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The Abandoned Room

by Wadsworth Camp · English · Gutenberg #10869 · 460,177 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Abandoned Room

Author: Wadsworth Camp


        
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #10869]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10869

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ABANDONED ROOM ***

                           THE ABANDONED ROOM

                            A Mystery Story

                           BY WADSWORTH CAMP

        Author of "The House of Fear," "War's Dark Frame," etc.

                                 1917




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

  I. KATHERINE HEARS THE SLY STEP OF DEATH AT THE CEDARS

 II. THE CASE AGAINST BOBBY

III. HOWELLS DELIVERS HIMSELF TO THE ABANDONED ROOM

 IV. A STRANGE LIGHT APPEARS AT THE DESERTED HOUSE

  V. THE CRYING THROUGH THE WOODS

 VI. THE ONE WHO CREPT IN THE PRIVATE STAIRCASE

VII. THE AMAZING MEETING IN THE SHADOWS OF THE OLD COURTYARD

VII. WHAT HAPPENED AT THE GRAVE

 IX. BOBBY'S VIGIL IN THE ABANDONED ROOM

  X. THE CEDARS IS LEFT TO ITS SHADOWS




THE ABANDONED ROOM




CHAPTER I

KATHERINE HEARS THE SLY STEP OF DEATH AT THE CEDARS


The night of his grandfather's mysterious death at the Cedars, Bobby
Blackburn was, at least until midnight, in New York. He was held there by
the unhealthy habits and companionships which recently had angered his
grandfather to the point of threatening a disciplinary change in his
will. As a consequence he drifted into that strange adventure which later
was to surround him with dark shadows and overwhelming doubts.

Before following Bobby through his black experience, however, it is
better to know what happened at the Cedars where his cousin, Katherine
Perrine was, except for the servants, alone with old Silas Blackburn who
seemed apprehensive of some sly approach of disaster.

At twenty Katherine was too young, too light-hearted for this care of her
uncle in which she had persisted as an antidote for Bobby's shortcomings.
She was never in harmony with the mouldy house or its surroundings,
bleak, deserted, unfriendly to content.

Bobby and she had frequently urged the old man to give it up, to move, as
it were, into the light. He had always answered angrily that his
ancestors had lived there since before the Revolution, and that what had
been good enough for them was good enough for him. So that night
Katherine had to hear alone the sly stalking of death in the house. She
told it all to Bobby the next day--what happened, her emotions, the
impression made on her by the people who came when it was too late to
save Silas Blackburn.

She said, then, that the old man had behaved oddly for several days, as
if he were afraid. That night he ate practically no dinner. He couldn't
keep still. He wandered from room to room, his tired eyes apparently
seeking. Several times she spoke to him.

"What is the matter, Uncle? What worries you?"

He grumbled unintelligibly or failed to answer at all.

She went into the library and tried to read, but the late fall wind
swirled mournfully about the house and beat down the chimney, causing the
fire to cast disturbing shadows across the walls. Her loneliness, and her
nervousness, grew sharper. The restless, shuffling footsteps stimulated
her imagination. Perhaps a mental breakdown was responsible for this
alteration. She was tempted to ring for Jenkins, the butler, to share
her vigil; or for one of the two women servants, now far at the back of
the house.

"And Bobby," she said to herself, "or somebody will have to come out here
to-morrow to help."

But Silas Blackburn shuffled in just then, and she was a trifle ashamed
as she studied him standing with his back to the fire, glaring around the
room, fumbling with hands that shook in his pocket for his pipe and some
loose tobacco. It was unjust to be afraid of him. There was no question.
The man himself was afraid--terribly afraid.

His fingers trembled so much that he had difficulty lighting his pipe.
His heavy brows, gray like his beard, contracted in a frown. His voice
quavered unexpectedly. He spoke of his grandson:

"Bobby! Damned waster! God knows what he'll do next."

"He's young, Uncle Silas, and too popular."

He brushed aside her customary defence. As he continued speaking she
noticed that always his voice shook as his fingers shook, as his stooped
shoulders jerked spasmodically.

"I ordered Mr. Robert here to-night. Not a word from him. I'd made up my
mind anyway. My lawyer's coming in the morning. My money goes to the
Bedford Foundation--all except a little annuity for you, Katy. It's hard
on you, but I've got no faith left in my flesh and blood."

His voice choked with a sentiment a little repulsive in view of his
ruthless nature, his unbending egotism.

"It's sad, Katy, to grow old with nobody caring for you except to covet
your money."

She arose and went close to him. He drew back, startled.

"You're not fair, Uncle."

With an unexpected movement, nearly savage, he pushed her aside and
started for the door.

"Uncle!" she cried. "Tell me! You must tell me! What makes you afraid?"

He turned at the door. He didn't answer. She laughed feverishly.

"It--it's not Bobby you're afraid of?"

"You and Bobby," he grumbled, "are thicker than thieves."

She shook her head.

"Bobby and I," she said wistfully, "aren't very good friends, largely
because of this life he's leading."

He went on out of the room, mumbling again incoherently.

She resumed her vigil, unable to read because of her misgivings, staring
at the fire, starting at a harsher gust of wind or any unaccustomed
sound. And for a long time there beat against her brain the shuffling,
searching tread of her uncle. Its cessation about eleven o'clock
increased her uneasiness. He had been so afraid! Suppose already the
thing he had feared had overtaken him? She listened intently. Even then
she seemed to sense the soundless footsteps of disaster straying in the
decayed house, and searching, too.

A morbid desire to satisfy herself that her uncle's silence meant
nothing evil drove her upstairs. She stood in the square main hall at the
head of the stairs, listening. Her uncle's bedroom door lay straight
ahead. To her right and left narrow corridors led to the wings. Her room
and Bobby's and a spare room were in the right-hand wing. The opposite
corridor was seldom used, for the left-hand wing was the oldest portion
of the house, and in the march of years too many legends had gathered
about it. The large bedroom was there with its private hall beyond, and a
narrow, enclosed staircase, descending to the library. Originally it had
been the custom for the head of the family to use that room. Its ancient
furniture still faded within stained walls. For many years no one had
slept in it, because it had sheltered too much suffering, because it had
witnessed the reluctant spiritual departure of too many Blackburns.

Katherine shrank a little from the black entrance of the corridor, but
her anxiety centred on the door ahead. She was about to call when a
stirring beyond it momentarily reassured her.

The door opened and her uncle stepped out. He wore an untidy
dressing-gown. His hair was disordered. His face appeared grayer and more
haggard than it had downstairs. A lighted candle shook in his right hand.

"What are you doing up here, Katy?" he quavered.

She broke down before the picture of his increased fear. He shuffled
closer.

"What you crying for, Katy?"

She controlled herself. She begged him for an answer to her doubts.

"You make me afraid."

He laughed scornfully.

"You! What you got to be afraid of?"

"I'm afraid because you are," she urged. "You've got to tell me. I'm all
alone. I can't stand it. What are you afraid of?"

He didn't answer. He shuffled on toward the disused wing. Her hand
tightened on the banister.

"Where are you going?" she whispered.

He turned at the entrance to the corridor.

"I am going to the old bedroom."

"Why? Why?" she asked hysterically. "You can't sleep there. The bed isn't
even made."

He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper:

"Don't you mention I've gone there. If you want to know, I am afraid. I'm
afraid to sleep in my own room any longer."

She nodded.

"And you don't think they'd look for you there. What is it? Tell me what
it is. Why don't you send for some one--a man?"

"Leave me alone," he mumbled. "Nothing for you to be worried about,
except Bobby."

"Yes, there is," she cried. "Yes, there is."

He paid no attention to her fright. He entered the corridor. She heard
him shuffling between its narrow walls. She saw his candle disappear in
its gloomy reaches.

She ran to her own room and locked the door. She hurried to the window
and leaned out, her body shaking, her teeth chattering as if from a
sudden chill. The quiet, assured tread of disaster came nearer.

The two wings, stretching at right angles from the main building, formed
a narrow court. Clouds harrying the moon failed quite to destroy its
power, so that she could see, across the court, the facade of the old
wing and the two windows of the large room through whose curtains a
spectral glow was diffused. She heard one of the windows opened with a
grating noise. The court was a sounding board. It carried to her even the
shuffling of the old man's feet as he must have approached the bed. The
glow of his candle vanished. She heard a rustling as if he had stretched
himself on the bed, a sound like a long-drawn sigh.

She tried to tell herself there was no danger--that these peculiar
actions sprang from the old man's fancy--but the house, her surroundings,
her loneliness, contradicted her. To her over-acute senses the thought of
Blackburn in that room, so often consecrated to the formula of death,
suggested a special and unaccountable menace. Under such a strain the
supernatural assumed vague and singular shapes.

She slept for only a little while. Then she lay awake, listening with a
growing expectancy for some message to slip across the court. The moon
had ceased struggling. The wind cried. The baying of a dog echoed
mournfully from a great distance. It was like a remote alarm bell which
vibrates too perfectly, whose resonance is too prolonged.

She sat upright. She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating
insufferably, felt her way to the window. From the wing opposite the
message had come--a soft, shrouded sound, another long-drawn sigh.

She tried to call across the court. At first no response came from her
tight throat. When it did at last, her voice was unfamiliar in her own
ears, the voice of one who has to know a thing but shrinks from asking.

"Uncle!"

The wind mocked her.

"It is nothing," she told herself, "nothing."

But her vigil had been too long, her loneliness too complete. Her earlier
impression of the presence of death in the decaying house tightened its
hold. She had to assure herself that Silas Blackburn slept untroubled.
The thing she had heard was peculiar, and he hadn't answered across the
court. The dark, empty corridors at first were an impassable barrier, but
while she put on her slippers and her dressing-gown she strengthened her
courage. There was a bell rope in the upper hall. She might get Jenkins.

When she stood in the main hall she hesitated. It would probably be a
long time, provided he heard at all, before Jenkins could answer her. Her
candle outlined the entrance to the musty corridor. Just a few running
steps down there, a quick rap at the door, and, perhaps, in an instant
her uncle's voice, and the blessed power to return to her room and sleep!

While her fear grew she called on her pride to let her accomplish that
brief, abhorrent journey.

Then for the first time a different doubt came to her. As she waited
alone in this disturbing nocturnal intimacy of an old house, she shrank
from no thought of human intrusion, and she wondered if her uncle had
been afraid of that, too, of the sort of thing that might lurk in the
ancient wing with its recollections of birth and suffering and death. But
he had gone there as an escape. Surely he had been afraid of men. It
shamed her that, in spite of that, her fear defined itself ever more
clearly as something indefinable. With a passionate determination to
strangle such thoughts she held her breath. She tried to close her mind.
She entered the corridor. She ran its length. She knocked at the locked
door of the old bedroom. She shrank as the echoes rattled from the dingy
walls where her candle cast strange reflections. There was no other
answer. A sense of an intolerable companionship made her want to cry out
for brilliant light, for help. She screamed.

"Uncle Silas! Uncle Silas!"

Through the silence that crushed her voice she became aware finally of
the accomplishment of its mission by death in this house. And she fled
into the main hall. She jerked at the bell rope. The contact steadied
her, stimulated her to reason. One slender hope remained. The
oppressive bedroom might have driven Silas Blackburn through the
private hall and down the enclosed staircase. Perhaps he slept on the
lounge in the library.

She stumbled down, hoping to meet Jenkins. She crossed the hall and the
dining room and entered the library. She bent over the lounge. It was
empty. Her candle was reflected in the face of the clock on the mantel.
Its hands pointed to half-past two.

She pulled at the bell cord by the fireplace. Why didn't the butler come?
Alone she couldn't climb the enclosed staircase to try the other door. It
seemed impossible to her that she should wait another instant alone--

The butler, as old and as gray as Silas Blackburn, faltered in. He
started back when he saw her.

"My God, Miss Katherine! What's the matter? You look like death."

"There's death," she said.

She indicated the door of the enclosed staircase. She led the way with
the candle. The panelled, narrow hall was empty. That door, too, was
locked and the key, she knew, must be on the inside.

"Who--who is it?" Jenkins asked. "Who would be in that room? Has Mr.
Bobby come back?"

She descended to the library before answering. She put the candle down
and spread her hands.

"It's happened, Jenkins--whatever he feared."

"Not Mr. Silas?"

"We have to break in," she said with a shiver. "Get a hammer, a chisel,
whatever is necessary."

"But if there's anything wrong," the butler objected, "if anybody's been
there, the other door must be open."

She shook her head. Those two first of all faced that extraordinary
puzzle. How had the murderer entered and left the room with both doors
locked on the inside, with the windows too high for use? They went to the
upper story. She urged the butler into the sombre corridor.

"We have to know," she whispered, "what's happened beyond those
locked doors."

She still vibrated to the feeling of unconformable forces in the old
house. Jenkins, she saw, responded to the same superstitious misgivings.
He inserted the chisel with maladroit hands. He forced the lock back and
opened the door. Dust arose from the long-disused room, flecking the
yellow candle flame. They hesitated on the threshold. They forced
themselves to enter. Then they looked at each other and smiled with
relief, for Silas Blackburn, in his dressing-gown, lay on the bed, his
placid, unmarked face upturned, as if sleeping.

"Why, miss," Jenkins gasped. "He's all right."

Almost with confidence Katherine walked to the bed.

"Uncle Silas--" she began, and touched his hand.

She drew back until the wall supported her. Jenkins must have read
everything in her face, for he whimpered:

"But he looks all right. He can't be--"

"Cold--already! If I hadn't touched--"

The horror of the thing descended upon her, stifling thought.
Automatically she left the room and told Jenkins what to do. After he had
telephoned police headquarters in the county seat and had summoned Doctor
Groom, a country physician, she sat without words, huddled over the
library fire.

The detective, a competent man named Howells, and Doctor Groom arrived at
about the same time. The detective made Katherine accompany them upstairs
while he questioned her. In the absence of the coroner he wouldn't let
the doctor touch the body.

"I must repair this lock," he said, "the first thing, so nothing can be
disturbed."

Doctor Groom, a grim and dark man, had grown silent on entering the room.
For a long time he stared at the body in the candle light, making as much
of an examination as he could, evidently, without physical contact.

"Why did he ever come here to sleep?" he asked in his rumbling bass
voice. "Nasty room! Unhealthy room! Ten to one you're a formality,
policeman. Coroner's a formality."

He sneered a little.

"I daresay he died what the hard-headed world will call a natural death.
Wonder what the coroner'll say."

The detective didn't answer. He shot rapid, uneasy glances about the room
in which a single candle burned. After a time he said with an accent of
complete conviction:

"That man was murdered."

Perhaps the doctor's significant words, added to her earlier dread of the
abnormal, made Katherine read in the detective's manner an apprehension
of conditions unfamiliar to the brutal routine of his profession. Her
glances were restless, too. She had a feeling that from the shadowed
corners of the faded, musty room invisible faces mocked the man's
stubbornness.

All this she recited to Bobby when, under extraordinary circumstances
neither of them could have foreseen, he arrived at the Cedars many
hours later.

Of the earlier portion of the night of his grandfather's death Bobby
retained a minute recollection. The remainder was like a dim, appalling
nightmare whose impulse remains hidden.

When he went to his apartment to dress for dinner he found the letter of
which Silas Blackburn had spoken to Katherine. It mentioned the change in
the will as an approaching fact nothing could alter. Bobby fancied that
the old man merely craved the satisfaction of terrorizing him, of
casting him out with all the ugly words at his command. Still a good deal
more than a million isn't to be relinquished lightly as long as a chance
remains. Bobby had an engagement for dinner. He would think the situation
over until after dinner, then he might go.

It was, perhaps, unfortunate that at his club he met friends who drew him
in a corner and offered him too many cocktails. As he drank his anger
grew, and it wasn't all against his grandfather. He asked himself why
during the last few months he had avoided the Cedars, why he had drifted
into too vivid a life in New York. It increased his anger that he
hesitated to give himself a frank answer. But always at such moments it
was Katherine rather than his grandfather who entered his mind. He had
cared too much for her, and lately, beyond question, the bond of their
affection had weakened.

He raised his glass and drank. He set the glass down quickly as if he
would have liked to hide it. A big man, clear-eyed and handsome, walked
into the room and came straight to the little group in the corner. Bobby
tried to carry it off.

"'Lo, Hartley, old preacher. You fellows all know Hartley Graham? Sit
down. We're going to have a little cocktail."

Graham looked at the glasses, shaking his head.

"If you've time, Bobby, I'd like a word with you."

"No preaching," Bobby bargained. "It isn't Sunday."

Graham laughed pleasantly.

"It's about money. That talks any day."

Bobby edged a way out and followed Graham to an unoccupied room. There
the big man turned on him.

"See here, Bobby! When are you going out to the Cedars?"

Bobby flushed.

"You're a dear friend, Hartley, and I've always loved you, but I'm in no
mood for preaching tonight. Besides, I've got my own life to lead"--he
glanced away--"my own reasons for leading it."

"I'm not going to preach," Graham answered seriously, "although it's
obvious you're raising the devil with your life. I wanted to tell you
that I've had a note from Katherine to-day. She says your grandfather's
threats are taking too much form; that the new will's bound to come
unless you do something. She cares too much for you, Bobby, to see you
throw everything away. She's asked me to persuade you to go out."

"Why didn't she write to me?"

"Have you been very friendly with Katherine lately? And that's not
fair. You're both without parents. You owe Katherine something on
that account."

Bobby didn't answer, because it was clear that while Katherine's
affection for him had weakened, her friendship for Graham had grown too
fast. Looking at the other he didn't wonder.

"There's another thing," Graham was saying. "The gloomy old Cedars has
got on Katherine's nerves, and she says there's been a change in the old
man the last few days--wanders around as if he were afraid of something."

Bobby laughed outright.

"Him afraid of something! It's always been his system to make everybody
and everything afraid of him. But you're right about Katherine. We have
always depended on each other. I think I'll go out after dinner."

"Then come have a bite with me," Graham urged. "I'll see you off
afterward. If you catch the eight-thirty you ought to be out there before
half-past ten."

Bobby shook his head.

"An engagement for dinner, Hartley. I'm expecting Carlos Paredes to pick
me up here any minute."

Graham's disapproval was belligerent.

"Why, in the name of heaven, Bobby, do you run around with that damned
Panamanian? Steer him off to-night. I've argued with you before. It's
unpleasant, I know, but the man carries every mark of crookedness."

"Easy with my friends, Hartley! You don't understand Carlos. He's good
fun when you know him--awfully good fun."

"So," Graham said, "is this sort of thing. Too many cocktails, too much
wine. Paredes has the same pleasant, dangerous quality."

A club servant entered.

"In the reception room, Mr. Blackburn."

Bobby took the card, tore it into little bits, and dropped them one by
one into the waste-paper basket.

"Tell him I'll be right out." He turned to Graham.

"Sorry you don't like my playmates. I'll probably run out after dinner
and let the old man terrorize me as a cure for his own fear. Pleasant
prospect! So long."

Graham caught at his arm.

"I'm sorry. Can't we forget to-night that we disagree about Paredes? Let
me dine with you."

Bobby's laugh was uncomfortable.

"Come on, if you wish, and be my guardian angel. God knows I need one."

He walked across the hall and into the reception room. The light was not
brilliant there. One or two men sat reading newspapers about a
green-shaded lamp on the centre table, but Bobby didn't see Paredes at
first. Then from the obscurity of a corner a form, tall and graceful,
emerged with a slow monotony of movement suggestive of stealth. The man's
dark, sombre eyes revealed nothing. His jet-black hair, parted in the
middle, and his carefully trimmed Van Dyke beard gave him an air of
distinction, an air, at the same time, a trifle too reserved. For a
moment, as the green light stained his face unhealthily, Bobby could
understand Graham's aversion. He brushed the idea aside.

"Glad you've come, Carlos."

The smile of greeting vanished abruptly from Paredes's face. He looked
with steady eyes beyond Bobby's shoulder. Bobby turned. Graham stood on
the threshold, his face a little too frank. But the two men shook hands.

"I'd an idea until I saw Bobby," Graham said, "that you'd gone back
to Panama."

Paredes yawned.

"Each year I spend more time in New York. Business suggests it. Pleasure
demands it."

His voice was deep and pleasant, but Bobby had often remarked that it,
like Paredes's eyes, was too reserved. It seemed never to call on its
obvious powers of expression. Its accent was noticeable only in a
pleasant, polished sense.

"Hartley," Bobby explained, "is dining with us."

Paredes let no disapproval slip, but Graham hastened to explain.

"Bobby and I have an engagement immediately after dinner."

"An engagement after dinner! I didn't understand--"

"Let's think of dinner first," Bobby said. "We can talk about engagements
afterward. Perhaps you'll have a cocktail here while we decide where
we're going."

"The aperitif I should like very much," Paredes said. "About dinner there
is nothing to decide. I have arranged everything. There's a table waiting
in the Fountain Room at the C---- and there I have planned a little
surprise for you."

He wouldn't explain further. While they drank their cocktails Bobby
watched Graham's disapproval grow. The man glanced continually at his
watch. In the restaurant, when Paredes left them to produce, as he called
it, his surprise, Graham appraised with a frown the voluble people who
moved intricately through the hall.

