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The Rest Hollow Mystery

by Rebecca N. Porter · English · Gutenberg #40416 · 354,715 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Rest Hollow Mystery

Author: Rebecca N. Porter


        
Release date: August 5, 2012 [eBook #40416]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REST HOLLOW MYSTERY ***

                            THE REST HOLLOW MYSTERY

                             BY REBECCA N. PORTER


    NEW YORK
    THE CENTURY CO.
    1922

    Copyright, 1922, by
    THE CENTURY CO.

    Printed in U. S. A.




                TO MY BROTHER
           WILLIAM STRATTON PORTER

    That ideal reader of mystery stories--with
    the ardor to pursue, the faith to believe
    and the magnanimity to guess wrong




THE REST HOLLOW MYSTERY




CHAPTER I


Kenwick himself had no recollection of the accident. But he knew that
there must have been one, for when he recovered consciousness, his
clothes were full of burrs, his hat was badly crushed, and there was a
violent throbbing in one of his legs.

With both hands gripping the aching thigh in a futile effort to soothe
its pain, he dragged himself into the clearing and looked about. It was
one of those narrow, wooded mountain ravines that in the West are
classed as cañons. Back of him rose a succession of sage-covered slopes,
bleak, wintry, hostile. In front was a precipitous cliff studded with
dwarf madrone trees and the twisted manzanita. Overhead the bare
distorted sycamore boughs lashed themselves together and moaned a dreary
monotone to the accompaniment of a keen November wind. No sign of autumn
lingered on the landscape, and the shed leaves formed a moldy carpet
underfoot. The cañon was redolent with the odor of damp timber and
decaying vegetation.

Kenwick buttoned his heavy overcoat about him and limped painfully
toward the cliff, keeping as nearly as possible a straight line from his
starting-point. Although his surroundings were totally unfamiliar his
mind was clear. But he had that curious sensation of a man who has slept
all night in a strange bed, and in the first moment of wakening is
unable to adjust himself to his environment. While he groped his way
through the tangled underbrush his memory struggled to clear a passage
back to the present.

At the foot of the cliff he stopped short, staring in horror at a spot a
few paces ahead of him. A scrub madrone had been torn from the side of
the ravine and had fallen to the bottom of the cañon, its mutilated
roots stretching skyward like the grotesque claws of some prehistoric
animal. The force which had torn it from its moorings had scarred the
slope with other evidences of disaster; a limb lopped off here, a mass
of brush ripped away there. A glistening object caught his eye. He
stooped laboriously and picked it up, then dropped it, shuddering. It
was a triangle of broken glass spattered with blood.

For half an hour he poked around in the brush searching for, yet
dreading to find, a more gruesome object. Perhaps the driver had not
been killed after all, he reassured himself. As he dimly remembered him,
he was a friendly sort of fellow whom he had engaged to drive him out to
the Raeburn place. As he climbed the steep hill now Kenwick tried to
remember what they had been talking about just before this thing
happened, but the effort made his head ache and landed him nowhere. A
more vital conjecture was concerned with how long he had been lying at
the foot of the ravine and why no one had come to his rescue.

When he gained the road there was nobody in sight. It was a splendidly
paved bit of country boulevard curving out of sight into what Kenwick
told himself must be the land of dreams and romance. He turned to the
left and started to walk, aimlessly, hopping part of the time to save
his aching leg. Surely some one would overtake him in a car soon and
offer assistance. He had dragged himself over half a mile, stimulated by
this hope, when he sighted a house set far back from the highway behind
a vista of date-palms. He struggled up to the entrance and gazed through
the bars of a tall iron gate. It was locked. And, as an extra
precaution against intrusion, a heavy iron chain was swung across the
outside. Through the trees the house was plainly visible, a colossal
concrete structure with stone trimmings flanked on one side by a sturdy
combination tank-house and garage. About the whole place there was an
aristocratic, exclusive dignity that reminded Kenwick of one of the
great English estates that he had once visited during a convalescent
furlough spent near London. It was more like a castle than a private
residence, with its high stone wall covered by dank clinging vines. The
very trees that bordered the driveway had an air of aloofness as though
they had severed all relationship with the rest of nature's family. It
was inconceivable, Kenwick told himself, that guests had ever been
entertained, unbidden, in that mansion. And yet it was here that he must
apply for help.

Strength had deserted him. Courage had deserted him. Even self-respect
was fast slipping away. Desperation alone remained; desperation lashed
almost to fury by the agony in his throbbing leg. He or his companion
must have been drunk, hideously drunk, to have met with such a
mischance. And yet where could they have purchased a drink? He himself
hated liquor, and he had no recollection of having been persuaded into
illicit conviviality. As he searched for an opening in the stone wall,
he took hasty stock of himself. The fur-collared overcoat would give him
a certain social status in the eyes of this householder. His hat, though
bearing the mark of riotous adventure, was obviously the hat of a
gentleman. His shoes subscribed liberally to this classification and his
dark broadcloth suit was conclusive. He felt in his pocket. There was
neither watch nor money. But he could mention Raeburn's name. The
wealthy New Yorker who was to have been his host undoubtedly stood high
in this community.

His search along the wall brought him at last to a broken ledge of rock
which might serve as a stepping-stone. He drew in his breath sharply,
dreading the pain of the stupendous effort that he was about to make.
Then he placed his sound foot on the ledge and dragged himself over the
enclosure.

If the place had looked inhospitable from the outside it was even more
formidable viewed from within. Only that portion of the acreage which
immediately surrounded the house was under cultivation. On either side
of this a wide expanse of eucalyptus forest sloped away from the road.
They were half-grown saplings and the blue-gray of their foliage blended
with subtle harmony into the somber winter landscape.

"Lord! What a lonely spot!" Kenwick muttered as he followed the driveway
around to the side of the house. "Good God! Anything could happen in a
place like this!"

The shallow stone steps echoed beneath his feet, and the door-bell,
tinkling in some remote region, gave back a ghostly, deserted sound. Two
more trials with the electric button convinced Kenwick that the place
was untenanted. He made a shade of his two hands and peered into the
plate-glass window that gave on the front porch.

What he saw was an elegantly appointed dining-room furnished in old
mahogany and dull blue hangings. There were carved candlesticks on the
sideboard, and in the center of the bare dining-table a cut-glass bowl
full of English walnuts. The somber high-backed chairs ranged along the
wall seemed to the man outside to be guarding the room like a body of
solemn gendarmes. Slowly he turned, descended the shallow steps, and
started around to the rear of the house. There must be some servant, he
reasoned, some caretaker or gardener who could administer temporary
relief and direct him to his destination. The ache in his leg was
becoming unbearable. It was impossible for him to go on unaided. However
reluctant this exclusive home might be to admit a stranger within its
gates, it must conform to the laws of decency and bind up his wounds.

On the side path, bordered with monster oleanders and dusty miller, he
stopped. The door of the garage was open. It seemed safe to assume that
the chauffeur or caretaker lived in the commodious quarters overhead.
Hope glimmered at last through the night of black despair. Almost blind
with pain now Kenwick staggered toward that open door. In the dim light
of late afternoon he made out a small room filled with garden tools.
Beyond, through an inside window, was revealed a handsome black
limousine standing motionless in the gathering darkness.

But the building was deserted. It was when he realized this that the
dusk suddenly enveloped the man peering desperately in at the threshold.
Through a bleak mist he saw the lawn-mower, garden hose, and
beetle-black car dance together in hideous nightmare. And then the room
full of garden tools rushed toward him. He felt the wheels of that
sinister black car grinding into his neck, and he knew no more.




CHAPTER II


When Kenwick came to himself he was lying on a cavernous divan with a
gorgeous Indian blanket over him and a tabouret drawn close to his side.
In a far corner of the room a rose-shaded lamp was burning. It gave to
the handsome drawing-room a rosy glow that seemed to envelop its every
object in subtle mystery. For long minutes the sick man stared about the
apartment without trying to move. Slowly the events of the last few
hours came back to him. Very cautiously, like a man who has just
recovered his sight after prolonged blindness, he felt his way back
along the path that he had just traveled. It brought him at last to the
door of the garage and the beetle-black limousine grinding over his
neck.

He reached out and touched the spindle-legged table at his side. On it
were his collar, tie, and a long-stemmed glass partly full of whisky.
Very slowly he drained the remaining contents. Then he sat upright and
gently touched his injured leg. It felt hard and tight. Whoever had done
the bandaging had made up in force what he had lacked in skill, but the
numbness of a too tight wrapping was an intense relief after his hour of
agony. He limped across the long room to the entrance-hall and stood at
length in the doorway of the mahogany-furnished dining-room guarded by
the row of gendarme chairs.

This last evidence was conclusive. In some way he had gained admittance
to the house with the barred gate. Evidently there had been some one
close at hand when he fainted; some one who had authority to carry him
through those impregnable doors. The thought gave him an uncanny
feeling. But where was this gum-shod combination of mystery and mercy?
In the curious way that the senses convey such intelligence he felt that
the house was empty.

"Well, if I've got to stay here alone all night," he said to himself,
"I'm going to see what this place looks like."

And so, using two light willow chairs as crutches, he started upon a
slow tour of exploration. Through the swinging doors he passed into a
butler's pantry and then into the kitchen. It was a large cheerful room
with laundry in the rear. But although there were no soiled dishes
about, it had an undefinable air of untidiness and neglect. A crumpled
dish-towel was under the table. The sink was grimy and the stove
spotted with grease. Even to Kenwick's inexpert eyes the room appeared
somehow dirty and repellant.

He set the wine-glass that he had brought from the front room on the
table and tried the back door. It was locked on the outside. Every door
and window that he had tested so far was similarly barred. With a vague
feeling of misgiving he returned to the drawing-room. It was very late.
The alabaster clock on the mantel was ticking its way toward midnight.
He felt ravenously hungry but shrank from touching any of the food upon
the pantry shelves. He decided that until his host arrived he would sit
in the den, a companionable little room, whose deep leather chairs
invited him. The porte-cochère was on this side of the house and the
home-comers, whoever they were, would doubtless enter there. No fire
burned on the hearth but the house was comfortably and evenly warm. It
was apparent that the caretaker was an expert furnace-man.

Kenwick was about to sink into one of the big chairs opposite the huge
antlers of a deer when suddenly an object caught his eye. He struggled
over to the telephone and took down the receiver. For five minutes he
stood there holding it to his ear listening for the familiar hum that
assures telephonic health. But the thing was dead. As he hung it up, it
struck Kenwick all at once that it might be disconnected. The idea
brought him a sense of unaccountable resentment. "My Lord!" he muttered.
"I might as well be in a jail!"

He sank into one of the Morris-chairs and gazed out into the blackness
of night. He could, he reflected, smash a window and make his escape
that way. But why escape from comfort into bleakness? Jail or no jail he
was lucky to have found such a haven. By morning somebody would have
arrived and he could be taken to old man Raeburn's. He was probably
worrying about him at this very moment. "I didn't break into this place
though," Kenwick reassured himself. "Somebody in authority brought me
in, so there's nothing criminal about staying on. And since there had to
be an invader, better myself than some unscrupulous beggar who might
make off with the family plate."

The reading-lamp upon the table was equipped with a dimmer. He drew the
chain half its length, pulled the Indian blanket over him, and, in spite
of the dull ache in his leg, was soon wrapped in the dreamless slumber
of utter exhaustion.

When he awoke it was broad daylight and the dimly burning bulb of the
reading-lamp shone with a futile bleary light. He extinguished it and
drew up the window-shades. Sleep had refreshed him and he felt healthily
hungry. The pain in his leg returned with almost overwhelming force when
he attempted to walk, but a sharp-edged appetite impelled him to seek
the pantry. He found the dining-room wrapped in the same somber
stillness that it had worn the night before, the bowl of walnuts showing
dully in the center of the table. From the kitchen table where he had
set it the night before the empty wine-glass stared back at him. But
there was something reassuring in its presence. It seemed to give mute
evidence of the reality of this adventure.

From the butler's pantry Kenwick brought a can of coffee and half a loaf
of bread. "Whatever my bill in this caravansary amounts to," he told
himself as he measured out the coffee, "it's going to include breakfast.
I've decided to sign up on the American plan."

On his trip back to the pantry he discovered upon the ledge inside the
window half a dozen fresh eggs. They gave him a little shock of
surprise. For he was certain that they had not been there before. The
window was small and narrow, much too tiny to admit a human body. But
whoever was detailed to take care of this place was apparently on the
job. Kenwick resolved to be on the alert for the egg-hunter. In twenty
minutes he had cooked himself an ample breakfast and carried it into the
dining-room on an impressive silver tray. Memories of long-ago camping
trips with his elder brother in the Adirondacks recurred to him as he
ate. Everett was a master camper but had always hated to cook. In order
to even things he had been willing to do much more than his share of the
rougher work. Now as Kenwick drank his coffee and ate the perfectly
browned toast and fluffy eggs, he blessed those camping trips and the
education which they had given him.

And then his memory wandered from the wholesome sanity of those days to
the first dreadful months of the war. From the chaos of that era, one
night leaped out at him. It was the night that he had parted with
Everett at the old Kenwick house, the house that had been the Kenwicks'
for sixty years. Perhaps the stark simplicity of that scene, shorn of
objective emotion by the presence of Everett's wife, was the very thing
that enabled him now to extricate it from the tangle of days that
preceded and followed it. Everett had laid his hand for just an instant
upon the shoulder of the new uniform. "I'm all you've got to see you
off, boy," he had said. "But if mother and dad could see you now they'd
be proud and happy." And then had followed a sentence or two of promise,
of affection, of admonition, murmured in a hasty undertone intended to
escape the ears of the statuesque creature who was his brother's wife.
Kenwick had wondered afterward whether they had escaped her, whether,
anything vital ever escaped Isabel Kenwick. And yet his farewell to her
had been a flawless scene. She was always the central figure in some
flawless scene. His brother's whole life seemed to him to be enacted
upon a perfectly appointed stage. There had been just the proper
proportion of regret and pride in Isabel's voice as she bade him
good-by; just the right waving to him from the steps and calling after
him that whenever he returned his old room would be waiting with
everything just as he left it.

And then he had come back and not found his room the same at all.
Everything about the house seemed changed. His room was a guestroom now,
and he had been relegated to a place on the third floor with
dormer-windows. He hated dormer-windows. When his mother had been head
of the home the third floor had been used only for the servants, but
under Isabel's régime it had been converted into extra guestrooms, and
there seemed to be a never-ending succession of guests.

So it had been no hardship to acquiesce in Everett's suggestion that he
come out to California and recuperate from the war strain in Old Man
Raeburn's hospitable Mont-Mer home. It was a splendid idea for Everett
well knew that the West was more like home to him now than New York.
Mont-Mer itself was unfamiliar, but only a few hours up coast there was
San Francisco. And in San Francisco was----He felt in his pocket. But
the slender flat object around which his fingers had closed during
moments of desolation and peril in the trenches was not there. The
realization that it had been pitched into the underbrush along with his
money and watch stabbed him with a new pain. Her picture out there in
that cañon where any casual explorer might chance upon it! Why, it was
desecration!

He pushed aside the tray and went over to the long mirror in the door of
the hall closet. In all his twenty-five years he had never given his
physical appearance such intensive consideration. Vanity had never been
one of his failings. And his fastidious taste in dress was more
instinctive than consciously cultivated. Now the keen dark eyes traveled
slowly from the brown hair brushed back from his forehead to the thin
lips and firm square chin. His eyes were the wide-apart eyes of the
student but it was the nose that gave his face distinction. Thin,
sensitive, perfectly molded, it betrayed an eager, intense nature never
quite at peace with itself. The hands with which he tried now to comb
his disordered hair into decorum were the long-fingered, hollow-palmed
hands of those who are blessed and cursed with the creative,
introspective temperament. They were hands impatient of detail, eager to
grasp at the garment of great achievement, resentful of the slower
process of accomplishment. He had drawn himself to his full six feet.
Army training had given him an extra inch, and of this one physical
asset he was proud.

"Decent appearing," he mused, checking off the credit side of his ledger
in businesslike tones. "Fairly prosperous, sane, and law-abiding. I
wonder if I'll be able to convince my host of any of those things."

He decided suddenly to explore the upper part of the house. It would
cost terrific physical effort, but a fury of restlessness possessed
him. On the broad landing the stairway divided and took opposite ways.
He turned to the left and a few minutes later found himself standing in
the open doorway of what appeared to be an upstairs sitting-room. It was
obviously a man's apartment. The smell of stale cigar smoke was in the
air and on the table a pipe and ash-tray. It was the sight of the latter
that brought Kenwick's fine eyes together in a deep-furrowed frown. From
the cold ashes he drew out a half-smoked cigar. For a long moment he
stood turning it in his hand. It couldn't have been in that tray for
more than a few hours.

In the room beyond, separated from the sitting-room by portières, was a
massive walnut bed, chiffonier, and shaving-stand. A blue-tiled bathroom
completed the suite. The windows of all three were closed and locked. He
went back to the hall, past another bedroom with door ajar, and
descended the stairs to the landing. Here he paused to rest, gazing
speculatively at the closed portals in the opposite wing.

"The modern American home," he decided. "He has one part of the house
and she has the other."

His face twitched with the pain of his pilgrimage. It was going to be a
crucial experience getting downstairs. While he stood there almost
despairing of the feat of covering the distance back to the den, there
came to his ears a sound that turned him cold. He forgot his pain and
clung to the supporting post motionless as a statue.

The sound came again. He knew this time that it was not the
hallucination of overstrung nerves. Dragging himself up by the banister,
he knocked on the first door of the right wing. There was no response.
He knocked again, then boldly turned the knob. The door was locked. But
through the deathly stillness there came, after a moment's pause, the
sound that he had heard before. It was the sound of a woman's stifled
sobbing.




CHAPTER III


Kenwick stood outside the closed door, a curious numbness stealing over
him. Was it possible, he asked himself, that there had been some one in
this house during the last twelve hours? Was it possible that this
person was a woman? A solitary woman? It was unmistakably a woman's
voice, and there was no sound of comforting or upbraiding or other
evidence of companionship. As he knocked again at the door he wondered
which one of them was the more startled by the presence of the other.

The sobbing had abruptly ceased. There was dead silence. Had he been of
a superstitious temperament he might have suspected that his knock had
somehow released from bondage an unhappy ghost who, wailing over a dead
tragedy, had vanished leaving this spectral house as desolate as he had
found it.

But Kenwick had no patience whatever with the occult. For him life was
too all-absorbing and vivid an enterprise to tolerate the pastel
existence of ghosts. Through the stillness his voice cut its way like a
torchlight cleaving a path through a blind alley.

"What's the matter?"

As he hurled this question through the panel, he reflected that, being a
woman, she would probably reply, "Nothing." But there was no response.
Kenwick persisted. "Can I do anything for you?" And then a voice that
was little more than a whisper came to him.

"Who are you?"

Conscious that the name would mean nothing to her, he gave it with a
touch of irritation. She must know that he couldn't explain his invasion
of her house through that inscrutably closed door. He had never thought
of the place as belonging to a woman. Nothing that he had seen in it so
far bespoke a woman's presence. The embarrassment that he had felt
during the first hours of his imprisonment ebbed back and for the moment
robbed him of further speech.

"Please go away." The voice from the other side of the door was
entreating. It was a cultured, beautifully modulated voice struggling
against heavy odds for composure. Kenwick had the feeling that it was a
voice that lent itself easily to disguise.

"I can't go away until I have told you about myself," he said firmly.
"I must tell you how I happen to be here, an uninvited guest in your
house." He gave her the story briefly and was horribly conscious that it
lacked conviction. In his own ears it sounded like the still-born
narrative of a debauchee. Having stumbled to the end he waited for her
comment. It came after a long pause.

"I'm sorry you're hurt. I hope you'll feel better to-morrow." To-morrow!
Did she expect him to prolong his visit indefinitely? The casual
courtesy of her tone was more disconcerting than indignation or
resentment or any other form of reply could have been. But he resolved
savagely not to leave that door until he had obtained some sort of
information.

"When I met with the accident I was driving out to the Raeburn house;
Charles Raeburn. Do you know where he lives?"

"No."

"Well, tell me about this place, then, please. Whose is it?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? And yet you live here?" Kenwick felt as though his
brain were turning over in his head.

"If you call this living." He wouldn't have caught this reply at all if
his ear hadn't been pressed close against the panel.

