The Communicating Door and Other Stories
Date: 1922-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Detectives
Description: A gathering of short stories, telling of detectives (police, private, and amateur) working to unravel mystery, chasing down villains, and sometimes investigating events that may be supernatural. ~ ~ ~ ~ Several of these feature Jim Garth — more Jim Garth stories can be found in Pulpmeister’s production of “The Gray Mask” in the MobileRead Library.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

THE COMMUNICATING DOOR

AND OTHER STORIES

1923

BY
WADSWORTH CAMP
(1879–1936)

MobileRead Edition
2022

A gathering of short stories, telling of detectives (police, private, and amateur) working to unravel mystery, chasing down villains, and sometimes investigating events that may be supernatural.

Several of these feature Jim Garth — more Jim Garth stories can be found in Pulpmeister’s production of The Gray Mask in the MobileRead Library.

Epub:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=335593

Kindle:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=335594

Charles Wadsworth Camp (18 October, 1879 – 30 October, 1936), American author (pen name: Wadsworth Camp), is best remembered for his mysteries and potboilers. Some of his works were adapted into films. He was the father of Madeleine L’Engle.

The Communicating Door, by Charles Wadsworth Camp (1879-1936), was first published in 1923. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Communicating Door
- Hate
- The Dangerous Tavern
- The Haunted House
- Defiance
- Open Evidence
- The Obscure Move

THE COMMUNICATING DOOR

When he had failed to encounter her for more than a month the suspicion was born in Dawson Roberts’s mind that Evangeline Ashley had been exiled through the jealousy of her incomprehensible husband. That put Roberts on John Ashley’s trail, and at dusk one January evening he ran him down in the lounge of a club.

“Where,” he asked, “is Evangeline hiding? Haven’t seen or heard of her for weeks.”

In their corner it was too dark to read Ashley’s face, and his voice, deep and soft, but wholly without color, gave nothing away.

“What about her having a little rest?”

“At Ashley House?” Roberts ventured. Ashley didn’t answer. Interminably he sat in the gathering night, voiceless, without motion.

“I say, John,” Roberts tried to quicken him, “I do hope she isn’t ill.”

From Ashley’s persistent immobility he drew an uncomfortable impression of the cataleptic. The man had an appearance of having withdrawn of himself all that was sentient, leaving no more than a dead husk. Instead of whipping Roberts’s annoyance that conception increased his fear for Evangeline, for John Ashley resisted any scale you chose to apply to him. Never, Roberts admitted now, largely because of this idea of a mental and spiritual recession, had he felt with him quite at ease.

A servant turned on a number of lights. One, a bracket, lowered over Ashley a saffron radiance. Even the abrupt exposure failed to alter his extraordinary tranquility that was void of meditation or any positive quality. His face, in a sombre mold, was handsome; and his hair remained black and heavy in spite of his more than fifty years. At the moment the most disturbing feature for the attentive Roberts was the regard of those wide brown eyes directed at him without the slightest animation.

How sallow Ashley’s skin was! It made Roberts think of the lusterless tones of flesh tints on an old canvas.

The whole trouble, he reflected while he waited, lay in the fact that Evangeline was too young for her husband’s age; too bright for his pronounced melancholy. Undoubtedly the six years of their wedlock had materially emphasized that disparity, and her failure to give an heir to the last of the direct line of the Ashleys hadn’t made their relationship more congenial.

Roberts, moreover, had no doubt. Ashley was jealous of him, and his temper grew that so morose a type couldn’t picture a protective and enduring affection growing from a hopeless love. For Roberts had loved Evangeline in a difficult silence since the first year of her marriage when Ashley had brought her triumphantly to New York from her home in the South. It was that honest passion that had made him suffer for her as year by year he had watched her beauty alter and her gaiety diminish beneath the suppression of her husband’s sombre nature. That was why he waited patiently, anxiously now before the motionless man, subordinating his temper to her service.

A vague dread rippled along his nerves. By Jove, it was unnatural this long quiescence; these unwavering eyes that saw nothing and released nothing!

It was that, finally, that got Roberts to his feet and sent him helplessly across the lounge. You couldn’t argue with an antagonist who deliberately detached his soul from his body. Roberts smiled grimly. Ashley could almost make one believe in that absurdity.

In the doorway he started at a touch on his arm. He had heard no movement behind him, but John Ashley stood at his elbow, his eyes sufficiently alive now with suspicion and dislike.

“You were wondering, Dawson,” he said in his dreamy voice, “about Evangeline’s movements. Would it be impertinent to ask why they interest you?”

Roberts was careful. The other, he was certain, had given something away: his responsibility for his wife’s departure and silence. He was particularly vigilant, too, because he of all men couldn’t afford an open break with Evangeline’s husband. He answered, therefore, on a casual note:

“When for a long time you don’t see an old friend you can’t help fearing something’s wrong.”

Ashley replaced his mask.

“Not a thing wrong with Evangeline, Dawson. On the contrary, quite all right. But thanks for asking.”

Roberts, to a man now confessed an active enemy, nodded a friendly good-night. If Ashley hadn’t been inimical he would have told Evangeline’s whereabouts. Roberts would have to find out for himself. He decided it that night as he sat reflectively before the fire in his apartment. The more he went over the case the more he believed Evangeline needed help. If only her father weren’t in the South! Roberts might have gone to a parent and spoken frankly to him the words that ran through his mind now.

“John Ashley and Evangeline are unhappy. The Lord never meant them for each other. He’s too finely bred, perhaps, because the Ashleys have more steadfastly clung to their traditions than any Colonial family I can think of. They’ve inter-married until their brains can’t absorb anything beyond their outworn Ashley ideas—”

Roberts halted his imaginary conversation. Was that quite just to Ashley? He got along well enough in Wall Street. It was socially that he held himself apart and made his acquaintances suspect a wayward, inexplicable personality. It was obviously unjust to charge him with more than an eccentricity that an unjustified jealousy had increased. But was he, because of his inheritance, capable of some medieval gesture with Evangeline? That was the delicate problem Roberts felt it his duty to probe, quietly, in order to avoid the least scandal.

It was Ashley who gave him his chance. Two days later Roberts read in the morning paper that he had left for Florida on a friend’s private car. Now one could scout at least, and the likeliest neighborhood was easily chosen.

Ashley had refused to affirm or deny when Roberts had asked him if Evangeline was at Ashley House. Ashley’s mother dwelt there, a nearly forgotten figure. What likelier place for an Ashley to hide the woman he distrusted? For the house was as old as the family in America, the temple of its traditions, and, more useful, off the beaten track, a logical spot for exile or imprisonment.

Roberts knew Ashley House was in the northern part of the state. He had never seen it; few New Yorkers had, Ashley excusing his lack of hospitality on the score of his mother’s age, the house’s inaccessibility, and its loneliness. Now and then a hunter who had stumbled upon it came back with rumors of its aged beauty and its dignified lack of virtue as a home. For Evangeline, already too much depressed by her melancholy husband, it would be the worst choice conceivable; but if she was there with Mrs. Ashley, Roberts could properly show himself and ask for an interview.

After an all day’s journey he alighted in an ashen, snow-threatening dusk at a village he understood to be five miles from his destination. From the unkempt automobiles about the station he chose the best, flung his bag in, and accosted the driver.

“Please take me to Ashley House.”

The man stared at him before refusing.

“Why not?” Roberts insisted. “It’s only five miles.”

“Nearer fifteen,” the driver grumbled, “and most of them over bad, scarcely used roads, and you can see for yourself.”

He indicated the threatening sky.

“I’m not anxious to be snowed under in those woods.”

He added under his breath, “And I’m not hankering to spend the night at Ashley House.”

“Why not?” Roberts asked. “I’ll give you more than your fare.”

The bait attracted. The driver frowned.

“If this snow held off a couple hours I could get back. What’ll you pay?”

Roberts agreed to an extravagant price, since now he was in the neighborhood, he desired to reach Ashley House with the least possible noise. So he climbed in beside the driver, and they swung out of the village and between fields that announced their sterility in spite of a kindly mantle of snow. Scattered farmhouses lifted themselves above the tiresome white expanse; but as the night closed down even the lights from these receded and vanished.

At the end of the dusk they entered a dense pine and hemlock forest on a road whose snowy surface was scarcely broken. The driver snapped on his headlights, and through the glowing tunnel they made the car jolted slowly onward, its exhaust echoing emptily.

“I’d heard,” Roberts sounded his man, “that Ashley House was rather off the track, but I hadn’t suspected a wilderness like this.”

The driver neglected his wheel long enough to give Roberts again his bewildered and inquisitive glance.

“There are few enough people,” he muttered, “that take the trouble to find it.”

“Visitors,” Roberts asked, “or country people?”

“There aren’t any visitors,” the driver said shortly, “and you might know that country people are superstitious.”

Roberts grinned.

“I’d expected something like that. Any old, inhospitable house gets the name of being haunted.”

“I guess that’s it,” the man agreed doubtfully. “Maybe if people got asked more they wouldn’t talk so much; but Ashley House hasn’t anything to do with the neighborhood.”

Roberts dared the question that had struggled for voice since he had alighted from the train.

“Who’s living there now?”

“Old Mrs. Ashley. Now and then Mr. Ashley comes up from the city, and that sour man of theirs meets him with a station car.”

Had Roberts after all misjudged John Ashley’s course?

“I’d heard,” he said, “young Mrs. Ashley was there.”

The driver laughed.

“I tell you nobody knows what goes on in that house. About a month ago I did see Ashley come in on the train with a swell-looking woman. Nobody’s seen her take train away. That could be his wife.”

At last he gave his curiosity open voice.

“What might be your business there?”

It was a question Roberts was likely to be asked many times on this reconnaissance. He tried to keep the embarrassment from his voice.

“I’m a lawyer.”

The driver appeared satisfied, and relapsed into silence while Roberts’s mind explored a brighter path. Of course he was a lawyer, and if John Ashley through physical means, or a subtle strategy, chained Evangeline in this wilderness, he would advise her to seek a divorce, and would take in her behalf the necessary steps. The realization that he was coming each moment closer to her tightened his nerves. It couldn’t be far now. A gate, in fact, barred their way. When the driver had opened it they entered the Ashley grounds, as far as Roberts could judge in the car’s light, as tangled and little explored as the outside forest. For all his skeptical nature he felt himself oppressed by a sense of removal from the familiar world; by an inimical loneliness, by misgivings as to what he would find at its heart.

Cottony snowflakes commenced to drift through the tunnel of light. The driver gave an exclamation.

“How long you expect to be here?”

“A few minutes.”

“I won’t wait longer than that,” the man said irritably. “If this keeps up the road’ll be blocked inside of two hours. There you are, ahead.”

Roberts stared as the fingers of light brushed with fugitive haste gray walls splotched with snow. The curving of the road left the building again to darkness without having disclosed a single detail. When, a moment later, he descended on hard gravel Roberts got only a formless impression of a brooding heap that sprawled in wings to either side. Ashley House was as blind as a ruin in a desert.

Aware of the beating of his heart he climbed stone steps, crossed a terrace, and paused before the dim shape of a door. His fumbling hands found no bell, but alighted on a knocker which a number of times he lifted and let fall. The response made him think of a stick struck repeatedly at a drum. The blind building seemed unavoidably as vacant as that.

Waiting, it was incredible life should ever stir beyond the gray walls. If it did what attitude should he take? Standing in the soundless darkness, shrinking from the stealthy caresses of the snow, Roberts’s doubt of John Ashley assumed a more compelling form. As if the hint had come from the house itself he conceived of him as a figure dangerous and inexorable.

Life disclosed itself inside. He heard a hand at the knob, and the grating of a heavy key in disused wards. He threw back his shoulders. They’d lie and say she wasn’t there, or, admitting it, would refuse to let him see Evangeline. He would insist. They could report what they pleased to John after he had had one word with her and had learned just how badly John was behaving. ‘

The next moment would tell. Here was his. chance. The door swung slowly open, releasing a band of wan candlelight in the center of which stood silhouetted a tall, ungainly woman, like a barrier.

“I wish,” Roberts said boldly, “to see young Mrs. Ashley on a matter of great importance.”

Amazement or caution held the servant stolidly in his path.

“Mrs. Ashley,” she announced in a hoarse tone, “sees no one.”

Roberts raised his voice so that it resounded confusedly within the house.

“I am Dawson Roberts. I think Mrs. Ashley would like to see me.”

Startled, the woman exposed her profile, a stern, middle-aged face unaccustomed to laughter. Beyond her now Roberts saw a wide and deep hall with a mantel on which two candles flickered, rows* of indistinguishable portraits on I the walls, a staircase which circled gracefully into darkness.

Roberts made a motion to step past. The woman hesitated but didn’t give way. Feet pattered in the blackness. Roberts held his breath as he saw those feet on the staircase, then the remembered lines of Evangeline’s figure, finally her face, unbelieving and eager.

He breathed again with a passionate anger. What had Ashley done to her during these few weeks? In her countenance, pallid and haggard, the unhappy suppression started in New York was now complete. Her hair, jet black a month ago, was streaked with dun souvenirs of suffering. She came to him as one runs to a rescuer, miraculously appeared.

“Dawson! Why are you here? You should have told me at once, Anna.”

Roberts was relieved to see the servant step obediently aside. Then Evangeline’s position couldn’t be as bad as he had feared. She hurried on, the words crowding each other with neurotic haste, her gestures jerky and misdirected.

“Of course you drove from the village, didn’t you? Anna! Send the automobile back. Mr. Roberts will spend the night.”

Disapproval in her eyes, the woman stepped out. Roberts grasped at the opportunity, bending close to Evangeline’s ear.

“I’ve been worried about you. Tell me quickly. I’ve thought of you as a captive.”

She commenced to laugh hysterically.

“Don’t do that, Evangeline,” he begged.

“I am a captive,” she laughed. “I’m bound hand and foot.”

She controlled herself. Appealingly she grasped his arm.

“That’s why I’m so glad you’re here — so glad! Perhaps you can cut the cords, Dawson.”

To what form of captivity could she refer? He couldn’t ask her then, for the servant came back, carrying Roberts’s bag, which she wouldn’t let him take. She crossed the hall toward the stairs.

“Anna,” Evangeline directed, “you will put Mr. Roberts in the master’s room.”

Again disapprobation flashed in the woman’s eyes as she turned and went on up the stairs.

“What am I doing to you, Dawson?” Evangeline whispered.

There was guilt in her face, and fear.

“I wondered if anyone would ever come to me.”

She took his hands and pressed them.

“I might have known it would be you. You must go with Anna now.”

“But, Evangeline,” he objected, “I’ve come to learn why you are buried here, what’s happened to you, if John’s lost his head—”

“Later,” she whispered. “Oh, yes. I want to tell you all that. But go with Anna now. Soon it will be time for dinner. Please, Dawson.”

Reluctantly he gave her her wish and climbed the stairs to a square hall from which on either side passages led, probably to the wings. Directly ahead were two ponderous doors. A console stood between bearing a number of candlesticks. The woman had lighted one of these. She raised it, crossed, and opened the door to the left.

Roberts, close behind her, hesitated before the air, charnel cold, palpably damp, that streamed from the room. In it the candle flickered, nearly expired, then continued faintly to burn. After the woman Roberts moved into that sodden atmosphere with his nerves rippling in a vaguely familiar fashion. As the woman placed the candlestick on the mantel he remembered where he had experienced that sensation before — at the club the other day when he had stared at John Ashley as at a man cataleptically withdrawn, leaving behind no more than a dead husk.

The room was large and evidently tightly closed, for this atmosphere was infinitely colder and more saturated than the outside air.

The servant was stooping at the fireplace striking a match, applying it to kindling beneath large logs. That would soon warm the place; but Roberts noticed the woman shivered even after the pile was well alight. She rose and walked hurriedly to the door.

“I hope,” she said in her husky voice, “you will be comfortable.”

After the heavy door had thudded shut behind her in Roberts’s memory her words became threatening.

“I mustn’t let myself grow fanciful,” he cautioned himself.

At any rate, he was safely within Ashley House, on the edge of the interview he craved with Evangeline. Why then should he combat a sense of frustration, and this curious, rippling discomfort? The last, of course, must come from the deadly atmosphere of a long-deserted chamber. He strode to one of the two casement windows and opened it. He shrank back from the whipping wind that entered. That, obviously, wouldn’t do. He forced the casement shut and fastened it. He walked to the fireplace to warm his back and take stock of the room to which Evangeline had assigned him with her puzzling burst of hysteria.

“What am I doing to you, Dawson?” she had said.

What the deuce had she meant by that? Certainly it wasn’t a room he would have chosen for himself.

The thickness and antiquity of the walls he could measure by the width of the window embrasures. The high, slightly convex ceiling, too, testified that he was in the oldest portion of Ashley House.

Against the wall opposite stood a four-poster bedstead, almost primitive in its massiveness and the coarseness of its carvings. The chairs, a chest of drawers, a dressing-table were all of the same sturdy period. Faded crimson curtains were draped over the windows. Against a stained terra-cotta wall paper hung a number of paintings of which he could make nothing in this unsatisfactory light.

All at once he shifted his weight nervously, the rippling at his nerves stronger than before. More carefully his glance searched the shadows. That was a rotten suspicion that he should be under observation. He retained it, nevertheless. He experienced the abominable self-consciousness of a man whose least movement is spied upon. Who would do that here? John Ashley was in Florida, but what about his trusted servants?

He swung sharply and faced the fire, instinctively convinced that the watcher was behind him, but, although the assurance remained, he saw no lurking place on that side of the room. Wait a minute. What about this door at his right, close to the fireplace?

Warily and interestedly he studied the heavy oak panels. If there was a spy he must be behind that door, peering through the keyhole. It would be wise to have this out at the start.

He tiptoed nearer, intending to fling the door open on the watcher.

Half way up the blackened oak an iron bolt lay snug in its socket. He tried noiselessly to slip it back and found he couldn’t budge it at all, so thoroughly was it rusted in place. There remained the keyhole. Of a size compatible with such a door a man would have no difficulty looking through. Roberts stooped and drew back, resting on his heels, again at a loss. Evidently the huge key had been turned in the lock and then the shaft broken off or filed through, for the opening was completely plugged. No one watched there, but his curiosity was aroused that this door, evidently leading to the twin of his bedroom, should be so painstakingly barricaded.

That settled it. His idea of being spied upon was his own imagination. Then as he stood up and turned back to the fireplace he smiled triumphantly, held for a moment by the illusion that he had caught the eavesdropper. From this angle the candle flashed upon a pair of steady eyes far above the mantel.

Roberts relaxed, grinning shamefacedly. There was a portrait there, of life size, that filled the entire space between the mantel and the ceiling. He had been deceived by painted eyes.

He moved the candle about until it cast upon the painting its best light. During several minutes Roberts studied the canvas, as interested as if he had discovered flesh and blood.

The thing might have been a portrait of Evangeline’s husband. Looking down at him were the same smooth-shaven features, the firm lips, the wide-open, inanimate eyes that had so unhealthily fascinated him the other evening at the club; and he recalled his comparison then of John Ashley’s sallow skin with the lusterless flesh tones of an old canvas. But this man, about John Ashley’s age, wore clothing of the Colonial period, and Roberts, when he went closer, made out in a lower corner the name of a renowned painter of that day, and the date 1765.

Unquestionably it was an old and valuable portrait of one of John’s ancestors, to whom, through some atavistic trick, he had this astonishing resemblance.

There was the explanation of his fancy of having been watched. He had, he argued logically enough, on first entering the room, glimpsed the painted eyes. While his active brain had forgotten, his subconscious mind had retained them to trouble his peace.

He leaned his elbows on the mantel. Here and there the paint was flaking. In their fading, it occurred to him, these pigments had achieved an illusion of life far truer than their original brilliancy could have done. Actually the pictured figure seemed more vitally with Roberts than the living John had frequently been, particularly that other afternoon at the club.

In shifting his position Roberts’s elbow struck an object on the mantel directly beneath the portrait. He lifted it and held it close to the candle, reflecting that the house was a museum of Colonial treasures. He had found an old hunting knife with a silver-chased grip and a long, curved blade. No one, evidently, troubled to keep these priceless pieces in order, for the silver was corroded and the blade had ruddy incrustations that might be traceable to rust.

He replaced the knife, and, shivering from the damp cold, washed and changed, guessing that the house must contain more congenial rooms than this, continuing to question why Evangeline should have given it to him with her neurotic burst of emotion. He was anxious to go downstairs and talk with her, to learn why she had called herself a prisoner when she went about the house with the deportment of its mistress. In any case, she was in deep trouble, and he was right to have come.

He was glad when at last he was ready to leave the depressing room. The fire ought to have killed its chill, yet he still shivered when he took the candle and started for the entrance. Half way across he paused, the response of his nerves this time easily understandable. What indiscretion had he committed? From beyond the communicating door he heard the quavering, beseeching voice of a woman.

“John! Don’t go there!”

Angrily Roberts admitted himself a dupe. He had walked straight into the trap John Ashley must deliberately have set for him, and had involved Evangeline in all its delicate implications. The sooner he had it out with the suspicious beast the better.

He went on to the hall, set his candle on the console, and knocked purposefully at the other door. Evangeline opened and faced him.

“Since John’s come,” he said ironically, “I’d like to speak to him.”

She stared as if he had lost his senses.

“Why, John’s not here.”

“What do you mean, Evangeline? I just heard you, or someone, speak to him in this room.”

Understanding cleared her eyes. She gave him her wan smile.

“Then suppose you come and see for yourself.”

He heard a sound of dull pounding from within the room. He entered. In dimensions and furnishing the chamber was the replica of the one Evangeline had given him. So much he absorbed before his attention focused on the reverse of the communicating door so oddly fastened. A white-haired, stooped old lady stood before it, her arms lifted, her impotent fists striking at the heavy panels. He caught her voice, murmuring an appeal that started again along his nerves that uncomfortable and indefinable rippling.

“Come back out of that room, John. It’s not safe. I tell you to come back, John.”

“But,” Roberts whispered to Evangeline, “no one’s gone through. That door’s bolted and locked on the other side.”

“And on this side,” she answered.

She had stiffened. Her lips moved with difficulty, as though overcoming a fettering inanimation.

“Mother!”

The old woman turned from the stubborn door, and with the motions of a somnambulist moved forward. Her eyes, although open, were, indeed, as void as the eyes of one who sleeps.

“Mother!”

Evangeline’s voice was more imperative. The old lady raised groping hands. Her intricately wrinkled face assumed an expression of regret.

“Yes, Evangeline,” she said patiently. “I am here.”

Evangeline relaxed. She indicated Roberts.

“This,” she said, “is Dawson Roberts. You’ve heard John and me speak of him.”

Mrs. Ashley’s smile was sweet and welcoming.

“I am glad to meet John’s friends. They don’t often come to us. Perhaps we are too old-fashioned.”

Roberts was surprised by the vital force of her grasp. Her hand seemed wholly of nerves.

“John,” she answered his commonplaces, “should come to welcome you; but he’s peculiar, beyond my understanding. He doesn’t often let himself be seen.”

What could she mean by that? In spite of Evangeline’s assurance Roberts experienced again the shocked conviction that John Ashley lurked in the house, spying, waiting to step between Evangeline and him. Mrs. Ashley glanced at her daughter-in-law.

“Shall we go down?”

But now when she moved for the door the old lady seemed to have been abandoned by the thrilling nervous force she had permitted Roberts to experience. She seemed much older. She tottered as she walked, so that Evangeline led her until at the head of the staircase they encountered the tall woman servant, who painstakingly conducted Mrs. Ashley down. Roberts fell in behind with Evangeline, glancing at her knowingly, sympathetically, but the negative movement of her head expressed regret that she couldn’t verify his doubt.

During dinner, in fact, it did seem to him illogical to charge Mrs. Ashley with more than the senility usual to her years. Although the vital quality had left her voice, too, she spoke quietly and courteously of his journey; and, when she found he didn’t care to discuss its aim, tactfully shifted the subject. No matter how peculiar her actions upstairs, her brain seemed quite normal here.

The conclusion puzzled him and added to the depression he drew from the vast, faded dining room. There was shadow everywhere, except for the circle of radiance from the table candles and the intermittent splashing of the firelight. The details of a number of portraits high above the wainscot eluded him. He wondered if among them was a duplicate of the portrait in his room with its amazing resemblance to John.

They were served by a middle-aged, noiseless man whose features had the stern rigidity of the woman who had admitted him — a servant, Roberts guessed, trained all his life in the immemorial traditions of Ashley House.

Opposite Mrs. Ashley a place was set before an empty armchair, undoubtedly reserved for the head of the house. Roberts found his glance continually wandering there. More than once he fancied the silent man pausing slightly as he passed; and Mrs. Ashley, he thought, when she wasn’t speaking to him or Evangeline, stared with affection at the empty chair, her lips moving soundlessly.

It was she, Roberts admitted, who made the long meal at all endurable, for Evangeline scarcely once aroused herself from a brooding silence, or from a perverse motionlessness to accept the dishes which she didn’t even make a pretense of eating; and moment by moment in this oppressive room, its eerie light, his conviction grew that there was something out of the way in the house that was unhealthy, and perhaps dangerous, for Evangeline, and might easily become so for himself. So far, he sneered as he arose, could mere atmosphere impress a man’s brain. With the dreary meal done and his interview with Evangeline at hand he tried to dismiss his mental dismay.

The woman servant met them in the hall. Mrs. Ashley gave Roberts her hand, apologizing in her quavering tones:

“I’m sorry to ask you to excuse me. I am on a regime. It takes me to my room now, like a child who’s had its supper.”

She offered her wrinkled cheek to Evangeline and surrendered herself to the waiting servant. It was this woman who at the curve of the stairs glanced back with disapproval and doubt at the pair who waited with a frozen impatience to be left alone.

When the others had disappeared Evangeline relaxed. She shivered.

“I’ve had a fire laid in the library. Come there, Dawson, and tell me how you guessed I needed you, or someone.”

In spite of blazing logs the library was scarcely more habitable than the dining room had been. Three candles burned on a center table. Above high, crowded bookshelves more portraits hung, disclosing only the fashions of other periods. The far comers were buried in substantial shadow.

“Why not,” Roberts asked impatiently, “an electric light plant; at least oil lamps? Nothing but candles, and never enough of those!”

As she sank in an easy chair before the fire Evangeline shivered again.

“I shouldn’t care,” she muttered, “to interfere with the customs of Ashley House. You haven’t yet told me what impelled you to visit it.”

While she had controlled the emotionalism of her first greeting her hope of help from his coming escaped from her anxious glance and the nervous picking of her fingers at a handkerchief. He sat opposite and told of his first worry at her disappearance, his unsuccessful questioning of her friends, his distressing interview with John that had determined him to learn where she was, and why.

“And now,” he said, “you call yourself a prisoner yet have an appearance of complete freedom. At least no one forbids me to speak with you alone.”

Once more she shivered although the heat was strong upon her.

“Who would,” she asked, “since John isn’t here; yet haven’t you a feeling it — it’s disapproved of?”

“Not by my conscience,” he said brusquely, “and that’s all that counts now.”

His voice softened.

“Forgive me, Evangeline; but in order to help you I must speak frankly. John guesses that I love you. Unfortunately, he can’t realize how unimportant that is to him so long as he behaves properly toward you.”

She glanced quickly, fearfully around, as if she had not been thinking only of John’s disapproval. Her voice was so low he barely caught her words.

“Then you won’t misunderstand, Dawson, when I tell you I’ve guessed it, too. Your coming tonight is the last proof. You’re right, if you’re to help me we must be frank. But if you’re to help me at all you mustn’t speak again of what you’ve just said.”

He nodded.

“It’s some happiness to have you know it. What must I do to help you, Evangeline?”

She tried to smile, but the sudden moisture of her eyes defeated her.

“Cut cords that can’t be touched. You can only help me by being sane where sometimes I suspect myself of madness.”

“I don’t take you quite seriously,” he said. “Answer me this: Are you free to return to New York if you wish?”

“If I wish!” she cried. “I can’t wish until I’ve found the explanation of the mystery that holds me here. I won’t be a moral coward, and I can’t let myself go to doubt for the rest of my life my own sanity. That’s how I’m a prisoner at Ashley House.”

“It’s John who’s made you so,” he said thoughtfully.

“In a sense,” she answered. “I never liked the place, never wanted to come; but he said last month I ought to spend a little time with his mother, and so I let him chain me to Ashley House. I think it was his jealousy that wanted to get me away from you and everyone else. I’ve got to tell you now. He’s always been jealous, morbidly fearful that he couldn’t keep my love. I’ve never been able to overcome his fear; and I guess it’s true you and I have seen too much of each other for the peace of his over-sensitive mind. I — I am afraid of him, have been for a long time, as I’m afraid of his house. It might all have been simpler if only we’d had children.”

She brushed the tears from her eyes.

“Dawson, this house is full of them — generations of children who’ve left behind more than their portraits and heaps of broken toys in the attic. At times it whispers with laughter, and pattering feet, and delightful infant griefs.”

She glanced up, smiling wistfully.

“But that’s my own morbidity; only the imagination of a disappointed mother. We can’t waste time on that.”

The breaking down of her reserve, the difficult baring of her mind m order that he might the better aid her, appraised for him the depressive power of the house; for he couldn’t concede it anything more individual or alarming. Gently he urged her to describe the bonds by which it held her. She hesitated.

“I don’t want to prejudice you with my experiences. Hadn’t you better wait and see if Ashley House has anything to say to you? If in the morning you can tell me it hasn’t I will be convinced that I am the victim of my own imagination. On the other hand, if you experience what I have, you, a man, may find a natural explanation.”

Commiseration shone in her eyes.

“It’s why I put you in that — that ghastly room.”

He stood up, and, his back to the fire, tried to mock her.

“Ghosts, eh? It’s old Mrs. Ashley with her crazy fancy that John’s about that’s got on your nerves. I confess she gave me a start when she talked as if John glided at will through oak doors double-bolted and locked.”

Her eyes reproved.

“Don’t jibe, Dawson. At least there’s a bond between mother and son. She’s told me of conversations and experiences she’s had here at Ashley House with John when I can prove by the calendar he was with me in New York. Often when I’m with her she seems suddenly to go away, as you saw her tonight. Her body remains, but her soul — I always wonder what becomes of that.”

Roberts recalled his impression the other day of a cataleptic recession on John’s part.

“I’ll not,” he said gravely, “argue against thought transference, but I’ll read nothing supernatural in it.”

“But she’s psychic,” Evangeline insisted.

For a moment she seemed to forget Roberts. She spoke musingly, as if to herself.

“She sees. And always I wonder. I can’t know which John she sees and talks to.”

“Which John!” Roberts repeated, astonished. “What are you talking about?”

She shrank back in her chair, as one discovered at an indiscretion, and wouldn’t answer; but Roberts skeptically traced her indefensible doubt to the flaking portrait in his room made more than a century and a half ago, probably of an earlier John Ashley, in the astonishingly precise likeness of the living one. He laughed, but stopped abruptly, so derisively did the shadowed corners echo his scorn.

“Evangeline!” he cried. “That is a mad thought. Tell me why that oak door between yours and the master’s rooms is so thoroughly barred. There’s an Ashley tradition about that, I’ll hazard. Looks as if it hadn’t been touched for generations. Maybe something to do with that old fellow hanging over my mantel that looks enough like John to be his twin?”

He saw now how completely the atmosphere of the house had captured her. She commenced to tremble. She wouldn’t meet Roberts’s eyes.

“Exactly like John, isn’t it?” she whispered. “I wondered if you’d notice it. He was an early John Ashley. John’s his direct descendant. Th — that’s one of the things that makes me afraid; for they say he was dreadfully and wrongly jealous, too. It’s how that door came to be barred a hundred and fifty years ago. He did it after — after”

Roberts had to encourage her to go on, although he rather shrank from hearing the sort of story he foresaw.

“After,” she finished, “he’d gone through that door, driven by his jealousy, to accuse his wife of, and punish her for, phantom wrongs. They say she was as innocent as — as I.”

“You never mean—” Roberts began.

She nodded quickly.

“With a knife,” she hurried on under her breath. “John showed it to me on your mantel when he brought me here and told me the story.”

Roberts glanced distastefully at his hand that had ignorantly grasped the evil thing.

Evangeline’s eyes were half closed. She had the air of describing an event she had actually witnessed; so meticulously must John have detailed the tragedy to her.

“Then,” she said, “he bolted and locked the door, and broke off the key; and, standing on the hearth beneath his own portrait—”

“Used the knife again?” Roberts asked. “Took the only way out?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “He killed himself, and, in a house so ridden by tradition, no one’s cared to disturb that door. Anyway, for generations. Mrs. Ashley’s told me, the heads of the house left those rooms abandoned. It’s John who’s moved back to them. It isn’t pleasant, Dawson, after a hundred and fifty years.”

“Beastly of him!” he said, his temper growing. Was it possible John had tried to frighten Evangeline with the chance of his repeating his ancestor’s jealous violence? In this day and generation men weren’t likely to do such things. But was John, ridden by Ashley tradition, really of this day and generation? Who could tell? He might be equal to some such morbid madness. He had shown himself capable, at any rate, of an unforgivable and singular cruelty. What a crime to force that story on a nervous, impressionable woman, and then condemn her to the very room long avoided because of its vicious memories.