"I'm afraid Paredes has planned a thorough evening," he said, "for which
he'll want you to pay. Don't be angry, Bobby. The situation is serious
enough to excuse facts. You must go to the Cedars to-night. Do you
understand? You must go, in spite of Paredes, in spite of everything."

"Peace until train time," Bobby demanded.

He caught his breath.

"There they are. Carlos _has_ kept his word. See her, Hartley. She's
glorious."

A young woman accompanied the Panamanian as he came back through the
hall. She appeared more foreign than her guide--the Spanish of Spain
rather than of South America. Her clothing was as unusual and striking as
her beauty, yet one felt there was more than either to attract all the
glances in this room, to set people whispering as she passed. Clearly she
knew her notoriety was no little thing. Pride filled her eyes.

Paredes had first introduced her to Bobby a month or more ago. He had
seen her a number of times since in her dressing-room at the theatre
where she was featured, or at crowded luncheons in her apartment. At such
moments she had managed to be exceptionally nice to him. Bobby, however,
had answered merely to the glamour of her fame, to the magnetic response
her beauty always brought in places like this.

"Paredes," Graham muttered, "will have a powerful ally. You won't fail
me, Bobby? You will go?"

Bobby scarcely heard. He hurried forward and welcomed the woman. She
tapped his arm with her fan.

"Leetle Bobby!" she lisped. "I haven't seen very much of you lately. So
when Carlos proposed--you see I don't dance until late. Who is that
behind you? Mr. Graham, is it not? He would, maybe, not remember me. I
danced at a dinner where you were one night, at Mr. Ward's. Even lawyers,
I find, take enjoyment in my dancing."

"I remember," Graham said. "It is very pleasant we are to dine together."
He continued tactlessly: "But, as I've explained to Mr. Paredes, we must
hurry. Bobby and I have an early engagement."

Her head went up.

"An early engagement! I do not often dine in public."

"An unavoidable thing," Graham explained. "Bobby will tell you."

Bobby nodded.

"It's a nuisance, particularly when you're so condescending, Maria."

She shrugged her shoulders. With Bobby she entered the dining-room at the
heels of Paredes and Graham.

Paredes had foreseen everything. There were flowers on the table. The
dinner had been ordered. Immediately the waiter brought cocktails. Graham
glanced at Bobby warningly. He wouldn't, as an example Bobby appreciated,
touch his own. Maria held hers up to the light.

"Pretty yellow things! I never drink them."

She smiled dreamily at Bobby.

"But see! I shall place this to my lips in order that you may make
pretty speeches, and maybe tell me it is the most divine aperitif you
have ever drunk."

She passed the glass to him, and Bobby, avoiding Graham's eyes, wondering
why she was so gracious, emptied it. And afterward frequently she
reminded him of his wine by going through the same elaborate formula.
Probably because of that, as much as anything else, constraint grasped
the little company tighter. Graham couldn't hide his anxiety. Paredes
mocked it with sneering phrases which he turned most carefully. Before
the meal was half finished Graham glanced at his watch.

"We've just time for the eight-thirty," he whispered to Bobby, "if we
pick up a taxi."

Maria had heard. She pouted.

"There is no engagement," she lisped, "as sacred as a dinner, no
entanglement except marriage that cannot be easily broken. Perhaps I have
displeased you, Mr. Graham. Perhaps you fancy I excite unpleasant
comment. It is unjust. I assure you my reputation is above reproach"--her
dark eyes twinkled--"certainly in New York."

"It isn't that," Graham answered. "We must go. It's not to be evaded."

She turned tempestuously.

"Am I to be humiliated so? Carlos! Why did you bring me? Is all the world
to see my companions leave in the midst of a dinner as if I were
plague-touched? Is Bobby not capable of choosing his own company?"

"You are thoroughly justified, Maria," Paredes said in his expressionless
tones. "Bobby, however, has said very little about this engagement. I did
not know, Mr. Graham, that you were the arbiter of Bobby's actions. In a
way I must resent your implication that he is no longer capable of caring
for himself."

Graham accepted the challenge. He leaned across the table, speaking
directly to Bobby, ignoring the others:

"You've not forgotten what I told you. Will you come while there's time?
You must see. I can't remain here any longer."

Bobby, hating warfare in his present mood, sought to temporize:

"It's all right, Hartley. Don't worry. I'll catch a later train."

Maria relaxed.

"Ah! Bobby still chooses for himself."

"I'll have enough rumpus," Bobby muttered, "when I get to the Cedars.
Don't grudge me a little peace here."

Graham arose. His voice was discouraged.

"I'm sorry. I'll hope, Bobby."

Without a word to the others he walked out of the room.

So far, when Bobby tried afterward to recall the details of the evening,
everything was perfectly distinct in his memory. The remainder of the
meal, made uncomfortable by Maria's sullenness and Paredes's sneers, his
attempt to recapture the earlier gayety of the evening by continuing to
drink the wine, his determination to go later to the Cedars in spite of
Graham's doubt--of all these things no particular lacked. He remembered
paying the check, as he usually did when he dined with Paredes. He
recalled studying the time-table and finding that he had just missed
another train.

Maria's spirits rose then. He was persuaded to accompany her and Paredes
to the music hall. In her dressing-room, while she was on the stage, he
played with the boxes of make-up, splashing the mirror with various
colours while Paredes sat silently watching.

The alteration, he was sure, came a little later in the cafe at a table
close to the dancing floor. Maria had insisted that Paredes and he should
wait there while she changed.

"But," he had protested, "I have missed too many trains."

She had demanded his time-table, scanning the columns of close figures.

"There is one," she had said, "at twelve-fifteen--time for a little
something in the cafe, and who knows? If you are agreeable I might
forgive everything and dance with you once, Bobby, on the public floor."

So he sat for some time, expectant, with Paredes, watching the boisterous
dancers, listening to the violent music, sipping absent-mindedly at his
glass. He wondered why Paredes had grown so quiet.

"I mustn't miss that twelve-fifteen," he said, "You know, Carlos, you
weren't quite fair to Hartley. He's a splendid fellow. Roomed with me at
college, played on same team, and all that. Only wanted me to do the
right thing. Must say it was the right thing. I won't miss that
twelve-fifteen."

"Graham," Paredes sneered, "is a wonderful type--Apollo in the flesh and
Billy Sunday in the conscience."

Then, as Bobby started to protest, Maria entered, more dazzling than at
dinner; and the dancers swayed less boisterously, the chatter at the
tables subsided, the orchestra seemed to hesitate as a sort of obeisance.

A man Bobby had never seen before followed her to the table. His
middle-aged figure was loudly clothed. His face was coarse and clean
shaven. He acknowledged the introductions sullenly.

"I've only a minute," Bobby said to Maria.

He continued, however, to raise his glass indifferently to his lips. All
at once his glass shook. Maria's dark and sparkling face became blurred.
He could no longer define the features of the stranger. He had never
before experienced anything of the kind. He tried to account for it, but
his mind became confused.

"Maria!" he burst out. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

Her contralto laugh rippled.

"Bobby looks so funny! Carlos! Leetle Bobby looks so queer! What is the
matter with him?"

Bobby's anger was lost in the increased confusion of his senses, but
through that mental turmoil tore the thought of Graham and his intention
of going to the Cedars. With shaking fingers he dragged out his watch. He
couldn't read the dial. He braced his hands against the table, thrust
back his chair, and arose. The room tumbled about him. Before his eyes
the dancers made long nebulous bands of colour in which nothing had form
or coherence. Instinctively he felt he hadn't dined recklessly enough to
account for these amazing symptoms. He was suddenly afraid.

"Carlos!" he whispered.

He heard Maria's voice dimly:

"Take him home."

A hand touched his arm. With a supreme effort of will he walked from the
room, guided by the hand on his arm. And always his brain recorded fewer
and fewer impressions for his memory to struggle with later.

At the cloak room some one helped him put on his coat. He was walking
down steps. He was in some kind of a conveyance. He didn't know what it
was. An automobile, a carriage, a train? He didn't know. He only
understood that it went swiftly, swaying from side to side through a
sable pit. Whenever his mind moved at all it came back to that sensation
of a black pit in which he remained suspended, swinging from side to
side, trying to struggle up against impossible odds. Once or twice words
flashed like fire through the pit: "Tyrant!--Fool to go."

From a long immersion deeper in the pit he struggled frantically. He must
get out. Somehow he must find wings. He realized that his eyes were
closed. He tried to open them and failed. So the pit persisted and he
surrendered himself, as one accepts death, to its hateful blackness.

Abruptly he experienced a momentary release. There was no more swaying,
no more movement of any kind. He heard a strange, melancholy voice,
whispering without words, always whispering with a futile perseverance as
if it wished him to understand something it could not express.

"What is it trying to tell me?" he asked himself.

Then he understood. It was the voice of the wind, and it tried to tell
him to open his eyes, and he found that he could. But in spite of his
desire they closed again almost immediately. Yet, from that swift
glimpse, a picture outlined itself later in his memory.

In the midst of wild, rolling clouds, the moon was a drowning face.
Stunted trees bent before the wind like puny men who strained impotently
to advance. Over there was one more like a real man--a figure, Bobby
thought, with a black thing over its face--a mask.

"This is the forest near the Cedars," Bobby said to himself. "I've come
to face the old devil after all."

He heard his own voice, harsh, remote, unnatural, speaking to the dim
figure with a black mask that waited half hidden by the straining trees.

"Why am I here in the woods near the Cedars?"

And he thought the thing answered:

"Because you hate your grandfather."

Bobby laughed, thinking he understood. The figure in the black mask
that accompanied him was his conscience. He could understand why it
went masked.

The wind resumed its whispering. The figures, straining like puny men,
fought harder. The drowning face disappeared, wet and helpless. Bobby
felt himself sinking back, back into the sable pit.

"I don't want to go," he moaned.

A long time afterward he heard a whisper again, and he wondered if it was
the wind or his conscience. He laughed through the blackness because the
words seemed so absurd.

"Take off your shoes and carry them in your hand. Always do that. It is
the only safe way."

He laughed again, thinking:

"What a careful conscience!"

He retained only one more impression. He was dully aware that some time
had passed. He shivered. He thought the wind had grown angry with him,
for it no longer whispered. It shrieked, and he could make nothing of its
wrath. He struggled frantically to emerge from the pit. The quality of
the blackness deepened. His fright grew. He felt himself slipping, slowly
at first then faster, faster down into impossible depths, and there was
nothing at all he could do to save himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Go away! For God's sake, go away!"

Bobby thought he was speaking to the sombre figure in the mask. His voice
aroused him to one more effort at escape, but he felt that there was no
use. He was too deep.

Something hurt his eyes. He opened them and for a time was blinded by a
narrow shaft, of sunlight resting on his face. With an effort he moved
his head to one side and closed his eyes again, at first merely thankful
that he had escaped from the black hell, trying to control his
sensations of physical evil. Subtle curiosity forced its way into his
sick brain and stung him wide awake. This time his eyes remained open,
staring about him, dilating with a wilder fright than he had experienced
in the dark mazes of his nightmare adventure.

He had never seen this place before. He lay on the floor of an empty
room. The shaft of sunlight that had aroused him entered through a crack
in one of the tightly drawn blinds. There were dust and grime on the
wails, and cobwebs clustered in the corners.

In the silent, deserted room the beating of his heart became audible. He
struggled to a sitting posture. He gasped for breath. He knew it was very
cold in here, but perspiration moistened his face. He could recall no
such suffering as this since, when a boy, he had slipped from the crisis
of a destructive fever.

Had he been drugged? But he had been with friends. There was no motive.

What house was this? Was it, like this room, empty and deserted? How had
he come here? For the first time he went through that dreadful process of
trying to draw from the black pit useful memories.

He started, recalling the strange voice and its warning, for his shoes
lay near by as though he might have dropped them carelessly when he had
entered the room and stretched himself on the floor. Damp earth adhered
to the soles. The leather above was scratched.

"Then," he thought, "that much is right. I was in the woods. What was I
doing there? That dim figure! My imagination."

He suffered the agony of a man who realizes that he has wandered
unawares in strange places, and retains no recollection of his actions,
of his intentions. He went back to that last unclouded moment in the
cafe with Maria, Paredes, and the stranger. Where had he gone after he
had left them? He had looked at his watch. He had told himself he must
catch the twelve-fifteen train. He must have gone from the restaurant,
proceeding automatically, and caught the train. That would account for
the sensation of motion in a swift vehicle, and perhaps there had been a
taxicab to the station. Doubtless in the woods near the Cedars he had
decided it was too late to go in, or that it was wiser not to. He had
answered to the necessity of sleeping somewhere. But why had he come
here? Where, indeed, was he?

At least he could answer that. He drew on his shoes--a pair of patent
leather pumps. He fumbled for his handkerchief, thinking he would brush
the earth from them. He searched each of his pockets. His handkerchief
was gone. No matter. He got to his feet, lurching for a moment dizzily.
He glanced with distaste at his rumpled evening clothing. To hide it as
far as possible he buttoned his overcoat collar about his neck. On
tip-toe he approached the door, and, with the emotions of a thief,
opened it quietly. He sighed. The rest of the house was as empty as this
room. The hall was thick with dust. The rear door by which he must have
entered stood half open. The lock was broken and rusty.

He commenced to understand. There was a deserted farmhouse less than two
miles from the Cedars. Since he had always known about it, it wasn't
unusual he should have taken shelter there after deciding not to go in to
his grandfather.

He stepped through the doorway to the unkempt yard about whose tumbled
fences the woods advanced thickly. He recognized the place. For some time
he stood ashamed, yet fair enough to seek the cause of his experience in
some mental unhealth deeper than any reaction from last night's folly.

He glanced at his watch. It was after two o'clock. The mournful
neighbourhood, the growing chill in the air, the sullen sky, urged him
away. He walked down the road. Of course he couldn't go to the Cedars in
this condition. He would return to his apartment in New York where he
could bathe, change his clothes, recover from this feeling of physical
ill, and remember, perhaps, something more.

It wasn't far to the little village on the railroad, and at this hour
there were plenty of trains. He hoped no one he knew would see him at the
station. He smiled wearily. What difference did that make? He might as
well face old Blackburn, himself, as he was. By this time the thing was
done. The new will had been made. He was penniless and an outcast. But
his furtive manner clung. He didn't want Katherine to see him like this.

From the entrance of the village it was only a few steps to the
station. Several carriages stood at the platform, testimony that a
train was nearly due. He prayed that it would be for New York. He
didn't want to wait around. He didn't want to risk Katherine's driving
in on some errand.

His mind, intent only on escaping prying eyes, was drawn by a man who
stepped from behind a carriage and started across the roadway in his
direction, staring at him incredulously. His quick apprehension vanished.
He couldn't recall that surprised face. There was no harm being seen,
miserable as he was, dressed as he was, by this stranger. He looked at
him closer. The man was plainly clothed. He had small, sharp eyes. His
hairless face was intricately wrinkled. His lips were thin, making a
straight line.

To avoid him Bobby stepped aside, thinking he must be going past, but the
stranger stopped and placed a firm hand on Bobby's shoulder. He spoke in
a quick, authoritative voice:

"Certainly you are Mr. Robert Blackburn?"

For Bobby, in his nervous, bewildered condition, there was an ominous
note in this surprise, this assurance, this peremptory greeting.

"What's amazing about that?" he jerked out.

The stranger's lips parted in a straight smile.

"Amazing! That's the word I was thinking of. Hoped you might come in
from New York. Seemed you were here all the time. That's a good one on
me--a very good one."

The beating of Bobby's heart was more pronounced than it had been in the
deserted house. He asked himself why he should shrink from this stranger
who had an air of threatening him. The answer lay in that black pit of
last night and this morning. Unquestionably he had been indiscreet. The
man would tell him how.

"You mean," he asked with dry lips, "that you've been looking for me? Who
are you? Please take your hand off."

The stranger's grasp tightened.

"Not so fast, Mr. Robert Blackburn. I daresay you haven't just now come
from the Cedars?"

"No, no. I'm on my way to New York. There's a train soon, I think."

His voice trailed away. The stranger's straight smile widened. He
commenced to laugh harshly and uncouthly.

"Sure there's a train, but you don't want to take it. And why haven't
you been at the Cedars? Grandpa's death grieved you too much to go near
his body?"

Bobby drew back. The shock robbed him for a moment of the power to
reason.

"Dead! The old man! How--"

The stranger's smile faded.

"Here it is nearly three o'clock in the afternoon, and you're all
dressed up for last night. That's lucky."

Bobby couldn't meet the narrow eyes.

"Who are you?"

The stranger with his free hand threw back his coat lapel.

"My name's Howells. I'm a county detective. I'm on the case, because your
grandfather died very strangely. He was murdered, very cleverly murdered.
Queerest case I've ever handled. What do you think?"

In his own ears Bobby's voice sounded as remote and unreal as it had
through the blackness last night.

"Why do you talk to me like this?"

"Because I tell you I'm on the case, and I want you to turn about and go
straight to the Cedars."

"This is--absurd. You mean you suspect--You're placing me under arrest?"

The detective's straight smile returned.

"How we jump at conclusions! I'm simply telling you not to bother me
with questions. I'm telling you to go straight to the Cedars where
you'll stay. Understand? You'll stay there until you're wanted--Until
you're wanted."

The merciless repetition settled it for Bobby. He knew it would be
dangerous to talk or argue. Moreover, he craved an opportunity to
think, to probe farther into the black pit. He turned and walked away.
When he reached the last houses he glanced back. The detective
remained in the middle of the road, staring after him with that
straight and satisfied smile.

Bobby walked on, his shaking hands tightly clenched, muttering to
himself:

"I've got to remember. Good God! I've got to remember. It's the only way
I can ever know he's not right, that I'm not a murderer."




CHAPTER II

THE CASE AGAINST BOBBY


Bobby hurried down the road in the direction of the Cedars. Always he
tried desperately to recall what had occurred during those black hours
last night and this morning before he had awakened in the empty house
near his grandfather's home. All that remained were his sensation of
travel in a swift vehicle, his impression of standing in the forest near
the Cedars, his glimpse of the masked figure which he had called his
conscience, the echo in his brain of a dream-like voice saying: "Take off
your shoes and carry them in your hand. Always do that. It's the only
safe way."

These facts, then, alone were clear to him: He had wandered, unconscious,
in the neighbourhood. His grandfather had been strangely murdered. The
detective who had met him in the village practically accused him of the
murder. And he couldn't remember.

He turned back to his last clear recollections. When he had experienced
his first symptoms of slipping consciousness he had been in the cafe in
New York with Carlos Paredes, Maria, the dancer, and a strange man whom
Maria had brought to the table. Through them he might, to an extent,
trace his movements, unless they had put him in a cab, thinking he would
catch the train, of which he had talked, for the Cedars.

Already the forest crowded the narrow, curving road. The Blackburn place
was in the midst of an arid thicket of stunted pines, oaks, and cedars.
Old Blackburn had never done anything to improve the estate or its
surroundings. Steadily during his lifetime it had grown more gloomy, less
habitable.

With the silent forest thick about him Bobby realized that he was no
longer alone. A crackling twig or a loose stone struck by a foot might
have warned him. He went slower, glancing restlessly over his shoulder.
He saw no one, but that idea of stealthy pursuit persisted. Undoubtedly
it was the detective, Howells, who followed him, hoping, perhaps, that he
would make some mad effort at escape.

"That," he muttered, "is probably the reason he didn't arrest me at
the station."

Bobby, however, had no thought of escape. He was impatient to reach the
Cedars where he might learn all that Howells hadn't told him about his
grandfather's death.

A high wooden fence straggled through the forest. The driveway swung from
the road through a broad gateway. The gate stood open. Bobby remembered
that it had been old Blackburn's habit to keep it closed. He entered and
hurried among the trees to the edge of the lawn in the centre of which
the house stood.

Feeling as guilty as the detective thought him, he paused there and
examined the house for some sign of life. At first it seemed as dead as
the forest stripped by autumn--almost as gloomy and arid as the
wilderness which straggled close about it. He had no eye for the symmetry
of its wings which formed the court in the centre of which an abandoned
fountain stood. He studied the windows, picturing Katherine alone,
surrounded by the complications of this unexpected tragedy.

His feeling of an inimical watchfulness persisted. A clicking sound swung
him back to the house. The front door had been opened, and in the black
frame of the doorway, as he looked, Katherine and Graham appeared, and he
knew the resolution of his last doubt was at hand.

Katherine had thrown a cloak over her graceful figure. Her sunny hair
strayed in the wind, but her face, while it had lost nothing of its
beauty, projected even at this distance a sense of weariness, of anxiety,
of utter fear.

Bobby was grateful for Graham's presence. It was like the man to assume
his responsibilities, to sacrifice himself in his service. He
straightened. He must meet these two. Through his own wretched appearance
and position he must develop for Katherine more clearly than ever
Graham's superiority. He stepped out, calling softly:

"Katherine!"

She started. She turned in his direction and came swiftly toward him. She
spread her hands.

"Bobby! Bobby! Where have you been?"

There were tears in her eyes. They were like tears that have been
too long coming. He took her hands. Her fingers were cold. They
twitched in his.

"Look at me, Katherine," he said hoarsely. "I'm sorry."

Graham came up. He spoke with apparent difficulty.

