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Title: The Amateur Inn

Author: Albert Payson Terhune

Release date: March 1, 2022 [eBook #67531]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: George H. Doran Company

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMATEUR INN ***





  THE AMATEUR INN

  ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE




_By_

ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE


  LOCHINVAR LUCK
  FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LAD
  BUFF: A COLLIE
  THE AMATEUR INN
  BLACK CÆSAR’S CLAN
  BLACK GOLD

  NEW YORK:
  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




  THE
  AMATEUR INN

  BY
  ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

  NEW YORK
  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




  COPYRIGHT, 1923,
  BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

  [Illustration]

  THE AMATEUR INN. II

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                        PAGE

      I A NON-SKIPPABLE PROLOGUE                    9

     II AT LAST THE STORY BEGINS                   22

    III AN INVOLUNTARY LANDLORD                    44

     IV TWO OR THREE INTRUDERS                     56

      V ROBBER’S ROOST, UNINCORPORATED             75

     VI THE POLICE AND THE DUKE OF ARGYLE          90

    VII FAITH AND UNFAITH AND SOME MOONLIGHT      103

   VIII THE INQUISITION                           112

     IX A LIE OR TWO                              125

      X A CRY IN THE NIGHT                        140

     XI WHAT LAY BEYOND THE SMASHED DOOR          161

    XII WHEREIN CLIVE PLAYS THE FOOL              175

   XIII HOW ONE OATH WAS TAKEN                    192

    XIV A CLUELESS CLUE                           211

     XV THE IMPOSSIBLE                            220

    XVI THE COLLIE TESTIFIES                      231

   XVII UNTANGLING THE SNARL                      243

  XVIII WHEN HE CAME HOME                         257

    XIX A MAN AND A MAID AND ANOTHER MAN          283




THE AMATEUR INN




THE AMATEUR INN




CHAPTER I

A NON-SKIPPABLE PROLOGUE


Osmun Vail doesn’t come into this story at all. Yet he was responsible
for everything that happened in it.

He was responsible for the whistling cry in the night, and for the
Thing that huddled among the fragrant boxtrees, and for the love of a
man and a maid--or rather the loves of several men and a maid--and for
the amazing and amusing and jewel-tangled dilemma wherein Thaxton was
shoved.

He was responsible for much; though he was actively to blame for
nothing. Moreover he and his career were interesting.

So he merits a word or two, if only to explain what happened before the
rise of our story’s curtain.

At this point, the boreful word, Prologue, should be writ large, with
a space above and below it, by way of warning. But that would be the
sign to skip. And one cannot skip this short prologue without losing
completely the tangled thread of the yarn which follows--a thread worth
gripping and a yarn more or less worth telling.

So let us dispose of the prologue, without calling it by its baleful
name; and in a mere mouthful or two of words. Something like this:

When Osmun Vail left his father’s Berkshire farm, at twenty-one, to
seek his fortune in New York, he wore his $12 “freedom suit” and had a
cash capital of $18, besides his railway ticket.

Followed forty years of brow-sweat and brain-wrack and one of those
careers whose semi-occasional real-life recurrence keeps the Success
magazines out of the pure-fiction class.

When Osmun Vail came back, at sixty-one, to the Berkshire farm that
had been his father’s until the mortgage was foreclosed, he was worth
something more than five million dollars. His life-battle had been
fought and won. His tired soul yearned unspeakably for the peace and
loveliness of the pleasant hill country where he had been born--the
homeland he had half-forgotten and which had wholly forgotten him and
his.

Osmun recalled the prim village of Stockbridge, the primmer town of
Pittsfield, drowsing beneath South Mountain, the provincial scatter of
old houses known as Lenox; the tumbled miles of mountain wilderness and
the waste of lush farmland between and around them.

At sixty-one he found Pittsfield a new city; and saw a Lenox and
Stockbridge that had been discovered and renovated by beauty-lovers
from the distant outside world. All that region was still in the youth
of its golden development. But the wave had set in, and had set in
strong.

A bit dazzled and more than a little troubled by the transformation,
Osmun Vail sought the farm of his birth and the nearby village of
Aura. Here at least nothing had changed; except that his father’s
house--built by his grandfather’s own gnarled hands--had burned down;
taking the rattle-trap red barns with it. The whole hilltop farm lay
weedgrown, rank, desolate. In the abomination of desolation, a deserted
New England farm can make Pompeii look like a hustling metropolis.
There is something awesome in its new deadness.

Cold fingers seemed to catch Osmun by the throat and by the
heartstrings; as he stared wistfully from the house’s site, to the
neglected acres his grandsire had cleared and his sire had loved.
From the half-memory of a schoolday poem, the returned wanderer quoted
chokingly:

“_Here will I pitch my tent. Here will I end my days._”

Then on the same principle of efficient promptitude which had lifted
him from store-porter to a bank presidency, Osmun Vail proceeded to
realize a dream he had fostered through the bleakly busy decades of his
exile.

For a ridiculously low price he bought back and demortgaged the farm
and the five hundred acres that bordered it. He turned loose a horde of
landscape artists upon the domain. He sent overseas for two renowned
British architects, and bade them build him a house on the hilltop that
should be a glorious monument to his own success and to his father’s
memory. To Boston and to New York he sent, for a legion of skilled
laborers. And the estate of Vailholme was under way.

Fashion, wealth, modernity, had skirted this stretch of rolling valley
to northeast of Stockbridge and to south of Lenox. The straggly
one-street village of Aura drowsed beneath its giant elms; as it had
drowsed since a quarter-century after the Pequot wars. The splashing
invasion of this moneyed New Yorker created more neighborhood
excitement than would the visit of a Martian to Brooklyn.

Excitement and native hostility to outsiders narrowed down to a very
keen and very personal hatred of Osmun Vail; when it was learned that
all his skilled labor and all his building material had been imported
from points beyond the soft green mountain walls which hedge Aura
Valley.

Now there was not a soul in the Valley capable of building any edifice
more imposing or imaginative than a two-story frame house. There was
no finished material in the Valley worth working into the structure
of such a mansion as Osmun proposed. But this made no difference. An
outlander had come back to crow over his poor stay-at-home neighbors,
and he was spending his money on outside help and goods, to the
detriment of the natives. That was quite enough. The tide of icy New
England hate swelled from end to end of the Valley; and it refused to
ebb.

These Aura folk were Americans of Puritan stock--a race to whom
sabotage and arson are foreign. Thus they did not seek to destroy or
even to hamper the work at Vailholme. But their aloofness was made as
bitter and blighting as a Bible prophet’s curse. For example:

When his great house was but half built, Osmun ran up from New York,
one gray January Saturday afternoon, to inspect the job. This he did
every few weeks. And, on his tours, he made headquarters at Plum’s, in
Stockbridge, six miles away. This was an ancient and honorable hostelry
which some newfangled folk were even then beginning to call “The Red
Lion Inn,” and whose food was one of Life’s Compensations. Thence, on a
livery nag, Vail was wont to ride out to his estate.

On this January trip Osmun found that Plum’s had closed, at Christmas,
for the season. He drove on to Aura, only to find the village’s one inn
was shut for repairs. Planning to continue his quest of lodgings as
far as Lenox or, if necessary, to Pittsfield, Osmun went up, through a
snowstorm, to his uncompleted hilltop mansion of Vailholme.

He had brought along a lunch, annexed from the Stockbridge bakery. So
interested did he become in wandering from one unceilinged room to
another, and furnishing and refurnishing them in his mind, that he did
not notice the steady increase of the snowfall and of the wind which
whipped it into fury.

By the time he went around to the shed, at the rear of the house,
where he had stabled the livery horse, he could scarce see his hand
before his face. The gale was hurling the tons of snow from end to end
of the Valley, in solid masses. There was no question of holding the
road or even of finding it. The horse knew that--and he snorted, and
jerked back on the bit when Osmun essayed to lead him from shelter.

Every minute, the blizzard increased.

The corps of indoor laborers and their bosses had gone to their
Pittsfield quarters, for Sunday. Osmun had the deserted place to
himself. Swathed in his greatcoat and in a mountain of burlap, and
burrowing into a bed of torn papers and paint-blotched wall-cloths, he
made shift to pass a right miserable night.

By dawn the snowfall had ceased. But so had the Valley’s means of
entrance and of exit. The two roads leading from it to the outer
world were choked breast high with solid drifts. For at least three
days there could be no ingress or egress. Aura bore this isolation,
philosophically. To be snowbound and cut off from the rest of the
universe was no novelty to the Valley hamlet. Osmun bore it less calmly.

By dint of much skill and more persuasion, he piloted his floundering
horse down the hill and into the village. There, at the first house,
he demanded food and shelter. He received neither. Neither the offer of
much money nor an appeal to common humanity availed. It took him less
than an hour to discover that Aura was unanimous in its mode of paying
him back for his slight to its laborers. Not a house would take him in.
Not a villager would sell him a meal or so much as feed his horse.

Raging impotently, Osmun rode back to his frigid and draughty hilltop
mansion-shell. By the time he had been shivering there for an hour a
thin little man stumped up the steps.

The newcomer introduced himself as Malcolm Creede. He had stopped for
a few minutes in Aura, that morning, for provisions, and had heard the
gleeful accounts of the villagers as to their treatment of the stuck-up
millionaire. Wherefore, Creede had climbed the hill, in order to offer
the scanty hospitality of his own farmhouse to Osmun, until such time
as the roads from the Valley should be open.

Osmun greeted the offer with a delight born of chill and starvation.
Leading his horse, he followed Creede across a trackless half-mile or
so to a farm that nestled barrenly in a cup of the hills. During the
plungingly arduous walk he learned something of his host.

Creede was a Scotchman, who had begun life as a schoolmaster; and who
had come to America, with his invalid wife, to better his fortunes. A
final twist of fate had stranded the couple on this Berkshire farm.
Here, six months earlier, the wife had died, leaving her heart-crushed
husband with twin sons a few months old. Here, ever since, the widower
had eked out a pitifully bare living; and had cared, as best he might,
for his helpless baby boys. His meager homestead, by the way, had
gleefully been named by luckier and more witty neighbors, “Rackrent
Farm.” The name had stuck.

Before the end of Osmun Vail’s enforced stay at Rackrent Farm,
gratitude to his host had merged into genuine friendship. The two
lonely men took to each other, as only solitaries with similar tastes
can hope to. Osmun guessed, though Creede denied it, that the Good
Samaritan deed of shelter must rouse neighborhood animosity against the
Scotchman.

Osmun guessed, and with equal correctness, that this silent and broken
Scot would be bitterly offended at any offer of money payment for
his hospitality. And Vail set his own ingenuity to work for means of
rewarding the kindness.

As a result, within six months Malcolm Creede was installed as manager
(“factor,” Creede called it) of the huge new Berkshire estate of
Vailholme and was supervising work on a big new house built for him by
Osmun in a corner of the estate.

Creede was woefully ignorant of business matters. Coming into a small
inheritance from a Scotch uncle, he turned the pittance over to Vail
for investment. And he was merely delighted--in no way suspicious--when
the investments brought him in an income of preposterous size. Osmun
Vail never did things by halves.

Deeply grateful, Creede threw his energy and boundless enthusiasm into
his new duties. He went further. One of his twin sons he christened
“Clive” for the inheritance-leaving uncle in Scotland. But the other
he named “Osmun,” in honor of his benefactor. Vail, much gratified at
the compliment, insisted on taking over the education of both lads. The
childless bachelor reveled in his rôle of fairy godfather to them.

But there was another result of Osmun Vail’s chilly vigil in the
half-finished hilltop mansion. During the hour before Creede had come
to his rescue the cold and hungry multimillionaire had taken a vow as
solemn as it was fantastic.

He swore he would set aside not less than ten of his house’s
forty-three rooms for the use of any possible wayfarers who might be
stranded, as he had been, in that inhospitable wilderness, and who
could afford to pay for decent accommodations. Not tramps or beggars,
but folk who, like himself, might come that way with means for buying
food and shelter, and to whom such food and shelter might elsewhere be
denied.

This oath he talked over with Creede. The visionary Scot could see
nothing ridiculous about it. Accordingly, ten good rooms were allotted
mentally to paying guests, and a clause in Vail’s will demanded that
his heirs maintain such rooms, if necessary, for the same purpose. The
fact was not advertised. And during Osmun’s quarter-century occupancy
of Vailholme nobody took advantage of the chance.

During that quarter-century the wilderness’s beauty attracted more and
more people of means and of taste. Once-bleak hills blossomed into
estates. The village of Aura became something of a resort. The face of
the whole countryside changed.

When Osmun Vail died (see, we are through with him already, though not
so much as launched on the queer effects of his queerer actions!) he
bequeathed to his beloved crony, Malcolm Creede, the sum of $500,000,
and a free gift of the house he had built for him, and one hundred
acres of land around it.

Creede had named this big new home “Canobie,” in memory of his mother’s
borderland birthplace. He still owned Rackrent Farm, two miles distant.
He had taken pride, in off moments, in improving the sorry old
farmhouse and bare acres into something of the quaint well-being which
he and his dead wife had once planned for their wilderness home. Within
a year after Vail’s death Creede also died, leaving his fortune and his
two homes, jointly, to his twin sons, Clive and Osmun.

The bulk of Vail’s fortune--a matter of $4,000,000 and the estate
of Vailholme--went to the testator’s sole living relative; his
grand-nephew, young Thaxton Vail, a popular and easy-going chap who,
for years, had made his home with his great-uncle.

Along with Vailholme, naturally, went the proviso that ten of its
forty-three rooms should be set aside, if necessary, for hotel
accommodations.

Thaxton Vail nodded reminiscently, as he read this clause in the will.
Long since, Osmun had explained its origin to him. The young fellow had
promised, in tolerant affection for the oldster, to respect the whim.
As nobody ever yet had taken advantage of the hotel proposition and as
not six people, then alive, had heard of it, he felt safe enough in
accepting the odd condition along with the gift.




CHAPTER II

AT LAST THE STORY BEGINS


Among the two million Americans shoved bodily into the maelstrom of the
World War were Thaxton Vail and the Creede twins.

This story opens in the spring of 1919, when all three had returned
from overseas service.

Aura and the summer-colony were heartily glad to have Thaxton Vail
back again. He was the sort of youth who is liked very much by nine
acquaintances in ten and disliked by fewer than one in ninety. But
there was no such majority opinion as to the return of the two young
Creedes.

The twins, from babyhood, had been so alike in looks and in outward
mannerisms that not five per cent of their neighbors could tell them
apart. But there all resemblance ceased.

Clive Creed was of the same general type as young Vail, who was his
lifelong chum. They were much alike in traits and in tastes. They even
shared--that last year before the war cut a hole in the routine of
their pleasant lives--a mutual ardor for Doris Lane, who, with her old
aunt, Miss Gregg, spent her summers at Stormcrest, across the valley
from Vailholme. It was the first shadow of rivalry in their chumship.

Clive and Thaxton had the same pleasantly easy-going ways, the
same unforced likableness. They were as popular as any men in the
hill-country’s big summer-colony. Their wartime absence had been a
theme for genuine regret to Aura Valley.

Except in looks, Osmun Creede was as unlike his twin brother as any
one could well have been. The man had every Scotch flaw and crotchet,
without a single Scotch virtue. Old Osmun Vail had sized up the lad’s
character years earlier, when he had said in confidence to Thaxton:

“There’s a white man and a cur in all of us, Thax. And some
psychologist sharps say twins are really one person with two bodies.
Clive got all the White Man part of that ‘one person,’ and my
lamentable namesake got all the Cur. At times I find myself wishing he
were ‘the lamented Osmun Creede,’ instead of only ‘the lamentable Osmun
Creede.’ Hester Gregg says he behaves as if Edgar Allan Poe had written
him and Berlioz had set him to music.”

From childhood, Thaxton and this Creede twin had clashed. In the honest
days of boyhood they had taken no pains to mask their dislike. In the
more civil years of adolescence they had been at much pains to be
courteous to each other when they met, but they tried not to meet. This
avoidance was not easy; in such a close corporation as the Aura set,
especially after both of them began calling over-often on Doris Lane.

Back to the Berkshires, from overseas, came the two Creedes. The
community prepared to welcome Clive with open arms; and to tolerate
Osmun, as of old, for the sake of his brother and for the loved
memory of his father. At once Aura was relieved of one of its former
perplexities. For no longer were the twins impossible to tell apart.

They still bore the most amazing likeness to each other, of course.
But a long siege of trench fever had left Osmun slightly bald on the
forehead and had put lines and hollows in his good-looking face and had
given his wide shoulders a marked stoop. Also, a fragment of shell in
the leg had left him with a slight limp. The fever, too, had weakened
his eyes; and had forced him to adopt spectacles with a faintly smoked
tinge to their lenses. Altogether, he was plainly discernible, now,
from his erect brother, and looked nine years older.

There was another change, too, in the brethren. Hitherto they had lived
together at Canobie. On their return from the war they astonished Aura
by separating. Osmun lived on at the big house. But Clive took his
belongings to Rackrent Farm; and set up housekeeping there; attended
by an old negro and his wife, who had worked for his father. He even
transported thither the amateur laboratory wherewith he and Osmun had
always delighted to putter; and he set it up in a vacant back room of
the farmhouse.