"Are you all alone here?"

There was no reply.

"Is any one with you?"

"Oh, please go away. Do have pity on me and go away."

She was alone, Kenwick decided, and was afraid to tell him so. The
realization brought a wave of hot color to his face. He dragged himself
painfully back to the landing. And from that distance he sent his voice
up to her, freighted with reassurance.

"Don't be frightened. I'm pretty badly bunged up just now, but I found a
revolver over in the other wing, and if anybody comes prowling
about--well, I'm not a bad shot." Suddenly a new thought occurred to
him. "Have you had anything to eat this morning? Are you hungry?"

"I think--I am starving."

It was like a spray of ice-water in his face. He stood for a moment
considering, "I'll get you something," he promised. "If you don't want
to come out I'll fix it and bring it up on a tray."

"There would be no use."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't open the door."

"Are you in bed?" His voice had sharpened.

Silence again, from which he concluded that she was. He stood there
staring at the heavy mahogany door as though by the mere intensity of
his gaze he could dissolve it. For a long moment he was lost in thought,
but he was not trying now to solve the riddle of the woman on the other
side of the barrier. The needs of the immediate present were all that
concerned him. Finally he spoke again.

"Is your bed anywhere near a window?"

"Yes."

"Is the window open?"

"Yes."

"Then listen. I'll go downstairs and get something for you to eat. I'll
put it into a bucket, attach some kind of rope with a weighted end to
it, and throw the end in at your window. I can't get outside so I'll
have to do it from the pantry window and it may take some time, but I'll
keep at it. When the end comes in, pull up the bucket. Do you see?"

"I'll try to."

He turned away and began the long trip down to the kitchen. Now that he
was animated by a desire to help somebody else, the depression which had
enveloped him was momentarily dissipated. In spite of the ever-present
pain he felt almost elated when at last he arrived again in the kitchen.

Half an hour later the "rope," manufactured from several towels tied
together, with a potato-masher on the end, flew in at the window just
above the pantry and the carefully covered bucket disappeared from
sight. "Pretty neat," Kenwick remarked to himself. "I had no idea that I
could do it when I told her I would."

But the strain had been too great. He was suddenly aware that every
nerve in his body was aching. Back in the den he sank down on the couch
where he had spent the night. Conjecture about the woman upstairs was
submerged now beneath his own physical misery. The shelves in the
library were empty. There was nothing to read save a paper-backed copy
of one of Dumas's earlier novels, which he discovered in a corner. He
took it up and tried to lose himself in the story, but it couldn't hold
him. He found himself wondering resentfully why old man Raeburn hadn't
shown more interest in his non-appearance. He was furiously impatient
and utterly helpless. And he told himself that these two cannot live
long together without wrecking the reason. Never before in his life had
he been in a position where he couldn't do something to alter obdurate
circumstance. To do anything would be better than to do nothing. The
thought came to him all at once that this was what women, overwhelming
numbers of women, must have endured during the terrible years of the war
just past. There must have been whole armies of them, furiously eager to
shoulder guns and march away to the trenches with the men they loved.
And instead they had to submit to being caged up in houses and,
blindfolded to all vision of the outer world, perform day after day the
dreary treadmill duties of routine existence. For the first time he
found himself wondering why more of them hadn't gone insane under the
pressure. He was certain that he himself would lose his mental balance
if the blindfold wasn't soon removed from his mental vision.

Suddenly he sat up and tossed aside his book. There was the sound of a
footstep on the gravel walk at the other side of the house. Pushing a
chair before him he followed the sound out to the dining-room. Through
the window he saw a tall, ungainly looking boy walking toward the
tank-house garage. He was carrying a long pole and a pair of pruning
shears. So this was the accursed gardener, the mysterious gatherer of
eggs, who, having brought him into the house, was content to let him die
there or make off with the family plate.

"Here, you!" Kenwick knocked on the window-pane. It was a loud
resounding knock, but the boy walked on unheeding, carefully examining
one end of his pole.

Kenwick tried the lock. He had noticed in a previous investigation that
all the windows on the lower floor had double locks. Undoing them on the
inside was futile until a spring released them on the outside. And
Kenwick was in no mood for making mechanical experiments. For an instant
he stood there, like some caged animal, staring after the gawky figure
of the boy as though he were the embodiment of hope fading away in the
distance. And then a blind fury seized him. Possessed only of the
overpowering desire to gain the attention of the outside world, he
suddenly doubled his fist and sent it crashing through the heavy
plate-glass pane. It shattered into a hundred pieces and cut a deep gash
in his wrist.

When he had bound this up in a handkerchief with deft first-aid skill,
he leaned out through the ragged aperture that had been the window. The
boy had vanished as completely as though he were a wraith. Kenwick,
controlling his dismay with a stupendous effort, told himself that he
had only gone to put away his tools and would soon come running back to
investigate the damage. He stood there waiting, exulting in his revolt.
In spite of the lacerated wrist this violent assertion of his rights
brought an immense relief. Why, a person might be murdered in this place
and it would be days before anybody would know a thing about it.

The boy did not return, and Kenwick made his way back to the den. It was
mid-afternoon now and a heavy rain had begun to fall. He made no further
attempt to read, but lay on the upholstered window-seat trying to find
some position that would be bearable. He cursed himself for having used
the leg so much. Had he remained quiet all day he might by now have been
able to get away from this uncanny place. But the woman upstairs! He
couldn't throw off an absurd sense of responsibility concerning her.
From all that he could gather she was as helpless a puppet in the hands
of fate as he. But of course she might have been lying to him. As he lay
there on his back gazing out at the needles of rain driven aslant into
the dank ground, he felt distrustful of the whole universe. Could there
be any way, he wondered, of getting a message out of this house? There
must be a rural delivery, and if so, at the gate would be a letterbox.
But that gate----It seemed tortuous miles away.

A search through the empty drawers of the desk revealed several loose
sheets of tablet-paper and the stub of a pencil. With this equipment he
wrote out a telegram to Everett. The mere wording of it seemed to
reinstate him somehow in the world of affairs. The problem of getting it
into the office could be solved later.

At six o'clock he forced himself to go out to the kitchen again and
prepare supper. The thought of eating revolted him, but the woman
upstairs, liar, decoy, or invalid, must be fed. Dangling close to the
pantry window was the white-knotted towel rope with the bucket on the
end. He put into it the last of the loaf of bread and some boiled eggs.
Then he called to her to pull it up. When the bucket had begun its
erratic climb, he leaned out of the narrow opening and spoke with
defiant triumph. "Did you hear me smash that window this afternoon? I
was trying to get the attention of the gardener. And I'm going to get it
too if I have to smash up everything on this place."

If she made any reply he did not catch it. The rain was falling fast now
and there was the growling sound of approaching thunder. Back in the den
again he turned on the reading-light, more for companionship than
illumination. Could it be possible that he would have to spend another
night in this ghostly house? The idea was intolerable, and yet there was
no relief in sight.

Another hour passed, and darkness enveloped the world in a shroud-like
mantle. The bandage with which Kenwick's leg was wrapped was a torture
now. He unwound it and began to massage the badly swollen limb using the
long firm strokes that he had learned from the athletic trainer during
his university days. They seemed to ease the pain somewhat and he
continued to rub until his arms ached with the effort.

Then all at once there came to his ears a sound that made him halt,
every muscle tense with listening. It was a sharp incisive knocking and
it seemed to come from the dining-room. He sat motionless, afraid to
move lest it should stop. But it came again, a clear unmistakable
knocking that had the dull resonance of metal clashing against metal. To
Kenwick it was perfectly obvious now that someone was trying to gain
entrance at that broken dining-room window. He tested his unbandaged
foot upon the floor and drew himself stealthily to a standing position.
And then he turned himself slowly in the direction of the darkened
dining-room.




CHAPTER IV


The Morgan home on Pine Street was a rambling old house; the only
shingle structure in a block of modern concrete apartments. To the elder
Morgans it had been the fulfilment of a dream; a home of their own in
San Francisco. Clinton Morgan had lived only a year after its
completion, and his widow, in spite of the pressure of hard times and
the inadequacy of the income which he left, had resisted all tempting
offers to sell the old place and had brought up her son and daughter
with a reverence for family tradition as incongruous to their
environment and generation as was the old shingle house among its
businesslike neighbors.

And then, eight years after Clinton Morgan's death, oil had been
discovered in his holdings over at Coalinga, and the last year of Sarah
Morgan's life had been spent in affluence. But she had never parted with
the old home. At the end of that year she had called Clinton, Jr., then
a young instructor in chemistry at the university, to her bedside and
laid a last charge upon him.

"Clint,"--Her voice held that note of unconscious tyranny that
approaching death gives to last utterances. For in the moment of
dissolution there is not one among us but is granted the crown and
scepter of autocracy. "Clint, don't let the old place go. Fix it over
any way you and Marcreta like, but keep it in the family as long as you
live."

"Yes, Mother."

"And Clint, there is something else."

"I know, Mother. It's Marcreta. But you needn't worry about her."

"I don't believe in death-bed promises. It's not right to try to tie up
anybody's future. But----You see, if she were strong and well, I
wouldn't be anxious; I wouldn't say anything but----"

"You don't need to say anything, Mother. I'll always look out for her."

A white, blue-veined hand stretched across the counterpane groping for
his. A moment later Marcreta was holding the other and brother and
sister faced each other alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was about a year after this that Clinton Morgan brought home with him
to dinner one night a young college fellow, just on the eve of
graduating from the University of California. The friendship between the
instructor and this undergraduate, five years his junior, had begun in
the fraternity-house where Clinton dined occasionally as one of the "old
men." And temperamental congeniality and diversity of interests had done
the rest.

"He's slated to be one of those writer freaks." Thus he introduced the
guest to his sister. "But he's harmless at present and he's far from
home, so I brought him along."

Roger Kenwick looked into Miss Morgan's grave blue eyes and became
suddenly a man. His host, surveying him genially from across the
meat-platter, found himself entertaining a stranger. The gay persiflage
which he had known over at "the house" was completely submerged under a
maturity which he had suspected only as potential. In vain he tried that
form of social surgery known to hosts and hostesses as "drawing him
out." He mentioned a clever poem in the college magazine of which
Kenwick was editor. He began a discussion of the approaching track-meet
in which Kenwick was to support his championship for the hundred-yard
dash. He tried university politics in which his guest was a conspicuous
figure. To all these leads his fraternity brother made brief, almost
impatient response. And Clinton Morgan was resentfully bewildered. He
experienced that cheated feeling known to any one who has brought home
exultantly a clever friend, and then failed in the effort to make him
show off.

But he couldn't complain that Kenwick was tongue-tied. He was talking
earnestly, but it was about future, not past achievement. Inspired by
Marcreta's sympathetic interest, he unfolded plans of accomplishment of
which until that moment he himself had been in densest ignorance.
Clinton had seen other men change, chameleon-like, in the presence of
his sister, and he found himself wondering now as he watched Kenwick
take his headlong leap into the future, whether it was Marcreta's regal
beauty which inspired their admiration or her physical disability which
appealed to their chivalry.

Kenwick himself was scarcely conscious of the disability. He was only
vaguely aware that there were cushions at Miss Morgan's back and that on
the way in from the living-room she had leaned slightly upon her
brother's arm. When the evening was over he left the Morgan home
enveloped in a white fury.

"I've been a fool!" he told himself violently. "I've been frittering
away my whole life. This college stuff is kids' play. If I wasn't just
two months from the end I'd ditch it and break into the man's game of
finding a place in the world."

"Great chap, Kenwick," Clinton was telling his sister. "But he wasn't
quite himself to-night. I think he has some family troubles that worry
him. Doesn't get on very well with his sister-in-law back East, I
believe. That's why he came out here to college."

Marcreta made a random reply. She was wondering what kind of person
Roger Kenwick's real self was. And she was soon to discover. For that
evening marked the beginning of a new era for them both. Scarcely a week
passed that he did not spend Saturday and Sunday evenings at the house
on Pine Street. Sometimes he read aloud to her "stuff" that he had
written for the local newspapers. Sometimes she read to him from her
favorite books. Once she helped him plan the plot of an absorbing serial
story. But often they didn't read anything at all; just sat in front of
the open fire and talked.

In May Kenwick was graduated from the university, but was still living
at the fraternity-house in Berkeley when there came a sudden summons
from New York. He ought to come, Isabel informed him, for his brother
was seriously ill. On the night before he left he made a longer call
than usual at the Morgan home.

"Everett's the finest chap in the world," he told Marcreta. "He's been
like a father to me. But----Lord! How I hate to tear myself away from
here! And the worst of it is, I don't know how long I may have to stay.
You won't forget me if it's a long time?"

And then all at once they were not talking about his trip any more, nor
of Everett. "If you could only give me some hope to go on," Kenwick was
saying. "Something to live on while I'm away."

But to this entreaty Marcreta was almost coldly unresponsive. She tried
evasions first; asked solicitous questions concerning his plans; showed
a heart-warming interest in his anxiety concerning his brother. But,
forced at length to answer his persistent question, she said simply:
"No. I don't care for you--in that way. Let's not talk any more about
it. Let's not spoil our last evening together."

It brought him to his feet white and shaken. "Spoil my last evening with
you!" he cried. "Spoil my whole life! That's what it will do if I can't
have you in it." His fingers sought an inside pocket of his coat. "I've
got your picture," he told her fiercely. "I got it down at Stafford's
studio the other day. And I'm going to carry it with me always--until
you give me something better."

A month after his arrival in New York he wrote her that his brother had
recovered and that he would soon be coming back to find a position in a
newspaper office in San Francisco. But he didn't come back. For it was
just at this time that men began to hear strange new voices calling to
them from out of the world-chaos. Day by day they grew in volume and in
authority luring youth out of the isolation of personal ambition into
the din and horrible carnage of war. Just before he left for a Southern
training-camp Kenwick wrote her a long letter. In it there was neither
past nor future tense. It concerned itself solely, almost stubbornly,
with the present.

On the evening that she received it Marcreta held conference with her
brother in the dignified old drawing-room. "Clinton, I want to make the
old house take a part in the war. I've been talking it over with Dr.
Reynolds. He says it would make an ideal sanitarium. I want to use it
for the families of enlisted men; the women and children, you know, who
are too proud for charity and who, for just a nominal sum, could come
here and get the best treatment. If you were at the front, wouldn't it
relieve your mind to know that somebody you loved, I for instance, was
getting the proper care when I was ill, even though you couldn't provide
it for me? I'll do all this out of my own money, of course, and keep
your room and mine, so that this will still be home to you when--you
come back from training-camp."

He stared at her incredulously. "Why, how did you----What makes you
think that--I'm going away?"

"I saw Captain Evans's name on that envelope the other day, so I wrote
to him and asked if you had quizzed him about war work," she told him
shamelessly. "I couldn't help it, Clint. I had to know. I really knew
anyway. Knowing you, how could I help seeing that you were mad to get
away and help. Every _man_ must be. But you've been afraid to broach it
to me."

In his first moment of wild relief, he didn't dare trust himself to
speak. When he at last ventured a response he plunged, manlike, into the
least vital of the two topics. "But you don't quite realize what it
would mean, Crete, tearing the whole house up that way. And the
incessant confusion of having all those people around would be a
frightful strain. With that spine of yours apt to go back on you at any
time----It isn't as if you were a well woman."

The instant the words were out he regretted them. He saw his sister
wince, but her voice was steady and eager with entreaty. "That's just
it, dear. It isn't as if I were well and could do any work myself. But I
can do this. I know what sick people need to make them comfortable. Oh,
let me do it, Clinton."

He reached over and patted her shoulder. "I don't want to stand in the
way of anything that would give you any happiness. But if it should be
too much for you--and I so far away from you----"

"Even if it should be, you would come to see some day that I was right
to do it. I have a right to take that chance. I have just as much right
as a soldier has to stake my life against a great cause."

In the end he yielded, and together they planned the readjustment of
their lives and the old home. Of the rooms on the lower floor, only the
big library remained unchanged. But there were invalid-chairs ranged
about the great room now and little tables holding bottles and trays.

On the Sunday evening before he left Clinton found his sister up in her
room sorting over a pile of letters. "Well, your dreams are coming true,
Crete," he told her. "Dr. Reynolds is delighted with this place
and--you're sending a man to the service."

She looked up at him with a smile, and it flashed across him suddenly
that she had done more than this. A silence fell between them, the tense
throbbing silence that precedes a last farewell. He felt that he ought
to say something; something comforting and cheerful. But the Morgans
were reserved people, and they found confidences incredibly difficult.
So he stood there looking down at her, thinking that she always ought to
wear that soft blue-gray color that seemed to melt into her eyes and
bring out all the richness of the dark curves of hair. It was so that he
would think of her in the days that were to come--a fragile but gallant
figure sitting at the old mahogany desk sorting out letters.

Suddenly she pushed them aside and rose to her full splendid queenly
height. She knew that the moment of farewell had come and was not
grudging it its crucial moment of life. He came toward her and put his
two hands lightly on her shoulders. But words failed him utterly. For
his glance had fallen upon the pile of letters which she had tied with a
narrow bit of white ribbon. And he noticed for the first time that they
were all addressed in the same handwriting.




CHAPTER V


Before going to investigate the knocking in the dining-room, Kenwick
picked up the loaded revolver which he had brought down with him from
the upstairs sitting-room. He felt himself so completely at a
disadvantage against any chance invader that only such a weapon could
even the score. Besides, there was the sick woman upstairs. He had her
to protect. He hobbled across the hall, making as little noise as he
could. But the process of getting into the dining-room took considerable
time. There was plenty of time, he reflected, for the intruder to become
discouraged or emboldened as the case might be.

As he crossed the room an icy blast struck him from the open window, and
he told himself savagely that he wished he had left it alone. You
couldn't expect a furnace to heat a house with a gale like that blowing
into it. He had dragged himself to within a few feet of the pane when
all at once he stopped. Two wide boards had been nailed across the
aperture. It was a clumsy job, hurriedly done. Kenwick stood there
gazing at it. So it was only for this that he had made the painful
journey from the den! And the carpenter was gone. The customary deathly
stillness prevailed.

He stood there listening for the sound of retreating footsteps but it
was another sound that caught his ear. What he heard was the far off
chugging of an automobile engine. He remembered now that the place was
on a corner; that he had walked what had seemed miles after turning that
corner before he had come to the iron gate. He was thinking rapidly.
This was his one hope. If he could manage to get out to that gate by the
time the motor-car reached it, he could get help. How ill the woman
upstairs might be he could not guess, but they were both terribly in
need of aid. At any cost he must get out to the road.

He laid the revolver upon a grim, high-backed chair and threw his whole
six feet of strength against one of the wide boards. It gave under the
pressure with a long tearing noise and hung outward dangling from its
secure end. Kenwick took up the revolver again, worked himself out
through the ample opening, and landed cautiously upon the gravel walk
beneath the window. Clutching at the branch of a giant oleander bush he
called up to the patient upstairs; "I'm going out to the gate. I don't
know what will happen to me before I get back, and I don't care. But I'm
going to get help or die trying."

There was no response. He wondered, as he started along through the
blackness, whether the woman could be asleep. How could any one sleep in
this ghastly place. Some people didn't seem to have any nerves. But she
might be dead. The thought brought him to an abrupt halt. But in that
case it was more imperative than ever that he toil on.

The rain had stopped now and the lawn under his feet was soggy and
water-beaten like a carpet that has been left out in a storm. He thanked
fortune that it was not slippery but gave beneath his staggering tread
with a resilience that aided progress. It was impossible for him to
proceed at anything faster than what seemed a snail's pace. The machine
must have passed the gate by this time, but there would be others. If he
ever reached that distant goal he would stand there and wait.

Across the circle of lawn, around the arc of drive, he made his
laborious way with clenched teeth. And so at last he came to where the
tall gate loomed black and forbidding through the darkness. The heavy
chain still swung its sinister scallop before it, seeming more like a
prison precaution now than a warning against invasion. As he looked at
the stone fence, stretching away from it on both sides, and recalled the
agony with which he had scaled it, courage fled. He'd rather die, he
decided, than attempt to struggle over that parapet again. So he stood,
supporting himself by one of the iron rods of the gate, listening for
the sound of an engine. It came at last, growing louder as the car
turned the corner a quarter of a mile away. It was evidently traveling
slowly in low gear. The reason was soon apparent. Its engine was missing
fire.