"You've not been home. Then what happened last night? Quick! Tell us what
you did--everything."

"I've seen the detective," he answered. "He's told you, too? Be careful.
I think he's back there, watching and listening."

Katherine freed her hands. The tears had dried. She shook a little.

"Then you were at the station," she said. "You must have come from New
York, but I tried so hard to get you there. For hours I telephoned and
telegraphed. Then I got Hartley. Come away from the trees so we can talk
without--without being overheard."

As they moved to the centre of the open space Graham indicated Bobby's
evening clothes.

"Why are you dressed like that, Bobby? You _did_ come from town? You
can tell us everything you did last night after I left you, and early
this morning?"

Bobby shook his head. His answer was reluctant.

"I didn't come from New York just now. I was evidently here last night,
and I can't remember, Hartley. I remember scarcely anything."

Graham's face whitened.

"Tell us," he begged.

"You've got to remember!" Katherine cried.

Bobby as minutely as he could recited the few impressions that remained
from last night.

When he had finished Graham thought for some time.

"Paredes and the dancer," he said at last, "practically forced me away
from you last night. It's obvious, Bobby, you must have been drugged."

Bobby shook his head.

"I thought of that right away, but it won't do. If I had been drugged I
wouldn't have moved around, and I did come out somehow, I managed to
get to the empty house to sleep. It's more as if my mind had simply
closed, as if it had gone on working its own ends without my knowing
anything about it. And that's dreadful, because the detective has
practically accused me of murdering my grandfather. How was it done?
You see I know nothing. Tell me how--how he was killed. I can't believe
I--I'm such a beast. Tell me. If I was in the house, some detail might
start my memory."

So Katherine told her story while Bobby listened, shrinking from some
disclosure that would convict him. As she went on, however, his sense of
bewilderment increased, and when she had finished he burst out:

"But where is the proof of murder? Where is there even a suggestion? You
say the doors were locked and he doesn't show a mark."

"That's what we can't understand," Graham said. "There's no evidence we
know anything about that your grandfather's heart didn't simply give out,
but the detective is absolutely certain, and--there's no use mincing
matters, Bobby--he believes he has the proof to convict you. He won't
tell me what. He simply smiles and refuses to talk."

"The motive?" Bobby asked.

Graham looked at him curiously. Katherine turned away.

"Of course," Bobby cried with a sharpened discomfort. "I'd forgotten. The
money--the new will he had planned to make. The money's mine now, but if
he had lived until this morning it never would have been. I see."

"It is a powerful motive," Graham said, "for any one who doesn't
know you."

"But," Bobby answered, "Howells has got to prove first that my
grandfather was murdered. The autopsy?"

"Coroner's out of the county," Graham replied, "and Howells won't have an
assistant. Dr. Groom's waiting in the house. We're expecting the coroner
almost any time."

Bobby spoke rapidly.

"If he calls it murder, Hartley, there's one thing we've got to find out:
what my grandfather was afraid of. Tell me again, Katherine, everything
he said about me. I can't believe he could have been afraid of me."

"He called you," Katherine answered, "a waster. He said: 'God knows what
he'll do next.' He said he'd ordered you out last night and he hadn't
had a word from you, but that he'd made up his mind anyway. He was going
to have his lawyer this morning and change his will, leaving all his
money to the Bedford Foundation, except a little annuity for me. He grew
sentimental and said he had no faith left in his flesh and blood, and
that it was sad to grow old with nobody caring for him except to covet
his money. I asked him if he were afraid of you, and all he answered
was: 'You and Bobby are thicker than thieves.' Oh, yes. When I saw him
for the last time in the hall he said there was nothing for me to worry
about except you. That's all. I remember perfectly. He said nothing more
about you."

"I wonder," Bobby muttered, "if a jury wouldn't think it enough."

Katherine shook her head.

"There seemed so much more than that behind his fear," she said. "As I've
told you, he gave me a feeling of superstition. I never once was afraid
of a murderer--of a man in the house. I was afraid of something queer and
active, but not human."

Bobby straightened.

"Would you," he asked, "call a man going about in an aphasia quite
human? Somnambulists do unaccountable things--such as overcoming locked
doors--"

"Don't, Bobby! Don't!" Katherine cried.

"Sh--h! Quiet!" Graham warned.

A foot scraped on gravel.

"Maybe the detective," Bobby suggested.

He stared at the bend, expecting to see the stiff, plain figure of the
detective emerge from the forest. Instead with a dawning amazement he
watched Carlos Paredes stroll into view. The Panamanian was calm and
immaculate. His Van Dyke beard was neatly trimmed and combed. As he
advanced he puffed in leisurely fashion at a cigarette.

Graham flushed.

"After last night he has the nerve--"

"Be decent to him," Bobby urged. "He might help me--might clear up
last night."

"I wonder," Graham mused, "to what extent he could clear it up if
he wished."

Paredes threw his cigarette away as he came closer. Solemnly he shook
hands with Katherine and Bobby, expressing a profound sympathy. Even then
Bobby remarked that those reserved features let slip no positive emotion.
The man turned to Graham.

"Our little difference of last evening," he said suavely, "will, I hope,
evaporate in this atmosphere of unexpected sorrow. If I was in the wrong
I deeply regret it. My one wish now is to join you in being of use to
Bobby and Miss Katherine in their bereavement. I saw the account in a
paper at luncheon. I came as quickly as possible."

Graham answered this smooth effrontery with a blunt question.

"Do you know that Bobby is in very real trouble, that he may be
implicated in Mr. Blackburn's death?"

Paredes flung up his hands, but Bobby, looking for emotion in the sallow
face then, found none. Paredes's features, it occurred to him, were
exactly like a mask.

Bobby checked himself. In his unhealthy way Paredes had been a good
friend. The man's voice flowed smoothly, demanding particulars.

"But this," he said, when they had told him what they could, "changes the
situation. I must stay here. I must watch that detective and learn what
he has up his sleeve."

Graham turned away.

"I've tried. Maybe you'll succeed better than I."

"Then you'll excuse me," Paredes said quickly. "I should like your
permission to telephone to my hotel in New York for some clothing. I want
to see this through."

The three looked at each other. Katherine and Graham seemed about to
speak. Bobby wouldn't let them.

"Carlos," he said, "you might help me. I'm almost afraid to ask. What
happened in the cafe last night? The last thing I remember distinctly is
sitting there with you and Maria and a stranger she had introduced. I
didn't get his name. What did I do? Did any one leave the place with me?"

Paredes smiled a little, shaking his head.

"You behaved as if Mr. Graham's earlier fears had been accomplished. You
insisted you were going to catch your train. I didn't think it wise, so I
went to the cloak room with you, intending to see you home. Somehow, just
the same you gave me the slip."

"You oughtn't to have let him get away," Graham said.

Paredes shrugged his shoulders.

"You weren't there. You don't know how sly Bobby was."

"I suppose it's useless to ask," Graham said. "You saw nothing put in
his wine?"

Paredes laughed.

"Is it likely? Certainly not. I should have mentioned it. I should have
stopped such a thing. What do you think I am, Mr. Graham?"

"Sorry," Graham said. "You must understand we can't let any lead slip.
This stranger Maria brought up?"

"I didn't catch his name," Paredes answered.

"I'd never seen him before. I gathered he was a friend of
hers--connected with the profession. Now I shall telephone with your
permission, Miss Katherine; and don't you worry, Bobby. I will see you
through; but we can't do much until the coroner comes, until the
detective can be made to talk."

Katherine hesitated for a moment, then she surrendered.

"Please go with him, Hartley, and--and make him as comfortable as you can
in this unhappy house."

Katherine detained Bobby with a nod. He saw the others go. He shrank, in
his mental and physical discomfort, from this isolation with her. As soon
as the door was closed she touched his hand. She burst out passionately:

"I don't believe it, Bobby. I'll never believe it no matter what
happens."

"It's sweet of you, Katherine," he said huskily. "That helps when you
don't know what to believe yourself."

"Don't talk that way. Such a crime would never have entered your head
under any conditions. Only, Bobby, it ought never to have happened. You
ought never to have been in this position. Why have you been friendly
with people like--like that Spaniard? What can he want, forcing himself
here? At any rate, you'll never lead that sort of life again?"

Her fingers sought his. He clasped them firmly.

"If I get past this," he said, "I'll always look you straight in the
eye, Katherine. It was mad--silly. You don't quite understand--"

He broke off, glancing at the door through which Graham had disappeared.

"Then remember," she said softly, "I don't believe it."

She released his hand, sighing.

"That's all I can say, all I can do now. You're ill, Bobby. Go in. Rest
for awhile. When you've had sleep you may remember something."

He shook his head. He walked slowly with her to the house.

As he climbed the stairs he heard Paredes telephoning. He couldn't
understand the man's insistence on remaining where clearly he was
an intruder.

He entered his bedroom which he had occupied only once or twice during
the last few months. The place seemed unfamiliar. As he bathed and
dressed his sense of strangeness grew, and he understood why. The last
time he had been here he had stood in no personal danger. There had been
no black parenthesis in his life during the stretch of which he might
have committed an unspeakable crime. For he couldn't believe as firmly as
Katherine did. Since he couldn't remember, he might have done anything.

"Come!" he called in response to a stealthy rapping at the door.

Stealth, it occurred to him, had, since last night, become a stern
condition of his life.

Graham entered and noiselessly closed the door.

"I had a chance to slip in," he explained. "Paredes is wandering about
the place. I'd give a lot to know what he's after at the Cedars.
Katherine is in her room, trying to rest after last night, I fancy."

"And," Bobby asked, "the detective--Howells?"

"If he's back from the station," Graham answered, "he's keeping low. I
wonder if it was he or Paredes who followed you through the woods?"

"Why should Carlos have followed me?" Bobby asked. "I've been thinking it
over, Hartley. It isn't a bad scheme having him here, since you think he
hasn't told all he knows."

"I don't say that," Graham answered. "I don't know what to think about
Paredes. I've come to talk about just that. I'm a lawyer, and I've had
some criminal practice. Since this detective will be satisfied with you
for a victim, I'm going to take your case, if you'll have me. I'll be
your detective as well as your lawyer."

Bobby was a good deal touched.

"That's kind of you--more than I deserve, for I have resented you
at times."

Graham, it was clear, didn't guess he referred to his friendship for
Katherine, for he answered quickly:

"I must have seemed a nuisance, but I was only trying to get you back on
the straight path where you've always belonged. I can't believe you did
this thing, even unconsciously, until I'm shown proof without a single
flaw. Until the autopsy the only thing we have to work on is that party
last night. I've telephoned to New York and put a trustworthy man on the
heels of Maria and the stranger. Meantime I think I'd better watch
developments here."

"Please," Bobby agreed. "Stay with me, Hartley, until this man takes some
definite action."

He picked at the fringe of the window curtain. "If the autopsy shows that
my grandfather was murdered," he said, "either I killed him, or else some
one has deliberately tried to throw suspicion on me, for with only a
motive to go on this detective wouldn't be so sure. Why in the name of
heaven should any one kill the old man, place all this money in my hands,
and at the same time send me to the electric chair? Don't you see how
absurd it is that Carlos, Maria, or any one else should have had a hand
in it? There was nothing for them to gain from his death. I've thought
and thought in such circles until I am almost convinced of the logic of
my guilt."

He drew the curtain farther back and gazed across the court at the room
where his grandfather lay dead. One of the two windows of the room was a
little raised, but the blinds were closely drawn.

"I did hate him," he mused. "There's that. Ever since I can remember he
did things to make me despise him. Have--have you seen him?"

Graham nodded.

"Howells took me in. He looked perfectly normal--not a mark."

"I don't want to see him," Bobby said.

He drew back from the window, pointing. The detective, Howells, had
strolled into the court. His hands hung at his sides. They didn't swing
as he walked. His lips were stretched in that thin, straight smile. He
paused by the fountain, glancing for a moment anxiously downward. Then he
came on and entered the house.

"He'll be restless," Graham said, "until the coroner comes, and proves or
disproves his theory of murder. If he questions you, you'd better say
nothing for the present. From his point of view what you remember of last
night would be only damaging."

"I want him to leave me alone," Bobby said. "If he doesn't arrest me I
won't have him bullying me."

Jenkins knocked and entered. The old butler was as white-faced as Bobby,
more tremulous.

"The policeman, sir! He's asking for you."

"Tell him I don't wish to see him."

The detective, himself, stepped from the obscurity of the hall, smiling
his queer smile.

"Ah! You are here, Mr. Blackburn! I'd like a word with you."

He turned to Graham and Jenkins.

"Alone, if you please."

Bobby mutely agreed, and Graham and the butler went out. The
detective closed the door and leaned against it, studying Bobby with
his narrow eyes.

"I don't suppose," he began, "that there's any use asking you about your
movements last night?"

"None," Bobby answered jerkily, "unless you arrest me and take me before
those who ask questions with authority."

The detective's smile widened.

"No matter. I didn't come to argue with you about that. I was curious to
know if you'd tried to see your grandfather's body."

Bobby shook his head.

"I took it for granted the room was locked."

"Yes," the detective answered, "but some people, it seems, have skilful
ways of overcoming locks."

He moved to one side, placing his hand on the door knob.

"I've come to open doors for you, to give you the opportunity an
affectionate grandson must crave."

Bobby hesitated, fighting back his feeling of repulsion, his first
instinct to refuse. The detective might take it as an evidence against
him. On the other hand, if he went, the man would unquestionably try to
tear from a meeting between the living and the dead some valuable
confirmation of his theory.

"Well?" the detective said. "What's the matter? Thought the least I could
do was to give you a chance. Wouldn't do it for everybody. Then everybody
hasn't your affectionate nature."

Bobby advanced.

"For God's sake, stop mocking me. I'll go, since you wish."

The detective opened the door and stood aside to let Bobby pass.

"Daresay you know the room--the way to it?"

Bobby didn't answer. He went along the corridor and into the main hall
where Katherine had met Silas Blackburn last night. He fought back his
aversion and entered the corridor of the old wing. He heard the detective
behind him. He was aware of the man's narrow eyes watching him with a
malicious assurance.

Bobby, with a feeling of discomfort, sprung in part from the gloomy
passageway, paused before the door his grandfather had had the
unaccountable whim of entering last night. The detective took a key from
his pocket and inserted it in the lock.

"Had some trouble repairing the lock this morning," he said. "That
fellow, Jenkins, entered with a heavy hand--a good deal heavier than
whoever was here before him."

He opened the door.

"Queerest case I've ever seen," he mumbled. "Step in, Mr. Blackburn."

Because of the drawn blinds the room was nearly as dark as the corridor.
Bobby entered slowly, his nerves taut. Against the farther wall the bed
was like an enormous shadow, without form.

"Stay where you are," the detective warned, "until I give you more light.
You know, I wouldn't want you to touch anything, because the room is
exactly as it was when he was murdered!"

Bobby experienced a swift impulse to strangle the brutal word in the
detective's throat. But he stood still while the man went to the
bureau, struck a match, and applied it to a candle. The wick burned
reluctantly. It flickered in the wind that slipped past the curtain of
the open window.

"Come here," the detective commanded roughly.

Bobby dragged himself forward until he stood at the foot of the
four-poster bed. The detective lifted the candle and held it beneath
the canopy.

"You look all you want now, Mr. Robert Blackburn," he said grimly.

Bobby conquered the desire to close his eyes, to refuse to obey. He
stared at his grandfather, and a feeling of wonder grew upon him. For
Silas Blackburn rested peacefully in the great bed. His eyes were closed.
The thick gray brows were no longer gathered in the frown too familiar to
Bobby. The face with its gray beard retained no fear, no record of a
great shock.

Bobby glanced at the detective who bent over the bed watching him out of
his narrow eyes.

"Why," he asked simply, "do you say he was murdered?"

"He was murdered," the detective answered. "Murdered in cold blood, and,
look you here, young fellow, I know who did it. I'm going to strap that
man in the electric chair. He's got just one chance--if he talks out, if
he makes a clean breast of it."

Across the body he bent closer. He held the candle so that its light
searched Bobby's face instead of the dead man's, and the uncertain flame
was like an ambush for his eyes.

In response to those intolerable words Bobby's sick nerves stretched too
tight. No masquerade remained before this huntsman who had his victim
trapped, and calmly studied his agony. The horror of the accusation shot
at him across the body of the man he couldn't be sure he hadn't murdered,
robbed him of his last control. He cried out hysterically:

"Why don't you do something? For God's sake, why don't you arrest me?"

A chuckle came from the man in ambush behind the yellow flame.

"Listen to the boy! What's he talking about? Grief for his grandfather.
That's what it is--grief."

"Stop!" Bobby shouted. "It's what you've been accusing me with ever
since you stopped me at the station." He indicated the silent form of
the old man. "You keep telling me I murdered him. Why don't you arrest
me then? Why don't you lock me up? Why don't you put the case on a
reasonable basis?"

He waited, trembling. The flame continued to flicker, but the hand
holding the candlestick failed to move, and Bobby knew that the eyes
didn't waver, either. He forced his glance from the searching flame. He
managed to lower and steady his voice.

"You can't. That's the trouble. He wasn't murdered. The coroner will tell
you so. Anybody who looks at him will tell you so. Since you haven't the
nerve to arrest me. I'm going. I'm glad to have had this out with you.
Understand. I'm my own master. I do what I please. I go where I please."

At last the candle moved to one side. The detective straightened and
walked to Bobby. The multitude of small lines in his face twitched. His
voice was too cold for the fury of his words.

"That's just what I want you to do, damn you--anything you please. I'm
accusing nobody, but I'm getting somebody. I've got somebody right now
for this old man's murder. My man's going to writhe and burn in the
chair, confession or no confession. Now get out of this room since you're
so anxious, and don't come near it again."

Bobby went. At the end of the corridor he heard the closing of the door,
the scraping of the key. He was afraid the detective might follow him to
his room to heckle him further. To avoid that he hurried to the lower
floor. He wanted to be alone. He must have time to accustom himself to
this degrading fate which loomed in the too-close future. Unless they
could demolish the detective's theory he, Bobby Blackburn, would go to
the death house.

A fire blazed in the big hall fireplace. Paredes stood with his back to
it, smoking and warming his hands. A man sat in the shadow of a deep
leather chair, his rough, unpolished boots stretched toward the flaming
logs. As he came down the stairs Bobby heard the heavy, rumbling voice of
the man in the chair:

"Certainly it's a queer case, but not the way Howells means. I daresay
the old fool died what the world will call a natural death. If you smoke
so much you will, too, before long."

Bobby tried to slip past, but Paredes saw him.

"Feeling better, Bobby?"

The boots were drawn in. From the depths of the chair arose a figure
nearly gigantic in the firelight. The man's face, at first glance,
appeared to be covered with hair. Black and curling, it straggled over
his forehead. It circled his mouth, and fell in an unkempt beard down his
waistcoat. The huge man must have been as old as Silas Blackburn, but he
showed no touch of gray. His only concession to age was the sunken and
bloodshot appearance of his eyes.

Bobby and Katherine had always been afraid of this great, grim country
practitioner who had attended their childish illnesses. That sense of an
overpowering and incomprehensible personality had lingered. Even through
his graver fear Bobby felt a sharp discomfort as he surrendered his hand
to the other's absorbing grasp.

"I'm afraid you came too late this time, Doctor Groom."

The doctor looked him up and down.

"Not for you, I guess," he grumbled. "Don't you know you're sick, boy?"

Bobby shook his head.

"I'm very tired. That's all. I'm on my way to the library to try to
rest."

He freed his hand. The big man nodded approvingly.

"I'll send you a dose," he promised, "and don't you worry about your
grandfather's having been murdered by any man. I've seen the body. Stuff
and nonsense! Detective's an ass. Waiting for coroner, although I know
he's one, too."

"I pray," Bobby answered listlessly, "that you're right."

"If there's any little thing I can do," Paredes offered formally.

"No, no. Thanks," Bobby answered.

He went on to the library. He glanced with an unpleasant shrinking from
the door of the enclosed staircase leading to the private hall just
outside the room in which his grandfather lay dead. There was no fire
here, but he wrapped himself in a rug and lay on the broad, high-backed
lounge which was drawn close to the fireplace, facing it. His complete
weariness conquered his premonitions, his feeling of helplessness. The
entrance of Jenkins barely aroused him.

"Where are you, Mr. Robert?"

"Here," Bobby answered sleepily.

The butler walked to the lounge and looked over the back.

"To be sure, sir. I didn't see you here."

He held out a glass.

"Doctor Groom said you were to drink this. It would make you sleep, sir."

Bobby closed his eyes again.

"Put it on the table where I can reach it when I want it."

"Yes, sir. Mr. Robert! The policeman? Did he say anything, if I might
make so bold as to ask?"

"Go away," Bobby groaned. "Leave me in peace."

And peace for a little time came to him. It was the sound of voices in
the room that aroused him. He lay for a time, scarcely knowing where he
was, but little by little the sickening truth came back, and he realized
that it was Graham and the detective, Howells, who talked close to the
window, and Graham had already fulfilled his promise.

Bobby didn't want to eavesdrop, but it was patent he would embarrass
Graham by disclosing himself now, and it was likely Graham would be glad
of a witness to anything the detective might say.