Aura was thrilled at these signs of discord in the hitherto inseparable
brethren. Clive had been the only mortal to find good in Osmun and to
care for his society. Now, apparently, there had been a break.

But almost at once Aura found there had been no break. The twins were
as devoted as ever, despite their decision to live two miles apart.
They were back and forth, daily, at each other’s homes; and they
wrought, side by side, with all their old zeal, in the laboratory.

Osmun’s cantankerous soul did not seem to have undergone any purifying
process from war experience and long illness. Within a month after he
came back to Aura he proceeded to celebrate his return by raising the
rents of the seven cottages he and Clive owned; and by a twenty per
cent cut in the pay of the Canobie laborers.

Aura is not feudal Europe. Nor had Osmun Creede any of the hereditary
popularity or masterliness of a feudal baron. Wherefore the seven
tenants prepared to walk out of their rent-raised homes. The Canobie
laborers, to a man, went on strike. Aura applauded. Osmun sulked.

Clive came to the rescue, as ever he had done when his brother’s
actions had aroused ill-feeling. He rode over to Canobie and was
closeted for three hours with Osmun. Servants, passing the library,
heard and reported the hum of arguing voices. Then Clive came out and
rode home. Next morning Osmun lowered the rents and restored wages to
their old scale. As usual, the resultant popularity descended on Clive
and not upon himself.

It was a week afterward that Thaxton Vail chanced to meet Osmun at the
Aura Country Club. Osmun stumped up to him, as Vail sat on the veranda
rail waiting for Doris Lane to come to the tennis courts.

“I was blackballed, yesterday, by the Stockbridge Hunt Club,” announced
Creede, with no other salutation.

“I’m sorry,” said Thaxton, politely.

“I hear, on good authority, that it was you who blackballed me,”
continued Osmun, his spectacled eyes glaring wrathfully on his
neighbor. “And I’ve come to ask why you did it. In fact, I demand to
know why.”

“I’m disobedient, by nature,” said Thaxton, idly. “So if I had
blackballed you, I’d probably refuse to obey your ‘demand.’ But as
it happened, I didn’t blackball you. I wasn’t even at the Membership
Committee’s meeting.”

“I hear, on good authority, that _you_ blackballed me,” insisted Osmun,
his glare abating not at all.

“And I tell you, on better authority, that I didn’t,” returned Thaxton
with a lazy calm that irked the angry man all the more.

“Then who did?” mouthed Osmun. “I’ve a right to know. I mean to get to
the bottom of this. If a club, like the Stockbridge Hunt, blackballs a
man of my standing, I’ll know why. I--”

“I believe the proceedings of Membership Committee meetings are
supposed to be confidential,” Thaxton suggested. “Why not take your
medicine?”

“I still believe it was you who blackballed me!” flamed Osmun. “I had
it from--”

“You have just had it from me that I didn’t,” interposed Thaxton, a
thread of ice running through his pleasant voice. “Please let it go at
that.”

“You’re the only man around here who would have done such a thing,”
urged Creede, his face reddening and his voice rising. “And I am going
to find out why. We’ll settle this, here and now. I--”

Thaxton rose lazily from his perch on the rail.

“If you’ve got to have it, then take it,” he said, facing Osmun. “I
wasn’t at the meeting. But Willis Chase was. And I’ll tell you what
he told me about it, if it will ease your mind. He said, when your
name was voted on, the ballot-box looked as if it were full of Concord
grapes. There wasn’t a single white ball dropped into the box. I’m
sorry to--”

“That’s a lie!” flamed Osmun.

Thaxton Vail’s face lost all its habitual easy-going aspect. He took a
forward step, his muscles tensing. But before he could set in whizzing
action the fist he had clenched, a slender little figure stepped, as
though by chance, between the two men.

The interloper was a girl; wondrous graceful and dainty in her white
sport suit. Her face was bronzed, beneath its crown of gold-red hair.
Her brown eyes were as level and honest as a boy’s.

“Aren’t you almost ready, Thax?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting, down
at the courts, ever so long while you sat up here and gossiped. Good
morning, Oz. Won’t you scurry around and find some one to make it
‘doubles’? Thax and I always quarrel when we play ‘singles.’ Avert
strife, won’t you, by finding Greta Swalm, or some one, and joining us?
Please do, Oz. We--”

Osmun Creede made a sound such as might well be expected to emanate
from a turkey whose tail feathers are pulled just as it starts to
gobble. Glowering afresh at Vail, but without further effort at
articulate speech, he turned and stumped away.

Doris Lane watched him until his lean form was lost to view around the
corner of the veranda. Then, wheeling on Thaxton, with a striking
change from her light manner, she asked:

“What was the matter? Just as I came out of the door I heard him tell
you something or other was a lie. And I saw you start for him. I
thought it was time to interrupt. It would be a matter for the Board of
Governors, you know, here on the veranda, with every one looking on.
What was the matter?”

“Oh, he thought I blackballed him, for the Hunt Club,” explained
Thaxton. “When, as a matter of fact, I seem to be about the only member
who didn’t. I told him so, and he said I lied. I’m--I’m mighty glad you
horned in when you did. It’s always a dread of mine that some day I’ll
have to thrash that chap. And you’ve saved me from doing it--this time.
It’d be a hideous bore. And then there’d be good old Clive to be made
blue by it, you know. And besides, Uncle Oz and his dad were--”

“I know,” she soothed. “I know. You won’t carry it any further, will
you? Please don’t.”

“I suppose not,” he answered. “But, really, after a man calls another a
liar and--”

“Oh, I suppose that means there’ll be one more neighborhood squabble,”
she sighed, puckering her low forehead in annoyance. “And two more
people who won’t see each other when they meet. Isn’t it queer? We
come out to the country for a good time. And we spend half that time
starting feuds or stopping them. People can live next door to each
other in a big city for a lifetime, and never squabble. Then the moment
they get to the country--”

“‘All Nature is strife,’” quoted Thaxton. “So I suppose when we get
back to Nature we get back to strife. And speaking of strife, there
was a girl who was going to let me beat her at tennis, this morning;
instead of spending the day scolding me for being called a liar. Come
along; before all the courts are taken. I want to forget that Oz Creede
and I have got to cut each other, henceforth. Come along.”

On the following morning, appeared a little “human interest” story,
in the Pittsfield _Advocate_. One of those anecdotal newspaper yarns
that are foredoomed to be “picked up” and copied, from one end of the
continent to the other. Osmun Creede had written the story with some
skill. And the editor had sent a reporter to the courthouse to verify
it, before daring to print it.

The article told, in jocose fashion, of the clause in old Osmun Vail’s
will, requiring his great-nephew and heir to maintain Vailholme, at
request, as a hotel. An editorial note added the information that a
copy of the will had been read, at the courthouse, by an _Advocate_
reporter, as well as Thaxton Vail’s signed acceptance of its conditions.

It was Clive Creede who first called Thaxton’s notice to the newspaper
yarn. While young Vail was still loitering over his morning mail, Clive
rode across from Rackrent Farm, bringing a copy of the _Advocate_.

“I’m awfully sorry, old man,” he lamented, as Thaxton frowningly read
and reread the brief article. “Awfully sorry and ashamed. I guessed
who had done this, the minute I saw it. I phoned to Oz, and charged
him with doing it. He didn’t deny it. Thought it was a grand joke. I
explained to him that the story was dead and forgotten; and that now he
had let you in for no end of ridicule and perhaps for a lot of bother,
too. But he just chuckled. While I was still explaining, he hung up the
receiver.”

“He would,” said Thaxton, curtly. “He would.”

“Say, Thax,” pleaded Clive, “don’t be too sore on him. He means all
right. He just has an unlucky genius for doing or saying the wrong
thing. It isn’t his fault. He’s built that way. And, honest, he’s a
tremendously decent chap, at heart. Please don’t be riled by this
newspaper squib. It can’t really hurt you.”

The man was very evidently stirred by the affair; and was wistfully
eager, as ever, to smooth over his brother’s delinquencies. Yet,
annoyed by what he had just read, Thaxton did not hasten, as usual, to
reassure his chum.

“You’re right when you say he has ‘an unlucky genius for saying the
wrong thing,’” he admitted. “The last ‘wrong thing’ was what he said to
me yesterday. He called me a liar.”

“_No!_ Oh, Lord, man, no!”

“Before I could slug him or remember he was your brother, Doris Lane
strolled in between us, and the war was off. You might warn him not to
say that particular ‘wrong thing’ to me again, if you like. Because,
next time, Doris might not be nearby enough to stave off the results.
And I’d hate, like blazes, to punch a brother of yours. Especially when
he’s just getting on his feet after a sickness. But--”

“I wish you’d punch _me_, instead!” declared Clive. “Gods, but I’m
ashamed! I’ll give him the deuce for this. Won’t you--is there any use
asking you to overlook it--to accept my own apology for it--and not to
let it break off your acquaintance with Oz? It’d make a mighty hit with
me, Thax,” he ended, unhappily. “I think a lot of him. He--”

Thaxton laughed, ruefully.

“That’s the way it’s always been,” he grumbled. “Whenever Oz does or
says some unspeakably rotten thing, and just as he’s about to get in
trouble for it, you always hop in and deflect the lightning. You’ve
been doing it ever since you were a kid. There, stop looking as if some
one was going to cut off your breathing supply! It’s all right. I’ll
forget the whole thing--so far as my actions towards Oz are concerned.
Only, warn him not to do anything to make me remember it again. As for
this mess he’s stirred up, in the _Advocate_, I can’t see what special
effect it’ll have. Uncle Oz was too well loved, hereabouts, for it to
make his memory ridiculous.”

       *       *       *       *       *

But, within the day, Thaxton learned of at least one “special effect”
the news item was to have. At four o’clock that afternoon, he received
a state visit from a little old lady whom he loved much for herself and
more for her niece. The visitor was Miss Hester Gregg, Doris’s aunt
and adoptive mother.

“Please say you’re glad to see me, Thax,” she greeted Vail. “And please
say it, _now_. Because when you hear what I’ve come for, you’ll hate
me. Not that I mind being hated, you know,” she added. “But you lack
the brain to hate, intelligently. You’d make a botch of it. And I like
you too well to see you bungle. Now shall I tell you what I’ve come
for?”

“If you don’t,” he replied, solemnly, “I shall begin hating you for
getting my curiosity all worked up, like this. Blaze away.”

“In the first place,” she began, “you know all about our agonies, with
the decorators, at Stormcrest. You’ve barked your shins over their
miserable pails and paper-rolls, every time you’ve tried to lure Doris
into a dark corner of our veranda. Well, I figured we could stay on,
while they were plying their accursèd trade. I thought we could retreat
before them, from room to room; and at last slip around them and take
up our abode in the rooms they had finished, while they were working on
the final ones. It was a pretty thought. But we can’t. We found that
out, to-day. We’re like old Baldy Tod, up at Montgomery. He set out to
paint his kitchen floor, and he painted himself into a corner. We’re
decorated into a corner. We’ve got to get out, Doris and I, for at
least a week; while they finish the house. We’ve nowhere to live. Be it
never so jumbled there’s no place at home--”

“But--”

“We drove over to Stockbridge, to-day, to see if we could get rooms in
either of the hotels. (We’ll have to be near here; so I can oversee
the miserable activities of the decorators, every day.) No use. Both
hotels disgustingly full of tourists. The return of all you A. E. F.
men and the post-war rush of cash-to-the-pocket-book have jammed every
summer resort on earth. We tried at Lenox and Lee and we even went over
to Pittsfield. The same everywhere. Not an inn or a hotel with a room
vacant. Then--”

“Hooray!” exulted Vail. “Stop right there! I have the solution. You and
Doris come over here! I’ve loads of room. And it’ll be ever so jolly to
have you--both. _Please_ come!”

“My dear boy,” said the old lady, “that’s just what I’ve been leading
up to for five minutes.”

“Gorgeous! But when are you going to get to the part of your visit
that’s due to make me hate you? Thus far, you’ve been as welcome as
double dividends on a non-taxable stock. When does the ‘hate’ part
begin?”

“It’s begun,” she said. “Now let me finish it. I saw the _Advocate_
story, this morning. I’d almost forgotten that funny part of the will.
But it gave me my idea. I spoke of it to Doris. She was horrified. And
that confirmed my resolve. Whenever modern young people are horrified
at a thing, one may know that is the only wise and right thing to do.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, crestfallen. “Doesn’t she want to come
here? I hoped--”

“Not the way _I’m_ coming,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “I’m not coming to
visit Vailholme as a guest. I’m coming here to board!”

She paused to let him get the full effect of her words. He got them.
And he registered his understanding by a snort of disdain.

“Your great-uncle,” she resumed, defiantly, “put that clause in his
will for the benefit of wayfarers up here who could pay and who
couldn’t get any other accommodations. That fits my case precisely.
So it’ll be great fun. Besides, I loathe visiting. And I really enjoy
boarding. So I am coming here, for a week, with Doris. To board. Not as
a guest. _To board._ So _that’s_ settled. We will be here about eleven
o’clock, to-morrow morning.”

She gazed in placid triumph at the bewildered young man.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” he sputtered. “You’re the oldest
friends I’ve got--both of you are. And it’ll be _great_ to have you
stay here from now till the Tuesday after Eternity. But you’re not
going to board. That’s plain idiocy.”

“Thax,” she rebuked. “You are talking loudly and foolishly. We are
coming to board with you. It’s all settled. I settled it, myself. So
I know. We’re coming for a week. And our time will be our own, and we
won’t feel under any civil obligations or have to be a bit nicer than
we want to. It’s an ideal arrangement. And if the coffee is no better
than it was, the last night we dined here, I warn you I shall speak
very vehemently to you about it. Coffee making is as much an art as
violin playing or administering a snub. It is not just a kitchen chore.
We shall stay here,” she forestalled his gurgling protest, “under
an act of Legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The law
demands that a landlord give us hotel accommodations, until such time
as we prove to be pests or forget to pay our bills. We--”

“Bills!” stammered Thaxton. “Oh, murder!”

“That brings me to the question of terms,” she resumed. “There will
be Doris and myself and Clarice, my personal maid. (Clarice has the
manners of a bolshevist and the morals of a medical student. But she
has become a habit with me.) We shall want a suite of two bedrooms and
a sitting room and bath for Doris and myself. And we shall need some
sort of room for Clarice. A cage will do, for her, at a pinch. I’ve
been figuring what you ought to charge me; and I’ve decided that a fair
price would be--”

“So have I,” interrupted Thaxton, a glint of hope brightening his
embarrassment. “I’ve been figuring on it, too. On the price, I mean.
Man and boy, I’ve been thinking it over, for the best part of ten
seconds. I am the landlord. And as such I have all sorts of rights, by
law; including the right to fix prices. Likewise, I’m going to fix it.
If you don’t like my rates, you can’t come here. That’s legal. Well,
my dear Miss Gregg, on mature thought, I have decided to make special
rates for you and your niece and Clarice. I shall let you have the
suite you speak of, per week, with meals (and coffee, such as it is)
for the sum of fifteen cents per day--five cents for each of you--or
at the cut rate of one dollar weekly. Payable in advance. Those are my
terms. Take them or leave them.”

He beamed maliciously upon the old lady. To his surprise, she made
instant and meek answer:

“The terms are satisfactory. We’ll take the rooms for one week, with
privilege of renewal. I don’t happen to have a dollar, in change, with
me, at the moment. Will you accept a written order for one dollar; in
payment of a week’s board in advance?”

“As I know you so well,” he responded, deliberating, “I think I may
go so far as to do that. Of course, you realize, though, that if the
order is not honored at the bank, I must request either cash payment or
the return of your keys. That is our invariable rule. And now, may I
trouble you for that order?”

From her case Miss Gregg drew a visiting card and a chewed gold pencil.
She scribbled, for a minute, on the card-back; then signed what she had
written; and handed the card to Thaxton. He glanced amusedly at it;
then his face went idiotically blank. Once more, his lips working, he
read the lines scribbled on the back of the card:

“_Curator of Numismatic Dept., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City:--Please deliver to bearer (Mr. Thaxton Vail) upon proper
identification, the silver dollar, dated 1804, which I placed on
exhibition at the Museum.--Hester Gregg._”

“The 1804 dollar!” he gasped. “That’s a low-down trick to play on me!”

“Why?” she asked, innocently. “It is worth at least its face value. In
fact--as you may recall--my father paid $2,700 for it. When I placed it
on view at the Museum, the curator told me its present value is nearer
$3,600. You see, there are only three of them, extant. So, since you
really insist on $1 a week for our board, it may as well be paid with a
dollar that is worth the--”

“I surrender!” groaned Thaxton.

“You’d have saved so much trouble--people _always_ would save
themselves so much trouble,” she sighed, plaintively, “by just letting
me have my own way in the first place. Thaxton, I am going to pay you
$200 a week, board. As summer hotel rates go, now, it is a moderate
price for what we’re going to get. And I’ll see we get it. We’ll
be here, luggage and all, at about eleven in the morning. And now
suppose you ring for Horoson. I want to talk to her about all sorts of
arrangements. You’d never understand. And you’d only be in the way,
while we’re talking. So, run out to the car. I left Doris there. Run
along.”