“You stay there,” he asked, “because he commanded it, and his mother expects it of you?”

“Yes,” she breathed, “and because I’m ashamed not to.”

“And you imagine,” he went on inexorably, “that a John Ashley comes through that locked door at night when you’re half asleep, or, through lack of sleep, have worked yourself into a state of hysteria?”

She covered her face with her hands.

“Don’t, Dawson,” she begged.

“Which John?” he cried. “No wonder you’ve asked that, and less wonder you don’t know!”

He surrendered to his rage. He bent over her, grasping the arms of her chair.

“Look at me,” he commanded. “If you’ve actually seen anyone I’ll tell you which John it was. The John you and I know; a John cunning enough to frighten through tricks; a John who’s lost every right he ever had to you by forcing that tragic story in your mind, then putting you where your loneliness and your imagination could scarcely help materializing a phantom. And just so you won’t fail to see a ghost John’s mother’s perpetually reminding you that she sees one. Isn’t it so? Don’t you believe she’s helping John frighten you into clinging to him?”

“It isn’t fair,” Evangeline fought. “His mother loves John, but she’s too sweet; she couldn’t hate me that much. It encourages me to have you be sure, Dawson; but wait until—”

“Until,” he interrupted sardonically, “I’ve seen a phantom, too? If I see John Ashley tonight I won’t ask which one it is. I’ll know well enough it’s a jealous living husband.”

He frowned, recalling his fear before dinner.

“One can’t even be sure the whole thing isn’t a trick — a pretty, jealous trap for you and me. Perhaps the announcement of John’s trip to Florida was the bait, to tempt me to come, as I have, straight to you, Evangeline.”

She struggled to her feet, pushing him aside.

“I won’t believe that, Dawson.”

“Just the same,” he said dryly, “it’s a solution worth considering. Just the same, you can’t deny you’re afraid of John.”

He took her hand and pressed it.

“Neither of us,” he said huskily, “any longer owes John a farthing’s worth of consideration.”

Then his heart leapt, for he saw that she was afraid of him.

“I must go,” she said in a warm panic. “Tell me all that in the morning. Prove to me that my husband is deliberately frightening me. Show me how he’s done it. Then I’ll decide how much consideration I owe him.”

He tried to restrain her.

“But, Evangeline—”

“No,” she said, “I must wait until morning to decide.”

Helplessly he followed her to the hall and watched her start up the staircase. At the curve she paused and bent over the rail. Her attitude was one of prayer. Her voice shook with her desire for mental peace.

“Prove to me in the morning there are no ghosts.”

Then she was gone. He knew his anger had destroyed his logic, but he was glad to follow the impulse with which it crowded his brain. He sprang up the stairs and caught Evangeline entering her room. Before she could forbid him he pushed his way in while she drew back, wide-eyed.

“Dawson! You mustn’t come here!”

“Don’t be afraid, Evangeline.”

As he pulled her, resisting, to him, his rapid glance took in the badly lighted, faded room; the bed, stained by that tragic story; the oak door uncompromisingly closed during more than five generations.

“I’ll prove to you now there are no ghosts,” he sneered. “I’ll say now in this room that I love you, and that you can’t deny loving me.”

“I do deny it,” she said fearfully. “I’ll never admit it until John gives me the right.”

He let her go.

“You rather damage my challenge,” he said, “but the jealous ghost has heard and doesn’t strike us down. So sleep in peace in this room for once, Evangeline.”

His bravado had failed to convince her. She leaned breathlessly against the back of a chair, her face chalky. How thoroughly, he mused, John had subjected her nerves to his inexcusable discipline! He backed out, murmuring a good-night, took his candle from the console, and entered his own room.

As he slammed the door shut his temper subsided. It was almost as if its flames had been quenched by the dark atmosphere. The fire, he saw, still smouldered. It had burned long enough to dry an apartment many times as large, yet he experienced the same pervading chill and wetness that had greeted him on his first entrance.

Irritably he advanced to the fireplace, stooped, and placed a fresh log on the heavy andirons. Suddenly, unconsciously, he glanced up, his nerves at their old rippling. Against his volition had slipped stealthily into his brain again that perception of a steady and inanimate regard. He arose and drew back, lifting the candlestick to stare at the painted face that had the conformation and dead coloring of the living John Ashley’s.

The portrait possessed a fresh interest now because Roberts knew something of the man’s tragic history. In view of that he asked himself if there was malevolence in the watchful eyes. Whimsically he wondered if they could hold malevolence for him. He was surprised to decide there was none at all. Gad! What a stain for a man’s memory! For such a crime there could be no expiation here or hereafter.

He lowered his glance to the rusted knife, then looked quickly away. The wet iciness of the room seemed to grasp and shake him. With an effort he overcame the chill, conquered the chattering of his teeth. In bed he’d probably be warmer. Thoughtfully he set about his preparations.

Was his mental discomfort wholly due to his presence in a room of pensive and tragic memories? Wasn’t there a more substantial factor to account for his nervousness? Hadn’t he too thoughtlessly just now cried out his challenge from the quick to the dead?

In spite of Evangeline’s unbelief it would have been simple for John to publish that story of his Florida trip in order that he might follow Roberts here, and, through the collusion of his mother and the servants, lurk, spying, while he worked himself into a jealous rage. There might easily be other eyes than the disturbing ones of the portrait surveying the charnel room.

For the first time Roberts regretted Evangeline’s course. It had been inevitable, because of her fear, that she should place him in the tradition-haunted chamber, for how else could she give him an opportunity to assure her her experiences were wholly subjective; the result of evil suggestions forced upon her by her husband and Mrs. Ashley? But John Ashley, if he were here, would never understand that motive. Unavoidably jealousy would give him another one, and he mightn’t stop to remember that the communicating door could only be opened with a crowbar and the aid of an expert locksmith. Jealous men are notoriously unfriendly to logic; and with that morbid brain of his, crowded with the story that stained his house, he might make some ugly move.

It was for Evangeline, not for himself, that Roberts was uneasy. He regretted his failure in modern New York to foresee and guard against the chances of a house where old habits and impulses survived. He should have brought a revolver, since clearly there was no quickly available law beyond the individual’s in this remote neighborhood.

He glanced uneasily around again, convinced that he was spied upon by the living, or else that Evangeline was right in believing that crime and agony leave impalpable and disquieting souvenirs at the scene of their shaping. Fruitlessly he explored the room again, found no hiding-place, and, consequently, was forced back to his puzzled contemplation of the portrait.

“Which John?” Evangeline had said with the poignancy of absolute doubt. For a moment Roberts shared her indecision, then shook his head craftily. The living John Ashley had been abroad secretly in this house, and might be prowling again tonight, driven by an unjust and monstrous jealousy. An apparent apparition in this room would portend one thing to Roberts. It would mean peril. In the absence of a revolver he would use his hands for what they were worth.

Holding his dressing-gown about him he approached the casement window that was nearest the communicating door and the fireplace at a distance of no more than ten feet. Between the faded curtains he stepped into the embrasure. Here the voices of the wind were louder. The casement rattled. Outside it was black although there should be a moon. Even with the curtains drawn behind him he could see through snow-crusted panes no more than the blurred, swaying masses of trees.

Roberts understood it would be unwise to spend the night here without fresh air. In spite of the failure of his earlier experiment, therefore, he opened one leaf of the casement and drew against it a heavy chair that held it at an angle wide enough to admit the wind without flooding the room with the snow that was now mingled with a stinging rain. The floor of the embrasure would have to suffer.

Already it was wet. Through the narrow opening the wind screamed, setting the curtains in violent motion. To protect them he looped them over chair backs. This air was breathable. It ought to sweep from the room its charnel cold.

He carried the candle to the stand by the cumbersome bed. The servant must have been there, for the covers were turned back, exposing coarse linen sheets. Throwing off his dressing-gown he yielded himself to their chill embrace. His feet touched a warm object: on investigation a stone jug filled with hot water and wrapped in a towel. In this unused bed it was of small virtue.

For a long time Roberts lay, shivering. The sheets and covers, like the air of the room, impressed him as more than cold. They, too, seemed wet. He smiled grimly. He’d have no difficulty keeping alert for John Ashley’s tricks.

In the wind the candle flickered. Roberts reached to lift it and blow it out, but his hand hesitated. He didn’t want to plunge the room in a darkness that would scarcely be tempered by the expiring fire. A question crept into his mind: Would that be so if it was only the living John Ashley he was afraid of?

He strained his eyes to peer at the portrait across the room. Even at this distance and in this bad light it stood out with a distinction nearly luminous. He stared back at the brooding eyes defiantly. In one respect — scarcely, however, a physical one — the two jealous John Ashleys differed significantly. The painted face appealed to one’s sympathies. For that man’s sake one could hope, indeed, that there was no immortality. Otherwise what punishment to brood for endless years over a crime for which there could be no possible expiation!

Those painted eyes brooded at least. Roberts stirred uncomfortably. Upon his own heavy ones they commenced to exercise a quality of hypnosis, not unnaturally, he argued, since too persistent regard of any object induces automatically a species of drowsiness; but when defensively he shifted his glance it went straight to the hearth. After all, how the man must have suffered there during the few moments he had allowed himself! How thoroughly the appeasement of his jealousy must have opened his eyes to his irreparable injustice! How the communicating door, barred upon the havoc he had wrought, must have recalled unbearable memories of a former happy marital intimacy!

Undoubtedly that John Ashley must have repented before making his futile, meaningless gesture of expiation with the knife. There was no expiation; but through that crime against himself he had admitted the error of his earlier one.

Crowded with the story, Roberts’s fancy transferred from the tarnished frame to the hearth the melancholy figure. He pictured it sprawled, all its grace and dignity destroyed by the awkward heaping of limbs and clothing. The stained knife lay to one side.

Even at this distance the furious wind hurled against his face particles of snow and rain, arousing him from his half-clairvoyant somnolence. Had those eyes compelled him? Otherwise how could he approach sleep in the dank linen, breathing the abominable air? Nonsense. That was because he had arisen early, had had a long journey, a wearisome day. If he didn’t exert his will he would let Evangeline force on him, in this gray world between sleeping and waking, the creeping doubts John had deliberately suggested to her. Perpetually he must remind himself that if an intruder should glide into the room it would inevitably be Evangeline’s husband with whom he would share unpleasantness, even violence.

He blew out the candle and lay back in the moist mass of linen. Little by little he made out again the evanescent flicker of the dying fire over the hearth. But there was more light than that. The room was flooded by a pallid, scarcely perceptible glow in which objects floated with a fog-like distortion. He assured I himself it was the snow radiance, reinforced by the moon from behind a multiple shroud of mist.

The wind, certainly, had gathered passion.

Its cries were wilder, making him think of the furious, incoherent voices of an army, insane from the lust of assault. To those mad troops of the storm conquest might come. He must remain alert for the dashing open of the casement. He must keep the snow and rain too freely from invading the room.

Already his vigil was difficult. In the pallid glow the portrait had lost its illusion of life, was only a black blotch above the mantel; but the unwavering eyes remained in his memory, lulling his caution, urging him to accept the relief of sleep.

He smiled. What influence the imagination, reinforced by night and storm in an old house, can exert over one! And he wasn’t at all sure now that his conscience didn’t trouble.

Suppose John was in Florida; suppose he did sleep through the night restfully? There would be reassurance for Evangeline in the morning; the only kind she wanted or needed. It was his duty to submit himself to the defenselessness of sleep. He sighed. In his ears the wrath of the storm had the pleasing influence of a lullaby.

Roberts sat bolt upright, reaching for the candle and the matches. He couldn’t find them; gave it up; through the fog, which had grown whiter and more luminous, stared fearfully across the foot of his bed.

At first he saw no alteration, and used the respite to clear his mind. He had no measure as to how long he had slept beyond the fainter Bickerings from the nearly consumed logs. He couldn’t even be sure what had aroused him. In his brain a memory of a scream survived, but the storm, raging harder than ever, might easily have given him an illusion of feminine agony.

The wind had achieved gale force, reminding him of the precariousness of the casement’s reinforcement. As he waited, his glance searching the room anxiously, he thought he heard a scraping of the chair he had placed against the window.

Suddenly he stiffened. The dying firelight had disclosed at last an alteration, significant and threatening. It barely outlined for him the feet of a man standing on the hearth, and the ankles above, and finally the bottom of a wrap of some kind.

Roberts’s voice choked.

“Who’s that?”

He strained forward, exposed finally to the doubt that had so frequently and pitilessly accosted Evangeline. Which John came and went about these rooms?

“John!” he cried, and threw off the fetters of his indecision, slipping from the bed.

Why didn’t the man answer?

Roberts found his dressing-gown and slippers, shrinking from the journey to the hearth where this unknown figure waited, half in ambush.

As he commenced fumbling again for the matches his heart went in his throat at a splintering crash. But the feet on the hearth beneath the portrait had not moved. Roberts remembered. The chair! It had been flung over by the attacked casement. The casement was wide, banging and shattering against the wall. The storm was in the room. He could feel it even on this side, searching him with its wet skirmishers. And with it came an increase of the pale light that flooded the interior as with a white darkness. He no longer needed matches to observe, unbelieving, the destruction of a tradition; the accomplishment of an apparent impossibility.

The door into Evangeline’s room, strengthened by the broken key and its bolts imbedded in the rust of generations, had been violated. It stood wide, so that through it in the white night Roberts could see the foot of Evangeline’s bed. He could make out also now the figure that meditated on the hearth, the figure of Evangeline’s husband, or the image of the John Ashley of the portrait.

Roberts clenched his fists. Had Evangeline’s cry aroused him too late? Was he about to witness the final phase of a repetition of that old tragedy?

He started forward, crying:

“Evangeline! Evangeline!”

He breathed again as she screamed:

“Keep away from the door, Dawson!”

Through the fog he saw her white shape beyond the threshold attended by the crouching form of Mrs. Ashley.

At her voice and that vision the figure on the hearth moved stealthily and noiselessly toward the communicating door, right hand upraised, clasping an object long, slender, and black. The knife from the mantel.

Roberts sprang forward to prevent at any cost the passage again of that doorway by a jealousy-maddened John Ashley. Hadn’t he told himself all along the only visitant to expect was Evangeline’s husband? Yet, as he ran, he couldn’t be sure. Evangeline’s doubt surged over him. Was all this really only a reproduction of the dreadful gestures that might ineradicably have inscribed themselves on the atmosphere of a house of death?

The figure was at the end of the hearth, within a stride of the door. Roberts swerved to the left to throw himself through ahead of him. He heard the whimpering of the old lady:

“John! John! Put down that knife!”

As Roberts leapt for the doorway something encumbered his feet and flung him forward. He saved himself against the overturned chair. He had tripped on the hangings. Behind him they swished across the casement. The white darkness became black. He was confused, unable to see or act. Evangeline, he realized, was helpless. Condemned by every appearance of guilt, she awaited the punishment of her husband.

“You’re wrong, man!” Roberts cried. “For God’s sake, don’t hurt her, John!”

Nearby something fell, with the dull sound of a heavy plastic bundle. There was a metallic rattling on the floor.

Roberts covered his face with his hands, listening to the perpetual whimpering of the old lady.

The scratching of a match in the adjoining room aroused him. Slowly he lowered his hands, afraid to look through the doorway.

Evangeline stood there, her wrapper drawn about her with one hand, a candle held aloft in the other. Roberts spread his arms.

“Evangeline! What is it?”

Her lips moved with difficulty.

“I don’t know, Dawson.”

But Mrs. Ashley slipped by, and with a trembling finger pointed to the hearth.

A body lay crumpled, face to the fireplace. The feet stretched almost to the threshold. In Evangeline’s hand the candle commenced to shake.

Roberts tiptoed forward and knelt.

“I’ve seen it before,” she whispered. “Don’t try to touch that—”

Her unhealthy dread retarded Roberts. The dressing-gown about the awkward form could belong to any period. And the knife lay there on the hearth, close at hand; the corroded knife from the mantel.

He shook off the spell of Evangeline’s fear of the occult. In the candlelight the rust of the knife blade glistened, as if it had been freshly wet. He reached out and grasped the shoulder of a man. He bent farther forward and stared down at the dead face of John Ashley.

“Just as I said,” he whispered to Evangeline. “It’s John who followed me here.”

The old lady sank in a chair, covered her face, rocked back and forth, moaning. But Evangeline stared at him incredulously.

“Then how—”

Her question set Roberts’s nerves rippling again, for there were abnormal phases of this defeat of John, unless one argued that, standing on this hearth, he had been overwhelmed by its memories, had been urged by them to destroy himself and his jealousy before it could impel him to another mistake beyond expiation.

As he bent to a closer examination Roberts realized the theory wouldn’t fit. The ugly wound at the back of the neck couldn’t conceivably have been self-inflicted. No doubt remained. As he had been on the point of stepping murderously through the doorway the knife had been snatched from John Ashley’s hand. He had been struck down from behind.

Roberts stood up, glancing helplessly at Evangeline. He sprang at her with a cry, and took the uplifted candle from her hand; for, unnoticed by her, the hot grease dripped on her bare forearm.

As he followed her fascinated, fearful glance to the tarnished frame over the mantel, he recalled audacious comments his brain had formed about expiation. But he was confused, for the moment helpless. He knew only that John Ashley had been inexplicably halted on the threshold of another unpardonable, jealous, tragic blunder; and above his body the lifelike portrait of that other John Ashley was no longer discernible. The frame enclosed only a bare canvas, uncolored save by the stains of its antiquity.

“On this earth,” Roberts explained gently to Evangeline the next morning in the library, “nothing happens that can’t be accounted for naturally.”

“Would you dare say,” she murmured, “anything happens that can’t be as easily accounted for supernaturally?”

In order to comfort her he embarked on a rational solution of what had happened last night.

“I know,” Evangeline interrupted him wearily, “that John followed you here and found you in that room. But what about the door?”

“I’ve examined it,” Roberts answered. “The bolts were both drawn, and the lock was back. Perhaps the lock had never been turned. With only the bolts to figure on, it’s obvious John shot the one on my side, and his mother the one on your side when your cry called her to your room.”

“She hasn’t the strength,” she protested. “Besides, I think she loves me. I don’t mind believing, Dawson, that door was opened by the hand that closed it. It might have been as a test for John, to see if he would act on its evidence without giving me a chance. Because of that extraordinary resemblance, you will agree John possessed all of that man’s mind and soul as well as his body: all but the saving regret, the desire for expiation.”

“I believe in atavism,” Roberts said stubbornly. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Then,” she challenged, “how was John struck down?”

“The noise of my fall,” Roberts answered, “must have startled him. He could have slipped, and, in going down, have dropped the knife and fallen on it. I tell you, everything can be normally explained. I’d noticed the paint on the portrait was flaking. That rush of wind and snow and rain must have washed it off like dust.”

She smiled wanly.

“If that’s all so, why is the house at peace for the first time? Don’t you feel it, Dawson, all the old restlessness and sorrow fled, as if cleansed by an expiation?”

“We know too little about natural forces,” he said gruffly, “to bother with the supernatural. I’ve told you what I believe.”

“And I you,” she said; “and we’ll never know which is right.”

In the peace of the house he dared touch her hand. She shook her head, but from her moist eyes he read all the brightness of their future.

HATE

Garth shrank instinctively from the task Talbot had given him. The young lawyer had come to headquarters, broken in health, mentally apprehensive, crying in effect:

“I’ll admit, Garth, that as prosecutor Eve condemned a man by doing brilliant things with insufficient evidence. Now, months after the crime, you must accomplish the apparently impossible. You’ve got to bring me better evidence than I had at the trial. Before they electrocute this poor devil you’ve got to make me sure I’m not a murderer myself.”

To understand the difficulties Garth faced it is necessary to observe from the beginning the rapid and inexorable construction of Talbot’s dilemma.

Indefinitely violence had impended over the relations existing between David Hume and Edward Felton. That one would eventually put the other out of the way was accepted in the politer underworld as inevitable. By temperament and circumstance they were natural enemies, approximating uniformly the attitudes of duellists. As race-track players, as rival proprietors of secret and luxurious gambling houses, as plungers in the Street, they had faced each other with an increasing hatred until the city was no longer large enough for both.

It was the woman, undoubtedly, who quickened their aggressive motions. Hume thrust first. Assuming a cloak of reform, because, he apologized, of his serious ill-health, he closed his own establishment, went to the district attorney, and informed on Felton. When the dapper, fox-faced Felton was sentenced for a term of years in jail two significant phrases slipped through the Tenderloin and even as far as police headquarters.

“Dave Hume has railroaded Felton so he can have a clear field with Baby Lennox.”

The other was more ominous.

“If Felton gets out, God help the squealer.”

Felton did get out, almost immediately, under heavy bail, pending the result of an appeal. Garth by chance was uptown when the news filtered through the crowds. He sought out a resort where the acquaintances of the antagonists were accustomed to gather. The gossip he heard revolted him. He couldn’t act legally, but something, he felt, must be done to halt this argument short of tragedy.

Hume, he heard, was dining brazenly in a nearby restaurant with Baby Lennox, the striking little chorus girl who was credited with being the impulse for his treachery. Felton would have heard that, too; hot-headed, was probably on his way already to exact payment.

Garth hurried to the place. He saw Hume the moment he entered the packed dining room. Hume, it occurred to him, habitually achieved the distinction of confusing those around him into a background for his massive and hideous figure. The broad, pock-marked face did, indeed, carry tonight a pallor of illness. The deformity of his nose was more than usually pronounced. His small, blood-shot eyes were turned hungrily on the girl, who was beautiful in a dark and piquant fashion. From those evil eyes escaped, too, a helpless eagerness, as if the man were racing desperately against an unconquerable opposition.

Garth sat down. Hume’s grin was resentful. His voice grated.

“You ought to know, Mr. Policeman, that my life’s as level now as that dance floor.”

Garth heard the girl gasp.

“My Gawd, David! Is that a live bull? He looks exactly like a man!”

Garth studied the pretty childish face.

“I suppose you’re Baby Lennox,” he said. “Although you don’t look it, you’re old enough to take better care of your beau.”

She fairly quivered with a sudden fury, quickly consumed.

“He’s not. Nobody is. For me men are only meal tickets.”

Hume thrust back the coarse hair from his sloping forehead.

“We’ll see about that, Baby dear,” he grated.

Then to Garth:

“I suppose you’ve come to tell me Felton’s loose. I’ll fight him in my own way, thanks.”

“There’ll be no fight,” Garth said. “I’m going as far as your apartment with you now. You’ll guarantee to leave town tomorrow and keep out of Felton’s way until his appeal is decided.”

“And if I say no?”

“I’ll trump up some charge,” Garth answered evenly, “that will put you where you can fight the walls of a cell.”

The grace of Hume’s surrender was unexpected. He thrust back his chair.

“Why not?” he said. “I’m better off without all this rich food. Stay and eat it if you want, Baby.”

But she arose prettily and walked with the others across the room. Hume, Garth noticed, was unsteady. He heard the girl ask:

“What is it, David? What did the doctor say?”

Then Garth saw Felton, who had evidently just entered the lobby. The detective was behind the big gambler, so that Felton, it is likely, failed to notice him at first. Garth saw the hatred flash in Felton’s thin and scholarly face; caught the quick motion of his right hand for the pocket of his dinner jacket. Baby Lennox was quicker than Garth. She sprang forward, grasping Felton’s arm, hiding with her slender figure the incriminating pocket. Her whisper was audible to all three.

“There’s a bull here, you fool!”

Her quick resolution had almost certainly saved Hume’s life.

“Hand over the gun, Felton,” Garth cried.

Baby Lennox sprang away, pattering lightly down the hall, her hands, held in front of her, partially hiding something in the folds of her skirt. A quick, white surprise in the faces of the loungers measured her progress.

“Come back!” Garth called.

She disappeared in a transverse corridor. He grinned.

“Quick as a cat! But you had the gun just the same, Felton.”

“Prove it.”

Felton’s face was still scarred by that frenzied temper for which he was notorious, which had just now lashed him toward a public crime whose consequences he would not have been able to escape. Nor had caution returned to him yet, for he raved at Hume.

“You won’t always have a cop at your elbow, or the petticoat you snitched from me to sneak behind.”

Hume handed his cloak-room check to a boy and distorted his mottled face with a deliberate irony.

“You’ve always been simple to beat, Ed. When you get too much for me I won’t try any cheap gun play. I bet you I’ll put you out so softly the cops will only wonder at the beautiful floral offering I’ll send for your funeral.”

“Better win your bet in a hurry then,” Felton said under his breath, “but, by gad, there’s something in that, too.”

And Garth’s anxiety increased, for he suspected that Felton had taken the lesson from Hume, that he was through with open violence. The detective’s presence seemed to impress the man for the first time. He became again a calculating figure, attempting to project an illusion of polish and breeding.

The girl returned, smiling.

“What did you do with the gun?” Garth asked.

“Let me into the comedy,” she replied impertinently. “If I’d had a gun I’d have tried to shoot a policeman out of charity for the poor, honest crooks.”

“Thanks, Baby mine,” Hume said, taking his hat and coat from the boy. “I guess you saved me from a little unpleasantness with this wild man fresh from limbo. Ready? You’re coming along with me.”

The desire for violence escaped once more from Felton’s eyes. It angered Garth that Hume himself should studiously fan that instinct. He lingered for a moment.

“Lay off it, Felton. You haven’t a chance without going to the chair.”

“I’d take the chair,” Felton whispered, “if there was no other way to keep that girl from him. She’s too good, too sweet—”

“Is she all of that?” Garth asked skeptically.

“By the memory of my mother,” Felton said with naive warmth.

All at once he endeavored mechanically to cover himself.

“But she doesn’t care for him. Don’t you worry, Mr. Garth. I’m not going to touch a hair of his ugly head. You’re right. You’ve got me too well spotted. Other people are afraid of the squealer. Maybe one of them will take care of him.”

Uneasily Garth followed Hume and the girl and walked with them as far as the flashy entrance of the apartment in which Hume lived.

“Tell your hall man not to let Felton upstairs if he should call,” the detective advised.

“And I guess,” Hume said, “I’ll take your advice and get out of town tomorrow.”

The Lennox girl, who had not spoken during the walk, followed Hume into the building. She had quite abandoned her audacious manner of the restaurant. Her confidence seemed to have fled. Garth, as he hurried home, recalled the two adjectives with which Felton had qualified her — Good. Sweet. Remembering his last glimpse, he admitted there was something of both in her impish face.

Garth’s heart sank when early the next morning the inspector telephoned him to hurry up to Hume’s apartment. His question was formal. The answer aroused his scorn.

“The precinct man,” the inspector rumbled, “says suicide.”

“Dave Hume kill himself!” Garth mocked. “Not if he had lost every cent and the girl to boot. I saw him last night. He had the girl all right, and-•”

“Don’t take my head off,” the inspector roared. “That’s why I’m sending you up. The district attorney feels the same way. He’s put an assistant on the job. Try to work peacefully with him.”

From the first Garth sensed the presence of murder evidence. He hurried through a gilded hall. He ascended in an elevator resplendent with mirrors. He pushed open the door of Hume’s apartment, entered among the atrocious furnishings, and for the first time came face to face with young Talbot. The boy’s eagerness — his over-eagerness — to try a big case, to earn a big reputation, escaped from his eyes, from his rapid gestures, from his greeting, excited and voluble.

“Glad they sent you, Mr. Garth. You’re famous. It doesn’t mean much to you, but I’m scarcely out of law school and new in the district attorney’s office. It’s a whopping chance for me, for these men are known all over the country. Things are crowded downtown. If I could get the evidence, the D. A. might let me try the case. Help me, Mr. Garth. Give me the stuff on which I can convict Felton, and I’ll be your friend for life.”

“Why Felton?” Garth asked dryly.

“The whole town knows he was gunning for Hume.”

“Seems to me,” Garth went on quietly, “the inspector said something about suicide. It isn’t good practice to convict a man just because you want to.”

“Suicide, my eye!” Talbot scoffed. “Talk to the coroner. He’s in there now.”

He followed Garth into the bedroom where Hume’s body lay, fully clothed, on the undisturbed bed. Recently the windows had been opened, but the odor of illuminating gas was still powerful. Garth sniffed, fancying an aroma more delicate — what might have been the ghost of a scent.

“You get it, too?” the coroner asked. “Chloroform! And look at this bruise on the right temple.”

Garth glanced at the faint discoloration. Then he got to his knees and groped under the bed.

“Thought I saw something white,” he explained.

In a moment he was up, holding out a linen handkerchief on which the initials E. F. were clearly distinguishable. He raised the linen to his face.

“There has been chloroform,” he said gravely, “on this handkerchief.”

“I told you!” Talbot cried excitedly. “We’ve got him already.”

Without answering Garth continued with his work. He returned to the sitting room and summoned the house servants, questioning each one closely. Hume had followed his advice and warned the hall man not to admit Felton, but a short time after Hume and the Lennox girl had entered the elevator the hall man had stepped out for a moment. Felton had come during his absence with a handsome tip for the elevator boy to take him up unannounced. As soon as he had learned the situation the hall man had hurried to Hume’s apartment to apologize. In the upper hall both he and the elevator boy had heard violent quarreling. Then, cutting under the woman’s voice, screaming and incoherent, they had caught Felton’s level tones, and were quite sure of his words:

“I won’t go to the chair for you, David, but I’ll cover myself and kill you just as sure as tomorrow morning. Baby, come along with me now.”

But Hume had opened the door, and, in the presence of these strangers, at Hume’s command and the request of the girl, cowering against the wall, Felton had been compelled to depart alone. A little later the Lennox girl had left, her face averted; letting escape, nevertheless, evidences of strong emotion. Felton had certainly not returned through the main entrance to commit the crime. The waiter, who had been accustomed each morning to take Hume his breakfast, said he had entered the apartment with his latchkey as usual, and had knocked at Hume’s bedroom door. After an astonishing wait he had tried the door. He had realized something was wrong when the door had opened, for always Hume, on retiring, had locked his bedroom, and had shot a bolt he had had arranged as an extra precaution.

The living-room window opened on a fire escape descending to a courtyard from which an alley led to the street in the rear of the building. Resting beneath the rubbish in an ash can at the foot of this fire-escape, Garth found what he was looking for — the weapon that had almost certainly caused the abrasion on Hume’s temple. It was a fragment of heavy, lead-covered cable. An open excavation suggested its convenient origin.

Garth beckoned to Talbot and led him toward Felton’s home. In response to the young lawyer’s eager questions he admitted that suicides by gas, as a rule, lock their doors and are content without such extras as chloroform.

“There’s the bruise, too,” he said. “The coroner agrees that the piece of cable, wrapped about with the handkerchief, would have left no more of a mark than the body shows, yet would probably have rendered the victim temporarily unconscious. Then the handkerchief was used again to drug Hume with the chloroform in order that he shouldn’t awake before the gas had done its job. You can picture the murderer lifting Hume to the bed; failing in the effort, for it must have been a great one, to see the handkerchief fluttering to the floor, slipping before his foot under the bed. He ought to have remembered it afterward, though.”

“They all slip somewheres,” Talbot grinned. “Probably something startled him, and he made his getaway in a hurry without noticing the handkerchief had fallen.”

But the point that hurt Felton most in Garth’s mind was the sequence of the quarrel in the restaurant: Felton’s threat, overheard by the hall man and the elevator boy; and the manner of Hume’s death. He could see the big gambler now, defying Felton.

“When you get too much for me I won’t try any crude gun play. I bet I’ll put you out so softly the cops will only wonder at the beautiful floral offering I’ll send for your funeral.”

Clearly Felton had read the lesson, boasting a little later to Hume:

“I’m not going to the chair for you, David, but I’ll cover myself and kill you just as sure as tomorrow morning.”

And before the morrow Hume had been killed and these patent attempts made to give the case an appearance of suicide.

“If it hadn’t been for the unlocked door and the handkerchief—” he said musingly.

“I want to thank you, Mr. Garth,” Talbot broke in. “If I can’t send Felton to the chair on this evidence I don’t deserve success.”

Garth smiled.

“Do you realize you haven’t got a single piece of direct evidence? There’s nothing more uncertain in this world than circumstantial evidence.”

“I’ve got the handkerchief.”

Garth shook his head.

“Felton might have dropped that during the quarrel when he was there publicly. It isn’t likely, but the defense will make that point. And don’t forget you have got to break down Felton’s alibi. Don’t imagine he won’t have one. Baby Lennox’s actions will bear looking into.”

Talbot’s enthusiasm, however, was undamped. He glimpsed reputation ahead, and nothing was going to snatch it from him.

Felton’s character was outlined by his dwelling as consistently as Hume’s had been. The apartment house in which he lived was small and neat, boasting only one servant, a negro boy who ran the elevator, operated the switchboard, and attended to the inquiries of callers.

“Felton’s alibi!” Garth grinned, indicating the boy.

The gambler greeted them with a studied politeness which let Garth observe nothing useful. He did, indeed, fancy a gleam of satisfaction in the level eyes.

“Then one of his other friends croaked the squealer.”

Garth smiled.

“Come with me, Felton. I’ve got to have you committed for the murder.”