It was still light. A ray from the low sun entered the window and rested
on the door of the enclosed staircase.

Graham's anxious demand was the first thing Bobby heard distinctly--the
thing that warned him to remain secreted.

"I think now with the coroner on his way it's time you defined your
suspicions a trifle more clearly. I am a lawyer. In a sense I represent
young Mr. Blackburn. Please tell me why you are so sure his grandfather
was murdered."

"All right," the detective's level voice came back. "Half an hour ago I
would have said no again, but now I've got the evidence I wanted. I
appreciate, Mr. Graham, that you're a friend of that young rascal, and
what I have to say isn't pleasant for a friend to hear. But first you
want to know why I'm so sure the case is murder, in spite of the doctor
who made his diagnosis without really looking."

"Go on," Graham said softly.

Bobby waited--his nerves as tense as they had grown in the presence of
the dead man.

"Two days ago," the detective went on quietly, "old Mr. Blackburn came to
the court house in Smithtown and asked for the best detective the
district attorney could put his hand on. I don't want to blow my own
trumpet, but I've got away with one or two pretty fair jobs. I've had
good offers from private firms in New York. So they turned him over to
me. It was easy to see the old man was scared, just as his niece says he
was last night. The funny part was he wouldn't say definitely what he was
afraid of. I thought he might be shielding somebody until he was a little
surer of his ground. He told me he was afraid of being murdered, and he
wanted a good man he could call on to come out here to the Cedars if
things got too hot for him. I can hear his voice now as distinctly as if
he was standing where you are.

"'My heart's all right,' he said. 'It won't stop awhile yet unless it's
made to. So if I'm found cold some fine morning you can be sure I was
put out of the way.'

"I tried to pump him, naturally, but he wouldn't say another word except
that he'd send for me if there was time. He didn't want any fuss made,
and he gave me a handsome present to keep my mouth shut and not to bother
him with any more questions. I figured--you can't blame me, Mr.
Graham--that the old boy was a little cracked. So I took his money and
let it go at that. I didn't think much more about it until they told me
early this morning he lay dead here under peculiar circumstances."

"Odd!" Graham commented. "It does make it more like murder, Howells. But
he doesn't look like a murdered man."

"When you know as much about crime as I do, Mr. Graham, you'll realize
that murders which are a long time planning are likely to take on one of
two appearances--suicide or natural death."

"All right," Graham said. "For the purpose of argument let us agree it's
murder. Even so, why do you suspect young Blackburn?"

"Without a scrap of evidence it's plain as the nose on your face," the
detective answered. "If old Blackburn had lived until this morning our
young man would have been a pauper. As it is, he's a millionaire, but I
don't think he'll enjoy his money. The two had been at sword's points for
a long time. Robert hated the old man--never made any bones about it. You
couldn't ask for a more damaging motive."

"You can't convict a man on motive," Graham said shortly. "You spoke of
evidence."

"More," the detective replied, "than any jury in the land would ask."

Bobby held his breath, shrinking from this information, which, however,
he realized it was better he should know.

"When I got here," the detective said, "I decided on the theory of murder
to make a careful search as soon as day broke. I didn't have to wait for
day, though, to find one crying piece of evidence. For a long time I was
alone in the room with the body. Queer feeling about that room, Mr.
Graham. Don't know how to describe it except to say it's uncomfortable.
Too old, maybe. Maybe it was just being there alone with the dead man
before the dawn, although I thought I was hardened to that sort of thing.
Anyway, I didn't like it. To keep my spirits up, as well as to save time,
I commenced searching the place with a candle. Nothing about the bed.
Nothing in the closets or the bureau."

He grinned sheepishly.

"You know I kind of was afraid to open the closet doors. Then I got on my
knees and looked under the bed. The light was bad and I didn't see
anything at first. After a minute, close against the wall, I noticed
something white. I reached in and pulled it out. It was a handkerchief,
and it had a monogram, Mr. Graham--R. B. in purple and green."

He paused. Graham exclaimed sharply. Bobby felt the net tighten. If that
evidence was conclusive to the others, how much more so was it for him!
He recalled how, after awaking in the empty house, he had searched
unsuccessfully in all his pockets for his handkerchief, intending to
brush the dirt from his shoes.

"I went to his room," the detective hurried on, "and found a lot of his
clothes and his stationery and his toilet articles marked with the same
cipher. I knew my man had made a big mistake--the sort of mistake every
criminal makes no matter how clever he is--and I had him. But that isn't,
by any means, all. Don't look so distressed, Mr. Graham. There isn't the
slightest chance for him. You see I repaired the lock, and, as soon as it
was day, closed the room and went outside to look for signs. Since
nightfall no one had come legitimately through the court except Doctor
Groom and myself. Our footprints were all right--making a straight line
along the path to the front door. In the soft earth by the fountain I
found another and a smaller print, made by a very neat shoe, sir, and I
said to myself: 'There is almost certainly the footprint of the
murderer.'

"There were plenty of others coming across the grass. He'd evidently
avoided the path. And there was one directly under the open window where
the body lies. It's still there. Perhaps you can see it. No matter.
That's the last one I found. The prints ceased there. There wasn't a one
going back, and I was fair up a stump. Then I saw a little undefined
sign of pressure on the grass, and I got an idea. 'Suppose,' I says, 'my
man took his shoes off and went around in his stockinged feet!' I
couldn't understand, though, why he hadn't thought of that before. I went
back to Robert Blackburn's room and got one of his shoes, and ran into a
snag again. The sole of the shoe was a trifle larger than the footprints.
Every one of his shoes I tried was the same way. I argued that the
handkerchief was enough, but I wanted this other evidence. I simply had
to clear up these queer footprints.

"I figured, since the murder had been made to look so much like a natural
death, that he'd come out here some time to-day, expecting to carry it
off. I wanted to go to the station, anyway, to find out if he'd been seen
coming through last night or early this morning. While I was talking to
the station agent I had my one piece of luck. I couldn't believe my eyes.
Mr. Robert walks up from the woods. He'd been hiding around the
neighbourhood all the time. Probably had missed his handkerchief and
decided he'd better not take any chances. Yet it must have seemed a
pretty sure thing that the station wouldn't be watched, and it's those
nervy things, doing the obvious, that skilful criminals get away with all
the time. I needed only one look at him, and I had the answer to the
mystery of the footprints. I gave him plenty of time to come here and
change his clothes, then I manoeuvered him out of his room and went there
and found the pumps he'd worn last night and to-day. You see, they'd be
a little smaller than his ordinary shoes. Not only did they fit the
footprints exactly, but they were stained with soil exactly like that in
the court. There you are, sir. I've made a plaster cast of one of the
prints. I've got it here in my pocket where I intend to keep it until I
clear the whole case up and turn in my report."

Graham's tone was shocked and discouraged.

"What more do you want? Why haven't you arrested him?"

In this room the detective's satisfied chuckle was an offence.

"No good detective would ask that, Mr. Graham. I want my report clean.
The coroner will tell us how the old man was killed. I want to tell how
young Blackburn got into that room. One of the windows was raised a
trifle, but that's no use. I've figured on the outside of the wing until
I'm dizzy. There's no way up for a normal man. An orangoutang would make
hard work of it. His latch key would have let him into the house, and it
would have been simple enough for him to find out that the old man had
changed his room. I've got to find out how he got past those doors,
locked on the inside."

He chuckled again.

"Almost like a sleep-walker's work."

Bobby shivered. Was that where the evidence pointed? Already the net was
too finely woven. The detective continued earnestly:

"I'm figuring on some scheme to make him show me the way. I've a sort of
plan for to-night, but it's only a chance."

"What?" Graham asked.

"Oh, no, sir," Howells laughed. "You'll learn about that when the
time comes."

"I don't understand you," Graham said. "You're sure of your man but you
keep no close watch on him. Do you know where he is now?"

"Haven't the slightest idea, Mr. Graham."

"What's to prevent his running away?"

"I'm offering him every opportunity. He wouldn't get far, and I've a
feeling that if he confessed by running he'd break down and give up the
whole thing. You've no idea how it frets me, Mr. Graham. I've got my man
practically in the chair, but from a professional point of view it isn't
a pretty piece of work until I find out how he got in and out of that
room. The thing seems impossible, and yet here we are, knowing that he
did it. Well, maybe I'll find out to-night. Hello!"

The door opened. Bobby from his hiding place could see Paredes on the
threshold, yawning and holding a cigarette in his fingers.

"Here you are," he said drowsily. "I've just been in the court. It made
me seek company. That court's too damp, Mr. Detective."

His laugh was lackadaisical.

"When the sun leaves it, the court seems full of, unfriendly things--what
the ignorant would call, ghosts. I'm Spanish and I know."

The detective grunted.

"Funny!" Paredes went on. "Observation doesn't seem to interest you. I'd
rather fancied it might."

He yawned again and put his cigarette to his lips. Puffing placidly, he
turned and left.

"What do you suppose he means by that?" the detective said to Graham.

Without waiting for an answer he followed Paredes from the room. Graham
went after him. Bobby threw back the rug and arose. For a moment he was
as curious as the others as to Paredes's intention. He slipped across the
dining room. The hall was deserted. The front door stood open. From the
court came Paredes's voice, even, languid, wholly without expression:

"Mean to tell me you don't react to the proximity of unaccountable forces
here, Mr. Howells?"

The detective's laugh was disagreeable.

"You trying to make a fool of me? That isn't healthy."

As Bobby hurried across the hall and up the stairs he heard
Paredes answer:

"You should speak to Doctor Groom. He says this place is too crowded by
the unpleasant past--"

Bobby climbed out of hearing. He entered his bedroom and locked the door.
He resented Paredes's words and attitude which he defined as studied to
draw humour out of a tragic and desperate situation. He thought of them
in no other way. His tired mind dismissed them. He threw himself on the
bed, muttering:

"If I run away I'm done for. If I stay I'm done for."

He took a fierce twisted joy in one phase of the situation.

"If I was there last night," he thought, "Howells will never find out
how I got into the room, because, no matter what trap he sets, I can't
tell him."

His leaden weariness closed his eyes. For a few minutes he slept again.

Once more it was a voice that awakened him--this time a woman's, raised
in a scream. He sprang up, flung open the door, and stumbled into the
corridor. Katherine stood there, holding her dressing gown about her with
trembling hands. The face she turned to Bobby was white and
panic-stricken. She beckoned, and he followed her to the main hall. The
others came tearing up the stairs--Graham, Paredes, the detective, and
the black and gigantic doctor.

In answer to their quick questions she whispered breathlessly:

"I heard. It was just like last night. It came across the court and stole
in at my window."

She shook. She stretched out her hands in a terrified appeal.

"Somebody--something moved in that room where he--he's dead."

"Nonsense," the detective said. "Both doors are locked, and I have the
keys in my pocket."

Paredes fumbled with a cigarette.

"You're forgetting what I said about my sensitive apprehension of
strange things--"

The detective interrupted him loudly, confidently:

"I tell you the room is empty except for the murdered man--unless
someone's broken down a door."

Katherine cried out:

"No. I heard that same stirring. Something moved in there."

The detective turned brusquely and entered the old corridor.

"We'll see."

The others followed. Katherine was close to Bobby. He touched her hand.

"He's right, Katherine. No one's there. No one could have been there. You
mustn't give way like this. I'm depending on you--on your faith."

She pressed his hand, but her assurance didn't diminish.

The key scraped in the lock. They crowded through the doorway after
the detective. He struck a match and lighted the candle. He held it
over the bed. He sprang back with a sharp cry, unlike his level
quality, his confident conceit. He pointed. They all approximated his
helpless gesture, his blank amazement. For on the bed had occurred an
abominable change.

The body of Silas Blackburn no longer lay peacefully on its back. It had
been turned on its side, and remained in a stark and awkward attitude.
For the first time the back of the head was disclosed.

Their glances focussed there--on the tiny round hole at the base of the
brain, on the pillow where the head had rested and which they saw now was
stained with an ugly and irregular splotch of blood.

Bobby saw the candle quiver at last in the detective's hand. The man
strode to the door leading to the private hall and examined the lock.

"Both doors," he said, "were locked. There was no way in--"

He turned to the others, spreading his hands in justification. The
candle, which he seemed to have forgotten, cast gross, moving shadows
over his face and over the face of the dead man.

"At least you'll all grant me now that he was murdered."

They continued to stare at the body of Silas Blackburn. Cold for many
hours, it was as if he had made this atrocious revealing movement to
assure them that he had, indeed, been murdered; to expose to their
startled eyes the sly and deadly method.




CHAPTER III

HOWELLS DELIVERS HIMSELF TO THE ABANDONED ROOM


For a long time no one spoke. The body of Silas Blackburn had been alone
in a locked room, yet before their eyes it lay, turned on its side, as if
to inform them of the fashion of this murder. The tiny hole at the base
of the brain, the blood-stain on the pillow, which the head had
concealed, offered their mute and ghastly testimony.

Doctor Groom was the first to relax. He raised his great, hairy hand to
the bed-post and grasped it. His rumbling voice lacked its usual
authority. It vibrated with a childish wonder:

"I'm reminded that it isn't the first time there's been blood from a
man's head on that pillow."

Katherine nodded.

"What do you mean?" the detective snarled. "There's only one answer to
this. There must have been a mechanical post-mortem reaction."

For a moment Doctor Groom's laugh filled the old room. It ceased
abruptly. He shook his head.

"Don't be a fool, Mr. Policeman. At the most conservative estimate this
man has been dead more than thirteen hours. Even a few instants after
death the human body is incapable of any such reaction."

"What then?" the detective asked. "Some one of us, or one of the
servants, must have overcome the locks again and deliberately disturbed
the body. That must be so, but I don't get the motive."

"It isn't so," Doctor Groom answered bluntly.

Already the detective had to a large extent controlled his bewilderment.

"I'd like your theory then," he said dryly. "You and Mr. Paredes have
both been gossiping about the supernatural. When you first came you
hinted dark things. You said he'd probably died what the world would call
a natural death."

"I meant," the doctor answered, "only that Mr. Blackburn's heart might
have failed under the impulse of a sudden fright in this room. I also
said, you remember, that the room was nasty and unhealthy. Plenty of
people have remarked it before me."

Graham touched the detective's arm.

"A little while ago you admitted yourself that the room was
uncomfortable."

Doctor Groom smiled. The detective faced him with a fierce belligerency.

"You'll agree he was murdered."

"Certainly, if you wish to call it that. But I ask for the sharp
instrument that caused death. I want to know how, while Blackburn lay on
his back, it was inserted through the bed, the springs, the mattress,
and the pillow."

"What are you driving at?"

Doctor Groom pointed to the dead man.

"I merely repeat that it isn't the first time that pillow's been stained
from unusual wounds in the head. Being, as you call it, a trifle
superstitious, I merely ask if the coincidence is significant."

Katherine cried out. Bobby, in spite of his knowledge that sooner or
later he would be arrested for his grandfather's murder, stepped
forward, nodding.

"I know what you mean, doctor."

"Anybody," the doctor said, "who's ever heard of this house knows what I
mean. We needn't talk of that."

The detective, however, was insistent. Paredes in his unemotional way
expressed an equal curiosity. Bobby and Katherine had been frightened as
children by the stories clustering about the old wing. They nodded from
time to time while the doctor held them in the desolate room with the
dead man, speaking of the other deaths it had sheltered.

Silas Blackburn's great grandfather, he told the detective, had been
carried to that bed from a Revolutionary skirmish with a bullet at the
base of his brain. For many hours he had raved deliriously, fighting
unsuccessfully against the final silence.

"It has been a legend in the family, as these young people will tell you,
that Blackburns die hard, and there are those who believe that people who
die hard leave something behind them--something that clings to the
physical surroundings of their suffering. If it was only that one case!
But it goes on and on. Silas Blackburn's father, for instance, killed
himself here. He had lost his money in silly speculations. He stood where
you stand, detective, and blew his brains out. He fell over and lay where
his son lies, his head on that pillow. Silas Blackburn was a money
grubber. He started with nothing but this property, and he made a
fortune, but even he had enough imagination to lock this room up after
one more death of that kind. It was this girl's father. You were too
young, Katherine, to remember it, but I took care of him. I saw it. He
was carried here after he had been struck at the back of the head in a
polo match. He died, too, fighting hard. God! How the man suffered. He
loosened his bandages toward the end. When I got here the pillow was
redder than it is to-day. It strikes me as curious that the first time
the room has been slept in since then it should harbour a death behind
locked doors--from a wound in the head."

Paredes's fingers were restless, as if he missed his customary cigarette.
The detective strolled to the window.

"Very interesting," he said. "Extremely interesting for old women and
young children. You may classify yourself, doctor."

"Thanks," the doctor rumbled. "I'll wait until you've told me how these
doors were entered, how that wound was made, how this body turned on its
side in an empty room."

The detective glanced at Bobby. His voice lacked confidence.

"I'll do my best. I'll even try to tell you why the murderer came back
this afternoon to disturb his victim."

Bobby went, curiously convinced that the doctor had had the better of
the argument.

For a moment Katherine, Graham, Paredes, and he were alone in the
main hall.

"God knows what it was," Graham said, "but it may mean something to you,
Bobby. Tell us carefully, Katherine, about the sounds that came to you
across the court."

"It was just what I heard last night when he died," she answered. "It was
like something falling softly, then a long-drawn sigh. I tried to pay no
attention. I fought it. I didn't call at first. But I couldn't keep
quiet. I knew we had to go to that room. It never occurred to me that the
detective or the coroner might be there moving around."

"You were alone up here?" Graham said.

"I think so."

"No," Bobby said. "I was in my room."

"What were you doing?" Graham asked.

"I was asleep. Katherine's call woke me up."

"Asleep!" Paredes echoed. "And she didn't call at once--"

He broke off. Bobby grasped his arm.

"What are you trying to do?"

"I'm sorry," Paredes said. "Now, really, you mustn't think of that. I
shouldn't have spoken. I'm more inclined to agree with the doctor's
theory, impossible as it seems."

"Yesterday," Katherine said, "I would have thought it impossible. After
last night and just now I'm not so sure. I--I wish the doctor were right.
It would clear you, Bobby."

He smiled.

"Do you think any jury would listen to such a theory?"

Katherine put her finger to her lips. Howells and the doctor came
from the corridor of the old wing. At the head of the stairs the
detective turned.

"You will find it very warm and comfortable by the fire in the lower
hall, Mr. Blackburn."

He waited until Katherine had slipped to her room until Graham, Paredes,
the doctor, and Bobby were on the stairs. Then he walked slowly into the
new corridor.

Bobby knew what he was after. The detective had made no effort to
disguise his intention. He wanted Bobby out of the way while he searched
his room again, this time for a sharp, slender instrument capable of
penetrating between the bones at the base of a man's brain.

Paredes lighted a cigarette and warmed his back at the fire. The doctor
settled himself in his chair. He paid no attention to the others. He
wouldn't answer Paredes's slow remarks.

"Interesting, doctor! I am a little psychic. Always in this house I have
responded to strange, unfriendly influences. Always, as now, the approach
of night depresses me."

Bobby couldn't sit still. He nodded at Graham, arose, got his coat and
hat, and stepped into the court. The dusk was already thick there.
Dampness and melancholy seemed to exude from the walls of the old house.
He paused and gazed at one of the foot-prints in the soft earth by the
fountain. Shreds of plaster adhered to the edges, testimony that the
detective had made his cast from this print. He tried to realize that
that mute, familiar impression had the power to send him to his
execution. Graham, who had come silently from the house, startled him.

"What are you looking at?"

"No use, Hartley. I was on the library lounge. I heard every word
Howells said."

"Perhaps it's just as well," Graham said. "You know what you face. But I
hate to see you suffer. We've got to find a way around that evidence."

Bobby pointed to the windows of the room of death.

"There's no way around except the doctor's theory."

He laughed shortly.

"Much as I've feared that room, I'm afraid the psychic explanation won't
hold water. Paredes put his finger on it. I would have had time to get
back to my room before Katherine called--"

"Stop, Bobby!"

"Hartley! I'm afraid to go to sleep. It's dreadful not to know whether
you are active in your sleep, whether you are evil and ingenious to the
point of the miraculous in your sleep. I'm so tired, Hartley."

"Why should you have gone to that room this afternoon?" Graham asked.
"You must get this idea out of your head. You must have sleep, and,
perhaps, when you're thoroughly rested, you will remember."

"I'm not so sure," Bobby said, "that I want to remember."

He pointed to the footprint.

"There's no question. I was here last night."

"Unless," Graham said, "your handkerchief and your shoes were stolen."

"Nonsense!" Bobby cried. "The only motive would be to commit a murder in
order to kill me by sending me to the chair. And who would know his way
around that dark house like me? Who would have found out so easily that
my grandfather had changed his room?"

"It's logical," Graham admitted slowly, "but we can't give in. By the
way, has Paredes ever borrowed any large sums?"

Bobby hesitated. After all, Paredes and he had been good friends.

"A little here and there," he answered reluctantly.

"Has he ever paid you back?"

"I don't recall," Bobby answered, flushing. "You know I've never been
exactly calculating about money. Whenever he wanted it I was always glad
to help Carlos out. Why do you ask?"