Summoning his housekeeper,--who had also kept house for Osmun
Vail,--Thaxton departed bewilderedly to the car where Doris was
awaiting her aunt’s return.

“Are you going to let us come here, Thax?” hailed the girl, eagerly. “I
do hope so! I wanted, ever so much, to go in while Auntie was making
her beautifully preposterous request. But she said I mustn’t. She said
there might be a terrible scene; and that you might use language. She
said she is too innocent to understand the lurid things you might say,
if you lost your temper; but that I’m more sophisticated; and that it’d
be bad for me. _Was_ there a ‘terrible scene,’ Thax?”

“Don’t call me ‘Thax!’” he admonished, icily. “It isn’t good form to
shower familiar nick-names on your hotelkeeper. It gives him a notion
he can be familiar or else that _you’re_ trying to be familiar. It’s
bad, either way. Call me ‘Mine Host.’ And in moments of reproof, call
me ‘Fellow.’ If only I can acquire a bald head and a red nose and a bay
window (and a white apron to drape over it) I’ll be able to play the
sorry rôle with no more discomfort than if I were having my backteeth
pulled. In the meantime, I’m as sore as a mashed thumb. What on earth
possessed her to do such a thing?”

“Why, she looks on it as a stroke of genius!” said Doris. “Any one can
go visiting. But no one ever went boarding in this way, before. It’s
just like Auntie. She’s ever so wonderful. She isn’t a bit like any one
else. Aren’t you going to be at all glad to have us here?”




CHAPTER III

AN INVOLUNTARY LANDLORD


Thaxton Vail was eating a solitary breakfast, next morning, when,
wholly unannounced, a long and ecstatic youth burst in upon him. The
intruder was Willis Chase, who had roomed with Thaxton at Williams and
who still was his fairly close and most annoyingly irresponsible friend.

“Grand!” yelled Chase, bearing down upon the breakfaster. “Grand and
colossal! A taxi-bandit is dumping all my luggage on the veranda, and
your poor sour-visaged butler is making awful sounds at him. I didn’t
bring my man. I didn’t even bring my own car. I taxied over from the
club, just as I was; the moment I read it. I knew you had plenty
of cars here; and the hotel valet can look after me. I’m inured to
roughing it. Isn’t it a spree?”

“If you’ll stop running around the ceiling, and light somewhere, and
speak the language of the country,” suggested the puzzled Thaxton,
“perhaps I can make some guess what this is all about. I take it
you’re inviting yourself here for a visit. But what you mean by ‘the
hotel valet’ is more than I--”

“Don’t you grasp it?” demanded Chase, in amaze. “Haven’t you even read
that thing? It was in one of the New York papers, at the club, this
morning. A chap, there, said it was in the _Advocate_, yesterday. Your
secret has exploded. All the cruel world knows of your shame. You run
a hotel. You have to; or else you’d lose Vailholme. It’s all in the
paper. In nice clear print. For everybody to read. And everybody’s
reading it, ever so happily. I’m going to be your first guest. It all
flashed on me, like--”

“Then switch the flash off!” ordered Thaxton, impatiently. “This crazy
thing seems to hit you as a grand joke. To me, it hasn’t a single
redeeming feature. Clear out!”

“My worthy fellow,” reproved Chase, “you forget yourself. You run a
hotel. Your hotel is not full. I demand a room here. I can pay. By law,
you cannot refuse to take me in. If you do, I shall bring an attorney
here to enforce my rights. And at the same time, I shall bring along
ten or eleven or nineteen of the Hunt Club crowd, as fellow-guests; to
liven things for the rest of the summer. Now, Landlord, do I stay; or
do I not?”

Vail glowered on his ecstatically grinning friend, in sour abhorrence.
Then he growled:

“If I throw you out, it’d be just like you to bring along that howling
crowd of outcasts; and all of you would camp here on me for the season.
If you think it’s a joke, keep the joke to yourself. If you insist on
butting in here, you can stay. Not because I want you. I don’t. But
you’re equal to making things fifty times worse, if I turn you out.”

“I sure am,” assented Chase, much pleased by the compliment to his
powers. “Maybe even seventy-eight times worse. And then some--_et puis
quelque_, as we ten-lesson boulevardiers say. So here we are. Now, what
can you do for me in the way of rooms, me good man? The best is none
too good. I am accustomed to rare luxury in my own palatial home, and I
expect magnificent accommodations here.”

Thaxton’s grim mouth relaxed.

“Very good,” he agreed. “Miss Gregg and Doris are due here, too, in an
hour or so. They have picked out my best suite. But--”

“They are? Glory be! I--”

Thaxton proceeded:

“As landlord, I have the right to put my guests in any sort of room I
choose to; and to charge them what price I choose. If my guests don’t
like that, they can get out. I have all manner of rooms, you know; from
my own to the magenta. Do you remember the magenta room, by any chance?”

“Do I?” snorted Chase, memory of acute misery making him drop
momentarily his pose. “_Do_ I? Didn’t I get that room wished on me,
six years ago, when your uncle had the Christmas house party; and
when I turned up at the last minute? I remember how the dear old chap
apologized for sticking me in there. Every other inch of space was
crowded. I swear I believe that terrible room is the only uncomfortable
spot in this house of yours, Thax. I wonder you don’t have it turned
into a storeroom or something. Right over the kitchen; hot as Hades and
too small to swing a cat in, and no decent ventilation. Why do you ask
if I ‘remember’ it? Joan of Arc would be as likely to forget the stake.
If you’re leading up to telling me the room’s been walled in or--”

“I’m not,” said Vail. “I’m leading up to telling you that that’s the
room I’m assigning to you. And the price, with board, will be one
hundred dollars a day. Take it or leave it. As--”

A howl from Chase interrupted him.

“Take it or leave it,” placidly repeated Vail. “In reverse to the order
named.”

“You miserable Shylock!” stormed Chase. “And after I worked it all out
so beautifully! Say, listen! Just to spite you and to take that smug
look off your ugly face, I’m going to stay! Get that? I’m going to
_stay_! One day, anyhow. And I’ll take that hundred dollars out of your
hide, somehow or other, while I’m here! Watch if I don’t. It-- What you
got there?” he broke off.

Thaxton had pulled out an after-breakfast cigar and had felt in vain
for the cigar-cutter which usually lodged in his cash pocket. Failing
to find it, he had fished forth a knife to cut the cigar-end. It
was the sight of this knife which had caught the mercurial Chase’s
interest. Thaxton handed it across the table for his friend’s
inspection.

“It’s a German officer’s army knife,” he explained. “Clive Creede
brought it home with him, from overseas, for me. There aren’t any more
of them made. It weighs a quarter-pound or so, but it has every tool
and appliance on earth tucked away, among its big blades. It’s the
greatest sort of knife in the world for an outdoor man to carry, in the
country.”

Chase, with the curiosity of a monkey, was prying open blade after
blade, then tool after tool, examining each in childlike admiration.

“What’s this for?” he asked, presently, after closing a pair of folding
scissors and a sailor’s needle; and laboriously picking open a long
triangular-edged instrument at the back of the knife. “This blade, or
whatever it is. It’s got a point like a needle. But it slopes back to
a thick base. And its three edges are razor-sharp. What do you use it
for?”

“I don’t use it for anything,” replied Vail. “I don’t know just what
it’s for. It’s some sort of punch, I suppose. To make graduated holes
in girths or in puttee-straps or belts. Vicious looking blade, isn’t
it? The knife’s a treasure, though. It--”

“Say! About that magenta room, now! Blast you, can’t I--?”

“Take it or get out! I hope you’ll get out. It--”

A shadow, athwart the nearest long window, made them turn around.
Clive Creede was stepping across the sill, into the room. He was pale
and hollow-eyed; and seemed very sick.

“Hello, old man!” Vail greeted him. “You came in, like a ghost. And you
look like one, too. Was it a large night or--?”

“It was,” answered Clive, hoarsely, as he turned from shaking hands
with his host and with Chase. “A very large night. In fact it came
close to being a size too large for me. I got to fooling with some
new monoxide gas experiments in that laboratory of Oz’s and mine. No
use going into details that’d bore you. But I struck a combination by
accident that put me out.”

“You look it. Why--?”

“Oz happened to drop in. He found me on the lab floor; just about gone
for good. He lugged me out of doors and worked over me for a couple
of hours before he got me on my feet. The whole house,--the whole of
Rackrent Farm, it seems to me,--smells of the rotten chemical stuff. I
got out, this morning, before it could keel me over again. The smell
will hang around there for days, I suppose. It--”

“Why in blazes should a grown man waste time puttering around with
silly messes of chemicals?” orated Chase, to the world at large. “At
best, he can only discover a new combination of smelly drugs. And at
worst, he can be croaked by them. Not that research isn’t a grand
thing, in its way,” he added. “I used to do a bit of it, myself. For
instance, last month, I discovered one miraculously fine combination,
I remember: A hooker of any of the Seven Deadly Gins, and one-- No,
that’s wrong! Two parts Jersey applejack to one part French--”

He broke off in his bibulous reminiscences, finding he was not listened
to. Thaxton solicitously had helped Clive to a chair and was pouring
him a cup of black coffee. The visitor appeared to be on the verge of
serious collapse.

“Did Doc Lawton think it was all right for you to leave the house while
you’re so done up?” asked Vail.

“I didn’t send for him. Oz pulled me through,” returned Clive, dully.
“Then I piked over here. I couldn’t stay there, in that horribly smelly
place, could I?”

He shuddered, in reminiscence, and gulped his coffee.

“It’ll be days before the place is fit to live in again,” he said. “The
gases have permeated--”

“I’d swap the magenta room for it, any time,” put in Chase, unheeded.

Clive continued:

“Oz brought me as far as your door, in his runabout. He had an idea he
wouldn’t be over-welcome here, so he went on. He wanted me to stay at
Canobie, with him, till I can go back home. But-- Well, when I’m as
knocked out as this, I don’t want to. Oz is all right. He’s a dandy
brother, and a white pal. But he has no way with the sick. He--”

“I know,” said Thaxton, as Clive halted, embarrassed. “I know.”

“You see,” added Clive, “I don’t want you to think I’m a baby, to go
to pieces like this. But the fumes seem to have caught me where I was
gassed, at Montfaucon. Started up all the old pain and gasping and
faintness, and heart bother and splitting headache again. I’ve heard it
comes back, like that. The surgeon told me it might. And now I know it
does. It’s put me pretty well onto the discard. But a few days quiet
will set me on my feet.”

“So you rolled over here, first crack out of the box?” suggested Willis
Chase. “By way of keeping perfectly quiet?”

“No,” denied Clive, looking up, apologetically, from his second cup of
black coffee. “I came over to sponge on Thax, if he’ll let me. Thax,
will it bother you a whole lot if I stay here with you for a few days?
I won’t be in the way. And I know you’ve got lots of room, and nobody
else is stopping with you. I don’t want to put it on the ‘hotel’ basis.
But that’s what gave me the nerve to ask--”

“Rot!” exclaimed Thaxton, in forced cordiality. “What’s the use of all
that preamble? You’re knocked off your feet. You can’t stay at home.
Every inn is full, for ten miles around. I can understand your not
wanting to stay with Oz. If you hadn’t come here, I’d have come after
you. Of course, you must stay.”

As a matter of fact, all Vail’s boyhood friendship for the invalid was
called upon, to make the invitation sound spontaneous. He liked Clive.
He liked him better than any other friend. Ordinarily, it would have
been a joy to have him for a house-guest. The two men had always been
congenial, even though they had seen less of each other since their
return from France and had abated some of the oldtime boyish chumship.

Yet with Doris Lane coming to Vailholme, the host had dreamed of long
uninterrupted hours with her. And now the presence of this other
admirer of hers would block most of his golden plans. Yet there was
no way out of it. In any event Willis Chase’s undesired arrival had
wrecked his hopes for sweet seclusion. So the man made the best of the
annoying situation and threw into his voice and manner the cordiality
he could not put into his heart.

He was ashamed of himself for his sub-resentment that this sick
comrade of his should find no warmer welcome, in appealing to him for
hospitality. Yet the dream of having Doris all to himself for hours
a day had been so joyous! While he could not rebuff Clive as he had
sought to rebuff Willis Chase, yet he could not be glad the invalid had
chosen this particular time to descend upon Vailholme.

Sending for Mrs. Horoson, his elderly housekeeper, he bade her prepare
the two east rooms for Clive’s reception.

“Say!” Chase broke in on the instructions. “You told me that measly
magenta room was the only one you had vacant!”

“I did not,” rasped Thaxton. “I told you it was the only one _you_
could have. And it is. I hope you won’t take it. If I’d had any sense
I’d have said the furnace room was the only one I’d give you. That or
the coal cellar.”

“Never mind!” sighed Chase, with true Christian resignation. “What am
_I_, to complain? What am _I_?”

“I’d hate to tell you,” snapped Thaxton.

“What are you charging Clive?” demanded Willis.

“A penny a year. Laundry three cents extra. He--”

“Miss Gregg, sir. Miss Lane,” announced the sour-visaged butler, from
the dining room doorway.

Thaxton arose wearily and went to meet his guests. All night he had
mused happily on the rare chance which was to make Doris and himself
housemates for an entire rapturous week--a week, presumably, in which
Miss Gregg should busy herself on long daily inspection visits to
Stormcrest. And now--an invalid and a cheery pest were to shatter that
lovely solitude.




CHAPTER IV

TWO OR THREE INTRUDERS


Yet luncheon was a gay enough meal. All the guests were old friends,
and all were more or less congenial. Thaxton’s duties as host were in
no way onerous, except when Willis Chase undertook to guy him as to
his anomalous position as hotelkeeper--which Chase proceeded to do at
intervals varying from two minutes to fifteen.

In the afternoon, Miss Gregg was forced to drive across to Stormcrest,
to superintend the first touches of the decorators to her remaining
rooms. Clive made some excuse for retiring shakily to his own rooms
for a rest. Willis Chase had to go back to Stockbridge on urgent
business--having found, on unpacking, that in his haste he had brought
along all his evening clothes except the trousers.

Thus, for an hour or so, Vail had Doris Lane to himself. They idled
about the grounds, Vail showing the girl his new sunken garden and his
trout hatcheries. Throughout the dawdling tour they talked idly and
blissfully, and withal a whit shyly, as do lovers on whom the Great
Moment is making ready to dawn. At their heels paced Vail’s dark sable
collie, Macduff.

The sky was hazy, the air was hot. Weather-wise Berkshire folk would
have prophesied a torrid spell, the more unbearable for the bracing
cool of the region’s normal air. But the hot wave had merely sent this
mildly tepid day as a herald.

To the lounging young folk in the garden it carried no message. Yet at
whiles they fell silent as they drifted aimlessly about the grounds.
There was a witchery that both found hard to ignore.

Rousing herself embarrassedly from one of these sweet silences, Doris
nodded toward the big brown collie, who had come to a standstill in
front of a puffy and warty old toad, fly-catching at the edge of a rock
shelf.

The dog, strolling along in bored majesty in front of his human
escorts, had caught the acrid scent of the toad and was crouching
truculently in front of it, making little slapping gestures at the
phlegmatic creature with his white forepaws and then bounding back, as
if he feared it might turn and rend him.

It was quite evident that Macduff regarded his encounter with that
somnolent toad as one of the High Dramatic Moments of his career.
Defiantly, yet with elaborate caution, he proceeded to harry it from a
safe distance.

“What on earth makes him so silly?” asked Doris as she and Vail paused
to watch the scene--the dog’s furry and fast-moving body taking up the
entire narrow width of the path. “He must have seen a million toads, in
his time.”

“What on earth made you cry, the evening we saw Bernhardt die, in
_Camille_, when we were kids?” he countered, banteringly. “You knew
she wasn’t really dead. You knew she’d get into her street clothes and
scrub the ghastliness off her face and go out somewhere and eat a big
supper. But you wept, very happily. And I had to give you my spare
handkerchief. And it had a hole in it, I remember. I was hideously
mortified. Every time I went to the theater with you, after that, I
carried a stock of brand-new two-dollar handkerchiefs, to impress you.
But you never cried, again, at a play. So that’s all the good they did
me. Of course, the one time you cried, I had to be there with the last
torn handkerchief I ever carried. Remember?”

“I remember I asked you why Mac is so silly about that toad,” she
reproved him, “and you mask your ignorance of natural history and of
dog-psychology by changing the subject.”

“I did not!” he denied, with much fervor. “I was leading up in a
persuasive yet scholarly way to my explanation. You knew Bernhardt
wasn’t dying. Yet you cried. Mac knows that toad is as harmless as
they make them. Yet he is fighting a spectacular duel with it. You
entered into the spirit of a play. He’s entering into the spirit of a
perilous jungle adventure. You cried because an elderly Frenchwoman
draped herself on a sofa and played dead. He is all het up, because
he’s endowing that toad with a blend of the qualities of a bear and
a charging rhinoceros. That’s the collie of it. Collies are forever
inventing and playing thrillingly dramatic games. Just as you and I are
always eager to see thrillingly dramatic plays. It isn’t really silly.
Or if it is, then what are people who pay to get thrills out of plays
they know aren’t true and out of novels that they know are lies? On the
level, I think Mac has a bit the best of us.”

