the features, and the whole attitude of the figure, very closely resembled the Baal or Moloch of some of the early Sumerian tribes.

"There was an inscription cut on the face of the stone below the image. It was in the wedge characters of the old Sumerian priests; it was partly defaced— the opening lines had scaled. Bradmoor and I got his copy of the inscription deciphered. It ran like a verse of Isaiah.

"'His right hand shall be his enemy, and the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.'

"You see," Lord Dunn went on, "it was a threat against anyone who should disturb the god.

"Bradmoor said the expression on the face of the image was one of inconceivable menace, an expression of eternal calm— a vast Satanic serenity— laid down over features exquisitely cruel. The menace in it struck one as with the impact of a blow.

"It stopped even old Bradmoor and Slaggerman when they came to the top of the path before it, and sent their hands to their pistol holsters. The old Duke said he had to compose himself a bit before he could go in.

"Now, that was a good deal for Bradmoor to say. He was a cold-blooded, hard-hearted man on an expedition— not a person to be affected by an image.

"The thing must have been pretty bad.

"They found nothing in the cell with the image. The bench on which it sat had been cut out of the red stone, and there was nothing about in the place, except the partly defaced inscription and a hole in the bench of stone directly under the extended, open hands of the image, between its knees. The hole was circular— about six inches in diameter, and smooth. It seemed to descend into the stone. Bradmoor said he was profoundly puzzled about what this opening could mean. They had nothing with which to explore it, and the whole chamber about them was entirely bare. He went outside where the path began to ascend, and with a small hammer broke off some fragments of stone, and dropped one into the opening. He heard it tumble against something at a short distance, as though it were a piece of parchment— there was a crackling as of paper.

"He bared his arm, and put it down into the opening.

"The hole was perfectly smooth, and descended for about two feet; then it made a slight turn toward the face of the image. Here his fingers came in contact with something that felt like a piece of parchment. He got hold of it with difficulty, and finally brought it up.

"It was a bladder, containing a handful of something that rattled like pebbles.

"It had been dropped into the opening, but had been too large to make the turn to the front as it descended. They cut the bladder open. It was partly full of rubies. They were magnificent rubies— big, pigeon-blood stones, such as are now only found in Burma; and there was a whole handful of them.

"The reason for the hole descending into the stone was now clear. It was a contribution box for the god. The position of the hands open between the knees of the image was also clear— anything placed in them dropped into his contribution box.

"Bradmoor tried it with fragments of stone. They fell out of the hand into the open hole below, and descended. He said he could hear the pieces of stone rattle for a long distance. He could not tell how far. He had no line, and no method of judging how far the hole descended; but it was evident that it was some sort of chute leading to a treasure house, and that it descended for a great distance.

"It had been only by accident that the rubies contained in the bladder had lodged at the turn where he had found them. There was nothing else to be found. The hole was as smooth as glass. Neither Bradmoor nor Slaggerman were able to make a drawing of anything. A rough map was the best the old Duke could ever do with a pencil, and the German knew nothing at all about drawing. They had no camera.

"They had experienced the same difficulty with respect to all implements that happens to every explorer in the desert— the natives always attach some sinister design to them, and they have to be abandoned. Rohlfs had to give up his implements, and Bradmoor had to cache his before he got very far in. A camera could not be used. Even the notebooks had to be written up at night in a tent. One was lucky to be able to take a modern weapon.

"The old Duke copied the inscription, and they put in the remainder of the day trying to get some clew to the treasure house. It must be somewhere below. He said that human understanding staggered when it began to think about what the treasure house might contain. It was evident that the cult of this god had been immense, covering a vast period of time.

"Slaggerman's conjecture was evidently correct. Human feet had worn down the path bringing offerings to this god; and these offerings had all descended into his contribution box beneath him. The enormous treasure thus assembled over an incredible period at the hands of innumerable worshipers was beyond any sane conjecture.

"Bradmoor said the conception was so overpowering that neither he nor Slaggerman thought very much of the handful of rubies at the time. He put them into his pocket, and the descending night found them hunting for the treasure house.

"But they never found it.

"In fact, they were never able to get out of the path by which they had ascended, and when night came they were compelled to return to their camp.

"There they found themselves practically prisoners. The desert sheik had followed with his retainers— their permit of a day was up. They were unable to move the sheik; their solicitations only made the tribes more determined, more suspicious. So they had to go back.

"Now, that's what Bradmoor found. He told me all about it, as I have said, when he came to make up his monograph for the Royal Society. He told it with accurate and elaborate detail— much of which I have omitted; and then he asked me my opinion.

"And I advised him to leave it out.

"I saw clearly what the result would be. The critics favorable to him would regard the story as the imaginings of a man broken down by fever, or overwrought at the end of an immense journey and great hardships; the unfavorable critics would merely say that it was a fantastic lie! In either event the man's reputation would suffer; and as I have said, the reputation of everybody else who undertook to make a serious exploration would suffer also.

"There was another thing Bradmoor told me that I advised him to leave out. It could do no good to give the correct report of it, and it might do a great deal of harm. When Slaggerman deserted the expedition on its return march, he took two things with him that the old Duke does not mention in his monograph— the big double express rifle, and the rubies.

"The German knew where the rubies were. In fact, Bradmoor had made no effort to conceal them from him. When they had leisure to examine them, they were amazed at the size and beauty of these jewels. Bradmoor had never seen anything like them. The German said that they were equal to the Crown jewels, both in size and luster.

"The two men frequently discussed them. It was a fascinating subject, and they speculated as to where the treasure house was under that peak of red stone, and what it contained— if these jewels were samples.

"As the two men were the only persons in the expedition who had any knowledge of the jewels, Bradmoor carried them in the medicine box, rolled up as though they were a package of bandages. The double express was the only rifle the expedition now possessed.

"When the German disappeared, Bradmoor stopped and endeavored to find him. He did not at the time think that Slaggerman had undertaken to make away with the treasure they had found. When he discovered the loss of the rifle, he imagined that the German had set out on some hunting expedition. Then he discovered that the German had taken his camping equipment with him, and some of the personnel of the expedition— evidently bribed to accompany him.

"Bradmoor did the only sensible thing possible. He offered a reward to the sheik of the district to bring the German in. Two days later he did bring him in, dead. He had been shot through the chest with the double express.

"The Arabs were not very definite about how the German came to be killed. It was clear, of course, that they had located his camp, crept in on him and shot him with his own gun. But they did not admit that. The sheik knew too much to be involved with the death of a white man.

"They had a very good story. They said they found Slaggerman dead, shot through the chest with his own gun. It was an accident, they supposed. They did not know. It was the will of Allah!

"They brought the gun, and every item of equipment which Slaggerman had taken, but they did not bring in the rubies. Bradmoor himself carefully searched the body, and through every part of the equipment, but he could not find them. He searched the camping place where they had found Slaggerman, and his other camping places; but there was no trace of them.

"Bradmoor said there was no use to ask the sheik or any of his people. If they had them, they would, of course, not give them up; and if they did not have them, it would make only useless complications to advise them now that he had found such a treasure.

"Nevertheless Bradmoor did not go on. He remained in camp for several days, and he continued to search through the clothes and equipment the German had taken away. He said the thing got on his nerves. He got to thinking about the German and the menacing blue image in its cell of rose-colored stone!

"And then he would put the Arabs to inquisition again on the manner of Slaggerman's death. But he learned nothing further. He never found any trace of the rubies; and presently he set out on his return trip."

Lord Dunn stopped in his narrative. He made his characteristic gesture, putting out his hands like a bookmaker dismissing a worthless bet.

"Now," he said, "that is what happened to Bradmoor. Marquis thinks there was no adventure in his life connected with the mysterious character of his death. When you come to think about it, wasn't this adventure connected with it? Wasn't the old Duke shot through the chest precisely as the German Slaggerman was shot, and apparently with the same sort of weapon?

"Bradmoor said that he recovered the double express rifle. I never thought to ask him what he did with it; but he evidently brought it back with him, and put it into the gun case in the room where he was killed. It is not in the gun case there; it's gone, and I believe it's the weapon with which Bradmoor was killed.

"Now, here is a coincidence, if you look at it in one direction. Of course, if you look at it in a direction equally convincing and probably more sensible, it isn't a coincidence. The Arabs shot Slaggerman; and we don't know who shot Bradmoor. But isn't there another side to it— the appalling menace in that ivory image, and its threat cut beneath it on the stone bench!

"It had guarded its treasure over an incredible period of time. Of course, it is easy to laugh at the notion; but we don't know what sinister influences were at one time abroad in the world, or what control they were enabled to enforce over events. All the religious legends of every race are crowded with stories of it.

"You can't dismiss them with a gesture.

"Bradmoor did not feel altogether at ease about it. He said he could not get the notion of the deadly menace of that strange blue image out of his head! There it sat in its eternal Satanic calm above its threat cut in the rose-colored stone: 'His right hand shall be his enemy. And the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.'

"And what became of the rubies? The German was no fool. Everything he did was practical and well-planned. He got his counter-expedition together carefully and slowly, and he did not leave Bradmoor until he was sure he could get out. He took the only rifle the expedition had, and he took the rubies.

"Now, what became of the rubies?

"It was an immense treasure. Bradmoor said he and Slaggerman had estimated the value pretty carefully. The German knew what such stones were worth in Europe; they could not have had a less value than one hundred thousand pounds sterling.

"The German did not take any chance with such a treasure. Before he robbed Bradmoor's medicine chest, he had figured out how he intended to conceal these jewels, and where he intended to conceal them. There could have been no doubt about that. There was only one place where he could have concealed them, and that was somewhere about himself. He could not have cached them in the hope of returning for them; and he could not have risked them anywhere except near to his own hand. That is the reason Bradmoor had not found them when he searched the body.

"But there is another hypothesis: suppose the Arabs did not find them? And that touches upon another theory with respect to his death. How do we know that the sinister influence expressing itself so appallingly in the physical aspect of that blue ivory image and its deadly threat, did not, in some manner, concern itself with the death of this German, who had helped to outrage its treasure house?

"And when you get into that idea, does it not follow along to the death of Bradmoor? After all, he was the main offender. He instigated the outrage, and he carried it out. If the blue image got Slaggerman with the double express, may it not— let's venture on the idea, anyway— have got the old Duke with the double express?

"The gun is gone, and we find Bradmoor shot through the chest! Of course, I am not advancing any theory about it. My position is: I don't know. If I were as bold an adventurer into the fantastic as the butler's mother, I would say the blue image got Bradmoor, just as it got Slaggerman.

"Let's consider some of the evidences that the old woman attached to her theory, the items which we know to be correct. The old Duke was afraid of something, and that fear developed, and finally got to be a kind of monomania.

"Now, what was he afraid of?

"He was not the sort of man to be afraid. No one could have undertaken the things he undertook in explorations if he had been a timid person. Any natural menace would not have put old Bradmoor in fear.

"Was it an unnatural menace?

"I don't know. But when you can't think of anything else, when no other hypothesis gets us anywhere in any direction, are we not driven back against that sinister inscription?

"'His right hand shall be his enemy. And the son of another shall sit in his seat. And I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.'

"Only," he added, "I don't understand the promise in it."

Now, this is the story as Lady Joan's guests related it to me on that night. There was some desultory talk after Lord Dunn had concluded; and then the party broke up. Sir Godfrey Simon, at the step of his motor, handed me a folded paper: "Read that," he said, "not now— to-morrow, when your head's cool."

I had noticed him writing, on a tiny pad, with a thin silver pencil, while Lord Dunn was in the body of his story. I thrust the paper into my pocket, and Sir Godfrey Simon's motor turned out into the highroad.

I retained the memory of his big, inscrutable sphinxlike face.

3

WE WENT outside, Joan and I, when the discussion of the mystery of Bradmoor's death had been given over for the evening, and Lord Dunn, Sir Godfrey and Marquis had gone.

Joan slipped a light opera cloak over her evening dress. It was a heavenly night. There was a great white moon over the sea.

We walked through the formal gardens from the cottage, passed the great stone house, to the sheer rock where the current of the Atlantic ran in under the window— where the mystery of Bradmoor's death had been enacted.

The ancient house was sinister, with the white moonlight on the walls. It stood on the rock, sheer over the sea. The grounds about it had been laid out by a king's gardener, but it had fallen by neglect into a wild beauty. The hedges were uncut, the walks overgrown with grass, the shrubbery sprawled in great clusters. With the moon on it, it was like the deserted gardens of some dead city in a Bagdad tale.

The house had been taken over by the old Duke's creditors, in the financial wreck after his death. Joan had gone to live in the lodge cottage at the land end of the place. The beautiful things from the house— her own possessions left to her by her mother at her death— had been transferred into it. It was the magnificence of these things that contrasted so markedly with the crudities of the cottage.

She was not the dead man's daughter. He had married, late in life, the widow of the Marquis of Westridge; he had no children. The girl was Westridge's daughter. But she had lived on here after her mother's death, and it was evident that a great love for the place was in her.

She had grown up in its magnificence— the magnificence of a fairy story— and in a belief that it would always remain...She spoke softly, gently, affectionately about it, as we stood there in the white moonlight above the sea, looking down into the dark water that moved in against the black, smooth-worn cliff below the tragic window.

The moving of the water stimulated a subconscious query in me, and I uttered it aloud.

"I wonder," I said, "what would become of anything that leaped into the water here; would it be carried out into the sea, or would it be cast up somewhere?"

The girl replied that long ago, when she was a little child, a fisherman had been drowned in the sea under the window, and his body had been discovered later in the sand of an inlet some quarter of a mile farther along the cliff. She pointed to it. We could see a patch of white where the sand extended, in a brief arc of beach, to the water.

I don't know that I mentioned actually in words the suggestion that moved vaguely in me— the nebulous idea that the thing that had accomplished Bradmoor's death might have drowned in the sea here, and its body gone ashore like that of the dead fisherman. I don't think I even undertook to imagine what the thing might be. Perhaps it was only the will to walk on with the girl in this mystic fairyland into which the witchery of the moon had changed the world. At any rate we went along the path through the neglected gardens, down the broken ledge, until we came out on the arc of sand. The girl sat down on a bit of wreckage, her hands clasped about her knees, looking at the sea; and I walked about in an indolent inspection of the inlet.

But the thing of particular and vital interest to me was this girl, silent here in the moonlight; her dark hair drawn back from the beautiful oval of her face, her great eyes fixed on the sea beyond her, her lips parted, her body motionless. I had not seen her for three years; and it seemed impossible that the thin, greateyed girl— who had laughingly promised to go with me to America, when I should come again for her— had grown into this magnificent creature! And my mind ran back to the one time I had kissed her. I recalled it as an hour out of a fairy day.

It had been three years ago, on my visit to England. Joan was only a slender slip of a girl then. We had ridden to a distant village along a highway bedeviled with motor cars, and we had determined to come back across the moors above the sea.

I remember the narrow sheep path that led up from the valley onto the plateau of the moors, and the long, almost sheer descent falling away a thousand feet into the valley below— not a ledge of stone, but a smooth slope grassed over with turf.

But it was as deadly dangerous as though it had been spikes of stone; there was barely width for a horse, and a misstep would have sent horse and rider rolling into eternity. We came at the top into a fairy cove, golden soft in the sun, and looking out over the sea. We stopped and got down and stood a moment by the horses.

Joan began to fondle the silky muzzle of her horse. And all at once I realized the heavenly creature she would presently become.

"Joan," I said, "will you go with me to America when I come again?"

She did not reply. She pressed her face against the horse and looked out shyly at me.

And I caught her up into my arms, and kissed her.

For a moment she was relaxed, soft like an armful of blossoms, and then she tore away, swung into her saddle and raced over the moor...And ten days later, in the middle of the Atlantic, I got a wireless message of three letters: "Yes."

No name, no address, only that single word materializing out of an Arctic fog.

For a long time there was no word between us now.

I stood looking down at the girl, flooded with the soft moonlight, the white sand stretching from her feet to the dark water, where the tide went slowly out. All the events in this complicated tragedy seemed to remove themselves, and to leave only the charm of this girl— alone here, as in an abandoned world.

Finally I spoke: "You will keep your promise to me now, Joan; you will go with me to America?"

Her voice, when she replied, was low, even, without emotion.

"No," she said, "that is precisely what I never can do, now."

I stood in a sort of hypnotic apathy, and she went on in that level, dead voice.

"You are not free," she said, "and so you cannot decide this. It is I, who am free, who must make the decision for us. It is not a pleasant thing to say, but the fact is, now, that you are not free to make a choice...A bankrupt peer of England would be an intolerable thing. You must find a wife, now, who can bring a fortune."

I made an impatient gesture.

"But I do not intend to take this title," I said. "I shall return to America, to my profession, and you shall go with me."

She cried out in sharp protest:

"Oh, no...England has desperate need of the sort of man you are, Robin. You are an Englishman; after all, you cannot abandon England. The curse of this land is an aristocracy that thinks only of amusing itself. It needs the energy, the vigor that men like you would bring to it. The law in America is not the narrow profession that it is in England. One goes to the head of affairs in it, in America, as you are going. One becomes there a directing intelligence of great affairs, a guiding factor in all the national events that enable a civilization to advance."

She paused a moment; then she went on in the same dead, even voice:

"You are going to the head of affairs in America; but you must give it up. You must come back to England. You must take the position which this title will give you, and you must bring your energy and vigor of intellect to the aid of the land that needs you. And— and you must marry some one with a fortune...Our dreams are ended, Robin."

She stood up with a whimsical smile.

"Besides, there is the promise of the Blue Image— the promise to you, included with a threat against the dead man."

And she repeated the strange words vaguely, as one repeats something in a distant memory:

"'His right hand shall be his enemy. And the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.'"

She went on, a little quaver in her voice, hard-held, I thought, but with a courage that would not fail:

"You see, Robin, you are to sit in his seat, for you are the son of another. There is no common blood in the two branches of this house, as everybody knows. This line was the pretender, as your grandfather's suit made clear. But it had the right of possession, and the conservative English law would not put it out.

"And so, Robin," the hard-held voice went on, "you must get a rich wife, and 'laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.'"

I came over a step nearer to her.

"Joan," I said, "this is all the veriest nonsense. I love you. Will you go with me to America?"

Her voice, when she replied, had returned to its vague, even note, to its quality of memory.

"You must sit in his seat," she said. "It has been foretold in this strange affair."

"Then," I cried, "I shall sit in his seat with you."

I laughed and went on: "I put the thing up to the Blue Image. If he wishes his prophecy carried out, let him see to it. If he enriches us, and guides our feet, and strengthens our hearts, then I will sit in the dead man's seat, and we shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces. If the great God of the Mountain is able to do this, let him do it, and if he is not able to do it, then you will go with me to America. Shall we declare it is a bargain with him?"

I stooped over, took her hands and drew her gently to her feet. But before I got her into my arms, she cried out, and pointed to the beach, where the water was creeping slowly out.

There was something emerging from the sand, like the end of an iron rod. We went down to it. In the clear moonlight I was able at once to see what it was. It was the heavy barrels of a rifle.

I drew it out of the sand. It was the double express that had disappeared on the afternoon of Bradmoor's death.

A surge of interest in the mystery returned. One phase of it, at least, was explained; whoever had assassinated Bradmoor had thrown the gun into the sea, and it had washed ashore here. We took it back with us to the lodge in a breathless interest, for we had a clew to this mystery; and incoherent explanations began to present themselves.

We took it into the dining room, and put it down on the great table. We lighted the candles, and sat down to examine it. It was rusted from the sea water. It was difficult to work the mechanism of the rifle in order to throw open the breech; and we searched among the articles brought into the cottage for oil, and implements to clean the barrels, and a screw driver. I had to take the rifle apart in order to find if it was loaded. The double barrels contained two cartridges, I found: one of them had been fired; the other remained loaded.

It was a heavy gun, with a big, hard rubber butt plate like that to be found on the modern shotgun. I made a discovery when I took the weapon apart:

The catch on the triggers had been filed.

Now, as a matter of fact, the pull on these heavy rifles is usually some ten pounds; but the catch on the triggers on this rifle had been filed until they were practically hair-triggers.

This rifle could be fired with the slightest touch on the triggers.

This seemed incomprehensible to me. A rifle like this with a hair-trigger would be an impracticable and dangerous weapon. No big game hunter would have ever thought of so filing the triggers. It must have been done with a deliberate intention— for some particular reason.

It was clear that this was the weapon with which the old Duke had been killed, for one barrel had been discharged. It was, therefore, more than probable— it was, in fact, certain— that the rifle had been made thus to fire at a touch, for the express purpose of this tragedy.

But who could have wished it to fire at a touch?

Who filed it, and for what definite purpose? I put the rifle together again, and we stood beside it where it lay across the table, the butt toward the stone fireplace. We were both aflame with the possibilities of this discovery. I winged out on the first suggestion that came into my mind.

The triggers had been thus filed for a phantom finger, a finger with no power of this world in the crook of it; and the threat of that old forgotten god— on his bench of rose-colored stone— cut in the wedge writing of the Sumerian priests, came up before me.

We could dismiss ancient religion with a gesture. These sinister gods were impotent images. How could they influence events? But after all, when we looked at the matter fairly, how did we know? The sacred books of every religion in the world were crowded with examples— especially the sacred books of the Jews, upon which our modern religions were all basically founded. What sinister power over events had the magicians of Pharaoh, the witch of Endor, the dead prophets of Yahveh!

And I could see this hideous idol of blue ivory moving about the doomed man, invisibly.

But I could not see it as Lord Dunn imagined, stumping heavily down from its seat of rose-colored stone to destroy the man who had outraged its dignity and looted it of its treasure. It seemed a nimble, insidious thing like that Devil's imp around which the butler's mother had built up her fantastic theory. I could see an avenging agent, of this sinister image, like that. Taking the doomed man at the moment of his unconcern— with a trigger filed to its phantom finger— and then slipping through that narrow slit in the wall to leap off into the sea, casting away the rifle as it descended!

And then the accident happened that unlocked the mystery of Bradmoor's death, like a key turned in the lock of a closed door.

So many involved suggestions were moving in my mind, that, I fancy, I failed to remember the change that had been made in the mechanism of the rifle, and I no longer thought about it. The old established knowledge of such weapons must have taken the place of what I had just discovered, for in resting my hand on the table beside the rifle, I touched one of the triggers with my finger.

I had forgotten that the opening of the breech had thrown back the hammers.

There was an explosion. The big lead bullet flattened against the stone of the opposite wall, and the gun leaped back from the table, the butt striking the stone corner of the chimney.

Joan cried out, and I stood for a moment astonished.

Then I realized another thing that threw a ray of light into this mystery. The heavy recoil of this gun would carry it backward; and it carried it backward with enough violence to cause it to be thrown entirely off the table. It was Joan who caught the meaning of this thing.

"Did you see that?" she cried. "How it leaped back of itself, without being touched?"

"Yes," I said. "These rifles all have a heavy recoil. They are apt to bruise the shoulder unless they are tightly held."

"But it leaped back," she cried. "It leaped back of itself!"

Then she came around the table to me.

"If that rifle had been lying in the narrow slit of the window, it would have leaped out into the sea— it would have leaped out of itself!"

She took hold of my arm.

"Think about it! What does it mean? What does it mean that the gun has been made to fire with a touch?"

What did it mean?

I began to think madly along the line her suggestion indicated— the gun in the loophole— in the slit in the window: it would leap out into the sea when it was fired— and it would have leaped out, as she said, without being touched, without the assistance of any human agency!

I caught at the suggestion.

"That is true," I said; "it would have leaped back out of the window of itself, without being touched by anybody."

"After it was fired," she said. "But it had to be fired first...Now, what did it mean that the mechanism was so filed that a touch would fire it? And what touch fired it? Who was it that wished the rifle to disappear after it was fired?"

She went on, her eyes wide, her face white, the tips of her fingers straining against the edge of the table:

"Not an assassin, for he could have thrown the rifle into the sea; it must have been someone who could not have thrown it in. Who after the shot was fired had to depend on the recoil of the rifle itself to cause it to disappear?"

Again I winged out into fantastic regions.

That old sinister god at his work of vengeance would require a slighter materialization than I had imagined. The heavy double express would itself leap into the sea if it lay in the slit of the wall and the triggers were touched by a phantom finger. But it would require to be placed there and trained on the doomed man seated in his chair, concerned with the preparation of his fishing tackle.

How had the Blue Image managed it?

Granted that it could move invisibly about Bradmoor on that afternoon, could it also move this heavy weapon invisibly about? And if it could also do that, why require that the triggers should be filed for a phantom finger? If it, or its invisible agents, could thus handle the heavy double express, would a ten-pound pull disturb them?

But had they handled it? And a line of that sinister threat cut in the rosecolored stone returned to me:

"I will encourage his right hand to destroy him."

The threat was not that this old, dread, mysterious, forgotten god would do the deed himself.

"His right hand shall be his enemy. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him."

It was thus that the threat ran.