"If any one," Graham answered, "looked on you as a certain source of
money, there would be a motive in conserving that source, in increasing
it. Probably lots of people knew Mr. Blackburn was out of patience with
you; would make a new will to-day."

"Do you think," Bobby asked, "that Carlos is clever enough to have got
through those doors? And what about this afternoon--that ghastly
disturbing of the body?"

He smiled wanly.

"It looks like me or the ghosts of my ancestors."

"If Paredes," Graham insisted, "tries to borrow any money from you now,
tell me about it. Another thing, Bobby. We can't afford to keep your
experiences of last night a secret any longer."

He stepped to the door and asked Doctor Groom to come out.

"He won't be likely to pass your confidences on to Howells," he said.
"Those men are natural antagonists."

After a moment the doctor appeared, a slouch hat drawn low over his
shaggy forehead.

"What you want?" he grumbled. "This court's a first-class place to catch
cold. Dampest hole in the neighbourhood. Often wondered why."

"I want to ask you," Graham began, "something about the effects of such
drugs as could be given in wine. Tell him, will you, Bobby, what happened
last night?"

Bobby vanquished the discomfort with which the gruff, opinionated
physician had always filled him. He recited the story of last night's
dinner, of his experience in the cafe, of his few blurred impressions of
the swaying vehicle and the woods.

"Hartley thinks something may have been put in my wine."

"What for?" the doctor asked. "What had these people to gain by drugging
you? Suppose for some far-fetched reason they wanted to have Silas
Blackburn put out of the way. They couldn't make you do it by drugging
you. At any rate, they couldn't have had a hand in this afternoon. Mind,
I'm not saying you had a thing to do with it yourself, but I don't
believe you were drugged. Any drug likely to be used in wine would
probably have sent you into a deep sleep. And your symptoms on waking up
are scarcely sharp enough. Sorry, boy. Sounds more like aphasia. The path
you've been treading sometimes leads to that black country, and it's
there that hates sharpen unknown. I remember a case where a tramp
returned and killed a farmer who had refused him food. Retained no
recollection of the crime--hours dropped out of his life. They executed
him while he still tried to remember."

"I read something about the case," Bobby muttered.

"Been better if you hadn't," the doctor grumbled. "Suggestions work in a
man's brain without his knowing it."

He thought for a moment, his heavy, black brows coming closer together.
He glanced at the windows of the old room. His sunken, infused eyes
nearly closed.

"I know how you feel, and that's a little punishment maybe you deserve.
I'll say this for your comfort. You probably followed the plan that had
been impressed on your brain by Mr. Graham. You came here, no doubt, and
stood around. With an automatic appreciation of your condition you may
have taken that old precaution of convivial men returning home, and
removed your shoes. Then your automatic judgment may have warned you that
you weren't fit to go in at all, and you probably wandered off to the
empty house."

"Then," Bobby asked, "you don't think I did it?"

"God knows who did it. God knows what did it. The longer I live the surer
I become that we scientists can't probe everything. Whenever I go near
Silas Blackburn's body I receive a very powerful impression that his
death in that room from such a wound goes deeper than ordinary murder,
deeper than a case of recurrent aphasia."

His eyes widened. He turned with Graham and Bobby at the sound of an
automobile coming through the woods.

"Probably the coroner at last," he said.

The automobile, a small runabout, drew up at the entrance to the court. A
little wizened man, with yellowish skin stretched across high cheek
bones, stepped out and walked up the path.

"Well!" he said shrilly. "What you doing, Doctor Groom?"

"Waiting to witness another reason why coroners should be abolished," the
doctor rumbled. "This is the dead man's grandson, Coroner; and Mr.
Graham, a friend of the family's."

Bobby accepted the coroner's hand with distaste.

"Howells," the coroner said in his squeaky voice, "seems to think it's a
queer case. Inconvenient, I call it. Wish people wouldn't die queerly
whenever I go on a little holiday. I had got five ducks, gentlemen, when
they came to me with that damned telegram. Bad business mine, 'cause
people will die when you least expect them to. Let's go see what Howells
has got on his mind. Bright sleuth, Howells! Ought to be in New York."

He started up the path, side by side with Doctor Groom.

"Are you coming?" Graham asked Bobby. Bobby shook his head. "I don't want
to. I'd rather stay outside. You'd better be there, Hartley."

Graham followed the others while Bobby wandered from the court and
started down a path that entered the woods from the rear of the house.

Immediately the forest closed greedily about him. Here and there, where
the trees were particularly stunted, branches cut against a pallid,
greenish glow in the west--the last light.

Bobby wanted, if he could, to find that portion of the woods where he had
stood last night, fancying the trees straining in the wind like puny men,
visualizing a dim figure in a black mask which he had called his
conscience.

The forest was all of a pattern--ugly, unfriendly, melancholy. He went
on, however, hoping to glimpse that particular picture he remembered. He
left the path, walking at haphazard among the undergrowth. Ahead he saw a
placid, flat, and faintly luminous stretch. He pushed through the bushes
and paused on the shore of a lake, small and stagnant. Dead, stripped
trunks of trees protruded from the water. At the end a bird arose with a
sudden flapping of wings; it cried angrily as it soared above the trees
and disappeared to the south.

The morbid loneliness of the place touched Bobby's spirit with chill
hands. As a child he had never cared to play about the stagnant lake,
nor, he recalled, had the boys of the village fished or bathed there.
Certainly he hadn't glimpsed it last night. He was about to walk away
when a movement on the farther bank held him, made him gaze with eager
eyes across the sleepy water.

He thought there was something black in the black shadows of the
trees--a thing that stirred through the heavy dusk without sound. He
received, moreover, an impression of anger and haste as distinct as the
bird had projected. But he could see nothing clearly in this bad light.
He couldn't be sure that there was any one over there.

He started around the end of the lake, and for a moment he thought that
the shape of a woman, clothed in black, detached itself from the
shadow. The image dissolved. He wondered if it had been more
substantial than fancy.

"Who is that?" he called.

The woods muffled his voice. There was no answer. Nor was there, he
noticed, any crackling of twigs or rustling of dead leaves. If there
had been a woman there she had fled noiselessly, yet, as he went on
around the lake, his own progress was distinctly audible through the
decay of autumn.

It was too dark on the other side to detect any traces of a recent human
presence in the thicket. He couldn't quiet, however, the feeling that he
had had a glimpse of a woman clothed in black who had studied him
secretly across the stagnant stretch of the lake.

On the other hand, there was no logic in a woman's presence here at such
an hour, no logic in a stranger's running away from him. While he
pondered the night invaded the forest completely, making it impossible
for him to search farther. It had grown so dark, indeed, that he found
his way out with difficulty. The branches caught at his clothing. The
underbrush tangled itself about his feet. It was as if the thicket were
trying to hold him away from the house.

As he entered the court he noticed a discoloured glow diffusing itself
through the curtains of the room of death.

He opened the front door. Paredes and Graham alone sat by the fire.

"Then they're not through yet," Bobby said.

Graham arose. He commenced to pace the length of the hall.

"They've had Katherine in that room. One would think she'd been through
enough. Now they've sent for the servants."

Paredes laughed lightly.

"After this," he said, "I'm afraid, Bobby, you'll need the powers of the
police to keep servants in your house."

Muttering, frightened voices came from the dining-room. Jenkins entered,
and, shaking his head, went up the stairs. The two women who followed
him, were in tears. They paused, as if seeking an excuse to linger on
the lower floor, to postpone as long as possible their entrance of the
room of death.

Ella, a pretty girl, whose dark hair and eyes suggested a normal
vivacity, spoke to Bobby.

"It's outrageous, Mr. Robert. He found out all we knew this morning.
What's he after now? You might think we'd murdered Mr. Blackburn."

Jane was older. An ugly scar crossed her cheek. It was red and like an
open wound as she demanded that Bobby put a stop to these inquisitions.

"I can do nothing," he said. "Go on up and answer or they can make
trouble for you."

Muttering again to each other, they followed Jenkins, and in the lower
hall the three men waited.

Jenkins came down first. His face was white. It twitched.

"The body!" he mouthed. "It's moved! I saw it before."

He stretched out his hands to Bobby.

"That's why they wanted us, to find out where we were this afternoon, and
everything we've done, as if we might have gone there, and disturbed--"

Angry voices in the upper hall interrupted him. The two women ran down,
as white as Jenkins. At an impatient nod from Bobby the three servants
went on to the kitchen. Howells, the coroner, and Doctor Groom descended.

"What ails you, Doctor?" the coroner was squeaking. "I agree it's an
unpleasant room. Lots of old rooms are. I follow you when you say no
post-mortem contraction would have caused such an alteration in the
position of the body. There's no question about the rest of it. The man
was clearly murdered with a sharp tool of some sort, and the murderer was
in the room again this afternoon, and disturbed the corpse. Howells says
he knows who. It's up to him to find out how. He says he has plenty of
evidence and that the guilty person's in this house, so I'm not fretting
myself. I'm cross with you, Howells, for breaking up my holiday. One of
my assistants would have done as well."

Howells apparently paid no attention to the coroner. His narrow eyes
followed the doctor with a growing curiosity. His level smile seemed
to have drawn his lips into a line, inflexible, a little cruel. The
doctor grunted:

"Instead of abolishing coroners we ought to double their salaries."

The coroner made a long squeak as an indication of mirth.

"You think unfriendly spooks did it. I've always believed you were an old
fogy. Hanged if that doesn't sound modern."

The doctor ran his fingers through his thick, untidy hair.

"I merely ask for the implement that caused death. I only ask to know how
it was inserted through the bed while Blackburn lay on his back. And if
you've time you might tell me how the murderer entered the room last
night and to-day."

The coroner repeated his squeak. He glanced at the little group by the
fire.

"Out in the kitchen, upstairs, or right here under our noses is almost
certainly the person who could tell us. Interesting case, Howells!"

Howells, who still watched the doctor, answered dryly:

"Unusually interesting."

The coroner struggled into his coat.

"Permits are all available," he squeaked. "Have your undertakers out when
you like."

Graham answered him brusquely.

"Everything's arranged. I've only to telephone."

The coroner nodded at Doctor Groom. His voice pointed its humour with a
thinner tone.

"If I were you, Howells, I'd take this hairy old theorist up as a
suspicious character."

The doctor made a movement in his direction while Howells continued to
stare. The doctor checked himself. He went to the closet and got his
hat and coat.

"Want me to drop you, old sawbones?" the coroner asked.

Savagely the doctor shook his head.

"My buggy's in the stable."

The coroner's squeak was thinner, more irritating than ever.

"Then don't let the spooks get you, driving through the woods. Old folks
say there are a-plenty there."

Bobby arose. He couldn't face the prospect of the man's squeaking again.

"We find nothing to laugh at in this situation," he said. "You're
quite through?"

The coroner's eyes blazed.

"I'm through, if that's the way you feel. Goodnight." He added with a
sharp maliciousness: "I leave my sympathy for whoever Howells has his
eagle eye on."

Howells, when the doctor and the coroner had gone, excused himself with a
humility that mocked the others:

"With your permission I shall write in the library until dinner."

He bowed and left.

"He wants to work on his report," Graham suggested.

"An exceptional man!" Paredes murmured.

"Has he questioned you?" Graham asked.

"I'd scarcely call it that," Paredes replied. "We've both questioned, and
we've both been clams. I fancy he doesn't think much of me since I
believe in ghosts, yet the doctor seems to interest him."

"Where were you?" Graham asked, "when Miss Perrine's scream called us?"

Paredes stifled a yawn.

"Dozing here by the fire. I am very tired after last night."

"You don't look particularly tired."

"Custom, I'm ashamed to say, constructs a certain armour. To-morrow, with
a fresh mind, I hope to be able to dissect all I have seen and heard, all
that has happened here to-day."

"The thing that counts is what happened to me last night, Carlos," Bobby
said. "It's the only way you can help me."

As Paredes strolled to the foot of the stairs Bobby waited for a
defensive reply, for a sign, perhaps, that the Panamanian was offended
and proposed to depart. Paredes, however, went upstairs, yawning. He
called back:

"I must make myself a trifle more presentable for dinner."

Graham faced Bobby with the old question:

"What can he want hanging around here unless it's money?" And after a
moment: "He's clever--hard to sound. I have to leave you, Bobby. I must
telephone--the ugly formalities."

"It's good of you to take them off my mind," Bobby answered.

He remained in his chair, gazing drowsily at the fire, trying,
always trying to remember, yet finding no new light among the
shadows of his memory.

Just before dinner Katherine joined him. She wore a sombre gown that
made her face seem too white, that heightened the groping curiosity
of her eyes.

Without speaking she sat down beside him and stared, too, at the
smouldering fire. From her presence, from her tactful silence he drew
comfort--to an extent, rest.

"You make me ashamed," he whispered once. "I've been a beast, leaving you
here alone these weeks. You don't understand quite, why that was." She
wouldn't let him go on. She shook her head. They remained silently by the
fire until Graham and Paredes joined them.

When dinner was announced the detective came from the library, and,
uninvited, sat at the table with them. His report evidently still
filled his mind, for he spoke only when it was unavoidable and then
in monosyllables. Paredes alone ate with a show of enjoyment, alone
attempted to talk. Eventually even he fell silent before the lack
of response.

Afterward he arranged a small card table by the fire in the hall. He
found cards, and, with a package of cigarettes and a box of matches
convenient to his hand, commenced to play solitaire. The detective, Bobby
gathered, had brought his report up to date, for he lounged near by,
watching the Panamanian's slender fingers as they handled the cards
deftly. Bobby, Graham, and Katherine were glad to withdraw beyond the
range of those narrow, searching eyes. They entered the library and
closed the door.

Graham, expectant of a report from his man in New York as to the
movements of Maria and the identity of the stranger, was restless.

"If we could only get one fact," he said, "one reasonable clue that
didn't involve Bobby! I've never felt so at sea. I wonder if, in spite of
Howells's evidence, we're not all a little afraid since this afternoon,
of something such as Katherine felt last night--something we can't
define. Howells alone is satisfied. We must believe in the hand of
another man. Doctor Groom talks about indefinable hands."

"Uncle Silas was so afraid last night!" Katherine whispered.

"That," Bobby cried, "is the fact we must have."

He paused.

"What's that?" he asked sharply.

They sat for some time, listening to the sound of wheels on the gravel,
to the banging of the front door, and, later, to the pacing of men in the
room of death overhead. They tried again to thread the mazes of this
problem whose only conceivable exit led to Bobby's guilt. The movements
upstairs persisted. At last they became measured and dragging, like the
footsteps of men who carried some heavy burden.

They looked at each other then. Katherine hid her eyes.

"It's like a tomb here," Bobby said.

He arranged kindling in the fireplace and touched a match to it. It
hadn't occurred to him to ring for Jenkins. None of them wished to be
disturbed. Eventually it was the detective who intruded. He strolled in,
glanced at them curiously for a moment, then walked to the door of the
enclosed staircase. He grasped the knob.

"To-night," he announced, "I am trying a small experiment on the
chance of clearing up the last details of the mystery. Since it
depends on the courage of whoever murdered Mr. Blackburn I've small
hope of its success."

He indicated the ceiling. "You've heard, I daresay, what's been going on
up there. Mr. Blackburn's body has been removed to his own room. The room
where he was killed is empty. I mean to go up and enter and lock the
doors as he did last night. I shall leave the window up as it was last
night. I shall blow out the candle as he did."

He lowered his voice. He looked directly at Bobby. His words carried a
definite challenge.

"I shall lie on the bed and await the murderer under the precise
conditions Mr. Blackburn did."

"What do you expect to gain by that?" Graham asked.

"Probably nothing," Howells answered, "because, as I have said, success
depends upon the courage of a man who kills in the dark while his victim
sleeps. I simply give him the chance to attack me as he did Mr.
Blackburn. Of course he realizes it would be a good deal to his advantage
to have me out of the way. I ask him to come, therefore, as stealthily as
he did last night. I beg him to match his skill with mine. I want him to
play his miracle with the window or one of the locks. But I'll wager he
hasn't the nerve, although I don't see why he should hesitate. He's a
doomed man. I shall make my arrest in the morning. I shall publish all my
evidence."

Bobby wouldn't meet the narrow, menacing eyes, for he knew that Howells
challenged him to a duel of slyness with the whole truth at stake. The
detective's manner increased the hatred which had blazed in Bobby's mind
when he had stood in the bedroom over his grandfather's body. For a
moment he wished with all his heart that he might accept the challenge.
He did the best he could.

"I gather," he said, "that you haven't unearthed the motive for
disturbing the body. And have you found the sharp instrument that
caused death?"

The detective answered tolerantly:

"I have found a number of sharp instruments. None of them, however, seems
quite slender or round enough. I'll get all that out of my man when I
lock him up. I'll get it to-night if he dares come."

"Why," Graham said, "do you announce your plans so accurately to us?"

The detective's level smile widened.

"You shouldn't ask that, Mr. Graham. I've caused the servants to know my
plans. Mr. Paredes knows them. I wish every one in the house to know
them. That is in order that the murderer, who is in the house, may come
if he wishes."

Katherine arose abruptly.

"When you come down to it," she said, "you are accusing one of us. It's
brutal, unfair--absurd."

"I am a detective, Miss," Howells answered. "I have my own methods."

Bobby stared at the slight protuberance in the breast pocket of the
detective's coat. The cast of his footprint must be secreted there, and
almost certainly the handkerchief which had been found beneath the bed.
He shrank from his own thoughts.

If he had consciously committed this murder he could understand a desire
to get that evidence.

Katherine had gone closer to the detective.

"In any case," she urged him, "I wish you wouldn't try to spend the night
in that room. It isn't pleasant. After what the doctor has said,
it--well, it isn't safe."

Howells burst out laughing.

"Never fear, Miss. I'm content to give Doctor Groom's spirits as much
chance to take a fall out of me as anybody. I'll be going up now." He
bowed. "Good-night to you all, and pleasant dreams."

He opened the door and slipped into the darkness of the private
staircase. They heard him, after he had closed the door, climbing upward.
Katherine shivered.

"He has plenty of courage, Hartley! If nothing happens to him to-night
he'll finish Bobby in the morning. That mustn't happen. He mustn't go to
jail. You understand. Things would never be the same for him again."

Graham spread his hands.

"What am I to do? I might go to New York and get after these
people myself."

"Don't leave the Cedars," Bobby begged, "until he does arrest me.
There'll be plenty of time for the New York end then. I've no faith in
it. Watch Carlos if you want, but most important of all, find
out--somehow you've got to find out--what my grandfather was afraid of."

Graham nodded.

"And if it does come to an arrest, Bobby, you're not to say a word to
anybody without my advice. You ought to get to bed now. You must have
rest, and Katherine, too. Don't listen to-night, Katherine, for messages
from across the court."

"I'll try," she said, "but, Hartley, I wish that man wasn't there. I wish
no one was in that room."

She took Bobby's hand.

"Good-night, Bobby, and don't give up hope. We'll do something. Somehow
we'll pull you through."

Bobby waited, hoping that Graham would offer to share his room with him.
For, as he had said earlier, the prospect of going to sleep, of losing
control of his thoughts and actions, appalled him. Yet such an offer, he
realized, must impress Graham as delicate, as an indication that he
really doubted Bobby's innocence, as a sort of spying. He wasn't
surprised, therefore, when Graham only said:

"I'll be in the next room, Bobby. If you're restless or need me you've
only to knock on the wall."

Bobby didn't leave the library with them. The warmth with which Katherine
had just filled him faded as he watched her go out side by side with
Graham. Her hand was on Graham's arm. There was, he fancied, in her eyes
an emotion deeper than gratitude or friendship. He sighed as the door
closed behind them. He was himself largely to blame for that situation.
His very revolt against its imminence had hastened its shaping.

He walked anxiously to the table. He had remembered the medicine Doctor
Groom had prepared for him that afternoon to make him sleep. He hadn't
taken it then. If it remained where he had left it, which was likely
enough in the disordered state of the household, he would drink it now.
Reinforced by his complete weariness, it ought to send him into a sleep
profound enough to drown any possible abnormal impulses of
unconsciousness.

The glass was there. He drained it, and stood for a time looking at the
pinkish sediment in the bottom. That was all right for to-night, but
afterward--he couldn't shrink perpetually from sleep. He shrugged his
shoulders, remembering it would make little difference what he did in his
sleep when they had him behind prison bars. Perhaps this would be his
last night of freedom.

He found Paredes still in the hall. The Panamanian, with languid
gestures, continued to play his solitaire. His box of cigarettes was
much reduced.

"I thought you were tired, Carlos."

Paredes glanced up. His eyes were neither weary nor alert. As usual his
expression disclosed nothing of his thoughts, yet he must have read in
Bobby's tone a reproach at this indifference.

"The game intrigues me," he murmured, "and you know," he added dreamily.
"I sometimes think better while I amuse myself."

Bobby nodded good-night and went on up to his room. Even while he
undressed the effects of the doctor's narcotic were perceptible. His eyes
had grown heavy, his brain a trifle numb.

Almost apathetically he assured himself that he couldn't accomplish these
mad actions in his sleep.

"Yet last night--" he murmured. "That finishes me in the eyes of the
law. The doctor will testify to aphasia. According to him I am two
men--two men!"