On through the darkness it came, its lights blazing a path for its
faltering progress. There was a noise of violently shifted gears and
then the heavy, greasy odor of a flooded carburetor. Behind the lights
there slid into view almost opposite the tall gate a high-powered
roadster. A man wearing huge glasses that gleamed through the dark like
the eyes of some superhuman being sprang out and wrenched open the
engine hood.

For a moment Kenwick watched him, dreading to speak lest the stranger
vanish and leave him solitary as the gardener had done. And then
abruptly he sent his voice hurtling through the night. At sound of it he
recoiled. Only those who have suffered in solitude the agony of a
nameless terror know the ghastly havoc that it can work upon the human
voice. Kenwick's held now a harsh, ugly tone that had in it something
like a threat. The man at the engine wheeled about and leveled his huge
eyes at the spot from whence the summons came. "What the devil----?" he
began.

And then explanations tumbled through the barred gate in an incoherent
torrent. They left the motorist with a confused impression of an
automobile tragedy, a bed-ridden woman, a feeble-minded gardener, and a
haunted house.

In sheer perplexity he began drawing off his heavy gantlet gloves as
though to prepare for action. "Take it slower," he advised. "I don't get
you." And then he noticed that the man on the other side of the gate was
hatless and without an overcoat. "My Lord!" he cried anxiously. "You'll
freeze out here, man!"

"Then for God's sake come in here and help me!" Kenwick entreated. "I
don't know whose place this is but it ought to be investigated. There's
a woman in here who's ill, and somebody has locked her into her room.
I'm not able to do a thing for her or for myself. Do you know what house
this is?"

The stranger shook his head. "No, I'm just out here on a visit." Kenwick
groaned. There flashed into his mind the stories of some of his friends
who had toured California and who were unanimous in their conclusion
that everybody in the southern part of the state was merely a visitor.
"But whom do they visit?" Everett Kenwick had once inquired and nobody
could supply him with an answer.

"Then you don't know where the Raeburn house is?" the man inside the
gate asked hopelessly.

The motorist shook his head again. "I'll tell you what though," he
suggested. "You get back into the house out of this cold and I'll send
somebody back here. I'm having engine trouble and I've got to get into
town."

Kenwick was fumbling with numb fingers in the pocket of his coat. He
stretched an oblong of white paper through the bars of the gate. "If
you're going in town, take this," he pleaded. "It's a message I want to
send to my brother in New York. Kenwick is the name and the address is
on the outside."

The stranger stopped on his way to the gate and a curious expression
crossed his face. And just at that moment Kenwick caught the sound of
another voice speaking from inside the car. He couldn't catch the words,
for the coughing of the engine beat against his ears. The man in the
goggles climbed to the seat and the next minute the machine was moving
jerkily away.

Cold desolation seized Kenwick. But he felt certain that the stranger
would return. There was nothing mysterious nor uncanny about him. But
how long would he have to wait there on the drenched gravel before help
could get back to him? It wouldn't do to catch cold in that leg and add
a fever to his other troubles. He must get back into the house. Out
there on the bleak road he thought longingly of its warm comfort.
Everything that he had done since he came into it seemed now to have
been the wrong thing. A horrible sense of incompetency, the first that
he had ever known in all his vivid, effective life, surged over him. And
added to this was a curious sense of having lost something. Was it
Marcreta Morgan's picture that he missed? He told himself that it was,
but he was only half satisfied with this assurance.

Arguing the matter with himself, he had covered half the distance around
the driveway when suddenly a sharp reverberation rang through the air.
It was the report of a gun. Almost immediately this was followed by a
woman's scream.

Kenwick stood still, balancing himself unsteadily upon his well foot.
The sound had come from the direction of the house. Did it herald a
tragedy or was it merely a signal? Scarcely knowing why he did it,
except to relieve the physical tension and to make his presence known,
he gripped his own revolver and fired two answering shots upward into
the night.




CHAPTER VI


The one idea which possessed Kenwick after dragging himself back through
the broken window was to find out if the woman upstairs was safe. The
journey out to the big gate and back had consumed almost an hour, and as
he pulled himself in between the wide board and shattered glass he felt
that it must have been years since he had gone on that painful quest. He
rested for a few moments and then went into the front hall.

To his amazement he found it ablaze with light. Brilliant too was the
living-room beyond. In the latter he had never used anything but the
shaded lamp upon the table. Now the chandeliers in the ceiling had been
lighted from the switchboard button. It was evident that some one had
been all over the lower part of the house while he was gone. It must
have been the woman upstairs. There was no one else on the premises
except that half-witted garden boy.

Grimly resolved to discover whether his mysterious companion was still
concealing herself behind locked doors or whether her apartment had
been stormed by some prowler he made his way up to the room in the front
of the right wing. As he approached it he called to her asking if she
was all right. There was no response. He knocked. The sound echoed dully
down the handsome stairway. Then in a futile sort of way he tried the
knob.

This time it yielded to his touch and swung slowly open. For a moment he
hesitated, dreading to snap on the light. Then the stillness grew
oppressive. His quick, impatient fingers groped along the wall, found
the switch-button, and pressed it. The mysterious apartment flashed into
sudden reality.

Kenwick looked about him, bewildered. The light revealed a large
handsome room furnished in golden oak. There was a massive double bed,
bureau, dressing-table, and several luxurious chairs. A heavy moquette
carpet deadened every footfall, and the rose-colored draperies at the
windows admitted only a restricted view of the outer world. But it was
the condition of the room, not its furnishings, that puzzled the man
upon the threshold. Dust covered every polished surface. The hearth was
swept clean. There had been no fire on it for months, perhaps years. On
the bed was a mattress but no coverings. The mirrors on bureau and
dressing-table showed a thin veil of dust. There were no toilet
articles, no personal belongings of any kind. The room was evidently a
woman's but there was no hint of a woman's presence, except that in the
air hung a faint perfume of heliotrope. He remembered suddenly that it
was the perfume that Marcreta Morgan had always used.

Kenwick went over to one of the chairs and sat down. He felt intensely
relieved. If the woman had gone away she would certainly send some one
back to the house, for she knew that he was alone and injured. But how
had she gone? Was there another entrance to these somber grounds? For
half an hour he sat there trying to think it out. The room grew very
cold. It had apparently been shut off from the furnace connection. He
arose at last, stiffly, and went back downstairs, switching off the
lights. In the living-room and hall he turned them off too, for they
gave to the solemn rooms a garish, incongruous splendor.

He went into the den and took his old place on the upholstered
window-seat. It may have been twenty minutes later that he heard the
sound of wheels crunching the gravel of the driveway. He listened
intently. No, this time he was not mistaken. Some vehicle was
approaching the house. The stranger in goggles had been true to his
promise and had sent back help, or perhaps returned himself. At last
this hideous bondage was to end. He limped into the living-room and
without turning on the light, peered out. There was no one in sight and
no sound of voices, but at the foot of the front steps stood a long
black car. It recalled to him in a flash the beetle-black limousine that
he had seen in the tank-house garage.

Impelled by his entry into the room upstairs to try the front door, he
turned the knob. It was unlocked. Whoever had come in or gone out had
been in too much of a hurry to fasten it this time.

And then, standing there at that half-open door, Kenwick suddenly lost
his headlong impatience. For the realization came to him at last that
his experiences of the last twenty-four hours were no casual adventure.
This was a game, perhaps even a trap. He had inadvertently stepped into
a carefully laid plot. That it had been obviously prepared for somebody
else did not alter the seriousness of his present position. Whoever was
engineering the thing had assumed that he would do and say certain
things. And now, he reminded himself angrily, he had probably done and
said them all. Certainly his every move had been direct, impetuous,
glaringly obvious. He would have to change his course unless he wanted
to die in this accursed house. This game, whatever it was, couldn't be
won by throwing all the cards face up on the table and demanding a
reckoning. The other players wore masks. If he was to have any chance
against them he must adopt their tactics.

He assured himself of all this while he limped down the shallow porch
steps. He hadn't the faintest notion of what he was going to do next,
but decided to trust to impulse. He had reached the lowest step when all
at once he recoiled. Almost with his hand upon the beetle-black
limousine he discovered that it was not a limousine at all. It was a
hearse.

At that same moment, he heard, coming from the near distance, the voice
of some one speaking with unaccustomed restraint. It was a raucous voice
talking in a harsh whisper. And then there was a sound of footsteps
approaching.

Without an instant's hesitation Kenwick opened the door of the hearse,
pulled himself inside, and drew it shut, unlatched behind him. There
was no definite plan in his mind except to escape. And the woman had
apparently fled so he felt no further responsibility for her.

The steps came nearer. In another minute some one might jerk open the
door and discover him. And he remembered uneasily that now he was not
armed. He had left the revolver on the table in the den. The footsteps
stopped close to his head and a man's voice called to somebody at a
distance.

"My orders was to come out here. That's all I know about it. But I'm not
goin' to get myself tied up in any mess like this. It's up to the
coroner first. It just means that I'll have to make another trip out
here to-morrow."

Kenwick heard him clamber to the high seat, and heard him jam his foot
against the starter, heard its throbbing response. And then he started
away on his long weird drive through the black night.

He had expected his conveyance to be almost as close and stifling as a
tomb, but was relieved to find that sufficient air came in through the
crack of the door to make the trip endurable. The only provident thing
that he had done during the whole adventure, he decided, was to put on
his overcoat and hat before leaving the den. One journey bareheaded
into the November night had been sufficient to warn him against a
repetition of such rashness. He was dressed now as he had been when he
first took stock of himself outside the tall iron gate.

The road was smooth asphalt all of the way, and the passenger, stretched
at full length on the hard floor of the hearse, felt more comfortable
than he had all that ghastly day. During the ride he tried to formulate
some definite course of action. For now that the solitary desolation of
the last twenty-four hours was ended, he was able to detach himself from
its events and to view the whole experience as a spectator.

His vivid imagination pictured the somber house in a dozen different
lights. But he discarded them one by one, and his interest centered
about the identity of the woman upstairs and the single shot which had
pierced the stillness of a few hours before. Of only one thing he was
certain--that he was going to get out of Mont-Mer as speedily as
possible. It was all very well to conjecture that the house might be the
disreputable retreat of some Eastern capitalist, or a rendezvous for
radicals, but he preferred to solve the riddle from a distance. He had
no intention of being called as a witness in an ugly exposé. It would
be easy enough to write to Old Man Raeburn and explain that it hadn't
been possible for him to stop off on his way to San Francisco. He
fervently hoped that he would never see Mont-Mer again. Without ever
having really seen it he had come to loathe it.

He had ridden for twenty minutes or more when he felt the vehicle slow
down. It made a sharp turn and came to a stop. Kenwick wondered if the
driver would open the doors, and he lay there waiting, staring into the
dark, impassive in the hands of fate. He heard the man climb down from
his seat and then the sound of his footsteps growing fainter in the
distance.

Ten minutes later Kenwick cautiously pushed open the flimsy doors and
worked himself out of his hiding-place. He was in an alley enclosed on
three sides by the backs of buildings. Half hopping, half crawling he
reached the dimly lighted street. It was almost midnight now and the
little town was deserted. At the corner he found a drug-store. It looked
warm, companionable, inviting. Drawing his fur-collared overcoat about
his ears he hobbled to the door and pushed it open.

Inside two men were leaning against a glass show-case talking with the
clerk. At Kenwick's entrance the conversation stopped abruptly like the
dialogue of movie actors when the camera clicks the scene's end. The
intruder, clutching at one of the show-cases for support, forced a
comradely smile. "If I can't put one over here," he told himself, "I
don't deserve to be called a fiction-writer."

But before he had time to speak one of the men came forward with a
startled questioning. "You look all in, man; white as a sheet. Sit down
here. What's the idea?"

"Pretty close call," Kenwick told him. "A fellow in a car bowled me over
as I was crossing the street. He went right on, but I doubt if I'll be
able to for a while."

"Well, what do you know about that?" the drug clerk challenged, as he
helped his visitor into a chair behind the prescription-desk. "Say, this
is gettin' to be one of the worst towns on the coast for auto accidents.
Didn't get his number, I suppose?"

"No. And I'm just a stranger passing through here. I don't know many
people."

"Hard luck." It was evident that the trio were disappointed in the
meagerness of his story. One of them stooped and was probing the
swollen leg with skilful fingers. Kenwick winced.

"You've got a bad sprain there all right," the doctor told him. "It's
swollen a good deal, too, for being so recent. Have you walked far?"

"Yes, rather." Kenwick watched in silence while the physician bound up
the injured member in a stout bandage. In spite of his best efforts one
sharp moan escaped him.

"Your nerves are badly shaken, I can see that," the doctor decided. "Fix
him up a little bromide, Gregson."

Kenwick took the glass, furious to note that it trembled in his hand.
The druggist attempted to joke him back to normal poise. "A little more
of a jolt and you'd have had to pass him up to Gifford, Doc. Gifford,
here," he went on by way of introduction, "is shipping a body north
to-night on the twelve-thirty. Bein' two of you, he might have got the
railroad to give your folks a special rate if you're goin' his way."

The patient evinced mild interest. "San Francisco?" he inquired. The
undertaker nodded.

"That's the train I hoped to make," Kenwick sighed. "But my money seems
to have been jolted out of me and----" He went carefully through his
pockets as he spoke. And then Gifford came over and stood beside him.
"If you don't mind," he began, "I'd like to know your name."

Kenwick's reply was glibly reassuring. "Kenneth Rogers."

"Oh! You that young Rogers that's been visiting for a few days at the
Paddington place, 'Utopia'?" It was the doctor who asked this question.

Kenwick nodded warily.

The physician extended his hand. "I'm Markham. Had an engagement to play
golf with you out at the country club this afternoon. Awfully sorry you
couldn't make it but I got the message all right from your sister that
you were having trouble with your car out near Hillside Inn and you
couldn't get away."

As Kenwick wrung his hand with easy cordiality there flashed before his
mental vision the picture of the wayfarer in goggles. Could a malign
fate have trapped him into taking the name of that visitor to Mont-Mer,
or any visitor, who might some day arise and challenge him? He had got
to get out of this place before the net that the gods were weaving about
him should bind him hand and foot.

"Say, listen." Gifford forced himself to the front again, speaking with
a mixture of eagerness and hesitation. "If you're goin' up to the city
to-night, I wonder if----You see, it's like this. I've got a big
masonic funeral on here for Thursday morning. It'll be a hell of a rush
for me to get back in time if I have to make this trip. But I promised a
little woman that I'd see personally to this shipment; send a
responsible party or go myself. I haven't got a soul to send, but if
you----."

Kenwick shook his head. "I won't be able to leave now until to-morrow.
I'll have to wait and get some money."

Gifford waved aside the objection. "Your expenses will be paid, of
course, as mine would have been. I'll advance you the funds. And you
don't have to _do_ a thing, you know. Wellman's man will meet the train
at the other end. Wait and see the casket in his hands and then you're
through."

He watched the other man eagerly. For a moment Kenwick didn't trust
himself to meet his gaze. He hoped that he was not betraying in his face
the jubilant conviction that his guardian angel had suddenly returned
from a vacation and had renewed an interest in him. In order not to
appear too eagerly acquiescent he asked casually: "Who is the fellow?
Or who was he?"

"Man by the name of Marstan. He wasn't known around here. His wife had
to come down from the city to identify him." He glanced at his watch.
"There's just about time to make the train now. I've got my car outside.
It's luck, your stumbling in here like this. Sheer luck."

"Luck is too mild a word for it," Kenwick assured himself as he crawled
into his Pullman a few moments later. "It's providence, old boy. That's
what it is."

The bromide had begun to do its work. And his leg, properly bandaged,
gave him no pain. Almost hilarious over the knowledge that daylight
would find him among familiar surroundings again, he fell into the
delicious slumber that follows sudden surcease of mental strain.

When he awoke the train was speeding through the oak-dotted region of
San Mateo. He had refused to accept any expense-money from Gifford
except enough for his breakfast, and after a cup of coffee in the diner,
he sat gazing out of the window, not caring to open conversation with
any of his fellow-travelers, completely absorbed in the business of
readjusting himself to this environment that he had loved and from
which the war had so abruptly uprooted him.

It was glorious to be back again, to catch up the loose threads of the
old life. And in spite of the stark bareness of winter, the landscape
had never seemed so appealing. The wide level stretches of pasture, cut
by ribbons of asphalt, the prosperous little towns which the Coast
Company's fast train ignored on its thunderous dash northward, the
children walking to school, the pruners waving their shears to him as he
sped by--all these breathed a healthy normal living that made the
neurotic adventures of the past day seem remote and unreal.

Under the long shed of the Third and Townsend Depot he lingered only
until he had carried out Gifford's instructions. Then he went on down
the open corridor to the waiting-rooms. Outside the voices of
taxi-drivers and hotel busmen made the radiant winter morning hideous
with their cries. The waiting-room was warm and bright. There was no
better place, Kenwick reflected, to map out his program. The air was a
tonic, crisp and tipped with frost. It was too cold to be without an
overcoat and yet, if Everett did not make punctual reply to the message
that he was about to send, he might have to part with it for a time.

He found a seat in a corner where he would be out of the draft of
incessantly opening doors. For in spite of his good night's sleep he
felt weak and a little giddy. Resolving to dismiss the past from his
mind and concern himself solely with the present was good logic, but
difficult of accomplishment. First, and dominating all his thought, was
Marcreta Morgan. The thought of her brought him a dull pain. So many
letters he had written her since his return to New York, and not one of
them had she ever answered. Once, in vague alarm, he had even written to
Clinton, but there had been no reply. And then pride had held him
silent. So he couldn't go to the house on Pine Street now. He wouldn't
go, he decided fiercely, until he had a decent position and had
reëstablished himself in civilian life.

Over at the news-stand a girl was fitting picture post-cards into a
rack. Kenwick walked over to her and with a part of the change left from
his meager breakfast bought a morning paper. While she picked it off the
pile he stood twirling the circular rack absently with one hand. The
Cliff House, Golden Gate Park, and prominent business blocks whirled
past his eyes, but he was not conscious of them. He took his newspaper
and turned away.

Halfway to the door he opened it and glanced at the sensational menu
spread out for his delectation upon the front page. All at once
something inside his brain seemed to crumple up. The Cliff House, Golden
Gate Park, and tall office-buildings sped around him in a circle, like a
merry-go-round gone mad. Somehow he found his way back to the corner
seat and sank into it. And there he sat like a stone man, staring at,
but no longer seeing, the front page of his newspaper.




CHAPTER VII


Two hours after Roger Kenwick had taken his gruesome departure from the
house of the iron gate, a mud-spattered car turned in at the side
entrance to the grounds which he had quitted. The man behind the wheel
drove recklessly, careening between the double row of eucalyptus-trees
like some low-flying bird of prey seeking its carrion. At the shallow
front steps he brought the car to an abrupt halt as though he had found
the thing for which he sought. Tugging at his heavy gloves he sprang up
the steps, two at a time. "Lord! What a handsome place this is!" he
muttered. "What a place for dinners and dancing--and love!"

He pressed the electric button and heard its buzz pierce the stillness
of the house. "It's a crime!" He was walking up and down before the
closed door, flapping his gloves against his chest. "It's a crime for a
man to live in a place like this alone." He pressed the button again,
keeping his finger upon it this time until he felt certain that its
persistent summons must tear at the nerves of whoever was within. But
still there was no response. Then he tried the knob, turned it, and went
inside.

The house was in complete darkness. He felt his way along the front hall
until his fingers found the switch-button. At the hat-rack he divested
himself of his heavy coat, hat, and gloves. The face which the
diamond-shaped mirror reflected was dark with disapproval and gathering
anger. "Door unlocked at one o'clock at night! Might as well leave a
child in charge of things!"

Walking with noisy, impatient tread, he ascended the stairs, taking the
left flight on the landing, and snapping on the light in the upper hall.
The doors were all closed. He turned the knob of the first one and went
in. The sitting-room was in perfect order. He crossed it and entered the
alcove beyond. It, too, was in order with fresh linen upon the bed.
Having made a tour of the suite he came back and stood beside the
center-table in the sitting-room. A half-burned cigar caught his eye,
and he drew it out of the ash-tray and turned it speculatively between
his fingers. Then, still holding it, he visited the other rooms in the
left wing. They were all orderly, silent, deserted. Somewhere in his
progress from one to another he dropped the cigar stump and did not
notice it. Moving like a man in a dream he found himself at last over in
the right wing, standing outside a heavy mahogany door. His movements
were no longer speculative. They were nervous and jerky as though
propelled by a disabled engine.