It was the doomed man's own hand that the Blue Image would set about this deadly work. It was his own hand that should carry out all these material preparations.

And then I saw the answer to Joan's query.

"Bradmoor!" I cried. "But how could he have fired the rifle?"

Joan looked at me a moment, her face tense in its abstraction.

"There was the fishing rod in his hand; he could— he could— —"

And then I saw the whole thing as the old Duke had so carefully planned it. He knew that the recoil of this heavy rifle would carry it out of this window into the sea after it was fired. He had filed the catch on the triggers until a touch would fire it; then he had placed the rifle carefully, adjusting its position so the bullet would strike him in the chest near the heart; and sitting down in the chair in the middle of the room, on that afternoon, he had touched the trigger with the end of the fishing rod. The great lead bullet had plowed its way into his chest; the gun had leaped into the sea; and Bradmoor's body had crumpled in its chair— some flies in his left hand, and the fishing rod gripped in the fingers of his other hand.

And he had left behind him a mystery that no man could solve!

The splash that the old woman had heard, sitting in her cottage, was caused by the heavy double express descending into the water!

And then I remembered the penciled note that old Sir Godfrey Simon had handed to me, when, after the dinner, he had got into his motor:

"To-morrow," he had said, "when your head is cool, read it." I brought it out of my pocket now, and tore it open. There were a few lines in a clear, fine hand like copperplate.

"Bradmoor killed himself, of course," the note ran. "I don't know how he did it, but in some clever way. They have all gone out like that— his grandfather, who left his death on the West Coast to look like an accident, and his father, who pretended to fall from the steeple of the chapel. There has always been a monomania of fear preceding the act. It is a common symptom. I said they were all under a curse. A streak of insanity is a curse. It is the worst form of curse, because it cannot be prayed off in a meeting-house."

I read the note and put it down on the table before the girl. She moved her head slowly, her eyes wide, her face still in its tense abstraction.

"The Blue Image carried out his threat," she murmured. "It was the dead man's right hand that destroyed him; it was his right hand that was his enemy! How awful!"

But the Blue Image, as a directing factor in this tragedy, seemed all at once a remote, fantastic notion, like the devil theory of the old paralytic helpless in her chair.

Sir Godfrey Simon had been right— alone of all the theorists right. The curse on this family had extended itself to Bradmoor. Sir Godfrey had seen it on the way. He had marked the evidential signs of it, the monomania of fear that preceded it, and the care to give the act the distinguishing features of a criminal agent.

Bradmoor's father and his grandfather had staged their self-directed act for accident, the tragedy of chance. But the old Duke had gone a step beyond them, and with a stroke of genius had put his exit beyond a conjecture of self-direction. It was the cunning of the unbalanced mind in a moment of inspiration.

And it had sent the keenest intelligence of England to fantastic theories. Henry Marquis and his hard-headed experts had stopped against a wall; the countryside had gone full cry after a devil theory; and men like the Earl of Dunn, accustomed to the somber realities of life, had seen no solution except through the supernatural agency of a Dunsany god on his bench of rose-colored stone.

And yet how snugly the whole thing ran in the grooves of this fantastic theory!

It held, it enveloped the girl, beyond me. And how lovely, how desirable a thing she was! And the bargain with the god, struck in that mood of half humor, on the arc of sand, under the moon, before the sea, returned to me.

If there was any virtue in the legend cut in the wedge characters of the ancient Sumerian priests on the bench of rose-colored stone below that sinister image, let it now appear. If it was the moving factor in this affair, let it go on. If it had, as its threat ran, encouraged Brad-moor's right hand to destroy him, let it carry out the remainder of that legend. And the words of it returned striding through my memory:

"His right hand shall be his enemy; and the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces."

The thing was like the pronouncement of a fate. And Bradmoor's death awfully confirmed it.

But was that one fact merely a sinister coincidence— or would the thing go on? If it required faith, here was the faith of Joan, and here was the bargain I had struck.

But the beauty, the charm, the fascination of the girl overwhelmed me. She became in that moment above all things, in any world, desirable, and I said aloud what I had already determined in my heart:

"If the God of the Mountain is so great a god, then let him carry out the remainder of his prophecy, for I shall never give you up."

For a moment there was utter silence. The girl looked about her vaguely, like one in a dream, like one expecting a visitation; and the beauty and the charm of her seemed to extend itself, to fill the empty places of the room.

Then suddenly something on the stones by the hearth came within the sweep of my eye. It looked like a red bead.

I went over and picked up the heavy double express from the hearth. The hard rubber butt plate, striking against the stone corner of the fireplace, had been broken to pieces, and a stream of rubies poured out.

The explanation was clear.

Slaggerman, when he had robbed Bradmoor in the desert, had unscrewed the butt plate, hollowed out the stock, and concealed the treasure in it. As in a sort of dream I gathered up the handful of great gleaming rubies, and put them on the table.

Then I turned toward the girl, standing with her arms hanging, her lips parted, her eyes wide with wonder.

She came with a little cry into my arms.

"You shall sit in his seat," she said. "The God of the Mountain has carried out his prophecy."

I drew her in against my heart.

"But not all of it," I said. "I hold him to the letter of that contract. 'I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life.'"

But her face crimson with blushes was bedded into my shoulder, and her hand creeping up, covered my mouth.

_________________

2: The Blackmailer

MY AMAZEMENT at the painting above the mantel in the smoking room did not escape Sir Rufus.

It was the notorious Lady Gault in the most beautiful frame that one could buy in Bond Street. I was astonished to see her picture in this house, or in any house.

She was an unspeakable person.

Sir Rufus had sent me word to ride over and sit with him. The fifth Duke of Dorset was expected on this night. The great old English house, above the ancient oak trees, and the dark, swift river, was lighted and silent, with that tense vague expectancy which inanimate things seem sometimes able to take on. Sir Rufus was the greatest surgeon in England. He was alone in the smoking room but for me, with a bottle of port on the table at his elbow.

He watched me looking at the picture.

"There is another that goes with it," he said. There was a sort of glee in his voice. "One I always bring out when I am here." He pointed to a little frame beyond the bottle of port. It was the Rajah of Gujrat, photographed by "The Bystander" at one of the Ranelagh polo games.

Sir Rufus laughed.

"You will understand this," he said. "There will be a reason for this picture here. It was the Indian Rajah of Gujrat who came to the rescue of the young duke's wrecked fortune."

I knew what Sir Rufus was driving at.

It was the inexplicable purchase at the moment of crying need of that great barren tract of deer forest in Argyleshire for a fabulous sum— a sum beyond all reason, beyond all sense. The deer forest was a practically valueless property. It was hardly an asset of the wrecked estate, and to the amazement of the whole of England this Indian Rajah had come forward with an offer of one hundred thousand pounds sterling for it!

It was not worth five thousand pounds sterling!

It was not, in fact, worth anything. An immense barren mountain with a vast rain-soaked moor, extending into the Firth of Lorn.

What value could the Rajah of Gujrat see in it?

Scotland was the last land in the world that a native Indian prince would wish to live in. England was cold and wet enough; what the Rajah of Gujrat should have been seeking was a dry land, baking in the sun.

Here was a mystery that no man in England could unravel.

The Rajah had never set foot on the estate after its purchase. He had never gone to see what he had bought. It had very nearly escheated to the Crown from neglect. Why, then, had he paid one hundred thousand pounds sterling for it? I took a cigarette out of a lacquered Japanese box on the table and lighted it. "I can understand why the Rajah of Gujrat might be set up here," I said. "He was the Fairy Friend, by whose mysterious aid all these things have resulted." Sir Rufus poured out a bottle of port and drank it slowly.

"Why, no," he said, "it was the woman over the mantel who was the Fairy Friend."

The words brought me up sharply before the woman.

She was there in the exquisite oval frame, as she had so often been notoriously before us in life. The big, determined bony face; the sharp, hawk eyes, that had an aspect of a bird of prey. She was the worst woman in England. I don't mean immoralities. I mean she was the most dangerous woman in England. She wasn't a factor in love affairs. She had a profession. She was the greatest blackmailer in the world!

She was of a good family, a distinguished family; determined in any direction it chose to set out on. She had chosen to set out in the direction of the devil, and— well, she outdistanced all competitors. It was an insult to know the woman; it was an unspeakable outrage to have her picture up.

I saw the smile deepening on Sir Rufus's face.

He twisted the cigarette a moment in his fingers, and his voice went into a soft, facetious note.

"It is I," he said, "who am the instigator of this abomination. I put the picture up there. They"— he made a slight gesture toward the far-away portions of the great English house— "the Two Innocents"— he meant the young duke and his American wife— "don't know who she is. He doesn't even remember her. It's hardly a wonder; she was in a fury of the fiends the only time he ever saw her. He thinks she is a friend of mine, and keeps the picture in a cupboard until I come down, and then he sets it up."

He laughed again.

"She was never a friend of mine, but she was a friend to him with the friendship mentioned in the Scriptures!

"She died in one of my rest houses in London, when she might have lived forever in a yacht on the Mediterranean."

"I know. Heaven, what a world it is!"

He got up with a sudden energy, and threw the glass down on the floor. It broke into a dozen pieces.

"She was the Fairy Friend," he said; "but for her none of it would have happened; they wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be here, nor the thing that will happen to-night."

I thought Sir Rufus was drunk. And there must have been some evidence of the thing in my face, for he crossed to the writing table, picked up two pencils, sharpened at the points and, taking one in either hand, extended his arms and brought the points of the two pencils together before him. The two points touched, and were held without the slightest tremor. The man had the steadiest hands of any human creature in the world. A bottle of port could not unhinge a nerve in him.

He took his toll of the cellar while he waited for the new duke.

The only part he elected to play in the matter was to wait. His theory about such things was to leave the local man alone, if the local man had sense enough to leave nature alone. In the most important instance like this one, or the most unimportant, he never varied the plan.

"I am here for the emergency," he said, "if there is one, and until it arises I shall sit by the fire."

It was to have some one wait with him by the fire that brought me in. All the time I was looking at the picture. How could anyone, even Sir Rufus, have the effrontery to put this woman's picture in the young duke's house? He selected a cigarette, and went back to his chair.

"You got your conception of the natures of people out of the copy books, Sir Henry Marquis," he said. "You think only the good do good. Heaven's enervating; that's the fact about it, Marquis. For a big thing, for a tremendous thing, for some sacrifice that takes your breath away, give me a creature out of hell!"

He made a vague gesture.

"I have had the confidence of the world, like a priest, for half a century. I have seen the insides of all of them, and I give it up. I can't tell the good ones." He extended his hand in a sort of caressing gesture toward the picture.

"That's the worst woman in the world...And this is what she did:

"Mahadol of Gujrat— that lightly colored gentleman in the frame to the left of my hand— had come over to England. His brother, the Rajah of Gujrat, had disappeared; joined a rising of the Sikhs in the north of India, the Mahadol said. Anyway, he had cleared out boots and baggage at a time the Germans were supposed to be stirring up the Sikhs. They found the English uniform that he had left behind him, to show that he had gone out of our service, at any rate.

"And there was a German resident out there, a Doctor Leouenheim, a sort of scientific professor of sorts, as he gave himself out to be; a Berlin agent, the Mahadol said, in the desertion plot with the Rajah. He disappeared a day or two later."

Again he indicated the picture with his hand.

"And Lady Gault was out there, too, it seems. She was anywhere that the business of her profession could be advanced. She broke the Sirdar of Egypt, as you remember, and there were things in India that she needed to know."

He paused a moment and regarded the picture.

"Mahadol came posthaste to England. He wished to be confirmed in the succession. But the Foreign Office is a little slow; sometimes a little skeptical; sometimes, strangely, a little careful.

"Mahadol went down to Somerset to play polo and to wait, while the Foreign Office considered him. He was sitting tight at a little hotel in Somerset, when one evening Lady Gault walked in on him.

"It was a heavenly night, like a fairy day.

"She told me all about it— every detail.

"There was a polo dance in the drawing-rooms below. Mahadol had the apartments looking out toward the sea. He was in evening dress; he had just come up.

"For some time he had been watching a yacht anchored in the bay outside, but now he had gone back to an immense chair that the manager had put in for him. The curtains were drawn across the windows. There was a sort of alcove; one could go behind them, and look down at the gardens and the sea, and be in the dark oneself. The curtains shut out the lights of the sitting room from the window recess.

"He had come back from behind these curtains and sat down. He was very much concerned; nervous, we would say. He did not understand the English people, and didn't know what the Foreign Office was going to do with him.

"That's what moved him about, like the evil spirits moved the swine. Anyway, it was at this moment that Lady Gault walked in.

"'Mahadol,' she said, 'I shall have to tap you on the shoulder, and ask you to give me a bit of the loot!'

"He didn't understand what she meant, but he knew who she was, and he knew how she was regarded. Unfortunately there was a thing he didn't know: he didn't know how she was feared.

"'What do you want?' he said.

"The woman was amused. 'Now, that's a direct question, Mahadol,' she said, 'and I shall answer it directly. I want one hundred thousand pounds sterling.'

"The big creature in the chair laughed.

"The woman's face took on a mocked, pained expression."

Sir Rufus paused.

"She told me every detail, as I said a while ago, and she acted it out.

"'Now don't laugh, Mahadol,' she said. 'I have got to have one hundred thousand pounds sterling. I can't cut it a shilling. I must pay for the yacht I have borrowed, out there'— she indicated the sea with her hand— 'and I must live on the Mediterranean for the rest of the time I am here. I wouldn't last three months in an English climate. It will take a lot of money. You will be the richest Rajah in India...I shall have to ask you to divide with me.'

"Mahadol thought she was crazy, but he found out differently in a moment. "'I can't be annoyed with you,' he said, and he put out his hand toward the bell cord. She came close to his chair then, and looked down at him.

"'Mahadol,' she said, 'if you put your hand on that bell cord you will never be the Rajah of Gujrat!'

"That brought him up. She saw the hesitation in his face, and quickly took advantage of it.

"'We are a queer people,' she said. 'We object to direct methods. The natural way, of course, when a man is in one's way, is to kill him...Succession by assassination is the oldest method of succession in the world. But it is not favored just now in England. I doubt if one who came into his succession by the direct and effective instrumentality of murder would be confirmed in his titles by our English Office.'

"Mahadol got up. 'What do you mean?' he said.

"The woman looked at a jeweled watch on her wrist. 'Do you remember Leouenheim?...Well, I have his report. I got it out of his lodgings at the residency the night before he disappeared. I don't overlook anything.'

"She seemed to study the face of the jeweled watch.

"'I knew what you were doing, Mahadol, and I didn't object to it, don't get a wrong impression. I am quite willing for you to be the Rajah of Gujrat, provided you are generous.'

"There must have been the menace of the devil in her vulture face.

"'No doubt you are generous, but I prefer to be sure of it. I prefer, in fact, to take no chances on your generosity.'

"She fumbled with the jewels on the watch.

"'I can turn Leouenheim's report over to the Foreign Office.'

"She said that the man's face changed, that it became the color of a handful of ashes. He kept repeating what he had said before.

"'What do you mean?'

"She knew where she had him! She was no fool to go about with threats and nothing behind them. That's what made her the greatest blackmailer in the world; she always had the data.

"She went on.

"'You looked pretty carefully through all the papers Leouenheim left behind him when he followed the Rajah the next day. It was like a German to write a report. You thought of that... But you were thinking behind events, Mahadol. I had already thought of it.'

"Her voice was soft, like the flying of a killer owl.

"'Don't be misled. The report is in Leouenheim's handwriting; no one could imitate it. It would be authenticated in any Foreign Office in the world.'

"Mahadol did not move. The woman looked leisurely about the room for a cigarette, and when she got it she squatted down on a rug before the creature's big feet. Then she went on:

"'The morning following the night on which the Rajah was supposed to disappear, you brought the abandoned uniform, pretty well cleaned up— washed, in fact— and showed it to Leouenheim. He took the coat of the uniform with him. The next day he came to see you. And what he said to you put the fear of God in you, Mahadol. He said:

"'"The Rajah is dead!"'

"She paused and watched the smoke rings from her cigarette climb slowly toward the ceiling. She was in no hurry. She wanted her words to sink in to the bone.

"'Leouenheim didn't know where the Rajah was; he had not seen him; he had talked with no one. He did not know what had occurred; couldn't have known any of the facts connected with the disappearance of the Rajah, except that you had brought to him the abandoned uniform. That was all Leouenheim had to go on.'

"She stopped again. One would have said she was only interested in the smoke rings.

"'You know all that, Mahadol. You had Leouenheim watched. He had not gone out of the residence on that night; no one had visited him; there were no sources of information available to the man. He knew absolutely nothing, could have known nothing, except, as I have said, that you brought to him the abandoned uniform— and only the coat of that. How could he know that the Rajah was dead?

"'You tried to find out how he knew, and his answer was that the evidences in his possession were conclusive, and that he would make a report to the English resident in Gujrat.

"'That was enough for you, Mahadol!

"'That night Leouenheim disappeared, "followed the Rajah," you said.'

"The woman laughed.

"'That was one time you told the truth— precisely the truth, Mahadol! Leouenheim did follow the Rajah!'

"She must have looked like a harpy there before him on the floor, with her big bony face— an abominable creature that had winged out of the pit; her voice like a loathsome caress.

"'But clever as you were, Mahadol, you were not so clever as I. I knew the report had been written before Leouenheim went to see you, and I got possession of it while he was in audience with you. He had written it out, put it into an envelope, and addressed it to the Resident— and I have it.'

"The big creature moved his thick neck as though he felt fingers on it. He tried to hold his composure, but his hands on the arm of the chair jerked. He was like one laid hold of in the dark by an invisible, deadly, illusive assailant. I suppose the woman's soft, loathsome voice behind the vulture face was the worst thing. She had the friendly manner of an ox butcher who has his knife in his sleeve.

"'Don't be disturbed about it, Mahadol!' she said. 'I'll turn the report over to you. But I want one hundred thousand pounds sterling...Think about the thing for a moment. For one hundred thousand pounds sterling you can be the Rajah of Gujrat.'

"Then she got up softly and went behind the curtain. She wanted her words, as I have said, to sink in to the bone.

"The heavy curtains cut off the room like a wall across it. Lady Gault was in the dark here, above was the sky sown over with stars, below the hotel gardens, and beyond the white yacht on a sea of amethyst. She knew what was going to happen. The successful termination of her last adventure was before her. What she had said to Mahadol was no lie. Life was only possible for her in the soft Mediterranean sea, without it she was under a sentence of death. She had no fear of what would happen in the room behind...the trapped prince would divide the loot. And she had that immense uplift of the spirit that attends a sense of victory.

"One can imagine how Mahadol thought about it.

"What had the cursed German written? He knew Leouenheim, a professor from Bonn, a little wizened creature who went about with a lens and a measure of acid— direct, accurate and always right! When he said, 'The Rajah is dead!' he knew.

"But how could he know? Even a professor from Bonn was not clairvoyant. He had seen only the Rajah's coat, and it had been cleaned. How could this miserable German tell by a coat that its owner was dead?

"And the man's mind, like a beast penned in a trap, kept turning backwards on itself.

"He had taken no chance on Leouenheim. If the German knew the Rajah was dead, he knew too much. The Rajah had deserted to the Sikhs in the purpose of a German war plot. It was not for Leouenheim to break down that story. He must follow the Rajah. And so Mahadol had acted in a wisdom large and comprehensive to him...

"He had been swift to act and cunning to conceal the evidences of that action. It was as though he had strangled, weighted and sunk the body of this crime, and here it was, unfastened from the weights, rising into the sun.

"Lady Gault stood for some time before the open window, the cold air on her face. Presently she observed two figures walking in the garden below. They moved slowly without speaking and without touching one another— a young man and a girl, come out into the garden from the dance. The night was like a fairy day. There was a soft moon veiled by a distant mist, and the myriad stars sown over the dome of the sky gave a white light. And the two lovers silent, and in a wrapt melancholy drew down the attention of the woman above them in the window. She leaned over the sill, in the dark, and regarded them...here was God at His eternal game! Her face hardened into a cynical smile.

"God at His game in the garden below, and she at her game, above, in the sitting room of Mahadol of Gujrat! And she had suddenly a profoundly curious impulse; was this thing that labored with every trick, with every artifice, eternally, without ceasing, to the end that life should continue, merely an impulse in nature, continuous and persistent, but blind— or was it an intelligence behind the world? If it were nature there would be waste and it would often fail. It would labor when it could not win with precisely the same vigor, the same care, the same patience with which it labored when it could win. And was she— that was to say, the human intelligence— in its directing of events superior to this thing?

"She leaned over in the window.

"The two figures walking in the garden advanced and seated themselves on a bench before a flowering vine, and a rift, thinned out in the mist, let the moon through. The faces of the two person were now visible in the light, and she knew them. It was the young Duke of Dorset and the girl from America.

"Lady Gault said that she very nearly laughed!

"God was wasting His effort! The properties just inherited by the young duke were bankrupt— she knew to a shilling the value of every estate in England— the girl had no fortune. A union of these two was out of the question. This youth could not take a duchess into beggary, and he knew it; the girl beside him knew it. The fact, certain and inevitable, was between them like a partition of steel.

"And yet this Thing— this Thing behind the world— had labored with an endless patience to accomplish it. It had drawn them together across three thousand miles of sea; it had lured them, enticed them, drugged them with its opiates, enveloped them with emotions until they dared not touch their hands, trust their voices! It was all done with such superb intelligence up to this point. Lady Gault saw that. All that this boy lacked the girl possessed. She was an exquisite blend of distant bloods. She had the fine nerve, the delicate beauty, the mysterious charm that this old English race needed to revitalize it. Everything was right; amazingly, inconceivably right...and it was all for nothing! The woman at the window reflected.

"It was as though she had gone to every care to blackmail one who had nothing in his pocket, or had threatened one with her menace when she had no fact behind it.

"And the comprehension of it stimulated her like a victory. She was superior to this Thing. It would lose in the game it played, but she would win in hers. And she rose and went back into the sitting room.

"The Indian was standing, his back against a table, a polo mallet in his hand.

"Lady Gault laughed.

"'It won't do, Mahadol,' she said, 'you are not lucky at murder. Break the pastern of Lord Winton's gray pony to-morrow in the first chukker; it will relieve you and set him wild.'

"She passed around him, softly like a cheta around a tethered goat.

"'Leouenheim knew from the Rajah's coat that he was dead, and I knew from a broken seam of moss in the palace garden where the dead man was... you removed every trace in that garden, Mahadol, with a devil's cunning— the best Khazi in India couldn't have found a spoor to follow, but you could not knit together a bed of broken moss, and you forgot that when the green edges dried up they would leave a brown line that the eye could see.'

"Then she went back behind the curtain.

"Nothing in the garden below had changed, except that the situation seemed to have grown more tense. The two persons talked together, their voices, but not their words, were audible. The woman above them in the darkness could not hear what they said, but she had no need to hear it. It would be the vague, irrelevant talk of persons bent like a bow.

"She got down on the floor by the window, put her elbows on the sill, her face in her hands, and considered them.

"What fool work to bring a thing like this thus far and then fail with it! But would it fail? That was the point of consuming, dramatic interest to the woman. A blind impulse in nature would fail, but an intelligence would find a way to win. Well, let the thing work out a solution if it could...the responsibility was not on her.

"She very nearly uttered the words.

"And then something happened.

"It was, the woman said, as though one watching another under the will of a hypnotist should suddenly realize that the hynotist had faced about on him.

"The responsibility was on her!

"The sense of it descended like a pressure. And she could not escape it. She tried. What weakness was this, what obsession, what absurdity? But it was of no use. The responsibility was on her!

"God is His universe labored at some great work. Life must go on. It was a chain which for mysterious, unknowable reasons must continue, lest somehow the destiny of all was periled. Did it break, then the labor of all was lost; the immortality of all endangered. Some doom reaching equally to the farthest ancestor; some doom not clear, not possible to get at, but sinister and threatening attended the breaking of that chain. The living, blind and rebellious sometimes denied this, but the dead knew; the very myriads of them seemed to press around her, their faces ghastly!

"She got up, her knees weakened. This old family, strengthened, vitalized, must go on.

"There must be a fifth Duke of Dorset!

"And she staggered about there in the darkness behind that curtain.

"It was not her affair, she was no party; she would not be drawn into this thing. But it was of no use! This thing could not be rejected by any Cain's disclaimer!

"She went back into the lighted chamber.

"The Indian had capitulated. It was in his face.

"She turned on him like a harpy.

"'This thing's ended!' she said. 'You pay a hundred thousand pounds sterling!'

"Her voice was like the edge of a steel tool.