“Why doesn’t he bring the sterling drama to a climax by annihilating
the toad so we can get past?” she demanded, adding, “Not that I’d let
him. That’s why I’m waiting here, while he blocks the path, instead of
going around him.”

“If that’s all you’re waiting for,” he reassured her, “your long wait
has been for nothing. No rescue will be needed. Mac will never touch
the toad.”

“Does Mac know he won’t, though?”

“He does,” returned Vail, with finality. “Every normal outdoors dog, in
early puppyhood, undertakes to bite or pick up a toad. And no dog ever
tried it a second time. A zoölogy sharp told me why. He said toads’
skins are covered with some sort of chemical that would make alum taste
like sugar, by contrast. It’s horrible stuff, and it’s the toad’s only
weapon. No dog ever takes a second chance of torturing his tongue with
it. That’s why Mac keeps his mouth shut, every time he noses at the
ugly thing. The toad is quite as safe from him as Bernhardt was from
dying on the elaborate _Camille_ sofa. Mac knows it. And the toad knows
it. If toads know anything. So nobody’s the worse for the drama.... One
side there, Mac! You’re a pest.”

At the command, the collie gave over his harrowing assault, and
wandered unconcernedly down the path ahead of them, his plumed tail
gently waving, his tulip ears alert for some new adventure.

“Remember old Chubb Beasley?” asked Thaxton. “He lived down on the Lee
Road.”

“I do, indeed,” she made answer. “He used to be pointed out to us by
our Sunday School teacher as the one best local example of the awful
effects of drink. What about him?”

“He owned Macduff’s sire,” said Vail. “A great big gold-and-white
collie--a beauty. Chubb used to go down to Lee, regularly, every
Saturday, to spend his pay at the speak-easy booze joint in the back
of Clow’s grocery. The old chap used to say: ‘If I c’d afford it, I’d
have a batting average of seven night a week. As it is, I gotta do my
’umble best of a Sat’dy night.’ And he did it. He came home late every
Saturday evening, in a condition where the width of the road bothered
him more than the length of it. And always, his loyal old collie was
waiting at the gate to welcome him and guide his tangled footsteps up
the walk to the house.”

“Good old collie!” she applauded. “But--”

“One night, Beasley got to Clow’s just as the saloon was raided by the
Civic Reform Committee. He couldn’t get a drink, and he spent the
evening wandering around looking for one. He had to go back home, for
the first Saturday night in years, dead cold sober. The collie was
waiting for him at the gate, as usual. Chubb strode up to him on steady
unwavering legs and without either singing or crying. He didn’t even
walk with an accent. The faithful dog sprang at the poor old cuss and
bit him. Didn’t know his own master.”

Macduff’s histrionic display, and the story it had evoked, dispersed
the sweet spell that had hung over the man and the maid, throughout
their leisurely walk. Subconsciously, both felt and resented the
glamour’s vanishing, without being able to realize their own emotions
or to guess why the ramble had somehow lost its dreamy charm.

They were at the well-defined stage of heart malady when a trifle
will cloud the elusive sun, and when a shattered mood cannot be
reconstructed at will.

Doris became vaguely aware that the afternoon was hot and that her nose
was probably shiny. Instinctively, she turned toward the house.

Vail, unable to frame an excuse for prolonging the stroll, fell into
step at her side, obsessed by a dull feeling that the walk had somehow
been a failure and that he was making no progress at all in his suit.

As they made their way houseward across the rolling expanse of
side-lawn, they saw a huge and dusty car drawn up under the
porte-cochère. On the steps was a heap of luggage. A chauffeur stood by
the car, stretching his putteed legs, and smoking a furtive cigarette;
the machine’s bulk between him and the porch.

In the tonneau lolled a fat and asthmatic-looking old German police dog.

On the veranda, in two wicker chairs drawn forward from their wonted
places, lolled a man and a woman swathed in yellow dust-coats. The man
was enormous, paunchy, pendulous, sleek. The woman was small and dark
and acerb. They were chatting airily, as Vail and Doris drew near.

In front of them wavered Vogel, the butler, trying to get in a word
edgewise, as they talked. Back of the doorway, in the hall, could be
seen the shadowy forms of the second man and a capped maid, listening
avidly.

At sight of Thaxton, the butler abandoned his vain effort to interrupt
the strangers and came in ponderous haste down the stone steps and
across the lawn to meet his employer.

“Excuse me, sir,” began Vogel, worriedly, “but might I speak to you a
minute?”

Doris, with a word of dismissal to her escort, moved on toward the
house, entering by a French window and giving the queerly occupied
front veranda a wide berth.

“Well?” impatiently asked Vail, vexed at the interruption and by the
presence of the unrecognized couple on the porch. “Well, Vogel? What is
it? And who are those people?”

For reply, the butler proffered him two cards. He presented them, on
their tray, as if afraid they might turn and rend him.

“They are persons, sir,” he said, loftily. “Just persons, sir. Not
people.”

Without listening to the distinction, Thaxton Vail was scanning the
cards. He read, half aloud:

“_Mr. Joshua Q. Mosely._” Then, “_Mrs. Joshua Q. Mosely, 222 River
Front Terrace, ... Tuesdays until Lent._”

“Interesting, if true. I should say, offhand, it ought to count them
about three, decimal five,” gravely commented Vail. “But it’s nothing
in _my_ young life. I don’t know them.”

“No, sir,” agreed Vogel. “You would not be likely to, sir. Nobody
would. They are persons. Most peculiar persons, too. I think they are
a bit jiggled, sir, if I might say so. Unbalanced. Why, sir, they
actually thought this was an hotel!”

“Huh?” interjected Vail, with much the same sound as might have been
expected from him had some one dug an elbow violently into his stomach.
“Huh? What’s that, Vogel? Hotel?”

“Yes, sir. That’s why I took the liberty of asking to speak to you
alone. I fancied you would not wish Miss Lane to hear of such a
ridiculous--”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, sir, they came here, some five minutes ago, and ordered Francis
to conduct them to ‘the desk.’ He could not understand, sir, so he came
to me, and I went out to see what it meant. They told me they wished
rooms here; for themselves and for their chauffeur. And for that stout
gray dog in the car. They were most unnecessarily unpleasant, sir, when
I told them this was no hotel. They insist it is. They say they know
all about it. And they demand to see the proprietor. I was arguing
with them when I saw you coming. Would it be well, sir, if I should
telephone the police station at Aura or--?”

“No,” groaned Vail. “I’ll see them. You needn’t wait.”

Bracing himself, and cursing his loved great-uncle’s eccentricity,
and cursing a thousand times more vehemently the mischief-act of
Osmun Creede, the unhappy householder walked up the veranda steps and
confronted the two newcomers.

On the way he planned to carry off the situation with a high hand and
to get rid of the couple as quickly as might be. Whistling to heel
Macduff, the collie, who showed strong and hostile signs of seeking
closer acquaintance with the fat police dog, he advanced on the couple.

“Good afternoon,” he said, briskly, as he bore down on the big man and
the small woman. “I am Thaxton Vail. What can I do for you?”

“I am Joshua Q. Mosely,” answered the enormous man, making no move
to rise from the easy chair from whose ample sides his fat bulk was
billowing sloppily. “What are your rates?”

“Rates?” echoed Vail, dully.

“Yes,” replied Mosely. “Your rates--American plan--for an outside room
and board for Mrs. M. and myself and a shakedown, somewhere, for
Pee-air.... Pee-air is our chauffeur. How much?”

“Please explain,” said Vail, bluffing weakly.

“Yep,” nodded Joshua Q. Mosely. “He said you’d try to stall. Said you
were queer that way. But he said if I stuck to it, I’d get in. Said he
could prove you weren’t full up. So I’m sticking to it. How much for--?”

“Who are you talking about?” queried Vail. “Who’s ‘he’? And--”

“Here’s his card,” responded Joshua Q. Mosely, groping in an inner
pocket. “Met him on the steps of the Red Lion--at Stockbridge, you
know--this morning. They’d told us they hadn’t a room left there. Same
thing at Haddon Hall. Same thing at Pittsfield. Same thing at Lenox.
Same at Lee. Full everywhere. Gee, but you Berkshire hotel men must be
making a big turnover, this season! Yep, here’s his card. Thought I’d
lost it.”

He fished out a slightly crumpled oblong of stiff paper and handed
it to Vail. Thaxton read: “_Mr. Osmun Creede, ‘Canobie,’ Aura,
Massachusetts._”

“We were coming out of the Red Lion,” resumed Joshua Q. Mosely.
“Figured we’d have to drive all the way to Greenfield or maybe to
Springfield, before we could get rooms. We didn’t want to do that. We
wanted another day in this region and then make the thirty-mile run to
Williamstown and back to North Adams and over the Mohawk Trail to--”

“Quite so,” cut in Vail. “What has all this to do with--?”

“I was coming to that. We were standing there on the steps, jawing
about it, the wife and me, when up comes this Mr. Creede. He’d been
sitting on the porch there and he’d overheard us. He hands me his card
and he says: ‘You can get into Vailholme if you’re a mind to,’ he says.
‘Most excloosive hotel in the Berkshires. Not like any other place in
America. Best food. Best rooms. They never advertise. So they aren’t
full up,’ he says. ‘They try to keep folks away. But give Mr. Vail this
card and tell him I’ll know who to go to with information if he refuses
to take in people who can’t get accommodations elsewhere; and he’ll
take you in.’ I thought maybe he was jollying me.”

“I--”

“He looked kind of funny while he talked to me,” prattled Mosely,
unheeding. “So I asked the day clerk at the Red Lion about it. The
clerk said he knew you run a hotel, because he’d read about it in
the paper. And he guessed you weren’t full up. So here I came. And
your--your head waiter, I s’pose he is, he told me you didn’t have but
four folks stopping here with you just now. So that means you’ve got
rooms left. What rates for--”

A despairing grunt from Vail checked at last the flow of monologue.
Thaxton was aware of a deep yearning to hunt up Osmun Creede and murder
him. Well did he understand the inner meaning of Creede’s hint as to
the lodging of information in case Vail should refuse to obey the terms
of the will whereby he held tenure of Vailholme. And he knew Osmun was
quite capable of keeping his word.

Vailholme was dear to Thaxton. He was not minded to lose it through
any legal loophole. He was profoundly ignorant of the law. But he
remembered signing an agreement to fulfill all the conditions of his
great-uncle’s will before assuming ownership of the property.

“I am obliged,” he said, haltingly, “to take in any travelers who can
pay my prices. Probably that is what Mr. Creede meant. But I have no
adequate provision--or provisions--for guests. I don’t think you’d care
for it, here; even for a single day. Why not go on to North Adams, to
the--”

“No, thanks, friend,” disclaimed Joshua Q. Mosely, with a leer of
infinite cunning. “This isn’t the first time the wife and I have been
steered away from excloosive joints. We know the signs. And we want to
stop here. So here we stop. For the night, anyhow. We know our rights.
And we know the law. Now, once more, what’s your rates for us? Put a
price on the--”

“Your chauffeur will have to bunk in at one of the rooms over the
garage,” said Vail, morbidly aware that the butler and a maid and the
second man were still listening from the hallway. “And I can’t give you
and Mrs. Mosely a room with a bath. I’ll have to give you one without.
And you’ll have to eat at the only table I have--the table where I and
my four personal guests will dine.”

“That’s all right,” pleasantly agreed the tourist. “We’re democratic,
Mrs. M. and me. We’ll put up with the best we can get. How much?”

“For all three of you,” said Thaxton, “the lump price will be--let’s
see--the lump price will be two hundred dollars a day.”

Joshua Q. Mosely gobbled. His lean little wife arose and faced him.

“It’s just like all these other excloosive places, Josh!” she shrilled.
“He’s trying to lose us. Don’t you let him! We’ll stay. It’ll be worth
two hundred dollars just to spite the stuck-up chap. We’ll stay, young
man. Get that? We’ll _stay_. If you knew anything about Golden City,
you’d know two hundred dollars is no more to my husband than a plugged
nickel would be worth to one of you Massachusetts snobs. We’re ‘doing’
the Berkshires. And we’re prepared to be done while we’re doing it. We
can afford to. Have us shown up to that room.”

Lugubriously Vail stepped to the hall door.

“Vogel,” he said, as a vanishing swarm of servants greeted his advent,
“show these people up to the violet room. Have Francis help their
chauffeur up with the luggage. Then have Gavroche take the chauffeur to
one of the garage rooms.”

He spoke with much authority; and forcibly withal. But he dared not
meet the fishy eye of his butler. And he retreated to the veranda
again, as soon as he had delivered the order.

“It’s all up,” he announced to Willis Chase, three minutes later, as
this first of his unwelcome guests alighted from a Stockbridge taxi,
bearing a bagful of the forgotten sections of his apparel. “Here’s
where I decamp. If I can’t get some inn to put me up for the night,
I’ll take a train for New York.”

“And leave us to our fate?” queried Chase, disgustedly.

“Precisely that. And I hope it’ll be a miserable fate. What do you
suppose has happened?”

Briefly, bitterly, he told of the arrival of the Moselys. Willis Chase
smiled in pure rapture. Then his face fell as he asked concernedly:

“And you say you’re getting out and deserting us?”

“Why not? It’ll be horrible. Fancy those two unspeakable vulgarians
sitting down to dinner with one! Fancy having to meet Vogel’s righteous
wrath! Fancy--”

“Fancy walking out on us!” retorted Chase. “Fancy leaving a girl like
Doris Lane to the mercies of the Moselys’ society at dinner! Fancy what
she’ll think of you for deserting her and her aunt, like a quitter,
when your place is at the head of your own table! Fancy leaving a
disorganized household that’ll probably go on strike! We’ve paid our
board. Are you going to welsh on us? Poor old Clive Creede is sick and
all shot to pieces. He came here to you for refuge. Going to leave him
to--?”

“No,” groaned Thaxton. “I suppose not. You’re right. I can’t. I’ve got
to stay and see it out. If I valued Vailholme any less than I value my
right arm, though, I’d let Uncle Oz’s fool conditions go to blazes.
Say! Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot as Tophet and I’m tired. But it’ll
be better than meeting Vogel till I have to. Let me put that off as
long as I can. Something tells me he is going to be nasty. And that
means he’ll probably organize a strike. Come along, Macduff!” he bade
the collie. “Stop nosing at that obese German dog in the car and come
here!”

“Why can’t real-life butlers be like the dear old stage butlers?”
sighed Chase, sympathetically, as he and Vail slunk, with guilty haste,
down the veranda steps and across the lawn. “Now if only Vogel were on
the stage, he’d come to you, with an antique ruffled shirt and with
his knees wabbling, and he’d say: ‘Master, I’ve saved up a little out
of my wages, this past ninety years that I’ve served your house. I
know you’re in trouble. Here’s my savings, Master! Maybe they’ll help.
And I’ll keep on working my poor hands to the bone for you, without
any wages, God bless your bonny face!’ That’s what he’d say. And he’d
snivel a bit as he said it. So would the audience.”

“Faster!” urged Vail, with a covert look over his shoulder. “He’s
standing on the steps, looking after us. Hit the pace!”




CHAPTER V

ROBBER’S ROOST, UNINCORPORATED


From a roadhouse two miles away Thaxton called up Mrs. Horoson, his
housekeeper. Without giving her a chance to protest he told her there
would be six, besides himself, for dinner that night and that a Mr. and
Mrs. Mosely were occupying the violet room.

He bade her break the news to Miss Gregg, on the latter’s imminent
return from Stormcrest, and to Miss Lane. Then he hung up,
precipitately, and rejoined Chase in the road.

“Let’s hustle!” he adjured. “She may find where we are from Central and
follow us. I can count on Horoson not to decamp even if the servants
do. But every now and then I feel toward her as I used to when I was a
kid and she caught me stealing Uncle Oz’s cigarettes. Hurry!”

It was within a half hour of dinner time when Vail and Chase, by
devious back ways, returned to Vailholme and let themselves in at a
rear door, preparatory to creeping upstairs to their rooms to dress for
the seven-o’clock meal.

The dinner ordeal was one of unrelieved hideousness. But for gallant
old Miss Gregg, the situation must have fallen asunder much sooner than
it did. Thaxton Vail, at the table’s head, writhed in misery. He had
absolutely no idea how to handle the unhandleable situation.

It was Miss Gregg who, unasked, took control of everything. Being
wholly fearless, she had no normal terror of the austere Horoson or of
the ever-sourer-visaged Vogel.

During the endless wait before dinner was announced she slipped out
to the dining room. Thaxton was there, flustered and curt, trying
to coerce his rebellious upper servants into setting the wheels of
domestic machinery into motion.

Vogel already had given warning, proclaiming briefly but proudly
the list of his former super-excellent positions, and repeating, as
a sort of eternal slogan of refrain that he was a butler and not a
boarding-house head waiter.

It was at this point that Hester Gregg took charge.

Grateful and sweating, Vail went back to the living room to listen
gloomily to the Moselys’ recital to Chase and Doris of the various inns
at which they had been either cheated or incompetently served. Though
the couple did not say so in actual words, Thaxton was left to infer
that Vailholme combined the worst qualities of all their tour’s other
wretched stopping places.