He did not at first try to open this door but called in a low uncertain
voice that seemed to dread a reply, "Marstan, are you here?" When there
was no response he tried the door in a futile sort of way as though he
were expecting resistance. When it yielded to his touch and he stood
upon the threshold the desolation of the room seemed to leap out at him.
He felt no desire to switch on the light here, but stood motionless in
the open doorway, transfixed, not by a sight but by an odor.

"Heliotrope!" he muttered at last, and brought the panel shut with a
jerk. "Some woman has been in that room!"

For long moments he stood there in the lighted upper hall. In his face
bewilderment struggled with alarm. At last he made his way downstairs to
the living-room and on to the den. Here he stared long at the half-drawn
shades and the crumpled cushions of the window-seat. Something was gone
out of that room; something that was a vivid, vital part of it. He
couldn't quite determine what it was.

Over in the dining-room he examined the bowl of English walnuts with
several empty shells mixed in among them and the nutcrackers lying askew
upon the centerpiece. All at once he dropped these with a crash that
made an ugly scar upon the polished table-top. His eyes had fallen upon
the wide board nailed across the shattered window. He went over and
investigated it carefully, his quick eyes taking in every detail of the
crude carpentry. Under his touch the sagging lower board suddenly gave
way and fell with a heavy thud to the gravel walk below.

The new-comer went back to the front hall, searched for an instant in
the pocket of his overcoat, and then, clutching a black cylindrical
object, he went out of the house and around on the dining-room side. His
hands were trembling now, and the path of light blazing from the little
electric torch made a zigzag trail across the dank flower-beds. He found
the dislodged board lying with its twisted nails sprawling upward and
dragged it off the path. As he dropped it his eyes fell upon an object
lying beneath a giant oleander bush. At last he knew what it was that he
had missed from the den. It was the Indian blanket. Mystified, he bent
down and picked it up, finding it heavy with the added weight of
dampness. The next moment he gave a startled cry, dropped the blanket
and torch, and staggered back against the wall. And the blackness of
night rushed over him like a tidal wave.

But his was the temperament which recuperates quickly from a shock.
Resourcefulness, the key-note of his character, impelled him always to
seek relief in action. Cursing the sudden weakness in his knees which
retarded haste, he strode, with the aid of the recovered torch, toward a
small frame cottage in the rear of the garage. Here he rapped sharply
upon the closed door, then pushed it open. This room, too, was empty.
Pointing the torch, like the unblinking eye of a cyclops, into every
corner of the apartment, he made certain of this. Then he drew a
solitary chair close to the door and sat down, the torch across his
knees.

More slowly now his glance traveled around the room. The blankets upon
the bed were in a disheveled heap. There were some soiled dishes upon
the table, a cup half full of cold tea, and under the small stove a pot
of sticky-looking rice. The fire had gone out. He crossed the room and
lifted the lid of the stove. Under the white ashes a few coals glowed
dully. There were no clothes in the closet. It was easily apparent to
him that the former inmate of the room had left unexpectedly but did not
intend to return.

For half an hour he sat there motionless. Then he rose, pushed back the
chair, and went out, closing the door behind him. Very deliberately he
followed the side path back to the dining-room window. This time he
retained the light, pressing one end of it firmly with his thumb. The
soggy Indian blanket he folded back, and, stooping close to the ground,
examined intently the dead cold face which it had sheltered.

It was the face of a man, young but haggard. The cheeks were sunken, and
through the skin of his clenched hands the knuckles showed white and
knotted. His hair was in wild disorder, but it seemed more the disorder
of long neglect than of violent death. The helpless shrunken figure
presented a pitiful contrast to that of the man who knelt beside it.

His was a large, well-proportioned frame that suggested, not corpulence
but physical power. His hands were powerful but not thick. His whole
bearing was self-assured, almost haughty. But it was the eyes, not the
carriage, that gave the impression of arrogance. They were the clearest
amber color with a mere dot of black pupil. Here and there tiny specks
were visible showing like dark grains of sand in a sea of brown. A woman
had once called them "tiger eyes," and he had been pleased. A child had
once described them as "freckled" eyes, and he had been annoyed. As he
knelt there now, searching the face of the dead man, his eyes, under
their drooping lids, narrowed to the merest slits. When at last he rose
and drew the blanket back over the still form, he moved with the brisk
effectiveness of one animated by definite purpose.

First, he drove the mud-spattered roadster into the garage and left it
there beside the beetle-black limousine. Then he let himself into the
deserted house again, went up to the second bedroom in the left wing,
and began sorting over some miscellaneous objects from one of the
chiffonier drawers. "Ghastly!" he muttered once. "Ghastly! I'll have to
take something to brace me up."

Back in the dining-room he took one of the long-stemmed glasses from the
sideboard and poured himself a drink from a bottle in the cupboard
underneath. But first he scrutinized its contents under the light. "Why
didn't you take it all?" he inquired sardonically of some invisible
being.

For a few hours he slept with a sort of determined tranquillity. But by
eight o'clock he was up and dressed, and a few minutes later he answered
a summons at the front door. Swinging it open he admitted a short sandy
man with the ruddy complexion of the Norsemen. "I'm Annisen, the
coroner," this visitor announced.

"Yes. I was expecting you. Come in." The other man swung the portal
wider. "Doctor Annisen, is it?"

The visitor nodded and stepped into the hall that was still dim in the
cold light of the winter morning. He unwound a black silk muffler from
about his throat. "Devilish cold," he commented. "Devilish cold for a
place that advertises summer all the year round."

His host smiled with sympathetic appreciation. "California publicity,"
he commented, "is far and away ahead of anything that we have in the
unimaginative East. My furnace-man left me yesterday and I haven't got
around to making the fires myself yet. But let me give you something to
warm you up, doctor."

While he filled one of the small glasses on the buffet, his guest eyed
him stolidly. "Still got some on hand, have you?" he said with a heavy
attempt at the amenities. "Well, this wouldn't be a bad place for
moonshining out here. Guess you could put almost anything over without
fearing a visit from the authorities."

There was a moment of silence. "You've got a beautiful place though," he
went on at last. "But Rest Hollow! What a name for it! Rest! Lord!
Anything might happen out here, and I guess most everything has. I
wasn't much surprised at the message I found waiting me when I got back
to town this morning. I've always said that this place fairly yells for
a suicide."

The other man's eyes were fixed upon his face with a curious intentness.
It was as though he were deaf and were reading the words from his
companion's lips. The coroner had raised his glass and was waiting. "No,
I don't drink," his host explained. "Very seldom touch anything. I can't
and do my kind of work."

Annisen set down his empty glass. "I shouldn't think you could do your
kind of work and not drink," he remarked. "Well, let's get this over. I
suppose you left everything just as you found it?"

There was the ghost of a smile in his host's eyes. "Glad he didn't put
that question the other way around," he was thinking. "It would have
been an embarrassment if he had asked if I found everything just as I
left it." And then aloud, "Certainly. I haven't touched anything. The
body is out here."

"Good. Gifford sent his wagon out last night, but fortunately his man
knew enough not to disturb anything until I'd been out. Were you here
when he came last night?"

"No. I didn't get here till later."

The two men crawled out through the broken window and in the gray light
of the November morning knelt together beside the still form under the
Indian blanket. Mechanically the coroner examined it and the empty
revolver which they discovered a few feet away. But he offered no
comment until he had finished. Then his verdict was curt. "Gunshot wound
in the head, self-inflicted. When did this happen?" He took out a small
book and noted down the answers to this and a variety of other
questions. Then he stood for a moment staring down at the white, drawn
face of the dead man.

"Young, too," he murmured. "But I suppose it's a merciful thing. There
was no life ahead for him, poor devil."

They followed the path around to the front of the house where Annisen's
car was waiting. "Be in to the inquest about two o'clock this
afternoon," he instructed. "That hour suit you all right, Mr.----? Don't
believe I know your name."

"Glover. Richard Glover. I'll be there at two, doctor."

Late that morning the hearse made its second trip out of the side
entrance of Rest Hollow. A mud-splashed roadster followed it. The
cortège had just passed the last gaunt eucalyptus-tree and turned out
upon the public highway when it was halted. A man in heavy-rimmed
goggles got out of his car and made his way across the road. His glance
wavered uncertainly between the driver of the hearse and the man in the
muddy roadster. He decided to address the latter.

"I heard the news last night. It got around the neighborhood. But I
thought----I didn't know----Those rumors get started sometimes with no
foundation of fact. But it's true then--that he is dead."

"That who is dead?"

The question seemed to be shot back at him. And he had the uncanny
conviction that it emanated, not from the lips, but from the amber eyes
of the man in the roadster. He stammered out his reply.

"Why--I think his name----He told me his name was Kenwick; Roger
Kenwick, I think."

The roadster started again. "Yes, that's the name. Did you know him?"

"No. But wait a minute, please." The goggle-eyed man hurried back to his
own car and returned with a handsome spray of white chrysanthemums. They
were tied with a broad white ribbon bordered with heliotrope. "I'd like
to have you take these if you will." He handed them up to the
hearse-driver.

The man in the roadster fired another question. "Your name, please?"

"They are not from me. One of the ladies in the neighborhood sent them.
She felt it was too sad--having him go away this way, all alone." He
went back to his machine and was soon lost in the distance. And the
funeral procession proceeded on its way to Mont-Mer.

The coroner's inquest was brief and perfunctory. Annisen was on the eve
of retiring from office and seeking a more lucrative position in a
Middle Western city where the inhabitants, as he contemptuously
remarked, "were not afflicted like this place is with a chronic
sleeping-sickness."

The jury returned the verdict that "the deceased came to his death by
shooting himself in the head." After they had departed, Gifford held
brief parley with the chief witness. "I suppose you'll attend to
notifying the family?"

Richard Glover nodded. And at his direction the haggard body was removed
from the cheap black coffin in which it had made the trip from Rest
Hollow. Following Richard Glover's instructions, it was embalmed for the
trip across the continent. But just as it was ready for the long
journey, he announced to Gifford that he had received orders from the
family to inter the body in the little cemetery of Mont-Mer. And so, on
the following day, it was taken to the quiet resting-place overlooking
the sea. In the presence of no one except the undertaker's assistants
and Richard Glover there was lowered into the lonely grave a handsome
gray casket with silver handles and a frosted silver plate on which was
inscribed the name "Roger Kenwick."




CHAPTER VIII


The editor of the "San Francisco Clarion" tilted his chair far back and
look quizzically at the young man sitting beside his desk. "Sure I
remember you," he remarked. "Did some Sunday work for us some time ago,
didn't you?"

"Yes, a little feature stuff when I was in college."

"And now you want to go it strong, eh? Well, we've been rather
disorganized in here since the war. There's been a constant stream of
reporters coming and going. But things are settling down a little now
and we're not taking on anybody who doesn't want to stick. Planning to
be in the city right along, are you?"

"Well, I'll be perfectly frank with you about that. I'm not. I've got to
go East as soon as I get a little money. But I'm not planning to stay
there. I'm coming back for good as soon as I've closed up my business."

"Why not close up the Eastern business first?"

"Can't. It's not ripe yet." There was a note of grimness in the young
man's voice. "I don't know just when it will be, either. But when I do
go back, I don't think it will take me long to finish it. Don't give me
a reporter's job if I don't look good to you. Put me on to some feature
stuff for a while."

"All right. Sit in, and I'll give you a line on a few things I'd like to
have hunted down."

When he left the office half an hour later, Kenwick sought the public
library. There he spent the entire afternoon and a part of the evening.
It was about nine o'clock when he entered the St. Germaine, a modest
hotel in the uptown district. The night clerk cast an inquiring glance
in search of his suit-case.

"My baggage hasn't come yet," the prospective guest explained
tranquilly. "It may be in to-morrow. If you want to know anything about
me, call Allen Boyer at the 'Clarion' office."

When he had been shown to his room on the fifth floor he lighted the
lamp on the stand near his bed and became absorbed in the contents of
one of the weekly magazines. He read until very late and then snapped
out the light, cursing himself for having abused his eyes on the eve of
taking a new position.

The next morning he was out early, eager to hunt down one of the stories
that Boyer had suggested. As he swung out into the exhilaration of the
crisp November morning on the scent of an assignment some of the old
self-assurance and buoyancy came back to him.

Half an hour after he had left the hotel, the revolving doors swung
round the circle to admit a man with prosperous leather suit-case and
"freckled" eyes. The day clerk handed him a pen and registration-slip.
He was beginning to sign, after a curt question about the rates, when
the blond cashier, perched on a stool in the wire cage adjoining the
desk, pushed a similar slip of paper toward the clerk. "Can't quite make
out that name," she confessed. "Looks like Renwich. Do you get it?"

The desk official glanced at it with the casually professional air of
one to whom all the mysteries of chirography are as an open book. "It's
Kenwick. Plain as day--Roger Kenwick."

The pen slid from the fingers of the man on the other side of the desk.
For a moment, self-possession deserted Richard Glover. He stood there
staring hard at the ugly blot which he had made across his own
signature. Then he crumpled the bit of paper, threw it into the
waste-basket, and, suit-case in hand, went out into the street.

The day clerk darted a contemptuous glance after his disappearing
figure. "Some nut," he remarked. "Told me the terms were all right and
then got cold feet. I'll bet he's a crook."

"Sure he's a crook." The blond cashier spoke with cheerful authority. "I
could have told you that when he first came in. I can size 'em up as far
off as the front door. And I had him posted on the 'Losses by Default'
page before he'd set down his bag."

The day clerk regarded her musingly. "He _had_ a bag, though, and that's
more than this Kenwick fellow showed. But Brown thought he was all right
and let him have 526. Did you notice him this morning? Tall, dark
fellow, young but with hair a little gray around the temples."

"Ye-a. High-brow. Looks like he was here for his health. Probably broke
down in some government job."

"No, he's a newspaper man."

"Let's see where he's from?" She reached for the slip.

"New York. Well, I slipped a cog. I would have said he was a Westerner."

"That's right. That last chap looked more like New York to me. But you
never can tell. And something seemed to hit him all wrong about this
place."

With this conclusion Richard Glover was in complete accord. As he walked
down Geary Street clutching his heavy bag, he was conscious with every
nerve of his being that something had struck him decidedly wrong about
the St. Germaine. "It might be just a coincidence," he reassured
himself. "It's undoubtedly just a coincidence but--but that isn't such a
very common name. My God! I begin to feel like a spy caught in his own
trap."

With scarcely more than a glance at the name above the entrance he
turned into the lobby of another hotel and signed for a room. It was
almost noon when he appeared again and wrote a letter at one of the
lobby desks. It was not a long letter, hardly more than a note, but its
composition consumed almost an hour and a half a dozen sheets of
stationery, which were successively torn to bits and thrown into the
waste-basket. And then at last the final sheet met the same fate and
Richard Glover sat tapping the desk softly with the edge of the blotter.

"No, I won't write; I'll just go," he decided. "For asking if I may come
almost invites a refusal. And then it takes longer. I'll go up there
this afternoon. The secret of getting what you want out of people is to
take them off guard."

Following this policy he set out in the late afternoon to pay a call. At
the door of the uptown address he was met by a colored maid. She offered
him neither hope nor despair but agreed to present his card.

And in front of the living-room fire Marcreta Morgan read the card and
flicked it across to her brother. "I don't think I care to see anybody
to-day," she said. "It's your first night at home, and there's so much
to talk about."

"Don't know him," Clinton decided. "Somebody you met while I was away?"

"Oh, yes, you know him, Clint. You introduced me to him yourself. Don't
you remember he came here one night before you went to Washington and
asked you to analyze some specimens of mineral water."

"Oh, _that_ fellow! Has he been hanging around here ever since?"

"Well, no. I can't say that he has hung around exactly. But of late he
has called rather often. He's really quite entertaining in some ways.
You were very much interested in his specimens."

"In his _specimens_, yes."

It may have been that she resented his implied dislike. It may have been
for some other reason. But Marcreta suddenly reversed her decision.
"Show him in, please," she ordered. And the next moment the visitor
stood in the doorway.

It was apparent as he crossed the long room that he had not expected to
meet any one save his hostess. But he responded warmly to Clinton's
handshake and drew up a chair for himself opposite Marcreta. "It's a
pleasant surprise to find you here, Mr. Morgan," he said. "I thought you
were still in the service at Washington. But it's time for every one to
be getting home now, isn't it?"

Clinton Morgan surveyed him silently. It struck him that his guest was
very much at home himself. For a time the conversation followed that
level, triangular form of talk which so effectually conceals purpose and
personality. Then Clinton excused himself on the plea that he had some
unpacking to do, and Marcreta and Richard Glover were left alone.

"It's been a long time since I've seen you, Mr. Glover," she said. "You
haven't been in the Bay region lately?"

"No, I've not been able to get away." His tone indicated that he had
chafed under this pressure of adverse circumstance. "But it's good to
get back now," he went on. "I'm always glad to get back--here."

She ignored the new ardent note in his voice. "But the southern part of
the State is beautiful," she said. "Mont-Mer, particularly, is so
beautiful that it makes the soul ache."

The words seemed to startle him. His eyes left the camouflaged log of
wood in the fireplace and fixed themselves steadily upon her. "How do
you know? How do you, San Francisco-bound, know?"

"I have just returned from there. My brother and I arrived home the same
day. I spent a week near Mont-Mer visiting my friends, the Paddingtons.
Do you know them?"

"No. But I think I know their home. They call it 'Utopia,' I believe?"

"Yes. And until I saw it I had always thought that Utopia was a myth."

"Mont-Mer," he mused, "does look rather like a fairy-story come true,
doesn't it? There's something perilously seductive about it. It's a
place where people go to forget."

"I have heard that said about it, but somehow it didn't make that kind
of an appeal to me. I had the feeling that in such a place as that every
sorrow of life is a bleeding wound. There's a terrible cruelty about
that tropical sort of beauty. It drives memories in, not out."

For some unaccountable reason the tensity of her tone annoyed him. "You
didn't like it then?"

"It's beautiful, as I have said, but--I shall never go there again."

"The place you ought to see," he told her, "is Cedargrove, about two
hours' trip to the south."

"That's where the mineral springs are?"

"Yes. And what I really came to tell you to-day is that I've bought the
controlling interest in the springs. It was after your brother had given
me his final analysis of the water last year that I decided to do it. He
said, you know, that in his opinion the medicinal ingredients equaled
that of the waters of Carlsbad. I've made great plans. You see, there
are twenty acres, and so far we've found eighteen springs. We've been
bottling the stuff for several months now and it's selling like hot
cakes. The next step is a hotel. It's not to be too colossal, but unique
in every respect. That's what takes in California. Show people that
you've got 'something different' and they'll jump to the conclusion that
because it's different it must be desirable. That's America. I've had
other chemists besides your brother tell me that the water is wonderful.
The best doctors in the South declare that those springs are a bigger
find than a gold mine."

He had warmed to his theme now and his amber eyes glowed. And she
followed his words with that quick responsiveness that was all
unconsciously one of her chief charms. "And what are your advertising
plans?" she asked.

It was like a fresh supply of gasolene to an engine. He plunged into
stupendous plans for a publicity campaign. "I'm doing most of the copy
work myself so far. I love the advertising game. I love telling people
what they want and making them want it. I'm calling it 'The Carlsbad of
America.' That will get the health-seekers, and health-seekers will pay
any price."

For half an hour he talked, going into every detail of his plan. And
then all at once he stopped abruptly as though he had grown suddenly
weary of Carlsbad. She sat gazing into the fire, waiting in sympathetic
silence, for him to resume the subject. But he didn't resume it. When he
spoke again, his tone had changed as well as his theme. For the first
time the conversation became keenly personal. He talked about himself
with a humility that was quite new and, to his listener, somewhat
startling.

"I don't think it can be a complete surprise to you," he said, "to know
how much I need you; how much I depend upon your sympathy and
understanding. You must have guessed something of my feeling. You are
too intuitive not to have guessed."

Her frank, blue-gray eyes were fixed upon him with an expression that
baffled him, yet gave him hope. "No, it is not quite unexpected," she
admitted. "But I didn't realize that it had gone quite so far. It seems
to have all happened rather suddenly. We haven't known each other very
long; not nearly long enough for anything like this."