“I can prove,” Felton said easily, “that I wasn’t out of this apartment after ten o’clock last night.”

“I thought you could do that,” Talbot laughed. “By the way, I must warn you that anything you say may be used against you.”

“Who,” Felton asked Garth, “is this pretty young thing you’re carrying around with you?”

“An assistant district attorney,” Garth answered, “who’s begging for a chance to convict you.”

“Guess I’d better keep my mouth shut,” Felton commented, “until I see a lawyer. I’ll say one thing, though. If Dave Hume has been murdered, you’ve got a swell chance of pinning it on me.”

Probably because of his conception of the enormity of that chance Talbot laughed again, happily.

The ambitious young man had, at least, not underestimated his opportunity. No matter how distasteful their reputations, Hume and Felton were known far and wide. The death of the one and the trial of the other were journalistic sensations. Baby Lennox’s picturesque and intolerant personality added to the case a certain pungency.

Talbot entered court, as Garth had foreseen he would, without a piece of positive evidence. It had been impossible to find the chloroform bottle or to trace its purchase. Evidently no one had seen Felton on the street that night. Baby Lennox, beyond denying that she knew anything, refused to talk until she should be called upon to testify. On the other hand, only the negro boy could bolster Felton’s alibi; and the man’s motive and his threats were powerful weapons in the hands of an unscrupulous prosecutor.

It is, perhaps, too much to call Talbot that.

He seemed to have forgotten he was dealing with human factors. Garth understood. Talbot had carried into the world from college an immature point of view. The man on trial for his life was to him no more than a football which he must at all costs boot between the goal posts of success.

Opposition whipped him to greater efforts. He faced the judge’s plain dissatisfaction at the lack of fact with renewed energy. As an antidote for Baby Lennox’s curious victory on the stand he brought tears into the eyes of the spectators through his adroit questioning of Hume’s physician.

More than once Garth had been on the point of urging the arrest of the Lennox girl, but the atmosphere of the case was antagonistic to such a move. There was really nothing against her beyond the fact that she had been alone with Hume shortly before his death. When she took the stand she wore a vivid red gown which threw into striking relief the dark coloring of her impish face. The courtroom gasped. Garth experienced only scorn for this over-adorned creature, who, nearly everyone believed, would, if he had lived, have been Hume’s wife.

She answered Talbot’s early questions glibly enough. Her recollections of the quarrel between Felton and Hume that night she failed to make distinct. It was about her, she admitted. She denied that anything beyond formal good-nights had passed between Hume and herself after Felton had left them.

“You,” Talbot cried, “as far as we know, were the last person to see David Hume alive.”

He commenced to heckle her. She pressed her lips tight. The judge told her the law, advising her to answer. Taking the words out of his mouth, she refused on the ground that to do so might incriminate her. She became hysterical, covering her face and weeping. It was necessary to lead her from the room and to conduct her to her home where she was placed more or less under surveillance.

Had she answered, Garth asked himself, to the identical impulse that had led her to protect Felton that night in the restaurant? Had they all figured wrong about her heart from the beginning? Felton, at her performance, did not conceal his joy. The jury responded to the doubt her behavior had cast on the case against him.

So Talbot got what he could from Hume’s physician. The witness testified that the big gambler had run his course, and would have died of an incurable disease which he had insisted on aggravating with his mode of life. Talbot’s questions elaborated this revolting idea of the murder of a dying man to satisfy an evil vengeance before nature could interfere. And on the stand himself Felton admitted that the quarrel had centered about Baby Lennox, and that the girl did not love him.

So the case swayed, while Garth watched a nervous strain increase in Talbot’s eagerness.

“You’ll work yourself sick,” he warned him one evening. “They’re sure to give you a verdict of manslaughter, anyway.”

Talbot wouldn’t have it.

“No tie games for me,” he said. “I want a first-degree verdict or nothing. He’s guilty as hell.”

“Maybe you’ll make the jury think so,” Garth muttered, “but not on the evidence.”

Talbot utterly discredited the negro boy, sole prop of Felton’s alibi; but it was his dramatic summing-up that over-weighed the balance beyond recovery.

“Edward Felton, I accuse you of the murder of David Hume.”

Clothed wholly in black, he stalked from behind the jury box and, with his finger outstretched at the white-faced prisoner, held his pose until the courtroom had reached a breathless silence.

Garth, in spite of his long experience, was impressed like the rest. That summing-up became historical among the lawyers. Its incomplete logic, by clever emphasis and masterly innuendo, was made to appear whole. Felton’s defense that he had lost his handkerchief in Hume’s apartment during the quarrel was referred to the personal habits of the jurors. And so with all the evidence. It was dramatic. It was brilliant. At the moment it appeared convincing, but the address was constructed of circumstance without the foundation of a single, indisputable fact.

It won the case. Felton’s lawyers failed to overcome the impression it had made. Their desperate demand for the arrest and indictment of Baby Lennox came too late. Talbot had got the jury.

Garth congratulated him.

“Although,” he added, “I’d hate to send a man to the chair on that evidence.”

Afterward he was sorry he had said that. Talbot’s dry hand scorched him.

“See here, boy. You’ve got fever.”

But Talbot only repeated mechanically under his breath:

“He’s guilty as hell. He’s guilty as hell. He’s guilty as hell.”

Talbot, when Garth saw him again, had fought through haggard months of typhoid, yet in his gestures and his emaciated face were recorded more than physical suffering.

Garth’s varied demands had driven the Felton case pretty thoroughly from his mind, but now the inspector told him to give himself for a few days completely to Talbot’s whim.

“I did my best to find all the evidence there was at the time,” he objected. “They’re electrocuting him — Friday, isn’t it? There’s not a chance. His lawyers haven’t been able—”

But Talbot wouldn’t let him go on.

“You’ve got to show me he was guilty beyond the slightest doubt. If I hadn’t been sick I suppose I wouldn’t have worried. I’ve had nothing to do but think of that case. Delirious and conscious, every detail has gone through my mind, and I know I didn’t have the goods on Felton. It’s why I resigned. I couldn’t bear the thought of prosecuting another man. And I’ve had three offers already from prominent firms. That’s the reputation I got out of the Felton case.”

He placed his shaking hands on Garth’s shoulders. His face worked.

“Save me from my own selfish cheating. Don’t let me owe my career to the deliberate murder of a man. I can’t go on unless I know surely that he’s guilty, or, if he really isn’t, until I get him a new trial. If only he wouldn’t swear day after day that he’s innocent! We’ve got to find the fact we never had. I’ve talked with Baby Lennox, but she won’t give up to me: yet I’ll swear she knows something. She’s changed, too. You may be able to handle her now.”

Hopelessly Garth agreed to try, promising to keep Talbot informed of every move he made.

Now that he dwelt exclusively on the case he recognized the vast injustice of which Felton might be the victim. Baby Lennox wasn’t the only alternative. As Felton had more than once suggested, there were plenty of lawless men to whom David Hume, turned informer, had become a menace. Still, as Talbot had suggested, the temperamental girl was his logical starting point.

Her habits had, indeed, altered conspicuously. He found her in an unpretentious boarding house on the upper West Side. She wore a simple dark gown. Her really lovely face had lost much of its impish mobility. Her eyes, startled at first, turned to him with curiosity and appeal.

“Reformed, Baby?” he said kindly.

For an instant her old spirit flashed.

“No need for me to reform. Whether you believe it or not, I never carried anything to confession I was ashamed of. I’ve left the chorus, if that’s what you mean. I’m trying to work. Dave’s going out that way fairly sickened me with flashy things, and now Ed—”

She glanced away. In the girl Garth saw qualities he hadn’t suspected. He experienced all at once a sympathy, direct and tender. Yet beneath this repression of her former scornful manner he caught an indignant impulsiveness that would make her capable, under the right provocation, of killing such a man as Hume. Excitedly he recalled her denial in the restaurant of any amorous intention toward the big gambler. Somehow he had to discover her exact sentiment for Hume that night of his death. He touched her hand, speaking softly.

“You loved him very much, Baby?”

Her quick tears surprised him, but she shook her head.

“Dave? I didn’t love him.”

The quality of her voice was desolate and groping.

“I don’t believe I could love anybody. It just isn’t in me.”

She hurried on with an artificial bravado, as if she had said too much.

“What you come here for? What you want of me? I didn’t kill Dave.”

It isn’t frequently that a detective can speak with the frank sympathy Garth experienced. His manner affected her, obviously; brought her mentally closer to him; would make her, he felt, in her turn, frank.

“I don’t believe you killed him, and I do believe Ed Felton did. But, Baby, the evidence was weak. I want the case cleared up before he’s executed. So does Talbot—”

She raised her hands, interrupting. Her face *was animated again.

“Talbot might be a murderer himself. Why does he keep coming to me? I won’t talk to him, the — cheater!”

“Because,” Garth answered slowly, “he believes, and so do I, that you know who killed Dave Hume.”

“It’s a lie!” she snapped.

“The doubt,” Garth went on gently, “is breaking that boy. He’s brilliant, and his whole future depends on his learning the truth before it’s too late. If you know Felton did it, you’ll only do good by saying so now. If you know, or think, that he didn’t, you can’t keep quiet any longer, for day after tomorrow he goes to the chair.”

“Why should I help Talbot?” she cried. “You saw how he treated me in court, trying to frighten me into saying things I had no right to say, couldn’t say—”

“You see,” he caught her. “You haven’t told all you know.”

“If you think I did it, why don’t you arrest me?” she challenged.

Garth shook his head.

“I haven’t the goods. Nobody has. His lawyers have moved heaven and earth for one new fact to reopen the case. You didn’t do it, Baby. I haven’t come here to make trouble — only to help you and Talbot and Felton. You’re talking to a friend. Do you, or do you not, know that Ed Felton killed Hume?”

“You were square,” she said, “through the whole thing. He’s going to die so soon! I might as well tell what little I can. It isn’t much. I don’t know, Mr. Garth, whether Ed killed him or not. On my oath, I don’t.”

“But you have a theory. I don’t believe either Felton or you testified to the whole truth about that last quarrel.”

She shuddered, as if at the memory of some devastating emotion.

“I couldn’t,” she whispered, “before those grinning men and all those sneering women. And Ed, I guess, thought it might hurt me, and him, too, by strengthening his motive for killing Dave.”

Garth tried to subdue his eagerness.

“Well? The quarrel was about Hume’s squealing and you. What else?”

She covered her face. He barely caught her words.

“That’s all, really, except when Ed came in that night I — I thanked God.”

Garth bent forward.

“I didn’t know, Baby. We all thought it was the other way.”

“Don’t think I blame Dave,” she went on. “I guess I’d strung him along, and he’d begged me to marry him more times than I can remember. He didn’t have long to go. He just couldn’t afford to wait, and Ed’s getting out on bail that day brought things to a head. Dave swore he’d make me promise to marry him the next morning. When I told him I didn’t love him and wouldn’t have anything more to do with him he lost his temper, and maybe I did let him think Ed was the cause.”

“And he wasn’t really?”

She looked up, indignant.

“I knew Ed’s record. I’m the only woman he ever treated decently. Those men were always cheating girls like me. I thought it only fair to get something out of them without paying. And I — I got to like them, as pals. But that night I forgot about the justice of it. I was ashamed, and — and afraid.”

“You mean you realized there was danger of quick murder after that quarrel?”

She nodded.

“I had a feeling one of them was bound to kill the other before morning, and there was nothing I could do. Well! It turned out that way, and I believe Ed did it. If that helps Talbot, he’s welcome.”

She glanced up, as if expecting him to go, but Garth had no such purpose.

“After what you’ve said it’s perfectly clear that more passed between you and Hume, after Felton left, than you’ve testified to.”

“I can’t say anything about that, except that it is of no importance.”

“Don’t you see that you must tell me? Remember! Felton goes to the chair day after tomorrow.”

“I can’t. It — it was personal — one or two favors Dave asked me as a sort of payment for giving me up. I promised, and I can’t talk about it — my promise to a dead man. I could never get absolution. But I swear if I told you every word Dave and I said it wouldn’t help Ed, and it — it might hurt him.”

It became clear that he couldn’t overcome her ingenuous conscience. He was inclined, indeed, to give the facts she withheld her own appraisal. After he had left her the girl’s transformation haunted him. Talbot, however, drew no comfort from her frankness.

“She only thinks Felton’s guilty. So do you. So do I. But I’ve got to know.”

Garth despaired of helping him any further. He exhausted every device. He was convinced that Felton and Hume’s friends knew or suspected nothing that had not appeared in court.

“If anybody else had done it there would be whispers around by this time.”

Talbot’s pallor and emaciation had increased. He spoke hoarsely.

“Then we’ve got to force the truth from Felton himself. It’s our last chance. He’s got to stop shouting out his innocence. That would worry me if I had convicted him on ten times the evidence.”

“Suppose,” Garth asked, “that is the truth he’s telling in every newspaper. The only truth that will satisfy you, Talbot, is a confession.”

But he yielded to Talbot’s wish and went with him to the death house.

In the gloomy corridor they were surprised by the sight of a slender, dark-clothed figure at the wicket of Felton’s cell.

“That’s his girl,” the turnkey muttered.

The woman turned, as if hunted. Even in that sinister obscurity Garth caught her anxiety, flushed and neurotic.

“I was just leaving,” she whispered.

Garth had agreed to approach Felton alone at first. He saw Talbot touch the girl’s arm.

“Couldn’t I have a word with you, Miss Lennox?”

Her red discomfort increased. She drew back, as if from some contagious contact.

Garth guessed Talbot’s purpose. He, too, wished an explanation of her presence here. Had she lied to him the day before about her feelings for Felton?

“Don’t be foolish, Baby,” he advised. “Stay with Talbot, I may want a word with you myself after I have seen Felton.”

He watched Talbot and her sit side by side on a bench in the intolerable corridor.

Felton made no difficulty. Garth entered the narrow and desolate death cell and heard the door grind shut behind him. Except for the prison pallor Felton had altered little. He was as neat and ferret-like as ever. His eyes had lighted with an evanescent hope. Garth hastened to destroy it.

“No good news,” he said, “much as I would like to bring it. I just felt the need of a little talk with you.”

Felton stretched himself on his cot and closed his eyes.

“You know,” he said, “they’re murdering me tomorrow morning. Chatty talks with bulls have ceased to interest.”

“Cut that murder stuff,” Garth answered. “You haven’t made the people connected with your conviction any happier by it these past few weeks. I just wanted to stop you making a fool of yourself. I’ve found direct evidence that would satisfy a jury of your best friends. For one thing, you were seen—”

Felton yawned.

“Save your breath, Garth. Pure bluff! You haven’t found any new evidence, because there wasn’t any to find. The play acting of that young brute Talbot convicted me, and I suppose he goes on, not realizing that he’s murdering me.”

Talbot’s only hope, Garth saw, lay in a direct appeal. The sight of Talbot’s physical weakness and mental torture might, just possibly, soften this bitter man.

“He’s here. He wants to talk to you, Felton.”

“I won’t see him.”

“Yes, you will,” Garth said confidently, “as a favor to me. Let’s look at the case for a minute. If you didn’t kill Hume, who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about Baby Lennox?” Garth whispered.

Felton sprang to his feet.

“If I had anything to strike you with, Garth, by God I’d use it.”

“I merely suggest,” Garth went on, “that if you keep shouting out your innocence, instead of confessing the truth, until it’s too late, the case might be reopened later and make things pretty uncomfortable for her.”

Felton didn’t answer, but for the first time Garth felt something like hope.

“A confession wouldn’t hurt you, and it might help her. As for Talbot, he’s a sick man. You’d better see him as I advise.”

Since Felton didn’t answer, Garth went to the wicket and summoned the turnkey. As he passed Talbot in the corridor he whispered to him:

“Make him feel sorry for you. Your only other chance is through the girl.”

He saw Talbot locked alone in the cell with the man he had convicted. Then he sat down on the bench beside the girl.

“Why did you come here?” he asked.

Her voice was lifeless.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “You weren’t square with me yesterday. You do love Felton — have loved him all along.”

With a pitiful sincerity she shook her head.

“No, but Ed cares for me, and I guess I was about the only good thing in his life. But I can’t love anyone. I only thought if I could make it any easier for him—”

“And,” Garth insisted, “no secrets passed between you?”

She looked straight at him. Her lips trembled.

“Mr. Garth, I know I don’t deserve it, but can’t you trust me now?”

The voices murmuring in the cell rose passionately. Garth went nearer in case Felton should grow violent.

“Felton,” Garth heard Talbot say with tense supplication, “if there was the slightest chance for you I would reopen the case myself. The chances have been exhausted. You’ve got to pay the penalty.”

“Because of you, you lying, lawyer-playactor.”

“Don’t, Felton. Don’t talk that way. You’ve got to tell me the truth.”

“You’ve heard it often enough,” Felton cried. “Before God, I didn’t kill Dave. There were plenty of others who wanted to croak the squealer. I tell you I must have dropped my handkerchief when I was there with Baby.”

“No, no,” Talbot broke in. “That won’t do, because we can’t prove it.”

He grasped the condemned man’s arms.

“Own up! You did it! You killed him!”

Felton commenced to laugh — a high-pitched, jeering giggle. Talbot persisted, losing control of himself.

“I can’t let you go to the chair without confessing.”

Felton’s hideous laughter ceased.

“Funny world!” he commented. “When I die tomorrow you will be a real murderer, but they won’t strap you in a chair, and put a harness over your head.”

Garth, discouraged, directed the turnkey to let Talbot out. Talbot entered the corridor, shaking from the vehemence of his desire. Baby Lennox arose and went to him spontaneously.

“What’s the use?” she said. “You weren’t fair to him at the trial, but there’s no use now.”

“The courts were satisfied, and so’s the governor,” Garth said gruffly. “You can’t do any more. It’s ended. Come along home.”

But Talbot refused to return to the city before the final act. The Lennox girl left them, saying she would be back in the morning as she had permission to see Felton one last time.

“Why do you torture yourself?” Garth asked her.

“If it will help him I must come,” she answered simply. “He’s asked me. I shall come.”

During the night Talbot paced the floor with the incoherent gestures of intoxication. Garth lay awake, oppressed by the imminence of fresh tragedy unless the sick man’s doubt could be satisfied before the hour set for the execution.

As they approached by a waning starlight, the brooding walls of the prison had an air of mocking hope, of wishing to smother the fresh and animated dawn.

In the corridor of the death house a lantern, turned low, made the deep shadows flicker with a suggestion of turbulent souls. There was one slight and steady gleam from the wicket of Felton’s cell. The turnkey stood there, his face averted, as if ashamed of his duty. Garth drew back at Baby Lennox’s voice from the cell, clear and sweet.

“I do love you, Ed. I never was sure before. I am now. I will think of you always. Yes, of course. You may kiss me.”

Both men answered to the same impulse, but it was Talbot who clutched at the turnkey’s arm.

“Get her out of there.”

The turnkey clanged open the door.

“Sorry,” he said hoarsely. “Time’s up.”

With an automatic dignity Baby Lennox walked out, staring straight ahead, with the appearance of one who has emerged triumphant from some incredible martyrdom. At sight of Garth she started.

“He wants to see you,” she whispered.

Garth slipped in. There was serenity, even content, in Felton’s greeting.

“I’m glad you stayed over for the show,” he said, “but I won’t see Talbot.”

Garth had no mask. He blurted out:

“You won’t be stubborn to the end! You won’t kill that boy!”

“Baby wants a confession,” Felton answered softly, “and she’s been awfully white. In a moment the warden and the priest will be here.”

And when they had come Felton sat at the table and wrote a complete confession of the murder of David Hume, following the details as Talbot had elaborated them during the trial.

When the warden and the priest had witnessed the document, and, at Felton’s request, had departed, Garth took the doomed man’s hand.

“This means everything to young Talbot, Felton.”

“And nothing to me,” Felton said grimly, “but I’m human enough to want somebody to know the truth. I wrote that confession to protect Baby and to help Talbot, for I want to go out square; but it’s a lie from start to finish. My alibi was straight. I didn’t leave my room after ten o’clock the night of Dave’s death. You can keep it to yourself.”

Garth drew back.

“Felton! What are you saying!”

“The real truth that I couldn’t prove. But don’t let it trouble you. I’ve killed other men in various ways, and as far as Dave’s concerned I’m guilty enough in intention. I’d have killed him the next day. The only reason I didn’t do it that night was that he taught me a lesson without meaning to. You remember what he said about killing me so cleverly that the police would only wonder about the flowers he’d send for my funeral? So I made up my mind to kill him that way, without paying the price, so I could have the laugh. I wasn’t quick enough. If I meet Dave up there he’ll have the laugh on me.”

Garth lifted his hands.

“And there’s nothing we can do.”

“Nothing,” Felton agreed. “But I deserve the chair.”

“Then,” Garth asked, “who got the piece of cable, the chloroform, your handkerchief?”

Felton smiled.

“Guess for yourself. It came to me last night.”

A measured tread interrupted them. There was time for nothing else.

Garth, Talbot, and the girl went to the warden’s office where they sat in front of the grate fire.

“Thank me for nothing,” Garth said in response to Talbot’s gratitude. “You owe everything to this young lady.”

But always, while visualizing the tragedy being accomplished across the yard, he asked himself if Felton had lied perversely to the end. At least it was the man’s wish that his confession should do the good for which it had been intended.

He wondered why Baby Lennox kept her glance on the window which looked toward the town. A sense of the girl’s expectancy grew upon him. He asked her what she awaited. She did not reply, but her eyes slowly filled with tears. Then he saw a boy, who carried an oblong cardboard box, approach the prison through the struggling dawn. She went to the hall. Garth, expectant, too, now, followed her. Talbot remained moodily staring at the fire.

“You are late,” she said with dull despair to the boy, who had been admitted.

Garth saw a number of men, soberly dressed, streaking across the courtyard from the chamber into which Felton had been recently led.

“What is in that box?” he asked the girl.

He saw that the box was addressed to Edward Felton. He tore the cover off, exposing a quantity of splendid roses in the midst of which a large, unaddressed envelope nestled. He ripped the envelope open and started to read the few lines printed with pencil on a sheet of paper in an obvious attempt to forbid identification of the writer’s hand.

“If Dave Hume were alive he’d want to remind you that he never lost a bet to you, Ed. Dave was no dude, like you. He never wore a wrist watch or carried his handkerchief hanging out of his breast pocket—”

Garth grasped the girl’s arm. She cried out.

“This is what you promised Hume! After you had told him you didn’t love him, and Felton had gone, he made you swear you’d buy these flowers and send this envelope!”

She nodded.

“I can tell now. He wrote the letter after Ed had left. He seemed to know Ed was going to kill him. If Ed didn’t, I could give the letter back to him. If he did I was to get it to Ed on the morning of his execution. But I fell down. The boy didn’t come in time.”

“Baby! Why didn’t you tell us?”

“It seemed little enough,” she answered, “to promise Dave not to. I’d hurt him so, and just as he’d been told he couldn’t live more than a few weeks. Afterward I was afraid to tell because it would have made it so much the worse for Ed. Did I do wrong? Why do you look at me so?”

Garth relaxed his grasp. He tried to smile, recalling Felton’s own wish.

“No, no, Baby. This only makes it more certain. I’ll take this.”

The soberly clothed men who had come from the death chamber were close. Garth led the girl back to the warden’s office. Talbot stood up and went to her, touching her hand with something like his old impulsiveness.

“I am going to take you home now. Do you know, I have been praying that Felton knows what his confession means to me.”

A flush stole across her pallor.

As Garth watched them go, side by side, he tore Hume’s letter into little strips. He tossed the pieces into the grate. He watched them burn, muttering as if the man were really in the room:

“This is the thing to do, isn’t it, Ed?”

When the warden entered, Garth was quite himself again. He said casually:

“Those flowers outside, Warden — the girl had them sent. Unfortunate they came too late!”

THE DANGEROUS TAVERN

The case of the frozen woman, even before it led him to the malevolent loneliness of the Crossways Tavern, filled Garth with a vague, disturbing fear.

It was toward noon of a bitter morning when the inspector summoned him to his office.

“Garth,” the big man announced, “the Newtown police have telephoned in one of the queerest cases I ever heard of. A young woman, beautiful, good breeding, and all that, was found at dawn this morning on a country road within three miles of the factories and houses of Newtown. She was bare-footed, half dressed, and nearly frozen to death. Her feet were badly torn, so she had been running. And, Garth, there was exactly no place for her to have run from.”

“What’s the matter with any house in the vicinity?” Garth asked.

“Only building nearer than Newtown is an old tavern. She was picked up close by. Any fool knows she couldn’t have run three miles, or one, the way she was dressed in this weather.”

“Sort of puts it up to the tavern,” Garth drawled.

The inspector shook his head.

“Nothing doing. It’s a cinch she was trying to get to the place. Two farmers on their way to town found her, woke the proprietor and his wife up, and carried her into the barroom. When they got her by the fire she opened her eyes for a minute and said: ‘Thank God I’m here.’ Repeated it two or three times, and passed out again. They gave her coffee, but it was no go. She’s been unconscious ever since. They’ve got her in the Newtown hospital. Here’s the dope, as far as I’ve been able to land it: Her husband, Dr. Joseph Anderson, is a nerve specialist on the upper west side. Not much of a hit as a practitioner, but has some reputation for research. I’ve notified him, and he’s on his way out in his automobile. Seems she left home yesterday afternoon to spend the night with some friends in Newtown. Their story is that she became restless after dinner, complained of not feeling well, and decided to return to New York. She started out alone for the station at eight o’clock. That’s the last seen of her until she’s picked up in this shocking state on a frozen woods road. Newtown says she must have escaped from an automobile passing through, and might be just as well pleased if the case was dropped. That’s darned nonsense. She seems to be an extra fine girl. Thing’s got me guessing. Jump the first train and bring me back the answer.”

“I think,” Garth said thoughtfully, “I’ll visit that tavern, unless you can suggest a more likely place to look for first-hand evidence.”

Snow threatened when Garth stepped from the train into the murk of the Jersey factory town. All the way out that picture of a woman, found in such a condition, had provoked him to numberless theories, all trending to one uncomfortable hypothesis. The inspector’s snap judgments were, as a rule, sound. If Mrs. Anderson was, indeed, of a finer sort, her impulse to flight in the face of almost certain death must have come from some abnormal and maddening terror. Unquestionably the detective’s own vague fear sprang from that conception.

First of all, he visited the local police headquarters. Newtown’s bluecoats were interested in little beyond radical agitation in the neighborhood’s many mills and foundries.

“You’d better hunt,” the chief advised, “in town for the automobile and the people she traveled with last night. The rest of it’s up to her husband.”

Garth hid his exasperation.

“You’ve investigated this tavern and its occupants?”

“Sure. She was making for the tavern. I tell you she must have slipped away from some companions in an automobile. We investigated the place all right. An old shell of a barn; been used as an inn ever since before the Revolution. The proprietor and his wife have been struggling along toward failure. It’s too far away, in a big stretch of woodland that some plutocrat’s been holding for a rise in values when the town grows out that way. Prohibition hasn’t helped them any, and the farmers haven’t liked it for some time, because it has a reputation of being haunted.”

Garth remembered his theory that Mrs. Anderson might have recoiled from some unspeakable shock.

“Tell me more about that,” he urged.

The chief, however, dealt only in the thinnest rumors of cries and visions. He was vastly amused.

“Just the same,” Garth said, “the case starts there, so I’ll have to look it over.”

“Then,” the chief answered irritably, “you’ve more time than I have.”

Garth took the hint and left to seek Mrs. Anderson.

The hospital brooded on the frontier of the grimy mill district. The detective, as he came up, observed a young man clinging to the fence. His attitude and features suggested a paramount anxiety. The handsome pale face; the dark hair, worn rather long; the excellent but unbrushed clothing; the soft collar and flowing Windsor tie sketched a superior sort of workman of socialistic tendencies, a member of whose family perhaps suffered within the stained and sickly walls. A small closed car with a physician’s cross on the radiator — probably Doctor Anderson’s — stood before the steps.

Garth passed on and entered. Upstairs, in response to his gentle knock, Doctor Anderson himself opened the door of his wife’s room. The detective glanced sympathetically at this man, well beyond middle age, whose deep-set eyes were haggard; whose voice, ordinarily authoritative, one would guess, was now husky and broken.

“Is she conscious? Has she said anything?” Garth asked eagerly.

The doctor spread his hands.

“Young man, if she lives I will be grateful. In addition to the exposure, I am sure she was heavily drugged. At the best it will be several days before she will be able to talk reasonably. I am taking her home at once.”

“Is that safe?”

“It is essential,” the doctor answered, “and the county physician agrees with me. Her eyes must open on familiar and friendly surroundings.”

“This hospital isn’t a very pleasant place,” Garth agreed. “I’m glad I caught you, for I must see her and examine the clothing she wore.”

Reluctantly Doctor Anderson admitted him.

More nearly palpable this time was the wave of vague fear about Garth as he studied the unconscious woman in the haggard twilight of that room.

The set lines about her eyes and mouth seemed carved in ashen marble. They recorded a formless horror. Her young beauty, distorted to that extent, assured him that the inspector had guessed right. She was rarely fine. A unique and unbearable experience must have sent her tortured feet along the frozen road.

The bandages about her feet were red. He examined the clothing — delicate lingerie, a silk underskirt — nothing else in that biting dawn. When he spoke he had a feeling of addressing her, who lay even now apparently dead.

“Don’t you worry. I’ll find the answer to this tonight.”

He watched the orderlies carry her to the automobile, saw her made comfortable there with hot water bottles and cushions, stood in the road until her husband had driven her away. As he turned to leave he noticed that the pallid young man still clung to the fence.

“Someone of yours sick in there?” he asked kindly.

The young man’s voice was full of despair.

“Oh, God, yes!”

“I’m sorry.”

The other controlled himself.

“That case that they just took out must have been pretty bad. She looked dead to me.”

“She’ll probably be all right,” Garth answered.

The pallid face flushed.

“I know. It was that woman who was found nearly frozen to death this morning, and you’re a detective.”

“Why does that interest you?” Garth asked quickly. “Who are you?”

“A damned fool,” the other answered bitterly. “Good afternoon.”

Before Garth could stop him he had dodged through the passing traffic. From the opposite sidewalk he waved a negligent hand and disappeared in the maze of a factory yard.

Again along the detective’s nerves rippled that oppressive and singular fear.

Garth accosted hackman after hackman. Either business was too brisk or the road was too rough. Evidently these unintelligent men took the ghosts of the tavern seriously. One went so far as to hazard:

“Guess that woman that got frozen out there saw something pretty bad.”

Garth gave it up and telephoned the inspector.

“I’m starting to walk to the tavern,” he reported, “because the jitney drivers don’t like it. The local Hawkshaws are asleep on the case, but I’ve a feeling it’s big. I’ll get them to drive me back from the crossroads or I’ll spend the night there. I simply must see the place and talk to those people, because I don’t believe for a minute she jumped from any automobile. Anderson’s driving her home now. Get a man up to his house to meet them and stand by in case she should wake up and say anything. I’ll telephone again the first chance I get.”

He set out for the Crossways Tavern.

The rough road did show marks of automobile tires, but they could be accounted for by the investigation of the early morning.

It was through a turbulent dusk that Garth came alone to the remote building. In the wind, the trees, huge, gaunt, stripped of their leaves, made grotesque gestures against a rushing sky. Soon it would snow.

The tavern was of two low stories with a doping roof. At either end a square chimney rose. Every window was carefully shuttered. No gleam of light escaped. Garth’s pulse quickened. Had the proprietor and his wife guilty consciences? Had they run away? Then he saw that out of one chimney smoke curled and was caught and torn by the wind.

His distaste for the place increased. It had an air, curiously human, of crouching with sullen privacy in the shadows. It seemed to project to the detective a morose warning.

He paused at the crossroads where a signboard creaked in the wind. She had been found there. He could see the marks of those who had saved her. No matter what she had said inside, she must have fled from the tavern. Brooding among the straining, crackling trees, the rotten house created an atmosphere of evil. And again the fear enveloped him.

He had to force himself to cross the echoing gallery. He grasped the door knob and paused before a more definite alarm. The tavern door was locked. With a gesture of determination he raised his stick and pounded on the panels. After a moment the stumping of feet reached him, but the curiously locked door wasn’t opened all at once. He heard a harsh voice, vibrating with surprise and disapproval.

“Who’s raising that racket out there?”

“If this is a tavern,” Garth called, “why is the door locked?”

The key turned. The door swung slowly back. A stout, unkempt man, holding a candle aloft, stood just within. In the moment before the wind caught and extinguished the tiny flame Garth appraised the suspicion in the beady eyes, the anxiety in the man’s gross face. Probably the proprietor guessed his errand, and that, Garth knew instinctively, was a bad beginning.

“It’s my tavern,” the man said surlily. “Besides, there’s a door at the back. What you want?”

“A bite to eat and a bed for the night.”

“No room,” the proprietor said brazenly.

Garth needed no more warnings.

“Wouldn’t have thought business was that brisk. Sort of puts me in a hole. Then dinner and a glass of cider while I make up my mind what to do.”

Before the other could interfere he slipped past and turned down a passage in the direction of the smoking chimney. He saw a dim light at the end. The door banged behind him. The sound was final, uncompromising.