"'Leouenheim found a fragment of bone in a shoulder seam of the Rajah's coat, bedded in the fibers of the cloth— fixed there, I suppose, by the rubbing of your servants when they washed out the blood stains. That fragment of bone would have meant nothing to me, nothing to you. But when Leouenheim saw it he knew that the Rajah was dead. It was a fragment of the stapedial bone of the inner ear. It could only have been removed by an injury resulting in death. She paused. 'When Leouenheim saw that fragment of bone he knew that the Rajah was dead...and when I saw that the moss grown over the covering stone of a cistern in the palace garden was broken along the edge I knew where the dead man was.'

"She went out and down the stairway— vicious, bitter! Like Mahadol, she, too, was trapped! But unlike that weak-fibered creature, the unbroken spirit in the woman snarled.

"She crossed the hall and entered the long drawing-room. The dancers gave her a wide way. She must have looked something awful! At the door to the garden she met the young duke and the girl coming in. They drew back as before a visitation from the pit; but she beckoned to them.

"'Dorset,' she said, 'I have a purchaser for your deer forest in Argyleshire at a hundred thousand pounds sterling... don't cut the price.'" Steps sounded without, and there was a light knocking on the smoking room door.

Sir Rufus sprang up, crossed with a stride, and opened it. A nurse spoke to him. He closed the door softly and remained a moment with his hand on the latch. From far off in the distant upper portions of the house a faint wailing cry descended. And Sir Rufus spoke, his eyes on the painted picture above the mantel.

"You cursed— you blessed— Jezebel, he's here!"

____________________________

3: The Cuneiform Inscription

IT WAS THE SIGNAL that I had so long awaited. I had just come in when the porter brought me the telegram. I was wet, my riding boots were covered with mud, and I was tired. I had been all day in the saddle at a distant meet of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. We had killed in a great wooded gorge beyond Porlock; the rain had fallen constantly, and the vast moors, covered with heather and gorse, swept by the gusts of rain, were like a sponge. A call to a ninety-mile run in a motor on this evening of early September was a thing to shudder at. But I received it with a great upward sweep of the heart! The thing which I knew would eventually happen had arrived, and it was bringing my golden hour with its wreckage.

I sat in the long hall of the hotel; a rain-drenched, mud-splashed figure with a sun-filled face. I must have seemed a strange creature to the hunting folk who passed and the servants who came to take my directions. I was a strange creature; one is always a strange creature when the event on which his life is turning begins to come up in the sky line!

I ordered the best in the kitchen and the cellar, and went up to my rooms for a hot bath and clothes for the road.

Her house was falling in about her, and she had sent for me! At last the thing I had to offer would have a value. That which was nothing to her when she thought her fortune was inexhaustible would now mean the things she could not give up: the stud of hunters in the Dukes country; the string of polo ponies here in Somerset; the gowns, the jewels, all the extravaganza of a gilded life! Two hours later I was on the road north. The big American roadster moved under my hands like a live thing. My driver was in the box behind. I wished some outlet for the inexhaustible vigor that possessed me. The day in the saddle had been nothing; this night in the rain and the dark was nothing. I had the strength of ten like the Galahad of legend— but not for his noble reason. The love of a woman moved me. Would she take, now, what I had vainly offered for three months in England?

For what else could her cryptic telegram say— come?

I knew something from the daily press. Her man of business had hanged himself in London and she was bankrupt; the very house over her head would go. The thing had fallen like an arrow out of the sky; in a moment, as at a witch word; as at the striking of a clock, she had only a pumpkin coach, mice, and the rags of an evening dress— and I raced to her with the fairy lamp that would restore them!

It was a devil's night; a cold chill on the fields, rain, no breath of wind, a vague darkness that seemed to make the visible objects only more indistinct. But it was a night in character with the event. The evil spirit of that hanged man of business would have some favor of the elements— some luck yet. He had surprised every solicitor in London.

His father and his father's father had handled the business of this family for a century with care, with that extreme caution that one can find only in a dingy English office, up two flights of stairs. The hanged man had, in particular, an exclusive control of this estate. The girl's uncle, that eccentric old antiquarian Sir Hector Bartlett, would not be bothered with a business matter. His signature was all the concern Sir Hector granted, and that went over finally to the man of business in a power of attorney to sign. Sir Hector was usually in the East, engrossed with the lost languages of Asia.

He was the greatest authority in the world on these lost languages; he was the one authority. When one mentioned Sir Hector, the learned societies about in the world, so to speak, uncovered. But they had a notion, these learned societies, that toward the end he was mad— perhaps it was out of his bitter contempt for a slower wit; perhaps it was the puzzle he left them for an inheritance, after he had deciphered the great inscription of Darius on the rocks at Behistun and got what it concealed. The learned men said the inscription Sir Hector left for them was an absurdity; but Sir Hector, dying, said it would fit their wits, and the one that could decipher it would get what he had dug up in Asia.

At any rate, unfortunately, the power to sign given by Sir Hector had been extended by his niece, and the man of business had flung the fortune into every wild thing that the intelligence of crooks could bring in to him— as though caution in his race, pressed too far, had gone awfully drunken. The thing had the completeness of a curse— as though the gods of the ancient races, violated in their sanctuaries by Sir Hector, had taken their vengeance on his heir. I smiled in the darkness. If such powers were the authors of this disaster they would not stand aside while I came in to the rescue; they would ditch the car. And the next moment the car very nearly was ditched. A human figure appeared suddenly in the road before me, and to avoid it I skirted the coping of an open bridge. The car skidded and stopped, with a rear wheel within an inch of the edge.

The figure came forward into the light and hailed me. Would I take him up? I could not see the man's face distinctly, but there was something in the voice that was familiar; somewhere, in some distant memory, I had known that voice. It was the voice of a gentleman by some vague quality remaining in it. And so, uncertain whom I had before me, I took him up. But when he had climbed beside me into the seat I was disillusioned. His drenched clothes had about them the odors of a dirty ship, and the man was drunk. His voice was thick, and he had the abominable familiarity of rum-soaked creatures.

He talked; he was going a long way; he had landed in England on this afternoon; he was going to see his godchild. I would be surprised, I would be amazed to know who his godchild was! How far did I go on the road? I hoped to get rid of him, and so told the truth. I would turn at the next crossing for Red House, sixty miles to the north.

The creature tittered. "That's luck," he stuttered in the laugh; "there's where I'm going."

I stopped the car and turned a flash on him. What mysterious creature had I taken up?

At first I was unable to attach a memory; a foul, sodden face appeared under a dirty cap; red-lidded eyes, blue sagging jowls, a nose swollen with liquor, and a slack mouth. It was the face of the worst human derelict I ever saw, and yet its abominations were laid down over something that was well bred in the beast. The creature had one time been a gentleman, but a gentleman gone with every loathsome bestiality to the pit.

"Do you know me, eh, what?" The sodden voice was in a sort of friendly whine.

And all at once I did know him.

"Good Heavens!" I said. "It's Backmartin!"

"Righto!" The whine went up into a little triumphant note. "Lord Backmartin of the Downs in the old day." He buttoned his rain-soaked rag of a coat, and drew his flabby body together in the seat.

"The best back in England, if I do say it...did you see me in the match with the Americans in 'ninety? Great polo, believe me...they win now, these Americans, but we rode 'em off in 'ninety. Did you see me pick out the ball in the last chukker and carry it through to their goal with every devil's son of them after me?...Did you see that game, eh, what? Were you there?" I was there, and I did see it!

The goals were coming up slowly, and one-all was the score up to within three minutes of the last bell. Hudson of the Americans was carrying the ball toward the English end. Victory was in their hands, when Lord Rose cut the ball out by a sort of accident and shouted to Backmartin to take it. And he did take it like a god; the ball went like an arrow; near-side and off-side were alike to him. He had the fastest pony in England; no one of the Americans could reach him; the ball, speeding like a bullet, crossed the goal before the bell rang.

Backmartin was the hero of England on that day.

The Downs joined Red House, where a daughter was newly born to the sporting squire who was brother to Sir Hector Bartlett, and so Backmartin had stood— at the next weekend— in the little chapel at Red House, as godfather to her. And here he was!

I fumbled about the levers and got the car ahead.

What should I do with him?

He was unspeakable. His reputation for seven years in England had been beyond words; and for seven more years his name had not been mentioned. He had been in China, in the Malay Peninsula, in the South Seas. Word of the creature came only when some of the great missionary organizations asked to have him expelled from a district for pretending to be a member of its order. The wrath of God was in their insistence to the Foreign Office. Backmartin and his abominations must get out; and he would journey to some new field of endeavor.

The creature was unspeakable.

And here he was riding with me on a journey to his goddaughter. I was twisted in Satan's fingers. If I put him down I would have no line on the hell plan that he came with. And how could I take him on?

I considered the damned thing as we raced north, and while the creature driveled.

He would be going out of his missionary trade— true it had its benefits, and the customs of the patriarchs as he taught them in the old book of the Scriptures came easy to the savage— but there was a fortune in rum running just now northwest of the Barbados if he could fit a ship. His goddaughter would no doubt be glad to help him— he mentioned a pensioner in her house as the alternative. So that was what the beast was after. And I carried him forward on that purpose; to force a levy for his rum running by the threat of sitting in her door! I could have killed the creature and thrown his rotten carcass into a ditch. My fingers itched for a clutch on him. But when I thought the matter calmly out, there seemed, after all, only one thing to do. I must hold him under my eye until I could get him out of England— when one fought the devil one needed to keep him in the light.

I took him on!

There is a long flag-paved terrace on the garden side of Red House, with casement doors entering the library and the drawing-room. It was very nearly midnight, and the strange events that I set out to write down here were on their way. The night had cleared; the air was warm and sweet as from distant hayfields; the stars were out.

And I waited on this terrace for the woman God denied me!

She had gone a moment to make sure that Backmartin had every comfort the house could give. He had already levied upon it for every use; and now dined and bathed and shaven and in the old squire's evening clothes, he sat in a great leather chair smoking a Havana, with a bottle of Burgundy opened beside him. I could see the smug creature through the glass doors to the library.

It raised the bristles on me. The transformation in this derelict seemed only to make him more perfidious. He blew the smoke thinly out at the corners of his slack mouth, lying back in the chair, his half-closed, red-lidded eyes on the little long-smoked frame above the mantelshelf containing the cuneiform inscription that Sir Hector had left, as a jest, for his contemporaries.

It was painted in India ink on a strip of vellum.

Two things had reduced me from the starry spaces: that Backmartin should be welcomed as a royal guest, and that I should be called here to be thanked for all my courtesies, and dismissed out of her life. My suit was now impossible. She would go up to London on tomorrow to seek some way to live and keep her selfrespect.

She wished to see me while a day of the old life remained. It was a whim I must forgive her. It had put me to some discomfort and a heavy journey; but she wished to say good-by while she remained an equal.

I offered my fairy lamp in vain to her.

I had far more than she imagined. I was, in fact, absurdly rich. What would be needed to clear off every debt I could advance out of an idle income. But she only shook her heavenly head at me. It would be a bribe now! And on that, as on an iron pike, I was impaled. If the thing had been possible before, did I not see that it was now out of the question? When she had a fortune, too, it was myself I offered, and she could consider that, but I offered a bribe now, and she could not take a bribe!

Did I not see how the bribe would taint her? When my blood had cooled, something would whisper to me, "And so it was these baubles that she wanted." She could not face a life against that whisper. And the abominable thing about it was that I was permitted to see how very nearly I had won her. All along she had been extremely fond of me; my admiration of her had not gone unnoticed. She had been attracted to me. We had tastes in common. She might have come in time to consider what I offered. That I was older by some twenty years had been no matter. Women wished experience of life in men and a tough fiber; one could not trust oneself to a callow boy. Youth was selfish, and it was, in particular, this unselfishness of man that a woman longed for.

I walked the great length of the terrace with my fingers locked behind me. What sort of devil was it that ran the world?

In my abstraction I struck my foot against the square of tiles laid down on the terrace as a sort of step before the library door and caught the latch to keep my balance. The noise brought Backmartin up in his chair, and he called to me.

"Oh! I say, come in."

And I had to go in. I could not have the beast feel that I was spying on him. I pretended to be seeking a match for my cigarette. I got one from his candlestick on the table and turned to go out, but he stopped me.

I do not know whether it was a word or a gesture that arrested my attention. I thought the beast, at his ease and with his cocky air, was now more loathsome. One could bear with him, perhaps, in his misery and in his habiliments of squalor, but cleaned and fed and comfortable and turned out for a gentleman he was beyond the patience of the saints. And yet I had to treat him with the courtesies of a guest— a distinguished guest in this country house; a godfather of this girl welcomed back to England!

He made a little gesture toward the framed strip of vellum on the mantelpiece. "Is that the old cock's secret cipher?"

I said it was the puzzle Sir Hector Bartlett had left to his contemporaries: two crowned Assyrian figures preceded by two wedge-signs; followed by a cuneiform inscription, all painted in India ink on a strip of vellum.

"Tell me about it," he said.

I loathed the creature, but I could not fail in what my hostess would expect of me with a guest. And I told him what was well known about the thing.

Sir Hector Bartlett had been the ablest Assyriologist in Europe. Under his hands the ancient writing in Asia had taken the completeness and the uniformity of a national language; before him these languages had been mere fragments puzzled out; and with a large conception he had welded these fragments together and shown this to have been the learned written speech of a great vanished age in Asia. This big conception had lifted the whole thing onto an elevated plane; it had laid forever the claims of Halévy that this wedge-writing was a mere cabalistic script of the Sumerian priests. He had shown it to be the speech of a people.

But the little skepticisms of his contemporaries had enraged Sir Hector. He said they were pretentious persons fit to work out puzzles, and so he had left a puzzle for them in his will. Let them work it out and they would find the treasure that he had found by deciphering the great inscription of Darius on the rocks of Behistun.

"Did he find a treasure?"

Backmartin cut in, shooting out his head with a sort of reptilian eagerness. I explained that such was the common rumor at the time. He was known to have got some concession from the Crown to confirm his right in what he might discover, and a report was current that the Louvre had offered him seventy thousand pounds for what he had shown the director of fine arts in Paris on his way home.

"What did he show him?"

The reptilian gesture was even, if possible, more eager in its appeal.

One did not know, I went on; there was every conjecture. Backmartin's big, loose face worked like soft rubber.

"And he said that thing up there," he indicated the mantel with his hand, "would tell where he hid it, if anybody could understand what it meant?"

"Yes."

"And what did the other learned Johnnies say about it?"

They said it was nonsense, I continued. They said it was an absurdity on its face. No inscription ever had two royal figures drawn in; the wedge was never inclined to the left; it was always pointed toward the right, or downward or aslant to the right, or two combined at their heads to form an angle. They said no word or syllable or gunu-sign of either the Persian, Susian, or Babylonian language was indicated; they said the thing was a hoax.

"But the old cock said they were only fit for puzzles, didn't he?— an' he would make one to fit their wits— eh, what?"

It was what Sir Hector had uttered about it, I told him. He held these learned men in a bitter contempt. Their knowledge of deciphering inscriptions, he said, was confined to the Black Cabinets of Berlin and Vienna, and their knowledge of Assyriology to the sacred books of the Jews— he would leave them an inscription within the zone of their intelligence.

I heard the casement door of the drawing-room to the terrace open, and I went out, Backmartin followed me with a sharp look. He had grasped the situation. He knew that things had gone to pieces and why I came; some of it by inquiry, no doubt, and the remainder by a sort of instinct. He was slack and despicable— baggy in the chair— and the glance seemed to emerge from a trace, in the beast, of something firmer.

I found Marjorie on the terrace; and I advanced toward her as toward something heavenly and denied. She was lovely beyond any descriptive words that I can write here. To catalogue her would be to give no adequate impression. Dark hair, and great deep eyes, and the alluring figure of a Nereid are not descriptive phrases, but they are fragments of fancy that another man— to know the thing I mean— must fit his own beloved woman into.

I loved her, and, to me, she possessed the charm of dreams.

And now that God denied her to me I adored her more. There is this quality, strange and bitter, in a loss, that it doubles the value of the thing removed; when it is gone once, wholly, one sees with an uncanny clearness how incomparable it was. To-night this terrace was some delicate, vague kingdom of illusion. It would presently vanish. There would be only an hour of it with her. And it seemed to me, as I walked slowly beside her the length of the flag-paved terrace, that this hour was priceless. Into it the mysterious purpose of every day that I had lived, of every day that I would yet live, seemed to converge, and to escape with the sound of my footsteps moving on the flag. I must convince her! And I labored to that end with every argument, with every insistence. And in the vague light I noted every detail of her: the long lashes, the exquisite mouth, the slender body. But it was not these visible things, however potent, that so wholly overcame me. It was a thing for which we have no word, of which there is no material evidence, that moved subtly from this girl into every fiber of me. The perennial charm of romance attended her. She came forth from haze, from shadow; there clung about her the freshness, the mystery of those fairy women that the soul of a man eternally longs for.

And unless I could persuade her, she was lost to me!

I cannot remember what I said; it must have been to offer what I had, to replace the things this disaster had swept out. My insistence must have revolved about this fixed idea; for she would only shake her heavenly head. I must not bribe her— she could not take a bribe.

I looked up finally like a man sinking in the pit, and I saw, beyond her across the terrace, a face pressed against the glass door of the library. For a moment the face seemed unfamiliar— or was I unhinged by my emotion?— there was something fine in it; something having a momentary control; something that had no proper being in the sodden features; something long submerged, trodden down, filth-covered, in a sort of awful effort to get on its feet.

Then the face relaxed into its vacuous abominations, and Backmartin opened the door.

"Oh! I say," he called to us, "if I might have a Bible I would read a chapter before I turn in— it's a sort of habit, y' know."

I had to turn, sharp, to conceal the disgust in me. But Marjorie went in to him with some courteous word— I don't remember— found a big old family Bible on a shelf among the dictionaries, and put it on his table. He was stooping over it when she came out to me.

She made no comment.

And I returned to my labor of a cursed Sisyphus. But I changed the tenor of it. If we must be equal before she would listen to me, then I would make us equal. If she would not be as well off as I was, then I would be as poor as she. I would abandon what I had, and we would go empty-handed into some new land. I was as good a man as that first one in Asia. I would till the earth and build a home and face the wilderness for her. And I would do it like one who finds a kingdom! We would go this very night, the two of us, with nothing. We would step out of the world leaving forever the rubbish of these great possessions!

She looked at me with a high face.

She stood with her arms hanging, her lips parted, her slender face gleaming like a flower; her hair spun darkness— her great eyes on me as though she saw a man there that she had never seen before.

Then a voice startled us as from another world.

Backmartin was standing before the library, with his hand on the latch of the closed door behind him. He was speaking to us, he was making some interrogation. Whether he had come out at that moment, or been there a long time, I do not know.

My forbearance with the beast very nearly went to pieces; but something in the voice, something strange, peculiar, unlike the creature, restrained me. "Is any place about this house paved with stones?"

There was an unstable quality in Backmartin's voice, as though it issued from one holding himself together with an immense effort. And there was sincerity in it. I could not see the man's face.

"This terrace," I said, "is paved."

He came running out, at that, and over the whole length of the terrace. Then he came back to the library door and stood with his hand pressed against his mouth as in some reflection.

"But upon it!" he said. "There is nothing upon it."

Then he flung the door open.

"Come in here," he said.

We went in behind him.

I was astonished at the man when the light uncovered him. He was the Backmartin of the old days; a ruin of that man, surely, and yet the man returned as by some sorcery into a brief, unstable control of this debauched, abandoned creature. That this control was unstable, at the virtue of a breaking effort, and uncertain of continuance, the aspect of him and the quavering voice evidenced. But while it held the ruin of the man together it gave that ruin a certain authority of life and a certain dignity of manner.

"And put it upon a pavement of stones!" he repeated; "that's the direction, 'upon a pavement of stones.'"

"What direction?" I said. "What are you talking about?"

He indicated the vellum with its cuneiform inscription above the mantel.

"The direction in that cipher," he replied. "It says, 'upon a pavement of stones.'"

"You have deciphered that inscription?" I was incredulous. "After all the learned men in Europe failed on it?"

A faint smile struggled into his tense, hard-held face.

"Did not Sir Hector say that their knowledge of Assyriology was confined to the sacred books of the Jews, and that they were only fit to work out puzzles?— well, that's what it is, a puzzle, connected with the sacred books of the Jews!"

He went over to the mantel and took up the framed inscription. He put his finger on the two royal Assyrian figures.

"That's a 'King,'" he said; "there are two of them, that would be 'Kings,' and there are two wedges before them, that would be two 'Kings.' And the remainder of it is made up of cuneiform characters put together to form the reference in Roman numerals: sixteen, seventeen, five. That is to say: 'Two Kings, sixteen, seventeen, five.' That would be 'Second Kings, chapter sixteen, verse seventeen, line five.'"

He turned about and put his big finger on a line of the Bible open on the table before him.

"And that line says: 'And put it upon a pavement of stones.'" He turned about to us. "Somewhere on a pavement of stones Sir Hector has concealed whatever it was that he brought out of Asia."

We looked at him in a sort of wonder. The girl's fingers were on my arm; she was tense now in a consuming interest.

Backmartin went on: "The terrace out there is paved with stones, and if this verse said under a pavement of stones I would know where to look. But it doesn't say under; it says upon...now, how could it be upon that terrace? There's nothing upon it."

Marjorie suddenly cried out as with an inspiration. "But there is something 'upon it'; there is a square of tiles laid down before this door; they would be 'upon' it."

Backmartin stood up at that; he looked a moment at the mosaic making a wide step before the door. Then he turned to me.

"Your car is standing out there; get a chisel and a hammer from the tool box."

I got the implements and we raised the tiles. Under them, upon the flag pavement, was a thin, square copper box. We took it into the library and put it on the table. No one spoke.

Backmartin carried the box, and we followed after him. He put it on the table. And then he did an inexplicable thing. He went on through the library door into the hall. I thought he went to seek a tool to cut the copper, and I followed. I found him in the hall putting on my greatcoat. In the light his contorted face was covered with sweat.

"Awaken your driver," he said, "and get me to the coast."

I hesitated in my profound astonishment.

And he turned suddenly on me, the sweat trickling in the lines of his hardpressed, dreadful face.

"Hurry, man." He very nearly spat on me in his extremity.

I stood outside, with my head uncovered, until the roar of the car racing south was a faint echo. Then I went in. Marjorie was standing by the library table. She had got the lid of the box unfastened, and within were row upon row of emeralds, big, gleaming, priceless.

But I was not happy. I felt a little man beside the big one who was gone. God, only, in His heaven knew the mortal struggle of this damned creature, or the dreadful thing he had considered and been held back from by the thin line of something noble that never wholly dies in us.

I spoke to the girl, looking strangely at me, from her place beyond the box of jewels.

"You will never love me?"

"Never!" she said, "...never, but for what has happened on this night."

"The finding of the emeralds?"

She made a gesture as of one who tosses away a bauble.

"The finding of a man...out there on the terrace...when I was poor."

_________________

4: The Hole in the Glass

I LOOKED carefully at the girl as I went up the stairway. I must have delayed my companion, behind me, for I went slowly and with the wish to retain every detail of this picture. It was so conspicuously in life what I had heard of these Americans; this idle, decadent breed of women; soft, steeped in luxury and useless.

The girl sat in the hotel drawing-room, visible through the open door. It was early in the afternoon. The place was nearly deserted. The hunting folk assembled here in Sommerset, were all at a distant meet of the hounds at Haddon; in the saddle from dawn and until the night should fall. But this soft creature sat in a great chair piled up with cushions; and an immense American motor, more luxurious than the state carriage of a Louis, awaited her outside.

She had every aspect of luxury.

The fur coat thrown open among the cushions of the chair must have cost a fortune; the smart gown was from a Paris shop on the Rue de la Paix; the very Pekinese dog in the hollow of her arm was worth the price of a polo pony at Tatterhalls.

It wasn't so much these evidences of luxury that impressed me. One may have the best, if one is able. It was the conspicuous effect of these things on their possessor. The girl was quite young, about twenty, I imagine; a blonde, slender and dainty with big blue eyes and an exquisite mouth. For a doll she was perfect, but for any mortal use as a human woman she was an absurdity. She sat with a cocktail before her on the table and a Turkish cigarette idly in her fingers. I broke out with what I thought when we were in my sitting room on the floor above.

"Did you see that girl, Barclay?"

The big man turned about and looked at me with a rather strange expression; I thought he was going to make some comment. But he evidently decided to reserve it.

"Yes, Sir James...do you know who she is?"

"I know what she is," I replied. "She is a hot-house orchid and about as useful in the world as the Pekinese dog in her lap."

Barclay squinted at me. He is a big man with a face wrinkled by the tropics.

"Don't be deceived about the Pekinese dog, Sir James," he said. "The Pekinese dog's all right. He's kept in every shop in China to warn against thieves...You can't slip in on a Pekinese dog."

"Dash the dog!" I replied. "It's the girl, I mean, of what earthly use could such a soft creature be to anybody!"

Barclay looked down at me. He's an immense bulk of a man. I thought the strange expression on his face was even more peculiar.