As he listened to the tale, Miss Gregg swept into the room again with
the pure exaltation in her eyes of one who has triumphed in a seemingly
hopeless battle. Presently thereafter Vogel announced dinner.

As the party filed stragglingly into the dining room, Clive Creede
came downstairs and joined them. He seemed a little better for his
afternoon’s rest, but still looked sick and shaky.

Thaxton’s collie, as usual, accompanied Vail to the dining room, lying
down majestically on the floor at the host’s left. From the shelter of
Joshua Q. Mosely’s bulk appeared the obese police dog, who also had
followed into the dining room. He disposed himself in a shadowy space,
behind Mrs. Mosely’s chair, where every passing servant must stumble
unseeingly over him.

“I hope you don’t mind our bringing Petty to dinner with us,” said
Joshua Q., as they sat down. “He’s quite one of the family. The wife
would as soon travel without her powder rag as without Petty. He goes
everywhere with us. Nice collie you’ve got there. I notice you had to
speak pretty firm to him, though, to keep him from pestering poor
Petty. Collies aren’t as clever at minding as police dogs. Had him
long?”

“He was bred by Mr. Creede, here,” answered Thaxton. “When Mr. Creede
went overseas, he left him at Vailholme.”

“And when I got back,” put in Clive, speaking for the first time, and
addressing Doris, “Macduff had clean forgotten me and had adopted Thax.
So I let him stay on here. Funny, wasn’t it? I’ve heard collies never
forget. I suppose that’s another nature fake. For Macduff certainly had
forgotten me. At least, he was civil to me, but he’d lost all interest
in me.”

Then fell a pause. Miss Gregg arose to the occasion by starting the
conversation-ball to rolling again.

“I think,” she said, “there ought to be a S. P. C. A. law against
naming animals till they’re grown. People call a baby pup ‘Fluffy’
or ‘Beauty.’ And then he grows up to look like Bill Sikes’ dog. For
instance, there’s nothing ‘petty’ about that big police dog. Yet when
he was a--”

“Oh,” spoke up Mrs. Mosely, “his name isn’t really ‘Petty.’ ‘Petty’ is
short for ‘Pet.’ His real name’s ‘Pet.’ He--”

Willis Chase cleared his throat portentously. Leaning far across the
table, he addressed the miserable Thaxton.

“Landlord!” he began, in awful imitation of the pompous Joshua Q.
Mosely. “Landlord, me good man, I--”

“Shut up!” snarled Vail, under his breath, glaring murderously.

A smile of utter sweetness overspread Willis Chase’s long countenance.

“Tut, tut!” he chided, patronizingly. “Don’t cringe, when I address
you, my honest fellow! Don’t be servile, just because I am a gentleman
and your own lot is cast among the working classes. I have every
respect for the dignity of labor. I don’t look down on you. In Heaven’s
sight all men are equal--landlords and gentlemen and day laborers and
plumbers and senators and bootleggers and authors and--”

“That sounds fine in theory, Mr.--Mr. Case, is it?” boomed Joshua Q.
“But it don’t work out always in real life. Not that I look down on a
man just because he’s got to run an inn or a boarding house to make a
living. Nor yet I don’t really look down on day laborers. Nor yet on
plumbers. Not even on authors--when they keep their place. But what’s
it to profit those of us who’ve made good and won our way to the
leisure classes, as you might say? What’s it to profit us if we’re to
be put on a level with folks who get paid for serving us? Money’s got
to count for _something_, hasn’t it? If a man’s got the brain and the
genius and the push to pile up a fortune, don’t he deserve to stand a
notch higher than the boob who ain’t--who _hasn’t_? Don’t he? Position
means something. It--”

“And family, too!” chimed in Mrs. Mosely, with much elegance of
diction. “I always tell Mr. M. that family counts every bit as much
as money, or it ought to. Even in these democratic days. I believe in
family. I don’t boast of it. But I believe in it. While I don’t brag
about my grandfather being the first Governor of--”

“Grandfathers!” sighed Willis Chase, ecstatically. “Now you’ve touched
my own hobby, Mrs.--Mrs. Mousely. I--”

“Mosely,” corrected Joshua Q., with much dignity. “And--”

“To be sure,” apologized Chase, meekly. “My mistake. But I murmur
‘Amen!’ to all you say about family and grandfathers. I even go a step
beyond. I even believe in pride of _great_-grandfathers.”

“Why--why, cert’nly,” assented Mrs. Mosely, albeit with a shade less
assurance. “Of course. And--”

“My own great-grandfather,” expounded Willis, unctuously, “my own
great-grandfather, Colonel Weilguse Chase, was the first white man to
be hanged in New Jersey. Not that I brag unduly of it. Yet it is sweet
to remember, in this age of so-called equality.... Landlord, these
trout are probably more or less fit to eat. But my doctor forbids me to
guzzle fish. I wonder if I might trouble you to order a little fried
tripe for me? I am willing to pay extra for it, of course. Nothing sets
off a dinner like a side dish of fried tripe. Or, still better, a nice
juicy slice of roast shoulder of tripe. But, speaking of family--”

“I’m afraid you don’t just get my point, Mr. Case,” interposed
Mrs. Mosely. “I mean about family. I don’t believe in pride of
ancestors--merely _as_ ancestors. But I believe in being proud
of ancestors who achieved something worth while. Do you see the
distinction?”

“Certainly,” agreed Chase, with much profundity. “And I feel the same
way. Now, out of all the millions of white men, great and small, who
from time to time have infested New Jersey, there could be but _one_
‘first white man’ hanged there. And that startling honor was reserved
for my own great-grandfather. Not that I brag of it--as I said. But
people like you and myself, Mrs. Mousely, can at least be honestly
proud of our ancestors. Now, I suppose our genial landlord here--”

“Luella!” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely, in sudden comprehension. “This--this
person is pokin’ fun at you. I’ll thank you, young man--”

“Speaking of family,” deftly intervened Miss Gregg, while Mosely
and Vail, from opposite sides of the table, looked homicide at the
unruffled Chase, “speaking of family, Clive, you remember the Bacons,
who used to live just beyond Canobie, don’t you? Your father asked
pompous old Standish Bacon if he happened to be descended from Sir
Francis Bacon. He answered: ‘Sir Francis left no descendants. But if he
had, I should be one of them.’ He--”

“If Mr. Case thinks it is a gentlemanly thing to insult--” boomed
Joshua Q., afresh.

“That’s just like Bacon,” cut in Clive Creede, coming to the old
lady’s rescue. “My father used to say--”

Then he fell silent, as though his tired mind was not equal to further
invention. He did not so much as recall the possibly mythical Bacon,
and he had not the energy to improvise further.

But Miss Gregg’s mind was never tired, nor was her endurance-trained
tongue acquainted with weariness. And before Mosely could boom his
protest afresh, she was in her stride once more.

“You’re right,” she assured Clive. “He was just that sort. If Standish
Bacon had lived in Bible times, he’d never have been content to be one
of the Apostles. He’d have insisted on being all twelve of them and a
couple of the High Priests thrown in. Doris, you’ll remember the time I
told him that?”

“Yes,” assented the girl, breaking involuntarily into the queer little
child-laugh that Vail loved. “I do, indeed. And I remember what he
answered. He--”

“If Mr. Case--” blustered the undeterred Mosely.

“I’d forgotten that part of it,” purred Miss Gregg, ignoring Joshua
Q. “I remember now. He said, in that stiff old-fashioned way of his:
‘Madam, you exaggerate. Yet in all modesty I may venture to believe
that if I had lived in Bible times, my unworthy name might have had the
honor to be mentioned in that Book of Books. Lesser folk than myself
were mentioned there by name. Fishermen and tanners and coppersmiths
and the like.’”

“No?” exploded Vail. “Did Bacon really say that? The old windbag! And
you let him get away with it, Miss Gregg? I should have thought--”

“No,” replied the old lady, complacently. “I can’t say I really ‘let
him get away with it.’ At least, not very far away. I’m afraid I even
lost my gentle temper, and that for once in my life I was just a
little rude. I said to him: ‘Why, Standish Bacon, you couldn’t have
gotten your name in Holy Writ if you’d lived through every one of its
books. You couldn’t even have gotten in by name if you’d broken up one
of St. Paul’s most crowded meetings at Ephesus. The best mention you
could have hoped to get for that would have been a verse, tucked away
somewhere in the middle of a chapter, in the Epistle to the Ephesians.
A verse like this: “_And it came to pass in those days that a Certain
Man of Ephesus busted up the meeting!_”’ Bacon didn’t like it very
well. But he--”

Joshua Q. Mosely and his glaringly indignant wife had been shut out of
the talk as skillfully as Miss Gregg’s ingenuity could devise. But mere
ingenuity cannot forever hold its own against a bull-bellow voice. Now
as the old lady still rambled on, Joshua Q. burst forth again:

“Excuse me for speaking out of turn, as the feller said!” he declaimed.
“But I want this Case person to know-- Hey, there!” he broke off, in
dismay. “What’s happenin’?”

For again the substance of his diatribe was shattered.

This time the needed and heaven-sent interruption did not come from
Miss Gregg, but from Macduff and Petty.

Thaxton, absent-mindedly, had tossed a fragment of trout to Macduff
on the floor beside him. He had long since dropped into the habit of
giving the collie surreptitious tidbits during the course of a meal.
Macduff was wont to accept them gravely, and he never begged.

But to-night, from his post behind Mrs. Mosely’s chair, the ever-hungry
police dog caught sight of the tossed morsel. He lumbered forward to
grab it. Macduff daintily picked up and swallowed the food, a second
before Petty could seize it.

Angry at loss of the prize and at another dog daring to get ahead of
him, Petty launched himself at the unsuspecting collie, driving his
teeth into Macduff’s fur-armored neck.

The collie resented this egregious attack by writhing out from under
his assailant, wrenching free from the half-averted grip, and flying at
the police dog’s throat.

In a flash of time an industrious and rackety dog fight was in progress
all over the dining room.

One of the maids screeched. Every one jumped up. A chair was overturned
bangingly. Mrs. Mosely shrieked:

“The brute is murdering poor darling Petty! _Help!_”

Excited past all caution, she dashed between the rearing and roaring
combatants just as Thaxton Vail recovered enough presence of mind to
shout imperatively to his collie.

At the command Macduff ceased to lay on. Turning reluctantly, he
walked back to his master. Joshua Q. Mosely, meantime, had flung his
incalculable weight upon the bellicose Petty, pinning the luckless
police dog to the floor. The fight was over.

Mrs. Mosely’s shrill voice, raised in anguish, soared above the hubbub.

“He’s bitten me!” she cried, nursing a bony finger whose knuckle bore a
faint abrasion from the glancing eyetooth of one of the warriors. “That
wretched collie has bitten me!”

Then it was that Joshua Q. Mosely proved himself a master of men and of
situations. Holding the fat police dog by the studded collar, he drew
himself to his full height.

“Come up to the room, Luella!” he bade his hysterical wife. “I’ll
wash out the cut for you and bind it up nice. If it’s bad, we’ll have
a doctor for it. As for you,” he continued, glowering awesomely upon
Vail, “you’re just at the first of what you’re going to get for this.
You tried to keep us from stopping here. Then you egged on one of your
other guests to insult Mrs. M. at the table. And now your dog attacks
ours and then bites my wife. We’re going to the room. To-morrow morning
we’ll have breakfast in it. You can send up the bill at the same time.
Because I don’t mean to sully my eyes or Mrs. M.’s by looking on your
face again. As soon as breakfast’s over we are leaving. At the first
police station I shall lodge complaint against you for maintaining a
vicious dog, a menace to public safety. And I’m going to write this
whole affair to my counsel and instruct him to institoot action. Come,
Luella.”

Out of the room they strode, Petty lugged protestingly along between
them. Miss Gregg broke the instant of dread silence by saying
decisively:

“I’m not surprised. I make it a rule never to be surprised at
anything said or done by a man who calls his wife ‘Mrs. M.’ or ‘Mrs.
Any-Other-Initial,’ or who speaks of ‘_the_ room.’ And their fat dog
was the only one of them that didn’t eat fish with a knife. Just the
same, Willis, you ought to be spanked! I’m ashamed of you. It was
all your fault; for trying to be funny with people outside your own
class. That’s as dangerous as massaging a mule’s tail, and ten times as
inexcusable.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Chase, remorsefully. “Honestly, I am. The
only bright side to it is the man’s promise that we’ll not see either
of them again. I’m sorry, Thax. I--”

Down the stairs clattered two pairs of bumpily running feet. Into the
dining room burst a flamingly red and bellowing Joshua Q. Mosely, his
wife spluttering along at his heels.

“We been robbed!” squealed Mosely, too upset to remember to boom.

“_What?_” gasped Vail, as the others stared open-mouthed.

Mosely repeated his clarion announcement:

“Robbed! Mrs. M.’s jewel case pinched right out of her locked bag.
Twelve thousand dollars’ worth of joolry stolen. It was there when we
come down to dinner, and now it’s gone, and the bag is busted open. I--”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Thaxton. “You can’t have been
robbed--_here_! What--?”

“Can’t, hey?” roared Mosely, his emotion scaling to the secondary
stage. “Can’t, hey?” he reiterated as he advanced on Vail with swinging
fists. “Well, we _have_! You’ve had us cleaned out! You run a robber’s
roost here, you dirty thief!”

Furious past further articulate words, Joshua Q. shook a hamlike fist
in Thaxton’s astonished face. Vail stepped in under the flailing arm.
Then he proceeded, quietly and scientifically, to knock the giant down.

After which, everything happened at once.




CHAPTER VI

THE POLICE AND THE DUKE OF ARGYLE


Ten minutes later they trailed downstairs from a mournful inspection of
the violet room. There could be no doubt as to the truth of what Joshua
Q. Mosely had told them. The smallest of the traveling bags heaped in a
corner of the room had been broken open. So had the flimsy lock of the
chased silver jewel box it contained.

The thief, apparently, had made brief examination of the various bags
in the jumbled heap until he had come upon the only one that was
locked. Then with a sharp knife or razor he had slit the russet leather
along the hinge, had thrust his hand in and had drawn forth the silver
box. It had been absurdly simple to force the lock of this. Probably it
had yielded to the first heave of the knifeblade in the crack under the
lid.

The window screens had not been disturbed, nor were the vines outside
broken or disarranged. Mosely declared he had left locked the room
door when he came down to dinner; and had pocketed the key. Clive
Creede’s comment on this information was to go to the door of the next
room, extract its key and fit it in the door of the violet room. It
turned the wards with entire ease.

“Most of the doors in private houses,” said Clive, by way of
explanation, “have standard uniform locks. Any one who wanted to get in
here could have borrowed the key of any door along the hallway. You say
you found the door wide open when you came back?”

“Yep,” said Mosely, unconsciously nursing his fast-swelling jawpoint.
“That’s what made us suspicious. So we switched on the light. And there
was this bag, on top of the rest, all bust open. So we--”

He refrained from repeating, for the ninth time, his entire windy
recital and mutteringly followed the others down to the living room.

“You look kind of tuckered out, young man,” he said, not unkindly, to
Clive as he and Creede brought up the rear of the procession.

“I am,” replied Clive. “This shock and the scene at dinner and the dog
fight and your mix-up with Vail--well, they aren’t the best things for
a sick man. They’ve started my head to aching again.”

“H’m! Too bad!” commented Mosely. “But not so bad as if you’d lost
$12,000 worth of good joolry.... I s’pose I spoke a little too quick
when I told Mr. Vail he was a crook and said he ran a robber’s roost.
But he had no call to knock me down. I didn’t carry it any further;
because I don’t believe in fisticuffs before ladies. But I warn you I’m
going to summons you folks as witnesses in the assault-and-battery suit
I bring against him. The young ruffian!”

“If you’re wise, Mr. Mosely,” suggested Clive, his usual calm manner
sharpening, “you’ll bring no suit. You’ll let that part of the matter
drop as suddenly as you yourself dropped. If we have to testify that
he knocked you down, we’ll also testify to what you called him and
that you shook your fist at him in what looked like a menace. Such a
gesture constitutes what lawyers call ‘technical assault.’ No jury will
convict Vail for self-defense. As for your loss--even if this were a
regular hotel--you surely must know a proprietor is not responsible for
valuables left in a guest’s room. I’m sorry for you. But you seem to
have no redress.”

Mosely glowered blackly. Then, without answering, he turned his back
on Creede and stamped into the living room.

“Telephoned the police yet?” he demanded of Vail.

“No,” said Thaxton. “Call them up yourself if you like. The main phone
is out there at the back of the hall. Call up the Aura police station.
I suppose we come within its jurisdiction more than Lenox’s.”

Mosely departed in search of the telephone. His wife stood in the
doorway, wringing her hands.

“Oh, if we’d only left Petty on guard up there!” she wailed. “We always
feel so safe when Petty is on guard! Mr. Vail, I’m certain this is an
inside job. It--”

“Yes,” assented Willis Chase. “That’s what the police are certain to
say, anyhow. When they can’t find out anything else, they always label
it an ‘inside job’ and behave as if that explained everything.”