Garth walked through into a low-ceilinged bar-room. Logs crackled in a big fireplace. The only other illumination came from an oil lamp above a tiny bar. Leaning on the bar was a woman who stared at him with blank amazement. The expression of her face was destroyed by a livid scar which ran across both cheeks and the nose.

“Wake up, Ma,” the proprietor ordered. “Give him some cider.”

Anger escaped from his harsh voice. He examined his undesired guest daringly. In that room, under those circumstances, the musical trickling of the liquid from tap to glass created an appalling dissonance.

Garth sat down, fully aware now that his suspicions were just; for the proprietor did not smoke, yet heavy and fresh tobacco vapor wreathed around the lamp, was pungent in his nostrils. As surely as if they had stood before his eyes Garth knew that several men had at his approach hurriedly secreted themselves in the depths of the house. His sense of mental discomfort fled. The excitement of his situation grasped him.

“Dollars to doughnuts,” he thought, “the case will be solved here — if I can get away with it.”

As he sipped his cider he acknowledged he would have to be adroit beyond the common to get away with it, for in the proprietor’s beady eyes he read danger, a capability for murder.

Once or twice Garth thought the man was on the point of speaking, but he turned and slipped through a doorway behind the bar, carefully closing the door after him.

Then the room was filled with a whisper, so hoarse, so nearly void of resonance, that Garth for an instant doubted its source.

“Say! What do you want here?”

“I wanted a room,” he answered, “but it seems I’m not to get it. I’m dickering for some of this property and wanted to look it over in the morning. Nobody’d drive me out. Seems you have ghosts here.”

Her laughter had scarcely more vibrations than her voice. She glanced at the hearth.

“Not interested at all in the pretty lady?” she whispered.

“Naturally,” he said calmly, “everybody talks about her in Newtown.”

“All I know,” she said with whispering haste, “is that they carried her in here; nearly put her in the fire, she was that frozen. She opened her eyes, grabbed my hand, and said: ‘Thank God I’m here.’ Two or three times just like that.”

Garth smiled grimly at her iteration of that evidence that should have cleared her house. Perhaps she noticed it.

“Do you know,” she went on, “I bet you’re a detective?”

“Is that the reason,” he asked, “that you tell me about the pretty lady?”

She shook her head. Her scar in the firelight gave her face an ugly leer.

“No. Just because I like pretty ladies.”

“Since,” he said, “I can’t have a bed, I’d like to telephone.”

Her noiseless laughter slurred through the room.

“Telephone! We’re not that stylish.”

Suddenly her face assumed an odd distortion. She rattled the glasses about the bar. As if providence had resented her denial, there had come from far in the house the faint, quickly smothered tinkling of a telephone bell. He gave no sign. She let the glasses rest.

“Have you got a horse?” he said. “Could you send me back to town?”

She shook her head.

“You’ll have to walk, and a bad storm’s coming up.”

“Your refusing me a room in an empty hotel would stir me up if I were a detective,” he said.

“If there was anything wrong with us,” she came back with her odd whisper, “do you think we’d let you go at all on your two feet?”

Garth doubted if she had weighed the substance of her threat. It must have been coincidence that brought the proprietor in on top of it. Probably he had conferred with men of subtler mind. His smile was bland, his voice hearty.

“Find I can give you a room after all. Storm’s getting worse. No night to let any man walk three miles. Supper’ll be ready in a quarter of an hour. Want to go upstairs?”

Garth expressed his gratitude, but his nerves tightened as he followed the proprietor, who had lighted a candle, along the passage and up a rickety staircase.

The atmosphere of the room into which the man led him was tomb-like. Nor to the eye was it more congenial. Evidently for a long time it had been unoccupied, had had no heat. A soiled and torn comforter and a pillow lay on a wooden bedstead. The only other furniture was a chair and a washstand. Yet the proprietor rubbed his hands like an actor who has learned his part well.

“I’ll have the bed made up after supper. Reckon you can be comfortable enough here.”

“With a little air,” Garth agreed.

He strode to the window, raised it, and commenced to unbar the shutters. The proprietor’s panic-struck haste resembled an attack. Garth tore his arm free, barely restrained himself from snatching out his revolver.

“What’s biting you?”

The other reached over his shoulder, banged the window shut, and relaxed.

“Hard enough,” he said apologetically, “to keep one room in this house warm. If you opened a window up here it would blow us away downstairs.”

His “Let well enough alone” had a special significance. He went out.

“I’ll call you when supper’s ready.”

That had the effect of a command for Garth to stay where he was until he should be summoned. As soon as he heard the proprietor’s pounding feet at the end of the passage he slipped down the stairs after him, grateful for the voluble voices of the wind that covered his progress. The bar-room door had been closed, for the lower passage was quite black. He could hear stirrings in the bar-room, and the cautious muttering of men. He crept to the door, crouched, and placed his ear at the keyhole. What he wanted most of all was light on the criminal activities of this house, and some explanation of how they had involved Mrs. Anderson; but his own disposition thoroughly concerned the lawless gathering. Some phrases reached him.

“He thinks it’s Garth” — “I’d like to see that beauty croaked” — “Hoped he wouldn’t come till morning” — “You’re warming broth for him, Ma. Put the dope in that” — “Afterward we’ll decide” — “If it could be made to look like an accident” — “All the evidence will be out of sight in an hour” — “I knew last night when I heard the skirt was here” — “It’s plenty dark. Let’s get to work” — “Graves” — “One’s enough — a big one.”

Then the scarred woman’s whisper, like the wraith of a voice, swayed in the passage.

“Oh, Christ! I don’t want to go to the chair.”

The stirrings recommenced. Garth didn’t dare wait. He got back to his room, closed the door, and faced the facts. In the tavern were at least one or two metropolitan crooks to whom his death, discreetly contrived, would be a joyous revenge. All the chances were that beyond the drugged sleep prepared for him lay the final sleep. Yet how could he go down there and refuse to eat without bringing the situation to a head and delivering himself almost as helplessly into their hands?

He quietly raised the window and opened the shutters. What was their game that even in this wilderness they feared an open window? The frantic wind hurled snowflakes against his face. Without moon or stars the earth had a lustrous quality against which the trees made misshapen changing masses. It would be so simple to slip across the porch roof, drop to the ground, and run to Newtown, demanding help; yet to do that would mean an abandonment of the case, since, before he could make the distance in this blizzard, the evidence would be concealed and the tavern deserted. His curiosity held him. What had that talk of graves meant? His grave?

The choice was, to an extent, taken out of his hands. He started. He closed the shutters and the window, because he wanted to be sure that the wind wasn’t furnishing him with the illusion of a woman’s cry. He tiptoed to the door and opened it, listening with an intense apprehension for the wayward sound that had disturbed him.

He stiffened. It had not been the wind. The smothered voice of a woman keened along the passage.

He thought of the rumors that had driven trade away from the tavern. That cry, he told himself, was made by no immaterial voice. In one of those rooms was a woman — perhaps a woman like Mrs. Anderson — who tried to express a fear as great as hers.

The voice had scarcely reached the lower floor, so he snatched up his candle and went along the passage. A repetition of the moaning guided him to the corner room. He opened the door cautiously. Whoever she was, she was alone. His glance absorbed the details of a room similar to his own, and as charnel cold. He tiptoed to the bed. A woman lay there, like a bundle, with a quilt thrown over her. The pitiful voice moaned again, and he stooped, and drew the covering away from the face of the woman.

He conquered the cry that struggled in his own throat. Her presence swung the case to a new and incredible basis. He tried to tell himself he was mistaken, but every detail of that beauty resembling perfectly cut marble had recorded itself in his brain. It was Mrs. Anderson, wearing the borrowed clothing in which she had left the hospital with her husband for home.

She lay there, indeed, as inanimate as a bundle, save for her eyes, which were open, dilated, and fearful. How could she have been transported from that comfortable nest in her husband’s car to these sepulchral surroundings? He spoke rapidly under his breath.

“Don’t make a sound, Mrs. Anderson. I’m your friend. I’m a detective. Can you talk?”

Her lips moved ineptly. He had to bend closer to hear the tired, defeated voice.

“Go before they get you. I’m past help. This house is full of dead things. They’ll kill you.”

“What happened after you left Newtown with your husband?” he demanded.

Her fingers twitched at the edge of the frayed comforter. Her wide eyes filled with a passionate appeal.

“Don’t bother about me. You’ve got to save him. Somehow. But don’t let them find you.”

“What’s wrong with this house?” He begged.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But I know it’s full of death. I touched—”

Her shoulders shook. She paused, the horror of her recollections gathering in an involuntary cry. It shook across the frozen atmosphere, filling the room, the passage, echoing beyond a doubt in the ears of those downstairs. Garth started for the door.

“Courage!” he said over his shoulder. “If they come up pretend to be asleep.”

Her head moved from side to side.

“Go! Go!”

Already the proprietor pounded along the lower passage. Garth got to his room and set his candle down. Then he ran to the head of the stairs, calling out:

“What was that? Good Lord, man! Who screamed?”

The proprietor mounted the stairs.

“What you talking about?” he asked uncertainly.

“You’re not deaf,” Garth mumbled. “I tell you a woman screamed as if she was being murdered.”

The proprietor’s grin was feeble.

“Come on down. Your supper’s ready. You’ve been hearing stories. We’re supposed to be haunted, but I haven’t heard any ghosts except the cats.”

Garth pretended to relax.

“Might have been at that, but it gave me a start.”

He smiled grimly at the feeble excuse. Anything would serve that would get him to his drugged meal. The situation, however, possessed one advantage. The man or the woman would have to go straightway to Mrs. Anderson to insure her quietness until he should be asleep.

As Garth entered the bar-room the scarred woman glanced at him expectantly. The proprietor laughed.

“Good thing I called him when I did. He’s been hearing spooks.”

Garth followed the man’s glance to a table by the fireplace. A steaming bowl stood there with bread and butter and rough cutlery.

“Eat it while it’s hot,” she whispered. “Ham and eggs will be ready in a minute.”

He detected no odor of frying. He made sure that the door behind the bar was closed. He glanced at the liquid in the bowl and walked on to the fireplace.

“Guess it will keep hot,” he said carelessly, “while I warm my hands for a minute.”

Certainly one of them would have to go to Mrs. Anderson. The will to violence showed in the proprietor’s face, but he glanced significantly at the woman.

“Maybe,” he said, “I’d better see if one of those cats has got upstairs.”

He went out. At the sound of his feet on the stairs Garth turned from the fire.

“Come here,” he commanded the scarred woman.

She faced him, startled. In the firelight the scar reddened. She opened her lips. He slipped around the table, grasped her arm, and, with his free hand, whipped out his revolver.

“Not a sound! I am a detective, and I wouldn’t hesitate a second to shoot a woman like you.”

She crumpled into a chair, dragging at his arm.

“Wh — what do you mean?”

“I’m on,” he whispered back. “If you care for your life you’ll play my game, for I’ll shoot at your first move to give me away.”

This time her whisper had a new, fierce quality.

“You’re not fool enough to think they’ll let you out of here alive?”

“All the more reason for your not committing suicide to gain a few minutes. Watch out now.”

He carried the bowl to the bar, poured a portion of its contents in a glass, and placed the glass out of sight behind the bar. The remainder of the poisoned liquid he threw in the sink. He replaced the bowl on the table.

“What’s the layout?” he asked.

She glanced up. He hurried to the table, sat down before the empty bowl, and pointed to the bar.

“Get back there,” he directed, “and don’t try to move out of my sight.”

The proprietor stumped down the stairs and along the passage. Garth fell back in the shadow of the chimney corner, slipping his revolver in a niche close to the wall, where it was within reach of his dangling hand but comparatively safe if they should search him. The man evidently didn’t think that worth while. He came in, glancing at his guest’s relaxed figure.

“Swallowed it whole, eh? A big dose. He’s safe until we’re through outside.”

He pointed to the ceiling.

“She seems quiet enough. I wouldn’t want to give her any more. Enough’s enough, and we’ll have our hands full getting rid of this cop without an investigation. What says you?”

Garth, watching her closely, saw her momentary tremor.

“I wish I was dead,” she whispered.

He started for the door behind the bar.

“May get your wish,” he grunted.

“They don’t need you,” she gasped. “Stay here.”

“The sooner the stuff’s out of sight the better,” he said. “What ails you?”

Garth gave her a warning gesture behind the other’s back. She caught it and repeated that monotonous phrase that was like a cry against fate.

“I wish I was dead.”

The man grimaced and went through. After a second the outer door slammed. Garth sprang up.

“So far so good. Now let’s chat.”

She displayed a tigerish fury.

“Find out for yourself. I may be bad, but I’m no squealer.”

“Oh, come now! What about Mrs. Anderson and her husband?”

Her breath came in quick gasps.

“When people,” she whispered, “run their noses into other people’s business whatever happens to them is their own fault. I’ll tell you this much: We hid her shoes and most of her clothes, so she couldn’t snoop.”

The irony of the situation gave her scarred face a twisted grin.

“Pretty fool had never seen this room or me. When they carried her here she thought she was with friends. I haven’t got anything against her or you, but I’d rather see you both underground than that I should go to jail, and I’ll give you away yet. That’s all the talking I’m going to do.”

“If you told the whole story now,” he proposed, “I would do my best to get you off.”

“Bargain when you’re out of the woods,” she sneered.

Except for the suffering woman upstairs they were probably alone in the tavern. If he could make the proprietress safe Garth would be able to reconnoiter the odd labor under way outside. There was one method that he had had in mind when he had saved some of the poisoned liquid. As he started for the bar he heard the outer door slam. He hurried back to his corner, fancying it was the proprietor.

“No tricks!” he warned.

But it was not the proprietor who entered. The anxiety of the pallid young man at the hospital fence was explained in part. He, too, must have had a share in last night’s drama. He came in, shaking the snow from his hat and coat. It was evident he had walked from Newtown. The woman’s surprise was not assumed.

“Thought you were safe,” she whispered. “Thought you were a quitter.”

He did not answer. He stared at Garth.

“A bull from New York,” she explained. “Had to fix his supper. They’re going to decide what to do about him after the stuff’s hid.”

He moved nervously about the room.

“A pretty mess! Suppose it had to be, sooner or later. Where is everybody?”

“Digging,” she whispered. “What you ought to be doing.”

He cried out hotly:

“I’d have dug a grave if I had been here last night. I’ve come to find out about that, and punish the one that let her in for this.”

“Oh, now don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t make matters worse.”

“Thank heaven she’s safe at home, anyway,” he muttered.

Such assurance puzzled Garth, complicated his reasoning. Curiously, as he studied the white, angry face, he found himself hoping that the man would not be too suddenly undeceived by the fact of Mrs. Anderson’s extraordinary return to this evil house.

The firelight flashed across her scar as she glanced quickly upward.

“Now don’t get excited,” she whispered quickly. “Go on out. Quick! You ought to help them.”

There was a dragging movement in the room above, along the passage, on the stairs — a series of incredibly difficult sounds, coming momentarily nearer.

“What’s that?” the pallid young man asked.

While this painful progress continued she grasped his arm and tried to urge him toward the rear door. Garth resisted an impulse to spring to her assistance.

“It’s nothing but the wind,” the woman whispered.

The pallid young man jerked his arm away.

“Let me go. There’s someone in the hall.”

“No, no. Only the wind,” she lied.

The passage door swung open, and Mrs. Anderson stumbled across the threshold. The quilt was drawn about her shoulders. She had the disheveled appearance and the lack of conscious animation of one who wanders in the gray lands of somnambulism. Her lips moved automatically, as if, all along, she had been urging courage by her monotonous chant.

“I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to get away.”

The eyes of the pallid young man were wide. His mouth fell open. He gave a great cry.

She turned, stared for an instant, then swayed back until the wall held her, while the quilt slipped from her borrowed clothing. As he dashed forward she raised her hands against him, but he overcame her feeble resistance and grasped her shoulders.

“Who brought you back here?” he said hoarsely.

She commenced to shake. She stammered:

“Then you’re — one of them. Oh, no! Not you! Take your hands away. Don’t touch me. Can’t you wait until I’m — frozen? Because I’m done now. I can’t—”

She slipped to the floor. He swung her up in his arms and bore her toward the fireplace. Like a flash the scarred woman slipped behind him and his burden, so that they were a shield for her against Garth’s revolver. Her whisper came with a gross, hysterical glee.

“The cop’s faking! Put the others on!”

Garth arose, smiling.

“She’s right. But you’ll give no alarm, either.”

The other’s dark head bent over the woman in his arms.

“She can’t stand any more,” he said simply.

With grotesque motions the scarred woman dodged behind her shield, seeking an opportunity to slip through one door or the other. Garth stepped around and faced her. She cowered, covering her deformed face.

“You won’t kill me!” she whimpered.

“I wouldn’t care to shoot even such a woman as you,” he said.

He took from behind the bar the glass which he had filled with the drugged liquid.

“Guess I’ll have to keep you both quiet,” he said. “You first. Take your own medicine.”

She drew back.

“It — it isn’t safe.”

He saw that the pallid young man was still occupied making Mrs. Anderson comfortable by the fire, so he let his revolver dangle by the guard, grasped her shoulders, and forced her head back. While she cried out, filling the room with croaking sounds, he got some of the liquid down her throat. But his triumph had taken more time and attention than he had anticipated. He swung to find the pallid young man gliding through the door behind the bar.

“Come back!”

“Tell them!” the proprietress screamed.

The outer door slammed.

Garth felt the woman relaxing in his grasp. He lowered her to a chair, and strode to Mrs. Anderson. He had a few minutes before the gang could besiege him.

“What made you run last night?” he asked.

Her drowsy eyes struggled open.

“Dead faces,” she said thickly. “I touched frozen faces.”

Her eyes closed. In her condition she could not resist the comforting warmth of the fire. Garth had no more time. He ran into the room behind the bar — a kitchen — saw a door to the left, opened it, found a sort of an office in which a lamp burned. There it was, as he had expected — a telephone fastened to the wall. He put in his emergency call for New York headquarters, then dragged a table across the doorway. With his revolver and that barricade he might put up a defense for some time.

His call came quickly through, and there was no sign yet of an attack. In a few words he sketched the situation for the man at the other end.

“Force the Newtown police to hustle,” he said. “They should get here in twenty minutes. I might hold out that long.”

“The inspector and his daughter,” the man in New York answered excitedly, “left for Newtown nearly two hours ago. Seems Mrs. Anderson and her husband never got home. That set the old man thinking; worried him about you. But I’ll check up on Newtown. Hold out. Help’s sure to reach you in a few minutes.”

Garth replaced the receiver, listening breathlessly. What the deuce delayed them? If they should hesitate another minute he could get outside. He drew the table away and entered the kitchen. He glanced quickly around the bar-room. The warmth had brought a flush to Mrs. Anderson’s cheeks. Evidently her exhaustion and fear were lost in a natural sleep. The proprietress lay back, breathing harshly. As he stepped from the tavern the wind stung his face. From the heavy snow the night borrowed a sort of phosphorescence. The marks left by the passing of the pallid young man were already nearly obliterated. He followed the diminishing trail, running low against the storm, into the forest that crowded close to the rear of the tavern. The straining branches gestured him back. The woods seemed full of witch-like voices, which screamed at him to run away.

He caught the ringing assault of metal on frost-hardened earth. The diggers assuredly had had plenty of time to trap him in the tavern, yet they continued their sinister task with utter indifference. He smiled triumphantly. The cause was obvious. Individual passion had neglected the welfare of the group. The proof reached him in a man’s angry cry.

“Somebody pull him off. He’s trying to kill me.”

“Drop it,” another voice called angrily. “We’ve got to finish here.”

Garth crawled to the edge of a meager clearing. Against the white night he saw four figures rising and bending in a wearisome rhythm. Abruptly there drifted between him and the laborers in the pit two figures, interlocked, gasping.

“I’ll do anything you say,” one managed, “only stop this madness.”

The other apparently redoubled his efforts. It was as if they had struggled to this side of the clearing to disclose to Garth that which he had wanted to find ever since entering the tavern. The fighters stumbled against an apparent inequality in the white ground then swayed away. Garth crept closer. He saw a dark patch where an anxious foot had knocked some snow aside. That patch, his fingers told him, was a blanket. He ran his hand beneath the blanket and commenced to examine the evidence whose successful concealment would mean safety to these men. First his fingers encountered an oblong tin box. His lips tightened. He drew the box out and put it in his pocket. He sent his hand again on its explorations. There were many similar boxes. He searched farther. He snatched his hand back, repressing the cry that struggled for expression. He could grin at his own timidity, understanding the emotions of Mrs. Anderson when she had stumbled on such evidence without any preparation or suspicion. His fingers still tingled. No wonder she had fled from the house in which these cold relics of humanity had lain as if to ambush her. He glanced up warily.

The digging had ceased. The four men climbed from the pit. They separated the antagonists. One fell to the snow and lay there, moaning:

“My leg! I tell you he’s smashed my leg!”

It was the pallid young man’s voice that answered.

“I want to finish him. Give me one of those picks.”

“Lay off it,” one said roughly. “Let’s get these things hidden and run.”

“What are you going to do with this fellow Garth?” the proprietor asked.

“You and your wife,” another said, “can settle with him when he wakes up. I’ve had enough.”

The pallid young man laughed.

“Maybe I ought to have told you before. The detective wasn’t drugged. Shamming.”

The rest gathered menacingly about him.

“You’re crooked. I’ve wondered about you.”

The man in the snow cried out:

“Get those things in. Cover them up. Help me away.”

He moved restlessly, groaning:

“My leg! My leg!”

For a moment the whole group was motionless. Garth heard it, too, the shouting from the tavern; saw in that direction the flashing of many lights.

“Scatter!” someone screamed.

Garth scrambled to his feet, snatched out his police whistle, and blew.

“No use,” he shouted. “You’re surrounded.”

Once more he heard that groaning voice.

“My leg! My leg!”

Then the echoes of a shot crackled through the trees and the patch in the snow was no longer restless.

Men dashed into the clearing. Garth recognized the huge bulk of the inspector.

“Handcuffs for these four,” he directed. “This fellow,” indicating the pallid young man, “will talk all we want.”

He hesitated. He pointed to the motionless figure in the snow.

“That’s Doctor Anderson, Inspector. He’s just shot himself. On the whole, I guess it was the best thing for him to do.”

With the prisoners — all easily recognized as possessing criminal records — on their way to Newtown, and with Mrs. Anderson in the hands of the inspector’s daughter, Garth verified his reasoning. The inspector, the Newtown chief, and the pallid young man gathered with him about the bar-room fire.

“So you’re Gordon Harvey,” Garth said to the pallid young man. “I’ve heard of you as a rising surgeon. I can guess how you got mixed up with Anderson’s gang, but I don’t see why you didn’t make a clean breast of it when I saw you at the hospital this afternoon.”

“You must have seen then,” Harvey answered, “that I wanted to tell you this tavern was a veritable museum of forbidden medical merchandise. I couldn’t, on her account.”

“How long,” Garth asked gently, “have you two loved each other?”

“More than a year,” Harvey said, “and it has been pretty hard, for she was too good and loyal even to think of a divorce. You see I knew her husband was a failure, and I kept my eyes open for her sake to find out what he was up to. Inside of the profession you hear of lots of things you don’t talk about; that the police can’t even guess at. I knew something of this sort was going on, and through his rather limited sources of supply it was easy for me to fix Anderson as the head of this crowd.

“I don’t need to tell you, I suppose, that dissecting in some states is against the law, yet always there are men who are glad to pay high prices for a sub-rosa opportunity to keep abreast of surgical developments. Anderson’s car with a doctor’s cross on it could cross state lines with the blinds drawn without a question, and you’ll admit that this lonely tavern was an ideal base and store-house. And let me say now that few physicians would feel anything beyond an ethical repugnance for a trade that gave their less-fortunate brethren the benefits of personal research. But when Anderson took me more or less into his confidence I realized that illegally assisting his brethren at a darned high price was only the commencement of his game.”

Garth nodded, taking from his pocket the tin box he had removed from the pile in the snow.

“This stuff,” he said, “can be valued by the tens of thousands of dollars — probably the biggest illicit drug traffic left in the country. No wonder they didn’t balk at the thought of murder.”

Harvey looked up appealingly.

“You see my position. For her sake I couldn’t give her husband away. And blackmail isn’t in my line. But I was planning to break the thing up somehow through him. There’s no harm talking now. I was desperate today when I found out what she had been made to suffer.”

“Naturally,” Garth said, “her own suspicions had been aroused. I suppose she followed him here, or made him bring her.”

“Yes. At home she had answered the telephone for some of his accomplices. Several she had seen at the house. She knew he had a lot of mysterious business out here. She did suspect. She became afraid for him. Last night she had actually planned to spend the night with her friends in Newtown. Then she heard him make a rendezvous with one of these crooks at the Newtown railroad station. She decided to find out then, and, if there was anything wrong going on, to plead with him to drop it. That’s why she left her friends. She found the doctor in his automobile at the station. She insisted on knowing what he was doing. He tried to shake her off, but she wouldn’t yield. He fancied he could get away with it. Said he had a case at a lonely house that might take him the night, and if she would go to bed he would take her home in the morning. He had to come here last night on account of payments, a new deal. The gang was waiting for him. So he took her directly upstairs and gave her some drugged coffee. She came out of it too soon, suspected she had been drugged, was terror stricken, couldn’t find her clothes, searched about in the dark, and stumbled into a room where some of his museum pieces were stored. You can fancy the effect on a woman in her mental and physical condition. She told me a little while ago that she was out of her head for a time. Her one thought was to get out of the house, to scream aloud its secrets that she couldn’t understand. She got down the stairs and out the front door without alarming them; but dressed as she was, and exhausted, she never had a chance. When I heard what had happened I could have killed him, Garth. I came out here tonight wanting to kill him. Yet up to the end she desired to save him somehow — simply because he was her husband. It’s atrocious.”

“Rather, pretty fine,” the inspector said softly.

“Then they gave her more drugged coffee after they had carried her in here?” Harvey asked hotly.

“Quite necessary,” Garth said. “Because that would keep her from talking until Anderson could chase to New York, establish an alibi, receive your report, Inspector, and get back to Newtown where he could continue to insure against her speaking. He had to keep her with him until he could clean up here, then he would have taken her home, threatened her to silence, and waited until the case of the frozen woman had blown over before opening up again from this ideal base.”

The inspector laughed.

“He might have gotten away with it, too, if Garth hadn’t telephoned me to keep a man at Anderson’s house to report on her first statement. Might have gone pretty hard with you, Garth, if I hadn’t got suspicious when they didn’t show up on time.”

The Newtown chief lighted a cigar thoughtfully.

“I’m not sure Garth wouldn’t have taken care of himself in any case. Pretty good man, Inspector. I’ll confess he was right where I was wrong.”

Harvey arose.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to see how she’s getting on.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Garth smiled, “you can go where you please. I’ll let you know if I need you in town.”

“I suppose,” the inspector said after Harvey had left the room, “those two will be getting married later. Queer how happiness comes out of the unhappiest cases.”

Garth shrugged his shoulders.

“Not so queer,” he said. “That’s the way the world goes on. Hello! It’s late. I’m tired and hungry. Maybe the chief’ll lead us to a bite and a bed in Newtown.”

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Garth entered the case of the haunted house at Ardell an avowed skeptic. Nora, who seemed to have a special prescience in such matters, was, on the other hand, uneasy from Simon Allen’s first appearance. Garth had called on her at the inspector’s flat that night. Quite unexpectedly, about ten o’clock, the inspector strolled in, bringing Allen with him.

“What comes of being famous, Garth,” the inspector rumbled, letting himself down in his favorite chair. “Mr. Allen’s here from the northern part of the state with a story I can’t make anything out of. He wants to tell it to you.”

Garth studied the stranger — a man between thirty and forty years old, good-looking enough, and with the appearance and manners of one who lives more vividly within his own imagination than in the humdrum routine of average existence; but the detective had never seen a face more haggard, or one which expressed more relentlessly grief and fear. He saw that Nora stared, too; that some of Allen’s fear was already in her eyes.

Allen’s voice shared the unhappy emotions of his features.

“I’m not so sure you can do anything for me,” he began eagerly, “but I want you to try, for my own reason is in the balance. I want you to prove that I am not the victim of self-hallucination. Your cases must have taught you something of the tricks and the truths of spiritualism. Since my wife’s death three years ago she has appeared to me several times — at dangerous or threatening moments. It happened finally last night. I caught the morning train and hurried to you.”

“A case for a doctor,” Garth thought.

He saw, however, that Nora bent forward, actively impressed; so he lighted a cigar, lay back in his chair, and bade the man to tell his story, carefully, from the beginning.

“I was married five years ago,” Allen said, “to an orphan, a very beautiful girl a good deal younger than myself. She had a lot of money. I had little. We lived in an old stone house a mile or so from Ardell, a small and lonely village near the border. Besides myself she had only my sister and my invalid father for company. It was horribly depressing for her. I realize that now. But I imagined myself a poet in those days. The city was impossible for me. The loneliness, the aspects of untouched nature, were my stock in trade. And she revolted. In desperation at last she threatened to leave me, and that meant, of course, that she would take her money. My sister, who has always been exceptionally devoted, gave me plenty of warning; but I, in my selfishness, made light of the whole situation. I didn’t see my wife sicken, just as she was on the point, I am sure now, of carrying out her threat. I didn’t realize, indeed, that she was going to die, until she lay, still and white, before my eyes, forever beyond the benefit of my remorse. For it was only when I had lost her that I realized how much I loved her. I broke down myself — was unable to go to the funeral. As soon as I could I fled from the house. I traveled. My sister’s letters, without reciting anything definite, gave me an increasing impression that she was living under some odd strain, unconnected with the care of my old father. I went back a little over a year ago, planning to spend a few nights. I remained just one.”

He moistened his lips. He continued more slowly:

“The house has always had the reputation of being — unpleasant. I mean, people have talked of footsteps, sighs; the more ignorant, even of visions. I had never seen anything nor heard anything I wasn’t willing to explain by old timbers or the weather; nor had my sister until Helen’s death. As soon as I entered the house that night I noticed the change. My sister looked older. Her eyes seemed continually to be seeking. Her movements were abrupt and neurasthenic. She said it was my imagination. My father, however, when I was alone with him for the first time, spoke in his unnatural way — you see his mind isn’t quite normal now—

“‘Helen,’ he said, ‘makes her act that way. Ever since she died the house has been full of Helen.’

“Although I had never thought seriously of spirits, this situation, combined with my guilty memories, and the night, and the moldy house, made me restless and — afraid. I expected something which filled me with a great hope. I received a shivering impression that Helen was near. I longed to see her and tell her that I understood now and was sorry. But, you can understand, I shrank, also, from seeing her in any such fashion.

“I slept in the room we had shared during two years. A dim moonlight got through the trees and in at the window so that I could see the frame of the doorway opposite my bed. I suppose I got to sleep at last. Then I was wide awake, sitting up in the bed, my heart choking me.

“The door had been opened. Just beyond the threshold, staring at me, stood my wife. The moonlight seemed green about her face, blurring the features, as if the face itself were a little phosphorescent. The whole vision was as removed from life as it is possible to imagine a thing to be. Yet I never doubted it was Helen. I gave a great cry, and started to rise to go to her. The door closed noiselessly. I lighted my candle and ran out, but the hall was quite empty. I was helpless. I could see, but I could not communicate. It seemed like a punishment, bitterly cruel. Then the next day I received my first intimation of the warning quality of these visions. My sister came down with a nervous collapse. A country doctor, a good one who had looked after Helen and cared for my father, pulled her through. I couldn’t stay at the house. I lived in the village and drove over each day. But even so I understood what my father had meant. The house was full of Helen. Always turning a corner I started, feeling she was there, just beyond my reach, just beyond my sight.

“When my sister was well enough I fled back to the city. The doctor, I am sure, loves her. I knew she was in good hands.

“The memory of what I had felt and seen haunted me. Four months ago I yielded to that unbearable, abominable temptation to see my wife again, to try again to talk to her. My father and sister, without saying anything, made it clear that she was still there. And one night, the last night, I think, I shall ever spend in that house, she appeared. This time she was actually in my room, between my bed and the closed door, outlined by the green moonlight, and I could see her face quite clearly. I fought to get to her, but something solid and transparent seemed to stand between us. While I struggled she faded. I tell you she melted into nothing within a few feet of my eyes, of my helpless hands, as if she had been of the substance of the fading, nocturnal light.

“That time the warning was for me. I came back to the city and went to the hospital with as vicious a case of typhoid as you could wish. For weeks they expected me to die. I tried to persuade my father and sister to leave the unhealthy house. My father wouldn’t be moved. You see he is very old, and he was born and has always lived in that house. To die there has become a religion with him. Besides, Helen’s proximity does not frighten him. Old people are not very fearful of that which they so nearly approach themselves. So my sister is chained by him.

“As soon as I was well I experienced again that dreadful temptation. You can’t fancy, Mr. Garth, what it is to desire an experience the thought of which takes your breath; to feel an irresistible necessity to yield yourself to a blind terror.”