"You'd take me to be pretty tough, Sir James...pretty hard to fag out!"

"Surely," I said, "or Marquis wouldn't have taken you into Africa with him. Marquis is no fool, if he is Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. And I wouldn't take you on for this expedition."

Barclay passed his hand slowly over his big square jaw; his fingers look like the coupling pins of a cart.

"You might be mistaken, Sir James!"

He made a sort of vague gesture, as though he included everything I'd said, and it annoyed me.

"I'm pretty good stuff for such a job, Sir James," he went on, "but I'm not the best stuff for it."

I suppose I looked a bit puzzled, and Barclay saw it.

"I mean," he went on, "a silk rope looks soft, and it is soft, but it's the strongest rope there is."

"I don't know what bally rubbish you're talking," I replied. "But I know you're all right or Marquis wouldn't have taken you into Central Africa, and he wouldn't write me now to take you."

Barclay turned at that and went over beyond our big table that was covered with maps. It was an immense table, quite bare except for the maps. I think we had assembled every map in existence on Central Africa. I meant to have a year's big game hunting in the heart of that continent. When I wrote Marquis for a man he indicated Barclay; and I had him down here at this hotel in Sommerset to plan out the route.

"He's the best man left since Stanley," Marquis said, "better get him!" Barclay sat down in a chair beyond the table. But he wasn't thinking of the maps.

"Do you know," he said, "why Sir Henry Marquis went into Central Africa?"

"After young Winton, wasn't he?" I replied. "He'd taken a shot at his uncle, old Brexford, and got out of the country, as I remember. I suppose Marquis thought the reputation of Scotland Yard was at stake. Had to find Winton, you know...did find him?"

Barclay got up, spread out one of the maps and put his finger on a point on it.

"We found him right here, on the old elephant trail. But if we'd been a little late we'd never found him. If he'd got into that immense forest to the south, he'd been out of Marquis's reach. Our expedition was fagged, I had a touch of the sun. We couldn't have gone on."

The man's voice grew firm.

"Nobody has any conception of that hell forest to the south. It's three thousand miles across it. We couldn't have found Winton in it. Marquis knew that. It was a piece of God's luck to have found his camp there on the plateau!...I was all in and Marquis was groggy."

He paused.

"You have got to keep the sun out of your face; a helmet and a spine pad aren't enough— the open road to the brain, for a sun's ray is through the eye and the sponge bones of the face."

He made a sort of bob of the head downward toward the drawing-room.

"Ever see this girl before, Sir James?"

"Used to see her at polo at Hurlingham," I replied, "on the days Rugby played. This young Winton was on the team...wanted to marry her, didn't he? Wasn't that the row with old Brexford?"

Barclay continued as though I had not made an answer.

"Yes," he said. "It all started from that. Brexford hated Americans; wouldn't hear of it; went into a devil's fury; stopped at nothing!"

"So young Winton took a pot shot at him, and cleared, eh?"

Barclay didn't seem to regard my comment. He went on in a sort of reflection.

"But there was one thing I couldn't understand. Why didn't he take the girl with him...that is I couldn't understand it at the time."

I laughed.

"I can understand it. She couldn't leave the cushions...she was too soft!" Barclay was looking at me, his mouth open; a sort of vague wonder on his big sun-seamed face.

The pose and the expression of the man annoyed me.

"What's wrong with you?" I said. "What are you gaping at?"

He was silent for some moments. He kept looking at me, in that sort of vague wonder, from the floor up. Finally, he spoke.

"How long have you been out of England, Sir James?"

"Two years," I replied. "In the Andes."

"Then you don't know what's happened."

"About young Winton? No; Marquis had got some rumor of him in Central Africa and was just starting out when I left. The grand jury in Hants had found an indictment against young Winton for assault with intent to murder; and the country had begun to howl— rich man's privilege— letting off the 'toff' and so forth. I suppose Marquis thought he had to get him...Marquis went down to Hants, himself, to see old Brexford, didn't he, and then the public clamor drove him on."

Barclay replied in a rather strange voice.

"Public clamor didn't drive Sir Henry Marquis. It was a sense of duty, a tremendous compelling sense of duty...nothing less would have sent Sir Henry on that awful journey into the heart of Africa."

"Call it what you like," I said, "Marquis had no notion of going out of England, until after he went to see old Brexford in Hants. That stirred up the hornets. The penny press said the uncle would smooth him down. Marquis had to go after that."

"But the uncle was the hottest hornet in the swarm. It was war to the death with him."

"He did die, didn't he?" I said. "I saw some notice of it in the ship's bulletin on the way south."

"Yes," replied Barclay, "he took to his bed the day after Sir Henry Marquis visited him in Hants, and he never got up."

"Like an old man," I said, "adamant against an offending member of his family until it comes to the jail door, and then he goes soft."

Barclay looked again at me, with that strange expression. But he did not speak. He moved the maps about on the table, until he found the one outlining Marquis's expedition. It had been enlarged and traced from Sir Henry Marquis's notes. It was not a printed map. Sir Henry had not made a published report of the expedition, because the Government had not borne the cost of it. I suppose Marquis financed it, he was rich, and his reputation was at stake. It was his boast that Scotland Yard, while he was at the head of its Criminal Investigation Department, would not tire out on the track of any man.

Barclay gathered up all the other maps on the table, folded them carefully, tied them with thin pieces of tape and laid them neatly to one side, then he spread the long tracing out over the whole length of the table. He went about it slowly like a man in some deep reflection. Then he put the query that I had been turning in my mind.

"Do you know who put up the money for this expedition?"

I told him what I have written here, Marquis, of course.

"No," he said, "Sir Henry did not put up the money."

"Then who did?"

"The uncle," he replied, "old Brexford put it up."

I was astonished.

"Then he didn't go soft...he wanted young Winton brought out!"

Barclay replied in the same even voice.

"No," he said, "Brexford didn't want him brought out."

He was smoothing the tracing with his hands, stooping over the table. He did not seem to notice my surprise. He would put the tip of his big finger on a crease of the map and slowly extend it.

"We went in too far north," he said, as in a vague comment. "We should have started in on the East Coast farther down, about Mombasa. But the report Sir Henry had, indicated Winton somewhere south of Omdurman, and we went in through Egypt. But he wasn't in Omdurman. The rumor always put him on south...you know about desert rumors; strangely accurate as a rule, and traveling over an immense distance, one can't understand how. But the rumor was correct, he was on south; he had followed the White Nile, along Baker Pasha's route, a little to the west. Sir Henry always hoped to pick him up somewhere along the White Nile. But Sir Henry was going on a wrong hypothesis, he was thinking about the movements of a man who must consider how he will get back, and Winton did not intend to get back."

He paused— a sort of hesitation in the narrative.

"We didn't realize that for a long time...then we had to go on or give up...Sir Henry, went on."

That, of course, abridged Marquis's whole character.

Barclay sat down close against the table where he could still stoop over the map. He went on.

"It was an awful march south. Winton was always just a little ahead. The desert rumors were pretty clear about him until we passed the big bend of the White Nile— you know it goes off west nearly at a right angle about four hundred miles south of Khartum— then the rumors began to get confused, sometimes they put Winton on in our front and sometimes, inexplicably to the rear of us...we couldn't understand it!"

He drummed a moment, with his thick square fingers, on the table.

I sat down. Anything this man had to say about an expedition was of interest to me. He didn't talk much. He went on.

"We thought at first that Winton had doubled back; or that we had passed him. But there was his trail going on ahead! We were profoundly puzzled. It was like a mirage of the mind. We were all feeling the sun...damned queer about the sun! We wore spine pads and helmets with an inch of cork, and the accursed desert bedouins marched nearly naked and with their heads shaven.

"I got uneasy. Sir Henry made no comment, but I knew what he thought; our scouts were beginning to see double— the sun will do anything to you!... But they weren't seeing double; we were being followed...The explanation that occurred to us was that Winton had divided his force and put a part of it in behind us. But the native trackers were positive that the size of the force on in front had not diminished by a man. And they were right. They pointed out a hundred evidences, in Winton's trail, to show that the same number of persons were on ahead."

Barclay paused, and sat a moment looking down at the map.

"We were being followed... I myself heard, faintly, shots in the rear; and the desert rumors began to get definite. There was a white man and a small native force behind and a little to the west of us, paralleling our route... There seemed to be some strange report about this man, current in our camp, that we could not find out. Finally, it seeped through to us... the man had no face!" Barclay passed his hand over his big square jaw.

"I suppose one could have a mirage of the mind. And mystery always breeds wonders... Anyhow that rumor went right on. The leader of the force that dogged our rear had no face... he was white, he was English, his very size and characteristics were given. It was clearly not Winton from these details... Winton's tall and broad shouldered.

"Then a strange thing happened. We stopped and the expedition behind us also stopped. We turned back on our route for a day's march, and it also turned back for a day's march. The thing was like a shadow... That settled it. We were being followed! Sir Henry said nothing and we went on. Winton ahead had gained a little. He didn't stop. There seemed to be no relation between this mysterious expedition and Winton... It wasn't after Winton. It was after us!

"Sir Henry went on. And the man without a face followed. He didn't have an easy time of it any more than we had. He had the sun and he had to beat off the desert marauders.

"There's no law at the head of the White Nile. We heard the firing. We could tell the very arm he used, a high-power magazine rifle made by Jermyn in Pall Mall— he was an Englishman all right. That was the one thing that quieted our concern about him. His mysterious movements might be inexplicable, but he was English and therefore no enemy... We had something to learn about that!"

Barclay made a vague gesture, like one who omits a mass of detail.

"We overtook Winton on the grass plateau beyond Lake Victoria Nyanza, just where the old elephant trail comes out of the immense continent of forest to the south.'

"We sighted his camp at dark and we stopped. He couldn't get away now and there was no hurry. We took our time. The sun had us pretty well crumpled. I could hardly walk and Sir Henry was jerky. But we lost possession of Winton's camp by just the measure of that night. There was a cordon of sentinels around it in the morning and another tent up...No Face had passed round us in the night...We were beaten to our man!

"I cursed under my breath. So the mysterious Englishman was an ally of the man we were after. It was all clear now. He had followed us in with the deliberate purpose of joining Winton against us. But why did he not attack us on the way in. If he were in fact hostile to us— if he didn't want us to find Winton? Of course I was only guessing half right as one always guesses. He did want us to find Winton!

"We were halted by two shots that flecked up the earth on either side of us when we started for his camp that morning and we had to stop. We sent a native on ahead with something white. And he came back to say that Sir Henry and I were to come forward alone to a scrub bush about a hundred yards from the cordon around Winton's camp. It was like a parley in a little hill war!

"I lay down at the bush, but Sir Henry stood. I was keen to know what would happen. We were at last come up with this mysterious Englishman who had hung on our flank all the way down the White Nile.

"It was some moments before we saw him. And then I sat up. He came out from behind a tent, and at the distance, true to the persistent rumor, the figure had no face; the space under the visor of his helmet was blank. I saw Sir Henry start, slightly, and unsling his field glasses and I got mine out.

"Then the mystery disappeared. The man had extended the apron of his helmet— which one wears in the desert to protect the back of the neck— entirely around the headband, to protect the carotid arteries, the sponge bones of the face, and the throat; this apron was fastened down securely from the head band of the helmet to the collar of his tunic."

Barclay paused.

"I afterwards examined it closely," he continued. "It was made of asbestos cloth to keep out the sun and it was fitted with big, thick colored lenses, to protect the eye from the heat rays. It was stitched into the headband of the helmet and buttoned down closely to the tunic collar...Strange no one of us had ever thought about the heat rays on the face, on the carotid arteries and the throat; of course the value of a colored lens for the eye was known; but not the value of a thick colored lens... No Face taught the world something about the sun... and the result was that he had come out of the desert fit, and we were groggy.

"You could see the man was fit by the swing of his body as he walked down from the tents. He was thin, naturally from what he'd gone through, and he wasn't very big... it isn't bulk. I had the bulk and I was down.

"He came out to the cordon of his sentinels about a hundred yards away, as I have said, and stopped; he carried a magazine rifle— we were right, one of Jermyn's in Pall Mall— in the hollow of his arm. There was a native with him. It was the native who addressed us. He spoke a precise English, like a phonograph.

"'The Master says, the first thing to arrange, Sir Henry,' he called, 'is a truce; Lord Winton has a touch of the sun, and your man's down.'

"He indicated me with a gesture. His voice was high; nervous tension usually puts the voice up.

"Marquis did not reply immediately to the point.

"'So your Master knows me,' he said.

"But the stranger was not to be diverted. He spoke to the native.

"'Oh, surely,' the native called back, 'but the truce, Sir Henry; shall you rest up a bit or have it out now?'

"'Have what out?' There wasn't much inquiry in Marquis's voice.

"'Why pretend, Sir Henry?' The native seemed to call out precisely the words spoken to him.

"'You came in to take Lord Winton out and the Master to prevent you.'" Marquis still avoided the point. "'Then why didn't your Master attack me on the White Nile— he could have rushed our camp before we knew about him.'

"'The Master will answer that,' the native called back, 'and then will you come to the point? The Master had to use you to find Lord Winton. He didn't know where he was...now, shall it be a gentleman's agreement; twenty-four hours notice and the camps to remain where they are?'

"Again Sir Henry did not reply to the point.

"'How ill is Winton?' he said.

"'Lord Winton is delirious,' the man replied. 'But it's the heat; only, a day or two in the cool air of this plateau will put him on his feet.'

"Sir Henry made what seemed a casual gesture.

"'Very well,' he said, 'when Winton's able we'll start back.'

"There was a strange shift in the bearing of the white man over beyond Sir Henry Marquis when he replied to that. I can't precisely describe it. He did not seem to change his position, but his posture got somehow a deadly menace in it. He seemed to speak sharply to the native, and that ebony herald repeated it to us.

"'You have your choice, Sir Henry,' he called.

"The inference did not need to be set out in words. It had been stated in the opening of this strange parley. I thought Marquis's reply was pure bravado.

"'Oh, there's no choice!'

"And he turned about and walked past me down the long green slope to our camp."

Barclay sat back from the table and put the fingers of his big hands together. He went on in a reflective comment.

"To tell the truth, I thought Marquis was acting a bit of a fool. It was clear to anybody that this mysterious ally that had joined Winton's camp was not a person to be either baffled or frightened. It was sheer nonsense to go ahead on that notion. There was in fact no choice, as Sir Henry said, but not as he evidently intended our enemy to believe. Winton would not go back to a criminal trial in an English court. We could not fight the two forces now combined; Sir Henry's front was sheer moonshine. I told him what I thought about it when we were back in our camp. The forces now joined against us were double the strength of our own. Lord Winton would be a desperate man, and the one with him had fought seventeen pitched battles in the last month's march, by actual count of the firing in our rear...it was all accursed fooling to imagine that we could take Lord Winton back without a fight for it.

"'There'll be no fight!' was all Sir Henry replied to me.

"'Then you won't take him?' I said.

"'Oh, yes,' he answered, 'we shall take Lord Winton back with us!'

"I got up and went out. The grass plateau in the afternoon sun was a heavenly spot be-side what we'd come through. It looked like a county in England, green, well watered; with the distant trees; Winton's camp was like a white cloth laid down on it. The place was a Garden of Eden after the march along the White Nile... Well, it was the last spot any one of us was very likely to see. There would be a rumor creep out in a year or two; the ivory raiders would carry it; or the slave gangs. There would be a brief official entry in the records of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard; and a lot of bleached skeletons to remain vaguely white here."

Barclay suddenly got up. He put his big hands on the table and leaned over toward me.

"I guessed what would happen," he said, with a slow deliberate intonation of the words, "an' I guessed wrong!

"Sir Henry Marquis went over into Winton's camp that night, unarmed and with his hands up...and ten days later we started for the Albert Nyanza on the return march...Marquis brought Winton out!"

He thrust his head a little farther across the table toward me.

"It's no use to guess, Sir James; one always guesses wrong!"

I misunderstood the innuendo as my answer indicates.

"How did Marquis manage it?" I said. "I'm not going to guess!" And I too leaned forward in my consuming interest; the thrill of the mystery held me.

Barclay seemed to relax a bit. He stood up, put his hands into the pockets of his coat and began to walk about the room.

"You see," he said, "old Brexford told the grand jury in Hants that he was sitting in his drawing-room reading beside a table. It was Sunday night, his servants had all gone to some frolic in the neighborhood and he was alone. He didn't know Winton was about. They had quarreled bitterly about the marriage with this American girl; Brexford was rich and unmarried and Winton was his heir. There had been a desperate quarrel on Saturday, the day before, a perfect devil of a row, the servants all heard it, and at the end of it old Brexford notified Winton that he would go up to London on Monday and cut him out of his will. It was one of those deadly, bitter, final quarrels in a family that never can be adjusted and Winton left the house."

Barclay walked over to the window then he turned back. He went on. "Brexford told Sir Henry Marquis what he had told the grand jury. He was sitting alone in his drawing-room reading when a shot fired from the darkness outside crashed through the window; it happened just as Brexford leaned forward to get a cigarette from a box on the table. That accident of chance saved Brexford's life, for the bullet passed by his shoulder instead of cutting its way through his chest. An instinct of safety caused the man to fall forward onto the floor and lie there as though he were dead; that saved his life again, for the man outside came up to the window and looked in, and Brexford out of the tail of his eyes, saw that it was young Winton... Winton thought he had killed Brexford and got out of the county."

"So that was it!" I said. "That was the reason Winton was willing to come out, Marquis brought him the assurance that his shot had missed!"

Barclay made a gesture of rejection with his big fingers extended.

"It's no use to guess, Sir James... you guessed on that girl a while ago!"

"Dash the girl," I said.

Barclay's face darkened for an instant, then he went on as though there had been no interruption.

"The first thing Sir Henry Marquis said to Brexford after he had looked over the drawing-room, was:

"'Are you sure the shot was not fired from the other side of this drawingroom?'

"This was impossible and Brexford pointed out at once that it was impossible. True, the casement window directly opposite on that side was open, for it was through this open window that the bullet directed at Brexford passed out of the drawing-room; but the country on that side fell away from the house sharply in a deep hollow, there was no tree or elevation; one to have fired such a shot from this side of the house through the drawing-room at Brexford in his chair would have required an elevation of at least fifty feet, and, as I have said there wasn't even a tree on that side of the house.

"But Sir Henry Marquis refused to be convinced.

"'The shot,' he said, 'came from this side.'

"Brexford lost his temper.

"'That's impossible,' he cried. 'Wasn't I sitting here, didn't I hear the bullet pass me, didn't I see the glass break?'

"Sir Henry only repeated what he'd said.

"'The shot came from this side!'

"Brexford blew up at that.

"Do you think I'm a liar?' he said.

"What Sir Henry Marquis replied was:

"'I know you're a liar!'

"Then he went at him, and before he got through old Brexford admitted that he fired the shot through the window himself from the drawing-room; and Marquis made him put up the money to find young Winton and bring him back to England... that's what took Sir Henry Marquis on that hell journey into Central Africa, justice to young Winton, not justice to the peace and dignity of the county of Hampshire... Young Winton hadn't been near old Brexford that night; he had gone to Christ Church determined to settle matters with this American girl— he was mad about her, she must take him or he would get as far out of the world as he could. He missed her by an accident. She had gone out to tea somewhere in Hants; the motor had broken down and she could not get back; and being Sunday she could not telegraph. Winton took it for intention, because she had given him her word that she would be there, and went on into Central Africa...that was the truth about it."

Barclay had gone over to the window and was looking down on the entrance to the hotel doorway, there was a bit of noise as though some one were going out.

"But the shot—" I said. "How did Marquis know that it was fired from the inside of the drawing-room...You're leaving unfinished explanations in your story?"

"That was simple," he answered. "When a bullet passes through a pane of glass it always breaks off a little rim of chips on the side where it comes out...When Sir Henry Marquis examined that window he saw at once that the rim of chips was on the outside of the pane, and consequently the bullet must have come the other way."

I got up and went over toward the window where Barclay stood.

"And there's another thing," I said. "Who was the mysterious person who followed you in to join Winton?"

Barclay looked up from the window; there was the sound of a motor moving from the door below.

"That was Lady Winton," he said.

I stopped short; the pride of race rising in me.

"An English woman!" I cried. "Right, my friend, one of our women could do that... they have the vigor and the fiber and the courage... no tender American pretty-doll carted about in cushions!"

Barclay beckoned me to the window.

"I'll show you Lady Winton," he said.

I crossed to him and looked down.

The big limousine motor was going out, and nestling in its soft upholstery, in an attitude of luxurious languor, was the yellow-haired American girl with the Pekinese dog in her arms!

_________________

5: The Phantom Woman

SIR HENRY Marquis, Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, has a monograph on this case. He said we were accustomed to believe that the dead were impotent in human affairs; but it was a thing of which no man could be certain. How could we know whether the power of those gone out of sight and hearing, waxed or waned, or ceased; or by what means, or in what manner they might be able to move the living to their will. He said this case profoundly impressed him.

We stopped in the pine woods to listen. The music seemed to fill the world; it was low and soft, a sort of vague elfin music appearing as by some enchantment. There was this strange quality in it— that it seemed to emerge from the wood itself, to be a part of this aspect of nature, the filtered sunlight, the odor of the wood and the soft air from the sea. And it drugged the senses in us. One heard it and was transported to a kingdom of the fairy and all things about it took on the glamour of a dream.

I stopped beside Sir Henry Marquis on the path, behind us was the village and its inn where we had gone for luncheon at the end of our motor journey from London that morning. And before us, at the end of the path through the wood, was the house and below it the sea. It was a lovely artistic house that my father's wife had built here for this romantic marriage after my father's death; and now that she, too, was dead it remained in the possession of this Hungarian fiddler. When one considered the man alone, when one looked coolly at him, it was past belief that my step-mother should have been so infatuated with him. The Count Andreas was, merely to the eye, what I have written, a Hungarian fiddler. It must have been this music that had entranced the woman, for out of the spell of it she seemed to be also out of the spell of this strange creature. For when she lay dying in her London house she expressed the wish that a bracelet of Burma rubies in the Count's possession should be given to me. And when her solicitor pointed out that her verbal wish could have no effect against the Count's resistance, she said, "I will return and make him do it!"

Count Andreas would make no reply to my solicitor. And so on the morning I went with Sir Henry Marquis, Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, to this interview with him. The verities of justice were on my side, the rubies had come from my American mother, had been passed on by my father to his second wife, and now by operation of the English law this Hungarian fiddler took them. I felt crowded out of my inheritance by a combination of evil events. My father's wife had tried to return my mother's jewels to me and here by the running of this English law I was dispossessed. I had gone from my solicitor to Sir Henry Marquis for he had known my mother in the old days, and remained a friend.

He had listened with rather a strange face, I thought, when I had related to him all the details of the matter.

"Sarah," he said, "you have your mother's eyes and that lovely line of the hair around the forehead."

Then he had got up and walked about the room.

"We shall go down and see this Count Andreas. I know something of him."

And so we had come down, on this August morning, where the great moors lay above the sea fringed along their edges by the pine trees. It was a lovely prospect in the sun; the bracken of the wild moors, the wood along their face when they fell sheer into the sea, and the sea itself with its great colored patches lying below the blue water as though it were on a painted floor.

We could see the grass terrace before the house; for the house stood on a shelf of the moor— a space had been cut out of the pine woods for it— and this green terrace flanked by the wood on either side and the house behind looked down on the sea. It was two hundred feet above but one could have cast a stone into the water. The brow of the moor here dropped like a plummet into the ocean. The music came from the terrace. We could see a man, walking about on it, a violin at his shoulder, his bow hand flying. And in the glamour of the melodies he was a sylvan creature. One held the breath to see him, and ventured softly lest he vanish...I saw how the hypnotic virtues of this music had entranced my father's wife, especially when she felt alone and with age before her. The man when he played was within the music as in a golden haze...but when he stepped out of it he was the Hungarian fiddler.

He stepped out of it as we came up, but he was a very clever person, carefully dressed and with a suave demeanor.

"It is Sir Henry Marquis," he said, "and Miss Sarah Whitney. I am honored."

Then he spoke directly to Sir Henry Marquis.

"You arrive quickly. My telegram to Scotland Yard could not have reached London before an hour of noon."

I caught the fleeting evidence of surprise in Sir Henry's face but there was no surprise in his voice or manner. He had not journeyed here at the call of any telegram from the Count to Scotland Yard; but his profession was not one permitting of surprises. The situation before Sir Henry, I thought was difficult. And I wondered what Delphic answer he could make.

"What are the details of this matter?" he said. It was a key that would fit any lock.

The Count put his violin down carefully on a stone seat and went with us toward a window on the first floor of the house on the farther side. The house sat parallel with the terrace in its longest direction; there was a hall in the center and a stairway going up and on one side the drawing-room with the dining room on the opposite side across the hall. It was not a large house but it was beautifully designed and its furnishings were artistic.