"No. But I've been looking for you all my life. That ought to count for
something."

"For something--yes. But not for so much as--that."

"Love isn't a matter of time," he told her.

"No. But it's a matter of exploration. It's a matter of finding each
other. And in the half a dozen times that you have called here, Mr.
Glover, we haven't talked about the finding kind of things. No, we don't
know each other. We don't know each other half well enough to consider
anything like this."

"But we can get to know each other better. Is there any reason why we
should not do that?"

She pondered this for a moment. "Well, for one thing, there is
distance."

"There is no longer distance," he pleaded eagerly. "For I have severed
my connections with Mont-Mer."

"Oh!" He couldn't tell whether the exclamation emanated from pleasure or
merely surprise. "You severed your connections there because of this new
Carlsbad plan?"

"Partly because of that. But chiefly because a secretaryship to a rich
man doesn't get one anywhere."

"I suppose not."

Still he couldn't decide whether her interest now was genuine or only
courteous. But she would give him no further encouragement than to allow
him to call occasionally. And with this permission he went away well
content.

Ten minutes after he heard the front door close, Clinton, in a
dressing-gown and slippers, appeared on the threshold of his sister's
room. "Gone, at last?" he queried. "What's Glover doing up here anyway?
I thought he was securely anchored with a millionaire hermit down
South."

She spoke without turning from the dressing-table where she was shaking
her long dark hair down over an amethyst-colored negligée. "You don't
like him, do you?"

"No, I can't say that I do."

"Why not?"

Before the directness of the question he felt suddenly shamefaced, as a
man always does who condemns one of his own sex before a woman on
insufficient evidence. "Oh, he's all right, of course. I have no reason
really for disliking the fellow, except----Well, he seems to like you
too much. And he's not your style. What did he want to-night?"

"He wanted to tell me about a new scheme he has, a really wonderful
enterprise, Clint, for turning that mineral water place into a
health-resort. He's taken over most of the stock and he talked glowingly
about it."

"He does talk well; I'll admit that. But who is going to capitalize this
venture?"

His sister smiled. "Well, Clinton, I could hardly ask him that, you
know."

"No, I suppose not. And if you had, I imagine that he would hardly have
liked to answer it. Anyhow, he's cheered you up, and I ought to be
grateful to him for that. It was a mistake for you to take that trip to
Mont-Mer, Crete. It was too much for you."

She made no response to this, and her brother, noting the delicately
flushed face and languid movements, told himself reproachfully that the
mistake was in going away and leaving her to struggle alone with the
hospital venture. He sat down on a cedar chest beside the window.

"Let's retint the whole lower floor, Crete," he suggested, seizing upon
the first change of topic that offered itself. "Now that this place is
to be a home again and not a sanitarium, let's retint and get the public
institution smell out of it."

She laid down the ivory brush and turned to him. But her gaze was
abstracted, and when she spoke in a musing voice, her words showed that
she had not been listening. "Clinton, have you ever figured out just how
much of the Coalinga oil stock belongs to me?"

He had been sitting with one knee hugged between his arms. Now he
released it and brought himself upright upon the cedar chest.

"Why, no, I haven't. I don't think it makes much difference, while we're
living together, sharing everything this way."

She got up from the dressing-table and walked over to the far window,
drawing the deep lace collar of the amethyst negligée up about her ears
as though to screen herself from his view. Out on the bay the lighted
ferry-boats plied their silent passage, and on the Key Route pier an
orange-colored train crawled cautiously, like a brilliant caterpillar,
across a thread of track. Marcreta, gazing out into the clear soft dusk,
sent a question backward over her shoulder.

"Would it be very much trouble to go over our properties some time
and--make a division?"

"No, it wouldn't be much trouble, and I suppose it would be much more
businesslike." He spoke briskly but she knew that her demand had
astonished him. "You know," he admitted ruefully, "I don't pretend to be
much of a business man. I think you may be right to insist upon an
accounting."

"O Clint! I don't mean that. You know I don't mean that." Her voice held
the stricken tone of the sensitive nature stabbed by the swift
realization that it has hurt some one else. "You've been the best
brother a girl ever had. You've been too good to me. I didn't mean
_that_ at all."

"What do you mean then, Crete?"

Her answer seemed to grope its way through an underbrush of tangled
emotions. "I just thought it would be well for us each to know what we
have because--you see, we may not always be living together like this."




CHAPTER IX


A month had passed since Kenwick became a member of the staff of the
"San Francisco Clarion." The work had been going well, and the perpetual
small excitement of a newspaper office brought back some of the old
thrill that he had known in his college days. But every emotion came in
subdued form now. There was a shadow across his sky, a soft pedal
applied to every emotion. And until this was lifted he resolved to deny
himself a sight of the house on Pine Street.

But during the beginning of his fifth week in the city desire overcame
pride and caution, and late one night he walked up the familiar hill and
looked into one of the lighted windows. There was no one in the room and
the furniture and floors were covered with heavy canvas sheeting
spattered with calcimine. An ugly step-ladder stood directly in front of
the window, partly obstructing his view. He was about to turn away in
bleak despair when the glitter of some small object in a far corner of
the room caught his eye. Peering more intently under the half-drawn
shade he saw that the gleaming thing was a small tinsel ball suspended
from the lowest branch of a tiny Christmas-tree. It was almost New
Year's day now, and the little fir with its brave showing of gilt and
silver had been relegated to a distant corner to make way for the
aggressive progress of the painters. The man at the window, staring in
from the darkness at the drooping glory of the little tree, felt for it
a sudden sense of kinship. And the Christmas-tree stared back at him
with an inarticulate sort of questioning. There was to Kenwick a
terrible sort of patience in its attitude. Torn away from its normal
environment, transplanted suddenly and without warning into surroundings
giddily artificial, and bereft of the roots with which to explore them,
the little fir-tree stood there, holding in its out-stretched arms the
baubles of an unfamiliar and irrelevant existence. He turned away,
maddened by a fury that he did not comprehend. "Anything but that!" he
cried savagely. "Anything but the patience of hopelessness!"

His thoughts were in a whirl, and he was unconscious of the fact that he
was almost running down the slanting pavement. When he became aware of
it he slackened his pace abruptly. He was a fool, he told himself.
"Anybody watching me would size me up for an escaped convict--prowling
around doorsteps at night; sneaking up to windows, like a professional
burglar looking over his territory."

He let himself into his room at the St. Germaine and snapped on the
light. The first thing his eyes fell upon in the bare, prim chamber was
a letter propped against his mirror. It was a yellow envelope and it
bore the dull black insignia of the dead-letter office. There was
something ominous-looking about it. There is always something ominous
about that pale yellow, unstamped envelope that issues, unheralded and
unwanted, from the cemetery of letters. Inside of it was a communication
written upon the St. Germaine stationery and addressed in his own
handwriting to his brother, Everett Kenwick. It had been opened and
sealed again, and across one end something was written. The single word
seemed to leap out at Kenwick with the brutal unexpectedness of a bomb.
He dropped the envelope as though it had stung him and stood gazing down
at it. It stared malignantly back at him, burning a fiery path to his
brain. Up and down the room he strode muttering over and over to himself
that one horrible word: "Deceased! Deceased!"

The walls of the room seemed to be coming closer and closer. He felt as
if he were being smothered. Taking his hat he went out into the hall,
and walked down the five flights of stairs rather than encounter the
elevator-boy. On the way down he decided to send a telegram of inquiry
to the family lawyer in New York. The indelible pencil handed to him by
the girl in the little hotel booth seemed to write the message quite of
its own accord. And there was a calming sort of comfort in the
impersonal manner of the telegraph-operator herself as she counted off
mechanically the frantic words of his query.

As he turned away he was conscious of only one impulse; to be with
somebody. He must have companionship of some sort, any sort, or he would
lose his reason. From the dining-room there drifted out to him the
pleasant din of human voices. He made his way inside and followed the
head-waiter to his accustomed seat beside one of the mirror walls.

The hotel dining-room was full that evening. There was an Elks'
convention in the city and the lobby swarmed with delegates. At his
table Kenwick found three other men, and was pathetically grateful for
their comradeship. Two of them were from Sacramento. The third
introduced himself as Granville Jarvis, late of New Orleans. Kenwick
remembered having seen him several times about the hotel. He had that
quiet, magnetic sort of personality that never comes quite halfway to
meet the casual acquaintance, but that possesses a subtle, indefinable
power that lures others across the intervening territory. "I have
something for you," Granville Jarvis seemed to say. "I have something
that I'll be glad to give you--if you care to come and get it."

The other men talked volubly, including the quartet in their random
conversation. Jarvis was an appreciative listener, an unmistakable
cosmopolite, whose occasional contributions to the table-talk were
keen-edged and subtly humorous. In his speech lingered only a faint
trace of the Southern drawl. Of the three men, his was the personality
which attracted Kenwick. The two Elks finished their dessert hurriedly
and left before the coffee was served. Then Granville Jarvis, glancing
at the haggard face of the young man across the table, ventured the
first personal remark of the hour. "You've scarcely eaten a thing, and
you look all in. I don't want to intrude into your affairs, but is there
anything I can do?"

It was that unexpected kindliness that always proves too much for
overstrung nerves. "I've just had bad news," Kenwick admitted. "It's
rather shaken me up. But you can't do anything, thanks."

"Better take a walk out in the fresh air," Jarvis suggested. "I know how
you feel. It's beastly--when a man is all alone."

"I am alone; that's the damnable part of it. And I've got to somehow get
through the night."

The other man nodded with silent comprehension. "I'll take a stroll with
you if you like, and you don't have to talk."

Kenwick accepted the offer eagerly, and for an hour he and his companion
walked almost in silence. Then Kenwick, still haunted by the specter of
solitude, invited the New Orleans man up to his room. There stretched
out comfortably in two deep chairs, with an ash-tray between them, they
discussed politics, books, and New York. "It's my home town," Kenwick
explained, "but I'm a Westerner by adoption. They say, 'Once a New
Yorker, always a New Yorker,' but it hasn't worked that way with me."

Jarvis smiled. "They say that about Emporia, Kansas, too, and about all
the other towns ranging in between. It's a world-wide colloquialism.
Don't you go back to visit, though?"

"I've been thinking of it," his host replied. And then, despite the
fact that his guest was a complete stranger, perhaps because of that
fact, he felt an overwhelming desire to tell him of his trouble. For
there is a certain security in confiding a sorrow to a casual stranger.
Every care-ridden person in the world has felt the impulse, has been
impelled to it by the realization that there is safety in remoteness.
You will never see the stranger again, or if you do, he will have
forgotten you and your trouble. A transitory interest has its
advantages. It demands nothing in the way of a sequel. It keeps no watch
upon your struggle; it demands no final reckoning. You and your agony
are to the chance acquaintance a short-story, not a serial.

Jarvis was leaning back in his deep chair, one leg dangling carelessly
over the broad arm. His eye-glasses, rimmed with the thinnest thread of
tortoise-shell, gave him a certain intellectuality. Although he was
still in the early thirties there were deep lines about his mouth. He
had lived, Kenwick decided. And having lived, he must know something
about life. Jarvis glanced up suddenly and met his gaze.

"Funny thing, my being here, isn't it?" he said. "Up here in your room,
smoking your cigars, sprawling over your furniture as though I'd known
you always instead of being the merest chance acquaintance."

Mashing the gray end of his cigar into the ash-tray Kenwick made
slow-toned response. "I don't think it's curious. I don't think it's
curious at all because as I look back on my life all the vital things in
it have had casual beginnings. I have a steadily increasing respect for
the small emergencies of life. Whenever I carefully set my stage for
some dramatic event it's sure to turn out a thin affair. The best scenes
are those which are impromptu and carry their own properties."

"That's flattering to a chance acquaintance, but a hard knock at your
friends."

"I'm all for chance acquaintances," Kenwick responded. "Friends have an
uncomfortable habit of failing to show up at the moment of crisis. Just
when you're terribly in need of them, they fall sick or get absorbed in
building a new house, or go to Argentina. And then, before you have time
to grow cynical, along comes somebody that you just bow to on the
street, and he sees you are in trouble and offers a lift. The people who
really owe you something, never pay. They pass the buck to the chance
acquaintance, and nine times out of ten he makes good. Makes things
more interesting that way. After all, life isn't merely a system of
bookkeeping."

Kenwick prided himself upon the fact that he had kept the bitterness out
of his voice, but when Jarvis spoke, this illusion was shattered. "Tough
luck, Mr. Kenwick. As I said before, I don't want to horn in, but I'd be
glad to score another point for the C. A. if it would be of any help to
you, and there's nobody else about."

Kenwick put down his cigar. "To tell the truth, there's nobody about at
all. It happens that during the past year every friend I had has gone,
figuratively speaking, to Argentina. Some of them used to be
particularly good at helping me out with my yarns. I'm a fiction-writer,
you know, and I'm under contract to finish a mystery-story for one of
the magazines. I'm stuck, and it's bothering me a lot. Can't move the
thing a peg. I know that the man who talks about his own stories is as
much of a pest as the man who tells his dreams but if----"

Jarvis had settled down into his chair with a sigh of luxurious content.
"Shoot," he commanded. "It's great stuff being talked to when I'm not
expected to make any replies. What's the name of it?"

"It hasn't any name just yet, but I'll let you be godfather at the
christening. This is just a scenario of the situation, with all the
color and atmosphere left out." He reached over and snapped off the
chandelier light, leaving only the soft glow from the little brass lamp
upon the table.

"The story," he began when he had resumed his seat, "hinges upon the
fortunes of two brothers--or rather the fortunes of one and the
misfortunes of the other. The parents die when the elder of the two is
thirty and the younger almost nineteen. The older brother has married,
and at the death of his mother comes back with his wife, to live at the
old home. But the sister-in-law and younger brother are not congenial,
and the boy, who has ambitions for a professional training decides to go
away from home to a distant university. There is very little opposition
to the plan. For the sister-in-law is in favor of it, and the elder
brother (who is guardian, of course, and a splendid fellow) consents on
the condition that the boy spend his summer vacations at home. He hopes
in this way to keep in touch with him and does.

"In the spring of his senior year, America enters the war, and the boy,
now a man of twenty-three, enlists and in the autumn gets across. He
sees more than six months of action at the front without getting a
scratch. But at the end of that time his nerves go to pieces and he is
sent first to a convalescent hospital in England and then home. There he
finds the old place completely changed under his sister-in-law's régime
and he is so obviously unhappy about it that his brother suggests that
he accept the invitation of an old family friend and spend the winter
with him in his California home. He complies with this plan, the more
eagerly because it gives him an excuse to get back to the environment
which he has grown to love and the associates that he knew in his
college days.

"Without adventure he arrives at the little southern California town,
and is met at the depot by his friend's chauffeur. But on the way out to
the house they meet with an automobile accident that shakes him up
pretty badly and, so far as he can determine from circumstantial
evidence, kills the driver. Stranded alone and injured in an unfamiliar
village, he applies at the first house he comes to for aid. It chances
to be one of those palatial country homes, so plentiful in that region,
which seems to have been built for the exclusive use of caretakers. For
although it is completely and elegantly furnished and bears every
evidence of being tenanted he stays there ill for more than twenty-four
hours, absolutely alone except for the presence of a mysterious woman
who is apparently locked into one of the bedrooms upstairs, and whom he
never sees.

"On the second night he makes a surreptitious escape from this uncanny
prison, without ever having encountered its owner, and by a happy stroke
of chance, makes his way up the coast to San Francisco. Here he plans to
establish himself permanently, look up some of his old associates, and
get in touch with life again. But this scheme is thwarted in a most
unexpected manner. For on the morning of his arrival something happens
that makes chaos of his plans and starts him upon a quest, not into the
future, but into the past. In the station depot he stops long enough to
purchase a newspaper, and----"

Kenwick paused for an instant and glanced at his auditor.

"Go on," Jarvis commanded with that impatient curtness that is the best
assurance of interest.

"He buys a newspaper," the narrator went on. "And from the date on it he
learns that instead of having lost connection with the world for two
days, he has been out of it for almost a year. There are ten months of
his life that he can't account for at all.

"At the library he reads up and discovers that the war is over. From the
newspapers and magazines he picks up the thread of world events and
orients himself with regard to national and local affairs. But to
connect his own past and present proves, as you may suspect, an almost
hopeless task. He sends several telegrams to his own home, all of which
are ignored. A letter to his brother brings, after long delay, the
startling information that he is dead. The message bowls him over
completely. And the more the thing preys upon his mind the more certain
he is that there has been foul play. He begins to be haunted by the
conviction that he is being watched. The only safe course open to him
seems to be to lead as normal and inconspicuous an existence as possible
until he can hear from the family lawyer."

Kenwick broke off suddenly and reached for the ash-tray. "Well," he
said, "what do you think of it?"

Jarvis stirred in his chair. When he spoke he appeared to be returning
rather breathlessly from a long distance. "Great stuff," he commented.
"It seems to have all the ingredients for a best-seller, except one."

"What's that?"

"Well, I don't pose as a critic of literature. But judging from the
novels I've read I should say that the thing it lacks is romance. The
poor devil ought to be in love with somebody, or somebody ought to be in
love with him."

Kenwick's face stiffened. It was apparent that he had not expected this
criticism. And he found himself envying those people who can discuss
their love affairs. But not to his best friend could he have mentioned
Marcreta Morgan's name. "I told you I was just giving you a scenario of
this thing," he reminded his critic. "I'll work up that part of it
later. As a matter of fact there is a woman in it. He proposed to her
before he went into the service and she rejected him."

"And he didn't look her up afterward?"

"Well, he could hardly do that, not until he had accounted for himself.
And especially as she had shown no interest in him whatever while he was
away."

"You never can tell about a woman, though. The fact that he had come
back a pariah and was in trouble might arouse her love."

"No, not her love; her pity perhaps."

"Well, I won't argue with an author. They are supposed to be authorities
on such questions. Go on with the thing. Where _had_ the chap been
during those ten months?"

"I haven't the least idea."

Jarvis brought himself upright. "Why, you outrageous devil!" he cried.
"Getting me all worked up over a story that you can't see the end of
yourself! And how about the family estate? What became of that?"

"I haven't finished plotting the thing yet. That's why I told it to you.
If I had solved all its problems it wouldn't have been necessary to
inflict it upon you."

His guest rose and stretched himself. "Well, I'm afraid I wasn't much
help," he said ruefully. "Fact is, I haven't any creative imagination at
all. I'm the kind of reader that writers of detective yarns love. I'll
swallow anything that's got a little salt on it, and I never guess right
about the ending."

He fumbled in an inside pocket of his coat and drew out a card. "I'd
like to have you return this call some time, Mr. Kenwick. I'm not far
away from you, just two blocks around the corner in the Hartshire
Building. If you care anything for photography, drop around some time
and I'll show you some interesting pictures. They are a harmless hobby
of mine. I fuss around in a laboratory over there most of the time, and
when I'm not there I'm in the dark room."

Kenwick promised to come, and a moment later Granville Jarvis was gone.
Bereft of his sympathetic presence the room seemed overpowering in its
gaunt emptiness. The last two hours of genial companionship were swept
aside as ruthlessly as though they had never been, and Kenwick found
himself back again at that ghastly moment when he had torn open the
yellow envelope. For he was to learn, in the crucial school of
experience, that the sorrow of bereavement is not a permanently
engulfing flood, but that it comes in waves, ebbing away under the
pressure of objective living only to gather volume for a renewed attack.
And in the moment that its victim recovers a staggering strength, it is
upon him again, sweeping aside in one crashing moment the pitiful
defenses of philosophy and faith which the soul has constructed to save
itself from shipwreck.

Until after midnight Kenwick sat at the window waiting for a summons
from the telephone. Then he went to bed and fell into a listening sort
of sleep. But not during that night nor in the days that followed was
there any response to his telegram.




CHAPTER X


It was on the morning after his conversation with Jarvis that Boyer, of
the "Clarion," summoned Kenwick into his office. "Got a story here that
I'd like to have you hunt down," he said, and pushed a clipping across
the table. Kenwick read it with an interest that was painfully forced.
It was cut from one of the local evening papers and was a rather
colorless account of the spectacular achievements of one of the city's
trance mediums. He noted down the address and rose with a hint of
weariness.