He yawned, recalling snatches of books he had read and one or two
scientific reports of such cases. He climbed into bed and blew out his
candle. His drowsiness thickened. In his dulled mind one recollection
remained--the picture of Howells coldly challenging him with his level
smile to make a secret entrance of the old bedroom in a murderous effort
to escape the penalty of the earlier crime. And Howells had been right.
His death would give Bobby a chance. The destruction of the evidence, the
bringing into the case of a broader-minded man, a man without a carefully
constructed theory--all that would help Bobby, might save him. Howells,
moreover, had indicated that he had so far withheld his evidence. But
that was probably a bait.

In his drowsy way Bobby hated more powerfully than before this detective
who, with a serene malevolence, made him writhe in his net. Thought
ceased. He drifted into a trance-like sleep. He swung in the black pit
again, fighting out against crushing odds. The darkness thundered as
though informing him that graver forces than any he had ever imagined
had definitely grasped him. Then he understood. He was in a black cell,
and the thundering was the steady advance of men along an iron floor to
take him--

"Bobby! Bobby!"

He flung out his hands. He sat upright, opening his eyes. The blackness
assumed the familiar, yielding quality of the night. The thunder, the
footfalls, became a hurried knocking at his door.

"Bobby! You're there--" It was Katherine. Her tone made the night as
frightening as the blackness of the pit.

"What's the matter?"

"You're there. I didn't know. Get up. Hartley's putting some clothes on.
Hurry! The house is so dark--so strange."

"Tell me what's happened."

She didn't answer at first. He struck a match, lighted his candle, threw
on a dressing gown, and stepped to the door. Katherine shrank against
the wall, hiding her eyes from the light of his candle. He thought it
odd she should wear the dress in which she had appeared at dinner. But
it seemed indifferently fastened, and her hair was in disorder. Graham
stepped from his room.

"What is it?" Bobby demanded.

"You wouldn't wake up, Bobby. You were so hard to wake." The idea seemed
to fill her mind. She repeated it several times.

"It's nothing," Graham said. "Go back to your room, Katherine. She's
fanciful--"

She lowered her hands. Her eyes were full of terror. "No. We have to go
to that room as I went last night, as we went to-day."

Graham tried to quiet her. "We'll go to satisfy you."

Her voice hardened. "I know. I was asleep. It woke me up, stealing in
across the court again."

Bobby grasped her arm. "You came out and aroused up at once?"

She shook her head. "I--I couldn't find my dressing gown. This dress was
by the bed. I put it on, but I couldn't seem to fasten it."

Bobby stepped back, remembering his last thought before drifting into the
trance-like sleep. She seemed to know what was in his mind.

"But when I knocked you were sleeping so soundly."

"Too soundly, perhaps."

"Come. We're growing imaginative," Graham said. "Howells would take care
of himself. He'll probably give us the deuce for disturbing him, but to
satisfy you, Katherine, we'll wake him up."

"If you can," she whispered.

They entered the main hall. Light came through the stair well from the
lower floor. Graham walked to the rail and glanced down. Bobby followed
him. On the table by the fireplace the cards were arranged in neat
piles. A strong draft blew cigarette smoke up to them.

"Paredes," Graham said, amazed, "is still downstairs. The front door's
open. He's probably in the court."

"It must be very late," Bobby said.

Katherine shivered.

"Half-past two. I looked at my watch. The same time as last night."

With a gesture of resolution she led the way into the corridor. Bobby
shrank from the damp and musty atmosphere of the narrow passage.

"Why do you come, Katherine?" he asked.

"I have to know, as I had to know last night."

Graham raised his hand and knocked at the door which again was locked on
the inside. The echoes chattered back at them. Graham knocked again. With
a passionate revolt Katherine raised her hands, too, and pounded at the
panels. Suddenly she gave up. She let her hands fall listlessly.

"It's no use."

"Howells! Howells!" Graham called. "Why don't you answer?"

"When he boasted to-night," Katherine whispered, "the murderer
heard him."

"Suppose he's gone down to the library?" Graham said.

Bobby gave Katherine the candle.

"No. He'd have stayed. We've got to break in here. We've got to
find out."

Graham placed his powerful shoulder against the door. The lock strained.
Bobby added his weight. With a splintering of wood the door flew open,
precipitating them across the threshold. Through the darkness Graham
sprang for the opposite door.

"It's locked," he called, "and the key's on this side."

Bobby took the candle from Katherine and forced himself to approach the
bed. The flame flickered a little in the breeze which stole past the
curtain of the open window. It shook across the body of Howells, fully
clothed with his head on the stained pillow. His face, intricately lined,
was as peaceful as Silas Blackburn's had been. Its level smile persisted.

Bobby caught his breath.

"Howells--"

He set the candle on the bureau.

"It's no use. We must look at the back of his head."

"The back of his head!" Katherine echoed.

"It's illegal," Graham said.

"Look!" Bobby cried. "We've got to look!"

Graham tiptoed forward. He stretched out his hand. With a motion of
abhorrence he drew it back. Bobby watched him hypnotically, thinking:

"I wanted this. I hated him. I thought of it just before I went to
sleep."

Graham reached out again. This time he touched Howells's head. It rolled
over on the pillow.

"Good God!" he said.

They stared at the red hole, near the base of the brain, at a fresh
crimson splotch, straying beyond the edges of the darker one they had
seen that afternoon.

Graham turned away, his hand still outstretched, as if it had touched
some poisonous thing and might retain a contamination.

"He was prepared against it," he whispered, "expected it, yet it got
him."

He glanced rapidly around the room whose shadows seemed crowding about
the candle to stifle it.

"Unless we're all mad," he cried, "the murderer must be hidden in this
room now. Don't you see? He's got to be, or Groom's right, and we're
fighting the dead. Go out, Katherine. Stand by that broken door, Bobby.
I'm going to look."




CHAPTER IV

A STRANGE LIGHT APPEARS AT THE DESERTED HOUSE


Graham's intention, logical as it was, impressed Bobby as quite futile.
Silas Blackburn had died in this ancient, melancholy room behind locked
doors. This afternoon, with a repetition of the sounds that had probably
accompanied his death, they had been drawn to find that, behind locked
doors again, the position of the body had changed incredibly, as if to
expose to them the tiny fatal wound at the base of the brain. Now for the
third time those stealthy movements had aroused Katherine, and they had
found, once more behind locked doors, the determined and malicious
detective, murdered precisely as old Blackburn had been.

Of course Graham was logical. By every rational argument the murderer
must still be in the room. Yet Bobby foresaw that, as always, no one
would be found, that nothing would be unearthed to explain the succession
of tragic mysteries. While Graham commenced his search, indeed, he
continued to stare at the little round hole in Howells's head, at the
fresh, irregular stain on the pillow, and he became absorbed in his own
predicament. Again and again he asked himself if he could be responsible
for these murders which had been committed with an inhuman ingenuity. He
knew only that he had wandered, unconscious, in the vicinity of the
Cedars last night; that he had been asleep when his grandfather's body
had altered its position; that he had gone to sleep a little while ago
too profoundly, brooding over Howells's challenge to the murderer to
invade the room of death and kill him if he could. Howells had been
confident that he could handle a man and so solve the riddle of how the
room had been entered. Certainly Howells's challenge had been accepted,
and Bobby knew that he had fallen into that deep sleep hating the
detective, telling himself that the man's death might save him from
arrest, from conviction, from an intolerable walk to a little room with a
single chair.

"Recurrent aphasia." The doctor's expression came back to him. In such a
state a man could overcome locked doors, could accomplish apparent
miracles and retain no recollection. And Bobby had hated and feared
Howells more than he had his grandfather.

Dully he saw Katherine go out at Graham's direction. As one in a dream he
moved toward the door they had had to break down on entering.

"Stand close to it," Graham said. "We'll cover everything."

"You'll find no one," Bobby answered with a perfect assurance.

He saw Graham take the candle and explore the large closets. He watched
him examine the spaces behind the window curtains. He could smile a
little as Graham stooped, peering beneath the bed, as he moved each piece
of furniture large enough to secrete a man.

"You see, Hartley, it's no use."

Graham's lack of success, however, stimulated his anger.

"Then," he said, "there must be some hiding place in the walls. Such
devices are common in houses as old as this."

Bobby indicated the silent form of the detective.

"He believed I killed my grandfather. The only reason he didn't arrest me
was his failure to find out how the room had been entered and left. Don't
you suppose he looked for a hiding place or a secret entrance the first
thing? It's obvious."

But Graham's savage determination increased. He sounded each panel. None
gave the slightest revealing response. He got a tape from Katherine and
measured the dimensions of the room, the private hall, and the corridor.
At last he turned to Bobby, his anger dead, his face white and tired.

"Everything checks," he admitted. "There's no secret room, no way in or
out. Logically Groom's right. We're fighting the dead who resent the
intrusion of your grandfather and Howells."

He laughed mirthlessly.

"After all, we can't surrender to that. There must be another answer."

"From the first Howells was satisfied with me," Bobby said.

Graham flung up his hands.

"Then tell me how you got in without disturbing those locks. I grant you,
Bobby, you had sufficient motive for both murders, but I don't believe
you have two personalities, one decent and lovable, the other cruel and
cunning to the point of magic. I don't believe if a man had two such
personalities the actions of one would be totally closed to the memory of
the other."

Bobby smiled wanly.

"It isn't pleasant to confess it, Hartley, but I have read of such
cases."

"Fiction!"

"Scientific fact."

"I wish to the devil I had shared your room with you to-night," Graham
muttered. "I might have furnished you an alibi for this affair at least."

"Either that," Bobby answered frankly, "or you might have followed me and
learned the whole secret. Honestly, isn't that what you were thinking of,
Hartley? And I did go to sleep, telling myself it would help me if
something of the sort happened to Howells. Now I'm not so sure that it
will. I--I suppose you've got to notify the police."

Graham held up his hand.

"What's that? In the corridor!"

There were quiet footsteps in the corridor. Bobby turned quickly,
Paredes strolled slowly through the passage, a cigarette held in his
slender, listless fingers. Bobby stared at him, remembering his surprise
a few minutes ago that the Panamanian should have sat up so late, should
have been, probably, in the court when they had followed Katherine to the
discovery of this new crime.

Paredes paused in the doorway. He took in the tragic picture framed by
the sinister room without displaying the slightest interest. He continued
to hold his cigarette until it expired. Then he crossed the threshold.
Graham and Bobby watched the expressionless face. Gracefully Paredes
raised his finger and pointed to the bed. When he spoke his voice was low
and pleasant:

"Appalling! I feared something of the kind when I heard you come to
this room."

He glanced at the broken door.

"The same unbelievable circumstance," he drawled. "I see you had to
break in."

The colour flashed back to Graham's face.

"You have taken plenty of time to solve your misgivings."

"It hasn't been so long. I fancied everything was all right, and I was
immersed in my solitaire. Then I heard a stirring upstairs. As I've told
you, the house frightens me. It is not natural or healthy. So I came up
to investigate this stirring, and there was Miss Katherine in the hall.
She told me."

Graham faced him with undisguised enmity.

"Immersed in your solitaire! We were attracted by a light in the lower
hall at such an hour. We looked down. You were not there. The front door
was open."

Paredes glanced at his cold cigarette. He yawned.

"When Howells died precisely as Mr. Blackburn did," Graham hurried on,
"you alone were awake about the house. Weren't you at that moment in
the court?"

Paredes laughed tolerantly.

"It is clear, in spite of my apologies, that we are not friends, Graham;
but, may I ask, are you accusing me of this strange--accident?"

"I should like to know what you were doing in the court."

"Perhaps," Paredes answered, "I was attracted there by the sounds that
aroused Miss Katherine."

Graham shook his head.

"From her description I doubt if those sounds would have been audible in
the hall."

"No matter," Paredes said. "I merely suggest that it's a case for Groom.
His hint of a spiritual enmity may be saner than you think."

Katherine appeared in the doorway. She had evidently overheard Paredes's
comment, for she nodded. The determination in her eyes suggested that she
had struggled with the situation during these last moments and had
reached a definite conclusions That quality was in her voice.

"At least, Hartley," she said, "you must send for Doctor Groom before
you notify the police."

Graham waved his hand.

"Why?" he asked. "The man is dead."

With a movement, hidden from Paredes, she indicated Bobby.

"Last time there was a good deal of delay before the doctor came. If we
get him right away he may be able to do something for this poor fellow.
At least his advice would be useful."

Bobby realized that she was fighting for time for him. Any delay would be
useful that would give them a chance to plan before the police with
unimaginative efficiency should invade the house and limit their
opportunities. Graham showed that he caught her point.

"Maybe it's better," he said. "Then, Bobby, telephone Groom to be ready
for you, and take my runabout. It's in the stable. You'll get him here
much faster than he could come in his carriage."

"While I'm gone," Bobby asked, "what will you do?"

"Watch this room," Graham jerked out. "See that no one enters or leaves
it, or touches the body. I'll hope for some clue."

"You've plenty of courage," Paredes drawled. "I shouldn't care to watch
alone in this room."

He followed Katherine into the corridor. Bobby looked at Graham.

"You'll take no chances, Hartley?"

Graham's smile wasn't pleasant.

"According to you and the dead detective there's no risk while you're out
of the house. Still, I shall be nervous, but don't worry."

Bobby joined the others before they had reached the hall.

"Of course Hartley found nothing," Katherine said to him.

"Nothing," Paredes answered, "except a very bad temper."

Katherine's distaste for the man was no longer veiled.

"You don't like Mr. Graham," she said, "but he is our friend, and he is
in this house to help us."

Paredes bowed.

"I regret that the amusement Mr. Graham causes me sometimes finds
expression. He is so earnest, so materialistic in his relation to the
world. That is why he will see nothing psychic in the situation."

Paredes's easy contempt was like a tonic for Katherine. Her fear seemed
to drop from her. She turned purposefully to Bobby, ignoring the
Panamanian.

"I shall watch with Hartley," she said.

He was ashamed that jealousy should creep into such a moment, but her
resolve recalled his amorous discontent. The prospect of Graham and her,
watching alone, drawn to each other by their fright and uncertainty, by
their surroundings, by the hour, became unbearable. It placed him, to an
extent, on Paredes's side. It urged him, when Paredes had gone on
downstairs, to spring almost eagerly to his defence.

"As Hartley says," Katherine began, "he makes you think of a snake. He
must see we dislike and resent him."

"You and Hartley, perhaps," Bobby said. "Carlos says he is here to help
me. I've no reason to disbelieve him."

A little colour came into Katherine's face. She half stretched out her
hand as if in an appeal. But the colour faded and her hand dropped.

"We are wasting time," she said. "You had better go."

"I am sorry we disagree about Carlos," he commenced.

She turned deliberately away from him.

"You must hurry," she said. "Hurry!"

He saw her enter the corridor to join Graham. The obscurity of the narrow
place seemed to hold for him a new menace.

He walked downstairs slowly. While he telephoned, instructing a servant
to tell the doctor to be dressed and ready in twenty minutes, he saw
Paredes go to the closet and get his hat and coat.

"I shall keep you company," the Panamanian announced.

Bobby was glad enough to have him. He didn't want to be alone. He was
aware by this time that no amount of thought would persuade useful
memories to emerge from the black pit. They walked to the stable, half
gone to ruin like the rest of the estate. Bobby started Graham's car. The
servants' quarters, he saw, were dark. Then Jenkins and the two women
hadn't been aroused, were still ignorant of the new crime. As they drove
smoothly past the gloomy house they glimpsed through the court the dimly
lit windows of the old room that persistently guarded its grim secret.
Bobby pictured the living as well as the dead there, and his mind
revolted, and he shivered. He opened the throttle wider. The car sprang
forward. The divergent glare from the headlights forced back the
reluctant thicket. Paredes drawled unexpectedly:

"There is nothing as lonely anywhere in the world."

He stooped behind the windshield and lighted a cigarette.

"At least. Bobby," he said between puffs, "the Cedars has taken from you
the fear of Howells."

And after a time, staring at the glow of his cigarette, he went on
softly:

"Have you noticed anything significant about the discovery of each
mystery at the Cedars?"

"Many things," Bobby muttered.

"Think," Paredes urged him.

Bobby answered angrily:

"You've suggested that to me once to-day, Carlos. You mean that each time
I have been asleep or unconscious."

"I mean something quite different," Paredes said.

He hesitated. When he continued, his drawl was more pronounced.

"Then you haven't remarked that each time it has been Miss Katherine who
has made the discovery, who has aroused the rest of the house?"

The car swerved sharply. Bobby's first impulse had been to take his hands
from the wheel, to force Paredes to retract his sly insinuation.

"That's the rottenest thing I've ever known you to do, Carlos.
Take it back."

Paredes shrugged his shoulders.

"There is nothing to take back. I accuse no one. I merely call attention
to a chain of exceptional coincidences."

"You make me wonder," Bobby said, "if Hartley isn't justified in his
dislike of you. You'll kill such a ridiculous suspicion."

"Or?" Paredes drawled. "Very well. It seems my fate recently to offend
those I like best. I merely thought that any theory leading away from you
would be welcome."

"Any theory," Bobby answered, "involving Katherine is unthinkable."

Paredes smiled.

"I didn't understand exactly how you felt. I rather took it for granted
that Graham--Never mind. I take it back."

"Then drop it," Bobby answered sullenly, sorry that there was nothing
else he could say.

They continued in silence through the deserted forest whose aggressive
loneliness made words seem trivial. Bobby was asking himself again where
he had stood last night when he had glimpsed for a moment the straining
trees and the figure in a mask which he had called his conscience. If he
could only prove that figure substantial! Then Graham would have some
ground for his suspicion of Paredes and the dancer Maria. He glanced at
Paredes. Could there have been a conspiracy against him in the New York
cafe? Did Paredes, in fact, have some devious purpose in remaining at
the Cedars?

The automobile took a sharp curve in the road. Bobby started, gazing
ahead with an interest nearly hypnotic. The headlights had caught in
their glare the deserted farmhouse in which he had awakened just before
Howells had told him of his grandfather's death and practically placed
him under arrest. In the white light the frame of the house from which
the paint had flaked, appeared ghastly, unreal, like a structure seen in
a nightmare from which one recoils with morbid horror. The light left the
building. As the car tore past, Bobby could barely make out the black
mass in the midst of the thicket.

Paredes had observed it, too.

"I daresay," he remarked casually, "the Cedars will become as deserted as
that. It is just that it should, for the entire neighbourhood impresses
one as unfriendly to life, as striving through death to drive life out."

"Have you ever seen that house before?" Bobby asked quickly.

"I have never seen it before. I do not care ever to see it again."

It was a relief when the forest thinned and fields stretched, flat and
pleasant, like barriers against the stunted growth. Bobby stopped the car
in front of one of a group of houses at a crossroads. He climbed the
steps and rang. Doctor Groom opened the door himself. His gigantic, hairy
figure was silhouetted against the light from within.

"What's the matter now?" he demanded in his gruff voice. "Fortunately I
hadn't gone to bed. I was reading some books on psychic manifestations.
Who's sick? Or--"

Bobby's face must have told him a good deal, for he broke off.

"Get your things on," Bobby said, "and I will tell you as we drive
back, for you must come. Howells has been killed precisely as my
grandfather was."

For a moment Doctor Groom's bulky frame remained motionless in the
doorway. Instead of the surprise and horror Bobby had foreseen, the old
man expressed only a mute wonder. He got his hat and coat and entered the
runabout, Paredes made room for him, sitting on the floor, his feet on
the running board.

Bobby had told all he knew before they had reached the forest. The doctor
grunted then:

"The wound at the back of the head was the same as in your
grandfather's case?"

"Exactly."

"Then what good am I? Why am I routed out?"

"A formality," Bobby answered. "Katherine thought if we got you quickly
you might do something. Anyway, she wanted your advice."

The woods closed about them. Again the lights seemed to push back a
palpable barrier.

"I can't work miracles," the doctor was murmuring. "I can't bring men
back to life. Such a wound leaves no ground for hope. You'd better have
sent for the police at once. Hello!"

He strained forward, peering around the windshield.

"Funny!" Paredes called.

Bobby's eyes were on the road.

"What do you see?"

"The house, Bobby!" Paredes cried.

"No one, to my certain knowledge," the doctor said, "has lived in that
house for ten years. You say it was empty and falling to pieces when you
woke up there this morning."

Bobby knew what they meant then, and he reduced the speed of the car and
looked ahead to the right. A pallid glow sifted through the trees from
the direction of the deserted house.

Bobby guided the car to the side of the road, stopped it, and shut off
the engine. At first no one moved. The three men stared as if in the
presence of an unaccountable phenomenon. Even when Bobby had
extinguished the headlights the glow failed to brighten. Its pallid
quality persisted. It seemed to radiate from a point close to the ground.

"It comes from the front of the house," Bobby murmured.

He stepped from the automobile.

"What are you going to do?" Paredes wanted to know.

"Find out who is in that house."

For Bobby had experienced a quick hope. If there was a man or a woman
secreted in the building the truth as to his own remarkable presence
there last night might not be so far to seek after all. There was,
moreover, something lawless about this light escaping from the place at
such an hour. A little while ago, when Paredes and he had driven past,
the house had been black. They had remarked its lonely, abandoned
appearance. It had led Paredes to speak of the neighbourhood as the
domain of death. Yet the strange, pallid quality of the light itself made
him pause by the broken fence. It did come from the lower part of the
front of the house, yet, so faint was it, it failed to outline the
aperture through which it escaped. The doctor and Paredes joined him.