“What is an ‘inside job’?” asked Creede. “It sounds familiar. But--”

“An inside job is a job the police can’t find a clue to,” explained
Chase. “So they leave the rest of the work to the detectives. That’s
the climax. When a policeman blows out his brains and survives, they
make a detective of him. Why, Thax, don’t you remember when the Conant
house was robbed and the--”

“Yes,” answered Vail, grinning at the memory. “I remember. That was the
time Chief Quimby’s box of safety matches got afire in his hip pocket
while he was on his hands and knees looking for clues. And you tried
to extinguish the blaze by kicking him. I remember he wanted to jail
you for ‘kicking an officer in pursuit of his duty.’ You said his hip
pocket wasn’t ‘out yet but seemed to be under control.’”

While they had been talking, Miss Gregg and Doris had come quietly
into the room. Both were a trifle paler than usual, but otherwise were
unruffled. A moment later Mosely returned from his telephone colloquy
with the police.

“The chief says he’ll be right over,” he reported. “He asked if any
other rooms had been robbed. And I felt like a fool, to have to tell
him we hadn’t even looked.”

“If you had waited a minute longer, before leaving the telephone,”
spoke up Miss Gregg, “you could have told him that at least one more
room had been ransacked. My niece and I stopped in our suite, on the
way down, just now. Her little jewel case and the chamois bag I kept
my rings and things in--both of them are gone.”

“Miss Gregg!” exclaimed Vail. “Not really? Oh, I’m so sorry! So--”

A babel of other sympathetic voices drowned his stammered condolences.
Out of the babel emerged Willis Chase’s query.

“Were they locked up?”

“Yes, and no,” returned Miss Gregg. “We locked them in the second
drawer of the dresser and hid the key. But being only normal women
and not Sherlockettes, of course we quite overlooked locking the top
drawer. The top drawer has been carefully taken out and laid on the
bed. And the case and the chamois bag have been painlessly extracted
from the second drawer. It was so simple! I quite envy the brain of
that thief. It is a lesson worth the price of the things he took--if
only they had belonged to some one else....

“Thax Vail!” she broke off indignantly. “Stop looking as if you’d been
slapped! You’re not going to feel badly about this. I forbid you to.
Here we all forced ourselves upon you, and turned your home upside
down, against your will! And if we’re the losers, it’s our own fault,
not yours. We--”

She stopped her efforts at consolation, catching sight of Clive Creede,
who slipped unobtrusively into the room. A minute earlier she had seen
him go out and had heard his step on the stairs.

“Well,” she challenged, as she peered up shrewdly into his troubled
white face. “Another county heard from? How much?”

Clive laughed, in an assumption of carelessness, and glanced
apologetically at Thaxton.

“Not much,” he made shift to answer the garrulous old lady. “Just a
little bunch of bills I’d left on my chiffonier and--and a watch.
That’s all.”

“The Argyle watch?” cried Miss Lane, in genuine concern. “Not the
Argyle watch. Oh, you poor boy!”

“What might the Argyle watch be?” acidly queried Mrs. Mosely. “It must
be something priceless, since it seems to stir you people up more than
our $12,000 loss. But then--of course--”

“The Argyle watch,” explained Doris, forestalling a hot rejoinder from
Vail, “is a big, old-fashioned, gold, hunting-case watch that the Duke
of Argyle offered as a scholarship prize once at the University of
Edinburgh. Mr. Creede’s father won it, as a young man. And it was his
dearest possession. I don’t wonder Mr. Creede feels so about its loss.
He--”

“The Duke of Argyle?” repeated Mosely, lifted momentarily from his
daze of grief by sound of so magic and familiar a name. “The one who
invented the scratching posts that made folks say ‘God bless the Duke
of Argyle’? I read about him in a book. Was he the same one?”

“No,” said Willis Chase, “this was the one who put up sandpaper pillars
on the border for Highlanders to rub the burrs off their dialect. He
was the laird of Hootmon Castle, syne aboon the sonsie Lochaber.”

Once more Mosely favored the flippant youth with a scowl of utter
disgust. Then, turning to the rest, he said:

“An idea has just hit me. I warn you I’m going to mention it to the
police as soon as they get here. We came down to this room before
dinner, and we had to wait around here for pretty near half an hour
before we were called in to eat. Mr. Vail, you sneaked out of the room
after we were here. And you were gone ten minutes or more. Long enough
to--”

“To rob all my guests?” supplemented Vail. “Quite so. I’m sorry to
spoil such a pleasant theory. But I was in the dining room trying to
quell a servile insurrection--trying to stave off a domestic strike--so
that you might get a decently appointed dinner instead of having to
forage in the ice box after the servants quit.”

“That’s your version, hey?” grated Mosely. “Most likely you can bribe
one or two of your servants to back it up, too.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mosely,” put in Miss Gregg, as Vail choked back a
retort. “I’m as sorry as Mr. Vail to spoil your perfectly beautiful
theory. But our sinning host happens to be telling the truth. In fact,
it is a habit of his. I know he’s telling the truth because I went
out there to reënforce him just as he was losing the battle against
butler and housekeeper combined, with the cook as auxiliary reserve. Of
course, _I_ may be bribed, too, in my testimony, for all you know. So
if you care to--”

“I never doubt a lady’s word, ma’am,” said Mosely with ponderous
gallantry.

“Why not?” insisted Miss Gregg. “It’s far safer than doubting Thaxton
Vail’s. To save my life, I couldn’t hit as clean a blow or as hard a
blow as the one that gave your chin that lovely mauve lump on it.
Thax, you’re something of a fool, but you’re something more of a man. I
never saw any one knocked down before. Except on the stage. I ought to
have been sickened by the brutal sight. But I confess it thrilled me. I
got the same reaction from it that I always get when the full _Messiah_
Chorus bursts into the ‘Hallelujah.’ It--”

“Auntie!” cried Doris, scandalized.

“So did _you_, for that matter!” accused the old lady. “Your eyes were
like a pair of overgrown stars. They--”

“Suppose,” broke in Doris, reddening painfully, “suppose the rest of
us see if the thief visited us. Then we can have a full report to make
when the chief comes. Let’s see--Auntie and I--the Moselys--Clive-oh,
yes--Willis Chase! Is--”

“I saw him start upstairs a second ago,” said Vail. “He--”

“And, by the way,” exclaimed Joshua Q., on new inspiration, “Case
didn’t come into the dining room till we had all sat down. He hurried
in later than--”

“Chase is always hurrying in ‘later than,’” said Miss Gregg. “It’s his
one claim to distinction. He is never on time anywhere. I’m afraid
your new theory won’t hold water any more than the other did, Mr.
Mosely.”

“If it comes to that,” suggested Clive Creede, “_I_ got downstairs
after all the rest of you did. Just as you were starting in to dinner.
I was almost as late as Chase. There’s as much reason to suspect me as
to suspect him, Mr. Mosely.”

“No,” denied Joshua Q., judicially, “there don’t seem to be. I can’t
agree with you. The cases might be the same, if you hadn’t lost money
and a watch. It isn’t likely you robbed yourself. Especially of a watch
like that Argyle one you think so much of. That watch seems to be
pretty well known to the other folks here. And if it’s known to them,
it must be known by sight to lots of others. After saying it was stolen
you couldn’t ever let it be seen again if you’d just pretended to steal
it. No, that lets you out, I guess.”

“Thanks,” said Creede. “I am glad you honor me with such perfect trust.”

He spoke crossly. His face was dead white and was creased with
pain-lines. Very evidently he was in acute suffering. Doris looked
at him with worried sympathy. Thaxton Vail saw the look, and he was
ashamed of the sharp pang of jealousy which cut into him.

Vail knew enough of women at large and of Doris Lane in particular to
realize that Clive Creede, bearing sickness and pain so bravely, was by
far a more dangerous rival than Clive Creede in the glow of health. He
was disgusted at himself for his own involuntary jealousy toward the
man who was his lifelong friend.

He moved over to where Clive stood wearily leaning against the wall.

“Sit down, old man,” he said, drawing a big chair toward him. “You’re
all in. This has been too much for you. We--”

“I beg to report,” interrupted Willis Chase, airily, coming back from
his tour of inspection, “I beg to report the total loss of a watch and
my roll and my extra set of studs. The watch was not given to my father
by the Duke of Argyle. But it was given to my father’s only son, by Mr.
Tiffany, as a prize for giving the said Mr. Tiffany a check for $275.
The transaction was carried on through one of his clerks, of course,
but that makes it none the less hallowed. Besides--”

“This seems to put it up pretty stiffly to the servants,” said Mosely.
“The police better begin with them. By the way, I suppose you’ve made
sure, Mr. Vail, that none of them could sneak away, before the chief
gets here.”

“No,” answered Thaxton, annoyed. “I never thought of it. But I’m
certain I can trust them. They have been with me a long time, most of
them. And--”

“Young man,” exhorted Mosely, from the depths of his originality, “if
you had had as much business experience as I’ve had you’d know it’s the
most trusted employee who does the stealing.”

“Naturally,” assented Miss Gregg. “Why not? The trusted employees are
the only ones who get a chance to handle the valuables. That’s one of
the truisms nobody thinks of--just as people praise Robin Hood because
he always robbed the rich and never molested the poor. Why should he
have molested the poor? If they’d been worth robbing, they wouldn’t
have been poor. And it’s the same with--”

The chug and rattle of a motor car at the porte-cochère checked her.
A minute later two men were ushered into the room by the awe-stricken
Vogel. They were Reuben Quimby, the Aura police chief, and one of his
constables.




CHAPTER VII

FAITH AND UNFAITH AND SOME MOONLIGHT


The lanky chief did not appear at all excited. Indeed, he and his
assistant went about their work with a quiet routine method that verged
on boredom. They made a perfunctory tour of the robbed rooms; then
they convened an impromptu court of inquiry in the living room, Quimby
bidding Vogel and Mrs. Horoson to collect the entire service staff of
house and grounds in the dining room and to herd them there until they
should be called for, one by one.

Then after listening gravely to Vail’s account of the affair and with
growing impatience to Joshua Q. Mosely’s longer and more dramatic
recital, Quimby announced that the interrogation would begin. Thaxton
was the first witness.

“Mr. Vail,” asked the chief, “what did _you_ lose? I don’t see your
list on this inventory of stolen goods you’ve made out for me.”

Vail looked blank.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “I never thought to look. I was so bothered
about the others’ losses I clean forgot--”

“Suppose you go and look now,” hinted the chief. “Be as quick as you
can. We’ll delay the interrogation till you come back.”

Thaxton returned to the improvised courtroom in less than three minutes.

“Not a thing missing, so far as I can see,” he reported. “And nothing
disturbed. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Chief. I seem to be the
only one who escaped a visit from the thief.”

Clive Creede had been slumping low in the chair which Vail had brought
him. Now, breathing hard, he got weakly to his feet and lurched through
the open French window out onto the moonlit veranda.

He made his exit so unobtrusively that no one but Doris Lane chanced
to note it. The girl, at sight of his haggard face and stumbling gait,
followed Creede out into the moonlight. She found him leaning against
one of the veranda pillars, drawing in great breaths of the cool night
air.

“Are you worse?” she asked in quick anxiety. “Why don’t you go to bed?
You’re not fit to be up.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” he declared, pluckily, as he straightened from
his crumpled posture. “Don’t worry about me. Only--the room was so
close and so crowded and so noisy--and I felt dizzy--and I had to come
out here for a lungful of fresh air. I’ll go back presently.”

She hesitated, as though about to return to the others. But the sick
man looked so forlorn and weak she disliked to leave him alone. Yet,
knowing how sensitive he was in all things regarding his health, she
masked her intent under pretense of lingering for a chat.

“I wonder if it was really an ‘inside job,’” she hazarded. “If it was,
of course it must have been one of the servants. And I hate to believe
that. We know every one else concerned, and we know we are all honest.
That is, we know every one but the Moselys. And they couldn’t very well
have done it, could they?”

“They couldn’t have done it at all,” he said, emphatically. “I know.
Because you said they were the first people in the living room, waiting
for dinner. I came down nearly half an hour later. I had overslept.
When I changed to dinner clothes, I left my watch and my cash on my
chiffonier. They were stolen. The Moselys had been downstairs a long
time. And they didn’t go up again till they went after that dog fight.
And then they weren’t gone two minutes before they came rushing back
to tell us they’d been robbed. Not long enough for them to ransack
a single unfamiliar room, to say nothing of my room and Chase’s and
yours. No, we must leave the Moselys out of it.”

“Then it must be one of the servants, of course,” decided Doris.

“I wish I dared hope so,” muttered Clive, almost too low for her to
catch the words.

“What do you mean?” she asked in surprise.

“I mean,” he said, wretchedly, “I mean it would be better to find out
that one of them had robbed us than if-- Oh, I don’t mean anything at
all!” he ended, in sulky anticlimax.

She stared at him with wonder.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “We’ve just proved it couldn’t
be any one but the servants, unless, of course, it was done by some
professional thief who got in. And that doesn’t seem likely.”

“No,” he said, shortly. “It doesn’t. It was done from the inside.
That’s proved.... Let’s talk about something else, shan’t we?”

But Doris’s curiosity was piqued by his eagerness to sheer away from
the theme.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

“Tell you what?” he countered, sullenly.

“Tell me whom you suspect,” returned Doris. “You suspect some one. I
know you do. Who is it?”

“I didn’t say I suspected any one,” he made troubled answer. “I’d
rather not talk about it at all, if you don’t mind.”

“But I _do_ mind,” she protested. “Why, Clive, all of us have been
living here in this corner of the Berkshires every summer since we were
born! We’ve all known one another all our lives. It’s--it’s a terrible
thing to feel that one of us may be a thief. Won’t you tell me whom you
suspect?”

Clive looked glumly down into her appealingly upraised face for a
moment. Then he squared his shoulders and spoke.

“You’ve asked for it,” said he, speaking between his shut teeth and
with growing reluctance. “I’d give ten years’ income not to tell
you--and I’d give ten years of my life not to believe it’s he.”

“Who?”

He hesitated. Then, a tinge of evasion in his unhappy voice, he replied:

“Every one of us was robbed.... Except one.”

She frowned, perplexed.

“What’s that got to do with it?” she asked. “Thax was the only one of
us who wasn’t robbed. That doesn’t answer my question at all.”

He said nothing.

“Clive Creede!” she burst forth, incredulously. “Do you mean to say you
are--are--_imbecile_ enough to believe such a thing of Thax? Why, I--
_Clive!_”

There was a world of amazed contempt in her young voice. The man
winced. Yet he held his ground doggedly.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I know, as well as you do, that
Thax didn’t do it through dishonesty or because he needed the money. He
has more cash now than he can spend. But--”

“Then why--”

“Either he did it as a mammoth practical joke or else--”

“Thax is not a practical joker,” she interpolated. “No one but a fool
plays practical jokes.”

“Or else,” he resumed, “he did it to get rid of his unwelcome guests.
That is the most likely solution.”

“The most likely solution,” she said hotly, “the _only_ sane solution
is that he didn’t do it at all. It’s absurd to think he did. He--”

“He is the only one of us who wasn’t robbed,” persisted Clive. “He is
the only one of us familiar enough with every room and every piece of
furniture to have gone through the house so quickly and so thoroughly,
taking only the most valuable things from each of them. Nobody else
would have had time to or a chance to. He is the only one of us who
could have been seen going from room to room without being suspected.
I thought of all that. But I wouldn’t believe it till he said himself
just now that he hadn’t been robbed. That proved it to me. That’s why I
came out here. It turned me sick to think--”

“Clive,” said the girl, quietly, “either the war or else those
exploding chemicals in your Rackrent Farm laboratory seems to have had
a distressing effect on your mentality. I’ve known you ever since I was
born. In the old days you could never have made yourself believe such a
thing of Thax Vail. You know you couldn’t. Oh, if--”

Her sweet voice trembled. She turned away, staring blindly out into the
moonlight.

“I’m sorry,” said Clive, briefly.

He hesitated, looking in distress at her averted head. Then with a
catch of the breath he turned and strode into the living room.

Doris took a step toward the French window to follow him. But there
were tears in her eyes, and she felt strangely shaken and unhappy from
her talk with Creede. She did not wish the others to see her until
she should have had time to recover her self-control. Wherefore she
remained where she was.

She was dully astonished that Clive’s disbelief in Vail should have
moved her so profoundly. She had not realized, until she heard him
attacked, all that Thaxton was coming to mean to her. A glimpse of this
new wonder-feeling had been vouchsafed her when she saw Vail knock down
a man so much larger and bulkier than himself. The sight had thrilled
her unaccountably. But it had been as nothing to the reaction at
hearing his honesty doubted.

Long she stood there, forcing herself to look in the face this
astounding situation wherein her heart had so imperceptibly floundered.
At last, turning from her blind survey of the moon-flooded lawn, she
moved toward the living room.

At her first step she paused. Some one was rounding the house from the
front, treading heavily on the rose-bordered gravel path that skirted
the veranda. Doris waited for the newcomer to draw nearer.

On came the heavy, fast-moving steps. And now they were mounting the
veranda’s side stair. In the moonlight, the face and body of a man were
clearly revealed.




CHAPTER VIII

THE INQUISITION


At first glance the man was Clive Creede. And Doris wondered how he
chanced to have left the house and to have approached the veranda in
such a roundabout way.