He paused, and looked around. He seemed startled by Nora’s intent expression. After a moment he continued:

“I yielded yesterday, and reached the house last evening. I started up the stairs with my bag in one hand and a candle in the other. I tell you Helen stood at the head of the stairs, glaring down at me, as if her suffering had urged her to come and forbid my passage. For the first time I received the impression of a malevolent spirit, and I knew I must not try to see her again. My candle dropped, and I cried out. I don’t remember. The next thing I remember I was lying on a sofa, my sister hysterically demanding what I had seen. And when I pressed her she admitted having seen a number of times a similar vision, but since my first experience. Before that she had only suffered from a mental alertness for the unhealthy and unnatural. My father, who had never actually experienced the — the apparition, said:

“‘Poor Helen! You wouldn’t let her go when she was alive, Simon, you can’t be cross with her for staying now that she’s dead.’”

“It seems to me,” Garth commented when Allen had finished, “you need a spiritualist rather than a detective.”

Vehemently Nora shook her head.

“A spiritualist,” she said, “is the last person in the world he wants.”

She smiled at Garth.

“He needs a hard-headed scoffer like you. If you felt anything, saw anything, he would know his mind was right enough.”

Allen nodded.

“Yes, because I realize I may have suggested these things to my sister. I don’t think Mr. Garth’s type of mind would be influenced by unconscious hypnotism. Or if he could find some physical explanation, some light effect; if he could prove to me that my house is healthy. Frankly, I see little hope of that, but I have come to him as a last resort, because I feel danger to one of us must follow this third vision.”

Nora touched Garth’s arm.

“You have to help him, Jim,” she whispered.

The inspector agreed.

“I can get along without you at Headquarters for a couple of days.”

“All right,” Garth agreed. “But let’s start square, Mr. Allen. I’ve no manner of belief in spirits.”

“That’s right,” Allen cried. “That’s just what I want. But I wonder if you’ll be able to tell me that after you have spent one night in my house.”

Through the gathering dusk the next evening Garth looked from the train at a hilly landscape of a peculiarly depressing outline and color. There were practically no houses. Patches of woodland and underbrush were separated by rocky stretches, or hilltops that the wind had swept clean.

When Allen and he left the train at Ardell the night was complete. Garth fancied the station master looked at him suspiciously. Without saying anything the man locked the station and set off for a cluster of lights that marked the village.

“Give me your bag,” Allen said.

His voice held a new authoritative note.

“I will send it out,” he continued, “from the village.”

“But we are going together to your house,” Garth cried.

“No. I want you to be free from any possible mental suggestion of mine. I will come out in the morning for your report.”

“Your sister expects me?” Garth asked.

“I will telephone her from the village.”

He pointed directly away from the lights.

“There’s your road. About a mile from here you will come to two large stone gate posts. You’re not likely to miss them even on such a night. Turn in there and walk along the driveway to the house.”

Garth shrugged his shoulders and set out. Instinctively he shrank from this lonely journey through a strange and black countryside. The road, as far as he could tell, skirted thick woodland. Almost at once it turned, and the lights of the village were blotted out. A wan patch in the east showed where the moon struggled unsuccessfully to project its light through heavy snow clouds. Nowhere else did a gleam of light escape from the sable pall. He received an impression that someone followed him, but he could see nothing, hear nothing. A sense of bleak withdrawal from the experienced, the comprehensible world, increased upon him. He stumbled on against an unreasonable reluctance. He came at last to the gate posts, found really only because his feet told him that a driveway swung in there. Once through, the world appeared blacker. The wind suggested that trees crowded close on either side. The driveway curved a great deal, as if to avoid them. He peered eagerly ahead for light. There was no light. He hadn’t dreamed the house was so deep in the woods. Allen shouldn’t have sent him off to feel his way about in the night, at the risk of losing the path, of stumbling on some pitfall. He snatched out his pocket lamp and pressed the control. He stared, surprised, at the end of the sudden brilliant vista. The house, then, was quite blind, for the light reached its walls not more than fifty yards away; and they were gloomy, depressing walls, built up of a dark stone to a height of three stories, with closely shuttered windows and a door within a deep-columned portico.

Garth climbed the steps, found the bell handle, and rang. Without delay he heard, muffled by the heavy door, approaching footsteps. The door was swung wide. It was as if to the occupants of this remote house no terror could possibly come from the outside.

The detective had a glimpse of a vast hall which borrowed a sort of radiance from a lighted inner room. He could see, therefore, only that a slender woman stood beyond the threshold.

“What is it?” this woman said in a hurried, nervous voice.

“You are,” Garth asked, “Mr. Simon Allen’s sister?”

“Yes.”

“He was to have telephoned you about me. I am the detective he brought up from the city.”

She stared.

“My brother hasn’t telephoned. When he left early yesterday he said nothing about a detective.”

From the lighted room a frayed thread of a masculine voice issued.

“Dora! Is that the doctor? Shut the door. There’s a draft.”

Immediately after a telephone bell tinkled.

“I daresay that’s your brother now,” Garth said.

She nodded, and, after he had entered, closed the door and entered the lighted room. Garth took off his coat and hat and followed her. The room was square, with an abnormally high ceiling. Before a log fire, huddled in a great chair, was the figure of a man, aged and shrunken. Out of the wrinkled yellow face, weak eyes blinked at the detective while Allen’s sister talked at the telephone. She hung up. She turned. For the first time Garth saw her face, and he drew back, experiencing a great pity, at a loss for words. Suffering and fear, rather greater than Allen’s, were stamped across the woman’s features, and her hair, although she was probably younger than Allen, was streaked with gray. Her gestures, moreover, were uneven. She seemed perpetually to reach for objects which she never quite touched. She tried to smile, but Garth saw that she was on the point of tears.

“It’s all right,” she said. “He had some trouble getting me. I am glad you have come.”

She walked closer. She clasped her hands, looking up at him.

“Thank God you have come!”

She was a trifle hysterical. The words poured from her as water tears through the abruptly broken sluice of a dam.

“Company! A man! A detective, who isn’t afraid! If I could only get away from this house! But I can’t. You see that I can’t.”

The old man’s voice quavered across the room:

“Don’t see why everybody wants to get away from this house. I shan’t go, at least. Helen means no harm. I was born here, and here I’ll die.”

She whispered to Garth.

“I’ll have to leave just the same, or I shall go mad.”

“Why?” he asked softly.

“Because,” she answered with a desperate earnestness, “although no one will come to us here, we are never alone.”

Yet she could tell him no more than Allen had already done. It was only later, in fact, that he had an opportunity to question her; for the fact that Allen, in his man’s fashion, neglected to mention, became evident. The house was without servants. In addition to caring for a helpless, exigent invalid, this worn and mentally harassed woman accomplished with her own hands what housework was done.

“We haven’t been able to persuade any servants to stay,” she explained wearily.

Garth urged her not to get him anything to eat.

“I really don’t need it.”

“One has to eat,” she said in her sing-song voice, “and it occupies me. I never want to sit still and think.”

He insisted on accompanying her to the kitchen — large and full of shadows, like all the other rooms in this echoing house.

No. She couldn’t tell him anything beyond queer sounds, such as soft footfalls, rappings, plaintive, scarcely heard cries; and twice the incredible vision her brother had described.

“The house is full of her,” she whispered. “Probably because while she lived in it she suffered so. According to that I should come back, too. Only I don’t want to die here. I shan’t, either, if I can help it.”

And Garth sensed an imprisonment, a frustration of hope, traceable to the old man who had lingered beyond anyone’s imagining. He saw, too, later that evening, how great her sacrifice was. The door bell rang, and she came back with a somber-faced man, about her own age, whom she introduced as the physician Allen had spoken of. His daily visits to care for the invalid, and to see the fading woman he so clearly loved, had impressed something of the house’s atmosphere on his personality.

“I hope you will succeed where I have failed, Mr. Garth,” he said. “I am a man of science, and I have actually seen nothing here; but I have felt, and I have heard; and I declare without reservation that there is something wrong with this house that I can neither understand nor cure.”

It depressed Garth to find a man as intelligent as the doctor convinced by the fancies of neurotic people.

“Oh, I’ll discover a cure somehow,” he boasted.

Yet, as the evening advanced, particularly after the doctor’s departure, he found himself unconsciously listening for the broad, lonely, and dark places of the crumbling mansion to make themselves audible.

At ten o’clock Allen’s sister went to a sidetable and lighted two candles.

“I will show you your room,” she said. “You will naturally want to sleep in their room.”

The old man stirred. All evening he had scarcely said anything. Now his voice came with a whine of reproof.

“I don’t think Helen will like strangers sleeping in her room.”

The unquestioning faith of the voice made Garth, for a moment, go cold.

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” the woman muttered in a hard voice. “Come!”

Garth followed her through the hall, up a flight of broad stairs, peopled with grotesque shadows, down a bare and echoing corridor, and at last into a room, square like the one downstairs, and as broad and as high. Opposite the door a four-poster bedstead stood between two windows. The rest of the furniture was massive and old-fashioned, but, in this light, without much form.

“I hope you will sleep well,” the haggard woman said, and left him.

For a long time, while he held aloft his candle, Garth stared at the bed where Allen’s wife had died, if he was to believe Allen, of a passionate hatred of her surroundings. And just there, beyond the footboard, Allen declared she had materialized as if to impress on its author the fact that such mental dissatisfaction is immortal.

Did one ever hear of such a thing? Allen was mad. He was impressing his madness on his sister. Those visions in the green moonlight could have existed only in Allen’s morbid and guilty fancy, from which they had been projected to the frightened woman.

Such logic was not convincing. It became less so when he had blown out the candle and had climbed into the huge, cold, and damp bed. Only enough light escaped from the strangled moon to make the heavy, ill-defined shadows restless. Garth grew restless in harmony. His task here was to wait; and, as the laggard minutes drifted on, that task became more difficult than any he had ever undertaken.

After a long time he found himself listening with a strange acuteness. He was sure he had not heard anything, and yet he had reacted exactly as if he had. No, of course he had heard nothing.

But that was something now. What was that?

He sat upright, straining his ears. He heard the persistent wind, but there was something beyond that, something very far away, whose direction he could not determine, as if it came from space itself, actually from beyond the wind and the night.

Now he began to understand. Someone strayed with strange footfalls. But did this wayward pacing come from the house or outside? The sounds were so faint, so soft, so irregular, he couldn’t be sure. He wanted to be sure.

He lighted his candle. The shadows drew sullenly away. He sat for a long time, listening, while the footfalls continued; seemed, without increasing in physical pressure, to stray nearer; glided, at last, he was convinced, along the corridor toward his door.

He slipped out of the bed, picked up his flashlight, and silently crossed the room. He made no attempt to deny his breathless anxiety, or the fear which rippled along his nerves. Fear, for that matter, had never failed to stimulate his mind, or to gather more serviceably his physical resources. He would not be taken unawares, and he would find out what was in the hall.

Abruptly he flung open the door and flashed his lamp. He stared. The corridor was empty, yet for a time he would have sworn that surreptitious feet glided through that emptiness.

He caught his breath. He bent over, listening with a vast unbelief. A thin, desperate voice gathered itself in a cry, not loud, but more arresting than the shrillest scream. It wavered through the house. It fell away, as the groping feet ceased their seeking, into the smothering silence; and the silence became like a great weight on his soul. It placed inaction beyond his powers. He could not go back to his bed. He felt he could never rest again until he had found the source of that straying, of that unearthly release of suffering. If only he knew the location of Miss Allen’s room. He called her name softly.

After a moment a door nearly opposite opened. She stood there, holding a candle, a dressing-gown drawn about her thin and shaking shoulders. The haggard fear in her eyes was as hard to face as that which he had just heard.

“If only,” she whispered, “you might have told me that you were awake yet had noticed nothing.”

She paused and bent forward, listening. He, too, grew rigid. Again the unseen feet strayed, close at hand, then far away, always seeking, at last drifting again into the night.

Miss Allen set her candle on the floor, leaned against the door jamb, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed unevenly.

“We are helpless,” she said after a time. “It serves us right. We were not kind to her. I did not love her enough. I was jealous of my brother.”

To Garth her words suggested too much mental tragedy. He crossed the corridor, and put his hand on her shoulder.

“We’re not going to give way to anything like that,” he said. “Get your clothes on. You’ll guide me about this house. I’ll search every rat-hole until I find whoever or whatever made those sounds.”

His confidence, nevertheless, waned when he had dressed and had explored with her the decaying intricacies of the house. Great, empty, echoing rooms; endless attics odorous with rotting lumber and the contents of ancient boxes and trunks — he searched them all and found nothing; and always in these gloomy places he had a feeling that Allen’s sister and he did not walk alone. More than once he failed to conquer the impulse to glance back over his shoulder. Each time she whispered:

“You feel as if there were someone else?”

“That’s natural enough, I suppose,” he muttered, “after what we’ve heard.”

But such sensations were new to him. He faced her in the lower hall at last, having found nothing, yet determined not to surrender. He put on his hat and coat.

“I shall look for footprints outside.”

She got a cloak and accompanied him. “You will find nothing,” she said.

A light wet snow fell. It wasn’t deep enough to have obliterated any marks made at the time they had heard the footsteps. It offered, however, no record. Garth flashed his light here and there, at a loss. He saw a rough path which wandered from the side of the house between stripped underbrush, rattling in the wind. With a swift gesture the woman touched his arm.

“Where are you going?” she gasped.

Her manner startled him.

“I am going to see where this path leads.”

She drew back.

“Then you know what is at the end of the path?”

He shook his head.

“Don’t go there,” she cried wildly. “I am afraid.”

“Why? Why?”

Her shivering became more pronounced. She replied through chattering teeth:

“Be — because Helen is there.”

He realized there was no use questioning her further. He started down the path. After he had gone a few paces he understood, and he drew back, too, although momentarily, from this sanctuary in the heart of the underbrush.

His light gleamed on stained wet walls with a curved roof. Facing him was an iron door with a small grating. There were slight marks in the snow here, not, apparently, made by shoes, but light and incomplete depressions, as if something had passed this way with less than normal pressure. They urged him ahead.

“It is locked,” she whispered when they were at the black door. “The key is in the house.”

But he had placed his hand on the knob, and he turned it as a matter of course. The door swung open. The woman cried out.

“I tell you it was locked,” she whispered. “I tell you it is always locked, except when someone is taken in.”

“And after you had imagined this vision!” he said. “Did you find it locked then?”

Slowly she shook her head.

“But it was not opened with the key,” she whispered. “It is a large key. It is always kept on the shelf by my father’s chair.”

He took a deep breath and stepped in. He felt himself bathed in a repellent and abhorrent atmosphere — bitter cold, damp to the point of moisture, redolent of earth and decayed vegetation.

The room which he searched with his light was not large. One wall was given over to the entrance. In each of the three others were two deep oblong niches. In each niche rested a stained metal coffin. From the roof water gleamed in the rays of his lamp, dripping with a throbbing rhythmical and persistent.

“Which is hers?” he asked softly.

She indicated the upper niche to the left. With a sense of intrusion he tiptoed closer and turned his light on the casket. The plate was tarnished and partly covered with mold. With difficulty he deciphered it.

“Helen Addison Allen, beloved wife of Simon Allen.” Then the dates, and, ironically, it occurred to him, “Requiescat in Pace.”

“She was very young to die,” he said wonderingly.

“Too young,” she whispered. “She might not have died if we hadn’t kept her here. I wish to God I had been kinder to her.”

For the first time in this place he spoke aloud, boasting.

“You can put it down, Miss Allen, that no matter how she suffered, she has never come back. She has never left that box.”

The echoes from the vaulted roof jibed at him. She gasped out defensively:

“Don’t say such things in here. What is that? Let us go. Quick! Oh, my God! What is that?”

At first he did not realize what had startled her: had made her go weak and white; had filled her with a far greater terror than she had yet confessed. There it was again. A series of dull raps, as nearly as he could analyze it, as if one struck metal with a muffled hammer.

“Who’s that?” he cried.

Miss Allen cowered against the wall. The rapping ceased. For the first time Garth noticed a trap door in the center of the floor.

“Where does that go?” he asked.

She barely managed to answer.

“The entrance to the vault below where many Allens who died a long time ago are laid to rest.”

She staggered to the door and stumbled out. He followed, at a loss; more uncomfortable than he cared to acknowledge. Thoughtlessly he released the control of the lamp. With the effect of a physical attack the darkness rushed upon him. He cried out involuntarily. Something had touched him. He couldn’t deny its nature. A hand, soft and charnel cold, had brushed his cheek. He had been aware of the contact of each dreadful finger. He flashed his lamp again.

“What was it? Tell me what it was!” Miss Allen said.

“Hush!”

Apparently from the tomb came a low, derisive laugh. It altered to an expression of grief and was lost in the night.

Miss Allen screamed once, then swayed, and sank in a heap to the whitened path. Garth turned the light on her face, and knew that his pursuit for that night was ended. For a moment he was afraid she had stopped breathing. He had never seen a clearer case of shock. He swung her in his arms and hurried with her to the house, looking constantly into the blackness behind him, convinced that he was followed by whatever had given him that deathlike touch, by whatever had terrified Miss Allen almost to the point of death.

He glanced at the shelf. The heavy key rested there, as she had said.

It was a long time before the heat of the living-room fire and the simple remedies he could apply brought her back to a half consciousness. It was only then that he dared telephone the tavern at the village, demanding Allen’s return, and Doctor Hannay, telling him that he should come at once. She stared at him with voiceless questions. And all this time the old man, who evidently spent his nights as well as his days in the great chair, mumbled to himself, only once or twice growing coherent.

“Why, what’s the matter, Dora? You let Helen frighten you again?”

“Helen’s been in here tonight. I couldn’t see her, but I heard her. She is restless.”

“Helen’s only lonely. She wants company. It’s wicked of you to be afraid of her.”

Allen, and the doctor a little after him, arrived with the leaden commencement of a threatening day. As the gray light strengthened the woman, to an extent, responded to the doctor’s stimulants, and he carried her to her room.

“I think she will sleep,” he said when he had come down. “Allen, I have waited a long time for her. Unless you let me marry her and take her away from this house, it will be too late.”

Allen gestured helplessly. He indicated the drowsing old man. The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“He may last for years.”

“We will see. We will see what can be done,” Allen promised vaguely.

Garth walked to the gate with the doctor. For the first time he could appraise the overgrown, the desolate aspect of the estate.

“Gloomy enough to harbor ghosts, in all conscience,” he muttered.

“And I believe it does!” the doctor said fiercely. “There is no other answer. I have done my best. There is no cure for that house. There is no cure for those who remain in it. Help me to persuade Allen to clear his sister out. That is all you can do, Mr. Garth. Beyond that you must realize you are wasting your time here.”

Garth shared the man’s discouragement, but his own peace of mind, his mental self-respect, were at stake. He told Allen more elaborately every event of the preceding night.

“At least, it’s not just my own morbid fancy,” Allen said. “Are you through? You have no hope to offer?”

“I am not through,” Garth said stubbornly. “I am going to search the house again by daylight. And I want to examine the vault near which I heard the rappings and the cry: where I felt that unbelievable touch.”

“It is never quite daylight in the vault,” Allen said gloomily.

Yet after he had spent hours in his examination of the house, measuring, sounding each wall, Garth had to confess himself beaten there. It was late afternoon when he gave up and turned to the tomb. He took a crowbar found in the barn. The door stood open as he had left it the previous evening; but Allen had been right. The late light seemed incapable of penetrating the gloomy vault. Snow, however, had whirled in, and made a white heap on the trap door. Garth lost some minutes clearing this away. Then he failed to find the mechanism of the trap, so that by the time he had broken the stone to get leverage for his crowbar the dusk outside was thick.

He pried the heavy door up. His light disclosed a flight of stone steps. He descended cautiously into the pit, experiencing again that uncomfortable feeling that he was not alone. At the foot of the stairs he found himself in a species of cave, larger than the room upstairs and containing more stained caskets. But he failed to unearth any hiding-place, any paraphernalia of trickery. The room was clearly a mortuary — nothing more.

Then what had brushed his face the previous night? He was glad to start up the stairs.

He paused, his heart in his throat. What was that black form partly hanging over the open trap as if to forbid his exit? The light showed him no face, but the black patch seemed to move. He whipped out his revolver.

“Who are you? You stay there until I can find out.”

But the black thing slipped from view, and a brief and scarcely heard laugh reached him. He ran on up, his revolver ready. A woman in black stood with a hand on Mrs. Allen’s coffin.

“Now, let’s see,” he cried.

But he was wary of some impossible vanishing, or a defense against which he would be helpless. Then the black figure turned and spoke, and Garth lowered his revolver, springing forward.

“Please don’t shoot me, Jim. There really isn’t time.”

“Nora! What are you doing here?”

“Hush! Not so loud. Maybe I came to make sure you wouldn’t go back to town converted. There’ll be time enough for all that later. Now we must work. I’ve looked everywhere for you. It’s dark, but you have your light.”

She climbed to the lower niche so that her head was above the level of Mrs. Allen’s casket.

“Take your crowbar,” she directed. “Lift the top of this box. I want to see inside.”

“Nora!”

“I’ll take my chances,” she said impatiently. “I’d have done it without you if I’d had the strength. The screws are all loose. Hurry!”

With a sense of sacrilege he obeyed her. She laughed lightly and jumped down. He started to climb in her place, but the crowbar slipped and the lid fell with a dull resonance. Before he could insert the instrument again Nora grasped his arm.

“We’re making too much noise,” she whispered. “What was that? I thought I heard—”

Garth’s excitement flamed.

“Nora! You mean it is empty? Mrs. Allen — the money — I’d thought of that.”

“If we’re too late!” she whispered, staring from the door. “I thought I heard—”

She sprang out. He followed her. She pointed to a woman’s figure, scarcely seen, that ran along the path to the house.

“Catch her, Jim,” she urged, “or we’re beaten.”

He ran as hard as he could with Nora tearing after him, but the figure of a woman reached the portico and got through the door ahead of him. The door slammed in his face, but he grasped the knob, pushing with all his strength, so that the key could not be turned. Nora ran up and added her strength. The door was released. They stumbled into the dark hall. But a light burned in the inner room, and they heard feet running there, and Allen’s voice:

“Why aren’t you in bed? What in the name of Heaven’s happened?”

Garth and Nora entered. The old man clutched at the arms of his chair as if he reacted to an absurd ambition to rise. Allen’s sister was at the telephone, frantically rattling the receiver, while Allen stared.

“Quick! Quick!” the woman urged desperately. “Two — four. Doctor Hannay’s residence.”

“Take the telephone from her, Mr. Allen,” Nora directed. “No questions now.”

Allen’s face twisted with pain, but he moved to obey. His hand caught the telephone and drew it away from his sister’s mouth. But she struggled with a desperate, an unsuspected strength. Nora nodded.

“Help him, Jim. She mustn’t be heard over that telephone.”

Garth caught the woman’s arms and forced her across the room. Nora made a rough gag with her handkerchief.

“Take the telephone,” she said to Allen. “Tell Doctor Hannay that your sister is worse, and that the detective has lost his nerve and quit. The doctor must come at once.”

Allen started to protest, but the doctor was connected, and he obeyed, at a loss.

“He’s coming right over,” he said when he had replaced the receiver. “I’ve done what you wished. I have a right to know. What has my sister done that you treat her this way?”

Nora lowered the handkerchief.

“Let her go, Jim. I think she realizes the game is up.”

Garth relaxed his grasp. The exhausted woman leaned against the wall, breathing harshly.

“Your wife, Mr. Allen,” Garth said uncertainly, “is not in here—”

“Stop, Jim!” Nora cried. “He might not understand. Come, Mr. Allen! Bring your sister with you. We’ve plenty of time before the doctor arrives.”

She led them down the path between the rattling bushes to the sepulcher. The shivering woman shrank from the charnel dampness of the place.

“I sounded all these boxes,” Nora said, “and I can tell you which happen to be empty just now, and which are not. I couldn’t lift the trap, but we can easily find out about the boxes in the lower vault.”

She tapped the casket which bore Mrs. Allen’s plate.

“This one is not empty. Please get the lid up again, Jim.”

Garth worked with an increasing excitement, knowing very well that Nora was not one to make mistakes. He pried the lid open. Allen and he climbed up so that they could peer within the casket. At once Allen sprang down, and, ashamed and angered, stared helplessly at his sister. For a moment Garth clung there, appraising with a sense of sheer wonder a fortune in cloths, silks, jewels, furs — luxuries that had not paid thousands of dollars in duties at the frontier but that would now. He gasped as he approximated the value of the contents of the other desolate-appearing boxes. He stepped down and glanced with a sort of admiration at the beaten woman.

“I know. Miss Allen,” Nora said quietly, “that you and the doctor are not the only ones implicated. There are some very prosperous people in this little village. If you cared to turn State’s evidence now—”

“She’ll tell all she knows,” Allen said harshly.

“I want to save the doctor,” she pleaded. “I did it for his sake. But I will talk.”

Garth went ahead of them toward the house to welcome the doctor.

“Maybe,” Nora said later in reply to Garth’s questions, “it’s because I am superstitious and know something about the habits of spirits that I caught points in Allen’s story you missed. Why was the face in the first vision blurred and phosphorescent? So that he couldn’t tell at a glance he wasn’t seeing his wife; and to frighten him. Then I wondered that a door had to be opened and closed. I was sure there had been no spirit that time. I thought of a ghost that might live across the hall, and his sister was the only woman in the house.”

“I missed that,” Garth admitted. “Anyway, my idea was to prove to Allen that there wasn’t anything spooky about his house. The second vision I always put down to his fever and his desire to materialize his wife, but the third puzzles me even now.”

“That,” Nora answered, “was what made me sure something was wrong. The first vision, instead of keeping him away, urged him back to see his wife. So it was necessary to make him think his wife was unfriendly and didn’t want him. I could see that it was simple to fool the old man, but they had to frighten everybody else off, even Allen. Logically, therefore, the house was the center of some big conspiracy. The doctor was implicated at the start, because Allen had said there was an attachment between him and his sister, and it seemed queer such a good man should waste his talents in this little village. Since you were to come, announced as a detective, there wasn’t much chance of your getting at the truth. So I decided to slip up and observe from the outside. I quietly took your train. I got off on the side away from the station. I followed you. I had a flashlight and explored the grounds. As you know, the front door was kept unlocked for the convenience of these people. I think I heard everything you said that night, and I saw the doctor come back to help Miss Allen with her trickery. They expected to scare you away before anything was discovered. It was necessary. There was too much money involved.

“I saw the big key on the shelf, and it seemed reasonable it would open the tomb. I was anxious to examine that, for I thought, at first, as you did, that the whole thing might be a conspiracy against Mrs. Allen; that she might be alive and a prisoner.”

“Why, Nora,” Garth asked, “did you frighten Miss Allen and me last night at the tomb?”

“Without disclosing myself,” Nora answered, “I wanted Miss Allen to know someone was secretly watching the house. Her really serious fright was the final proof of her guilt. And the ruse succeeded. I took pains to overhear her first private interview with the doctor. She told him, when he had carried her upstairs, that you weren’t the only one to fear — that there was a spy who really suspected something. They agreed that she was to warn him at the first definite sign of danger, and that he was to run across the border. But they said nothing to give away the nature of the game, so I couldn’t act until I had real evidence.

“My first inkling of the truth came when I realized what a splendid hiding-place for forbidden merchandise that tomb was. In any case, I was afraid to stay around here by daylight, so I followed the main road to the custom house. The chief knew my father, and he talked willingly enough. He told me of the enormous leak for more than two years that they hadn’t been able to stop. I promised to get his smugglers. That’s all, Jim. I hurried back, and found you, and learned what was in those boxes. It all comes down, as so many cases do, to a woman’s mad infatuation for a man.”

“Ghosts and women,” Garth mused, “seem to be a little beyond me.”

He smiled.

“Even you’ll admit, Nora, that it would be helpful if I could take them more to heart.”

DEFIANCE

Doubtless because there exists between the dinner table and the consultation room a distance to be overcome only through pronounced and painful effort, Stacy Baldwin and his wife, Anna, carried their physical caprices to a physician less fortunately placed socially than Dr. Jimmy Wilmot. On his part Wilmot was sufficiently grateful, for it would have been his duty to hound Baldwin with his belief that that young man was riding in reckless flight straight toward an evil cropper; and, in the darkened seclusion of his office, he admitted to himself, he couldn’t possibly have hidden from Anna the sympathy of his heart, or his great love which had survived the shock three years before of her dreadfully unfortunate marriage.

He was, therefore, open-mouthed when his man came to him late one October night, announcing that Mr. Stacy Baldwin was downstairs and would be grateful if the doctor would see him.

What the deuce could Baldwin want of him? Probably the waster was involved in some unique difficulty, and of course Wilmot would have to receive him, for Anna’s sake, if for no other reason.

When the doctor entered the consultation room Baldwin, his evening clothes slightly disordered, paused in the midst of a nervous pacing, disclosing an abnormally white face and eyes that were wide with aggressive interrogation.

“Sorry to knock you up, Jimmy. Seemed simplest thing to do.”

His voice wasn’t quite steady. His attempt at a laugh failed.

“Sit down,” the doctor said curtly, “and tell me what’s wrong with you besides the fact that you’ve had too much illicit stuff to drink.”

“Wouldn’t bother a sawbone for anything so normal as that,” Baldwin grinned brazenly.

The frightened, questioning light came back to his eyes. He glanced anxiously around. He moistened his lips.

“Don’t think I’m binged, Jim, or off my pate; but, gad! I’ve had a start.”

He sat down and leaned toward the doctor. Again he wet his dry lips.

“Fact is, a few minutes ago somebody — somebody tried to kill me.”

Wilmot’s first incredulity shrank before the other’s patent earnestness. He poured the man a glass of brandy, and watched him gulp it down. He helped Baldwin off with his coat and waistcoat, and saw some ugly stains beneath the left arm. He cut the linen away and ran his fingers lightly over the flesh. After a moment he glanced up.

“You’re a lucky devil.”

Baldwin shivered.

“Always was that, Jim.”

“Daresay you’ve needed a bit of luck,” Wilmot muttered; “certainly never more than tonight. A couple inches to the right and the coroner would have been pawing you over instead of me. It’s nothing. The bullet passed between your upper arm and your body. No point destroying any more fine raiment. Get those things off, and I’ll make you nice and safe from infection.”

Baldwin nodded.

“That’s why I thought I’d better come. Didn’t fancy I was much damaged. Lay you long odds I gave a hanged sight more than I got.”

But the doctor expressed no curiosity until his work was completed.

“That will be more comfortable,” he said, as Baldwin struggled into his clothes. “Are you making a secret of who offered the compliment?”

Baldwin’s eyes resumed their anxiety. He commenced again to pace the room nervously.

“No idea who tried it. That’s what worries me.”

He swung around, his face white and drawn.

“And what makes it worse, it happened in my own house — in my own front hall. Gad, Jimmy! That’s what staggers me. That’s what gives me the jumps.”

Wilmot whistled.

“Don’t wonder. When I ran into you at the club tonight I thought you said you were alone.”

“Right. Anna’s up country. Sort of soured on the city. All the servants with her except my man, Manuel; and he sleeps under the roof. Out of the question to doubt him, anyway. Faithful unto death. You know the sort. Would follow dear master to the very jaws of Hades. Anyway, I let myself in. May remember, the street lamp throws a lot of light in the hall. I recall seeing the switch, and reaching out for it as I shut the door — then the — the thing happened.”

He shivered again.

“Couldn’t have been half an hour ago. That seems funny! Might have been lying up there now—”

“Go on,” the doctor encouraged him. “You had just shut the door. You hadn’t turned on the lights.”

Baldwin’s face grew chalkier. He spread his hands.

“A flash from between the drawing-room curtains; a bang, not much of a one; a pain under the arm; and there you are!”

With grim satisfaction he repeated his odd boast.

“But I’ll lay you I gave better than I took.”

“You mean you caught the fellow?” the doctor asked.

Slowly Baldwin shook his head.

“It was pitch black with the front door closed, but the flash told me an arm had been thrust through the hangings. As a sawbone you know how quickly one reacts in an emergency, and you’ve seen that loaded walking stick I carry. I struck just behind the flash with all my might.”

An evil triumph scarred his weak face.

“It found flesh. Felt it. I tell you, if I didn’t break a bone I gave a beastly bruise.”

His eyes narrowed.

“The next few days I’m going to suspect everybody I see with an arm in a sling. That blow, as I say, was automatic. After that for a minute I was up a tree, sort of feeling myself over, wondering if I was going to drop dead. Gave the scoundrel his chance to get away. Too bad to disappoint him, ’cause he’ll expect to read in the morning papers that I’m an angel. Heard steps, but by the time I got to the service entrance it was too late. I woke Manuel up. He hadn’t heard the shot, and he hadn’t let anyone in.”

“Been giving your latchkeys around?” Wilmot asked.

“Not I. Bad plan! That kind of friend might appear inconveniently, ’cause Anna does condescend to show herself in her husband’s home occasionally; but keys have a most annoying habit of getting lost. Mean to say an enemy might possibly have got a key, though it’s dashed unlikely.”

The doctor frowned. He wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the routine of Baldwin’s habits to be of much value as an adviser.

“What did you do between the time I saw you at the club and your arrival home?”

“Picked up Bill Dungan. You know Bill.”