"The thing that makes her different from the others and worth a trip out
there," his employer explained, "is that Professor Drew of the
psychology department over at the university has set himself the task of
showing her up. She has done some rather dramatic things that have got
on his nerves and the other day he gave a lecture on her methods before
his abnormal psychology class and had the place packed. She has just
written a book too; bizarre sort of thing called the 'Rent Veil' or the
'Torn Scarf' or something like that. It ran in the 'Record' about two
months ago and they made a big hit with it."

He leaned back in his chair and surveyed Kenwick speculatively. "What do
you make of it?" he asked. "This stupendous revival of interest in the
supernatural? Some of our greatest writers devoting themselves to
spirit-writing; some of our best citizens declaring that they get
comfort and inspiration out of the ouija-board and planchette?"

"I think," Kenwick answered slowly, "that it is one of the inevitable
results of the war. It has caused a big upheaval in the spiritual as
well as the economic world. And one of the things that it has brought to
the surface is death. Of course death has always been with us but unless
it came right into our own lives we have persistently ignored it, as we
have ignored the industrial problems and immigration and a lot of other
things. But during the last few years death has been rampant. Everybody
has had to look at it from a greater or less distance. For awhile we'll
have to go on looking at it. And human nature is so constituted that it
has only two alternatives. It must either ignore things or try to
account for them. I don't think this renaissance of the supernatural is
anything unusual. Every great war must have been followed by a frenzied
season of accounting for death."

The other man glanced at him with eyes in which there was no longer
impersonal speculation. "You've been touched by it too, Kenwick?" he
ventured.

"Yes. My brother."

"I'm sorry." He stretched out a hand. "Well, to get back to this Madame
Rosalie; get an interview with her and also with Drew. We'll give 'em
each a column on Sunday. We might be able to start a controversy that
would be worth while."

And so, half an hour later, Kenwick was ringing the door-bell at a
shabby old house on Fillmore Street. As he stood there waiting he was
convinced that his only motive for the errand was a journalistic
interest. But if there is any season of life when the sane well-balanced
man or woman may be tempted into the region of the occult it is during
that interval between the shock of bereavement and readjustment to an
altered order of existence when the soul quivers upon the brink of two
worlds. The lapse of time between shock and readjustment varies with
every temperament, but in that period of helpless groping we all stand
close to the psychic, the unexplainable, the supernatural.

If Kenwick had expected to find Madame Rosalie's domain extraordinary in
any particular, he was distinctly disappointed. It was one of those ugly
old frame houses with protruding bay-windows which still weather
competition with the concrete and stucco residences in every part of the
city. In the front basement window was the hideous sign of a
dry-cleaning establishment, and in the neighboring flat the windows were
placarded with the promise to supply "Costumes for All Occasions."

In response to his summons a petite dark woman in a loose-flowing garnet
robe opened the door and voiced the professional query, "You have an
appointment?"

When the visitor had admitted that his call was impromptu, she
considered for a moment. "I have a client just now," she explained, "and
you may not want to wait until his sitting is over."

"I'll wait," Kenwick assured her. "How long does it take?" It was
instantly apparent from Madame Rosalie's expression that this query was
a violation of professional etiquette. As well inquire of a doctor how
long it will take to perform a major operation.

Ignoring his query the medium opened the door wider and ushered her
caller into the front room. It was a dim commonplace apartment furnished
with flowered cretonne-covered chairs, a defiant-looking piano, and
gilt-framed pictures. "You will find some magazines here," she promised.
"Just make yourself at home, please."

It would be a difficult achievement, the reporter decided, as he settled
himself in one of the rigid-looking chairs. And Madame Rosalie's tone,
though courteous, had not been eager or placating. It was apparent that
she had plenty of business. Her manner of greeting had been more like
that of an experienced and self-possessed hostess taken unawares by a
guest, than of an exponent of the supernatural. She was obviously an
educated woman. Her voice alone betrayed that fact, and she moved with a
grace that seemed somehow incongruous in those sordid surroundings. As
he sat beside the bow-windows, gazing out into the fog, Kenwick smiled
grimly. "I don't know Drew yet," he murmured, "but whoever he is, I'll
bet she can give him a run for his money."

Within twenty minutes he heard low voices at the far end of the hall,
and then the sound of approaching footsteps. He rose and went to the
door. Madame Rosalie and her client were emerging from a shadowy chamber
whose door was draped with maroon-colored portières. The caller had
reached the hat-rack and was jerking himself into his overcoat when all
at once he stopped with words of astonished greeting. "Why, hello,
Kenwick!" He strode forward with extended hand. And Kenwick gripped it
with an equal astonishment. It was one of the men whom he had known well
at college. "Going it strong now that you are back in civilization
again?" On his face was genuine pleasure and the shamefaced expression
that it would have worn if the newspaper reporter had suddenly
encountered him tobogganing down one of San Francisco's hills on a
child's coaster.

When he was gone the reporter followed his hostess into the room with
the maroon-colored curtains. It was as shabby as the waiting-room but
more comfortable and somehow expressive of a strong personality. Over a
felt-covered table, strewn with cards and stubs of pencils and other
aids to occult communication, was an electric bulb held in place by a
loop of white cotton string. Madame Rosalie motioned him to a seat
beside this table and sank into a deep chair on the opposite side.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Madame Rosalie's eyes rested upon
her client with a scrutiny that was not inquisitive but almost
uncomfortably searching. They were dark eyes and brilliant with the
unnatural shining that is often caused by chronic insomnia. At first
glance he had thought that her hair was confined under a net; now at
close range he saw that it was cut short and waved alluringly over the
lobes of her ears. She had been a beautiful woman once, he reflected,
but life had given her brutal treatment.

He picked up a crystal sphere that was lying upon the table. "Tell me
what you see for me in that?" he commanded.

She turned it slowly under the light. Kenwick watching her, felt a
little cheated by the unspectacular quality of her technic. For all the
thrill which she seemed likely to give him, he might as well be opening
an interview with the census-taker.

"You came," the medium said at last, still gazing into the depths of the
crystal, "to consult me, not about the future but the past."

He made no response.

"You are in trouble," she went on in the same unhurried voice. "You are
in great trouble--but you are not taking the right way out."

"What is the right way out?"

"You must have help."

An expression of annoyance crossed his face. She would follow up that
statement, of course, with the suggestion that he enlist for a prolonged
course of "readings." He was preparing a curt dismissal of this plan
when suddenly she set the crystal down upon the table and looked at him
with compassionate eyes. "You must have help," she repeated. "But it
must be the help of some one who is dear to you--or _was_ dear to you."

"Can you evoke such a spirit?"

"I don't know. I never can promise, but I'll try."

She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. The man, looking at
her from across the table, was startled at the change in her face. For
hers was that type of face which is dominated by the eyes. Without their
too brilliant light it suffered a complete loss of personality. Words
came at last through her slightly parted lips. "There is some one who
wishes to speak to you. I think it is a woman."

"A woman!" Kenwick was not conscious that his tone held a note of
disappointment. "Who is she?"

"I can't quite get the name. It's a difficult control. But she wants
very much to talk to you. She says----It will be hard to forgive at
first, but you must come back."

"Back where?"

The voice went on, unheeding. "She says----that she was influenced by
some one else--some one stronger. You must look for that man. You must
never stop looking for him----in crowds and everywhere you go you must
look. And when you see his face you will know at once that he is the
one, the only one who can help you. He is your missing link."

There was a long pause. "Anything else?" Kenwick inquired at last. His
voice was guarded but he was strangely moved.

"There is some one calling to you. He seems to be in a prison and he is
looking out through iron bars. They might be the bars of a gate. I can't
see the face, but some one is calling your name."

"Shall I answer the call?"

"No. There would be no use. It is too late now."

Her eyes opened suddenly and met Kenwick's fixed upon them intent but
inscrutable. He stretched his hand across the table.

"Read my palm."

She held it only a moment but her eyes seemed to take in its every line
at a glance. "There is a perpetual conflict raging in your soul," she
said.

He smiled. "That's true of most people, isn't it?"

Madame Rosalie had a superb disregard for irrelevancies. "Part of you is
eager to plunge gallantly into the tasks of the present, but the other
part is holding you back. You have the drooping head-line with the
introspective fingers. It's a bad sign on the hand of the creative
temperament. And you are some kind of a creative artist; painter,
musician, or writer. But your head-line didn't always droop. It's a
recent tendency, so you have a good chance to overcome it."

"How can I overcome it?"

"In the first place, give up all idea of trying to reconcile yourself
with the past. You can't possibly do it and the effort may--wreck you."

He got to his feet and stood looking down at her. "There doesn't seem to
be much ahead for me, does there?" he said.

"There is everything ahead; all the tragedy is behind you." She was
still looking at him compassionately. "You are too young," she said at
last.

"Too young for what?"

"To have lost so much out of your life." Her voice was like red coals
leaping into sudden flame. It startled Kenwick. "And you are choosing
just the wrong way to wrestle with such a loss. You had originally a
splendid initiative, an impatient desire for action. But the artistic
side of your nature has assumed control of you. And the artistic
temperament is long on endurance and short on combativeness. If you
spent one-third of the time fighting this specter in your past that you
spend trying to reconcile yourself to it, you would win gloriously."

For a few moments they stood beside the table talking of commonplaces.
Once Kenwick mentioned Professor Drew, and Madame Rosalie smiled.

"I'm not afraid of him," she said. "And neither do I care to enter into
a public debate with him."

She followed her client to the door. "I'm sorry I wasn't able to help
you more. But you are not ready for my help yet."

Kenwick walked back to the "Clarion" office with these words ringing in
his ears. The messages from the other world may have been guess-work,
but at least she was a shrewd reader of character. And contrary to all
his expectations she had not made any effort to win him for a permanent
client.

His Sunday story, featuring her and Professor Drew, was all that Boyer
had hoped for it. The astrologist was sketched with a few vivid strokes,
the room with the maroon-colored curtains more in detail, and an
interview reported which thrilled the souls of the credulous and held
even the attention of the skeptical. There was neither ridicule nor
championship in the story, and the caustic comments of Professor Drew
were bare of journalistic comment. Altogether, the thing worked up well
and made a hit. After reading it during his late breakfast at the St.
Germaine, Kenwick suddenly decided to go around to the Hartshire
Building and keep his promise to Jarvis. He found the photographer
enveloped in a long black apron and rubber gloves. "Good boy!" he cried
slapping his visitor on the back. "I've been thinking about you and that
cursed story you told me: can't get the blame thing out of my head. That
was good stuff about the clairvoyant in the 'Clarion' this morning.
Where on earth do you dig up those oddities? I recognized your
pen-name."

He hung Kenwick's coat in a shallow closet as he talked. "You are in the
nick of time to help me with an experiment if you will," he went on. "I
want to do some research work on the human eye and I've got to have a
subject. I've got a lot of cards here--featuring optical illusions and
that sort of thing. Do you mind helping me for, say, half an hour? You
see, the human eye and brain are the ideal apparatus for perfecting the
camera and I'm working on an invention."

Kenwick complied with alacrity, glad of the opportunity to get his mind
off of himself. For almost an hour Jarvis worked under the black hood of
the tripod while Kenwick reported on the images printed upon the cards.
When the tests were finished and he rose to go, the photographer pushed
aside his paraphernalia and wiped his forehead. "Hot as Hades under that
thing!" he cried. "Say, I was wondering the other day if you play golf."

"I used to go out and play with my brother at his club," Kenwick
replied. "But it's been some time ago; I'd be a duffer at it now."

"Well, I've got a card that will let us into the club over in
Claremont," Jarvis explained. "If you haven't got anything better to do,
what do you say that we meet at the ferry building about two o'clock
this afternoon and play a few holes over on the course? It's a great day
to be outside. Can you make it?"

"Yes, I think so." For a moment Kenwick stood looking at his host with
an expression that puzzled Jarvis. Then abruptly he turned and went
away. Up the steep California street hills he strode, scarcely conscious
of the effort it cost. For a horrible dread was tearing at his heart. It
was not a new sensation to him, and its very familiarity made it the
more hideous; that persistent dread known only to those who are
struggling back over the hard road of mental prostration. The seed of it
had sprouted on the morning when he had bought that fatal newspaper at
the Third and Townsend Depot. And during the weeks that followed its
tendrils had wrapped a strangle-hold about his life. Sometimes it almost
stopped his breathing. And as yet he had never seen the thing that he
dreaded. It was not yet upon any one's face. But he assured himself
desperately that some day he would see it. Some day, when perhaps he
wasn't thinking about it at all, it would suddenly leap out at him. In
the eyes of some man or woman, or perhaps even some little child, he
would see suspicion or fear or morbid curiosity. Without being told,
they would know suddenly that here was a man who had once lost his
mental grip. They would be afraid that he might suddenly lose it again,
and that shuddering fear would send him reeling backward into the land
of shadows and specters.

He stumbled on blindly, and through the blackness of his anguish there
came to him again the curious sensation that he had experienced on his
second night at Mont-Mer; the sensation of having lost some material
prop that could restore his courage.

The genial suggestion of Jarvis that they play golf together over in
Claremont was like a cool hand laid upon his forehead. To Jarvis he must
seem sane and normal, capable at least of acquitting himself creditably
in the sport of sane and normal men. He ate a hasty and solitary lunch
and at two o'clock met the photographer in front of the flower-booth in
the ferry building for an afternoon at the country club.




CHAPTER XI


It was Sunday afternoon, and Marcreta was expecting a caller. "How long
do you think he'll stay?" Clinton demanded as they rose from their two
o'clock dinner.

"As long as I'll let him, I suppose."

"Well, call a time-limit, Crete." And then recalled suddenly to the
realization that he must begin making the best of a situation that gave
every evidence of forcing itself upon him for life, he added hastily,
"What's the use of trying that new cure if you're going to pull against
it all the time?"

"Do you call this 'pulling against it'?"

"I do, decidedly. Every time that man comes here you're strung about an
octave higher than normal."

She looked at him, astonished. "Why, Clinton, I don't feel it myself.
I'm not conscious that he affects me that way."

"He does, though. We all know people who affect us that way. And it is
not a question of attraction or aversion. Liking or disliking them
doesn't alter the fact that they have the power to screw us up.
Sometimes, of course, it's a beneficial stimulant, but you shouldn't be
taking anything like that just now. Give Dr. Reynolds a chance."

"I will give him a chance. But to-day----Well, I promised Mr. Glover
that I'd listen to something that he has written."

"Help! Then he'll probably be here to supper. I didn't know he'd broken
into the writing game."

"I didn't either until the other day. But I think it is some advertising
for the new springs. He is very versatile. He does a number of things
and does them well."

Her brother glanced at her sharply without replying. That note of
championship in her voice put an edge on his nerves.

But she was mistaken in her guess concerning advertising matter for the
American Carlsbad. For when she and Richard Glover were alone in the
living-room he produced a copy of one of the popular magazines. "You
remember you said I might read you something to-day?" he began, drawing
his chair into a better light.

"Yes. I have been looking forward to it with pleasure. But I thought it
would be in manuscript. It is something you have had published?"

"My first attempt at anything in this line. It's a serial story and this
is the initial instalment. You see, I had a good deal of leisure time on
my hands when I was down at Mont-Mer and I've always wanted to try my
luck with a pen. I call this 'A Brother of Bluebeard.'"

"That's a gruesome title, but excellently chosen if it's a
mystery-story. I'm shivering already."

He settled himself with his back to the light and his profile toward
her. "I may as well tell you at first that I am not bringing this out
under my own name."

"Why not?"

"Because I wouldn't have felt quite free about writing it if I were
standing out in the open."

"Oh, it's a true story?"

"No, I can hardly claim that for it. It's rather a fantastic plot as you
will see. But every writer knows this, that when you first break into
print whatever you write is supposed to be transcribed almost verbatim
from actual experience, preferably your own experience. No matter how at
variance with your own life-plot the story may be, the people who know
you will leap to the conclusion that it is rooted in autobiography.
Imagination is the very last thing that our friends are willing to allow
us."

"What nom-de-plume do you use?"

"Ralph Regan. It's short and snappy and sounds as if it might be
genuine, don't you think?"

He found the place and began to read in a resonant, well-modulated
voice. The opening paragraph was a little stilted, a bit amateurish, but
after that the story swung into bold and breathless action. It gripped
its hearer with a compelling force that held her tense and motionless in
her chair. Only the sound of the reader's voice and the crisp crackle of
paper when he turned a page broke the quiet of the room. Outside, a gray
January mist engulfed the city, and electric bulbs from the houses
across the street cut bleary patches in the mantle of fog. For almost an
hour Richard Glover read in his clear, unhurried voice, and Marcreta
listened, her wide eyes fastened upon his face.

When he had finished, with the irritating promise, "To Be Continued," he
laid the periodical face-down upon the library-table and turned toward
her. In his amber eyes was a new light. A railroad switchman who faces
the company's president after saving a train from destruction might wear
just that expression.

Marcreta seemed bereft of speech. She was staring at one of the lights
in the house across the street as though it had hypnotized her. One of
the delicate white hands was clasped tight upon the arm of her chair.
Richard Glover told himself that he had never seen her look so
beautiful. And for the first time since he had known her, there was not
a suggestion of invalidism in her tall, regal figure. She was wearing a
filmy gray dress with a touch of pink that seemed to give a heightened
flush to her cheeks. He allowed several seconds to pass. Was it
possible, he was wondering, that this "first story" had won that tribute
most coveted by all authors--the tribute of breathless silence?

"Well?" he ventured at last. "What do you think of it?"

She brought her eyes back to the room, to the magazine lying face-down
upon the table, but not to him. "I think," she said with a long sigh,
"that you are a wonderfully clever man."

The light flickered out of his eyes. He leaned toward her with a
pleading gesture. "Is that all you are going to say to me?"

"Isn't that enough? Wouldn't you rather have me say that than anything
else?"

"You know I wouldn't. You know that there are many other things that I
would far rather have you say." He came over and stood beside her chair.
"Marcreta," he begged, "say just one of them. Say this--that you are
glad to have me come here. I wrote that story for you; because I know
that you value creative power more than anything else in the world. Are
you glad that I did it? Are you glad that I brought it to you?"

She was looking at him now, all her ardent soul in her eyes. "I _am_
glad," she breathed. "I can't tell you how glad."

"Then I think you ought to give me some reward. I ought to have at
least----"

She put out her hand with the imperious little gesture that he had come
to know well. "Not just now. Please, not just now. You see, you have
rather--swept me off my feet. Isn't that enough for one day?"

"It is enough," he assured her exultantly. And when, a few moments
later, he climbed into the roadster that was waiting at the curb, he was
repeating the three words over and over to himself like a hilarious
refrain.

Just at dusk Clinton came home and found his sister still sitting in
front of the gas logs where Richard Glover had left her. His step
startled her out of a reverie. "Oh, it's you, Clint! I'm so glad you've
come. The house has been full of ghosts."

"I suppose so. Glover come?"

"Yes. He has come and gone."

He reached down swiftly and felt one of her hands. It was icy.
"Something has happened, Crete." The words were not a question, but they
demanded a reply. And she gave it without hesitation.

"Yes, something has happened. I've got to take some action about it too,
but I haven't decided yet what it shall be."

He stood on the hearth-rug looking down at her with a curious mixture of
annoyance and admiration in his eyes. It had always been so, he
reflected. About the trivial things of life she was willing to abide by
his judgment, but in every vital issue she took the initiative and
pushed her own convictions through. In the moment of large emergency she
had always stood superbly alone. As he looked at her a half-audible sigh
escaped him. After all, this semblance of vitality was but the ephemeral
stimulation of excitement. And he dreaded the bleak reaction from it;
that sudden ebbing away of hope, known to all of those who have kept
long vigils beside sick beds.

"Let me manage it, whatever it is," he commanded. "I've told you before
that you're not strong enough for these emotional scenes. It isn't as if
you were a well woman."

She lapsed into silence, and he felt a sharp twinge of self-reproach. It
was that double-edged remorse that chivalrous strength always feels when
it reminds frailty of its weakness.

"Whatever it is, Crete," he hurried on, "can't you defer the action
until a more propitious time? Can't it wait until you are stronger?"

A little choking sound came from her. He stopped short in swift alarm.
Never before in all the long years of her semi-invalidism had she let
him see her give way to tears. He went to her, moving uncertainly as
though through unfamiliar territory. She had covered her face with her
hands as though she could shut out with them the sounds of passionate
sobbing.