Then, as he stood before her, she saw he was not in dinner clothes, but
in a dark lounge suit. And as he lifted his soft hat at sight of her,
she saw his forehead was bald and that he wore spectacles. Also that
there was a sagging stoop to his shoulders and the hint of a limp in
his walk.

Clive’s twin brother was the last man she cared to meet in her present
tumultuous frame of mind. At best she had never been able to bring
herself to like him. Yet he had come too close now to be avoided
without rudeness.

As he recognized her, Osmun Creede took an impulsively eager step
forward.

“Why, Doris!” he exclaimed joyously. “This is better luck than I looked
for. What on earth are you doing at Vailholme? And why are you out
here all alone? Doesn’t the same moon that interests you interest Clive
or Vail?”

“Oh, you’ve come to see Clive?” she asked, trying to speak civilly and
not to let herself be annoyed by the man’s awkward attempts at banter.

“Yes,” said Osmun. “He’s stopping with Vail till his house gets
disinfected or loses the reek of some chemicals that made him sick. Why
he should choose to come here instead of to his own brother’s home,” he
added bitterly, “is a mystery to me. Probably he has his own reasons.
Anyhow, I came over to see if he is better and if there’s anything I
can do for him. I didn’t ring because I saw through the windows that
there’s a party of some kind going on. I saw a bunch of people in the
living room. And I’m in tramping clothes. I came around to the side
door, on the chance of finding a servant I could send upstairs to Clive
to find how he is.”

“Clive was out here five minutes ago,” she replied. “He went back to
the interrogation. I’ll--”

“Interrogation?” repeated Osmun, puzzled. “Is it a game? Or--?”

Briefly she outlined to the dumbfounded man the story of the evening’s
events. He listened, open-mouthed, his face, in the moonlight, blank
with crass incredulity. The instant she paused he began to hurl
questions at her. Impatiently she answered them. But in their mid-flow
she turned away and walked to the long window.

“I’m afraid I must go in,” she said, stiffly, his avid curiosity and
his evident relish of the affair jarring her unaccountably. “They may
want to interrogate me, too. The chief was going to examine us all, I
believe. You’ll excuse me?”

“I’ll do better than that,” he assured her. “I’ll come along. I
wouldn’t miss this thing for a million.”

Before she could deter him he had stepped past her and had flung wide
the French window. Standing aside, he motioned her to pass through.
She hesitated. Chief Quimby, catching sight of her on the threshold,
beckoned her in.

“We wondered where you were, Miss Lane,” said he. “We’ve been waiting
for you. Every one else has been questioned. Come in, please.”

Reluctantly she entered. Osmun Creede pressed in, at her heels, closing
the window behind him. The guests were seated in various parts of
the living room, one and all looking thoroughly uncomfortable. At a
table sat the chief. Beside him, holding an open note book, sat the
constable.

Through the doorway Doris could see in the hall a flustered group
of servants, babbling in excited whispers. One woman among them was
repeating snifflingly at intervals that she was a respectable working
girl and that never before in her life had any one asked her such a
passel of turrible questions and she was going to pack up and leave
right away and she’d have the law on them that had asked was she a
thief!

Quimby seemed to note the presence of this offstage chorus at the same
time as did Doris. For he turned to the housekeeper who stood primly in
a far corner:

“You can send them back to the kitchen quarters, Mrs. Horoson,” he
said. “I’m through with them for the present. Only see none of them
leave the house. Let them understand that any one who tries to sneak
out will be followed and arrested. I shall take it as an indication of
guilt. That is all, Mrs. Horoson. We shan’t need you or Vogel any more
either. Or if we do I’ll ring for you.”

“Where is Clive?” Osmun asked Willis Chase, who had greeted the
unpopular twin’s advent with the briefest of nods.

“Gone up to bed,” answered Chase. “Went up as soon as the chief had
finished asking him a handful of questions. Said he felt rotten. Looked
it, too. Chief excused him. He has the two East rooms, if you want to
go up and see him.”

“I shall, presently,” said Osmun. “This is too interesting to leave
just yet.”

He listened to the chief’s few queries of Doris as to the discovery
that her jewel box had been stolen. Doris replied clearly and to the
point, her testimony confirming in all details the story her aunt had
just told.

The last witness being examined, the lanky chief leaned back in his
chair beating a tattoo on his teeth with the pencil he carried. Then he
glanced at his notes and again at the inventory on the table before him.

“I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that all you people have told me the
truth. And I am inclined to believe the servants have done the same.
Taking into consideration their flurry and scare, they told remarkably
straight stories, and it seems clear that none of them were absent from
their duties in the kitchen or in the dining room long enough to have
run upstairs and robbed so many rooms and then to have gotten back
unnoticed. It seems none of them had even gone up so early to arrange
the bedrooms for the night. And there is positively no sign, outdoors
or in, that any professional thief broke into the house. Of course, a
closer search of the rooms and a search of the servants and of their
quarters--and of yourselves, if you will permit--may throw new light on
the case. But--”

He paused. On these summer people and on others of their clan depended
ninety per cent of Aura’s livelihood and importance. Quimby had tried,
therefore, to handle this delicate matter in such a way as to avoid
offense. And, thus far, he had not a ghost of a clue to go on.

“Search away--as far as I’m concerned,” spoke up Willis Chase, in the
short pause which followed. “Three times, on the Canadian border, I’ve
had my car searched for bootleg booze. And every time I hit the New
York Customs crowd, on my way back from Europe, they search my soiled
collars and trunkbottoms with the most loving care. So this’ll be no
novelty. Search.”

“I have a horrible feeling that all the stolen things are going to
be found on _me_,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “They would be, in a
nightmare, you know. And if this isn’t a nightmare I don’t know what
nightmare is. But search if you like. The sooner it’s over the sooner
we’ll wake up.”

“I speak for the good wife as well as for myself,” boomed Joshua Q.
Mosely, “when I say we shall do all in our power to uphold the law. We
are willing to be searched.”

He gazed about him with the rarefied air of one who has just consented
to part with life in the holy cause of duty.

“_I_ am not going to be searched.”

It was Thaxton Vail who said it. Every one turned with something akin
to a jump and stared marvelingly at him.

“I am not going to be searched,” he repeated, coming forward into the
strong glare of lamplight beside the table where sat the two officials.
“And I am not going to permit my guests to be searched. When I say ‘my
guests,’ I do not refer to Mr. and Mrs. Mosely, but to the friends whom
I have known all my life. They are under my roof. They have suffered by
being under my roof. Neither they nor myself shall be humiliated any
further. I’ve listened patiently to this comic opera interrogation, and
I have answered all questions put to me in the course of it. But I’m
not going to submit to the tom-foolery of a search. Please understand
that clearly, Chief.”

He sat down again. There was a confused rustle throughout the room.
Joshua Q. Mosely glared at him with fearsome suspicion. Quimby cleared
his throat, frowning. But before either could speak Osmun Creede had
come forward out of the shadows to the area of light by the table.

“Chief,” he said, his rasping voice cutting the room’s looser sounds
like a rusty file, “I’m the only person here who can’t possibly be
connected with the thefts. I didn’t get here till five minutes ago, and
I can prove by a dozen people that I was dining at the Country Club at
the time the things were stolen. So I can speak disinterestedly.”

“What’s the sense of your speaking at all?” grumbled Chase. “It’s no
business of yours.”

Unheeding, Osmun proceeded:

“Chief, you have established that some one in this house is a thief.
That thief, presumably, had to do his work mighty fast and presumably
he had no time to hide all his loot in a place safe enough to elude a
police hunt. He had only a minute or two to do it in. Therefore, the
chances are that the bulkier or less easily hidden bits of plunder are
still concealed on him. Perhaps all of it. Very good. It would be that
man’s natural impulse to resist search. Practically every one else
here has volunteered to submit to search. One man only has refused. By
an odd coincidence, that happens also to be the one man who was not
robbed. Figure it out for yourself. It--”

“Oz Creede!” Miss Gregg declaimed, as the rest still sat dazed into
momentary stillness at the unbelievable attack. “If you had the
remotest idea how utterly vile and worthless you are, you’d bite
yourself and die of hydrophobia.... I just thought I’d mention it,” she
added, apologetically, to Doris.

But Doris did not hear. The girl’s glowing eyes were on Thaxton Vail,
who had sprung to his feet and was advancing on his accuser.

“Oz,” said Vail, his voice muffled and not quite firm, “I promised your
brother I’d forget I had any grievance against you. May I trouble you
to leave here before I forget that promise?-- As quickly as you can,
please.”

“Hold on there!” blustered Joshua Q., billowing forward. “Hold on
there! There seems to me to be a lot in what this young feller says.
He talks sense, Mr. Vail. And I believe he’s right. This is no time to
go trying to carry things highhanded. Chief, I demand--”

He broke off short in the rolling utterances, his mouth ajar, his
little eyes bulging. Osmun Creede and Vail stood confronting each
other. With a gesture as swift as the strike of a rattlesnake Osmun
thrust out his right hand toward the left waistcoat pocket of Vail’s
dinner clothes.

Now he withdrew the questing hand and was holding it open for all to
gaze on. In its palm glowed dully a huge old hunting-case watch.

“I caught sight of a bulge in that pocket,” he rasped. “So I took a
chance at a search on my own account. Now I’ll go. Not because you’ve
ordered me out, Vail, but because I don’t care to stay under the same
roof with a man who robs his guests. Good-by.”

His words went unheard in the sudden babble of voices and the pressing
forward of the rest. Every one was talking at once. The chief peered,
hypnotized, at the watch Osmun had laid on the table in front of him.
Vail, after a moment of stark blankness, lurched furiously at Creede,
mouthing something which nobody could hear in the uproar.

The constable threw himself between Vail and the sardonically smiling
man. Before Thaxton could break free or recover his self-control Creede
had left the room. But, in the hallway outside, during the moment’s
hush which followed the clamor, all could hear his strident voice as he
shouted up the stairs:

“Clive! Come down here! Come down in a rush! The thief’s found!”

Again Vail took a furious step in pursuit, but again the constable
stepped officiously in front of him. And a second later the front door
slammed.

“Stay where you are, everybody!” commanded the chief, a new sternness
in his voice, as Willis Chase succeeded in working his way around the
constable and Vail and made for the hall. “Where are you going, Mr.
Chase?”

“I’m going to catch that swine!” yelled Willis, wrathfully, over his
shoulder, pausing in the living room doorway as he cleared the last
obstacle and sprang toward the hall. “I’m going to find him and bring
him back by the scruff of the neck. And--”

The constable took a belated step to stop him. Chase turned and bolted.
But as he did so, he collided violently with Clive Creede. Clive had
come downstairs at his brother’s shouted summons, just in time to
receive Chase’s catapult rush.

Under the impact the sick man staggered and would have fallen had not
Chase caught him. At the same time Thaxton Vail called sharply:

“Willis! Come back here! Don’t make a fool of yourself! Come back. I
don’t need any one to fight my battles for me. I can attend to this
myself.”

Apologizing to the breathless Clive for the unintended collision and
helping to steady the shaken man on his feet, Chase abandoned his plan
to overtake and drag Osmun back by force. Sullenly he returned to the
living room, Clive at his side. To the invalid’s puzzled questions he
returned no answer.

As they came in, Quimby was on his feet. His deferential manner was
gone. The glint of the man hunt shimmered beneath his shaggy gray brows.

“Sit down, everybody!” he commanded. “Mr. Vail, I said, _sit down_!
This case has taken a different turn. Let nobody leave the room.
Whitcomb,” to the constable, “stand at the door. Now then, we’ll
tackle all this from another angle. The time for kid glove questioning
is past.”

He eyed them sternly, his gaze focusing last on Thaxton Vail. Then, as
silence was restored, he picked up the watch and held it toward the
blinkingly wondering Clive.




CHAPTER IX

A LIE OR TWO


“Mr. Creede,” said he, “look carefully at this watch. Do you recognize
it?”

“Of course I do,” replied Clive. “It’s mine. How did--?”

“This watch, Mr. Creede,” said the chief, slowly, “has just been turned
over to me by your brother.”

“My brother?” asked Clive, surprised.

As he spoke his eyes searched the room, peering into the farther
shadows in quest of Osmun.

“He has gone,” said the chief, reading the glance. “But before he went
he pulled this watch out of the vest pocket of--Mr. Thaxton Vail.
You admit it is yours. The watch that was stolen from your room this
evening. Therefore--”

“Clive!” broke in Vail. “You know me well enough to--”

“Mr. Vail,” interrupted the chief, “it is my duty to warn you that
anything you say may be used against you. Now, then, Mr. Creede: You
have identified this watch as the one stolen from you. It was taken
from Mr. Vail’s pocket in the presence of all of us. You can swear to
the identification?”

“Hold on, please!” said Clive. “You’re barking industriously, Chief.
But you’re barking up the wrong tree. That isn’t the watch I lost.”

“You said it was!” accused the chief. “You said--”

“I said nothing of the sort,” denied Clive. “You asked me if I
recognized the watch. And I said I did and that it was mine. I didn’t
say it was the one that was stolen to-night. And it isn’t.”

The house guests--to whom the Argyle watch was a familiar
object--gasped. Thaxton Vail made as though to speak in quick
disclaimer. But Clive’s tired voice droned on as he met Quimby’s
suspicious eyes fairly and calmly.

“This watch is mine. It belonged to my father. It was one he had made
the year before he died, with the Argyle watch as a model. And a very
poor bit of work it was. For it has scarcely a look of the original.
Last week at my Rackrent Farm house Mr. Vail dropped his repeater-watch
and broke its mainspring. He sent it to New York to be mended. And I
lent him this second watch of mine to carry till his own comes back.
That’s what I meant just now when I said I recognized the watch and
that it is mine.”

“Clive!” sputtered Vail. “You’re--”

“If my brother snatched this watch out of Mr. Vail’s pocket,” finished
Clive, heedless of the interruption and with his eyes still holding the
chief’s, “then he did a mighty impertinent thing and one for which I
apologize, in his name, to my host. That’s all, Chief. The Argyle watch
is still missing.”

The stupidly coined lie deceived no one but the police, though Doris
Lane felt a throb of admiration for the man who thus sought to shield
his friend. The lie helped to blot from her memory Clive’s earlier
suspicion of Vail. She gave eager credit to the way wherein he defended
the chum in whose guilt he really believed.

Old Miss Gregg reached out a wrinkled hand and patted Creede on the
knee much as she might have patted the head of Macduff, the collie.

“You’re a good boy, Clive,” she whispered. “You always were. And, oh,
it’s so infinitely better to _do_ good than just to _be_ good! If--”

Thaxton Vail’s fierce disclaimer drowned out her murmured words of
praise.

“Chief,” declared Vail, “my friend is saying all this to protect me.
But I don’t need any protection. That is the Argyle watch. Though how
it happened to be in my pocket is more than I can guess. That’s the
stolen watch. I ought to know. I’ve seen it a thousand times ever since
I was a child. And I never broke a repeater-watch at Mr. Creede’s
house. I never owned a repeater. And I never borrowed any watch from
him. Also, to the best of my belief, his father never had a watch made
to order. He always carried the Argyle watch, and I never heard of his
having any other.”

“Chief,” interposed Clive, very quietly, as Vail paused for breath,
“I have just told you the true story--the story I shall stick to, if
necessary, on the witness stand. Please remember that. If I say that
watch is not the stolen one any jury in the world will take my word as
to my knowledge of my own property. And any accusation against Mr. Vail
will appear very ridiculous. It will not add to your reputation. For
your own sake I advise you to accept my statement at its face value.”

“Drop that idiocy, Clive!” exhorted Vail angrily. “I tell you I don’t
need any protection. And if I did I wouldn’t take it in the form of a
lie. You mean well. And I’m grateful to you. But--”

“That’s my story, Chief,” calmly repeated Creede.

Quimby was looking from one to the other of the two men in worried
uncertainty. Both were rich and influential members of the Aura
community. Both were lifelong dwellers in the region. The word of
either, presumably, would carry heavy weight in court. Yet each flatly
contradicted the other. The chief’s brain began to buzz. Holding up the
watch and facing the onlookers he asked:

“Can any of you identify this watch?”

No one spoke. Vail glanced from face to face. Every visage was either
unwontedly pale or else unwontedly red. But nobody spoke. Clive
Creede’s eyes followed Vail’s to the countenances of the spectators. In
his sunken gaze was a world of appeal.

“Miss Gregg!” cried Thaxton at random. “You knew Clive’s father for
years. You’ve seen the Argyle watch ever so often. I call on you to
identify it.”

“My dear Thax,” cooed the old lady, placidly, “nothing on earth
would give me greater joy than to identify it--except to identify the
scoundrel who stole it.”

“There!” exclaimed Vail, turning in grim triumph to the chief.

“But,” prattled on the serene old lady, “I’m sorry to say I can’t
identify it. Because I don’t see it. I’m perfectly familiar with
the Argyle watch. But the Argyle watch is most decidedly _not_ the
turnip-like timepiece our friend Quimby is dangling so seductively
before me.”

Thaxton groaned aloud and sank into his chair, his mind awhirl. The
chief smiled.

“That seems to settle it,” he said, briskly. “Mr. Vail, you must be
mistaken. This cannot be the Argyle watch. Two more-than-reputable
witnesses have just testified most definitely to that fact.”