But Count Andreas did not go on directly to the window. He stopped.

"It was all very cleverly done," he said, "there was no sound...I am puzzled to know if the woman was alone, or had an accomplice."

Sir Henry put a query then.

"Were you alone in the house?"

Again it was a key for any lock for he did not know what was before him and whether it had happened in the night or day, or in fact what it was in which a woman had been concerned.

Count Andreas made a vague gesture.

"I am very careless," he said. "I sleep here alone, the servants come out from the village of a morning, but I have no fear."

Sir Henry made a rather strange reply.

"It is very dangerous," he said, "to have no fear."

The Count shrugged his shoulders.

"I am not a practical man," he said, "or else I would have taken my wife's jewels to London and a bank vault; but I wished her room in this house to remain as she left it...nothing has been changed or moved in it, the dust, and the spiders have their way...I had forgotten that her jewels remained in a little drawer of her writing table."

Then he turned quickly about to me; as though some sharp amazing thing had suddenly occurred to him.

"Alas! Miss Sarah," he cried. "You will be a loser with me; for the ruby bracelet about which you wrote me is gone with the other jewels." The words were like a blow to me, for I had hoped to recover this heirloom of my mother— this bracelet of rubies set in a gold work that hinged between the stones. It was of great value and had been in my mother's family for a hundred years.

I suppose I must have looked the despair I felt, and I could not keep back a mist of tears.

Sir Henry touched me gently.

"Perhaps we shall find it," he said— and he went on behind the Hungarian who had faced about after the delivery of his blow. He also hoped that the jewels would be recovered, he said. No doubt Sir Henry Marquis would find them. Scotland Yard was so wonderful and wise. It was marked fulsome flattery, but it had in it I thought a note of the praise of the prophet for the accomplishments of Baal. I fear that I was a rather pathetic figure as I came on behind them. Sir Henry Marquis did not put any query; he followed the man to the window. The Count directed Sir Henry's attention first to the window and after that to the flower bed below it.

"Here," he said, "the thief entered; the bolt fastening the window was probably turned from the inside, or by collusion with one of the servants. You will observe that when the window is unfastened the knob stands perpendicular, in precisely the same position as when it is closed, so no one would notice that it was unfastened."

He paused a moment.

"I say she, Sir Henry, because you will see that it was a woman; a woman about the size of Miss Whitney. There are her tracks quite clearly marked in the soft earth of this flower bed below the window."

And there were the tracks, indeed to be seen where the woman had stood before the window while she had carefully pushed the swinging window that opened the house to her.

Sir Henry examined these footprints.

"The lady," he said, "has been very considerate of us. These faint footprints are in the very best position on this soft earth to remain clear."

Then he turned to Count Andreas.

"But why do you say 'a woman about the size of Miss Whitney'?"

The man hesitated as though puzzled to find a reply, then he gave the reason.

"I was thinking of my wife's maids," he said; "they have been all women of about Miss Whitney's size; and this robbery will be the work of some one familiar with the house."

"On the contrary," replied Sir Henry, "these footprints were made by a thin woman— Miss Whitney will weigh nine stone— an incredibly thin woman."

The Count was astonished.

"Look at the print," he said. "These footprints might have been made by Miss Sarah Whitney."

Sir Henry turned to me.

"Quite so," he said; "the prints here might have been made by Miss Whitney's slipper if there was no such thing as gravity." Then he addressed me directly. "Sarah," he said, "will you kindly walk from the flag path of the terrace to this window and stand a moment before it."

I did as he directed, although I was puzzled to understand what it meant; was I perhaps to be indicted as the thief?

Count Andreas cried out in confirmation of Sir Henry.

"You see the prints are almost identical."

"Ah, so!" replied Sir Henry. "But you fail to note the important feature. You will observe that the heel of Miss Whitney's slipper sank into the turf on her way from the flag path and here in the flower bed it makes a deep footprint. While the heel of this other woman's shoe cannot be seen on the turf which she must have crossed from the path and here in the flower bed where she stood the footprints are clear but faint...these evidences could mean only one thing— an absence of weight!"

Then he stooped suddenly over as though to look closely at the footprints, but he was looking rather, I thought, at the grass beside the flower bed; it appeared, even to my unpracticed eye, pressed over, faintly, as though something long and heavy, and of some bulk had been put down there.

But he made no comment and presently turned to Count Andreas. His face strange.

"Gravity has been negatived here," he said. "This will be a sort of miracle."

The astonishment in Count Andreas's manner gave way to a suave irony.

"How clever," he said. "Yours, Sir Henry, is an extraordinary profession!"

But Sir Henry Marquis replied as if the compliment were sincere.

"Ah, Count," he said, "if we were only clever enough no criminal would escape us. One may think what he likes and be safe but when one acts he leaves behind him evidences that indicate him. And if we have the skill to assemble and fit together these evidences, we can in a fashion build up the criminal agent...but one's deductions must be correct."

"Like this deduction of yours about the miracle here!" cried the Count.

"Precisely," replied Sir Henry.

"I would call that inspiration," said the Count.

Sir Henry Marquis looked grave.

"I fear that would be an unhappy word here," he replied. "Inspiration has usually served only to mislead the one that it pretended to enlighten." Then he added a rather queer comment. "My deduction here that this was a thin woman may be too comprehensive...that the body of the woman lacked weight may be as far as I ought to go...we usually associate weight with bulk, but the relation is not constant even in nature and outside of nature, in what we call the supernatural there may be bulk without weight or with little weight...the small size of these footprints and the depths to which they are sunk in the earth, to be precisely accurate, indicate a woman of very little weight— as we understand weight!"

Count Andreas looked puzzled; and I was certainly puzzled at this speech. But Sir Henry Marquis was not pausing to consider us. He was going on into the house. Count Andreas overtook him and led the way up the stairs to the room which his wife had occupied and from which the jewels had been taken. It adjoined the room which the Count himself occupied separated only by a thin partition. Count Andreas stopped at the door leading from the hall at the head of the stairs into his wife's room.

"I have not permitted this room to be disturbed," he said, "it remains as my wife left it. I preferred to think of her, here, in this setting where she was in loving sympathy with me, and not in the London house where she had the strange delusions against me."

Sir Henry Marquis stopped short as though suddenly seized with some idea, until then vague.

"Ah, yes," he said, "it was in her London house that this lady died, during your absence in Paris, and it was there she called a solicitor 'wishing to bequeath' this ruby bracelet to Miss Sarah Whitney; and it was to this solicitor that she made her strange remark: 'I will come back and make him do it.'"

The Count's shoulder moved as at some unpleasant touch, but he made no reply. He turned at once to the door.

"I regret, sir," he said, "that I am unable to say whether this door was locked, or unlocked, when the thief entered last night. If it were locked, then the thief had a key to it, which is in line with the evidences that this is the work of some discharged servant familiar with the house." Then he turned about to Sir Henry. "Perhaps you can tell this by an examination of the lock."

But Sir Henry Marquis declined to give the door the slightest attention. I was no less astonished than Count Andreas. The door was the way into the room, whether it was fastened or opened seemed to me to be of the very vitals of this inquiry. There was only one possible explanation and the Count put that in his query.

"Do you, perhaps, conclude that the thief did not enter through this door?"

"Oh, no," replied Sir Henry. "The thief entered by this door, but I have a theory that this door was no bar to the sort of creature that accomplished this robbery...perhaps no door in this house would have been any bar...I am inclined to believe that the door means nothing."

But on the inside of the room Sir Henry's interest in physical evidences seemed to reassert itself.

It was a lovely room done in dainty shades of blue. There was an inlaid writing desk near a window; a dressing table with a great mirror and two clothes presses in the wall, with double doors. There was a thin partition between this room and the one occupied by Count Andreas, as though this space had all originally been a single room; there was a door of which the whole face was a mirror standing closed between the two rooms. There was a severity of good taste about the room; no clutter of ornaments; the only picture on the wall was a painting of Count Andreas, by a famous Italian, in a simple frame. It hung over the mantel.

The room gave evidence that it had been long closed; the dust lay in it and there was a great spider web stretching along the bottom of the frame to the wall below it.

But the room was in disorder, everything in it had been opened, pulled out and searched. This search had been minute and thorough. There remained no drawer unopened. It was the work of some one going carefully to be sure that no place of concealment would remain unopened.

Count Andreas made a gesture to indicate this disorder.

"It is I," he said, "who have searched the room. I took this robbery to be the work of some discharged maid, or her accomplice; such a one would know, that I am leaving England and that the house will be presently closed. She might, therefore, if she were clever, conceal the jewels about the room here, in some other place, intending to return later when the house was closed and regain them. This would greatly reduce the risk in the robbery; first, because the ruby bracelet especially, is a piece of conspicuous jewelry. Burma stones so large and of so pure a color could not be accounted for if found in possession, and the gold work about them is distinguished. And in the second place, I wished to be certain that my wife had not, herself, placed these jewels elsewhere in some drawer of the room instead of the little drawer of her desk which was opened." Sir Henry Marquis glanced about the room.

"You were quite right," he said, "it is the common custom of the thief to conceal a stolen article near the very spot from which it was taken, especially if he is familiar with the place and able to return to it...he reasons that the owner, finding only a single locked drawer opened, will conclude that the lost articles have been taken away...I congratulate you, Count, on your acumen...and besides you have saved me the labor of this search."

He gave no attention to this confusion. He went directly to the inlaid writing table, near the window, which Count Andreas indicated. It had a little row of drawers in the center behind the writing pad. The top drawer of this series had been the one from which the jewels were taken.

Count Andreas called Sir Henry's attention particularly to it.

"This drawer was the one in which my wife kept her jewels. I had supposed that it was locked, but it seems to have been open like the others. You will observe that it is in no manner broken."

Again Sir Henry's interest seemed to be intermittent in the affair. He gave no attention to any evidences of a breaking— a thing, one has heard criminal investigation take every care with— but stooped over, put his monocle into his eye and looked carefully at the lock on the drawer.

Then he sat down in the chair before the desk; his hand gathered about his chin like one profoundly puzzled.

"This drawer was locked," he said.

"Impossible," cried Count Andreas. "It was not broken."

"It was unlocked with the key," said Sir Henry. "Who had the key?"

"My wife only had the key," replied the Count.

Then he added, as a thing incredible.

"You mean that this drawer was locked and last night was unlocked by some one having possession of the key?"

"That is precisely what I mean," replied Sir Henry. "Dust gathered in this lock as it gathered over all things in this room, the key and the moving bar of the lock have just disturbed it. The thing has been done by someone who knew where the key was."

Count Andreas put the query that must have occurred to us all.

"But what living person could know where the dead Countess had concealed the key to her desk?"

Sir Henry passed his hand slowly over his face, as though he were in some doubt how to reply; then finally he answered.

"But are events in the world exclusively directed by the living? How do we know what will to compel them the dead can exert. All our theories of the existence and influence of the dead are in fact vain imaginings...Did not the Countess, as she was leaving the world, bequeath this ruby bracelet to Miss Sarah Whitney and when the solicitor pointed out that you would take it by operation of law, reply, with a mysterious sentence."

Count Andreas's face darkened.

"Unfortunately," he added, "my wife was influenced against me in her last illness. I was not in England, and my enemies were with her."

His face grew hard and determined.

"And therefore," he continued, "I disregard the bequest made under the influence of enemies, and this threat. And now I cannot help it that a thief has removed them...that the Countess Andreas, dead, and out of the world had any part in this affair is a ridiculous suggestion."

Sir Henry rose; stood a moment as in some reflection and began to walk about the floor. He walked with his head forward, his hands behind him, touching now and then an open drawer or some disturbed article, and stopping, like one whose mind is wholly on some distant thing, to close the open drawer or to carefully replace the disturbed article. He set a little frame neatly on a table; he spread down a corner of a rug; he opened the folding doors to the closets in the wall where the dead woman's clothes hung and shut them carefully; he stopped before the mantel and flecked the mantelpiece absently with his finger. He looked like one in some queer somnambulism, his motions languid; his face vague, with the thick monocle screwed into his eye, with no cord to hold it as though it clung there and must be pulled away in order to remove it. He glanced up at the painting of Count Andreas where the big spider web attached the bottom of the gilded frame to the wall, peered at it a moment as in the ineptitudes of a trance and passed on.

He made a vague comment like one profoundly concerned with some difficult introspection.

"This spider," he said, "will not have favored the thief here as the Scotch spider favored the Bruce, for it took days to make a big strong tough web like that."

He reached the door; put out his hand in the manner of one so detached that his senses no longer guide him. Then suddenly he faced about and addressed Count Andreas, as though there had been no interval after the man's comment.

"And yet...how shall we say that the Countess has not been here?"

He crossed with a stride to one of the closets and threw the door open. There was a little shelf across the bottom of the closet on which were a row of shoes. Sir Henry took up a pair of slippers and brought them over to Count Andreas.

"Look," he said, "there are bits of earth on the heels of these slippers; it is garden earth, and it is quite fresh."

He held out the slipper and his eyeglass to the Hungarian.

"The monocle," he said, "is a rather tremendous lens."

The Count stepped back from Sir Henry's extended hand. But the big Englishman did not seem to notice that shrinking gesture.

"The theory is against all experience of life," Sir Henry went on, "but here are the evidences. One enters this house through a window probably fastened, through a door probably locked, opens a drawer in a desk with a key which the dead woman had hidden, and removes its contents, all so noiselessly that Count Andreas sleeping within a dozen steps is not awakened...these slippers belonging to the dead Countess have walked before the window, but with only the weight of a phantom on them...How shall we say that she has not been here?"

The Hungarian faced about as for some stern endeavor. His voice was harsh. "The dead do not return; this will have been done by some one of my wife's maids, who prepared for it in advance, by taking away with her the key to these drawers and the slippers. The window has probably been unfastened a long time, and the door, as I have said, was probably not locked...It does not require a ghost to go noiselessly about a robbery!"

But one could see that the man's logic did not even convince himself. He did not believe it.

Sir Henry looked strangely at the man.

"This was not the work of any mortal woman! Mortal women have weight!"

He advanced a step toward Count Andreas, and his voice took on a low penetrating menace.

"If I show you that no living person could have done this thing, will you take that for an evidence of your dead wife's will in this affair, and release these bracelets to Miss Whitney...if I can find them."

The Hungarian laughed, as in a sort of harsh bravado...as in a sort of ugly challenge.

"Yes," he said, "if you can find them."

There was a certain confidence of victory behind the laugh.

But Sir Henry regarded him like one with some deep serious intent.

"It is a bargain," he said, "before a witness and I accept it."

Then there came into his voice a suave apologetic note.

"Assuming, as a theory, that the Countess Andreas was able to carry out her threat; where should we look to find these jewels? Let us reflect."

He looked steadily at the man before him.

"The dead woman would be at this work to remove these rubies from your possession, and she would place them where you would not look to find them...then to find them we must look in that place which you have not searched." He paused.

"There is only one place in this room," he said, "where you have not looked, and you will agree with me that no living person, on last night, could have concealed the jewels in that place."

He turned abruptly and indicated the Count's portrait fastened to the wall by the great spider web.

He went on.

"No living person could remove that frame without breaking that web, and yet the jewels are concealed in the old folded paper that holds the bottom of this frame out a little from the wall."

Count Andreas made a swift stride forward; but Sir Henry was before him, he wrenched the folded paper from under the frame and thrust it into his pocket. I thought Count Andreas looked about him for a weapon. Then the menace fell from him and he sat down.

"You are right," he said, "the dead woman has been here."

"If any woman has been here," replied Sir Henry Marquis.

Outside, on the path of the little wood to the village, with the priceless rubies in my hand, I turned to Sir Henry Marquis.

"Did the dead woman come back to carry out her threat?"

"Perhaps the dead woman carried out her threat," he replied, "but she did not come back to do it. Who can say what power the dead have to move the living to their will!

"Count Andreas wished to be rid of your insistence, so he prepared these false evidences to indicate that a discharged maid had entered the house and accomplished the robbery. But he was a conspicuous bungler, for all his care; the woman's footprints which he made in the flower bed, by lying down on the turf and pressing the Countess's slipper into the soft earth with his hand, did not show a print deep enough for the weight of a woman...Of course he had the key to the desk drawer."

"But the spider web?" I cried. "How could he move the frame of the portrait to conceal this bracelet behind it, and not break that web?"

Sir Henry fingered the cord to his big monocle.

"The trouble with the spider web," he replied, "was that it is the web of a wood spider, who does not build in a house, and, no matter where he builds he does not fasten his web to its supports with American mucilage.

"The lens of my eyeglass," he added, "is one of the strongest Arnold grinds in Zurich."

______________________

6: The Stolen Treasure

I THOUGHT she was the loveliest human creature in the world. Certainly she was the smartest when she came into the club that night. And yet she had been out all the winter afternoon in a run with the Meadow Brook.

It was winter, and there was a mist of rain. Her top hat and her riding habit were wet, her boots were mud-splashed, and she was tired, but no fatigue could impair the fine vigor of her. I regarded her with wonder as I have always regarded her.

She did not see Sir Eric and me. We were in the library. The door was open. But we saw her. And as I have said, she moved me to wonder. But the sight of her, just then, seemed to infuriate Sir Eric.

Perhaps it was the culmination of disappointments to the man. It was a day of wrecked plans for him; a wrecked hope and a wrecked vengeance to boot, and the sight of her was like a prick on a sore nerve plexus. He had failed to raise the subscriptions for his second expedition, and he had failed to establish a criminal action against the man whom he charged with the loss of his great discovery on the first one. Our men of wealth, our courts, our women— at least this one— were all anathema to him.

He was in a bitter mood, and his words were not carefully chosen. "Surely the Salic law does not run in this accursed country," he said. "Does everyone take his directions from a woman in it? This girl appears, and the decision of a museum committee and the opinion of a barrister are suddenly determined, as though some divine sibyl had said the word."

He made a derisive gesture, putting out his hand with the fingers crooked. "I would wager a guinea that even Warren himself would run to her if she crooked her finger at him."

"You would win the guinea," I said.

He turned sharply toward me. "What!" He was surprised at the confirmation of his prophecy. "After the way she deserted him when this thing came out!— flitted off to Europe and left him to face the charge I brought. She's hard as nails, hard as the deck of a whale ship. I could almost feel for the man at the way she cast him off, I who have every reason to detest him. He could expect me to be against him. But not this girl who pretended to love him when his name was clear, who was to be his wife when he got back from our expedition. She cuts and runs— fine type that. Imagine a girl of my country— a girl of any country but this— abandoning the man she pretended to love at the first gun!" He swore under his breath. "Fine type of a woman!"

"The very finest type of a woman," I said.

He shot a strange, hard glance at me. Did I speak with him in irony, or was I also under this witch spell with the others? But it was a truth that he could not get at. In the trade I follow one governs one's face.

It was winter. Sir Eric Dorm and I were in the library of the club on Long Island. It is the most comfortable and one of the best-conducted clubs in the world. But it was empty on this afternoon except for the two of us and the girl who had just come.

I had been out of America for some time. I had returned to join Sir Eric in the matter with which he was engaged, and this girl had appeared also— appeared, as the man so bitterly put it in his denunciations, to influence, as he imagined, everything against him.

He was in a rabid mood about her, as one with a monomania might come to believe some evil intelligence moved covertly to thwart him at every point in his endeavors. He was so far gone in this bitter seizure that he could almost bring himself to sympathize with the man whom he had endeavored to get before the criminal courts. The man the girl had deserted, as he said it, when Dorm's formal charge had been made against him—"Cut and run when the cloud descended," is how he put it in his milder mood. And it was not a flurry of fear that moved her; that one could forgive. Little fears and a woman one could understand. A weak girl might fly to cover when the man her name was linked with got entangled with a felony— a moral one, at least if the charge stood, if not a legal one. But the girl had not abandoned Warren in a fear flurry. She had turned away with her head up. It was a cold-blooded desertion of the man in trouble.

This was Sir Eric Dorm's analysis, not mine. I am not writing here what I thought.

The whole affair from its inception was extraordinary. A strange adventure into an unknown region of the world, a strange discovery and a strange conclusion. It had no equal in any fiction that I knew, and the actors in it were like characters in a drama.

Take, for example, Sir Eric Dorm. He was not English by birth. I never knew the stock he was of. But he had adopted England, turned to her in the Great War out of one of the German colonies. And for that act got a paper title. He came out of the waste places of the world, remote waste places that the Germans had raised a flag in.

He had appeared here as an explorer with a theory. The theory had a rumor at its back. The rumor had come to him in German East Africa, and the archaeologists that were always drifting into the colonies from the empire had considered it, as they considered everything.

There was a monument standing on a plateau of the Lybian Desert. The rumor was vague about the thing. There was a legend of it among certain wandering tribes, a vague legend. But it persisted; it was old; ancient natives had heard it, and younger men. It seemed to be renewed, as though by chance the thing were on occasion rediscovered by some individuals lost from their usual native route. Dorm had come here from London. He had tried to get a company in England to back an expedition. But he found the English people conservative. They trusted their own men only. They would not take a chance outside. The museums and the learned societies heard him, admitted that there might be a core of truth in the rumor; admitted that ancient civilization had probably an early situs in the region; admitted that monuments or fragments of old structures might even exist to this day in some unknown sector. But there the matter ended. They would neither indorse the man's plan nor advance it with financial aid. And so he came to America. We were young and adventurous. We had imagination and the will to risk. We had enthusiasms and the courage to go afield with them.

At any rate, one of our great institutions took him up, and one of our great financial factors raised the money. It was no great sum to the Americans who assembled it. Dorm wanted to go light. He rejected, himself, the idea of an elaborate expedition equipped to excavate a city. He wanted a scouting party, that could move swiftly and cover ground. If he found the thing, an elaborate expedition could go in later, and it could go equipped to meet the conditions that existed. There seemed sound sense in that. It appealed to the rich American sitting in his Long Island house with a million dollars in carved stone and wood over his head, alone and bored. He gave Dorm a quick decision. If the great museum would indorse the venture, he would finance it.

And here the girl came in.

She had an uncle on the committee. She went to him, and finally the institution gave assent; Dorm could go in its name, if the wealthy American on Long Island would provide the money.

And here, too, young Warren came into the thing.

He should go with Dorm. He needed a vacation, change from the banking house in which he slaved to eminence. What were great possessions, if one had no sound body to go with them! Economy in life was the last economy. It was this girl's decision. Perhaps it was the moving motive in the whole affair. To get Warren into the open, out of the sight and hearing of the money changers.

Dorm maintained that the region he wished to enter, contrary to the common opinion on it, was not unhealthy; that, in fact, it was an elevated plateau, dry, with a clean bracing air, a baked earth, the very bracing region for one enervated by a sedentary life.

It was not in the sand of the Sahara. That was another misconception. It was a hardbaked plateau, dry as a tile at the season he would select for the march inland. There was a rainy season, when this plateau had a sort of carpet of grasses on it. But in the month that he planned to enter, these grasses would be dried wisps of vegetation covering an earth hard like a clay road with the moisture out of it.

You see, Dorm had a base— or, better yet, roots everywhere embedded in the thing for his Odyssey.

This girl was behind events. She was behind the events that got his first expedition on the way. And she was behind the events that now so utterly and in such diverse forms thwarted his second expedition. From a beneficent, she had turned, as he expressed it, to a malignant influence.

Snow lay on the world. It was winter, as I have written. The door to the library was partly open; through it we had seen the girl enter, and looked after her as she disappeared at the end of the long hallway. Dorm went over now and closed the door, closed it firmly and latched it as though thereby to bar out the influence of this girl against him. Then he walked about, passed the great leather couch with the beautiful electric lamps at either end of it, passed the writing table, passed the long table covered with magazines behind the couch and the open book shelves set in against the wall.

There was a wood fire, and I stood on the hearth beside it. Dorm was silent. He padded about like a sort of beast in a den, and I watched him. He was a heavy, strange human creature, a massive face and thick, stooped shoulders. I regarded him from a larger knowledge of this affair than he possessed himself. I was not puzzled by its mysteries. But the man in some aspects of him was an intriguing puzzle. Why had he turned in the German colonies so quickly to the English side? Was it a sound common sense foreseeing an ultimate, inevitable end, the end of German dominion in the world, or had the English intelligence service marked him out as amenable to influence? Had he, in fact, come over for a price?

I wondered. Had the man any of the fine enthusiasm of an explorer? I looked closely at him from my place by the fire.

He had found the thing that he had set out to seek. One had to give him credit for that. And he had organized his expedition and conducted it with a certain skill. He had not wished to take young Warren with him. He did what he could to get rid of the man. But he could not get rid of him. This girl saw to that. Dorm had to take the man, or give the whole thing up. He was not a fool. And when the thing became inevitable, he made the best of it.

But it was clear that he wished to go alone. And from his point of view he was profoundly right. Perhaps from the general point of view of such a man he was right also.