He must have read Wilmot’s disapproval, for he hurried on apologetically:

“You fellows are a pack of frumps. Just because Bill’s a rough diamond with the wealth of Croesus is no reason for treating him like a worm.”

Wilmot made a wry face.

“If only he wasn’t an early and often worm, Baldwin!”

“Naturally he wants to climb,” Baldwin admitted, “and you’ll have to admit the missus has something.”

“Beauty,” the doctor said, “but she’s the same sort — a climber without a single rung of polish or breeding. Never mind. What did you and Croesus do?”

At last Baldwin’s cheeks held some color.

“One always earns the disapproval of one’s sawbones. Anyway, you’re not a dominie. Give you my word, Jimmy, I’d love to be a pillar of society like you; just can’t carry the load. I took Bill up to Estelle Smith’s. She isn’t twinkling toes until her new show opens next week, and she was giving a big party for some curly-headed Hams and some bad eggs like me. Give you my word, we only got a little fried. We both decided the show was too enormous for fun, and ducked it. Bill had another shindy on, but I felt virtuous and decided to pass it up and go home for a good night’s sleep. Wish to the deuce now I hadn’t. And that’s all. Hang it, I can’t even make a guess.”

It was difficult for Wilmot to speak, yet he knew he had to. He couldn’t bear the thought of an underworld scandal reflecting itself from her worthless husband to Anna Baldwin. At last he got it out.

“You’re not fancying the police might help? I mean, there’s no real harm done, and it would be pretty disagreeable for Anna.”

Baldwin’s face flashed anger.

“You’re precious thoughtful of Anna, dear doctor. May be tough on her she didn’t marry pillar of society like you. Just beg to remind you she didn’t. Must say it’s friendly to want me to give this fellow unlimited pot shots simply to spare Anna a little unpleasantness.”

“Don’t be an ass, Baldwin.”

Baldwin’s eyes narrowed.

“No intention of being. Make you feel any easier, I’m keeping away from the police for my own sake. Simply can’t afford to shove all the divorces and politics off the front page. That’s why I came to you: knew I could trust you.”

Wilmot didn’t hide his relief.

“Then what’s your idea?”

“To take jolly good care of myself while I sleuth—”

He broke off, glancing up inquiringly. A discreet rap had sounded on the door from the reception room.

Wilmot was equally startled, for it was well after midnight.

“Come,” he called impatiently.

His man glided in, closing the door softly behind him.

“Well? What now?”

“There is a lady in the reception room, sir.”

“You know perfectly well,” Wilmot accused him, “I’m not accustomed to receiving patients in the middle of the night.”

“Yes, sir. I explained it to her, but she seemed in a great deal of pain, and insisted. Since you were in here, sir, I thought—”

“When you commence to think, Jamieson, you cease to be useful. What’s her name?”

“She wouldn’t give her name, sir.”

“What? Then I shan’t see her.”

“Said her name was of no consequence, but she is really suffering, sir.”

Wilmot turned irritably to Baldwin.

“A physician can’t turn his back on suffering, but I wish you wouldn’t run off just yet. I’d like to know what you’re going to do. If I could help you—”

“I’ll wait,” Baldwin grinned. “Know you’re no blind admirer of mine, Jimmy, but you might offer a poor devil a shake-down. I’ve no intention, at least, of going back to my cheerful home.”

Wilmot nodded.

“Jamieson, take Mr. Baldwin up to the rear bedroom. I’ll drop in before you’ve gone to by-by.”

“Decent of you,” Baldwin muttered. “Must say my nerves are twitchy.”

He followed the man out. Wilmot closed the hall door after him, and strode to the entrance of the reception room.

“This is quite unusual,” he said, opening the door.

For a moment he thought his visitor had gone. Then at the point farthest removed from the one dim light he saw a dark figure stir, rise, and, with faltering steps, come toward him. He stepped aside, motioning the woman past; yet in the consultation room he could make little more of her, for the lines of her tall figure were blurred by a voluminous black wrap, and a heavy black veil obliterated her features. This she reinforced by sitting at a distance from the bright, green-shaded lamp on the table desk.

The hour, her secretiveness, replaced the doctor’s irritation by a lively curiosity. He stared down at her, trying to penetrate the veil, but it was too heavy, or the light upon it too weak.

“I should be glad if you would remove your veil,” he suggested.

He fancied her shoulders shook.

“Why?” she asked in a formless voice, scarcely more than a whisper.

“The face,” he explained pleasantly, “tells a physician a great deal.”

“I shan’t do it. I shan’t do it,” she said in her harsh, strained manner.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“Then perhaps you’ll tell me how I can help you. My man said you were suffering.”

The black veil shook as she nodded quickly.

“I’ve had a nasty fall. I thought the pain would go away, but it got worse — until I couldn’t stand it. By that time I happened to be nearby.”

“Do you want me to believe,” he asked gently, “that you called here this time of night by chance?”

“Of course I — I’ve heard a great deal of your skill,” she whispered. “Will you please see what you can do, tell me how seriously I’m hurt?”

With a reluctant gesture she raised her left hand and slipped the cloak from her right shoulder, disclosing a simply made, expensive gray traveling gown. She indicated her right arm; apparently she couldn’t raise it.

“Will you please be very careful?”

For a moment, as he rolled back the sleeve, the doctor had to call on his will to make his fingers steady. The woman’s forearm was badly discolored. Cartilage had been torn, but, since her arm had evidently given with the shock, the large bone was not broken. His voice when he spoke vibrated scarcely more than hers. Here, possibly, was the one who had shot at Stacy Baldwin. Of course it would have been a woman.

“How did you say this happened? When?”

She answered slowly, as if struggling for words:

“Half an hour or so ago. On the steps of the Elevated. I slipped. My arm came down under me. As I say, I didn’t look you up directly, because I hoped the pain would pass.”

Her muted voice filled with appeal.

“Doctor! Can you dress it so it won’t show?”

Wilmot turned in order that she mightn’t see his excited face. That settled it. Her injury had to be hidden. The Baldwin house wasn’t far. Here, beyond a doubt, sat the woman who had tried to kill Stacy Baldwin.

“Nothing broken,” he said. “Must have been a glancing blow.”

Perhaps in his eagerness he had pressed the injured arm too hard; or had it been his use of that incriminating word, for she gasped: “Blow!” and went limp and lifeless in the chair.

Wilmot swung her in his arms and carried her to a sofa. During several moments he stared at her, undecided. There was less light here than at the chair she had occupied; the veil, consequently, was more protective, and it modeled her features only slightly. Once his hand went out to it, but he restrained himself. That was none of his business, but decidedly the identification of the woman who had tried to murder him was Stacy Baldwin’s affair; a right that no man could deny him without, possibly, conniving at his death; without attacking the very foundation of society. The doctor ran to the hall and called up the stairs.

“Baldwin! I say, Baldwin! Come down quick — no matter how you’re dressed.”

Baldwin obeyed, struggling into one of the doctor’s dressing-gowns.

“What’s the rumpus? Somebody been sniping at you, too?”

Wilmot took his arm and led him toward — the consultation room.

“Baldwin, in there is the woman who tried to cook your hash.”

Baldwin hesitated.

“What’s the idea?”

Then he must have seen the doctor’s uncompromising earnestness, for he went on, muttering under his breath:

“Had half an idea it might be a lady. What ho! The one that had to see you — suffering? I get you. Smashed arm?”

They went through. With gleaming, revengeful eyes Baldwin studied the lifeless figure on the sofa, grinned at sight of the discolored arm.

“No question. I gave her that tidy bruise. Wears a pretty thick veil, too; and this light’s none too good.”

His hand went out and hovered for a moment over the black covering.

“You’re a good sort, Jimmy. Gives a fellow a chance to protect himself.”

“That’s why I called you, since you won’t make an arrest.”

“Not so sure now,” Baldwin muttered, still hesitant. “Lady’s identity might change my mind. Gives me the shivers, the thought of knowing what dame’s got so much against gentle little Stacy.”

“Hurry!” Wilmot urged him. “She won’t stay under forever.”

Baldwin’s face tightened. Abruptly he flung the veil aside. He drew back, his eyes wide, startled. The doctor gave a sharp cry, braced himself against the sofa. Both men stared agape at the white, lovely, and inanimate features of Anna Baldwin.

The eyelids of Baldwin’s wife fluttered. She stirred, then resumed her cold impassivity. Wilmot raised his clenched hands and brought them down on the shoulders of the fascinated man.

“This is madness, Stacy! There’s a ghastly mistake — a coincidence.”

No matter what Anna had done, he hated himself for having delivered her helpless into the hands of her vicious husband. To an extent Baldwin had got himself under control. A smile of growing satisfaction twitched at the corners of his mouth.

“The gentle Anna! The saintly, too far better half! Admit, Jimmy, I haven’t given her too much cause to love me lately, but I never dreamed she had it in her. Pretty pussy Anna, turned cat with real claws, ugly claws—”

The doctor halted the wondering voice.

“Stop that! You’ve enough sense to know Anna never would have tried such a game. I tell you it’s pure coincidence. She fell on the Elevated stairs.”

Baldwin swung on him angrily.

“Never quite realized how soft you were on my wife, and I don’t like it. You get that? I won’t put up with it. Coincidence be hanged! You didn’t mention it when you called me, before you had seen her face. ‘In there,’ you said, ‘is the woman who tried to cook your hash.’”

Wilmot had nothing in answer. The evidence was sufficiently clear, yet even now he couldn’t believe that Anna’s resentment against her faithless husband had culminated in such desperate violence. She stirred again. Baldwin was musing.

“Might stand the scandal now. Public sympathy all mine! What, Jimmy?”

“Don’t talk that way,” the doctor cried. “Be careful. What are you going to say to her? She’s coming out.”

Baldwin, still smiling, carefully replaced the veil over his wife’s face. He tiptoed to the door.

“I’ll say just nothing for the present. I fancy you’ve no great desire to tell her I’ve seen her. I mean, spare the dear creature’s feelings, and all that. I’m off to bed, and a good think. Be fair, Jimmy. There are lots of men not much better than I am, yet that woman’s goodness has irritated me to the limit; and you see what it really amounts to. Maybe I can protect myself in more than one way now.”

He slipped out. As in a dream the doctor went to his desk to prepare a restorative, but Anna’s voice, sufficiently recognizable in her semi-consciousness, called him back.

“Did I hear you speaking? I must have fainted. I’m sorry.”

Suddenly she struggled to a sitting posture. Her hand went frantically to her veil.

“I must have been a little awkward,” he said under his breath. “I had no idea I was hurting you so much. I am going to try to make things better for you.”

He bent and commenced to bandage her arm. After a time she spoke.

“Why do your hands tremble?”

He couldn’t answer. He saw her touch her veil once more. When she spoke again she made no effort to disguise her voice. It expressed a weary surrender to the inevitable.

“You’ve found out who I am. I wouldn’t have thought—”

Vehemently he shook his head.

“An accident — when you fainted. Anna! Why didn’t you want me to know?”

She threw back her veil, disclosing the suffering of her white face.

“We — we’ve been such good friends. I came to you because of that. I didn’t want to go to a stranger. You — you see I’m not supposed to be in town tonight. It — it would be humiliating”

His heart sank as she supported the evidence of his eyes.

“Why should you come secretly, Anna?”

“Because of Stacy,” she whispered. “You won’t tell anyone you’ve seen me? No matter what happens you’ll not say I was here? And is my arm going to show? Will it have to go in a splint?”

He stood up, shaking his head.

“It ought to,” he said harshly, “but since you wish — if you can put up with the pain it needn’t show.”

She relaxed.

“Thanks, Jimmy. You don’t know what that means to me. You are good.”

“Anna!” he burst out. “Where have you been tonight? How were you hurt? Why did you tell me that story about the Elevated? You wouldn’t have been there.”

She sprang up and faced him, panic-stricken, holding her injured hand against her side.

“What are you talking about? Jim! Why do you look at me like that? What are you accusing me of?”

“Answer me, Anna. Where have you been?”

She ran with uneven steps away from him. In the shadowed reception room he stopped her flight that was more eloquent of guilt than anything she had done or said. No longer existed the gulf between them of loyalty and custom. Without revealing how much he knew, he had to impress upon her the extent of his love that would accept, no matter what she had done, any sacrifice in her defense.

“Trust me, Anna — no matter what happens.”

More frightened than before she tried to pull away from his grasp that tightened on her left hand.

“I don’t have to tell you,” he blurted, “that I’ve never loved anyone else—”

“Hush, Jimmy!”

“I’m not blind,” he rushed on. “You don’t fancy I’d say this if I knew you were happy with Stacy.”

Through the dusk of the room he caught her wistful smile.

“You’re right. You didn’t have to tell me that you love me, dear old Jimmy. That’s why you must never speak of it again.”

“But, Anna,” he pointed out, “one escape has offered itself all along.”

She shook her head. Her voice was determined, fierce.

“I’d do anything rather than face that torture.”

Discouraged, he let her go. She’d rather do anything! That, too, had its dreary significance; yet he wondered why she should prefer to the scandal of a justifiable divorce action the revolting publicity of a trial for the attempted murder of her husband.

“You’ll promise, Jimmy,” she was begging with that haunted voice, that neurotic manner. “You’ll swear not to tell anyone you’ve seen me, that I’ve even been in town tonight?”

He promised. When she had slipped out he sank in a chair, crushed by the burden of his love which her unbelievable crime had only made immeasurably heavier.

During the following days Wilmot scarcely found the courage for his initial glance at the morning and evening newspapers, for Baldwin had left his house without disclosing his plans; and, as if with evil purpose, he had increased the doctor’s suspense with self-satisfied and incomprehensible smiles. Nor did Wilmot see Baldwin or his wife again until the following week at Estelle Smith’s opening. He went to the theater then only because he felt sure he would find Baldwin, sitting well down front, slipping back between the acts, smiling complacently that the stunning Smith girl should receive more flowers than the star herself. It might be possible to have a word with him; tactfully to learn why he had not made a move; or even, with a bit of luck, if he would move at all.

Before he had been in the theater ten minutes Wilmot with a sense of breathless shock received proof that Baldwin was, in fact, progressing along some twisted line spun from the prolific revelation of the consultation room; for he stalked down the aisle, marshaling Mrs. and Mr. William Dungan, and — Anna. It was sufficiently obvious that Anna would have placed herself in the position of hostess to such a party only under some brutal compulsion; and Wilmot wondered if Baldwin had been vicious enough to tell her all he knew of that night; even to have his way through an unbearable threat of arrest.

Anna, in spite of her rare restraint, failed quite to hide the mortification of her surrender, for the Dungans’ ambition was common knowledge and convenient stimulant for the wits of the town. Everyone knew that Stacy Baldwin was trying to help them, probably at a staggering price; but he had never before been able to offer value through his wife; had never forced her to appear in public beside Dungan’s shining bald head, his gross face, his over-corpulent figure.

Mrs. Dungan, her clothing and jewelery too pronouncedly advertising their cost, glanced around the house with an expression impudent and avaricious. Wilmot had to admit she was handsome with her thick black hair, her snapping eyes, her naturally ruddy cheeks; but, he told himself, by contrast with Anna, her beauty was coarse and wholly of the flesh. She suggested, indeed, a colorful wild flower abruptly snatched up and set among the cultivated and delicate plants of a formal garden.

As a matter of fact, something like that had really happened to her. Dungan had brought her from the southwest along with fantastic sums of money he had made through oil and a serviceable lack of conscience. She would never do here, Wilmot decided, yet he could approximate her exuberant content as the avowed guest of Stacy Baldwin’s wife.

Wilmot was grateful when the curtain rose, but the appearance of the notorious Estelle Smith beyond the footlights only made Anna’s position more wretched.

Wilmot sat back in his seat, watching the brilliant creature. He could appreciate that Baldwin’s friendship for her would give him a destination for a good deal more money than even Dungan was likely to line his pockets with; for she was an exigent and hot-tempered little wretch, one heard, who invariably got what she wanted.

Baldwin slipped out as the curtain fell — almost certainly to seek by a circuitous route the dressing room of the popular Estelle. Wilmot’s temper blazed at this new affront to Anna. Without forecasting the effect on the one he wished to help, he walked down the aisle, and sank in the seat Baldwin had left. Anna glanced at him quickly, and his sympathy grew, for now he saw that the artifices of the dressing table had failed to obliterate the record of the last few days’ mental and physical torture. He glanced at the carefully powdered arm. By gad! If he hadn’t known, Baldwin might not have noticed that.

“I didn’t know you were here, Jimmy,” she said. “I don’t know whether to be glad.”

Once Wilmot had had to accept an introduction to Dungan from Baldwin, so he wasn’t surprised to see the apoplectic man stretch his pudgy hand in front of his wife.

“’Lo, Doctor. Met my wife? This is Dr. James Wilmot, Florence.”

The woman tossed her head as if she would have preferred the presentation to come from Mrs. Baldwin. She smiled, however, ingratiatingly.

“I’ve heard a very great deal about you, Doctor.”

Wilmot with surprise found a quality in her voice that he liked — a strong, harsh tone that vibrated with the egotism bred by broad spaces and limited companionships. Then she submerged that vital note beneath an affected lisp.

“Aw’fly nice show, don’t you think?”

His momentary interest died. Such people would be bearable if only they remained themselves instead of imitating the inanities of men like Stacy Baldwin. He made up his mind to escape those two, to give Anna a moment’s release and what strength he could.

“There’s coffee below,” he suggested.

And when they were caught in the crowd of the aisle he whispered in Anna’s ear:

“Slip them in the foyer. I’ve got to talk to you.”

“I — I don’t dare,” she whispered back. “What do you want to say?”

“Everything,” he answered. “I’ve got to know.”

He managed it for her, and hurried her down the stairs and to a corner hidden from the serving table where people already clustered like voracious ants; to which the Dungans would almost certainly go first of all to find them.

“Sit down. We’ve only a minute,” he said.

Her lips trembled. The persistent color of her cheeks made her face haggard.

“You want to ask why I came with those people, with Stacy.”

“I want to know that,” he said determinedly.

She looked down. She clasped her hands and commenced to twist her fingers.

“You couldn’t,” she whispered, “you couldn’t have told Stacy I was at your office that night?”

“Anna!”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I — I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m about at the end of my rope. But that’s why I’m here, because I think he knows, and I can’t see how he found out. He brought the Dungans out over last weekend, and when I said I wouldn’t receive them he laughed and answered that I jolly well would, or I’d wish I’d never been born; and he wanted to know what was the matter with my arm; and said that he knew all I’d been up to. Jim! Jim! He frightened me. So I came tonight, too.”

“Why,” he asked gently, “should Stacy be able to threaten you because you went to a doctor to have a badly bruised arm dressed?”

He was sorry he had had to ask it, and he shrank from her reply.

She glanced restlessly around.

“Because I — I couldn’t bear to have him know I had been in town—”

“Anna,” he interrupted her. “Tell me the truth. Don’t you know what happened to Stacy at your house that night?”

She shrank away from him. Her fingers recommenced their twisting.

“Were you at your house that night? Answer me, Anna. I can’t help you unless you give me your confidence.”

She spoke quickly, hysterically, although her voice remained low.

“You’re accusing me, too, of some dreadful thing you won’t put into words. And I can’t guess what you know or think.”

Wilmot couldn’t draw back now.

“You know, don’t you, that Stacy was shot at that night from behind a curtain in your house? You know, don’t you, that he caught his assailant over the arm with his walking stick?”

She cried out. She sprang to her feet and looked wildly about as if seeking a path of flight. Then Wilmot, watching her, saw her become motionless and little by little relax, while its normal impassivity returned to her face. He understood. Stacy Baldwin hurried stormily toward them.

Wilmot arose and spoke easily.

“Entr’acte about over?”

“Not the point,” Baldwin said, making no effort to disguise his temper. “I want to know, Anna, why you left Bill and his missus flat.”

“I lost them in the foyer,” she said.

“Then get back to them. They’re waiting up there. A word with you, old Doc Sawbones.”

For Wilmot, her helpless obedience was sufficient answer. Why, indeed, he asked himself hotly, shouldn’t she be guilty? If ever an attempted crime was justifiable hers was. Baldwin tapped his arm.

“Don’t fly away after the show, James, my boy.”

“Why not?” Wilmot asked coolly.

“Because,” Baldwin answered, “we’re going to have a little show-down.”

“About what?”

“Show-down! No bluffing!” Baldwin sneered. “If you care as much for Anna as you pretend to you’ll be on hand. Back to my guests. Ta,ta.”

Before Wilmot could say anything Baldwin had hurried up the stairs. The doctor followed and returned slowly to his seat. A show-down! In Baldwin’s mood that could mean only one thing. Before the only person who would have to admit the justice of his charge he would accuse his wife of having tried to put him out of the way. But with what purpose? Money? Anna, Wilmot guessed, as soon as she had learned the truth about her husband, had protected her considerable fortune from his extravagances; but, as he suffered through the final act, the doctor feared a less comprehensible move, something more difficult to protect oneself against.

In his anxiety he wanted to demand that the brazen Smith woman be snatched from the vision of the greedy-eyed men surrounding him; most of all from the sight of Stacy Baldwin who had been daring enough to drag his wife here to watch her antics.

Afterward in the lobby he waited for the little party. Were the Dungans also to be witnesses of the show-down? Evidently not; for their own car came up, and Baldwin solicitously helped Mrs. Dungan in, then whispered for a moment to Dungan, probably about some celebration that would almost certainly follow at Estelle Smith’s home.

Anna stood close to Wilmot, failing to hide her dismay. Her glance, no longer controlled, restlessly swept the crowded sidewalk, as if more poignantly than before she recognized the paramount need of escape; and once she whispered:

“Do you know what he’s going to do to me, Jim? Tell me — what’s going to happen?”

Wilmot shook his head. He found her hand and pressed it.

The Dungans’ car moved away. Baldwin beckoned and motioned Anna into her automobile which had drawn up.

“You next, Doctor James,” he directed Wilmot.

“Where are we going, Stacy? What is it?” Anna begged.

“Didn’t you hear me say to drive home?” Baldwin muttered, nor would he speak again until they were in the hall of the house.

There he indicated a small hole in the wainscot. He smiled sardonically.

“That point, my kind physician, is where the bullet entered after slipping thoughtfully by me. Don’t say, devoted wife, that you hadn’t noticed it.”

Anna leaned against the wall, her evening cloak fallen from her shoulders, her eyes wide and guilty.

“I — I don’t know what you mean,” she managed.

“Then come on in and find out,” Baldwin said, and drew the curtain aside, and entered an inner room.

As he followed, Wilmot tried not to believe that Baldwin had lashed himself to a revenge that would make the man that loved her the means of Anna’s destruction.

“Sit down, both of you,” Baldwin ordered.

Anna obeyed, because, the doctor saw, she was at the limit of her strength. He chose a chair nearby, while Baldwin faced them from the fireplace, lighting a cigarette which he smoked with easy satisfaction.

“Glad you showed up tonight, faithful cavalier,” Baldwin said. “Rather fancied you would, though I’d made up my mind, anyway. Safe to say you’ve loved Anna since long before she took me for the better man.”

He grinned.

“Funny that! Safe to say, too, that the more she’s seen of me, the more she’s thought of you. Too bad she didn’t find the difference out in time. She was too saintly for me. No use crying. What’s done’s done. Only thing left is to arrange matters so everybody’ll be happy.”

Anna looked up; dared to meet his eyes.

“You mean a divorce, Stacy. I made up my mind long ago I wouldn’t ask for one. I don’t want to do that. I don’t believe in it.”

Baldwin laughed.

“My dear! It’s no longer a question of what you believe in or want. Get this through your heads, you and Jim. It’s what I want; and you’ll have to admit I’m pretty easygoing.”

Wilmot stood up, walked close to him, and looked at the flushed face.

“Suppose you tell us what you’re driving at.”

Baldwin laughed his impertinent laugh again.

“I could do with a divorce. Now you’ve just heard. Anna refuses to get it, anyway. What’s the matter with me? Could do with whatever sympathy’s going around; and if there’s a settlement to ease outraged feelings! Even Jimmy’ll admit my feelings have been pretty badly shot up — eh? Fact is, I’m rather more penniless than you imagine, and you’ve a plenty, Anna.”

She stared at him, her mouth half open. Wilmot started to lift his hand then let it fall.

“You don’t mean what you’re saying, Baldwin. You’ve drunk too much. You’ll change your mind in the morning.”

Baldwin shook his head slowly.

“Not a chance, Jimmy. Better understand neither you nor Anna’s in a position to turn nasty. You’ll do what I suggest. And I might remind you, if you feel in the mood for a rough and tumble, the doughty Manuel’s within easy call. I’ll bring suit, and I’d advise you not to put up more than enough contest to make it look pure. That man of yours, who let Anna in your house after midnight, veiled like a houri. Properly coached, he’ll make a useful witness.”

Anna straightened. She stretched out her hands.

“Stacy! Who told you I was there?”

“Now don’t get excited. I saw you.”

He bared his teeth.

“And I saw your arm!”

She fell back in her chair.

“It isn’t true,” she said, covering her face.

“Jim! Tell me it isn’t true.”

Wilmot looked down.

“I’m sorry, Anna. It’s true.”

“You may call it circumstantial evidence,” Baldwin said easily, “but I’ll lay you there isn’t a grand jury in the land wouldn’t indict on it. I fancy you’ll find this other action rather less painful. What?”

Wilmot’s instinct was to spring at him, to choke him. But that would only make Anna’s situation worse.

“You won’t do it,” he cried. “Man! You can’t do such a thing.”

“Try me. Divorce and salve, or the lockup for Anna. What’s the rumpus, Doc? Don’t you want to marry her? Afraid she might pot at you? I say, Anna! Old Jimmy’s crawling away backward. Hello’ Seems to have the habit.”

Wilmot turned and hurried to Anna’s side.

“Bring her out of it,” Baldwin jeered. “I’m off to a cheerful party at Estelle’s. Believe me, Doc, that lady can take care of herself. She isn’t the fainting sort.”

“Baldwin! Wait!”

Baldwin snapped his fingers and went out.

“No use wasting words,” he called back. “When I hold the winning hand I know how to play it safe for the last trick.”

Wilmot summoned Anna’s maid. He realized it would be better for her first consciousness not to focus on him; but before leaving he hurriedly scratched a note, begging her to do nothing until she had heard from him. He tried to distract her mind from the one tragic means of escape that must inevitably occur to her with promises that he would find a means of defense before Baldwin could do anything. He sealed the envelope, gave it to the maid, and went out. Yet, as he walked home, and afterward as he paced his consultation room, only one possible means of keeping Baldwin from fulfilling his threat occurred to him — to do successfully that at which Anna had failed. Heaven knew it would be self-defense, but of a sort the law couldn’t recognize.

The sofa, where he had a fancy the impress of Anna’s form lingered, accused him mutely. He had brought Baldwin down to lift the veil. He had delivered Anna helpless into his hands. Somehow he must set her free, but there was no way — no way except to close Baldwin’s lips forever. He stood at the foot of the sofa, staring hypnotically at the place where Anna had rested. No man, he believed, had ever faced so abominable a temptation.

He relaxed. The telephone sounder was buzzing.

He walked to the desk and lifted the receiver from the hook.

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently.

He bent forward and braced himself against the desk, his eyes wide, his face suffused. A woman’s strangled voice had reached him, scarcely intelligible, as if her mouth had not been near the transmitter; but he had understood these words:

“Better come. Stacy Baldwin is — is in dreadful trouble here.”

“Where?” he cried. “Where?”

As faint as the whispering of a breeze among distant trees slipped the answer.

“At Estelle Smith’s. Quick! You’d better come quick!”

“Who are you?” he shouted.

He rattled the hook, but the woman had gone. He remembered Anna’s whispering voice when she had come to this room the other night. Was it Anna who had called him? Who else, indeed, would have? She, too, must have realized that the only way out was the closing of her husband’s mouth. If she had had the courage to attack him the other evening, how much more powerful was her motive tonight!

He shivered as if the room had all at once been invaded by a charnel cold. It was impossible to picture Anna doing such things. He dwelt on what Baldwin had said of a party at Estelle Smith’s. He tried to sketch that party as he would have had it: a big crowd; noisy, scarcely accountable men and women; a quarrel. He couldn’t go on. He looked at his watch. He had struggled with the dilemma longer than he had thought. It was nearly three o’clock.

In the street he found a late taxicab, gave the driver the address of Estelle Smith’s apartment uptown near the river, urged him to hurry through the nearly empty streets, and at last was taken by a somnolent elevator boy to the corridor from which the woman’s apartment opened.

Wilmot rang. After a time he glanced at the door, surprised, his suspense increasing; for from the apartment had come to him no stirring, no suggestion of a large party, no sign of life. He rang again. Had Baldwin been in less trouble than the unknown woman had fancied? Had he, perhaps, been able to leave? Had the party, because of whatever had happened, dispersed early? Even so, the Smith girl and her maid would have remained.

The brooding silence stung him to action. He reached out and rattled the door knob, and the door swung open. Then the latch had not been fastened. The hall was dark except for a blazing light that made a band across the floor from a door opposite. Certainly that brilliant room suggested occupancy. He rapped against the wall. Still no response arose from the strangely silent apartment.

“Hello, in there!” he called.

As if physically pushing the silence aside, Wilmot crept forward to the lighted doorway.

Caught in the blaze the doctor stopped short, reached out, and steadied himself against the door jamb. For a moment the air was too heavy for his lungs; for he knew that Stacy Baldwin’s luck had failed at last. Anna’s husband lay beneath the glare of the ceiling lamps in the center of the gaudily decorated room, his arms outstretched, his shirt front grotesquely stained.

Wilmot tiptoed across and knelt. After a second he drew back. Baldwin had been shot through the heart, but he had not been long dead. That hysterical summons must have come within a few minutes of the crack of the revolver that had done for him.

Crouched on his heels the doctor glanced around. Baldwin had lied. There had been no cheerful party at Estelle Smith’s that night. Except for this tragic discord the room was orderly; chairs were in their normal places, and evidently there had been no struggle. She must have taken him by surprise. She had fired. That was all.

The undisturbed dining room offered him further proof that Baldwin had had a rendezvous alone with Estelle Smith. But where was Estelle Smith or her maid? He explored the pantry and the kitchen. Everything was empty, dark. He came back to the brilliant room and leaned against a chair back, his nails pressed against his palms. Anna must have heard Baldwin say he was coming here, had followed. But where was Estelle Smith? She must have received her guest. She must have heard the shot, must have seen the one who had fired. He straightened. Somehow he must find Estelle Smith, and keep her from taking the stand to point out Anna Baldwin as the murderess of her husband.

With the motions of a somnambulist he commenced his search. Two closed doors led to rooms on either side of the dining room. One of them must be Estelle’s. He chose the door to the right, turned the knob, and entered.

Lights burned here, too, flashing on a frantic disorder. Clothing was strewn on the bed and chairs, overflowed to the floor. Bureau drawers stood open. The dressing table was in disarray. It was clear enough a bag or two had been packed. Estelle Smith, and probably her maid, had fled.

The doctor for the first time since entering the noiseless dwelling had a flash of hope. The logic of Anna’s guilt had smothered his reason. Suppose retribution had been snatched from her hand? In view of the disordered room, of this incontinent flight, wasn’t it also logic that Estelle Smith had murdered Stacy Baldwin?

With that clearing of his mind there came to him, too, the compromising nature of his own position alone in the apartment with the dead man. He shrugged his shoulders. He’d be glad enough to pay the price for Anna if only she would let him.

Abruptly he stiffened. What was that?

He listened, tensely. There was more than death in the other room. No one had answered his ring or his call, yet something stirred stealthily in there. His heart seemed to stop. Could he have been mistaken about Baldwin? He sprang for the door. There was only Baldwin in the garish room, lying as the doctor had first seen him, still threatening in death, still malevolent.

He started. A sob had reached him, difficult, strangled. He saw the hangings at the hall door sway.

“Who’s there?”

There was no answer, so he ran across, paused in the doorway, and drew slowly back, his momentary hope abruptly strangled.

A woman, one hand clutching at the hangings, crouched against the wall just beyond the band of light; and he saw with a sinking heart that she wore a long black cloak, and that her face was covered by a heavy black veil. She must have been hidden in the other bedroom, must have been attempting to slip out. Wilmot held out his hands to her.

“Anna! It’s all up now.”

She seemed endeavoring to get away from him, but the wall held her. Again he heard her choked sobbing, and he took her in his arms, but she resisted.

“I’ll stand by you, Anna,” he cried.

Slowly she raised her hand to her veil and drew it away.

Wilmot fell back. He couldn’t bear the suffering he saw in the white face.

“Oh, my God, Jimmy,” she whispered. “It — it’s happened.”

He took her hand and led her into the brilliant room.

“Come,” he said. “We must make up our minds what to do.”

She shrank against him.

“I — I can’t stay here—”

“Hush,” Wilmot whispered. “Don’t say anything now—”

She followed his fascinated glance to the door opposite Estelle Smith’s bedroom. Slowly the door swung open, as though of its own volition. At last it was wide, and a woman stepped from behind it and across the threshold. He stared unbelieving at the coarse and audacious beauty of Mrs. William Dungan.