"I'll never be any stronger, Clint. _You_ know it; _I_ know it. Why do
we drag on with this miserable pretense? Oh, it is killing me, but it
takes so long. Why can't I die?"

He recoiled before that cry, before the havoc that it revealed to him.
Inwardly he cursed himself and then he remembered Glover, as he might
have remembered a gun which he had accidentally discharged, believing it
to be unloaded. He couldn't endure the thought that _he_ had hurt her
and, manlike, seized upon the first scapegoat that offered itself. But
he carefully refrained from a mention of the late caller. And when he
spoke his voice was harsh with feeling. "Crete, how selfish of you. If
you should die, what would become of me?"

The promptness of her reply struck him like a blow. "You'd marry. You're
over thirty, Clint, and if it hadn't been for me you would have been
married years ago and would be living a normal life in a home of your
own. You think----" She was sitting upright now, facing him with a
terrible courage. "You think I don't realize what you have sacrificed.
Oh, if you only knew how I've lain awake at night, staring into the
dark, praying to die so that I could set you free. You promised mother.
I've always known that you did. But even if you hadn't, you would have
promised yourself. And _that's_ what has 'keyed me up,' as you express
it. That's what is making me live an octave higher than I can stand. It
isn't--any other man who is doing it. It's you."

He sat down on the broad arm of her chair as though overcome by sudden
weakness. "Well, thank God you have told me this, Crete, before it eats
any deeper into your soul. Sacrifice you call it. But sacrifice involves
renunciation, and I have never renounced any woman for your sake. I have
never been engaged--nor wanted to be."

"But you ought to," she told him violently. "You ought to, and you would
if you hadn't unconsciously put the idea away from you so many times.
You ought to have a home and wife and children. Oh, I know that you
should, and the knowledge has made me desperate."

A dawning suspicion showed in his eyes and then they grew hard. "It must
have," he said coldly. "It must have made you very desperate indeed--if
you have been considering Glover as a way out."

She met the charge without resentment. "What other way is there for me?
You see, there wouldn't be any danger of my--caring more for somebody
else afterward. That is quite beyond the range of possibility now, so it
would be safer for me than for some women. And physical disability, the
thing that made me--that would have made me refuse a man of a different
type, wouldn't count at all with him. His ambitions are purely material,
and I could capitalize them. That's all he wants. It would really be
quite a fair bargain."

Clinton Morgan rose slowly and stood looking down at his sister as
though she were a stranger to whom he had just been introduced. "Well,
by Gad!" he breathed, and for a moment was bereft of further speech. And
then his words came slowly, and more as the detached fragments of a
soliloquy than a response to her own.

"Crete, of all women in the world! You, with your temperament! With an
idealism that I and most other men couldn't touch with a ten-foot
pole--and yet you'd work out a proposition like that! I didn't know that
you saw through Glover. I made that excuse for you, that you were too
unsophisticated to see through him. But sizing him up for an adventurer,
you frame up a contract that----Why, I'll be hanged if I can believe
it, Crete. I simply can't believe it."

She made no defense, and he went on in the same dazed tone.

"Go out on the street and pick up the first girl you meet and bring her
in here. If I should make love to her and try to get her to marry me,
and succeed, I'd have a much better chance of happiness than this
adventure would ever give you. For, at least, I'd be swimming with both
hands free. Now listen." He seemed to become suddenly aware of her
presence again. "When I fall in love, I'll begin to think about getting
married. But I'm not going to be hurried into it by you or anybody else.
And when I decide to marry, not you nor anybody else shall stand in my
way."

She reached for him with a convulsive gesture. "Clinton, do you mean
that? Do you mean that nobody should?"

"I pledge you my word. But this has got to be a bargain. You have
demonstrated that you know how to make one. Now don't you ever let that
man cross this threshold again."

"I've got to, Clint. After what happened this afternoon, I've got to let
him come--for a while."

"Why?"

"Sit down and let me tell you about it. I'll have to tell you, or it
will eat up my heart. But the thing will seem incredible."

"Not to me. I think after what I've just heard that I can believe
anything."

"Well, you remember that I told you he had promised to read me
something that he had written?"

"Yes, advertising matter for the new Carlsbad."

"I thought it was going to be that but I was mistaken. It _was_
advertising matter, but not for Carlsbad."

"For what, then?"

"For Richard Glover."

Clinton grunted. "I see. He is trying to win you by doing the _Othello_
stunt on paper."

Marcreta appeared to weigh the suggestion. "I don't think it is entirely
that. He wants money very badly. He has to have money, a lot of it, for
this hotel venture, and he is trying every means of getting it."

"I've always been led to believe," Clinton interposed, "my friends who
write have always led me to believe that story-writing (and I assume
that this was some sort of story) is rather an uncertain means of
capitalization for a novice."

"But this story was not written by a novice, Clint." Marcreta's voice
had sunk suddenly almost to a whisper. "It was written by----"

"By whom?"

"Roger Kenwick."

Clinton Morgan stiffened in his chair. "_What?_" he cried. "You mean to
say that he had the nerve to steal the thing and bring it out under his
own name?"

"He is too clever to bring it out under his own name. He chose a
fictitious name, and he changed the opening paragraph. But except for
that and the alteration of the title, I pledge you my word, Clint, that
that story is exactly as Roger Kenwick read it to me, before he went
into the service."

There was a moment of silence. Clinton was recalling what she had said
when he came in about ghosts. He scanned her face uneasily. And he saw
in it the new expression which had startled Richard Glover. For the
first time in his life he began to think of her as she might be if she
were unhampered by physical infirmity. And then he fell to wondering
what had passed between her and Kenwick; just how far the tragedy of his
life had affected her. The Morgan reserve had kept her completely silent
upon this subject and he had never had any wish to intrude himself into
her confidence. He picked up the thread of the story where she had
dropped it. "How could it have happened? And how did he dare?"

"I can't even make a guess at how it happened, but so far as daring
goes----Well, as I said, he is desperate for money. And the thing, as
looked at from his point of view, was not so very risky. Why should it
be? He must have discovered in some way that the--the author was not a
possible source of trouble. And who else could care about it? Never in
his wildest dreams would any one conjure up the possibility that I might
know. He doesn't have the least idea, of course, that I ever knew the
real author. What a nemesis! That he should have chosen me, of all the
people in the world, for his audience! It's so impossible that he will
never suspect it."

"But what happened after he had finished? What did you do?"

"Nothing, except to compliment him on his cleverness and try to hide
every emotion that I've ever had. It was hard; I think it's the hardest
test I've ever had to meet. But it has given me something that I never
have had before." Her voice grew husky with sudden embarrassment. "O
Clint, you were right about him. I've known for quite a long time that
you were right about him, but I couldn't admit it to myself; not with
the course that I had decided to take. But, Clint, although I knew he
was calculating and sordid and insincere, I didn't know this about him.
I didn't think he hadn't a sense of honor. If I had suspected that, it
would have made everything different. But you can see," she went on
eagerly, "you can see now why I must let him go on coming here for a
while? Why I can't let him get beyond my sight?"

Her brother nodded. "Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself, that's
the idea, isn't it?"

"I've got to be very careful, you see. He has told me a good many things
about himself of late, and I'm trying to fit them all together. Some of
them don't match at all. And now that he has revealed himself, I'm
beginning to doubt everything. That Mont-Mer secretaryship, for
instance, looks very improbable to me now. I've questioned him about
several prominent people down there, and he doesn't seem to have heard
of any of them."

"Well, don't worry any more about it just now, Crete. Let's hustle
something to eat and call it a day."

When his sister had gone to bed that night Clinton sat for a long time
in the library, staring into the fireplace. The little scene which had
been enacted there a few hours earlier had stirred him to the depths of
his being. It brought him perplexity and a poignant self-reproach. The
fact that she was not the crying type of woman made her emotional
abandon a particularly haunting thing.

"I've been an awful ass," he muttered. "I can't see just now where it is
exactly that I failed. But it's evident that somewhere along the line
I've acted like one of the early Christian martyrs."

He picked up a little volume that was lying at his elbow. It was a
dainty thing bound in gold and ivory. He remembered that Roger Kenwick
had given it to his sister on that last night when he had come to bid
her good-by. He had never looked into it before. Now he turned the pages
idly. It was modern verse, and he read intermittently here and there.
Among the leaves he came at last upon a folded bit of paper. It was in
Marcreta's handwriting; evidently something that she had copied. He
tilted it under the light and read the trio of stanzas.

    I cannot drive thee from my memory;
      I cannot live and tear thee from my heart.
    Is there no corner of oblivion's realm
      Whence thy uneasy spirit may depart?

    If love were dead, if love could only die,
      And leave me desolation and despair;
    The emptiness of day, the aching night,
      All these at last my soul could learn to bear.

    But ever when I think thy fire is spent
      And seek the peace of death's all-sacred pain,
    Behold, comes Memory with her torch a-light--
      And all my altar flames to life again.

Clinton Morgan folded the bit of paper with reverent fingers. For he
knew, all at once, that this was not a copy of anything, but that he had
unwittingly torn aside the veil of his sister's secret soul. He felt all
of the honorable man's repugnance against outraged decency. The scrap of
paper seemed to scorch his fingers. With a punctilious regard for
detail, which he knew to be absurd, he tried to find the exact page
where it had been concealed. Then he put the volume back upon the table
and went over to the window. His conjectures concerning this romance had
come to an end. Now he knew, and knowing felt suddenly weighted with
guilt.

He could imagine now how she must have felt as she had sat, a few hours
before, listening to the paragraphs of Kenwick's masterpiece as they
fell from the glib tongue of Richard Glover. There was an expression
almost of awe upon his face. She could write all that, feel all that
for one man, and then deliberately plan to marry another, to set _him_
free! The thing seemed preposterous, and yet he knew it to be true.

And then his thoughts reverted to Kenwick, and the days that now seemed
almost like the unreal days of a dream, when he had first known him over
at the fraternity-house in Berkeley. He recalled the night when he had
brought him home to dinner and introduced him to Marcreta and tried to
make him show off for her like a trained puppy. Perhaps it would have
been better if he had never brought him. But these things were in the
hands of fate and fate has an infinite number of tools. Standing there
at the window, gazing at the reflection of the gas logs mirrored against
the black pane, he found himself growing suddenly resentful of the
casual emergencies of life. Mere cobweb threads they were but upon them
hung the destinies of human souls. You turned the first corner instead
of the second in an hour of aimless wandering, and the circulation of
your life current was completely changed. It was folly to believe that
all the corners were posted with signs to be read and heeded by that
secret autocrat, the subconscious mind. The intricacies of such a
universe made the brain reel. It was better to believe that we played
the game blind, and that the stakes were to the courageous.

He went back to the table and turned out the reading-lamp, blotting out
the sight of the white and gold book.

"Lord! What a pity!" he murmured. "She would have been such an
inspiration to him. It was the devil's own luck. Poor Kenwick! Poor
little Crete!"




CHAPTER XII


Madame Rosalie was setting her stage for a caller. It was evidently to
be an important client, for cards, crystal, horoscope, ouija-board, and
other handmaidens to divination were set forth upon the table in the dim
back parlor. The priestess herself, in her garnet-colored robe, moved
about the room with the noiselessness of a shadow. Although it was
barely dusk she drew the shades and swung the electric bulb over the end
of the table. Then she stood surveying her work with the critical
scrutiny of an artist experimenting for the best light upon his picture.
Her too-brilliant eyes roved restlessly from one carefully arranged
detail to another.

Suddenly a footstep sounded outside, and there was a buzz of the
electric bell. Madame Rosalie waited exactly the correct length of time
before responding to its summons. The interval was expressive neither of
eagerness nor indifference. When she returned to her sanctum it was to
usher into it a man who moved hurriedly, drew off a pair of heavy
driving-gloves, and tossed them into the Morris-chair. The astrologist
removed them quietly to a settee in a far corner of the apartment and
seated herself in the chair.

"They say you're the eighth wonder of the world." Her visitor spoke with
a thinly veiled sarcasm as he took his place under the light. "I might
as well tell you at the outset that I don't go in much for this sort of
thing. I'm here upon the suggestion of somebody else. I've known a good
many of you trance mediums and my experience has been that you're strong
on the future and weak on the past. You play safer that way. But it
happens that I want help with the past more than with the future. What's
the idea now? Are you going to hypnotize me?"

His voice was not antagonistic, only briskly businesslike. He might have
been suggesting that he try on the suit of clothes which a salesman was
proffering for his favor.

Madame Rosalie answered in the low, slightly indifferent voice that had
surprised Roger Kenwick. "Hypnotism is a coöperative measure. I couldn't
hypnotize you unless you were willing and would help me."

He laughed. "That's a good deal for you to admit. Most of you people
claim to be able to do anything."

"Do you wish me to try to hypnotize you?"

"No, I don't care about it especially. It takes a lot of time, doesn't
it? Get busy on something that comes right down to brass tacks."

She turned the crystal sphere slowly in her hand. "You are obsessed by a
fear, and you have reason to be. There is a very serious problem
confronting you, and you need help in solving it. I can't help you, but
perhaps I can find some one else who can."

She gathered up a bundle of cards. At first glance he had thought they
were playing-cards, but he saw now that the reverse sides were all
blanks. "On each of these I am going to write a word," she explained.
"I'll hold it for an instant before your eyes. Read it, close your eyes,
and then look at those maroon-colored curtains over there."

Without comment he followed these instructions. Ten minutes passed while
the client glanced at the cards and then at the curtains. Sometimes his
gaze strayed back to the bit of pasteboard before the medium had another
one ready. By the end of the hour she had cast his horoscope, read his
palm, and performed other mystic rites. Then she settled back in the
deep chair and announced herself ready to "project the astral body." A
few moments passed in absolute silence. The medium appeared to fall into
a light slumber, and the man on the other side of the table was prepared
to see her face contorted by the writhing pains of the trance victim.
But it remained calm, almost deathlike. His shrewd eyes were sizing her
up as she slept. He seemed almost to forget that he had come for
spiritual counsel, and his gaze was calculating, speculative, as though
he were considering her possibilities as an ally. Suddenly a voice came
from the depths of the chair. It made him jump. It was not the voice of
Madame Rosalie, but one that seemed vaguely familiar.

"Marstan is dead." The words died away in a kind of moan. After an
interval of silence came the message, "He says to tell you that you have
found the criminal, and now is the time to act." She seemed to sink
deeper into oblivion. The client waited a full minute. Then he leaned
over and whispered through the stillness two words--"Rest Hollow."

The medium's head rolled from side to side on the cushions of the
chair, like that of a surgical patient who is trying to escape the ether
sponge. "Gone!" she muttered. "All gone!"

He swept aside the cards and ouija-board and leaned closer, his hands
almost touching hers. The amused skepticism had died out of his amber
eyes, and the question that he asked came in a tense whisper. "Where is
Ralph Regan?"

A frown drew the woman's heavy black brows together. "Gone!" she
murmured again. "Gone!"

It was not possible for him to determine from her tone whether she was
answering his last question or merely repeating her response to "Rest
Hollow." He tried again.

And after a moment the reply came slowly through stiff lips. "The way
leads over a curving road. Follow that road to a place with a high stone
fence where the gates stand always open. There you will find him."

He settled back in his chair, his eyes resting, fascinated, upon the
graven face.

"Marstan is here." She spoke in her own voice now and there was in it a
note of infinite weariness. "He has something to say to you."

The man smiled grimly. "I should think he would. Tell him to go ahead;
I'm listening."

"He says you must give up the first plan----" She frowned in the effort
of transmission. "And the second plan--and try the third. He says there
is a woman working in the plan too: she has just begun to work in it.
You must get her aid or she might----"

He leaned forward eagerly. "Yes? She might what?"

"I don't quite get it. It's a difficult control. But he seems to be
afraid of that woman. He wants very much to warn you against----"

She shivered slightly and opened her eyes. The man had left his seat and
was standing close to her side. "I hope you got what you want," she said
wearily. "I don't know when I've had a sitting that has cost so much."

He crossed to the settee and picked up his gloves. "It must get on your
nerves. Suppose we go out somewhere and have a little bite of supper. I
know a place down on Dupont; no style about it, but they give you a
great little meal. What do you say?"

She glanced at the nickel clock upon the mantel. "It's almost seven,"
she demurred, "and I expect another client at seven-thirty."

"No more sittings to-night," he decreed. There was an almost insolent
authority in his tone. "Time to call a halt. It's dinner-time in
heaven, and spirits must live. You're coming out with me. Get on your
street togs, little witch."

Without further protest she obeyed while her escort waited in the shabby
entrance-hall. At the curb he helped her into the roadster, and five
minutes later they were seated at a small bare table in one of the
popular bohemian restaurants of the downtown district.

"No Martinis any more," he sighed, as he helped her out of her cheap
coat with its imitation-fur collar. "Life isn't what it used to be, is
it?" His own hat and expensive-looking overcoat he hung upon the peg in
a diamond-shaped mirror bearing the soap-written injunction, "Try Our
Tamales." "But they serve a placid little near-beer in this place that
helps some. Bring two, waiter."

When the attendant returned with the glasses, he tossed off the contents
of his at a gulp, but the woman sipped hers with the leisurely enjoyment
of the epicure. Then she set it down and stabbed with her fork at the
dish of green olives in the center of the table.

The soup came, a rich bean chowder, which she ate almost in silence,
while her companion commented casually upon the service and furnishings
of the café. They had a rear table near the swinging doors that led into
the kitchen. It was not more or less conspicuous than any of the others.
The atmosphere of unconventionality which pervaded the place seemed to
envelop all its habitués in a sort of mystic veil that was in itself a
guarantee of privacy. At the table nearest them a girl was talking
earnestly to a man who sat with his arm about her. Madame Rosalie,
raising her eyes from her soup-plate, encountered the bold, appraising
stare of her escort. She returned it impersonally and with the flicker
of a smile, taking in the "freckled" eyes and the large thin hands. And
when she smiled her face re-gained something of a former beauty. The man
leaned toward her with a consciously confiding manner. "You call
yourself Madame Rosalie," he said. "But isn't it really Mademoiselle?"

Her smile deepened but she gave him no answer. In the delicate, lacy
waist and white skirt which she had donned, she looked years younger.
There was a ruby pendant at her throat but she wore no other jewel. The
garish light of the café, shining upon her straight black hair, gave it
a luster that was like the dull gleam of jet.

"Not Mademoiselle?" he queried again, and his smile was like the
password between two brother lodge-members.

And then Madame Rosalie lost some of her inscrutable reserve. "Not
_Rosalie_," she corrected. "But it's a good name; as good as any other
for my trade, don't you think?"

He turned one of the clumsy glass salt-shakers between his fingers. "The
name is all right," he admitted. "But--why do you do--that sort of
thing? You admit yourself that it's hard on your nerves. Why do you do
it--when you could do other things?"

The waiter reappeared and littered the table with an army of small oval
platters. Odors of highly seasoned macaroni and ragout steamed from
them. Madame Rosalie dipped daintily into the nearest dish. But in spite
of her restraint, it would have been apparent to a close observer that
her enjoyment of the meal was the keen avidity of one who has been long
denied. When the waiter was out of hearing, she caught up the last words
sharply.

"What do you mean by 'other things'?" For the first time her voice was
eager, as though seeking counsel.

He shrugged. "_I_ don't pretend to be a clairvoyant. Yet I know that
there are other things that you could do--have done."

"How do you know it?"

"Well, in the first place, if you had been a medium for very long, the
clever medium that you undoubtedly are, you would have made more money
at it."

"I have made money at it."

"Not as much as you should have made. You wouldn't live as you do if you
had money."

If she resented this assertion, she gave no sign of it, and he went on
with the cool assurance of a physician who is certain of his diagnosis.
"You may persuade yourself that you are in that business because you are
interested in it or because you know that you have an unaccountable
power. But you are doing it chiefly for the same reason that most of us
ply our trades; because you want to make money."

"Well?" She commented, "It does supply me with a living, and you know
there's a theory that we must live."

He laughed. "You don't have to live the way you do. There are much
easier ways for you to accomplish that end. Have you got anybody
dependent on you?"