"When I was here," he said, "all the shutters were closed. This glow is
too white, too diffused. We must see."

As he started forward Paredes grasped his arm.

"There are too many of us. We would make a noise. Suppose I creep up and
investigate."

"There is one way in--at the back," Bobby told the doctor. "Let us go
there. We'll have whoever's inside trapped. Meantime, Carlos, if he
wishes, will steal up to the front; he'll find out where the light comes
from. He'll look in if he can."

"That's the best plan," Paredes agreed.

But they had scarcely turned the corner of the house, beyond reach of the
glow, when Paredes rejoined them. His feet were no longer careful in the
underbrush. He came up running. For the first time in their acquaintance
Bobby detected a lessening of the man's suave, unemotional habit.

"The light!" the Panamanian gasped. "It's gone! Before I could get close
it faded out."

Bobby called to the doctor and ran toward the door at the rear. It was
unhinged and half open as it had been when he had awakened to his painful
and inexplicable predicament. He went through, fumbling in his pocket for
matches. The damp chill of the hall nauseated him as it had done before,
seemed to place about his throat an intangible band that made breathing
difficult. Before he could get his match safe out the doctor had struck a
wax vesta. Its strong flame played across the dingy, streaked walls.

"There's a flashlight, Carlos," Bobby said, "in the door flap of the
automobile."

Paredes started across the yard with a haste, it seemed to Bobby,
almost eager.

Striking matches as they went, the doctor and Bobby hurried to the front
of the house. The rooms appeared undisturbed in their decay. The shutters
were closed. The front door was barred. The broken walls from which the
plaster hung in shreds leered at them.

Suddenly Bobby turned, grasping the doctor's arm.

"Did you hear anything?"

The doctor shook his head.

"Or feel anything?"

"No."

"I thought," Bobby said excitedly, "that there was some one in the
hall. I--I simply got that impression, for I saw nothing myself. My
back was turned."

Paredes strolled silently in.

"It may have been Mr. Paredes," the doctor said.

But Bobby wasn't convinced.

"Did you see or hear anything coming through the hall, Carlos?"

"No," Paredes said.

He had brought the light. With its help they explored the tiny cellar and
the upper floor. There was no sign of a recent occupancy. Everything was
as Bobby had found it on awakening. A vagrant wind sighed about the
place. They looked at each other with startled eyes. They filed out with
an incongruous stealth.

"Then there are ghosts here, too!" Paredes whispered.

"Who knows?" Doctor Groom mused. "It is as puzzling as anything that has
happened at the Cedars unless the light we saw was some phosphorescent
effect of decaying wood or vegetation."

"Then why should it go out all at once?" Bobby asked. "Is there any
connection between this light and what has happened at the Cedars?"

"The house at least," Paredes put in, "is connected with what has
happened at the Cedars through your experience here."

At Doctor Groom's suggestion they sat in the automobile for some time,
watching the house for a repetition of the pallid light. After several
minutes, when it failed to come, Bobby set his gears.

"Graham and Katherine will be worried."

They drove quickly away from the black, uncommunicative mass of the
abandoned building. The woods were lonelier than before. They impressed
Bobby as guarding something.

He drove straight to the stable. As they walked into the court they saw
the uncertain candlelight diffused from the room of death. In the hall
Bobby responded to a quick alarm. The Cedars was too quiet. What had
happened since he and Paredes had left?

"Katherine! Hartley!" he called.

He heard running steps upstairs. Katherine leaned over the banister. Her
quiet voice reassured him. "Is the doctor with you?"

He nodded. Paredes yawned and lighted a cigarette. He settled himself in
an easy chair. Bobby and Doctor Groom hurried up. Katherine led them down
the old corridor. Two chairs had been placed in the broken doorway.
Graham sat there. He arose and greeted the doctor.

"Nothing has happened since I left?" Bobby asked.

Graham shook his head.

"Katherine and I have watched every minute."

Doctor Groom walked to the bed and for a long time looked down at
Howells. Once he put out his hand, quickly withdrawing it.

"It's simply a repetition," he said at last, and his voice was softer
than its custom. "It may be a warning, for all we know, that no one may
sleep in this room without attracting death. Yet why should that be? I
miss this poor fellow's materialistic viewpoint. There's nothing I can do
for him, nothing I can say, except that death must have been
instantaneous. The police must seek again for a man to place in the
electric chair."

Graham touched his arm with an odd reluctance.

"Sitting here for so long I've been thinking. I have always been
materialistic, too. Tell me seriously, doctor, do you believe there is
any psychic force capable of killing two men in this incisive fashion?"

"No one," the doctor answered, "can say what psychic force is capable of
doing. Some scientists have started to explore, but it is still uncharted
country. From certain places--I daresay you've noticed it--one gets an
impression of peace and content; from others a depression, a sense of
suffering. I think we have all experienced psychic force to that extent.
Remember that this room has a history of intense and rebellious
suffering. Some of it I have seen with my own eyes. Your father's fight
for life, Katherine, was horrible for those of us who knew he had no
chance. As I watched beside him I used to wonder if such violent agony
could ever drift wholly into silence, and when we had to tell him finally
that the fight was lost, it was beyond bearing."

"If these men had been found dead without marks of violence," Graham
said, "I might consider such a possibility, irrational as it seems."

"Irrational," Doctor Groom answered, "must not be confused with
impossible. The marks of a physical violence, far from proving that the
attack was physical, strengthens the case of the supernatural. Certainly
you have heard and read of pictures being dashed from walls by invisible
hands, of objects moved about empty rooms, of cases where human beings
have been attacked by inanimate things--heavy things--hurtling through
the air. Some scientists recognize such irrational possibilities.
Policemen don't."

"Very well," Graham said stubbornly. "I'll follow you that far, but you
must show me in this room the sharp object with which these men were
attacked, no matter what the force behind it."

The doctor spread his hands. His infused eyes nearly closed.

"That I can't do. At any rate, Robert, this isn't wholly tragic to you. I
don't see how any one could accuse you of aphasia to-night."

"You've not forgotten," Bobby said slowly, "that you spoke of a
recurrent aphasia."

"That's the trouble," Graham put in under his breath. "He has no more
alibi now than he had when his grandfather was murdered."

Bobby told of his heavy sleep, of the delay in Katherine's arousing him.

The doctor's gruff voice was disapproving.

"You shouldn't have drunk that medicine. It had stood too long. It would
only have approximated its intended effect."

"You mean," Bobby asked, "that I wasn't sleeping as soundly as I
thought?"

"Probably not, but you're by no means a satisfactory victim. Men do
unaccountable things in a somnambulistic state, but asleep they haven't
wings any more than they have awake. You've got to show us how you
entered this room without disturbing the locks. Now, Mr. Graham, we must
comply with the law. Call in the police."

"There's nothing else to do," Bobby agreed.

So they went along the dingy corridor and downstairs. From the depths of
the easy chair in which Paredes lounged smoke curled with a lazy
indifference. The Panamanian didn't move.

While Graham and the doctor walked to the back of the hall to telephone,
Katherine, an anxious figure, a secretive one, beckoned Bobby to the
library. He went with her, wondering what she could want.

It was quite dark in the library. As Bobby fumbled with the lamp and
prepared to strike a match he was aware of the girl's provocatively near
presence. He resisted a warm impulse to reach out and touch her hand. He
desired to tell her all that was in his heart of the division that had
increased between them the last few months. Yet to follow that impulse
would, he realized, place a portion of his burden on her shoulders; would
also, in a sense, be disloyal to Graham, for he no longer questioned that
the two had reached a definite sentimental understanding. So he sighed
and struck the match. Even before the lamp was lighted Katherine was
speaking with a feverish haste:

"Before the police come--you've a chance, Bobby--the last chance. You
must do before the police arrive whatever is to be done."

He replaced the shade and glanced at her, astonished by her intensity, by
the forceful gesture with which she grasped his arm. For the first time
since Silas Blackburn's murder all of her vitality had come back to her.

"What do you mean?"

She pointed to the door of the private staircase.

"Just what Howells told you before he went up there to his death."

Bobby understood. He reacted excitedly to her attitude of conspirator.

"He said," she went on, "that the criminal had nothing to lose. That it
would be to his advantage to have him out of the way, to destroy that
evidence."

"I thought of it," Bobby answered, "just before I went to sleep."

"Don't you see?" she said. "If you had killed him you would have taken
the cast and the handkerchief and destroyed them? Hartley has told me
everything, and I could see his coat for myself. The cast and the
handkerchief are still in Howells's pocket."

"Why should I have killed him if not to destroy those?" Bobby took her up
with a quick hope.

"You didn't," she cried. "Nothing would ever make me believe
that you killed him, but you will be charged with it unless the
evidence--disappears. You'll have no defence."

Bobby drew back a little.

"You want me to go there--and--and take from his pocket those things?"

She nodded.

"You remember he suggested that he hadn't sent his report. That may be
there, too."

Bobby shook his head. "He must have said that as a bait."

"At the worst," she urged, "a report without evidence could only turn
suspicion against you. It wouldn't convict you as those other things may.
You must get them. You must destroy them."

Graham slipped quietly in and closed the door.

"The district attorney is coming himself with another detective," he
said. "I can guess what Katherine has been talking about. She's right.
I'm a lawyer, an I know the penalty of tampering with evidence. But I
don't believe you're a murderer, and I tell you as long as that evidence
exists they can convict you. They can send you to the chair. They may
arrest you and try you anyway on his report, but I don't believe they can
convict you on it alone. You're justified in protecting yourself, Bobby,
in the only way you can. No one will see you go in the room. We'll
arrange it so that no one can testify against you."

Bobby felt himself at a cross roads. During the commission of those
crimes he had been unconscious. If he had, in fact, had anything to do
with them, his personality, his real self, had known nothing, had done no
wrong. His body had merely reacted to hideous promptings whose source
lurked at the bottom of the black pit. To tamper with evidence would be a
conscious crime. All the more, because of his doubt of himself, he shrank
from that. Katherine saw his hesitation.

"It's a matter of your life or death."

But although Katherine decided him it wasn't with that. She came closer.
She looked straight at him, and her eyes were full of an affection that
stirred him profoundly:

"For my sake, Bobby--"

He studied the dead ashes of the fire which a little while ago had
played on Howells, vital and antagonistic, by the door of the private
staircase. The man had challenged him to do just the thing from which he
shrank. But Howells was no longer vital or antagonistic, and it occurred
to him that a little of his shrinking arose from the thought of
approaching and robbing the still thing upstairs, all that was left of
the man who had not been afraid of the mystery of the locked room.

"For my sake," Katherine repeated.

Bobby squared his shoulders. He fought back his momentary cowardice. The
affection in Katherine's eyes was stronger than that.

"All right," he said. "Howells never gave me a chance while he was alive.
He'll have to now he's dead."

Katherine relaxed. Graham's face was quite white, but he gave his
instructions in a cold, even tone:

"We'll go to the hall now. Katherine will go on upstairs. She mustn't see
you enter the room, but she will watch in the corridor while you are
there to be sure you aren't disturbed. You and I will chat for awhile
with the others, Bobby, then you will go up. You understand? Paredes
mustn't even guess what you are doing. I'll keep him and Groom
downstairs. If he spied, if he knew what you were at, he'd have a weapon
in his hands I'd hate to think about. He may be all right, but we can't
risk any more than we have to. We must go on tiptoe."

He opened the door. Katherine gave Bobby's hand a quick,
encouraging pressure.

"Take the stuff to my room," Graham whispered. "The first chance, we'll
destroy it so that no trace will be left."

They went to the hall. Without speaking, Katherine climbed the stairs.
Graham drew a chair between Paredes and the doctor. Bobby lounged against
the mantel, trying to find in the Panamanian's face some clue as to his
real feelings. But Paredes's eyes were closed. His hand drooped across
the chair arm. His slender, pointed fingers held, as if from mere habit,
a lifeless cigarette.

"Asleep," Graham whispered.

Without opening his eyes Paredes spoke: "No; I feel curiously awake."
He yawned.

Doctor Groom glanced at his watch. "The powers of prosecution," he
grumbled, "ought to be here within the next fifteen or twenty minutes."

Bobby glanced at Graham. Then it wasn't safe to delay too long. More and
more as he waited he shrank from the invasion of the room of death. The
prospect of reaching out and touching the still, cold thing on the bed
revolted him. Was there anything in that room capable of forbidding his
intention? Was there, in short, a surer, more malicious force for evil
than his unconscious self, at work in the house? He was about to make
some formal comment to the others, to embark on his distasteful
adventure, when Paredes, as if he had read Bobby's mind, opened his
eyes, languidly left his chair, and walked to the foot of the stairs.

"Where you going?" Graham asked sharply.

Paredes waved his hand indifferently and walked on up. There was
something of stealth in his failure to reply, in his cat-like tread on
the stairs. Graham and Bobby stared after him, unable to meet this new
situation audibly because of Groom. Yet five minutes had gone. There was
no time to be lost. Paredes mustn't rob Bobby of his chance. With a sort
of desperation he started for the stairs. Graham held out his hand as if
to restrain him, then nodded. Bobby had his foot on the first step when
Katherine's cry reached them, shaping the moment to their use. For there
was no fright in her cry. It was, rather, angry. And Bobby and Graham ran
up while Doctor Groom remained in his chair, an expression of blank
amazement on his face.

A candle burned on the table in the upper hall. Katherine and Paredes
stood near the entrance of the old corridor. Paredes, as usual, was quite
unruffled. Katherine's attitude was defensive. She seemed to hold the
corridor against him. The anger of her cry was active in her eyes.
Paredes laughed lightly.

"Sorry to have given the household one more shock. Fortunately no
harm done."

"What is it, Katherine?" Graham demanded.

"I don't know," she answered. "He startled me. He entered the corridor."

Paredes nodded.

"Quite right. She was there. I was on my way to my room. If your house
had electricity, Bobby, this incident would have been avoided. I saw
something dark in the corridor."

"You may not know," Graham said, "that ever since we found Howells, one
of us has tried, more or less, to keep the entrance of that room under
observation."

"Yet you were all downstairs a little while ago," Paredes yawned. "It's
too bad. I might have taken my turn then. At any rate, since I was
excluded from your confidence, I overcame my natural fear, and, for
Bobby's sake, slipped in, and, I am afraid, startled Miss Katherine."

"Yes," she said.

His explanation was reasonable. There was nothing more to be said, but
Bobby's doubt of his friend, sown by Graham and stimulated by the
incidents of the last hour, was materially strengthened. He felt a
sharp fear of Paredes. Such reserve, such concealment of emotion, was
scarcely human.

"If," Graham was saying, "you really want to help Bobby, there is
something you can do. Will you come downstairs with me for a moment? I'd
like to suggest one or two things before the police arrive."

Without hesitation Paredes followed Graham down the stairs.

Katherine turned immediately to Bobby, her eyes eager, full of the tense
determination that had dictated her plan in the library.

"Now, Bobby!" she whispered. "And there's no time to waste. They may be
here any minute. I won't see you go, but I'll be back at once to guard
you against Paredes if he slips up again."

She walked across the hall and disappeared in the newer corridor. Without
witness he faced the old corridor, and with the attempt directly ahead
his repugnance achieved a new power. The black entrance with its scarcely
dared memories reminded him that what he was about to do was directed
against more than human law, was an outrage against the dead man. He had
to remind himself of the steely purpose with which Howells had marked him
as the murderer; and the man's power persisted after death. In such a
contest he was justified.

He took the candle from the table. Through the stair-well the murmur of
Graham's voice, occasionally interrupted by Groom's heavy tones or the
languid accents of Paredes, drifted encouragingly. Trying to crush his
premonitions, Bobby entered the corridor. Instead of illuminating the
narrow passage the candle seemed half smothered by its blackness. For the
first time in his memory Bobby faced the entrance of the sinister room
alone. He pushed open the broken door. He paused on the threshold. It
impressed him as not unnatural that he should experience such misgivings.
They sprang not alone from the fact that within twenty-four hours two men
had died unaccountably within these faded walls. Nor did the evidence
pointing to his own unconscious guilt wholly account for them. At the
bottom of everything was the fact that from his earliest childhood he had
looked upon the room as consecrated to death; had consequently feared it;
had, he recalled, always hurried past the disused corridor leading in its
direction.

Through its wide spaces the light of the candle scarcely penetrated. No
more than an indefinite radiance thrust back the obscurity and outlined
the bed. He could barely see the stark, black form outstretched there.

The dim, vast room, as he advanced, imposed upon him a sense of
isolation. Katherine in the upper hall, the others downstairs, whose
voices no longer reached him, seemed all at once far away. He stood in a
place lonelier and more remote than the piece of woods where he had
momentarily opened his eyes last night; and, instead of the straining
trees and the figure in the black mask which he had called his
conscience, he had for motion and companionship only the swaying of the
curtains in the breeze from the open window and the dark, prostrate thing
whose face as he went closer was like a white mask--a mask with a fixed
and malevolent sneer.

The wind caught the flame of the candle, making it flicker. Tenuous
shadows commenced to dance across the walls. He paused with a tightening
throat, for the form on the bed seemed moving, too, with sly and scarcely
perceptible gestures. Then he understood. It was the effect of the
shaking candle, and he forced himself to go on, but a sense of a multiple
companionship accompanied him--a sense of a shapeless, soundless
companionship that projected an idea of a steady regard. There swept
through his mind a procession of figures in quaint dress and with faces
not unlike his own, remembered from portraits and family legends, men and
women to whom this room had been familiar, within whose limits they had
suffered, cried out a too-powerful agony, and died. It seemed to him that
he waited for voices to guide him, to urge him on as Katherine had urged
him, or to drive him back, because he was an intruder in a company whose
habit was strange and terrifying.

He forced his glance from the shadows which seemed more active along the
walls. He raised his candle and stared at the dead man. The cast was
undoubtedly there. The coat, stretched tightly across the breast,
outlined it. He stood at the side of the bed. He had only to bend and
place his hand in the pocket which the cast filled awkwardly. The wind
alone, he saw, wasn't responsible for the shaking of the candle. His hand
shook as the shadows shook, as the thing on the bed shook. The sense of
loneliness grew upon him until it became complete, appalling. For the
first time he understood that loneliness can possess a ponderable
quality. It was, he felt, potent and active in the room--a thing he
couldn't understand, or challenge, or overcome.

His hand tightened. He thought of Katherine guarding the corridor; of
Paredes and Doctor Groom, held downstairs by Graham; of the county
authorities hurrying to seize this evidence that would convict him; and
he realized that his duty and his excuse were clear. He understood that
just now he had been captured by a force undefinable in terms of the
world he knew. For a moment he eluded the stealthy fleshless hands of its
impalpable skirmishers. He reached impulsively out to the dead man. He
was about to place his fingers in the pocket, which, after all was said
and done, held his life.

In the light of the candle the face seemed alive and more menacing than
it had ever done in life. About the straight smile was a wider, more
triumphant quality.

The candle flickered sharply. It expired. The conquering blackness took
his breath.

He told himself it was the draft from the window which was strong, but
the companionship of the night was closer and more numerous. The darkness
wreathed itself into mocking and tortuous bodies whose faces were hidden.

In an agony of revolt against these incorporeal, these fanciful horrors,
he reached in the pocket.

He sprang back with a choked, inaudible cry, for the dead thing beneath
his hand was stirring. The dead, cold thing with a languid and impossible
rebuke, moved beneath his touch. And the pocket he had felt was empty.
The coat, a moment ago bulging and awkward, was flat. There sprang to
his mind the mad thought that the detective, malevolent in life, had long
after death snatched from his hand the evidence, carefully gathered, on
which everything for him depended.




CHAPTER V

THE CRYING THROUGH THE WOODS


Bobby's inability to cry out alone prevented his alarming the others and
announcing to Paredes and Doctor Groom his unlawful presence in the room.
During the moment that the shock held him, silent, motionless, bent in
the darkness above the bed, he understood there could have been no
ambiguity about his ghastly and loathsome experience. The dead detective
had altered his position as Silas Blackburn had done, and this time
someone had been in the room and suffered the appalling change. Bobby's
fingers still responded to the charnel feeling of cold, inactive flesh
suddenly become alive and potent beneath his touch. And a reason for the
apparent miracle offered itself. Between the extinction of his candle and
the commencement of that movement!--only a second or so--the evidence had
disappeared from the detective's pocket.

Bobby relaxed. He stumbled across the room and into the corridor. He went
with hands outstretched through the blackness, for no candle burned in
the upper hall, but he knew that Katherine was on guard there. When he
left the passage he saw her, an unnatural figure herself, in the
yellowish, unhealthy twilight which sifted through the stair well from
the lamp in the hall below.

She must have sensed something out of the way immediately, for she
hurried to meet him and her whisper held no assurance.

"You got the cast and the handkerchief, Bobby?"

And when he didn't answer at once she asked with a sharp rush of fear:

"What's the matter? What's happened?"

He shuddered. At last he managed to speak.

"Katherine! I have felt death cease to be death."

Later he was to recall that phrase with a sicker horror than he
experienced now.