“What are you doing here?” he gasped.

“Trying to do my duty,” she answered in her loud, self-reliant voice, “although I’ve been on the point of dodging it more than once. I’d intended getting the police as soon as I’d phoned you and Mrs. Baldwin to come, but I lost my nerve, and decided to wait until you got here. Then I lost my nerve again; but there’s only one thing to be done — own up to the truth.”

Wilmot clutched Anna’s hand. For the other woman’s sake he tried to keep his joyous relief from his voice.

“But why, Mrs. Dungan, why did you do it?”

Her eyes flashed at him their bewilderment.

“I? — I? Would I soil my hands with such dirt?”

She looked down.

“It was Bill, the utter fool — head over heels with that painted-face dancer, and so jealous of Baldwin he couldn’t think straight; and he had more reason than that. Baldwin’s been taking his money and double-crossing him, not putting him up at clubs or getting him asked places — things Bill had paid for. Baldwin lied to him tonight, tried to steer him away from here; and Bill telephoned Mrs. Baldwin to check up on him. You remember, Mrs. Baldwin; and you told Bill your husband had come here. Bill went raving, and I was afraid there would be trouble, so I followed him quietly. The door was unlatched. I saw the whole thing from behind those curtains. There were some hot words, Baldwin struck, and — and Bill shot him like a dog.”

She clenched her hands. The determination of her features increased.

“Then — then, while I stayed hidden, and tried to think out what to do, I had to watch him cut and run with that woman. She didn’t have to think much. A live millionaire was a lot more use to her than a dead swell.”

She stiffened.

“I’d rather see him in jail for life than in her hands.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Dungan,” Wilmot said. “I’m sorry for you. It makes a clear case, but your husband may plead self-defense.”

He turned to Anna.

“But the other night?”

She nodded quickly.

“It must have been Dungan,” she whispered.

“Then you were there,” he said. “What were you doing that night secretly in your house?”

She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“I’d slipped quietly into town to make another effort with Stacy. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I dressed as I did because I didn’t want people to see me going to my husband on my knees. I waited so long for him. I fell asleep in the dark drawing room. Stacy’s key in the lock must have waked me up, and I saw in the light from the street this — this man behind the curtains, raising a revolver. I had enough sense not to scream, for that would have made him shoot then. I crept behind, thrust my arm through the curtains, and grasped his hand as he fired — and Stacy’s cane struck my arm.”

Her lips trembled.

“I ran after the man to the servants’ entrance, but he was too quick for me, and I was about to go back when I heard Stacy searching, and all at once I realized.”

She shivered.

“I knew Stacy mustn’t find out about my arm. Jim! Don’t you see? My only chance was that Stacy should never know I had been at the house, in town that night. I was frantic, and walked the streets while the pain got worse, but I kept telling myself Stacy must never know my arm had been struck. And after that night he began to threaten, and I couldn’t guess how much he knew; and I had only tried to save him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Anna?” he asked gently.

She shook her head. She indicated her injured arm.

“No matter how much you had wanted to, you wouldn’t have believed me, Jim. Stacy was right. No man had been seen, except by me. Any jury would have convicted me.”

Mrs. Dungan touched Wilmot’s arm. She spoke in a hard, dry voice, but he saw there were tears in her eyes.

“Take her away from here before the police come. Give her all the happiness she’s earned.” She hid her face in her hands. Wilmot led Anna slowly out of the place where Stacy Baldwin lay, a curiously boyish figure, from which all evil had been torn.

OPEN EVIDENCE

The telephone in the doctor’s office next door had jangled determinedly until Hudson thought its ultimate effect would be very like that of the storied Chinese torture — the water that drips on some part of the body with deadly regularity, until its victim goes insane. The racket had already driven him from his writing. And he was paying an exorbitant rent for this tiny room on the top floor of a small upper Fifth Avenue office building simply that he might have the quiet necessary for his work. This, moreover, was the second time within a week the thing had happened. Before, he had complained to the doctor at his first opportunity with such unmeasured vehemence the janitor had inserted himself into the conversation as a peacemaker. The doctor’s defense had been the lateness of the hour. He couldn’t prevent hysterical patients calling up when the building would normally be deserted.

This time there was no excuse. It was barely three o’clock and the torture had been applied for twenty insufferable minutes.

Hudson determined to take matters into his own hands. He snapped his watch shut and pushed back his chair. He glared viciously at the communicating door between his room and the doctor’s. Then he strode to the hall and rang the bell of the one elevator.

The janitor happened to be on the car with the elevator boy.

“Listen, Robert,” Hudson said, “I’m neither Job nor a deaf-mute. Go in and take the receiver off the hook. Where the devil are they all?”

The janitor stepped out, rattling his keys.

“He doesn’t have many appointments Saturday afternoon. He let Miss Moran off yesterday for over Sunday, and his assistant went out to lunch before he did and hasn’t come back yet. That’s queer, too. Doctor Seely came in half an hour ago.”

“He must take something if he can nap through that hubbub,” Hudson snorted.

“I know he hasn’t gone out since,” the janitor said, “because I’ve been on the car the last two hours while Willy here went downtown on an errand for the boss.”

Hudson pointed to the stairs which descended just outside the doctor’s door.

“If he had walked down,” the janitor conceded, “and the car hadn’t been on the ground floor I wouldn’t have seen him; but what’s the elevator for?”

He shook his head. He stooped over, inserted a key in the lock, and gave the door a shove. It failed to open. He straightened, staring at Hudson.

“I knew he was here. Bolt’s shot on the inside.”

Hudson glanced from the doctor’s’ door to his own. They were the only two at that end of the hall.

“Isn’t there another way out?” he asked, nevertheless.

“Except through your office, but those communicating doors are kept locked.”

He stooped again, pushed back the flap of the mail slot, and peered through. He made a frightened noise in his throat. Suddenly he sprang upright, shattered the glass panel with his foot, reached in, turned the knob, and stumbled across the threshold. Hudson followed him. It was clear enough why Doctor Seely hadn’t answered his telephone.

The apartment was designed for the reception of patients. Laden bookshelves ran around all four walls save where one door led to the private office and the other communicated with Hudson’s room. A large mahogany table, covered with neatly arranged piles of magazines, stood in the center of the floor. Half under this table Doctor Seely lay, stretched unmistakably in death.

Hudson expressed his first coherent thought.

“There’s no blood.”

“Poisoned himself,” the janitor whispered. “I’ll phone for the police.”

That reminded Hudson. The bell still rang monotonously.

“Wait a minute,” he said, and lifted the receiver to his ear. “Hello!”

A woman’s voice vibrated nervously over the wire.

“Thought you would never answer. Well? Don’t be afraid. You’ve found him?”

“Good God, yes!” Hudson answered hoarsely.

“Oh, he did get me into a lot of trouble,” the voice came back.

Hudson’s saner judgment snapped. He fairly shouted into the transmitter:

“Who are you? Where can I find you?”

The wire went dead. He hung up the receiver and stared at the janitor.

“A woman did it. She was on that wire.”

But the janitor used his logic. “If it wasn’t suicide the murderer’s got to be in this office now.”

He walked to the door of the consultation room and flung it open. There was no one there.

Hudson knelt over the body.

“Look!” he called after a moment.

He pointed at the back of the victim’s neck. A tiny round hole gaped between the base of the brain and the spinal column. He stooped lower.

“Do you want to see what did it?”

He touched a gleaming slender thread of steel half hidden by the body.

“A knitting needle!” the janitor cried.

“No. A lancet. Who but a woman — If it had been suicide, Robert, he wouldn’t have had time to draw the deadly thing out.”

The janitor shrugged his shoulders. “Mr. Hudson, it’s a sheer drop of five stories to a stone pavement from the windows. You saw yourself that the entrance was bolted on the inside. That leaves the locked door to your room.”

He stepped across the rug, and, to prove his point, turned the knob. The door answered to his touch and swung open.

“Good Lord, Mr. Hudson! How long have you been in there?”

Hudson arose.

“Two hours at least. That won’t do, either, Robert.”

“It’s the only way, Mr. Hudson. You must have seen him or her go through, or—”

Hudson’s nerves grew taut as he recognized the frank suspicion in the janitor’s eyes. He guessed that the man was recalling his quarrel with the doctor, and would tell everything. The police, in their usual anxiety to make an immediate arrest, might cause him endless trouble, even danger, unless he could trace this woman, who, escaping mysteriously from the scene of her crime, had given the alarm in so unique a fashion.

“You don’t think, Robert—” His voice trembled a little. “Why, that woman on the phone! And would I have come to you and insisted on breaking in here?”

“I’m not accusing you,” the janitor answered, “but the police’ll say that was a nervy stunt to throw them off the track; and I can’t testify to any woman on the phone because I didn’t hear one. If I was you, Mr. Hudson, I’d let somebody else pick holes in the suicide theory. I’ll tell you something, too, though maybe I shouldn’t. Doctor Seely asked me to keep my mouth shut, but it might help. One of his patients lost a valuable string of pearls day before yesterday. A detective was in here pumping me before I locked up last night. Maybe the doctor knew too much about it to want to face the music.” »

“The police won’t see it any more than I will,” Hudson said. “You’ll have to tell them all you know, so I’m going to try to find that woman now, while the trail is warm. There won’t be any trouble getting me if I’m wanted.”

The janitor was in a quandary. “That ain’t just fair to me, Mr. Hudson.”

Hudson snapped at him angrily. “If you’re like most janitors you know too much about bolts and locks to be above suspicion yourself. I want a couple hours.”

The elevator door slammed. Hudson heard a quick step in the hall and a cheery whistling. Doctor Seely’s assistant, a neat, good-looking young man, appeared in the doorway. He stopped, turned white, and leaned weakly against the wall.

“What’s this?” He gaped for a moment. “Why don’t you do something?” He sprang forward and knelt.

“Don’t touch the body,” the janitor warned.

Hudson was sorry for the boy; his grief was pitiful.

“He was like a father to me,” the assistant sobbed, after he had had time to realize and to recover a little. “He saw me through medical school. He took me in here—”

He sprang up.

“Do you know who—”

Hudson shook his head.

“I’ll spend every cent I’ve got to run down the beast who did it,” the assistant cried.

“Good,” Hudson said. “Then you don’t think the wound was self-inflicted?”

“Suicide! Why should he want to kill himself?”

“Pull yourself together,” Hudson urged. “Can you think of anyone likely—”

“No, no.”

“His patients were mostly women?” Hudson suggested.

“Yes — nervous women. One — temporarily insane — might have — Oh, why did I stay out so long?”

“Or an angry woman?”

“He was straight as a die,” the assistant flashed back.

“Physicians are easily misunderstood,” Hudson persisted. “Think now. Isn’t there someone?”

The assistant’s eyes narrowed. “A man was in here this noon. He seemed angry. That was when Doctor Seely told me to go out to luncheon and not to hurry back.”

“A man! Who was he?” Hudson asked.

“A Mr. Arnhem — the husband of one of Doctor Seely’s oldest patients.”

“Did anyone go out or come back with Doctor Seely, Robert?”

“No,” the janitor answered. “I’m sure he came and went alone.”

“Everywhere a blank wall,” Hudson said. “You’d better call the police.”

He went into his own room and got his coat and hat. As he stepped to the hall again he heard the assistant’s excited voice.

“What’s this door doing open? By gad! That was the way out!”

Hudson didn’t dare stop to argue. The assistant, remembering his quarrel with the doctor, would doubtless add two and two with the same convincing ease and error as the janitor. So he ran down the five flights of stairs and stepped on the sidewalk.

He had said he wanted two hours. He knew the police might be after him in fifteen minutes. And he had no pronounced ability for this obscure business. There wasn’t time to go to any of the large detective agencies, but on his daily walks from the Sixth Avenue Elevated he had frequently noticed the sign of one of the smaller sort. He hurried around the corner now, his mind made up to get here the help he needed; yet when he stopped in front of the place and examined it closely for the first time he was filled with doubt and distaste.

Parsons
— Special Agent —
Discretion Guaranteed

The sign hung above the sidewalk, but an arrow in a lower corner pointed downward to an unswept areaway and two windows whose original purpose was almost lost in dust and grime. Still time pressed, and any aid would be better than none. So he descended the steps and pulled at the bell handle. A slovenly maid answered and indicated the detective’s door. Hudson knocked.

A round and cheerful voice called out to enter. Hudson wondered at it as he obeyed and faced the extreme poverty of the interior. A table desk, two cane-seated chairs, and a piece of sectional bookcase completed the furniture. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls bare. A coal fire glowing in a low grate made the one bright spot. But Parsons, even more than his voice, was at variance with his surroundings. Hudson could see that he was darkly good-looking and young — probably about thirty. He wore a check suit, fashionably made and set off by a maroon necktie. A gray felt hat, a cane with silver trimmings, and a pair of fresh gloves lay on the desk near a telephone. Met on the street, the man might have been set down as a dandy, a jewelery salesman, a wine-agent — anything but a detective. Taken in connection with his office, he became an anomaly. Hudson, pausing on the threshold, realized it with a sinking heart.

“If there were not another chair I would offer you mine,” Parsons said softly. “Don’t let appearances discourage you unless you bring another divorce scandal. I shall change that sign as soon as I can afford it.”

Suddenly he sprang to his feet. “Come in, man! Come in! You’re in a mess! What?”

Hudson nodded mechanically and closed the door.

“I want to use your telephone.”

Parsons sat down and pushed the instrument across the desk.

Hudson chanced to know the superintendent of the telephone company for that district. He hoped to trace the persistent call through him, and the woman through the call. When he had asked for his information he hung up the receiver and sat down. He looked at Parsons for some moments, almost unwilling to begin. But as he gazed Parsons’ swarthy face seemed to alter. The eyes narrowed. New lines appeared in his forehead and about the mouth. His voice when he spoke was level and business-like.

“Nothing but lack of time would have brought you to me, so I wouldn’t wait any longer. Tell me everything without reserve as clearly and as quickly as you can.”

Hudson gave Parsons his story just as it had happened, from his quarrel with the doctor to his arrival here. Parsons interrupted only once.

“Are you sure that’s all the janitor said about the pearls?”

“Everything,” Hudson answered. “Do you attach importance to them?”

“I happen to know of their loss,” Parsons said, “as, naturally, I do about most things that are reported to the Central Office. There are one or two puzzles connected with those pearls. Still — go on.”

Hudson took up the thread. As he was finishing, the telephone bell rang. Although he expected to be told the woman had called from some public place, he ran eagerly to the instrument. The superintendent said the call had apparently come from the house of J. A. Arnhem, a banker, living in Sixty-fifth Street, near Fifth Avenue.

Hudson swung around triumphantly.

“Arnhem! The man who went to Seely, angry, this noon. The woman’s probably his wife. Let’s get after her.”

“Wait. Wait,” Parsons said patiently. “Sit down, Mr. Hudson, and give me half a minute to digest your story. These cases must be solved largely by logic and checked up afterward. Our interview with this woman is the most vital check I foresee at present. In the first place, it was she who lost the pearls. Her husband, I learn from my source of information in the Central Office, reported the matter to the police night before last. Last night he unaccountably called the police off. Something to think about there, eh? In the second place, you suspect her of the murder. It is not impossible she should have left the doctor’s office unseen by you. When I am told there is no apparent escape for a criminal from the scene of his lawlessness, I take it for granted there are several perfectly obvious ones. At least I shall go on that assumption until I have seen the place. What she said over the phone at first thought seems to support your theory. But several serious difficulties arise. You tell me the doctor, when you found him, had been in his room half an hour, and the telephone had been ringing twenty minutes. Those estimates may vary, but probably only a trifle. Therefore Mrs. Arnhem would have had to commit the crime, reach her house in Sixty-fifth Street, and rush to the telephone within approximately ten minutes. I grant you it’s possible if she had used a fast automobile. But why, in Heaven’s name, this violent haste to incriminate herself by giving the alarm — and from her own house? Let’s glance at the janitor. You say the police did question him about the pearls. But I can’t go any further with that until I have examined the door he told you was bolted on the inside. Nor must we altogether neglect the theory of suicide.”

“But,” Hudson objected, “the lancet was not in the wound. His death would have been practically instantaneous.”

“The lancet might have dropped out when he fell,” Parsons said.

“By Jove, you’re right.”

“An awkward wound, though, since he wasn’t a surgeon,” Parsons went on. “A doctor would almost instinctively turn to poison. Still, that proves nothing.”

He smiled blandly at Hudson.

“Then, from a purely objective point of view — and as the police will say — there is always yourself.”

Hudson whitened. He stood up and pushed back his chair. “That’s why I came to you. If you—”

“Your own heart knows best,” Parsons interrupted. “You will be satisfied if I verify what is in your heart?”

“Yes, yes. You’re forgetting the husband.”

“No, I’m not.”

The detective lay back and closed his eyes.

“There are so many motives where doctors are concerned, and here we have pearls besides — powerful motives to fit everyone we can suspect. Love. Hatred. Jealousy. Avarice. Fear.”

The lines in Parsons’ forehead deepened. Hudson grew restless and walked to the window. When he turned, Parsons had the telephone in his hand.

“I’ll get a taxi,” he said. “We’d better see that woman now.”

They put on their coats and hats and waited at the area door.

“There’s certain to be a Central Office man hanging around this corner since it’s the least likely place to find you,” Parsons said. “I’ll step out first. When I wave my hand you may come.”

Hudson reached the cab safely, but as they swung into Fifth Avenue, Parsons gaily pointed out a square-cut individual lounging in the doorway of the building where Seely lay dead. Hudson shivered.

“You — you have formed some theory that may get me out of this?”

“Nothing to talk about or raise false hopes on yet,” Parsons answered.

“You don’t seem to realize what this means to me,” Hudson prodded him.

“Possibly an unpleasant death,” Parsons replied. “But for me it means success or failure — really more vital matters. Don’t worry, Mr. Hudson, I’ll attend to your business with all my heart.”

The Arnhem residence was an imposing gray stone, English basement affair — the usual New York symbol of considerable wealth. Parsons instructed the driver to wait for them, stepped into the vestibule, and rang the bell. A supercilious man in livery opened.

“Mrs. Arnhem is not at home,” he announced as Parsons handed him his card.

If Parsons had not put his foot in the aperture the door would have closed in their faces. He tapped the card.

“Take your foot out, sir.”

But Parsons continued to tap the card.

“Give this to Mrs. Arnhem. She’ll be at home to me.”

“Better present it at the tradesman’s entrance,” the servant said. “Take your foot out, or—”

“Mr. Hudson,” Parsons directed, “there is a fixed post around the corner. Ask the policeman to come back with you.”

He faced the man again.

“If you think your mistress wishes a uniformed policeman in the house you were never more mistaken in your life.”

The door opened wide.

“I don’t think Mrs. Arnhem’s at home, but, if it’s as important as that, I’ll take your card and see.”

“Could you have really used the police to get in?” Hudson asked when they were alone in the darkened reception room.

“One is always put to expedients,” Parsons answered, “and this happened to work. Because of it she’ll be all the surer to see us. Curious! She raised what barricades she could.”

Mrs. Arnhem, indeed, did appear within five minutes. Even in the half light her fear and nervousness were confessed by disheveled hair; by the pallor of her rather handsome face; by the graceful body, slightly stooping now and not altogether steady.

Hudson gazed at her eagerly, then glanced at Parsons. The detective had fixed the woman with a steady stare. She clutched at the curtain which had fallen behind her.

“This intrusion,” she said with some difficulty. “To what am I — What is the reason?”

Her voice died away impotently. Hudson could have sworn it was the voice he had heard over the telephone in Doctor Seely’s office.

Parsons didn’t answer. His stare apparently added to her nervousness. She put her hand to her hair with a jerky motion. She advanced a few steps.

“The police — Thompson says you threatened to call the police unless I saw you. Why? Why? What can you want of me? I — I know nothing.”

Parsons sighed.

“You seem to know about the murder. Your knowledge has been very rapidly acquired, Mrs. Arnhem. It isn’t even in the papers yet.”

Evidently she realized her mistake. She considered for some moments while she pulled at her handkerchief.

“I — I do know about Doctor Seely. I telephoned his office a little while ago. They told me.”

“You mean, then, you’ve telephoned twice,” Parsons said.

“What do you want? I won’t put up with this,” she cried shrilly. “You have forced an entrance into my house. I tell you I know nothing — nothing — nothing!”

“You are curiously excited for one who knows nothing at all,” he drawled.

She held herself momentarily in check.

“Doctor Seely was an old friend. The shock was great. I can say nothing more. I want you to go.”

Parsons answered slowly:

“Before we obey it is only fair to tell you when you first phoned Doctor Seely’s office Mr. Hudson was on the other end of the wire. The police may act on the most obvious construction of what you said.”

“Are you accusing me? What authority have you?”

“Mr. Hudson has retained me to sift the facts. If you have nothing to conceal why not answer my questions?”

“But I tell you I know nothing,” she repeated hysterically.

“Don’t you know where your husband is?” he demanded suddenly.

Her laugh was an inadequate mask for the terror his question had aroused.

“He isn’t even in town.”

“When did he leave? That’s easily determined.”

“I — I don’t know. He took his bag downtown after breakfast. He said he was going to Chicago. I suppose he got a morning train.”

“He didn’t, Mrs. Arnhem. We know that he went to Doctor Seely’s office this noon. He was angry.”

She clutched at a chair back.

“I don’t believe it. You can’t fasten it on him.”

“Wait a moment, Mrs. Arnhem. I am accusing no one. My business is to find out who did not do this murder. Tell me why your husband should have been angry with Doctor Seely.”

“I won’t. I — I can’t.”

Parsons shrugged his shoulders. “Your husband and you did not part good friends this morning?”

“I won’t answer such questions. They are impertinent.”

“Then please answer this: have you recovered your pearl necklace?”

Mrs. Arnhem stiffened.

“How do you know about that?”

“Yes or no, please.”

She shook her head negatively.

“I thought not. Then why did your husband call the police off last night?”

Mrs. Arnhem pressed her lips together. She would not meet Parsons’ eyes. She fumbled with her handkerchief again.

“At whose request?” Parsons asked softly.

He waited a moment.

“At yours?”

Still she didn’t answer.

Parsons’ eyes gleamed.

“Why did you ask him to call the police off?”

Her lips trembled. “I have said nothing. I tell you I know nothing. I won’t answer any more questions.”

Parsons moved closer to her.

“Mrs. Arnhem,” he said gently, “this is an ugly tangle. If the police aren’t satisfied with the first arrest they make, if they go far enough, you and your husband may find yourselves in a difficult situation. Trust me. Place yourself in my hands. Tell me what sooner or later I’ll find out anyway.”

“I won’t,” she cried. “I want to be left alone. I want to be left alone.”

“They will not leave you alone,” he urged gently. “For your own sake, but particularly for your husband’s, come with me to Mr. Hudson’s office. There you may change your mind, and if you do, we can, perhaps, settle this case once and for all, and save you from — well, from the witness stand, anyway. It’s your best chance, Mrs. Arnhem, on my honor.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she breathed. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You will come with me.”

She glanced up appealingly.

“It isn’t fair.”

“I said, on my honor, it was your best chance. If you throw it away, if you let them drag you to court, heaven knows what scandal will grow.”

“I’ll come. I’ll get my things,” she surrendered, and left the room.

Hudson was doubtful.

“Suppose she gives us the slip.”

Parsons smiled.

“She won’t, and when she sees the coroner in your office and probably a policeman or two I think she’ll talk. I hate these tricks, but her husband—”

He paused.

“You’ve retained me, Mr. Hudson. I can’t go further until I have examined the place, and I must have that woman there. She is the key to the whole puzzle.”

Mrs. Arnhem came back heavily veiled. In the cab Parsons warned her to guard her emotions carefully no matter what he should say or whom he might seem to implicate. Once he whispered to her and she nodded.

When they reached the building the Central Office man had left his corner, but, as they stepped from the elevator at the fifth floor, Hudson saw him standing just outside the door of his office. He tried to walk down the hall as though nothing unusual were about to happen; but the Central Office man, after staring at him incredulously, put his hand on his shoulder.

“Are you Mr. Hudson?”

“Yes.”

“You’re wanted.”

Hudson entered his room, but the other followed quickly, jingling a pair of handcuffs.

“Hold on! Not so fast!”

“Put those up,” Parsons advised. “Sit down, Mrs. Arnhem.”

“Who are you?” the Central Office man demanded.

“I am representing Mr. Hudson. If you want to make him safe stand by that door to the hall. The other leads to Doctor Seely’s office, and the windows are only useful for light and air and accidents.”

“That’s what puts it up to him,” the man answered, “and I don’t want any sleight of hand while I phone for the patrol.”

Parsons chuckled.

“Are you looking for a reputation as the prize blunderer of the Department? Go ahead, then. Use those handcuffs. Send for your patrol.”

Uncharted responsibilities clearly had no lure for the Central Office man.

“Coroner’s in there,” he suggested.

“Then let things stand as they are for five minutes while I speak to the coroner.”

As Parsons opened the communicating door Hudson had a glimpse of a group of reporters about the janitor and Doctor Seely’s assistant. He was grateful none had chanced to step in the hall to observe his arrest. He leaned against the windowsill near Mrs. Arnhem, who, at Parsons’ request, had sunk into a chair in the corner. The Central Office man kept close to Hudson, his hand in his pocket. Hudson suspected what the hand grasped.

In five minutes Parsons came through the door from the hall. The assistant and the janitor followed. Hudson could hear the coroner fighting back the reporters.

“No, no, gentlemen. You can’t come in. I will tell you what there is to tell afterward.”

The coroner — aged, wizened, undersized — slipped through and closed and locked the door.

“Now, Mr. — I didn’t get your name.”

“Parsons.”

“What’s all this?”

“I merely want to show you how absurd it is to charge Mr. Hudson with this crime.”

“Inquest is the place for that.”

“It would be too late then,” Parsons answered, “to save the police and the coroner from being grinned at. And suppose I should give you the real murderer?”

“If you have any facts let’s hear them.” The coroner receded.

The assistant sat in the corner opposite Mrs. Arnhem. The janitor leaned against the door. The coroner took Hudson’s desk chair and fumbled irritably with his sleeves.

“But it’s a waste of time,” he said. “No one could have left the room after the murder without Mr. Hudson’s seeing him. So he’s guilty or he knows who is. We need him either way.”

“You want to arrest him,” Parsons answered, “because of a mistaken idea, and for motive all you can dig up is a silly quarrel. I take it for granted you’ve noticed the relative position of the stairs and the elevator. Then you know the murderer could have entered and left the building unobserved; and there are other ways out of that room. For instance, I examined the spring bolt. If it is set in a certain position and the door is closed sharply it will snap into place.”

“Who would know of that?” the coroner asked.

“Well — the janitor. We only have his word for it that the door was bolted at all.”

The janitor straightened.

“See here, I won’t be dragged into this.”

“Very unlikely,” the coroner said.

“Then I will show you a more obvious exit for the murderer. That communicating door was undoubtedly bolted only on one side — the doctor’s. People are careless about these things. If they try such doors at all they are generally content to find them tight without bothering to see if they are locked on both sides. Probably there are other doors in this building in the same case. When these rooms were described to me, instead of thinking the thing impossible except for Mr. Hudson, I pictured a very plausible escape for the murderer. I could see him, either appalled by his crime or occupied by a search of the doctor’s office, losing track of time for twenty minutes until he heard Mr. Hudson and the janitor in the hall. Then I saw him, trapped, looking wildly around for a means of escape. This communicating door offered the only one. Perhaps he had recognized Mr. Hudson’s voice and knew his room was empty. At any rate, he took the single chance, threw back the bolt, and found the door would open. I could fancy him entering here and waiting breathlessly until he heard them break in. Then, knowing they would have eyes for nothing but what they had found, he slipped across the hall, down the stairs, and out of the building unobserved.”

Parsons closely watched the effect of the suggestion on his audience. The coroner accepted it readily enough.

“It’s plausible. I hadn’t thought of it.”

“Against Mr. Hudson,” Parsons went on, “you have left the motive of a quarrel over the same thing that led to the discovery of the body — a noisy telephone.”

“There’s a deeper motive than that,” the Central Office man grumbled.

Parsons grinned at him.

“Pearls! Pearls! We’re all terribly excited about pearls!”

“What do you know about them?” the Central Office man demanded.

But Parsons paid no attention. He spoke to the coroner again.

“Mrs. Arnhem, whom I have brought here, lost a valuable string of pearls day before yesterday somewhere between her house and Doctor Seely’s office. She came and went in her own automobile. As her chauffeur, who is a trusted servant, helped her in and out of the machine, he must have noticed if the pearls had dropped on the sidewalk. So it’s almost certain they were lost in this building — in Doctor Seely’s office, in the hall, or the elevator. Am I not right, Mrs. Arnhem?”

Mrs. Arnhem’s heavy veil trembled an assent.

“Doctor Seely knew of the loss or theft,” Parsons continued. “Suppose the janitor had picked up the necklace? Suppose Doctor Seely had taxed the janitor with having them?”

“See here,” the janitor said huskily, “I never saw—”

Parsons stopped him with a gesture. He studied his face.

“After all, the circumstantial evidence against you is stronger then everything we hold against Mr. Hudson.”

“Put ’em both where we can get ’em,” the Central Office man suggested.

“Brain cells are often more useful than prison cells,” Parsons objected mildly.

The coroner motioned the Central Office man to be quiet.

“Go on, Mr. Hudson. Go on.”

Parsons turned to the assistant.

“Did you tell them Mr. Arnhem, in a bad temper, came to see Doctor Seely this noon?”

“Yes.”

“What have you done about Arnhem, Mr. Coroner?”

“Wired we’d want his testimony at the inquest.”

“Good Lord! I should think so! Then he’s left?”

“They said at his office he expected to make the three-fifteen train.”

“Ample time to do the killing,” Parsons cried.

“Mr. Parsons,” the coroner objected a little testily, “Arnhem had evidently left here before Doctor Seely went to lunch.”

“Of course they never come back,” Parsons smiled.

His grave look returned.

“Mrs. Arnhem, tell me: Did you and your husband quarrel last night? You said you would trust me.”

“Yes.”

The voice from behind the veil was scarcely audible.

“Why did you quarrel?”

The veil shook, but she didn’t answer.

“Remember what I told you,” Parsons warned. “Perhaps you’ll tell us how your husband learned of the loss of the pearls. Did you voluntarily mention it to him?”

“No. He asked me that night where they were.”

“I see. Then he notified the police. Wasn’t the quarrel caused by your own request last night that he call the police off?”

After a long time she murmured, “Yes.”

“Why should that have angered him?”

“The pearls were very valuable. I didn’t realize myself how extraordinary the request was until he asked me to explain it. I — I couldn’t. I could only say that—”

“Yes. What did you say?”

“That Doctor Seely had asked me to make it, and I had agreed to see that it was done.”

“What reason did Doctor Seely give you?”

“I can’t answer that.”

She nodded at the communicating door.

“It wouldn’t be fair to him. He made me promise.”

“We needn’t press the point now, but, gentlemen, surely you can guess. Your nerves are none the best, Mrs. Arnhem. Doctor Seely was treating you for them. Didn’t your nerves run away with you when your husband insisted on the explanation you couldn’t give?”

“Yes. I became angry, a little hysterical.”

“And how did you win your point?”

“I refused to argue. I told him he must do it for my sake, without asking reasons.”

“For your sake!” Parsons repeated triumphantly. “She told her husband the police must be called off for her sake! He jumped at jealous conclusions, but he obeyed. That is significant. He obeyed for her sake. It proves that he misunderstood. Still angry, he left his wife this morning, and came down here to have it out with Seely. Somehow Seely held him off. But we know Arnhem could have reentered the building unseen. We can conceive of his spending twenty minutes in there searching for the pearls which he may have thought Seely held as a present or as blackmail from his wife. We know he could have escaped through this room. And motive? You couldn’t have a better one for a quarrel, with murder at the end. of it. Come, come. Won’t the handcuffs fit Arnhem better than Mr. Hudson?”

“A neat case,” the Central Office man acknowledged. “We’ll wire and have Arnhem taken off the train.”

“Yes, I’d do that,” the coroner agreed.

“There’s only one question,” Parsons said. “Is it worth while causing unnecessary annoyance to another innocent person? Circumstantial evidence! Circumstantial evidence! It does go to one’s head!”

“What are you driving at now?” the Central Office man wanted to know.

“If you had sifted the facts in this affair,” Parsons answered: “if you had even reasoned along the line of least resistance while I was building up the circumstantial cases against the janitor and Mr. Arnhem; if you had drawn the more likely conclusions from what Mrs. Arnhem has told us, you would know that Doctor Seely’s murderer is with us now — in this room. If you must use those handcuffs, put them on this young Judas.”

He sprang forward, grasped the assistant’s elbows, and held him struggling in his chair. “I think you’ll need them,” he added dryly.

“No, no,” the assistant screamed. “I was like his own—”

“Stop that,” Parsons cried. “The case against you is strong enough. Get the handcuffs on him, I say.”

As the Central Office man advanced the assistant got to his feet, scratching and kicking, and fought toward the door. Then the handcuffs snapped into place and Parsons let him go.

“I’ll admit he looks guilty enough,” the coroner said. “But what evidence have you?”