If he went alone he had only himself to consider, and if he discovered anything of archaeological value he would have the honor of it. There would be no division of the spoil to make. There was ample illustration for the wisdom of such a course. Supercargoes were always critics of the skipper's conduct of his ship; especially if they were related in any way to persons having a financial interest in the voyage. And aids on an exploration always wrote about it, fouling the fine story the leader planned to write himself. One had not a free hand when one had a witness.

Caesar could write his commentaries as he liked in the quiet of his Roman house. He could draw his own figure as he liked.

He could build up the details of his great adventures and overcome them with a fine dramatic courage when he had the whole matter in his hand— when there was, to say it plainly out, no witness. Dorm saw that; not the literary advantage, perhaps, but the larger material advantage. He wished to go alone. He looked on Warren as a peril to him. And from his standpoint he was right.

I have written that Dorm found the thing he set out to discover. And this was true. He went into the Lybian Desert with Warren and a dozen natives; after the first long march south, they reached a terrain comparable to the region Dorm expected to come on. It was a high plateau, baked hard and covered with a variety of dried grasses. It was not sand covered nor poisonous, as is the general belief. The earth was fiat and hard, and there was a crisp, invigorating air like the region above Assouan in autumn.

Plainly, it was an unknown region, for the geographies put sand here and a miasmatic climate. They did not find a buried city nor any ruined structure of a civilization. Nevertheless, the persisting rumor was right.

They found a stone Sphinx standing out of the baked earth of this plateau. It was an Assyrian or Phoenician model of the ancient Egyptian Sphinx. They sighted it in the distance about sunset, and Dorm thought it was gold. Warren also was profoundly astonished. The creature gleamed yellow in the sun, covered with its wings.

Then the night descended suddenly, as it comes on in the desert. There is no twilight as we understand that word. It was a night of wonder for the two men, a night that would, as it seemed to them, never pass. They talked through the long night.

Suppose that great image were in fact gold. The thing was not beyond all hope. Immense gold monuments had existed in the world. There was the Athene of Phidias.

The thing was not gold, but there was a basis for their hope. The wings of the Sphinx as they approached it, appeared to be gilded. Upon examination, the great feathers of these wings were found to be hammered out of thin sheets of gold and fastened to the stone image with bronze pins cemented in. Dorm removed these gold plates. They made a considerable bulk, but they were hammered thin and were not heavy; a few natives could carry them overland to the coast.

Now here in this adventure appeared the first doubtful incident. How one explained it depended on the man one believed. Dorm said that Warren suddenly abandoned him in the night taking most of the natives with him and most of the equipment. The gold plates bound together for the native bearers also disappeared. But eight natives remained, and he set out to return to the coast with them.

Warren gave a somewhat different version of the incident. In plain words, he said that he quitted Dorm's camp that night out of fear. He was afraid to remain. He could give no evidential overt act, but he was convinced that his life was in danger. He had a feeling that Dorm did not intend for him to come out alive. It was in the way the man looked at him, Warren said. At any rate, he did leave Dorm's camp in the night, and the majority of the native bearers went with him. He frankly admitted this, but he denied all knowledge of the gold plates. He had taken nothing except bare necessities. What he had taken in no way reduced either the supplies or the equipment Dorm required for his return.

He said that it was not precisely the fear of death that moved him. It was the fear of the issue that approached between them. Presently, as he saw it, Dorm would make way with him, unless he acted first. He wished to forestall that issue, and the only way open was to cut and run for it. He could not kill Dorm as a preventive measure.

It must be conceded that Dorm's story was the most convincing. He led the expedition, and he had the authority of that leadership. He laughed at Warren's motive. There had been no quarrel, no clash, not even a word or gesture between the two men. Warren had suddenly taken the native bearers and deserted in the night. Dorm shrugged his shoulders. The treasure of the gold plate also was gone. The inference was irresistible. Why so many native bearers if Warren carried nothing out with him?

The circumstantial evidence was convincing. And Warren's suspicions, as he related them, seemed hardly adequate. Decidedly, Dorm had the best of it. There was a further thing. Dorm said the food supplies left him were mostly tinned stuff that he and Warren had put aside as doubtful. He was afraid to eat it, and he warned the natives. But hunger overcame his warning. They did eat it toward the end of the march, and their disobedience cost them their lives. They died on the last day's march, and Dorm came in alone, very nearly a starved madman, as he described it.

Young Warren stood badly before the world when Dorm came in with his story. He made a rather sorry figure. It was then that this girl, as Dorm put it, deserted Warren, flitted out to Europe with her head up. Most persons regarded him askance.

Dorm had hung about New York for two months, writing his story of the expedition; making his report to the museum, and endeavoring to get young Warren before the criminal courts. I had been out of America for these two months, and now on my return I had this interview with Sir Eric Dorm. He found decisions suddenly made up. Things delayed, discussed, put off, were now decided— decided against him! And always, as the man's seizure compelled him to believe, it was this girl who influenced events against him. He saw her sinister shadow in the background behind every adverse decision.

She was in the foreground visible to the eye at the interview we were fresh from— the interview with the attorney. She stood beside his table when he gave Dorm his final pronouncement on the criminal feature of young Warren's act.

There was no criminal feature!

No ownership could be established in the missing plates, and the circumstantial evidence was too vague for an indictment; besides the act was not within the jurisdiction of our courts.

The thing was clear and ended. Young Warren could not be haled before a criminal court here on the suspicion of a theft in Central Africa.

The great legal authority had brought his hand down heavily on the table, and the girl had smiled, looking at Dorm through narrowed eyelids, as at one vanquished and considered for a triumph.

It was more than Dorm could endure in silence. "And so the thief goes free?" he said.

But the barbed taunt got no entry through her armor. She repeated the sentence as though it were the pronouncement of an oracle. "And so the thief goes free." Before the committee at the museum we met the same finality. The matter would not be reconsidered. The commission to Sir Eric Dorm was withdrawn. Going in, we had passed the girl on the stone stairway coming out. Dorm swore. Was there no end, then, to the influence of a hostile woman?

And here on Long Island, when we came today to get a final answer from the rich American who had financed the first expedition, Dorm received the same denial. This Croesus was no longer interested in the affair. He shrugged his shoulders, and in plain words he put us out among the hounds and horses of the meet before his door.

He followed, as it happened, but not to soften our dismissal. He came to laugh with this ubiquitous, inevitable girl, sitting her big hunter like some daughter of the gods.

Dorm went forward with his head down and every muscle tense. But I paused to smile and wave a welcome to her. I could not forbear it. She has no equal in the world, as I think.

And now Sir Eric Dorm and I were come to the conclusion of this whole affair, here in the library of this club, alone, on a winter evening. He walked about heavily, like some imprisoned beast. And I stood, as I have written, on the hearth beside the wood fire.

The fire drew my attention, a little flame springing up from a smoldering log, and I put a query as though the sight of it had aroused my interest. "You had a fire at each night's camp on your African march?"

He answered as though the reply were reflex, as though my idle inquiry did not reach to the deep matter he considered. "Yes," he said, "a little fire."

"You carried fuel with you?"

"No."

"What fuel was to be had on the hardbaked plateau?"

He made a gesture as to dismiss a triviality that disturbed him. "It was hot. We required no fire except to boil a kettle, a few handfuls of the dried desert grasses did that."

"This would be the only trail of your route then— the dot of these fires?"

"Yes," he said, "they would remain until the winter rains come."

Then he faced suddenly toward me, as though he were come up from his consuming introspection with a very determined purpose.

"My friend," he said, "you must have a conception of truth from evidential incidents, or you would not be representing Sir Henry Marquis in the affair. Do you think these gold plates were stolen?"

"I do," I said.

His face cleared. His voice took a firmer note. "You believe that?"

"I know it," I said.

"Then," he cried quite impulsively, "why do you not help me to fasten this act on the guilty man? Are you, too, under the spell of this girl?"

I stooped over and warmed my hands above the flame. My hands were not cold, but the gesture led to a question that I wished to appear irrelevant. I put it now in an idle voice. "If a little fire at a camp on your march was meant to boil a kettle, Sir Eric, what would a great fire, at a camp on your march, mean?"

"A great fire!" He echoed the words as though they were a sort of explosive epithet.

I did not look up from my stooped posture. But out of the tail of my eye I could see the changed attitude of the man, as though a great water beast had flung up from the depths to confront an enemy.

I went on, passing in a casual voice to his comment on the girl. "It was not altogether the mere influence of this girl that decided the museum committee. You see, the gold plates were brought in." I spoke evenly, with no break, as though to give him no space for comment. "You asked me if I thought they had been stolen. I said I knew it. That is how I knew."

I stood up. I did not look at the man. I wished my attention to appear diverted.

A motor arriving at the door; voices in the hall; two persons going into dinner, helped my purpose.

When I did look at Dorm, he was standing behind the big leather couch, his hand on the table, leaning forward. "And so the thief finally brought them in?" he said. His voice was low and careful, like one who feels about covertly in the dark.

"Well," I said, "not precisely that, Sir Eric." I spoke in a large, cheerful manner. "The thief did not bring them in. You see, another expedition went over your route. This expedition brought them in. That would explain the committee's present attitude toward you, and that of Midas here on Long Island. And yet the girl's in it, Sir Eric."

But he had himself in hand. I give him that due. "Where on Warren's trail out did they find the plates hidden?" he said.

"It was not on Warren's trail out," I answered. "It was on your trail out."

I did not look at him. I continued in an even voice: "I asked you a question a moment ago, and you did not answer it: 'If a little fire was meant to boil a kettle, what would a great fire mean?' You did not answer that, Sir Eric. But the one who took this second expedition over your route did answer it. A great fire had been built at your last camp on your way to the coast, after Warren left you. Why this great fire— grasses gathered up over a large area, with labor, for it? There was a purpose in that."

I went on: "I could not guess that purpose, Sir Eric. But the one who led this expedition guessed it. The great fire was to cover the fact that the baked earth at this point on your trail had been disturbed— dug up— to bury something of bulk, to bury the gold plates. There had to be a great fire with ashes over six feet of space."

He kept his posture and his steady voice and he struck clean to the vital query: "Who led this expedition?"

There is a second door to the library in this club. It looks through a bit of hall to the long dining room. For reply I crossed now and opened this door part way, and through the narrow slit of space we could see the girl and Warren at dinner, at a table toward the drawing-room. Changed to an evening dress, the girl was as lovely as a dream; and the boy beyond her a strong, bronze figure, restored to health.

I closed the door and faced Dorm. "It was this American girl," I said. "She did not desert Warren in his need. She went to prove him guiltless. She took that second expedition over your trail. She guessed the meaning of that fire at your last camp; she brought in the plates."

But there was now a light of victory in Dorm's face. "Who would believe her?" he said, "with her interest in Warren. She persuaded him to give the plates up." He repeated with a sneer. "Who would believe her?"

I looked him squarely in the face. "I would believe her," I said.

"And why would you believe her?" The sneer and the light of victory remained.

But they died out at my answer.

"Because I was with her," I informed him with deliberate finality. "Besides"— and I made a trifling gesture—"natives who die from ptomaine poison, Sir Eric, are not found with bullet holes in the skull!"

_____________________

7:  The Garden In Asia

"Come to the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!"

IT HAD COME on to rain. Night was approaching, and I was lost. I had been a guest of the Marquis de Brie at the hunt in the southeast of Belgium. The meet at the château had been in the afternoon for the convenience of the guests of the Marquis, who came out from Brussels. It was late before the hounds picked up a fox, and then there had been a mad run.

I was unfamiliar with the country, and by one of those accidents common in the field, I had got separated from the hunt.

There had been a high timber jump. In the take-off my horse slipped, and I feared that he had received a strained tendon. I got down to look, for I valued the horse, and in my concern the field passed. The horse seemed all right. But I was unable again to come up with the hunt, and I was lost.

I set out to return to the château, following that instinct of direction which every man imagines himself to possess. But it was an unfortunate undertaking as is usually the case with these vaunted instincts.

I had the feeling that I passed more than one time through fields that I remembered. At any rate, night was coming on, and a worse thing presented itself. The hunter had been injured in that unfortunate timber jump. He began to save his leg a bit— everybody knows the indications.

Of course I was not in a deserted country. There were peasant houses about, and the great windmills— that primitive institution of the flat country, serving the peasant farmer as the mountain torrent served to turn the grist mill of the Virginia settler. Our fathers had big conceptions of the uses of the elemental forces. They harnessed the water and the winds.

But I could get no direction from the Belgian peasant.

The Fleming and the Walloon spoke no language that I could understand; and, of course, English was a simian jabber to them.

I have no idea in what direction I traveled, nor precisely how I came into the road I determined to follow. It was not a highway. It was a sort of lane running along by an immense wood, carpeted with grass and unkempt, for occasionally there was the branch of a forest tree in it.

I had gotten down out of the saddle. It was all the horse could do to limp along, and I at least had two good legs under me.

I walked by the horse's bridle.

The road continued; and presently, in the dim light, I observed that it followed a great fence: a fence of iron spikes as high as a man could reach sitting in the saddle. It was fastened into cement pillars, and it seemed to enclose all the lands off to my right.

I took it to be a great parked estate. The wood beyond the fence was cleared of brush, and I could sometimes see the extension of a meadow. It was beyond question some great estate.

And I took courage from that observation.

There would perhaps be some friend of the Marquis, or at least someone with a knowledge of the hunt, and if I were not put up for the night, I would at least get some direction that would set me intelligently on the road.

I followed along the great spiked fence, expecting to find an entrance. There would be some way to go in at no inconsiderable distance. But the hope dwindled. We went on— the unused road paralleling the great parked estate, but shut out by this immense, forbidding fence.

I must have traveled for several miles along that fence enclosing this estate, but I never found a place that a fox could go through or a mark that indicated that any human creature had ever endeavored to pass.

And there was no gate.

I began to wonder what the accursed thing could be that this immense wall of spearheads enclosed, and I felt myself confronted by one of two discouraging alternatives: to sit down on a fallen log by my horse until the day arrived or walk on in the rain.

I walked on.

Discomforts do not seem to be so acute when they accompany us in action. I could not sit in a Belgian drizzle with a miserable horse. And that wall of spikes went on, as though it were a sort of wall of the world, as though I had come by some door through the hill to the boundary of a forbidden country.

Finally I did find a light off to the left, and I turned out toward it. I could not have gone on, at any rate, for the road turned that way. The tangled wood that I feared to find, in fact, appeared here as the outside border of the great spiked wall that went straight on as though it had been surveyed from the French border to the North Sea.

I supposed I followed the road for a mile at right angles to the estate. I was now able to see the light. It was like a gleam of a candle in a window; sometimes the brush, or a turn in the road, shut it out. But it seemed always before me at the end of the road; and there was, in fact, nothing to do but go on. It was now so dark that I was hardly able to keep in the road— I with the miserable, lame horse. I was wet to the skin and a rather ugly human creature when I finally came to the light. It was a house sitting on the rise of a hill.

I had a strange feeling as I pounded on the door with my riding crop. The house was lighted, and the angles of it had shut off from the road all but one light in the window by the door. My impression of it was that I had wandered out of modern reality into some romance. The thing did not seem real. I felt as though by some turn I had got out of the world as I knew it.

It was a tavern with the setting of Dumas. The door was opened by a little Walloon, dressed like a miller, except that his cap was off and he wore an apron. Behind him, seated by a big oak table that stood out in the room from a peat fire, was the strangest human creature I have ever met. He was a big, old man with an immense head; a head as bald as a gravestone— there was not a fringe of hair on it. He had a heavy face, a big crooked nose, and sharp eyes. The eyes were heavy-lidded; but there was no mistaking the alert intelligence that they indicated.

The man was waiting for his dinner. I don't think he was pleased to see a stranger enter. For a moment he looked surprised, I thought, or disconcerted: put out in some manner. Perhaps it was only annoyance. And then, when he had a better look at me, he got up.

I had given my horse to the Walloon. He said he had stabling and fodder for it. I seemed to be able to understand the sort of French he gabbled in. In dreams and in the countries of romance we always understand in any dialect that is spoken. At any rate, I understood the Walloon, and I trusted the horse to him. And then I stood in the door, my riding boots spattered with mud and the rain running in tiny rivulets from my top hat and the creases of my riding coat.

The old man leaned on the table and looked at me.

"Come in," he said. "There will be dinner for two and a fire to dry you. It will be better to be wet inside than out on a night like this." I thought he was going to laugh, but it was only the shadow of a laugh. It began along the border of his great thin-lipped mouth. It was a firm mouth, for all the heavy face.

The mouth and the eyes determined me. I began to explain what had happened; how I had managed to arrive here.

"Can you tell me into what part of the world I have wandered?" I said. He did laugh then: a laugh that did not disturb the massive features; a laugh like a shadow passing over a wall.

"You have wandered into Asia," he said.

I thought the man was mad, but not entirely mad. You will have to try to understand the state of mind I was in. You see, that feeling of unreality had very nearly dominated the whole of my intelligence. You will have to think about that to get any conception of how this reply impressed me, I did not wholly reject it. I had explained pretty fully all that had happened to me and the way I had come. I put another query before I asked him to amend his answer. "What is the great estate to the right of the road: the one with the huge spiked fence along it?" The smile repassed over his face. To be accurate, it came back over it.

"That is not an estate," he said: "that is a garden."

"A garden," I echoed.

"Yes," he said, "the Garden of Eden...You are in Asia."

I took off my wet top hat; I put my riding crop down beside it and went over to the fire. The old man sat down in his chair before the table. He continued to regard me sharply through the corners of his heavy-lidded eyes, but he did not say anything. He gave some directions to the Walloon, who came in just then. And that creature of romance placed a second chair beyond the table and put out his plates for another guest for the dinner he was roasting in his kitchen. The odors of it came through the door. The dinner would compensate for any sort of madness.

I think the big old man had been waiting a long time for that dinner to be prepared. And the Walloon had taken a lot of care with it, as for an imperial guest. Fortunately, it was abundant, for it served two— a hungry man who had ridden to hounds and this other.

My host was courteous.

"I know the Marquis de Brie," he said, "and the hunt, but it does not belong here. It is in the world. It is on the Continent of Europe...It is in Belgium." He made a gesture, as of one indicating something beyond the land he was standing in.

"I am glad to be host to a guest of the Marquis," he said, "even when he wanders into Asia."

He paused. "Do you believe the Bible story of the Garden of Eden?"

I had a sudden flare of annoyance.

"I am not young enough to believe it," I said.

He looked at me a moment through his heavy-lidded eyes.

"You mean you are not old enough."

He beckoned me to the table, and we sat down. The wonderful roast fowl, the old wine, the incomparable salad put me in a better humor. The host permitted me to eat. I thought he was highly amused with me, but he did not take his amusement with a hungry man.

It was some time before he began to talk.

"There is a man and a woman in that garden," he said, when I had the comfort of that dinner and the warmth of a fire to put me in a better mood.

"Not the first man and the first woman...but it is the same garden."

Then he put a sharp query: "Do you believe in any of our mysterious religions?"

"I don't know," I said.

He passed his hand over his face at that.

"You don't know; you are too young. One has to be old to know. Perhaps one never gets old enough to know precisely."

He smiled again.

"Our greatest religion begins with a Garden in Asia. That is the base of it; that is the point it starts from, and it carries a warning that the young forget, but the old remember...There was the witch of Endor, and there were the creatures with familiar spirits; there was the magic of Pharaoh's magicians.

"You think it is not true? Have you ever considered the evidence to support it— the testimony of the Scriptures and the witness of every other early race?

"You know what the Akkadian Magi said about it: that all these formulas of magic— formulas by which the natural world was changed; by which the forms of men and beasts were changed, such as the magicians of Pharaoh assembled— were all written down in gold characters on six thousand ox hides and stored in the palace of Darius at Persepolis...But they were lost!"

He made a gesture with his hand over the table.

"I quote the Magi. 'The barbarian Alexander, penetrating into Asia, burned the palace at Persepolis with its contents, thereby wiping out in a day the sum of all human knowledge.'"

He removed his hand. It was hidden by the cloth. There was a cheap cloth on the table with an Oriental design.

"I wonder why we assume that all the early historians were liars. Are we so truthful ourselves?

"There is the testimony of every one of them to the things I say: the Scriptures, legends of early races; Arabian stories that have come down to us and the writings of every wise man.

"Take Herodotus if you like, or take the greatest modern legal mind in England...I mean Sir Matthew Hale. He said in his most famous opinion that there was nothing so thoroughly established in the world as witchcraft, for three reasons, which he named in their order. First, that it was so stated in the Scriptures; second, that all nations had made laws against it; and third, that the human testimony in its favor was overwhelming."

That shadow of a smile returned for an instant across his face.

"Do you know who I am?" he said.

I had been thinking all the while that I knew, but I could not precisely place this extraordinary personality. I remembered instantly when he said the name. Sir Godfrey Simon! Of course I knew him! Everybody knew him. He was the greatest alienist in England.

I regarded him now with a sort of wonder. What did he mean by all this Delphic discourse: witches, magic, a Garden in Asia?

Here was one of the cleverest men in the world; one of the shrewdest men; one of the hardest men to mislead in the world. He was at the head of one of the most difficult professions in the world: a profession that had to weigh and consider all kinds of delusions, all kinds of fairy belief, all kinds of imagined wizardry; a profession that must discover it and reject it; a profession that must discriminate, clean-cut and accurately, between the conceptions of sanity and the vast, shadowy realm of madness.

And he sat here in this fantastic place commending me to a belief in the most impossible legends; commending me to a belief in magic, in witches, in familiar spirits, in the properties that belong to the stories coming down to us from the baked earth in Arabia.

And he laid it all in our modern life, in our age of trams and spindles!

I tell you the story as he told me the story. You can believe what you please about it. But it was true. I am able to write my signature under that assurance. When you get on to the end you will believe me...

You have all heard of the Countess of Heatherstone— that unusual romance reversing the order of such adventures— an American girl who married an English title and a lot of money with it.

It is the only case I ever heard of.

The thing is usually the other way about, so you may remember it for that conspicuous element. But the Countess is not in this story. It is her brother, Arthur Letington, the American, that we are concerned with. Some of you may have met Letington about. He was not a usual person. He belonged with his sister to one of our old Southern families, a family with a queer streak in it— neurotic and not always normal.

I think it was his outdoor life that kept Letington fit. He went in for sports. He was keen after hounds, and he was one of the best polo players in the country; one of the best in England.

He was usually in England with his sister.

The Earl of Heatherstone was a canny Scotchman about his money. He did not like to see it get away from him, and usually it did not get away. He was one of the best men of business in England, for all of his being an earl.

And that is one of the causes, the inciting causes, as one might say it, of the extraordinary adventures I am coming to.

You see, Letington had no money and he had no profession. I suppose he had a bit of an income from somewhere, but nothing to speak of. I imagine his sister kept him going; mounted him in the hunts and backed the polo at Roehampton and Ranelagh. It might have gone on like that, but the earl had a notion that everybody should be useful, and so I suppose the thing in a manner adjusted itself, as such things have a way of doing.

At any rate, Letington found himself presently included in a business venture. Heatherstone had every sort of iron in the fire all over the British Empire; among other things, a little railway in a section of timber land in Canada. It was a short line, built primarily to bring out hemlock from lands over which the white pine had been removed. It was not very much of a railway, but it had one value: it was a link in one of the great transcontinental lines across Canada to the Pacific.

I don't think the English stockholders realized very handsomely from the manufacture of hemlock lumber. They could not compete with the mills of the Americans.

Still, that was not the thing that got Heatherstone and his stockholders going. It was the big economic situation in England. I mean the lack of employment for labor. English labor was out of work. It was the business of great commercial adventurers like Heatherstone to find employment for it.

The government called him in.

They began to "put it up," as we would say, to the business men of England like Heatherstone. The government had an inventory, a sort of list of every English enterprise in the world, especially the ones which employed foreign labor, and Heatherstone's little railway was on the list. It was operated entirely by Italians. There was not an English laborer on the plant.

It seemed queer to think of a lumber plant and a bit of a railway, in a cold waste of Canada, operated by Italians. But there is a point about this race that one must always consider. It will go any place if it goes as a colony. And that is precisely how it got into this sector of Canada. It had gone as a colony. It was a portion of southern Italy laid down in a section of the north.

I don't know how the thing came about. I think the early advance of the war was perhaps behind it; England and her dominions had no man power to spare, and so the Italian colony came in. At any rate, it was there, attached to the soil, a fixture in that wilderness, as permanent as the villages of Salerno.

And it manned the whole plant, manufactured the lumber, stripped the bark, operated the railway, and moved the great transcontinental train that went over this line once in every twenty-four hours. I mentioned that a moment ago. It was the one industrial fact that made this piece of railway important. It was a short cut on one of the big transcontinental lines. It was not a permanent part of the line. It was never designed to be a permanent part of it; but the main line through was being rebuilt and in the meantime their fast passenger train went over this connecting link. Heatherstone's road coupled the line together. They were paid handsomely for the use of the road, but there was a condition. They had to guarantee the safety of the train and its equipment while it was on their line.