"You saw something!" she said. "But your candle is out. There is no light
in the room."

He took her hand. He pressed it.

"You're real!" he said with a nervous laugh. "Something I can understand.
Everything is unreal. This light--"

He strode to the table, found a match, and lighted his candle. Katherine,
as she saw his face, drew back.

"Bobby!"

"My candle went out," he said dully, "and he moved through the darkness.
I tell you he moved beneath my hand."

She drew farther away, staring at him.

"You were frightened--"

"No. If we go there with a light now," he said with the same dull
conviction, "we will find him as we found my grandfather this afternoon."

The monotonous voices of the three men in the lower hall weaved a
background for their whispers. The normal, familiar sound was like a
tonic. Bobby straightened. Katherine threw off the spell of his
announcement.

"But the evidence! You got--"

She stared at his empty hands. He fancied that he saw contempt in her
eyes.

"In spite of everything you must go back. You must get that."

"Even if I had the courage," he said wearily, "it would be no use, for
the evidence is gone."

"But I saw it. At least I saw his pocket--"

"It was there," he answered, "when my light went out. I did put my hand
in his pocket. In that second it had gone."

"There was no one there," she said, "no one but you, because I watched."

He leaned heavily against the wall.

"Good God, Katherine! It's too big. Whatever it is, we can't fight it."

She looked for some time down the corridor at the black entrance of the
sinister room. At last she turned and walked to the banister. She called:

"Hartley! Will you come up?"

Bobby wondered at the steadiness of her voice. The murmuring below
ceased. Graham ran up the stairs. Her summons had been warning enough.
Their attitudes, as Graham reached the upper hall, were eloquent of
Bobby's failure.

"You didn't get the cast and the handkerchief?" he said.

Bobby told briefly what had happened.

"What is one to do?" he ended. "Even the dead are against me."

"It's beyond belief," Graham said roughly.

He snatched up the candle and entered the corridor. Uncertainly Katherine
and Bobby followed him. He went straight to the bed and thrust the candle
beneath the canopy. The others could see from the door the change that
had taken place. The body of Howells was turned awkwardly on its side.
The coat pocket was, as Bobby had described it, flat and empty.

Katherine turned and went back to the hall. Graham's hand shook as
Bobby's had shaken.

"No tricks, Bobby?"

Bobby couldn't resent the suspicion which appeared to offer the only
explanation of what had happened. The candle flickered in the draft.

"Look out!" Bobby warned.

The misshapen shadows danced with a multiple vivacity across the walls.
Graham shaded the candle flame, and the shadows became like morbid
decorations, gargantuan and motionless.

"It's madness," Graham said. "There's no explanation of this that we can
understand."

Howells's straight smile mocked them. As if in answer to Graham a voice
sighed through the room. Its quality was one with the shadows,
unsubstantial and shapeless. Bobby grasped one of the bed posts and
braced himself, listening. The candle in Graham's hand commenced to
flicker again, and Bobby knew that it hadn't been his fancy, for Graham
listened, too.

It shook again through the heavy, oppressive night, merely accentuated
by the candle--a faint ululation barely detaching itself from silence,
straying after a time into the silence again. At first it was like the
grief of a woman heard at a great distance. But the sound, while it
gained no strength, forced on them more and more an abhorrent sense of
intimacy. This crying from an infinite distance filled the room,
seemed finally to have its source in the room itself. After it had
sobbed thinly into nothing, its pulsations continued to sigh in
Bobby's ears. They seemed timed to the renewed and eccentric dancing
of the amorphous shadows.

Graham straightened and placed the candle on the bureau. He seemed
more startled than he had been at the unbelievable secretiveness of
a dead man.

"You heard it?" Bobby breathed.

Graham nodded.

"What was it? Where did you think it came from?" Bobby demanded. "It was
like someone mourning for this--this poor devil."

Graham couldn't disguise his effort to elude the sombre spell of the
room, to drive from his brain the illusion of that unearthly moaning.

"It must have come from outside the house," he answered "There's no use
giving way to fancies where there's a possible explanation. It must have
come from outside--from some woman in great agony of mind."

Bobby recalled his perception of a woman moving with a curious absence of
sound about the edges of the stagnant lake. He spoke of it to Graham.

"I couldn't be sure it was a woman, but there's no house within two
miles. What would a woman be doing wandering around the Cedars?"

"At any rate, there are three women in the house," Graham said,
"Katherine and the two servants, Ella and Jane. The maids are badly
frightened. It may have come from the servants' quarters. It must have
been one of them."

But Bobby saw that Graham didn't believe either of the maids had released
that poignant suffering.

"It didn't sound like a living voice," he said simply.

"Then how are we to take it?" Graham persisted angrily. "I shall question
Katherine and the two maids."

He took up the candle with a stubborn effort to recapture his old
forcefulness, but as they left the room the shadows thronged thickly
after them in ominous pursuit; and it wasn't necessary to question
Katherine. She stood in the corridor, her lips parted, her face white
and shocked.

"What was it?" she said. "That nearly silent grief?"

She put her hands to her ears, lowering them helplessly after a moment.

"Where did you think it came from?" Graham asked.

"From a long ways off," she answered. "Then I--I thought it must be in
the room with you, and I wondered if you saw--"

Graham shook his head.

"We saw nothing. It was probably Ella or Jane. They've been badly
frightened. Perhaps a nightmare, or they've heard us moving around the
front part of the house. I am going to see."

Katherine and Bobby followed him downstairs. Doctor Groom and Paredes
stood in front of the fireplace, questioningly looking upward. Paredes
didn't speak at first, but Doctor Groom burst out in his grumbling,
bass voice:

"What's been going on up there?"

"Did you hear just now a queer crying?" Graham asked.

"No."

"You, Paredes?"

"I've heard nothing," Paredes answered, "except Doctor Groom's
disquieting theories. It's an uncanny hour for such talk. What kind of a
cry--may I ask?"

"Like a woman moaning," Bobby said, "and, Doctor, Howells has changed his
position."

"What are you talking about?" the doctor cried.

"He has turned on his side as Mr. Blackburn did," Graham told him.

Paredes glanced at Bobby.

"And how was this new mystery discovered?"

Bobby caught the implication. Then the Panamanian clung to his slyly
expressed doubt of Katherine which might, after all, have had its impulse
in an instinct of self-preservation. Bobby knew that Graham and Katherine
would guard the fashion in which the startling discovery had been made.
Before he could speak for himself, indeed, Graham was answering Paredes:

"This crying seemed after a time to come from the room. We entered."

"But Miss Katherine called you up," Paredes said. "I supposed she had
heard again movements in the room."

Bobby managed a smile.

"You see, Carlos, nothing is consistent in this case."

Paredes bowed gravely.

"It is very curious a woman should cry about the house."

"The servants may make it seem natural enough," Graham said. "Will you
come, Bobby?"

As they crossed the dining room they heard a stirring in the kitchen.
Graham threw open the door. Jenkins stood at the foot of the servants'
stairs. The old butler had lighted a candle and placed it on the mantel.
The disorder of his clothing suggested the haste with which he had left
his bed and come downstairs. His wrinkled, sunken face had aged
perceptibly. He advanced with an expression of obvious relief.

"I was just coming to find you, Mr. Robert."

"What's up?" Bobby asked. "A little while ago I thought you were all
asleep back here."

"One of the women awakened him," Graham said. "It's just as I thought."

"Was that it?" the old butler asked with a quick relief. But immediately
he shook his head. "It couldn't have been that, Mr. Graham, for I stopped
at Ella's and Jane's doors, and there was no sound. They seemed to be
asleep. And it wasn't like that."

"You mean," Bobby said, "that you heard a woman crying?"

Jenkins nodded. "It woke me up."

"If you didn't think it was one of the maids," Graham asked, "what did
you make of it?"

"I thought it came from outside. I thought it was a woman prowling around
the house. Then I said to myself, why should a woman prowl around the
Cedars? And it was too unearthly, sir, and I remembered the way Mr. Silas
was murdered, and the awful thing that happened to his body this
afternoon, and I--you won't think me foolish, sirs?--I doubted if it was
a human voice I had heard."

"No," Graham said dryly, "we won't think you foolish."

"So I thought I'd better wake you up and tell you."

Graham turned to Bobby.

"Katherine and you and I," he said, "fancied the crying was in the room
with us. Jenkins is sure it came from outside the house. That is
significant."

"Wherever it came from," Bobby said softly, "it was like some one
mourning for Howells."

Jenkins started.

"The policeman!"

Bobby remembered that Jenkins hadn't been aroused by the discovery of
Howells's murder.

"You'd know in a few minutes anyway," he said. "Howells has been killed
as my grandfather was."

Jenkins moved back, a look of unbelief and awe in his wrinkled face.

"He boasted he was going to sleep in that room," he whispered.

Bobby studied Jenkins, not knowing what to make of the old man, for into
the awe of the wrinkled face had stolen a positive relief, an emotion
that bordered on the triumphant.

"It's terrible," Jenkins whispered.

Graham grasped his shoulder.

"What's the matter with you, Jenkins? One would say you were glad."

"No. Oh, no, sir. It is terrible. I was only wondering about the
policeman's report."

"What do you know about his report?" Bobby cried.

"Only that--that he gave it to me to mail just before he went up to the
old room."

"You mailed it?" Graham snapped.

Jenkins hesitated. When he answered his voice was self-accusing.

"I'm an old coward, Mr. Robert. The policeman told me the letter was very
important, and if anything happened to it I would get in trouble. He
couldn't afford to leave the house himself, he said. But, as I say, I'm a
coward, and I didn't want to walk through the woods to the box by the
gate. I figured it all out. It wouldn't be taken up until early in the
morning, and if I waited until daylight it would only be delayed one
collection. So I made up my mind I'd sleep on it, because I knew he had
it in for you, Mr. Robert. I supposed I'd mail it in the morning, but I
decided I'd think it over anyway and not harrow myself walking through
the woods."

"You've done a good job," Graham said excitedly. "Where is the
report now?"

"In my room. Shall I fetch it, sir?"

Graham nodded, and Jenkins shuffled up the stairs.

"What luck!" Graham said. "Howells must have telephoned his suspicions to
the district attorney. He must have mentioned the evidence, but what does
that amount to since it's disappeared along with the duplicate of the
report, if Howells made one?"

"I can fight with a clear conscience," Bobby cried. "I wasn't asleep
when Howells's body altered its position. Do you realize what that means
to me? For once I was wide awake when the old room was at its tricks."

"If Howells were alive," Graham answered shortly, "he would look on the
fact that you were awake and alone with the body as the worst possible
evidence against you."

Bobby's elation died.

"There is always something to tangle me in the eyes of the law with these
mysteries. But I know, and I'll fight. Can you find any trace of a
conspiracy against me in this last ghastly adventure?"

"It complicates everything," Graham admitted.

"It's beyond sounding," Bobby said, "for my grandfather's death last
night and the disturbance of his body this afternoon seemed calculated to
condemn me absolutely, yet Howells's murder and the movement of his body,
with the disappearance of the cast and the handkerchief, seem designed to
save me. Are there two influences at work in this house--one for me, one
against me?"

"Let's think of the human elements," Graham answered with a frown. "I
have no faith in Paredes. My man has failed to report on Maria. That's
queer. You fancy a woman in black slipping through the woods, and we hear
a woman cry. I want to account for those things before I give in to
Groom's spirits. I confess at times they seem the only logical
explanation. Here's Jenkins."

"If trouble comes of his withholding the report I'll take the blame,"
Bobby said.

Graham snatched the long envelope from Jenkins' hand. It was addressed in
a firm hand to the district attorney at the county seat.

"There's no question," Graham said. "That's it. We mustn't open it. We'd
better not destroy it. Put it where it won't be easily found, Jenkins. If
you are questioned you have no recollection of Howells having given it to
you. Mr. Blackburn promises he will see you get in no trouble."

The old man smiled.

"Trouble!" he scoffed. "Mr. Blackburn needn't fret himself about me. He's
the last of this family--that is Miss Katherine and he. I'm old and about
done for. I don't mind trouble. Not a bit, sir."

Bobby pressed his hand. His voice was a little husky: "I didn't think
you'd go that far in my service, Jenkins."

The old butler smiled slyly: "I'd go a lot further than that, sir."

"We'd better get back," Graham said. "The blood hounds ought to be
here, and they'll sniff at the case harder than ever because it's done
for Howells."

They watched Jenkins go upstairs with the report.

"We're taking long chances," Graham said, "desperately long chances, but
you're in a desperately dangerous position. It's the only way. You'll be
accused of stealing the evidence; but remember, when they question you,
they can prove nothing unless the cast and the handkerchief turn up. If
they've been taken by an enemy in some magical fashion to be produced at
the proper moment, there's no hope. Meantime play the game, and Katherine
and I will help you all we can. The doctor, too, is friendly. There's no
doubt of him. Come, now. Let's face the music."

Bobby followed Graham to the hall, trying to strengthen his nerves for
the ordeal. Even now he was more appalled by the apparently supernatural
background of the case than he was by the material details which pointed
to his guilt. More than the report and the cast and the handkerchief,
the remembrance of that impossible moment in the blackness of the old
room filled his mind, and the unearthly and remote crying still throbbed
in his ears.

Katherine, Graham, and the doctor waited by the fireplace. They had heard
nothing from the authorities.

"But they must be here soon," Doctor Groom said.

"Did you learn anything back there, Hartley?" Katherine asked.

"It wasn't the servants," he said. "Jenkins heard the crying. He's
certain it came from outside the house."

Paredes looked up.

"Extraordinary!" he said.

"I wish I had heard it," Doctor Groom grumbled.

Paredes laughed.

"Thank the good Lord I didn't. Perpetually, Bobby, your house reminds me
that I've nerves sensitive to the unknown world. I will go further than
the doctor. I will say that this house _is_ crowded with the
supernatural. It shelters things that we cannot understand, that we will
never understand. When I was a child in Panama I had a nurse who,
unfortunately, developed too strongly my native superstition. How she
frightened me with her bedtime stories! They were all of men murdered or
dead of fevers, crossing the trail, or building the railroad, or digging
insufficient ditches for De Lesseps. Some of her best went farther back
than that. They were thick with the ghosts of old Spaniards and the
crimson hands of Morgan's buccaneers. Really that tiny strip across the
isthmus is crowded with souls snatched too quickly from torn and tortured
bodies. If you are sensitive you feel they are still there."

"What has all this to do with the Cedars?" Doctor Groom grumbled.

"It explains my ability to sense strange elements in this old house.
There are in Panama--if you don't mind, doctor--improvised graveyards,
tangled by the jungle, that give you a feeling of an active, unseen
population precisely as this house does."

He arose and strolled with a cat-like lack of sound about the hall. When
he spoke again his voice was scarcely audible. It was the voice of a man
who thinks aloud, and the doctor failed to interrupt him again.

"I have felt less spiritually alarmed in those places of grinning
skulls, which always seem trying to recite agonies beyond expression,
than I feel in this house. For here the woods are more desolate than the
jungle, and the walls of houses as old as this make a prison for
suffering."

A vague discomfort stole through Bobby's surprise. He had never heard
Paredes speak so seriously. In spite of the man's unruffled manner there
was nothing of mockery about his words. What, then, was their intention?

Paredes said no more, but for several minutes he paced up and down the
hall, glancing often with languid eyes toward the stairs. He had the
appearance of one who expects and waits.

Katherine, Graham, and the doctor, Bobby could see, had been made as
uneasy as himself by the change in the Panamanian. The doctor cleared his
throat. His voice broke the silence tentatively:

"If this house makes you so unhappy, young man, why do you stay?"

Paredes paused in his walk. His thin lips twitched. He indicated Bobby.

"For the sake of my very good friend. What are a man's personal fears and
desires if he can help his friends?"

Graham's distaste was evident. Paredes recognized it with a smile. Bobby
watched him curiously, realizing more and more that Graham was right to
this extent: they must somehow learn the real purpose of the
Panamanian's continued presence here.

Paredes resumed his walk. He still had that air of expectancy. He seemed
to listen. This feeling of imminence reached Bobby; increased his
restlessness. He thought he heard an automobile horn outside. He sprang
up, went to the door, opened it, and stood gazing through the damp and
narrow court. Yet, he confessed, he listened for a repetition of that
unearthly crying through the thicket rather than for the approach of
those who would try to condemn him for two murders. Paredes was right.
The place was unhealthy. Its dark walls seemed to draw closer. They had a
desolate and unfriendly secretiveness. They might hide anything.

The whirring of a motor reached him. Headlights flung gigantic,
distorted shadows of trees across the walls of the old wing. Bobby faced
the others.

"They're coming," he said, and his voice was sufficiently
apprehensive now.

Graham joined him at the door. "Yes," he said. "There will be another
inquisition. You all know that Howells for some absurd reason suspected
Bobby. Bobby, it goes without saying, knows no more about the crimes than
any of us. I dare say you'll keep that in mind if they try to confuse
you. After all, there's very little any of us can tell them."

"Except," Paredes said with a yawn, "what went on upstairs when the woman
cried and Howells's body moved. Of course I know nothing about that."

Graham glanced at him sharply.

"I don't know what you mean, but you have told us all that you are
Bobby's friend."

"Quite so. And I am not a spy."

He moved his head in his grave and dignified bow.

The automobile stopped at the entrance to the court. Three men stepped
out and hurried up the path. As they entered the hall Bobby recognized
the sallow, wizened features of the coroner. One of the others was short
and thick set. His round and florid face, one felt, should have expressed
friendliness and good-humour rather than the intolerant anger that marked
it now. The third was a lank, bald-headed man, whose sharp face released
more determination than intelligence.

"I am Robinson, the district attorney," the stout one announced, "and
this is Jack Rawlins, the best detective I've got now that Howells is
gone. Jack was a close friend of Howells, so he'll make a good job of it,
but I thought it was time I came myself to see what the devil's going on
in this house."

The lank man nodded.

"You're right, Mr. Robinson. There'll be no more nonsense about the case.
If Howells had made an arrest he might be alive this minute."

Bobby's heart sank. These men would act from a primary instinct of
revenge. They wanted the man who had killed Silas Blackburn principally
because it was certain he had also killed their friend. Rawlins's words,
moreover, suggested that Howells must have telephoned a pretty clear
outline of the case. Robinson stared at them insolently.

"This is Doctor Groom, I know. Which is young Mr. Blackburn?"

Bobby stepped forward. The sharp eyes, surrounded by puffy flesh,
studied him aggressively. Bobby forced himself to meet that unfriendly
gaze. Would Robinson accuse him now, before he had gone into the case
for himself? At least he could prove nothing. After a moment the man
turned away.

"Who is this?" he asked, indicating Graham.

"A very good friend--my lawyer, Mr. Graham," Bobby answered.

Robinson walked over to Paredes.

"Another lawyer?" he sneered.

"Another friend," Paredes answered easily.

Robinson glanced at Katherine.

"Of course you are Miss Perrine. Good. Coroner, these are all that were
in the front part of the house when you were here before?"

"The same lot," the coroner squeaked.

"There are three servants, a man and two women," Robinson went on.
"Account for them, Rawlins, and see what they have to say. Come upstairs
when you're through. All right, Coroner."

But he paused at the foot of the steps.

"For the present no one will leave the house without my permission. If
you care to come upstairs with me, Mr. Blackburn, you might be useful."

Bobby shrank from the thought of returning to the old room even with this
determined company. He didn't hesitate, however, for Robinson's purpose
was clear. He wanted Bobby where he could watch him. Graham prepared to
accompany them.

"If you need me," the doctor said. "I looked at the body--"

"Oh, yes," Robinson sneered. "I'd like to know exactly what time you
found the body."

Graham flushed, but Katherine answered easily:

"About half-past two--the hour at which Mr. Blackburn was killed."

"And I," Robinson sneered, "was aroused at three-thirty. An hour during
which the police were left out of the case!"

"We thought it wise to get a physician first of all," Graham said.

"You knew Howells never had a chance. You knew he had been murdered the
moment you looked at him," Robinson burst out.

"We acted for the best," Graham answered.

His manner impressed silence on Katherine and Bobby.

"We'll see about that later," Robinson said with a clear threat. "If it
doesn't inconvenience you too much we'll go up now."

In the upper hall he snatched the candle from the table.

"Which way?"

Katherine nodded to the old corridor and slipped to her room. Robinson
stepped forward with the coroner at his heels. Bobby, Graham, and the
doctor followed. Inside the narrow, choking passage Bobby saw the
district attorney hesitate.

"What's the matter?" the doctor rumbled.

The district attorney went on without answering. He glanced at the
broken lock.

"So you had to smash your way in?"

He walked to the bed and looked down at Howells.

"Poor devil!" he murmured. "Howells wasn't the man to get caught
unawares. It's beyond me how any one could have come close enough to make
that wound without putting him on his guard."

"It's beyond us, as it was beyond him," Graham answered, "how any one got
into the room at all."

In response to Robinson's questions he told in detail about the discovery
of both murders. Robinson pondered for some time.

"Then you and Mr. Blackburn were asleep," he said. "Miss Perrine aroused
you. This foreigner Paredes was awake and dressed and in the lower hall."

"I think he was in the court as we went by the stair-well," Graham
corrected him.

"I shall wa

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