"No, but I am horribly in debt." The admission seemed to slip from her
without her permission, and when the words were out a little frown
puckered her forehead. The eyes of her escort were fixed upon the ruby
pendant, so obviously a genuine and costly stone. She toyed absently
with it, putting a cruel strain upon its slender thread-like chain of
gold. "Do you know," she said slowly, "I believe you would make a
wonderful hypnotist. I believe that you could even hypnotize me."

The bold amber eyes gazed straight into hers. "But you told me, didn't
you, that hypnotism had to be a coöperative measure? You said, I
remember, that nobody could hypnotize anybody else unless--unless the
victim were willing."

One of his hands closed over hers as it reached for the sugar-bowl. She
made no effort to draw it away.

"Perhaps," she answered softly, "perhaps the victim _is_ willing."

He stacked up a little pile of the oval platters and pushed them
impatiently to one side. "I guess we understand each other all right,"
he said. "You need me and I need you. We've each come to the place where
we need help. Now let's not waste any more time about it. Let's get down
to brass tacks."




CHAPTER XIII


It was seven o'clock on a rainy evening, and Kenwick turned up the
collar of his coat as he left the St. Germaine. Inside the Hartshire
Building there was a cheerful warmth that promised well for the evening.
He ignored the elevator and walked up the three flights of stairs to the
floor where the photographer had his rooms. On the way, he tried to
persuade himself that he was not doing this in order to gain time. But
there was a good hour intervening between now and time to start for the
theater, and at the end of that hour, he reflected Jarvis might not care
to keep the engagement.

As he toiled upward Kenwick considered every possible detail of the
scene that was before him, and then wearily discarded them all. "Why do
I do it?" he challenged himself, as he reached the last landing. "How do
I dare to do it? My God! I can't afford to do it; I've got to have one
friend left!"

But as he had once told Jarvis, those scenes of life whose settings are
scrupulously ordered usually lack dramatic climax. At the end of what he
was pleased to characterize as his "confession," the photographer
surveyed him with sympathetic but unastonished eyes.

"I'd begun to think that there might be something personal in it," he
commented. "I could see that there was something lying heavy on your
chest. It's a devilish mess, isn't it?"

The other man was looking at him with a disconcerting sharpness. But the
thing for which he probed was not in Granville Jarvis's eyes.

"I seem to be such a helpless sort of brute," his host went on, and
pushed a box of cigars across the table as though in an unconscious
effort to make up with tobacco what he lacked in counsel. "I never can
think of the right thing to do just on the spur of the minute.
Inspiration has an uncomfortable habit of failing to keep her
engagements with me."

"I didn't expect any advice," Kenwick told him. "But it's a relief to
tell you and get it off my mind; to tell you and yet not have you think
that I ought to be locked up."

"Somebody ought to be locked up," Jarvis remarked grimly. "And it's your
job to find that person. Why don't you go East?"

"I am going East. I've decided to go next week. It would be hard to make
you understand why I haven't done it before, but----Well, this sort of
an--illness does a terrible thing to a man's soul, Jarvis. It paralyzes
his initiative. It gives him the most deadly thing in this world; the
patience of despair. I'm constantly _waiting_ for things to clear up
instead of going at them hammer and tongs."

His companion nodded. "I think I understand. It would be the hell of a
situation for you back there among people you've always known, and who
presumably know all about you, and not being able to bridge the gap. I
can see why you wanted to get a line on yourself first, and you're
right, too. After all, a man owes something to his nervous system. But
since you've decided to go and brave it out back there I think I'd let
things rest the way they are till you go. Sometimes life works itself
out better if we don't interfere too much. Somebody is bound to make a
foolish play if you let them all manage their own hands."

"And yet somebody told me the other day, Jarvis, that I was too passive
in the crutches of fate; that I ought to be more combative, more
aggressive."

Jarvis laughed. "I'd be willing to bet that it was a woman who told you
that."

"Yes, a woman did tell me. It was that trance medium."

"I might have guessed it. By the way, I went to see her myself the other
day. Your story got me interested. She ought to have paid you a liberal
commission for that yarn. But I suppose she doesn't even know you wrote
it. She struck me as being a mighty clever little woman. Well, it's
after eight o'clock. Let's go."

They found their seats in the first row of the balcony. The house was
brilliantly lighted and filling up rapidly. But although Jarvis had
urged his companion to forget for a time the tangle in which he was
enmeshed, it was he who returned to the theme while they sat waiting for
the curtain to rise.

"The trouble is, there's a missing link in the chain somewhere. I don't
mean an event, but a person. Somebody dealt those cards, of course, and
whoever did it knows where the marked one is. The New York trip may be a
wild goose chase after all. Did you ever think of hiring a detective to
help you out?"

"Yes, I've thought of it a lot. But somehow I don't want to do it. I
don't want to have anybody mixed up in my affairs as intimately as
that. I can't explain my feeling about it. But there is so much noise
about this sort of thing if it once rises to the surface, and if there's
any graft connected with my name, I'd like to keep the scandal private.
Besides," he laughed with a tolerant self-indulgence, "I don't suppose
the person lives, Jarvis, who doesn't believe that way down inside of
him somewhere, sleeping but never dead, is the genius of the detective.
I've made a sort of a covenant with myself that I and no other shall run
this thing to cover, and do it without kicking up a noise."

Jarvis was staring speculatively at the foot-lights. "It's one of the
most curious cases I ever knew. I'll tell you what, Kenwick. You're the
original 'Wise Man from Our Town.' Remember him?

    "And when he found his eyes were out,
      With all his might and main,
    He jumped into the bramble-bush
      And scratched them back again."

"A dangerous experiment, I always thought," Kenwick remarked.

"So is dynamite, but sometimes we have to use it, and nothing else will
take its place."

"Are you advising me to put a bomb under somebody on the chance that it
might be the man who shuffled the deck?"

"No. I'm advising you to do the bramble-bush stunt. Don't jump forward;
jump back."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, the more I think of it the more I believe that the solution of
this mystery is to be found in the place where it began."

"But where did it begin?"

"So far as your knowledge of it extends, it began in the cañon or ravine
or whatever place it was that you had the accident. If I'm not mistaken,
Kenwick, that place is your bramble-bush."

The curtain rose upon the first act and there was no opportunity for
further conversation. It was during the intermission between the second
and third acts that Jarvis, leaning over the balcony, said suddenly,
"There's a friend of yours; fourth row on the right."

Kenwick made a cursory examination of the seats and shook his head.
"Don't see him. Don't see anybody I know here to-night except Aiken, our
dramatic critic."

"This is a woman. Count seven seats over in the fourth row. Isn't that
lady in the garnet-colored coat your Madame Rosalie?"

"You're right; it is."

"I thought I couldn't be mistaken. There's a certain air of distinction
about that woman in spite of----" Jarvis stopped, for he saw that his
companion was not listening. For a moment Kenwick sat there staring down
at the fourth row like a man in a dream. Then he gripped Jarvis's arm.
"Look!" he cried. "Down there with Madame Rosalie."

"What's the matter? You're such an excitable cuss, Kenwick."

"That fellow who's with her. Look! Jarvis, _that's_ the man!"

"What man?"

"The man we've been talking about--my Missing Link."

Together they leaned over the balcony and scrutinized, with the intent
gaze of a pair of detectives, the couple in the fourth row right. It may
have been coincidence, or it may have been that species of visual
hypnotism known to us all, which suddenly impelled Madame Rosalie's
escort to turn in his seat. His eyes swept the house with a casual
glance, then lifted to the balcony. Slowly they surveyed the arc of
faces above the lights. The two men leaning toward him did not move. In
another instant he had found them, and for a full minute he and Roger
Kenwick held each other. And then the theater went black as the curtain
rose on the last act.

Just before it was over Kenwick bade his companion a hurried farewell.
"I'm going down and introduce myself to that fellow. I know I've seen
him before somewhere, and he may be able to give me my clue. You don't
mind if I break away? I want to catch him before he is lost in the
crowd."

But this hope was thwarted. For hurrying down the aisle in that moment
before the rush of exit, while the audience was finding its wraps, he
found two seats in the fourth row empty. Slowly he walked back to the
St. Germaine, his thoughts in a tumult. Why should they have wanted to
leave before the end of as good a performance as that? Something must
have happened. Could it be that they had wanted to escape him? At such
long range it hadn't been possible for him to determine whether or not
there was a flash of recognition in the other man's eyes, but his
mysterious disappearance was haunting. On the following morning, before
going to the "Clarion" office he took a car out to Fillmore Street.

At Madame Rosalie's shabby home a man in shirt sleeves opened the door.
"Oh, she don't live here any more," he explained to the caller. "She
moved a week ago. I'm gettin' the place ready for a new tenant."

"Do you know where she went?"

The man grinned. "Them mediums don't generally leave no forwardin'
address. Their motto is 'Keep Movin'.' I will say, though, that the
Rosalie woman was a perfect lady and paid her rent regular in advance."

Kenwick walked away, turning this latest development slowly in his mind,
looking at it from every angle. At his office he worked mechanically,
scarcely conscious of what he wrote. He was in two minds now about the
Eastern trip. Perhaps it would be better to take Jarvis's advice and let
things have their head a bit longer. And he was certain of some of his
facts now. The face of the man in the fourth row had been like the flash
of a torch at midnight. For most of the night he had been awake, going
back over the painful trail of the past, fitting some of its previously
incomprehensible details into their places. What a curious mosaic his
life had been! What contrasts of light and shade! But as for going back
to Mont-Mer----The idea made him shudder. No, that was one thing he
would not do. It would be like courting the return of a nightmare.

At four o'clock he left the office and went to keep an appointment with
Dr. Gregson Bennet in the Physicians' Building. Dr. Bennet belonged to
that class of specialists who designate their business quarters in
plural terms. His offices comprised a suite of four rooms. The sign on
the door of the first one invited the caller to enter, unheralded.
Complying with this injunction, Kenwick found himself in a well-lighted
chamber containing a massive collection of light-green upholstery and an
assortment of foreign-looking pictures artfully selected to convey the
impression that their owner was on chummy terms with the capitals of
Europe.

As the door closed automatically behind him, a white-uniformed figure
appeared, like a perfectly trained cuckoo, from the adjoining room and
announced in level tones, "The-doctor-will-see-you-in-just-a-minute."
Kenwick accepted this assurance with the grave credulity that one
fiction-maker accords another. He glanced at the five other patients
already awaiting their turns and picked up a magazine.

By four-thirty he had read the jokes in the back of "Anybody's Magazine"
for the preceding six months. No physician in reputable standing ever
removes old numbers of periodicals from his files. For what better
testimony can he offer in support of his claim upon a long-established
practice? As Kenwick read, he was aware that his companions were being
summoned one by one to embark upon that mysterious journey from whose
bourne no traveler returns, departure having been arranged for around
some obscure corner, to prevent exchange between arriving and retreating
patient of a "Look! Stop! Listen!" signal.

By five o'clock only one other patient besides himself remained; a
little woman in shiny serge suit and passée summer hat. Kenwick put down
his magazine with a long-drawn sigh, and she smiled in patient sympathy.
"Gets pretty tiresome waitin', doesn't it?" she ventured.

His quick eyes took in her shabby suit and the knotted ungloved hands.
She was probably the mother of a growing family, he reflected, and would
not get home in time now to prepare dinner. His easy sympathy flared
into words.

"It's an outrage to keep people waiting like this when they have an
appointment for a definite hour. They tell me Bennet's a nerve
specialist, and I believe it."

She smiled wanly, but there was an eager championship in her response.
"Oh, but he's wonderful! When he once begins to talk to you, you forget
all about bein' mad at him. Seems like he sees right through your head
to tell what's the matter with you."

The white uniform appeared and pronounced a name: "Mr. Kenwick." He rose
and followed her through the door. The second room was like the first,
minus reading-matter and plus wall-charts. Here he sat, gazing at the
fire-escapes on the opposite building, while the white uniform made a
not completely satisfying attempt to collect family statistics. And
then, at last, the door of the third room opened and Dr. Bennet himself
emerged. He was enveloped in a heavy white apron that recalled to
Kenwick's mind the pictures he had seen in the agricultural magazines
featuring model dairying.

But if the specialist had been slow to admit him, he was equally
reluctant to let him go. When he had finished his examination, Kenwick
stood beside the couch in the fourth and last room pulling on his coat.
"Then you think I'm in pretty good condition, doctor?" Through the
half-open door he could see the white uniform hovering, like an emblem
of peace, above a steaming basin of warlike instruments.

"I should say," the physician told him slowly, "that you are absolutely
sound. Your nerves are a bit too highly charged, but I imagine that is
more a matter of temperament than overstrain."

"Is that all?"

"No, that isn't all. The history of your case, as you have given it to
me, is a most interesting one. And you were right to let me make the
examination and form my own conclusions before telling me anything about
your history. I wish it were possible for you to recall the name of the
physician who handled your case in France. I'd like to get the
scientific beginning of the story. Without it I can only make a guess,
and guessing is not satisfactory. But I think that in his place I should
have taken the chance and operated. However, you can't judge; he may not
have had the proper equipment. I wish you would come around next
Saturday when the office is closed, and let me make some X-ray plates.
I'd like to display them at the medical convention in April."

"And what do you advise me to do for my--my mental health?"

"Forget your mental health. Take some regular out-of-door exercise and
mix with your friends. I can't give you any better prescription than
that. If it were something done up in pink paper you'd be more apt to
take it, I know."

Kenwick walked back through the darkening streets with a feeling of
exultation. The pendulum of his despair was swinging backward to a
height only attained by those who can plumb the depths of wretchedness.
For the first time in six weeks he felt his old defiance of life. And
recalling the pale ghost of a former prayer, he was ashamed of its
cowardice. "_That_ never happens to the desperate and the lonely," he
reminded himself grimly. "The best security on earth for a prolonged
life is to express a sincere desire to die. After that, you lead a
charmed existence. Houses burn to the ground and not one inmate escapes;
ships go down with everybody aboard; pedestrians are run over by cars
and shot by thugs, but none of these things come near the man who courts
them. They overtake those whom others find it hard to spare, those whose
lives are vivid with purpose."

As he walked back to the hotel he found himself thinking of Marcreta
again. Had he ever really made a place for himself in her life? Whether
he had or not, he knew that he had never, even in his blackest moments,
given her up. All the plans for his future centered still about her.
Well, he had a fight before him now, and not until he won it would he
make himself known at the house on Pine Street.

On the corner a newsboy thrust a paper under his face. He waved it
aside. "I can read all that bunk for nothing, sonny," he told him
cheerfully. The huge head-lines filled him with a spiritual nausea. The
chronicle of the day's tragedies for the public to batten upon! Was
there never to be an end to America's greed for the sensational?

At the St. Germaine the clerk handed him a telephone call. It was from
Jarvis and urged him to call him up immediately. In his own room Kenwick
complied with this request. The voice of the Southerner came to him,
sharply commanding, over the wire. "Can you come around right away? I
want to talk it over with you."

"Talk what over?" Kenwick's voice was almost defiant.

"Why, haven't you seen it? Well, come around anyway. I'll be here for
the next hour."

When Kenwick arrived at the Hartshire he found the photographer sorting
over a pile of films. But as his guest entered, he swept these into a
pasteboard box, and cleared off a chair for him. "Where have you been?"
he demanded. "I called you at the hotel and the 'Clarion' office twice."

Kenwick gave him a brief account of the last two hours. Jarvis grunted.
"Well, I don't blame you for wanting to get the seal of scientific
approval but--I can't believe that you haven't read the 'Record' yet.
And you a newspaper man!"

He fished the paper out from under a stack of developing-trays and
searched the columns of the second page. "Remember what I suggested to
you last night, that you let things take their own course for a while?
Well, it seems that they've been taking them in rather a headlong
fashion." He creased back the page and handed the paper to Kenwick.
"Read that and see if it doesn't give you something of a jolt."

He took the paper. The head-lines at the top of the third page riveted
themselves upon his brain.

                       RELATIVE SEEKS MISSING MAN

             Body of Roger Kenwick to Be Exhumed at Mont-Mer

     The body of Roger Kenwick, son of the late Charles Kenwick, of New
     York, who died at Rest Hollow last November, is to be exhumed for
     examination on the demand of Mrs. Hilda Fanwell, of Reno, Nevada.
     Mrs. Fanwell, a widow, arrived from her home last week in search of
     her brother, Ralph Regan, who has been a resident of Mont-Mer for
     the last two years. A letter received from him in the early part of
     November indicated, according to the sister's statement, that he
     was in failing health. Being unable to come to him then, owing to
     the illness of her husband, Mrs. Fanwell wrote several letters,
     none of which were answered. The description of her brother, which
     she furnished the police, has resulted in a demand to the
     authorities to have the body of Roger Kenwick exhumed.

Kenwick let the paper slide to the table. "My Lord!" he murmured.
"Jarvis, what would you do about it?"

"Why should _you_ do anything about it? This Fanwell woman is apparently
the oldest Gold Dust twin. Let her do your work."

But Kenwick's eyes were still fixed upon the paper. Over it a drop of
acid from the developing-tray was eating a slow passage. "But to see my
name tied up to a gruesome thing like that----Why, you can't imagine
how it----It gives me the feeling that--that I've just begun on this
thing. And I thought when I came in here that I had all the cards in my
hands."

He got up from the table slowly, like a hospital patient testing his
strength on the first day out of bed. And Jarvis, after one glance at
his pale face, rose too. "You've got nothing to worry about----," he
began. But Kenwick waved the soothing aside with a fierce impatience.

"Nothing to worry about?" he cried hotly. "Don't offer me that stuff,
Jarvis. How do I know--how _can_ I ever know what I may have done during
those ghastly ten months?"




CHAPTER XIV


When Kenwick entered the St. Germaine on the evening after his interview
with Jarvis, a man rose from the farther corner of the lobby and came
toward him. "Kenwick!" he cried, and held out his hand. "I thought you
never would come. I've been waiting here an eternity." It was Clinton
Morgan.

When the first, somewhat incoherent greetings were over and the two men
sat facing each other across Kenwick's untidy writing-table, a moment of
embarrassed silence fell between them. Then, in a desperate attempt to
start the conversation, "I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long
time," the host apologized.

"You have," his caller agreed. "It's been more than a year, hasn't it?"
He spoke in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone as though a mere
pleasure-trip had intervened between this and their last encounter. But
Kenwick was looking at him intently.

"You know--about it then?"

"Yes, we know all about it." Clinton Morgan leaned over and put his
hand affectionately upon the other man's shoulder. "And, by George,
Kenwick, I congratulate you. I congratulate you from the bottom of my
heart. It was one chance against a thousand that you could win out. It's
a miracle!"

Kenwick was scarcely conscious of the last sentences. His attention had
stopped short at that word "we." He reached down and picked a burnt
match from the carpet as he asked with a pathetic attempt at formal
courtesy, "How is your sister?"

"Getting well, I believe. She has been----Well, this case of yours is a
most enthralling one, Kenwick. Anybody would be interested, but
particularly any one who has known you. We have been following it with
great interest."

Kenwick looked at him incredulously. "How could you?"

The caller shifted his position uneasily. "Well, that's rather a long
story. And Marcreta might prefer to tell you part of it herself. And
that brings me to my errand. I came here to ask you up to the house.
We've just got the old place fixed over, and,"--he glanced at his
watch,--"it's not nine o'clock yet. If you haven't something else on
hand that----"

Kenwick cut in almost harshly. "Are you sure that your sister would care
to see me? That she wouldn't perhaps be--well, afraid of me?"

Morgan laughed. "Well, I'll be there, you know, if you should get
violent and begin throwing things around."

But the other man's face did not relax. His voice came low and strained
as though it were being let out cautiously under high gear. "You don't
understand. Nobody can, I suppose, who hasn't been through this
experience." His nervous hands stiffened upon the arms of the chair. "I
tell you, Morgan, it's easier for a denizen of the underworld to live
down her reputation and achieve a reputable place in society than for a
man or woman to regain the confidence of the world after a period
of----Well, I may as well out with the damned word--insanity."

"Don't call it that, Kenwick. It wasn't that. In the trenches you got a
blow that put you out of commission. But you were simply in a dazed
condition; mental aberration beginning with melancholia. You were never
violently insane; never dangerous to anybody else."

"How do you know? How do I know? I've suffered the anguish of hell,
wondering about it. Somebody may have been killed in that accident that
restored me to life. It may have been all my fault. I don't know. I've
spent the last month trying to find out in a quiet way. I suppose you
think I'm a coward for not going at it more dir

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