“If his miserable appearance isn’t sufficient conviction,” Parsons answered, “there’s evidence in plenty. The Central Office will easily be able to trace the sale of the pearls to him. You will find that his private life has been leading to something like this. You can learn where he lunched today. He will be unable to account for the hour afterward during which Doctor Seely was killed. This conclusion was almost inevitable. It was reasonable, as our Central Office friend will tell you, to connect the loss of the pearls with the murder; and when Mr. Hudson told me his story the assistant seemed the only person who would fit the case from all angles. The little unwilling information I extracted from Mrs. Arnhem pointed in the same direction. Mr. Hudson told me that Mrs. Arnhem called up Doctor Seely’s office this afternoon shortly after the murder. She said these significant words: ‘Well! Don’t be afraid. You’ve found him? Oh, he did get me into a lot of trouble.’ I couldn’t fancy a murderess saying such words unless she was insane. We traced the call to Mrs. Arnhem. I saw she knew nothing surely about the murder. Of course, then, she had thought she was phoning to the doctor, to whom her words would not have been an enigma. Who would have got her into a lot of trouble just now? The man who had taken her pearls. And with whom would she be most likely to have had that trouble? Her husband. It was equally clear, from what she said over the phone, that Doctor Seely was to see the thief today. Again, her husband was naturally anxious to recover the pearls, yet he had called the police off. It was easy to guess why, and Mrs. Arnhem has verified the guess. Under all the circumstances there is only one sensible reason why Doctor Seely should have made such an extraordinary request and surrounded it with so much secrecy. Just what did Doctor Seely say to you, Mrs. Arnhem? He could have no objection to your telling us now.”

“He said he had found out who had taken the pearls and that the thief had promised to turn them over to him today. The thief was repentant. The doctor had thought it over carefully, and he felt he must save him and give him another chance. So it was important the police should be stopped at all costs. He wouldn’t tell me any more, and he made me promise not to mention even that little to my husband.”

“Exactly,” Parsons said. “The pearls were lost in this building. There is just one person in this building the doctor would be likely to protect — the boy he had seen through the medical school, the boy he treated like a son. But the pearls had been sold — perhaps separately. The thief had promised to return them merely to gain time. His time was up this afternoon, but he had learned from his patron this morning what Mrs. Arnhem has already told us — that Doctor Seely had kept his secret. You understand his temptation. He couldn’t recover the pearls, but if Doctor Seely’s lips were closed he would be safe. The rest is simple. He slipped into the building after luncheon, waited for Doctor Seely, and, convinced there was no other way, struck the blow — a doctor, mind you, who knew its effect, who knew just where to place it. I was sure from the beginning no one but a doctor could have used that lancet with certainty. It was a silent, deadly, cowardly method — a blow struck from behind against the man who had loved him and tried to protect him.”

“Stop! Stop!” the assistant gasped.

“Afterward he shot the bolt of the door and went through the doctor’s papers to see if anything in writing was left to incriminate him. As soon as I glanced at the desk I knew someone familiar with its order had gone through it. He was the only one. I watched him while I talked to you. The strain had told. At first there was guilt and fear in his face. Later, when I led the trail to other people, there was too much relief. And now Doctor Seely himself convicts him through Mrs. Arnhem. Get your detectives after the pearls. There’s evidence enough to send him to the electric chair twice over.”

At the mention of his likely punishment the assistant fell back and closed his eyes.

“No, no,” he pleaded. “He struck me — self-defense!”

“That’s enough,” Parsons snapped.

He smiled. “But the world wags on, and hasn’t Mr. Hudson been disturbed sufficiently this afternoon? He’s doubtless anxious to get back to his work. Mrs. Arnhem, I should be glad to take you home.”

THE OBSCURE MOVE

His friends have never understood why Morgan, one of the best of private detectives, gave up the excitements of the trail for the stupid dignity of office management. Morgan, naturally, didn’t care to talk about it at first. Time is a good carpenter, however, and Morgan feels now that he may safely stand on the record. Here it is:

To begin with, Morgan was an odd one. If you had questioned him about the deductive method he would have laughed good-naturedly. It is equally certain that the mention of psychological analysis would have sent him to the dictionary for a clue. Common-sense and a sense of humor were his own stock in trade. His specialty was the smooth crook who keeps the money of the carelessly avaricious in circulation. Consequently he wore expensive clothing himself. He smoked large, fragrant cigars of Havana. When on the road — which was nine tenths of the time in those days — he frequented only the most luxurious hotels. Furthermore, he was fast acquiring an appearance of rotund prosperity quite out of key with the best-loved traditions of the stealthy profession. Still, as has been said, he was one of the most successful in that business.

Therefore, when the Duncan Investment Company closed its doors it was not surprising that the victims should have carried their resentment from the formal optimism of police headquarters to Morgan’s agency.

Duncan, they explained, had fled with large sums which he had persuaded them to invest through a trifling lure of from fifty to a hundred per cent. They were law-abiding citizens none the less, and they felt it their duty to society to see that Duncan, who had taken so much, should also receive what was judicially owing to him.

Morgan lighted a fresh perfecto.

“Rest easy,” he told his clients. “I’ll place Mr. Duncan in an iron cage where you can poke your fingers at him all you like.”

After the sheep had flocked out, he gazed about his comfortable office, filled his pockets with cigars, locked his cellarette, and set forth on his adventures.

Morgan took the customary precautions in case the confidence man had his heart set on Canada or a trip abroad. But Duncan was too wary to thrust his head in the lion’s jaw through any such first-offense methods. Instead he revealed the attributes of an eel, squirming, dodging, and once or twice nearly slipping across the Mexican border. The stout, good-natured detective, however, seemed to possess a special intuition. Time and again he made Duncan turn on his tracks. Then a very natural thing happened. When the chase got too hot, Duncan, who had been born and raised in Florida, sought ground which would be far more familiar to him than to his pursuer. Yet Morgan, entering Florida, was reminiscent of nothing so much as a fat, grinning cat, approaching the holeless corner into which he has driven his mouse.

When the police channels had run dry, the detective called on that peculiar intuition of his and bothered the lumber, turpentine, and phosphate men until he had located the fugitive in a timber camp far in the wilderness. Morgan was justly proud. Few men, if they had studied Duncan’s record, would have dreamed of looking for him in the vicinity of manual labor.

Morgan’s work had chiefly lain in comfort-furnished cities, but, by rail, by boat, by springless wagon, he bravely followed the trail. One crisp morning he reached his destination — a group of tiny, unpainted cabins clustered about a sawmill and a commissary.

With a look of high achievement lighting his face, Morgan shook the camp superintendent’s hand.

“Peary and Amundsen and Doctor Cook have nothing on me,” he said. “Just remind me to jot down my latitude and longitude so people’ll believe I’ve really been here.”

The superintendent stared.

“And it’s inhabited!” Morgan went on with awe in his voice. “I’ll write a book, and maybe get decorated by the Swiss — or the Swedes, is it? Well, I made my dash on your word.”

“How come you to suspect he was here?” the superintendent asked.

Morgan’s voice fell.

“Perhaps a fortune teller saw it in the cards.”

He laughed.

“What you laughing at?” the superintendent asked suspiciously.

“The idea of Beau Duncan’s living here! Which may be his stylish bungalow?”

“His quarters, you mean? The shanty yonder with the busted window light.”

“And some of the best hotels have stopped paying dividends since he left town. The lobster palaces are all in heliotrope for him. Where’s old Beau Brummel Duncan now? At the golf club or leading a black-face cotillion?”

“Naw,” the superintendent said. “I allow he’s doing an honest day’s work on the skidder. That’s about three miles from here.”

“The president of your company told me you were a deputy sheriff.”

The superintendent proudly displayed his badge.

“Maybe it puts us in the same criminal class with Duncan,” Morgan said, “but we’re paid to work. Let’s make a bluff, anyway.”

The superintendent led two raw-boned little horses from the corral. He considered Morgan’s portly person with a thoughtful eye, then brought a soap box from the commissariat. Morgan mounted to the soap box and thence to the saddle. He settled himself gingerly.

“Don’t you worry if you ever run out of razors,” he advised. “You might take a chance on Dobbin’s backbone. I’ve tried every means of locomotion on this case except aviating, and if Dobbin gallops it will be that or coming in two. I think animals are fond of you. Use your influence. Don’t let this one overdo himself on my account.”

Proceeding cautiously, they followed the lumber tramway until they came to an open space where a donkey engine was noisily loading logs on a string of flat cars. At first Morgan thought the workers about the engine were all negroes, but finally he realized that, except for dirt and grime, one of them was white.

“According to the description that ought to be my affinity,” he said.

They dismounted and left the horses loose, as they had shown no exceptional aggressiveness, to crop the wiry grass. Morgan followed the superintendent in a wide and casual circle toward the donkey engine. The superintendent, as though he were showing off the activities of the clearing to an interested stranger, frequently stopped to point with broad gestures in one direction or another.

“Better cut that stuff,” Morgan warned. “Remember, Duncan isn’t any stage crook. He has real brains.”

Duncan, in fact, had already turned from his work. He leaned on his log hook, staring at the detective. Then he carefully placed the hook on a flat car, thrust his hands in his pockets, and loafed in the direction of the horses. Morgan and the superintendent quickened their pace. Evidently that was sufficient proof for Duncan, for, with a yell, he threw pretense aside, vaulted a log, and broke into a run.

Morgan started heavily after him, but Duncan was younger, slenderer, and much better conditioned. By the time Morgan had reached his horse and had clambered to the saddle in apparent defiance of the laws of gravity, Duncan was already well away on a sandy track which entered the woods at a right angle to the tramway.

When duty beckoned no chances were too great for Morgan. He set his teeth as he urged his horse to a gallop. Swaying from side to side or bobbing up and down with surprised little grunts, he clutched impulsively at the animal’s mane and went in pursuit.

The track wound into the virgin forest. Almost immediately the landscape seemed to conspire lawlessly for the protection of the fugitive. The trees thickened. A dense underbrush sprang up. A growth of saplings cluttered the soil between the trunks. Morgan’s horse was a self-centered brute. In worming his quick way among the saplings, he allowed only for his emaciated body. Consequently, the detective had to look out for his own too-solid person. What with lifting one fat leg or the other to escape bruises and fractures against the eager saplings, and what with ducking beneath overhanging branches to avoid being brushed from the saddle, he must have presented the appearance of a grotesque jumping-jack answering to eccentric strings.

Duncan clearly received this impression, for the last Morgan saw of him the other was going through a black, shallow stream, his hand upraised in a mocking and undignified farewell. And the last Morgan heard of him was laughter — unrestrained, joyous, insulting.

But Morgan plodded ahead, hoping that the hummock would soon give way to open forest land where he might wear the fugitive down. The underbrush, however, closed more riotously about him. There were many stagnant pools which obscured and finally obliterated Duncan’s trail. Morgan brought his horse to a halt. He half fell from his saddle. He looked about him, for once at a loss.

Yellow slash pine, towering with forbidding indifference in all directions, spread their green-plumed tops in a roof so thick that the sun could force its way through only at long intervals. Scrub palmettos, like huge caterpillars, squirmed along the ground and thrust green tentacles upward from their ends. Here and there one reared its body higher than horse and man. Stunted maple and gum fought for life in the perpetual twilight, and in the wettest places thick-boled cypresses raised their ghastly frames, strung with moss that had the appearance of matted hair. The ground was soggy underfoot, and the air was hot, damp, and full of decay.

Morgan whistled.

“This,” he mused, “is somewhat more of a place than that panorama of hades I paid ten cents to see in Coney Island last summer. Besides, it’s several stations farther from Times Square.”

He took off his hat, drew an immaculate linen handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his heated brow. There was no virtue in stubbornness now. Duncan had undoubtedly given him the slip for the present. His best scheme was to return to the lumber camp, where he could arrange to watch the outlets of the forest.

He mounted with considerable difficulty and some strategy, then turned his horse’s head. But the many stagnant pools had confused his own trail as thoroughly as they had Duncan’s. When the sun set he made a wry face and acknowledged he was lost.

The prospect of spending the night in the swamp was very annoying to one of Morgan’s habits. Since his lungs were perfectly sound he had never interested himself in all this talk about outdoor sleeping, but he was ready to back at odds the fact that it couldn’t be done either comfortably or beneficially here. The ground was too wet for one thing, and, for another, it was probably friendly to snakes. He had a wholesome respect for snakes. Yet he was certain his raw-boned horse couldn’t support him all night. He had already examined him several times to see if his back was sagging.

He tumbled to the ground again, tied the horse to a sapling, and walked to a fallen log. After he had thoroughly searched the neighborhood for reptiles, he sat down and munched some of the sweet chocolate he always carried for emergencies. Then he lighted a red-banded Havana. His heart sank at the recollection that his pocket carried only two more of those luxuries. Ah, well, they would last until the next morning, when he would certainly be back at the camp.

While he smoked, the drowsy wood life of the warm day melted into a new note as the melancholy creatures of night awoke. Morgan shivered. He had never cared for the country. The only birds whose music he understood fluttered along Broadway or in and out of the Tombs.

He sprang upright at a rustling in the grass behind the log. Snakes, he was sure! He lamented his lack of experience with country jobs, but he remembered reading somewhere that hunters built fires as a protection against such rural denizens as lions and tigers. It might work with snakes. He gathered a pile of sticks and started a meager blaze. Afterward he lay down, but rest was not easy in the swamp. An owl declaimed its dismal periods nearby; a whippoorwill called disconsolately; a high-pitched, vibrant outcry brought him erect, every nerve alert, his hand on his revolver; some heavy body crashed past; always he imagined furtive rustlings in the grass about him. A case had once taken him to the opera.

He had slept through “Gotterdammerung,” but that was a soporific compared with this.

It began to rain. He saw his fire diminish and die. He fancied the rustlings were closer, and he had no idea what hunters did when their fires went out. He lifted his feet. He hugged his knees. In this unprofessional attitude he spent the remainder of the night without sleep.

When the gray dawn came he looked in vain for his horse. The broken bridle dangled eloquently from the sapling.

Chilled to the bone and wet, Morgan set out, determined to make Duncan pay in some way for this night just past. He imagined the confidence man, at the end of a multiplicity of adventures, completely at his mercy — even on his knees, begging for mercy. What he wouldn’t. say to Duncan then! Or, if Duncan resisted, what he wouldn’t do to Duncan! These pleasant thoughts served to pass the time, but they brought him no nearer the edge of the swamp. , When night fell his weariness overcame his fear of snakes and he slept.

By rare good luck he shot a wild turkey the next morning and managed to broil it over a smoldering fire. Near that fire he stayed all day, for it still rained and he felt rheumatic.

Another night came, and another day of rain. He lost track of time. The feeling that he had spent most of his life in the swamp depressed him. As a matter of fact, it was the fifth day when the storm finally ceased.

Morgan, sitting in the warm, bland sunlight, took stock of himself. The prosperous, well-dressed detective who had entered the swamp had become a mass of discomforts to which rags clung. He was undecided as to whether the rheumatism or his lack of tobacco hurt the more. He had only two cartridges left, and from past experience he knew they might not bring him a single morsel. It behooved him to get on his feet and escape from this hole, rheumatism or no rheumatism.

With the sun shining he could be reasonably sure he was keeping to a straight line. But the swamp was evidently interminable. His lack of success pricked his anger against Duncan. He swore aloud.

“Let me get my hands on that slick article who let me in for this! Just let me see him! Just let me get within striking distance!”

It was about this time that he turned pale and leaned weakly against a tree. He had heard a man shout.

As he opened his lips he wondered if the rain, the cold, the long disuse had affected his voice. Would it respond to his will at this vital moment? It was more than a shout. It was a roar that left his throat. And from somewhere a voice answered, triumphantly, hysterically.

Almost immediately Morgan saw a man running toward him, splashing through pools, waving his arms, crying out incoherently. Morgan straightened and began running, too, in the direction of this figure so like a scarecrow. It was a human being. It meant companionship, conversation, a touch of the world again. Heaven knew he needed all that!

Then Morgan saw that it was Duncan. At the same moment Duncan saw that it was Morgan.

Duncan sprang behind a tree. He thrust his arms out in frantic gestures. Morgan drew his revolver. He walked steadily forward.

“Duncan, my dear, it’s struck twelve. Come on out now and take your medicine.”

“Gently! Gently!” Duncan called. “I give you fair warning!”

Morgan walked faster.

“Fire away. Til take my chances.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Duncan said. “I haven’t a gun. Do you think I would harm a hair of your head if I had? I have a better weapon than that. Come any closer and I’ll run like the devil.”

Morgan stopped. Vengeance was in his heart, but he permitted himself a glimpse at the reverse of the picture.

“Duncan! For God’s sake, don’t do that!”

“Then you’ll listen to reason.”

Morgan smiled again.

“It’s a bluff, Duncan. Maybe you can run like Bryan, but you haven’t the nerve.”

“Be reasonable or you’ll see,” Duncan threatened. “I’m a human being. So are you, I take it.”

Morgan’s smile broadened.

“Don’t be foolish with other people’s money and bet on it.”

Duncan pulled at the torn fringe of his shirt sleeves. He shifted his feet.

“Suppose I surrendered?” he asked. “Where would you find a policeman or a patrol wagon? Could you get me out of here?”

“I can’t seem to find a taxi for myself,” Morgan replied. “But I’ll land you in the cooler yet.”

“If we live,” Duncan said, “and nothing happens, and all goes well, and deus volens.”

“Don’t swear in a foreign tongue,” Morgan answered.

“Let’s confer on the main problem,” Duncan proposed. “If you don’t agree I’ll run and leave you alone. I don’t believe you’re very good company for yourself just now.”

“As far as that’s concerned,” Morgan grinned, “if I were you I’d hate myself by this time.”

“So I do, and I want a truce,” Duncan blurted out.

Morgan sighed.

“All right,” he agreed. “I’ll mark this place, and when we’re through you can go play Indian again.”

Duncan stepped out. His hair was heavy and tangled. The thick black growth on his face made his eyes seem very large, white, and hungry.

“If I had had you along,” Morgan said, “I needn’t have been afraid of the snakes.”

Duncan came straight to him and put his hand on his shoulder.

“You don’t know how good it is to see you, Morgan. I’ve been denied even the companionship of my horse. He got bogged.”

Morgan’s voice was a little husky as he asked:

“Say, you don’t happen to have a cigar hidden away on your clothes?”

“No, but I retain the essentials.”

He produced a large sack of cheap flake tobacco and a package of cigarette papers.

“I never smoked those puff rolls,” Morgan said disappointedly. “I couldn’t roll one of them if it would get me out of this swamp.”

“Permit me to roll it for you,” Duncan offered.

And he did it, deftly and lovingly, and passed it to the detective. Then he rolled one for himself, and they sat on a log, shoulders touching, while they smoked contentedly.

“So you’re Bob Morgan!” Duncan said. “The famous Morgan! I must confess your present state isn’t up to your reputation. You might at least have brought a few necessities in with you.”

Morgan glanced at the soiled, tattered figure.

“Beau,” he said, “believe me, you’re not up to it. If you come any more of that easy money talk on me I’ll scream for help.”

They both spoke in soft, silky, wondering voices, as though admiring the unaccustomed sounds; and at Morgan’s words they burst into high-pitched laughter that was so terrifying in their ears it ceased immediately.

“Glad to meet you, Duncan,” Morgan said gruffly. “But I don’t want to tap any wires or buy any green goods. Let that be understood.”

Duncan shook his head.

“Morgan,” he announced, “there is something radically wrong with us.”

“Better patent that discovery.”

Duncan shook his head again.

“No,” he continued. “We’re not living up to tradition.”

“I’m scarcely living at all,” Morgan said.

“For a detective and a fugitive,” Duncan declared, “we show extraordinary good sense. Romantically speaking, we should be at each other’s throats.”

“Cut it, and prepare me another whiff of joy.”

But Duncan good-humoredly refused to manufacture any more cigarettes until Morgan had consented to some working arrangement.

The decision to join forces until they had found a way out of the swamp, if the thing could be done, was a matter of a moment. That the chase should recommence once they were out was also agreed to at once. They divided only on the start the detective should give the criminal. Morgan offered half an hour, and Duncan demanded half a day. Morgan wanted to smoke. Duncan was hungry. Morgan produced from his pocket a few small bones to which tiny shreds of meat still clung, and these he kept prominently in view while the other carelessly dangled the paper and the tobacco bag in his fingers. They began to compromise.

By the time they had settled on an hour and a half the sun was down. They made camp. Duncan proved himself more adept than Morgan at building fires. When he had a pile of brushwood blazing he went in search of certain edible roots on which he had largely subsisted for the last few days. He brought some of these back and shared them with the detective.

The gobbling of wild turkeys awoke them at dawn, and they crept to a clump of palmettos at the foot of a dead cypress. As the sky lightened behind the gibbet-like branches, a row of birds appeared in silhouette. Morgan rested his arm against a palmetto trunk, aimed, and brought one of the birds down.

Duncan patted him on the back.

“You would have made a fortune conducting a shooting gallery, Morgan.”

“Yeh. And if I live to tell about that shot up north, Til feel like a liar and everybody’ll know I’m one.”

The turkey solved the food problem for the present, and, as long as the sun shone, they knew their chances for speedy escape were good. But the clouds turned black again in the afternoon, and a dismal downpour commenced.

“Doesn’t it do anything but rain in this hole?” Morgan grieved.

“We are below the snow line,” Duncan explained. “I suggest camping here before we start walking in circles.”

They made a fire and by the last daylight gathered a heap of wood.

Duncan regretted their lack of a pack of cards to pass the time. This gave Morgan a thought.

“You don’t happen by any crazy chance to play chess, Duncan?”

“I know something more than the moves.”

“Three cheers,” Morgan cried.

He felt in his pocket and brought forth a small pocket chess board.

“When I’m traveling alone I often irritate myself working problems on this. I was using it on the train only a thousand years or so ago.”

They moved closer to the fire, tossed for sides, arranged the markers, and in a few minutes their minds were far away from the swamp and their plight. They were well matched. Morgan, who had the white pieces, opened with a brilliant, puzzling attack on the king’s side; but Duncan, with confidence and forethought, combined his forces in a flawless defense. As they recognized each other’s ability they took more time for their moves. Morgan would lean forward, pursing his lips, studious lines showing on his forehead, while Duncan, eyes intent on the board, would roll a couple of cigarettes, pass one to his opponent, reach out his hand to the fire, and offer a burning brand for a light. It was very exciting. Perhaps they saw in the game a symbol of their relations — detective against criminal, and both most excellent players. It was very late when Morgan unmasked his rooks and trapped Duncan’s knight on the king’s line.

Duncan leaned back.

“You play a strong game, Morgan.”

The detective was pleased by his victory.

“You’re pretty good practice for me, Beau,” he conceded. “But you ought to have left that pawn of mine alone. It was a gold brick. Oh! Excuse me for talking shop. Hello! It’s still raining.”

The storm ceased the next day for only a few minutes. They did not travel far, because Morgan complained of what he called his growing pains.

That night they played chess again. Duncan won.

“A game apiece,” Morgan said. “Tomorrow night’ll be the rubber. Waterloo won’t be jack stones to what I’ll do to you.”

But Morgan was in no condition to walk the next day. He lay by the smoldering fire, inclined to complain.

“Another twenty-four hours and you’ll be all right,” Duncan said cheerily.

“I’ll never be all right again,” Morgan lamented.

Duncan dried enough sticks and moss at the fire to make a crude bed. He lifted Morgan from the wet ground, then prepared a soup of turkey bones and roots in the detective’s drinking cup. Morgan drank it with relish, but his ailments occupied his mind to the exclusion of chess. So Duncan sat at his side, watching the fire and trying to keep up his spirits.

The last clouds sailed away in the morning. The cold, wet weather was routed. But Morgan’s vocabulary was not sufficiently large to let him walk far at a time. After several attempts he gave up and lay down, groaning.

“Poor old Morgan,” Duncan said, leaning sympathetically over him.

“Go to the corner and send in an ambulance call,” Morgan answered, with a grimace. “Then bid me farewell before it begins to pour again. If you hang around for me we’ll both die of water on the brain.”

Duncan patted his shoulder.

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t get delirious — Bob.”

For some time Morgan frowned at the fire.

“Beau,” he said at last, “I mean it. I haven’t got the build for a millstone. Besides, I can’t be under obligations. I can’t let pleasure interfere with business. If you get out do me just two favors. Send a posse in for me and wire the office to get another man after you as quick as lightning.”

“My position is very simple,” Duncan answered. “I wouldn’t leave you if you offered me title to all the real estate in this swamp.”

Morgan grinned.

“Since you’re talking shop, Beau, you may be a Southern cavalier and me a Yankee born, but I never took fifty per cent., and I see ten suckers in my business any day where you see one.”

“No use trying to get me mad, Bobbie. I’m too selfish to leave you and face this cheerless world alone.”

“Well, just remember, Beau, I’ll get you. As sure as the whole world’s gone to grass and water, Til get you.”

“I admire ambition,” Duncan said. “I regret that I can not encourage it. But the problem need not trouble us at present. Let me make you comfortable, then I’ll roll you another cigarette.”

He carried Morgan to a sunny spot, and gave his limbs a thorough, hard massage. Afterward the detective struggled up and began to walk in a crouching position. Duncan cut a stout stick for him. He took his arm and helped him all he could.

“You’re sure full of sand, Bob,” he said.

Without answering, Morgan walked on. Now and then he would pause, but always, after a few minutes’ rest, he would start forward again. By and by his figure crouched less and his steps grew longer.

He was exhausted when they made camp, but the worst of his pains had left him, and it was he who proposed after supper that they play the rubber game.

“I’m an awful object to think about,” he explained. “Men have gone nutty over less. I’ve got to get my mind off myself. Besides, I’d like to know who’s the better man. If I hadn’t lost sight of one thing last time there wouldn’t have been anything to it.”

The game was slow. Each was determined to win, so each took as long as he pleased for his moves. Morgan, when he could scarcely keep his eyes open, suggested that they postpone the finish until the next evening.

“I guess I’m trained a little fine,” he said. “I don’t want to make a slip.”

“It looks like a draw to me,” Duncan answered.

“It looked as though I’d get out of this swamp the day I came in, but did I? Study the board. I can see more than one way to slip over a knock-out.”

Duncan laughed.

“I’m afraid you’ll never win this game.”

“I’ve got to and I will,” Morgan said. “I’ll bet you three pine trees and a case of swamp water — magnums!”

He folded the board, returned it to his pocket, lay down, and was fast asleep in a twinkling.

They were off by the time the sun had slipped its first long shadows through the swamp. Morgan was convalescent. He walked steadily onward, resting one hand on Duncan’s shoulder. They talked of the unfinished game which had assumed colossal proportions in their dwarfed minds. But that rubber was destined never to be finished. It was a little after noon when Morgan said in a hushed voice:

“Beau, wait a minute.”

“What’s the matter?” Duncan whispered as he stopped.

“This darned swamp’s thinning.”

“It had occurred to me,” Duncan agreed. “I was afraid to speak of it.”

“Look at those palmetto clumps,” Morgan went on excitedly. “They’re not as high or as thick. There isn’t as much water. Beau, old boy, I believe we’re going to get out!”

“There’s certainly higher ground ahead,” Duncan answered. “Come on, Bobbie.”

“Beau! Think of the food and the cigars!”

“Oh, you won’t have any taste for decent tobacco,” Duncan said carelessly.

Morgan made a wry face and rubbed his knee.

“And this rich food isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Rich food for the idle rich!”

They struggled through the last of the underbrush and stepped into the open pine forest. There was hard soil or sand beneath their feet. About them the sun laid warm, caressing fingers of light. Insects droned, and birds sang joyously. Before long they came to trees scarred by turpentiners, and later to a wood road.

They paused and stood awkwardly for a few minutes without words. The road — narrow, twisting, and overgrown — screamed of civilization, of populous cities, and of marts noisy with commerce.

“We’ve discovered America,” Morgan said.

“Yes,” replied Duncan. In a moment he added: “I believe you agreed to give me an hour and a half. Therefore, I will resume my travels.”

Morgan looked at him with an air of childish wonder.

“So I did,” he answered dreamily — “an hour and a half!”

He pulled his wits together.

“Cross my heart, I’ll stay where I am for an hour and a half after I lose sight of you.”

“Quite satisfactory,” Duncan said.

“Before you go,” Morgan began uncomfortably, “I’d like to hand you a few words of thanks on this auspicious occasion.”

“There’s no question of thanks,” Duncan protested politely. “Undoubtedly we were mutually helpful.”

Morgan extended his hand.

“Beau, good-bye.”

He essayed a little humor.

“That is — so long. It won’t be many days before we meet again. I am looking forward to it.”

Duncan took the detective’s hand.

“This is an eternal farewell. In some ways I regret it. Good-bye, Bob. You’re sure you can navigate until you come to a house?”

“Sure. I’ll steer into the first dry dock I see and have them light a fire under me.”

Their hands dropped. Duncan hesitated. Finally he put his fingers in his pocket, pulled out tobacco and paper, and rolled a cigarette. He handed it to Morgan, who mechanically placed it between his lips. Duncan divided the tobacco. He gave a part of it with several papers to Morgan. Then he turned and strode off through the woods.

Morgan sat down. He watched the tall, gaunt figure about which ragged clothing flapped until it was out of sight. Very soon he became restless. He took the paper and tobacco and tried to make a cigarette, but his fingers were clumsy. The flakes spilled, and the thin, slippery paper tore. As his desire to smoke even this distasteful makeshift increased, the picture of Duncan’s deft manipulation came into his fancy and lingered.

He opened the chess board to study the unfinished game. His line of attack was perfectly clear in his mind now. As move by move its beauties unfolded he chuckled quietly. Duncan was helpless. Suddenly his chuckling ceased. There was one obscure move that Duncan might have offered in reply. It would have spoiled the entire combination. Yet it was the advancing of a pawn on the extreme flank, and its immediate significance appeared of minor importance.

“Duncan wasn’t wise to it,” he told himself.

And after a moment:

“Could Duncan have been hep?”

He puzzled over the board for a long time. He arose and paced back and forth.

“He might have forced a draw with that move,” he mused, “or even a winning attack. I’ve got to know what he would have done. Til ask him when I nab him.”

He took out his watch. Duncan had been gone two hours.

Morgan didn’t follow the route Duncan had taken. The memory of his lonely wanderings kept him in the road which brought him before dark to a turpentine camp. He accepted the foreman’s hospitality for the night.

He set out early the next morning with the foreman’s horse and buggy which he was to send back from the nearest railroad station, five hours away. The road was long and monotonous, but he sat at his ease, smoking bad cigars which he had bought at the camp, and singing snatches of popular songs in praise of his release from muscular effort.

His thoughts of Duncan centered about the uncompleted game of chess. While he was confident that Duncan’s capture was only a matter of time, he refused to bother his head with definite plans until he reached the railroad. These few hours, this long journey, were a vacation from mental and physical labor — an excursion in contentment.

The appearance of the country had not altered when the shriek of a locomotive whistle warned him his ride was nearly ended. He touched the whip to his horse for the first time and was soon on the right of way. He saw the glittering lines of steel, a rough section house, and a water tank; but in front of him the woods were as thick as those he had just left. He pulled up, thoroughly puzzled, for he had expected to find a station at this crossing.

Suddenly his curiosity died. His indolent figure stiffened. His hand went to his coat pocket where the revolver with its single remaining cartridge lay. A filthy man in rags was trying to conceal himself behind one of the insufficient tank supports.

Morgan stepped from the buggy, leveling his revolver.

“Duncan,” he said, “I warned you it was  ‘so long.’”

“It’s Morgan, of all the world,” Duncan answered, but his smile was sickly. “If that train had only stopped Pd have missed this pleasant reunion.”

“You ought to be grateful. Nice people are waiting to weep on your neck up North. Come on out and let’s hurry home.”

“Not so fast, Morgan. I can easily get away from you. But I confess to a strong desire to finish that game. Suppose for that purpose we arrange another truce.”

“We’ll finish it on the train,” Morgan answered with a grin. “I’ve got you beaten so many ways I blush to think of it.”

“Have you?” Duncan asked slyly. “How about that pawn? I win!”

Morgan’s mouth opened. His revolver arm dropped.

“You never saw that—”

Duncan sprang from behind his post, and bounded across the right of way for the woods.

Morgan raised his arm again.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

But Duncan ran the faster. The muzzle of Morgan’s revolver was pointed at the fugitive’s back. He had brought down wild turkeys. The result was certain.

Then his arm swayed gently to one side. The movement seemed almost involuntary. He pulled the trigger. He sped his last cartridge into the heart of an innocent pine tree.

He thrust the gun in his pocket and started in pursuit. When he reached the edge of the woods Duncan had disappeared. Morgan sank to the ground. He rubbed his knees ruefully.

He shook his head. He shrugged his shoulders. Sitting there in a heap he lighted one of his vile cigars.

“That blasted rheumatism!” he moaned. “That blasted rheumatism! It must have jumped to my gun arm. I’ll have to report sick. I’m not worth a hill of beans at this business as I am. I wonder if I’ve got anything besides rheumatism.”

As he blew the stinging smoke from his nostrils he smiled reminiscently.