That gave Heatherstone and his stockholders some concern. But they never had any trouble about it.

There was no complaint of the Italian colony. It did its work well. They are the best stonemasons in the world. The large tunnel on Heatherstone's line was a model in its way, wonderfully stone-arched, Sir Godfrey Simon said.

So these were not the things that bothered Heatherstone and his stockholders. It was the insistence of the government that they should displace this Italian labor with labor from England. It was a sort of national eviction they were after. And the government was farsighted. It knew the only solution was to scatter the unemployed; to spread them out over the Empire; that is to say, over the world.

And it put its thumb on Heatherstone.

Now, that is how Letington came to get into the thing.

Heatherstone and his stockholders met, determined to send somebody out to Canada to take charge of the enterprise and to substitute English labor for the Italian.

Here was his brother-in-law, "idling," as the poets used to write it, "between tennis and the bath;" that is to say, between the shooting in Scotland and the polo at Roehampton; and so the earl sent him.

Sir Godfrey Simon said that Letington was the last man to send, if you looked at him from one angle.

He was not a man of business. He was a sportsman and he was a dreamer. Any one would have seen this but the hard-headed earl. On the other hand, he had a certain courage that fitted him for such a venture. He was a big-game hunter; he had gone on all sorts of expeditions into waste places of the earth; he knew how to handle men, and he was not concerned about hardship.

But he was a sentimentalist.

At any rate, that was Heatherstone's final opinion and the opinion of his stockholders.

The methods of these men were direct. They were not concerned with circumlocutions. The order to Letington was to move that Italian colony out— boots and baggage— and substitute English labor for it!

Sir Godfrey Simon made an impressive picture of the situation Letington found himself in. He saw at once how difficult the thing could be.

The resolution directed him to remove from this Canadian forest what was, as I have said, a complete section of Italy set down in it. It was a difficult thing to undertake, and it was a brutal thing.

Letington saw that the moment he went over the line.

Here were these foreign people with their families, their homes, their gardens, their churches, their shrines; graves of their dead, their schools— their civilization, in fact.

Where would they go? How would they continue to live when they were ejected out of this New Italy? Where could he place them? That was not a thing that Heatherstone and his stockholders had considered. It was not a part of the English business problem. It was, as I have said, sentimentalism. They were practical people. Considerations of humanity had nothing to do with it.

But humanity did have something to do with it.

Letington saw what he was "up against," as we would say, and he made a protest. He sent in a report to the earl. He pointed it all out to him.

It was a good paper, Sir Godfrey Simon said— a good paper for impractical people who confused sentiments of humanity with their business affairs. But it was a poor paper for the earl and his stockholders. They gave Letington a pretty curt answer. He would do what he was told! He was not there on God's business.

He was there on the affairs of an English company. He would carry out the directions they gave him and leave his sentimentalism to the ulterior Authority that considered the sparrow.

I do not mean that this was the message of the directors. It never could have been the message of the Glasgow solicitor who was secretary of the board. But it was the message as edited by Sir Godfrey Simon.

Letington went over the line; over the plant.

It was a strip of railway well kept up; its bridges solid; its one big tunnel a fine example of stone work. Everything was in order: the little switches running out to the bark sheds; the mills in the mountains; the Italian village, where the whole dependency lived. The road was over a little valley, burrowing at one point through a shoulder of a mountain. It was a mountainous country; winter was on the way; snow would come presently, and then it would be a sector of Switzerland. It was in the late autumn when Letington went out.

There was nothing that Letington could do after he got the reply of the Glasgow solicitor. He had either to go ahead or give the thing up, and there was something in the man that balked at failure. He was not a success in any way that our commercial age would be apt to measure him. But he did not give things up. That was the quality that made him one of the best sportsmen in his class. He was not afraid, and he did not weaken.

So he called the Italian colony together and explained his directions. The Italians said almost nothing at the time. I suppose they could not realize it. But the idea began to move in them, and they finally understood what the English company intended. When they got the thing in their heads the whole colony was by the ears.

They sent a committee to wait on Letington. They put the case before him in their protest. They wished him to put their protest before the company. He took a good deal of pains to make them understand him then. He had put the matter before the company. He got out his report, the report he had sent in to the earl and his stockholders, and read it to them. He read it carefully and slowly. And then he showed them the reply.

There must have been some sensible persons on that Italian deputation. A common workman often has a clear head; an understanding heart he nearly always has. They said nothing more, and they went out. Letington was misled. He imagined the colony had accepted this decree of eviction. It was a profound error. The Italians had merely realized that it was of no use to make further protest. The English company would not change.

Two or three days later an extraordinary thing happened.

An Italian woman, accompanied by two or three laborers, came in to see Letington.

They wished a private conference with him, and they were admitted to his office. The woman looked like a Neapolitan peasant. She wore the picturesque costume of Salerno. She was of middle age. But there was something about her that profoundly impressed Letington when he came to observe her closely. Her big, determined features gave him the impression of a powerful personality who by an accident of birth had arrived from a low racial origin.

There was no mistaking the fact that she was an extraordinary person. She did not speak English, or, at any rate, only a few words of it.

The men with her began to explain.

They used a lot of words and gestures, and they interrupted one another in their effort to make their meaning clear in a language in which they felt themselves to be deficient. But they finally made Letington understand. He did not understand the Italian word they used, but he did understand what they were meaning by it. The woman was what we would call in our plain English tongue a witch. She had a familiar spirit. She had a control of what we call supernatural forces, or, rather, to be more accurate, a supernatural control of what we call natural forces, and when they got that idea before Letington they coupled their threat with it.

They said if he undertook to put his policy into effect, this woman would cause the great engine that pulled the transcontinental train over the line to disappear. They elaborated the threat with the figures of their Italian tongue and with vague gestures. The engine would vanish.

Of course Letington was not misled about it. He thought he understood perfectly what was behind all this theatrical property. The thing was just a plain threat to wreck the train!

This was serious. As I have said, the English guaranteed the safety of the train over this line: to wreck it would be to destroy the company.

But the threat carried farther. If the engine were wrecked, would the crowded passenger coaches escape? The thing might carry murder with it. He could see all sorts of disasters extending themselves from this threat, and he said what he thought.

The Italian workmen with the woman protested with great vigor. No one would be hurt; no part of the great transcontinental train would be injured; there would be no scratch on paint of a coach; there would be no battering of a bolt in the engine. Nothing would be injured.

The great engine would simply disappear.

This woman, this witch, this person with the supernatural control of the natural forces of the world, by her magic would simply remove that engine from sight and hearing. The train would remain! That was what they meant.

They went out with the promise that they would return and show Letington what the woman could do; that is to say, she was going to give him an example of the power she possessed.

What precisely did this mean? Was it, in fact, what he first imagined, a veiled threat to derail the great train? That would be simple enough and not outside of probability. Not, in fact, outside of a possible event— there was precedent enough for it.

The Latin was racially influenced to revenge.

It was with him a form of human injustice. Northern races, logically and coldly, might adjust their difficulties in third-party tribunals, but revenge is an act of the Latin. It is a conception of justice common to peoples of a hotter blood. It is an old, deep-seated instinct. When one received an injury, one returned it. When a village or a family received an injury, it returned it. This seemed the adequate explanation, if, in fact, the threat meant anything. It was hardly likely that even ignorant Italians were moved by the idea that they could frighten an English company out of a plan on which it had decided or that they could frighten its manager here.

The Anglo-Saxon was not easily intimidated. You could not, usually, move him with a threat. And yet these explanations, when one undertook to apply them to the event, did not seem wholly adequate. There must be something more behind this extravagance. Frankly, the man was puzzled; he was also alarmed, but he was not in fear. He was not the sort of person to be easily put in fear. Still, he could not rid himself of a sort of concern about it. The thing must mean something, and he recalled the indirections and the extravagant innuendo of the Italian speech. He expected something to happen, but the thing that did happen was alien to any idea in the man.

The Italians said they would return and this woman, this witch, this person with the familiar spirit would show him what she could do.

And she did return.

Some days later they came in again to Letington— the Italian workmen and this woman. It was rather late in the evening— twilight, in fact. Night was descending. Letington was alone. He had remained to go over some reports of the office. The man was, in fact, conscientious about the business of this company, and he was endeavoring to get up the details on it; going back to see how his predecessor had managed the business. This is how he came to be alone and in the office of the company at this late hour.

Three persons entered.

But there was now with them a fourth person— a little, old woman, feeble and not able to walk. The Italian laborers carried her in gently and put her into a chair at the end of the room. She was dressed in the deep, somber mourning of the Italian women in the bereavement of death. Without being able to see any feature of her, Letington said it was impossible to escape the conviction that the woman was immensely, incredibly old and of such frailty that the slightest exertion would eject her out of life. With the others was the big, sturdy Italian woman, in the dress of a peasant of Salerno.

She stood in the center of the group, a figure of strength and vigor.

She had, as I have said, and as Letington continually insisted, the dominance of uncultivated persons, who by some strange order of nature seemed foreordained for a certain direction of events; having, in fact, a certain authority of action in the presence of unusual events. I gave some examples a while ago. You have all met with these examples. You know what Letington meant, and you know what I mean here in my effort to put this extraordinary story before you.

The group said very little.

Letington never could recall any significant conversation. The Italian workmen, who carried in the woman, made some usual salutation. They bid him "Good evening," or something of the sort, and they may have uttered some expression to indicate the object of their arrival: that they came to verify what they had said, or the like. He thought they did say something of this character.

He was not certain.

What happened was too extraordinary. The verbal passages preceding it did not sufficiently impress him. At any rate, they were not important. They had, in fact, come to give the demonstration, as one would call it; to show what the witch could do before she undertook the thing she threatened— to put teeth into the threat, as we would say. If the approaches to the event were not recalled in sharp outlines, we must believe that the event itself was sufficiently vivid. Letington may have forgotten what they said; but he never forgot what happened.

The big peasant woman made him a curtsy. He said it reminded him of that exaggeration which a certain old dancing master in London used to demonstrate to the American women about to be presented at the Court of St. James. It had an Old World, out-of-fashion aspect about it.

Something in a fairy story was the idea I got; the kind of extreme gesture of the Foreign Envoy at the Court of the King of the Golden Mountains! I can only present the thing by this indirection. You know what I mean.

Letington said another thing about it that makes the illustration I suggest a bit more apt. He said it was ironical, as though it were made before a mock authority; as though superior persons presented themselves before a pretender. It would be the way a jinni would bow before a mortal king in an Arabian story before he produced his magic city or his winged horse.

After that curtsy, the woman took out of the bosom of her dress what appeared to be a ball of grass made up with resin. She held it in the palm of her hand. One of the Italian workmen ran forward, got a coal from the fire, and touched it to the ball of resin.

The thing began to smoke.

It smoked feebly at first, after the manner of a wet wisp of hay, scarcely afire. The smoke arose like a fantastic flower, a thin stem curling and expanding at the summit. Then it extended itself. It extended itself vaguely until the whole room was filled with an aromatic odor, a sort of haze. Letington said the thing went on until the ball of resin in the woman's hand was consumed, and the result was that strange aromatic odor filling the whole space and a haze as though one had caught and confined here the sort of blue-gray haze observed on our mountains in the autumn, in what we call Indian summer.

There had been no sound.

There was absolute silence in the room. Letington said he did not move. He looked on as if at some extravaganza, but he was impressed. The thing got him, as we might say, into a sort of atmosphere. The strange thing was that it did not seem to be absurd. It seemed to be a sort of phenomenon of some character appearing with a certain aspect of dignity.

We cannot understand, I fear, precisely how he thought about it. At any rate, the peasant woman standing thus, surrounded with this impalpable smoke haze, as of something arising from the earth about her, suddenly cried out, extending her hand.

Letington said it was a harsh cry. He often thought about it afterward. It was not in any language that he knew. He did not think the words the woman uttered were of the Italian language. He thought it was an older, harsher language. And it was a sort of formula. It was a cry that seemed to shatter or, as one would say, break down a barrier already thinned or weakened. That is an inadequate explanation of the effect. But Letington said he had some sort of vague conception of that character. He had no idea of what would happen, but the thing that did happen was beyond any conception that he could have had.

I have said that the Italian laborers brought in an old woman and put her in a chair in the corner of the room. Now, at this cry, the feeble figure in the chair rose. It came up stiffly to its feet like an image of wood, and then it began to sing.

Letington said that he remained immovable with wonder.

The singing was something heavenly. The rich, deep, beautiful voice filled the room: extended itself; seemed to fill the world.

He said the thing was incredible beyond any winging of the fancy.

He had never heard such a voice. It was not the volume of it, for it lacked great volume; it was not the vigor of it nor any unusual note. There was a haunting music in it, an appealing sweetness— something that got into one's spirit and there awakened every romantic fancy.

It was incredible. It belonged in a fairy story; in the properties of romance. It seemed to the man that he was hearing something that he had read about in the poets of old time, in ancient romances, as though the practical world had turned backward— revolved backward— into a world of wonder.

It was the golden-snooded muse, singing in the Seven-Gated City of Thebis! He could see the fairy city in the air— a mirage of gilded towers and veiled brazen gates on a cloud island; and the voice coming from an interminable distance, but losing nothing, neither its vigor nor any tone!

It had that marvelous quality.

It was far away, and it was not far away. He said he could not differentiate the singing from the conceptions of romance that arrived with it. It was something singing behind the horns of Elfland in some kingdom of faërie: singing among the stars in unending summer, in undying youthfulness! He said every extravagant expression that he could think of paled before the wonder of that heavenly reality.

Then the figure collapsed. The big peasant woman caught it. They wrapped it up in a shawl and carried it out.

Letington did not move. He remained in his chair behind his table, that plain oak table, with the records of the company littering it before him. He sat there for a long time without thought, as he used to try to express it, and without motion, as one recovering from a drug or a hypnotic envelopment. He did not know what had happened to him. The thing was too unreal; it was too improbable; it was too utterly beyond all human sense.

The footsteps of the Italians carrying out the ancient, feeble woman grew vague, and ceased. There was again silence; the haze in the room disappeared. The aromatic odor thinned out, ceased to exist. But the man remained in his chair. Finally he put his hand up and passed it over his face, as though by that gesture to remove an illusion.

That, of course, was the only explanation he had. That was the only explanation anyone could have. Of course there wasn't any explanation. What sane person could believe in witches or in a magic that transported one from a modern, workaday world to a land of fairies; that took an ancient, feeble crone, so old that she had to be carried about, and forced her by a harsh cry to sing like a fabled siren in faërie lands forlorn!

Of course there wasn't any explanation.

The man went out after a while, but he said that he did a thing that any one of us would have done. He said that he went about the room touching objects in it, replacing chairs, adjusting the table, trying the door latch.

You see what he was after!

He was trying to convince himself that he was in a world of reality— just what any of us would have done— that he was, in fact, here in this place; that the place had not changed; that it was the same place.

After that he went out.

There was only one explanation of it that didn't overturn every landmark of our common reason. He believed himself to be a victim of some hypnotic influence, as the traveler in some city of the East, in an enclosed courtyard, sees a rope thrown into the air by a juggler, and a lad climb it into the sky, disappearing, a tiny figure in some cloud haze. That was the explanation Letington finally got about it. He had to take that or go adrift. But it seemed neither an adequate nor a true explanation of the phenomenon.

It was the voice that he could not escape from. That voice was real. The singing was real. He could differentiate the effects from the voice. The effects were illusions, but that haunting, heavenly voice was a reality! He could no more doubt the reality of it than he could doubt the reality of the sunlight, or the outline of the forest in the distance, or his hand. The voice was real, and it affected him as had no other singing in the world.

He never heard a voice like it.

He could not escape from the lure of that voice. It seemed to have entered into every fiber of his body: something he had long sought; something he had hungered for; something he had waited for from the time he was born— and from beyond that— from the beginning of the world.

I am taking a lot of pains to try to make these impressions clear to you, for they are a vital part of this extraordinary thing. Perhaps you can, in some manner, realize how the thing impressed this man. I suppose one would have to call it an exclusive personal element. There was a feeling that the voice had something to do with himself, as differentiated from other persons; as though no one but himself could have heard it, or as though it could have been intended for no other person. It was his due: belonged to him out of some other existence.

That is as near as I can get it out of the elaboration that Sir Godfrey Simon gave me. At any rate, that was the end of it. Things went on. Letington imagined himself to have been present at an inexplicable phenomenon, a sort of hypnotic phenomenon. It had put his reason out of dominance. He had a feeling of anxiety about events now that he could neither define nor control.

And it was a correct premonition.

He went ahead endeavoring to put into effect the policy of eviction that he had been sent here to accomplish. The Italian colony made no further protest. It carried out the preliminaries of his direction. The notices posted were not disturbed. The orders for inventories on materials and tools were carried out. The first preliminaries of the eviction went forward, and there was no disorder. There was not even discourtesy.

Everywhere he was received with the same deference; his directions were received with the same silent acquiescence. But it was a calm that had too much serenity in it. He did not like it. He would have felt safer if he had found groups of men talking together; evidences of violence here and there; protests, or ugly threats echoed after him as he passed: that is to say, the usual thing that one expects and can understand. But he did not find it. The whole colony was composed, silent and obsequious. It got on the man's nerves.

And then suddenly the thing happened.

Winter was beginning to arrive. At twilight one evening the great transcontinental was stopped by an emergency signal. Snow was beginning to fall. It was on a slight grade beyond the Italian village. When the train stopped there was an insistent call for the fireman and engineer to come to the rear of the train. They got down and went back along the coaches. It was now coming on to snow heavily. They passed down on either side of the coaches to the end of the train. But they could find no reason for the emergency signal. No official in the coaches knew anything about it, and no one could be found who had called. The conductor joined them. They went to the extreme end of the train, but they could find nothing to indicate why such a signal should have been given.

And when they returned the engine was gone!

It had disappeared. The train officials released the brakes and ran the passenger coaches back into the village. Letington, awakened at one o'clock in the morning, was told of this mysterious event.

Don't forget where I was when I got this story. Keep that in your mind. I was before a peat fire in an inn in Belgium, as I told you in the beginning. I had turned about from the table. I was wet, and my clothes steamed, but I was comfortable with an excellent dinner. There was a bottle of wine on the table, and Sir Godfrey Simon on the other side of it. You will remember what I said about him. A big, old man with a perfectly bald head— a head as bald as an ivory door handle— a crooked nose; a wide, narrow-lipped mouth; little, sharp eyes under craggy eye pits; shaggy, arched brows over them.

It is his story that I am trying to tell you— not mine.

I know nothing about it, except what the man said. That I precisely know. I remember every detail. No word of it escaped me. It was the most extraordinary tale I had ever heard, in the most extraordinary setting, surrounded by the most extraordinary suggestions.

I was lost, and I had turned up as by the directions of the fairies at this inn, by this Garden in Asia and the long, iron-spiked fence that seemed, as I have said, to stretch across Belgium, across Europe, across the world.

That was the hard background behind all this extravaganza. It was the thing at my back. That is a pretty good expression. It was the Garden in Asia at my back that made the whole of this story such a wonder.

I go back to Letington and the disaster he was awakened out of sleep to meet. Of course there could, in fact, be no mystery to speak of about the matter. A great passenger engine could not disappear. Stop a moment and realize it: a thing of complicated machinery weighing five hundred thousand pounds. It was a late model of the American passenger engine, one of these huge monsters built to haul a long train over mountains across a continent.

Such engines are unknown in any European country.

It would weigh, as I have said, some two hundred and fifty tons. Try to get a conception of such a mass of metal. And it was valuable. It was worth a hundred thousand dollars. It could not be made to disappear at the will of a peasant woman burning a ball of aromatic grass and uttering a verbal formula.

Of course it had been cut off from the train and run forward in the absence of the engineer and fireman, who had been drawn back to the rear of the passenger coaches by what they took to be the call of the conductor.

It was a clever trick in a snowstorm.

But where could the engine have been taken? It was a single-track road, and short, connecting the two branches of the transcontinental line. As it passed through the valley one saw from it only the little mills that dotted the lumber yards; the great sheds under which the hemlock bark was stored for shipment to the tanneries, looking like immense hillocks covered with roofs of bark; the scattered villages of the lumbermen; the narrow river; and beyond the vast mountains that seemed to extend into the sky.

The engine could not have gone back, because the passenger coaches were behind it. These coaches had been released and run down the grade to the Italian village. The engine had to go forward.

As I have said, there could not be very much of a mystery about it, and, in fact, there was not any mystery about it.

There was a tunnel through a shoulder of the mountain just beyond where the engine had been cut off. Letington and his track crew, going over the line in the morning, found the entrances to this tunnel shot down.

It was clear now what had occurred.

The engine had been run into the tunnel and the ends of the tunnel shot down with explosives to prevent it from being taken out. The whole thing had been done cleverly and with Italian cunning.

But there was no mystery about it.

The agents carrying the thing into effect had selected a night of storm, one of those nights of early winter when heavy snow was approaching. They had given an emergency signal. It would be easy to do that. Any one of them could have boarded the train as a passenger and given such a signal precisely as the conductor or officials in the rear of the train might have given it. And they could have called the engineer and fireman to the rear of the train, precisely as the conductor might have done. There was no difficulty about this part of the business.

There was no particular difficulty about the other part. The Italian colony operating the plant contained more than one competent engineer. Any one of them could have handled this engine, or any engine. They could cut it loose from the train and run it forward in the absence of the engineer and fireman, especially in a snowstorm in the night. And that was precisely what had been done.

Letington was not misled about it.

He knew what had happened, and when he found the entrances to the tunnel on either side of the shoulder of this mountain shot down with explosives, as though there had been a landslide, he knew where the engine was. In fact, the thing was all so simple that the man began to wonder at the circumlocutions of pretended magic that had accompanied it. That, however, would be the Latin mind. But to the hard Anglo-Saxon intelligence it seemed a sort of child's play.

What value, in fact, was to be obtained by all this extravaganza surrounding so evident and practical a fact?

Nevertheless, there was the situation to be met.

The great train could not go over the line, and the engine was sealed up in a tunnel. The work had been done thoroughly.

As I have said, the approaches to the tunnel looked as though they had been covered with a landslide. The persons who undertook this thing carried it out effectively. The shoulder of mountain on either side of the tunnel had been shot down to cover the entrance. It was a big undertaking to clear it, and besides the snow made the work more difficult. It continued to fall. It was one of those heavy storms that bring winter into this north country.

Letington was very much concerned about this disaster, and he put everybody on inquisition, but of course he could discover nothing.

No one in the whole colony knew anything about it. They had seen nothing; heard nothing.

There was not a word, a gesture, or an incident that he could get hold of that could connect the affair with anybody.

Every man in the colony demonstrated that he was about his usual affairs at this hour. Everybody could establish an alibi. There was not a court in Christendom that could have found a clew to connect anybody in the colony with this affair. There was no one in this Italian settlement who would admit any connection with the affair, with the single exception of the Italian peasant woman. She admitted it.

She came into the office where Letington would be holding his courts of inquiry, and she would stand there and look at him with her strange, ironical smile.

She laughed at his explanation; at the effort he was making; at his practical solution of the difficulty. He would never get his engine out from under the mountain. She had made that engine to disappear!

And this gave him further anxiety.

He took it to mean that the engine had been destroyed in the tunnel. He was now greatly alarmed. The safety of the train and the contract of the company to secure the daily safe passage over the line would bankrupt the enterprise, already heavily involved. The man saw complete disaster before him.

Of course there was only one thing to do, and that was to uncover the approaches to the tunnel and get the engine out as soon as he could. Here he was met with a further concern. The Italian labor, which he must make use of, would perhaps either refuse to work or it would hinder his efforts in some way. This meant that the undertaking would go forward slowly; and in the meantime, if the engine were not already destroyed, it would be seriously injured. The tunnel would be damp; the delicate machinery of the engine would be injured by the rust.

At the best he could hope for, there would be great delay, a violation of the contract with the transcontinental line and injury to the machinery. But could he, in fact, get it out? Could he depend on the Italian labor for this service?

When he considered the whole matter he was firmly convinced that he could not. But in this conclusion he was conspicuously mistaken. He had not the slightest difficulty with the Italian laborers. They went to work at his direction to uncover the approaches to the tunnel. But the great snow delayed them, and after that was cleared away there were still tons of earth to be removed. It was like making a new cut into the shoulder of the mountain.

Letington was uncertain what to do.

He reported the accident briefly, by cable, to the English company. And then he made out a report of what had occurred. He had to send this report by mail. That would mean practically a month before he had a reply. The answer to his cable was to make no concession to the Italian colony; to put the tunnel in shape, and to go forward with the policy of eviction as he had been instructed. The English company would make whatever adjustments were necessary with the transcontinental line with which they had their agreement of carriage. Letington went forward under that instruction.

One of the logging engines pulled the coaches back to the junction with the main line, and they went around in another direction to the main line beyond. In the meantime Letington went forward with the work of opening the tunnel. This work, as I have said, advanced slowly.

The heavy winter weather continued. Snow fell and had continually to be removed. The shoulder of the mountain at the opening of the tunnel was sheer; the earth kept slipping in. Letington put every man at his disposal to work on the thing, and although he had no reason to complain of either the individual effort or the unity of effort of his crew, the advance was slow.

Neither did he abandon his effort to discover who had been connected with the affair. Every morning at daylight he was with the crew at their work before the tunnel, and every night he conducted his court of inquiry in the office. The men, the women of the colony were examined; even the children were interrogated; but it was entirely useless.

He never discovered anything.

Everyone professed utter ignorance in the affair. They were just as much astonished and amazed as he was. When he asked them what had become of the engine they merely shrugged their shoulders: How did they know?

And always the sturdy peasant woman was in the room with her strange, ironical smile. What was the use of all these inquiries or this questioning of men and children? She could tell him all about it. What had happened was precisely what she had warned him would happen. Why go forward with his ridiculous efforts to discover the author of this disaster? The author was before him. She had accomplished the thing. It was her work. She admitted it.

She had caused the engine to disappear.

And then she would add her Delphic sentence:

"You will never get your engine out from under the mountain."

The thing got on the man's nerves, and finally he abandoned any further effort to discover who were the criminal agents in this affair. He closed the office at night, gave up his courts of inquiry and devoted himself to the effort of opening the tunnel.

I suppose a man never made a greater or more persistent effort than Letington did to drive a heading into the tunnel. He was, as I said, profoundly disturbed. He was not puzzled. He knew where the engine was, and the intent of the thing was all clearly before him. But the veiled threat in the continually repeated sentence of the Italian woman more and more impressed him.

"You will never get your engine out from under the mountain!"

That might have two or three meanings. It might mean that the engine was not under the mountain. But that phase of the oracular expression he could at once dismiss. There was no other place that it could be. It could not have been run on over the line. It would have been discovered, of course. The line in a southern direction connected with the transcontinental line ahead. It could not have been taken in that direction. Nobody could conceal an immense passenger engine on a track. And there was no other place to take it.

When one stops to think about it, what could be more conspicuous than a passenger engine?

One could not put it in one's pocket like a bauble nor tuck it under a board. The thing was, of course, out of the question; besides, here were the ends of the tunnel shot down. This feature of the matter did not concern him. He dismissed it precisely as you or I would have dismissed it. But the thing that did concern him was whether the engine was destroyed.

"You will never get your engine out from under the mountain!"

That would mean either that he would never get the tunnel clear, and therefore could not get it out, or it meant that the engine was, in fact, destroyed, and therefore he would not get it out.

There was anxiety enough in either of these two alternatives.

Of course his first impression was that the woman meant that he would not be able to uncover the openings of the tunnel. She could very well depend on that. He had only this Italian labor to use for the undertaking, and all of it, he could well assume, would be out of sympathy with his effort.

But, as I have said, he was mistaken in that.

He was looking for some indication of that intent all the time, but he never saw the slightest evidence of it. He had no complaint to make. He observed the men on day and night shifts. He thought, in the beginning, that when he went away from the work at night to sleep he would find in the morning that his night crew had done nothing or that it had done something to impair the work that had gone forward in the day. He was amazed when he found this was not true. The work of the crew at night had been as efficient and apparently as sincere in its efforts as the crew that he handled in the day.

I made a point of this because it had a bearing on the essentials of the story. It puzzled Letington, and it puzzled me when Sir Godfrey Simon got a little farther on with his narrative. It puzzled me because in this extraordinary story we came continually, it seemed, in contact with things that were what one would call out of reason or out of the usual experience of men. This was one of the features of it.

The whole story is out of reason.

It is out of the common experience of men. I suppose the profound impression it made on me was merely the cumulative effect of all these details bearing the same aspect. One does not get a great impression of wonder or unreality out of the influence of a single event. It is built up. It is made of a variety of smaller events. It is the converging point of a great mass of trivialities.

I don't give you that as my conclusion.

It was Sir Godfrey Simon's conclusion, and if you want to value the weight of it, think for a moment who he was, who he is to-day; the greatest alienist in England: that is to say, the greatest authority on the orderly procedure of the human mind, or would I better say the greatest authority on the disorderly procedure of the human mind?

At any rate, you understand what I mean.

I mean it was his business, his profession, to discriminate between the normal activities of the mind and those that were not normal. And he stood above every man in his profession. He has not an equal in the world. Anybody who knows anything about that profession knows that Sir Godfrey Simon is at the head of it. I think I told you all this in the beginning; that it was some time before I recognized the man when I came into that Dumas Inn with the Garden in Asia behind me. I did not know him for a while. I had a haunting memory of a face. And then, when he told me who he was, I remembered. I think I said that. Here before me at the table was Sir Godfrey Simon, the greatest alienist in England.

This digression is not a matter of inadvertence.

I put it here for a purpose: with a profound purpose, as you will realize in a moment. Carry it in your mind when you note the next thing that happened. I pass over the long labor of driving a heading into the tunnel. But the point I wish to consider is that when the heading was finally driven, the engine was not in the tunnel!

I leave you to realize what Letington thought when he crawled through the opening of the heading and went with a torch to the other end. The whole tunnel was clear. The headings were driven in practically at the same time. There was nothing in the tunnel!

The thing was absurd, incredible. It was fantastic. It was anything you wish to say. There is no language, in fact, to express the incredibility of such an event. But there it was.

An immense passenger engine, weighing five hundred thousand pounds, and as big as a peasant's house, had simply disappeared, vanished!

The thing was a vast preposterous impossibility.

You cannot imagine what Letington's impressions were. He was like one before a reversal of the order of nature: trees that moved; animals that uttered words, or anything you like. There was no explanation! You can see that. What explanation could one give? Suppose you had been with him; suppose you had been, in fact, the man himself when you had crawled through the hole of one heading and gone with a torch along that single track, and crawled out into the air through the hole of the other heading, and found nothing in the tunnel. What would you have thought about it?

But, as I have said, there it was!

A huge piece of machinery weighing five hundred thousand pounds had vanished at the will of a peasant woman burning a ball of aromatic grass! Letington went back to the office of the company in the little village and sat down.

He did not know what to do.

He did not even know what to say to his English company; what to say to anybody. Who would believe this extraordinary thing? Heatherstone and his board of directors would come to one of two conclusions: that the man was as mad as a March hare or that he was in collusion with the Italians. One could not blame them. This is exactly what you would have thought. You might have thought, of course, that a simple-minded person had been tricked. But Letington was not a simpleminded person.

I have told you precisely what happened.

Now comprehend it in every detail, and see what you would have done in his place; where your intelligence would have been superior to his, or where any trick about it could have come in. Sir Godfrey Simon shot that query at me, and I considered it pretty carefully. I considered it for a good while, sitting there in the Dumas Inn, drying my riding clothes before the peat fire. I could not see anything, any precaution, any effort that I could have made that Letington had not as well or as adequately also made.

That is how I ask you to think about it.

And think about another thing. What would you have done when you came to meet the problem of giving these facts to the English company; to the sane world? I think any of us would have been in precisely the position Letington was. We would not have known what to do. I am going to tell you what he did do.

It was not a sudden determination. He thought about the thing a while. He thought about it while the work of clearing up the tunnel went forward. They got all the earth out of the way, the stone arches up, the track cleared.

The man could not keep away from the work.

He kept walking through that tunnel. He could not believe what had happened, and it was time, it was delay that built up the state of mind to the point where he was receptive of the measure which he finally undertook.

He called in the sturdy peasant woman.

Now, that sounds like absurdity!

She repeated her preposterous offer. She would cause the engine to materialize again, provided Letington would agree not to evict the Italians. She would make the engine appear— re-appear, to be more accurate— perfect as it was on the night that it had vanished out of sight and hearing; not a scratch on the paint. Letington did not say anything at the time. But the pressure on him increased, and finally he agreed to the terms. And almost immediately the engine appeared, precisely at the place on the track where it had vanished, in perfect condition, under full steam.

He did, as a matter of fact, make a pretty full explanation of the matter to the English company, and it was received precisely as he foresaw. They did think he was insane.

But that is not a point in the story I wish you to consider here. It comes in a little later. Letington was haunted by that wonderful singing voice. He wanted to hear it again. And, having packed his luggage— prepared himself, as one would say, to escape out of this land of unreality— he determined to have a further experience of it.

He sent for the peasant woman.

He asked to see the ancient singer; to hear her again. He put the profound problem that disturbed him, the problem that could have no adequate explanation. How could this singer be old, senile, feeble, at the end of life, and still possess this heavenly, sensuous voice of adolescence?

The peasant woman made a gesture.

It was all the business of magic. The form was nothing; youth and age were alike merely manifestations of the spirit! The formula that caused the spirit to take on a physical aspect could produce it as easily in one aspect as in another. That physical aspect could not be changed, but the thing at any period in its former existence could be reproduced.

Let me give an illustration out of the one book with which everybody is familiar.

When the Witch of Endor called up Samuel she could have called him up at any age of his life period: when he was a youth serving in the temple, at mid-life or at the end of it.

That's the explanation the Italian woman gave Letington.

She did not give him this illustration of it. I put that in here. She was trying to make Letington understand that the form of this mysterious singing woman that she had called up was merely an incident. She could call her up at any period: in youth as well as at the very end of her life. Letington had been permitted to hear the voice, but not to see the singer.

And then she uttered a significant sentence: "You can be made to see her, but the agencies behind the world sell their gifts: to gain great treasure one must suffer great sacrifice."

Then she gave him a Delphic promise:

"You may win your way to this woman— young, perfect, as beautiful as a dream— if you should lose the sun."

Letington did not understand what she meant.

He understood later on, but that is going ahead of the story. He did understand that the woman was repeating in a vague way those esoteric expressions which the performers of magic have brought forward from the day of Pharaoh. The physical thing visible to our eye, audible to our ear, is merely an illusion.

The human spirit alone is a reality!

At its will and according to formula, carefully worked in the morning of the world, all physical manifestations presented themselves. At any rate, she promised Letington that he should hear the voice again and that he should see the singer.

She took him to one of the remote Italian villages, adjacent to the mountains. It was an empty village. The Italian workmen had removed to the line of the railway. There were only abandoned houses here, as though some plague, or some fear, had removed the inhabitants. Beyond this village a narrow path led into the forest.

Letington and the woman were alone.

She strode along in front of him, a big, sturdy peasant. And he followed. They entered the forest, traversed it for some time, and finally came out into a little meadow where some pioneer had once cleared a farm.

Across the meadow beyond them at the edge of the forest was a cottage. The afternoon sun had removed the snow from the meadow, and the cottage lay naked against the bosom of the forest toward the south.

It was a scene from a fairy story— the tiny meadow in the heart of the forest, with the sun on it, and the little cottage with the blue wood smoke ascending from its chimney. Two hundred paces from the door of the cottage the peasant woman stopped.

She turned about to Letington.

Would he promise to remain where he stood until this singing was ended and then go to his ship? He gave the promise. Then she repeated the former details of her magic. She took a ball— the ball of grasses and resin— out of the bosom of her dress, lighted and burned it. The aromatic odor appeared, extended itself. There was silence.

There was not even, as it appeared, motion in the world. The tiny thread of smoke from the aromatic grasses ascended and assumed the fantastic shape of a flower, as it had assumed in the office that day before him. The haze appeared. Then the woman cried out that same harsh, shattering formula, extending her hand.

It seemed again to Letington to be the precise form of magic used by those magicians in the Hebrew Scriptures who undertook to control spirits— to call them up out of the underworld or to materialize them out of the air— the extended arm, the crooked fingers and the loud cry.

And immediately a figure appeared in the door of the cottage, but it was not the aged figure that had appeared before him at the first manifestation. It was a slender figure in its glorious youth.

He was too far away to get details of it.

The face was indistinct, but the hair was golden, and the image had the figure of a dryad. Other details the distance blurred. But the one immense fact was youth. This woman was young, like the daughters of faërie in the morning of the world!

And again that heavenly voice reached him; that wonderful, haunting voice in its incomparable music. The man was transported into fairyland, as through a door in the hill, beyond time, beyond space.

He was in a world of wonder.

And the young, alluring fairy figure was singing to him. It was to him that the voice called. It brought a message of wonder to him; a longing to him, as though the singer had waited through an interminable age for him to arrive; had been seeking him through the world. Time was nothing; distance was nothing; age was nothing!

These things were all illusions.

The reality was the longing for him; the search for him. And now that he was found, the joy of that final ending of the search could not be concealed.

It ran a subdued note through the music.

The man stood in some land of unending summer, of undying youthfulness, seized with all the longings of all the lovers that had ever lived. Here was something mysteriously synchronized, divinely, to his own spirit.

Then it ceased.

The figure entered the cottage, the door closed, and the peasant woman took him back, as in a dream, to the world of reality.

He went to his ship and to England.

Letington took up the old life with his sister, the Countess of Heatherstone. He hunted that winter in the Midlands. There was not, perhaps, a great change to be noted in the man. He was never a voluble person. But he seemed more reticent, and perhaps more interested in the hunt. He was out nearly every day with some master of the hounds. He rode hard, and he was less careful either of himself or his horse. There was little change, as I have said, to be observed in the man. Perhaps when one knows that one has been connected with an extraordinary event, or is under the shadow of some mental illusion, one marks details as signboards on the way. But if one does not have this knowledge about him, no notice will be taken.

The spring came, and Letington took up polo. One day at Roehampton, in a scrimmage, he was by accident struck on the temple with a mallet. The injury at the time did not seem to be important. He did not get down from the pony, and the game went on.

But the injury was, in fact, serious.

The optic nerve congested, and his sight began to fail. He went to all the experts in England. They were all quite agreed about it. There was an obscure injury of some character to the optic nerve. They could do nothing. And the appalling thing about it was that the failing sight was not confined to the eye on the side of the temple injured. It appeared in both eyes. In plain truth, the man was going blind.

And then he got a mysterious message:

"Come to me if you lose the sun!"

He did not know where the message came from nor how it happened to arrive. He said that he was in Piccadilly Circus one afternoon in London. He had been up to see one of the experts. He was getting into a taxicab. There was a crowd at this point, held up by the traffic and someone whispered the words to him.

He could not see who it was.

He was pretty blind by now. The world was passing. He got no idea who had been near him. He was facing the door of the taxicab at the moment. It was not certain that he could have seen the speaker if his eyes had been all right. In the condition they were in he did not know who had spoken to him. But he heard the message precisely, and he knew whence it came.

It was the Delphic promise of the peasant woman. He knew now what she meant by that oracular expression:

"You may win your way...if you should lose the sun!"

Well, he was on the road to losing the sun. That was one way to put the case.

As this blindness went on the sun would disappear.

But the thing cheered him like a bugle.

If the way to this heavenly creature lay through the dark only, then he was glad of the dark. He welcomed it. It was the thing he wished above all other things, and his manner changed. He no longer complained against his blindness.

He no longer cared.

He welcomed it!

The only thing that concerned him in the message was the uncertainty of it. How could he go to her when he had no knowledge of where she was? How could one reach a fairy creature, a dryad singing in a sacred grove?

Where was the door in the hill through which one entered into this magic country? He was on the way to lose the sun; that was certain. That way was clear enough. But how was he to get his feet on the other way? It was all a mystery. But he had an incredible uplifting of the spirit. The way in the end would be made clear to him. But did it mean that he was to go out of life? Did it mean that to come to this heavenly creature he must go out of the world of consciousness, of sight, of hearing? Was it the door of death that he was called to go through? That was the only thing that disturbed him.

He wished to find that heavenly creature in this life, while his strength and his youth were with him. He was in every way strong and in vigor, with the exception of this blindness, and he did not care for that. He recalled what the peasant woman had said: the agencies behind the world sold their gifts; sold them at a price. And for a gift so excellent this price was not excessive.

He did not haggle about the price.

He was willing to pay it, glad to pay it, anxious to pay, if he could win his way to this woman of dreams!

And so it came about, as I said a moment ago, that the man's attitude toward things changed. He seemed pleased with the disaster that was overtaking him. And this manner, the incredible events that he had reported to the English company, and his now marked unconcern in the face of an appalling disaster, convinced everyone about him that he was insane; that, on the way to loss of vision, he was also on the way to a loss of sanity.

They called in Sir Godfrey Simon.

Everybody believed Letington on the way to madness; that is to say, everybody about him but the one person who was an authority on that subject.

Sir Godfrey Simon did not believe it.

He knew the man was not insane. He knew it for several reasons, complete and satisfactory in themselves. You see, there was a series of coincidents in this thing.

Sir Godfrey Simon, as it happened, had a knowledge of these events. He had a larger knowledge of them than this actor in them. He knew the extent of them, their ramifications and whither they led, while Letington knew only the result of them. He had a larger knowledge of the whole business than Letington; and that, for one reason, convinced him that the man was not insane.

But he said very little about it.

He let the whole of England go on believing what they pleased. Still, he never misled them. When they put the pointed query at him, he said no. But he took a profound interest in the case. He took what one would call a fatherly interest in it. He got the man's confidence, and he encouraged him in his attitude before the disaster that approached.

It was incredible, like everything else in this incredible story.

Here was a man, ordinarily a normal man, in youth, in the strength and vigor of youth, encouraged to welcome, impatiently to welcome, a ghastly disaster because by that sacrifice he would win a way into some world of dreams.

Of course his sister, the Countess of Heatherstone, did not give him up. She kept sending him back to the London experts. It was of no use. The man was blind! The optic nerve was ruined. There was no hope for him. There was nothing an expert could do. Letington did not wish to go to London. But he was glad of the insistence that sent him to the experts the last time. An event happened for which he had been hoping.

He got another message!

It was in Regent Street, as he was getting down from the Countess' motor before the door of one of the experts. Someone spoke to him and passed on. He could not see who it was. He could not see anything now, except the vague presence of light. He knew when it was day and when it was dark, and that was about the extent of it.

It was another Delphic message like the first one:

"Come to me in the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!"

I want to stop here a moment until we can assemble the essentials of the story. Get the whole thing, as one might say it, within a sweep of the eye.

I have said that Sir Godfrey Simon was the deus ex machina in this whole affair. He had not only a grasp on the whole thing but also had the direction of it. I do not mean a direction by accident. I mean a direction by the will— direction like a providence. When one realizes this controlling fact, one is on the way to an accurate conception of the whole thing.

The Earl of Heatherstone has a big country seat on the Teith.

There is a wonderful suite in the east wing of it. Sir Godfrey Simon was there with Letington after the event I have just related, the arrival of that last Delphic message. It's a wonderful room: a big sitting room, bright with chintz, looking out over a sweep of meadow descending to the dark, rapid river, with a wood beyond.

Letington was profoundly disturbed.

Where was this land— the land where men ground their wheat in the sky? How could he go there? It was like a line out of a fairy story; like a message sent in an Arabian tale.

He began to wonder about it.

Was he, after all, merely the victim of an illusion? That was the only thing that disturbed him. He was not concerned about the night that he had entered. There was a symbolism in that. It comforted and sustained him. When one thinks about it, there is always the dark to be traversed before one comes into any form of life. One arrives at a new day only by passing through the night before it.

The wonderful, incredible fairy life before him lay through this night.

He was not afraid of the night.

If he could be certain that the thing he longed for was to be reached by traversing the night— and he had that assurance— he didn't care for the world of reality. What was the dark to him if he could win his way to this alluring woman! But the fear haunted him that the land he was beckoned toward was not, in fact, one of living man. And it was as a living man that he wished to possess this alluring, heavenly creature. He wanted her in life; in this life. He didn't care about sight and hearing, so long as the living sense of feeling remained.

That was the whole thing.

The consummation of every great emotion, of every ecstasy of emotion, after all, was in nearly every instance accomplished in silence and in the dark. Sight and hearing added nothing to it! It was the sense of feeling that elevated human emotions into an ecstasy. But one had to be alive; to be a living man in the land of the living. There was nothing to be depended on outside of the world he knew. He wanted this woman now, alive, in this world.

That was the thing that brought Sir Godfrey Simon to sit with him in the great room overlooking the Teith. And it was Sir Godfrey Simon who gave him the key to the mystery, who read the riddle for him:

"Come to me in the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!"

That night Letington disappeared.

He disappeared wholly out of England, as though the earth had opened and received him. No one ever know what became of him. No one ever saw him again. He left a message, on the table, for his sister, written large and crudely, for he couldn't see:

"I have gone to the land where men grind their wheat in the sky."

That was all anyone, except Sir Godfrey Simon, ever knew. He gave me a little verbal picture of what happened, as one might look for a moment, through the crack of a door, into fairyland.

Letington crossed a stretch of water in the night, like Arthur on his way to Avalon. He came to a shore beyond it. He was met by an old peasant with a dog harnessed to a cart. He was taken with his luggage on a road he could not see. He could not see! It was all night to him.

They stopped after a while before what seemed to be an immense metal gate. The old peasant had a good deal of trouble to open it. It seemed to be morning and in a land of sun. The peasant led the blind man through the gate, but remained himself outside. He told Letington to go forward, and he did go forward on what appeared to be a gravel path. And presently beyond him he heard the heavenly voice that he had heard in the Canadian forest; that haunting, alluring, mysterious voice.

He groped his way toward it.

He found the singing woman. He took her in his arms, he passed his fingers gently over her face, her hair, her exquisite, beautiful body. It was clear to his delicate touch that she was young, lovely, and as perfect as a dream! He had lost the sun, but he had come to what he longed for in the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!

They disappeared among the trees, in the distance, beyond the great metal gate. The man's arm was around the slender, golden-haired girl, as in the morning of the world the first man and the first woman wandered away in the Garden in Asia!

Go back with me to the opening of this story.

You know where I was; in that inn out of a page of Dumas, conducted by a Walloon to whom I had intrusted a hunter worth a thousand pounds sterling. I was lost, and it was raining outside. The night had descended. I was drying my clothes before a peat fire, and Sir Godfrey Simon was going forward with his story. He shot now a pointed query at me:

"Suppose you had had that oracle to interpret. What would you have done?"

"I would have given it up," I answered. "Men do not grind their wheat in the sky, and there is no such land, except in the kingdom of the fairies."

"In the Kingdom of the Belgians!" he said. "What did you pass to-night on your way here?"

I told him what I had passed: meadows, ditches, an abandoned road, and a great spiked iron fence.

"And what else?" he said.

I tried to think about it.

"Some peasant cottages, a village now and then, a sluggish stream."

"And what else?" he said again.

"And a windmill," I answered, "now and then in the distance."

He brought his great hand down on the table.

"There you have it," he cried. "Grist mills turned by the wind! It is the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!"

He made a great gesture.

"Everywhere else in the world men grind their wheat on the earth. But not so in the Kingdom of the Belgians."

A thing is a mystery because we do not understand it. It is no mystery when we see it to the end.

Ten minutes of explanation cleared the thing up— cleared up every fabulous thing in it. I thought about it as I rode back in the morning to the château of my host, the Marquis de Brie; as I returned along that abandoned road beside the immense fence.

Sir Godfrey Simon's brother, dead and buried, and leaving a great estate, had married an Italian operatic star in Vienna. He had one daughter with a golden voice. The girl had prepared to make her début, and on the first night of the opera a piece of scenery caught fire, and her face was burned. She was placed in the care of the greatest experts, who succeeded in restoring the lovely contour of her face and its delicate skin. But they could not remove the horrible red discoloration that underlay the skin. It made the girl, otherwise physically perfect, repulsive to the eye. As a last experiment they turned to Hilderback's treatment of subjecting the delicate flesh to extreme cold. The girl would not go to Switzerland on account of the crowds of tourists everywhere. The peasant woman who had been her mother's maid and companion knew of this Italian colony in Canada and persuaded the girl to go there for the winter. And so came this extravaganza in the Canadian forest. All the pretended witchcraft was only clever play-acting. For example, the passenger engine was merely cut loose from the train, run through the tunnel and switched into one of the great bark sheds. The hemlock bark was taken down and set up again around it. The fall of snow covered everything. The ends of the tunnel were shot down as a blind.

And Sir Godfrey Simon, with the immense wealth that his brother had bequeathed to the girl, had purchased this estate in Belgium and cut it off from the world with its immense iron-spiked fence.

He had directed events. He brought the two persons together. He had by that direction of events turned a disaster into a heavenly thing. Like a genie in a tale, he had transported a girl with a horror of aspect and a man with a horror of blindness into the Garden in Asia!

I thought about it in the morning sun on my way to the château of the Marquis de Brie; as I rode southeast over fields and ditches:

In the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!

End

Table of Contents

- 1: The Bradmoor Murder
- 2: The Blackmailer
- 3: The Cuneiform Inscription
- 4: The Hole in the Glass
- 5: The Phantom Woman
- 6: The Stolen Treasure
- 7: The Garden In Asia