“I don’t know what conspiracy you people are in to save me,” mumbled
Vail, glowering from the haggard Clive to the smugly smiling old lady.
“But you wouldn’t do it if you didn’t think I am guilty. And that hurts
like raw vitriol. I--”

“Don’t be absurd!” chided Miss Gregg. “Don’t lose all the little
intelligence the Lord saw fit to sprinkle into that fatuous brain of
yours. I’ve known you all your life. I know all about you. You’d never
receive a Nobel prize for anything except cleanness and squareness and
sportsmanship and kindness. But you’re no thief. And every one knows
it. So stop trying to be pathetic.”

“But--”

“Besides,” she continued, in the same reproving tone, “nobody but a
kleptomaniac ever steals without a practical motive. What motive have
you? Why--!”

“Motive?” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely. “Motive, hey? Well, I can’t speak
for you people’s losses, but Mrs. M.’s stolen joolry was worth $12,000,
at a low appraisal. That seems to be motive enough for a poor dub of a
country hotelkeeper to--”

“My good, if loud-mouthed, man,” replied Miss Gregg, “Mr. Vail’s annual
income is something in the neighborhood of $200,000, to my certain
knowledge. If he wanted such jewelry as was stolen to-night, he could
have bought and paid for a three-ton truckload of it. He could even
have paid present-day prices for enough gasoline to run the three-ton
truck. What object would he have had in sneaking into our rooms and
purloining little handfuls of gew-gaws? That is one argument which may
appeal even to your mighty intellect. He--”

“But,” gurgled Joshua Q. “But--but hold on, ma’am! Is this a funny joke
you’re springing? What would a man with a $200,000 income be doing,
running a backwoods tavern like this? Tell me that. There’s a catch in
this. Are the lot of you in the plot to--?”

“Miss Gregg is right, sir,” said the chief, who, like the rest of the
community, stood in chronic fear of the eccentrically powerful old
dame. “And there’s no need to use ugly words like ‘plot,’ when you’re
speaking to a lady like her. Mr. Vail’s income is estimated at not less
than $200,000, just as she’s told you. As for his running a tavern
or a hotel, he doesn’t. This is his estate, inherited from the late
Mr. Osmun Vail. I read in the paper, yesterday, that a clause of the
will of Mr. Osmun Vail makes him keep a part of the house open, if
necessary, as an inn. Whether or not that’s true, or just a newspaper
yarn, I don’t know. But I do know that Mr. Vail could have no financial
reason for stealing jewelry or small rolls of bills or cheap watches.”

He spoke with the pride of locality, in impressing an outlander with
a neighbor’s importance. Thaxton Vail, thoroughly uncomfortable, had
tried in vain, once or twice, to stem the tide of the chief’s eloquence
and that of the old lady. Now he sat, silent, eyes down, face red.

Joshua Q. Mosely arose and came closer, staring at the embarrassed
youth as if at some new-discovered specimen. His wife fluttered and
wiggled, eyeing Vail as she might have eyed a stage hero.

“Well, I’m sure,” she said, mincingly, “that puts a new turn on
everything. Quite a romantic--”

“Luella,” decreed her husband, breathing hard through his nose, “I
guess we’ve made fools of ourselves, horning in here, to-day. Just the
same,” he went on, scourged by memory of his loss, “that don’t clear up
who stole our joolry. Nor yet it don’t give our joolry back to us. And
those two things are more important just now than whether Mr. Vail is a
multimillionaire or not.”

“Quite so,” agreed the chief. “We don’t seem to be getting much further
in the case. Since Mr. Vail objects to being searched and objects to
his guests being searched--well, I have no warrant to search them.
But I take it there’s no objection to my searching the house, once
more--especially the servants’ quarters and all that?”

“None at all,” said Vail. “Ring for Horoson. She’ll show you around.”

“I guess I and Mrs. M. will turn in,” said Mosely, “if we’re not
needed any longer. We’re pretty tired, the both of us. Came all the
way through from Manchester since sunrise, you know. And we’ve got to
be off first thing in the morning. Chief, I’ll stop in at the police
station on my way to-morrow and leave our _ad_dress and post a reward.
G’night, all.”

He and his wife departed to the upper regions, gabbling together in
low, excited tones as they went. The housekeeper appeared, in answer to
Vail’s ring. The chief and the constable strode off in her indignant
wake to make their tour of inspection.

“I wish,” said Willis Chase, vindictively, “I wish those Mosely
persons and that road-company police chief could be made to take turns
occupying the magenta room. That’s the worst I can wish any one. I--”

“Clive, old chap!” exclaimed Vail, wheeling on Creede as soon as the
policemen’s footsteps died away. “Why in blazes did you tell such a
thundering lie? And, as for you, Miss Gregg--!”

“Young man,” interrupted the spinster, with great severity, “I knew you
when you were in funny kilt skirts and when you wore your hair roached
on top and in silly little ringlets at the back, and when you couldn’t
spell ‘cat.’ If you think I’m going to tolerate a scolding from you or
going to let you call me to account for anything at all you’re greatly
mistaken.”

“But--”

“Besides,” she went on, relaxing, “suppose I did tell a lie? For
heaven’s sake, what is a lie? That weasel of a Reuben Quimby had no
more right to the contents of my brain than to the contents of my safe.
A person who is not ashamed to lock a door with a key need not be
ashamed to lock his mind with a lie.”

“Aunt Hester!” cried Doris, quite horrified.

“Not that I excuse foolish and unnecessary lies, my dear,” explained
her aunt. “They are ill-bred, and they spoil one’s technique for the
few really needful lies.”

Then, feeling she had averted for the moment Vail’s angry condemnation
of her falsehood, she shifted the subject once more.

“Clive!” she ordained. “Go to bed. You look like the hero of a Russian
problem novel. One of those ghastly faced introspectives with influenza
names, who needn’t bother to spend money in getting their hair cut;
because they are going to commit suicide in another chapter or so
anyhow. You look positively dead. This has been too much for you. Go to
bed, my dear boy. And thank you for restoring my faith in boykind a few
minutes ago by lying so truthfully.”

Clive got to his feet, wavering, his face set in a mask of illness. He
turned to Thaxton Vail and held out his hand. To Doris there seemed in
the action an assurance of loyalty. To Vail the proffer savored of the
dramatic--as if, believing his friend guilty, Creede was none the less
willing to shake his hand.

“Clive,” said Vail, coldly, ignoring the gesture, “if you think I’m a
thief I don’t want to shake hands with you. If you don’t think I’m a
thief there’s no need in shaking hands in that melodrama fashion. Good
night. Need any help to get upstairs?”

“No, thanks,” returned Creede, wincing at the rebuff. “I--”

He finished the sentence by toppling over in a dead faint at his host’s
feet.

Instantly Vail and Chase were working over him, loosening his collar
and belt, and lifting his arms on high so that the blood might flow
back into the heart. Miss Gregg dived into the recesses of the black
bead handbag she always carried on her wrist. From it she exhumed an
ounce vial of smelling salts.

“Here!” she said. “Let me put this under his nostrils. It’s as strong
as the Moral Law and almost as rank. The poor boy! He-- Drat this cork!
It’s jammed in. Got a corkscrew?”

Thaxton paused long enough in his work of resuscitation to take from
his hip pocket the big German army knife which Clive had brought him
from overseas.

“Here!” he said, opening the corkscrew and handing the knife to her.

“What a barbarous contraption!” commented Miss Gregg, as she strove to
extract the cork from her smelling-bottle. “How do you happen to be
carrying it in your dinner clothes?”

“I stuck it into my pocket, along with my cash, when I changed, I
suppose,” said Vail, as he worked. “I was in a rush, and I--”

“That’s a murderous-looking thing on the back of it,” she went on, as
she finished drawing the cork and laid the knife on the table. “It
looks like the business-half of a medieval poniard.”

“That’s a punch, of some sort,” he answered absently. “Got the smelling
salts ready yet?”

“He’s coming around!” announced Chase, as Miss Gregg knelt beside the
unconscious man to apply the bottle to his pinched nostrils. “See, his
eyes are opening.”

Clive Creede blinked, shivered, then stared foolishly about. At sight
of the faces bending above him he frowned and essayed weakly to sit up.

“I--surely I wasn’t such a baby as to keel over, was--was I?” he
panted, thickly.

“Don’t try to talk!” begged Doris. “You’re all right now. It’s been too
much for you. Let Thax and Willis help you up to bed. Auntie, don’t you
think we ought to telephone for Dr. Lawton?”

“No,” begged Clive, his voice somewhat less wobbly. “Please don’t. A
good night’s rest will set me up. I’m ashamed to have--”

“Don’t waste breath in talking, old man!” put in Vail. “I’m a rotten
host, to have let you have all this strain when you were sick. Don’t go
struggling to get up. Lie still. So!”

Deftly he passed his arms under the prostrate man’s knees and
shoulders. Then, with a bracing of his muscles, he lifted Clive from
the floor.

“Go ahead, and open the door of his bedroom,” he bade Chase. “I’ll
carry him up.”

“No!” protested Clive, struggling. “I--”

“Quiet, please,” said Vail. “It’ll be easy to carry you, but not if you
squirm. Gangway!”




CHAPTER X

A CRY IN THE NIGHT


Doris Lane followed him with her admiring gaze, noting how lightly he
bore the invalid and with what tenderness he overrode Creede’s petulant
remonstrances.

“Yes,” said Miss Gregg, as though answering a question voiced by her
niece. “Yes, he is splendidly strong. And he’s gentle, too. A splendid
combination--for a husband. I mean, for one’s own husband. It is thrown
away, in another woman’s.”

“I don’t understand you at all,” rebuffed Doris.

“No? Well, who am I, to scold you for denying it, just after my
longwinded lecture on the virtues of lying?”

“Auntie,” said the girl, speaking in feverish haste in her eagerness
to shift the subject, “have you any idea at all who committed the
robberies? Have you?”

“Yes,” returned the old lady, with no hesitation at all. “I know
perfectly well who did it.”

“You do!”

“I haven’t an atom of doubt. It was Osmun Creede.”

“Why, Auntie, it couldn’t have been! It _couldn’t_!”

“I know that. I know it as well as you. Just the same, I believe he
did.”

“But he wasn’t even here!” urged the girl. “You heard what he said
about having dined at the Country Club, and that a dozen people there
could prove it.”

“Yes,” assented Miss Gregg. “I heard him.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“Yes. I believe him implicitly. For nobody would want to testify in
Osmun Creede’s behalf who didn’t have to. He knows that as well as we
do. So if he says a dozen people can prove he was there, he’s telling
the truth. He’d like nothing better than to bother those people into
admitting they saw him there. Especially if they could send him to jail
by denying it. Oh, he was there, fast enough, at the Country Club while
the rooms here were being looted. I believe that.”

“Then how could he have done the robbing?” insisted the girl, sore
perplexed.

“I don’t know,” admitted her aunt. “In fact, I suppose he couldn’t.
But I’m equally certain he did.”

“But what makes you think so?”

“What makes me _know_ so?” amended Miss Gregg. “You’re a woman. And
yet you ask that! Are you too young to have the womanly vice of
intuition--the freak faculty that tells you a thing is true, even when
you know it can’t be? Osmun Creede stole our jewelry. I know it, for
a number of reasons. The first and greatest reason is because I don’t
like Osmun Creede. The second and next greatest reason is that Osmun
Creede doesn’t like _me_. A third reason is that there’s positively
nothing too contemptible for Osmun Creede to do. He cumbers the earth!
I do wish some one would put him out of our way. Take my word, he
stole--”

“Isn’t that rather ridiculous?” gravely asked Doris, from the lofty
wisdom of twenty-two years.

“Of course it is. Most real things are. Is it half as ridiculous as
for Thaxton Vail to have the stolen Argyle watch in his pocket when it
couldn’t possibly be there? Is it?”

“I--I can’t understand that, myself,” confessed Doris. “But--”

“But you know it’s somehow all right? Because you trust Thax.
Precisely. Well, I can’t understand how Oz Creede could have committed
the robberies when he wasn’t here. But I know he did. Because I
distrust him. If it comes down to logic, mine is as good as yours.”

“But,” urged Doris, giving up the unequal struggle, “why should he
do such a thing? He is well off. He doesn’t need the things that
were stolen. That was your argument to prove Thax didn’t steal them.
Besides, with all the horrid things about him, nobody’s ever had reason
to doubt that Osmun is as honest as the day.”

“Honest as the _day_!” scoffed Miss Gregg. “You’re like every one else.
You get your similes from books written by people who don’t know any
more than you do. ‘Honest as the day?’ Do you know that only four days,
out of three hundred and sixty-five, are honest? On the four solstices
the time of day agrees absolutely with the sun. And on not one other
day of them all. Then a day promises to be lovely and fair, and it
lures one out into it in clothes that will run and with no umbrella.
Up comes a rain, as soon as one is far enough from home to get nicely
caught in it. ‘Honest as the day!’ The average day is an unmitigated
swindler! Why--”

The return of Vail and Chase from their task of getting Clive to bed
interrupted the homily.

“He seems all right now,” reported Willis. “He’s terribly broken up,
though, at having fainted. And he’s as ashamed as if he’d been caught
stealing pennies from a blind beggar.”

“He needn’t be,” snapped Miss Gregg. “If I’d had to be Oz Creede’s
twin brother as long a time as Clive has, I’d be too inured to feel
shame for anything short of burning an orphanage. Just the same, he’s a
dear boy, Clive is. I like the way he came to the front, this evening,
when--”

“We’ve been clear through the house, from cellar to garret,” announced
the chief, from the doorway. “And we’ve been all around it from the
outside with flashlights. Not a clue.”

“Behold an honest cop!” approved Chase. “One who’ll admit he hasn’t a
dozen mysterious clues up his sleeve! It’s a record!”

“I’m going back to the station now,” resumed Quimby, ignoring him,
“to write my report. There’s nothing more I can do to-night. I’ll be
around, of course, the first thing in the morning. I’ve thrown the fear
of the Lord into the whole staff of servants. They won’t dare budge
till I get back. No danger of one of them confusing things by leaving
on the sly.”

Vail followed the two officers to the front door and watched them
climb into their rattling car and make off down the drive. As they
disappeared, he wished he had asked the chief to leave his man on guard
outside the house for the night.

The mystery of the thefts and the evening’s later complications had
gotten on Vail’s nerves. If the supposedly secure rooms could be
plundered by a mysterious robber when a score of people were awake, in
and around the building, could not the same robber return to complete
his work when all the house should be sleeping and unguarded?

Thaxton’s worries found themselves centering about Doris Lane. If the
intruder should alarm her at dead of night--!

“Mac,” he said under his breath to the collie standing at his side on
the veranda. “You’re going to do real guard duty to-night. I’m going to
post you at the foot of the stairs, and there I want you to stay. No
comfy snoring on the front door mat this time. You’ll lie at the foot
of the stairs where you can catch every sound and where you can block
any one who may try to go up or down. Understand that, old boy?”

Macduff did not understand. All he knew was that Vail was talking to
him and that some sort of response was in order. Wherefore the collie
wagged his plumed tail very emphatically indeed and thrust his cold
nose affectionately into Thaxton’s cupped hand.

Vail turned back into the house, Macduff at his heels. He locked the
front door, preparatory to making a personal inspection of every ground
floor door and window. As he entered the front hall he encountered
Doris Lane.

The girl had left her aunt in the living room, listening with scant
patience to a ramblingly told theory of Chase’s as to how best the
stolen goods might be traced. Doris had slipped away to bed, leaving
them there. She was very tired and her nerves were not at their best.
The evening had been an ordeal for her--severe and prolonged.

“Going to turn in?” asked Vail as they met.

“Yes,” she made listless reply. “I’m a bit done up. I didn’t realize it
till a minute ago. Good night.”

“Excuse me,” he said uncomfortably, “but have you and Miss Gregg got a
gun of any sort with you in your luggage?”

“Why, no,” she said. “We don’t own such a thing between us. Auntie
won’t have a pistol in the house. It’s a whim of hers.”

“So you go unprotected, just for a woman’s whim?”

“You don’t know Aunt Hester. She is a woman of iron whim,” said Doris
with tired flippancy. “So we live weaponless. We--”

“Then--just as a favor to a crotchety host whose own nerves are jumpy
on your account--won’t you take this upstairs with you and keep it
handy, alongside your bed? Please do.”

He had gone to the Sheraton lowboy which did duty as a hall table. From
the bottom of one of its drawers he took a small-caliber revolver.

“I keep this here as a balm to Horoson’s feelings,” he explained. “Out
in the hills, like this, she’s always quite certain we’ll be attacked
some day by brigands or Black Handers or some other equally mythical
foes. And it comforts her to know there’s a pistol in the hall. Take
it, please.”

“What nonsense!” she laughed--and there was a tinge of nerve-fatigue
in the laugh. “Of course I shan’t take it. Why should I?”

“Just to please _me_, if there’s no better reason,” he begged.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to think up some better reason,” she said
stubbornly. “I refuse to make myself ludicrous by carrying an arsenal
to bed, to please you or any one else, Thax. If you’re really timid I
suggest you cling to the pistol, yourself.”

It was a catty thing to say; and she knew it was, before the words were
fairly spoken. But she was weary. And, perversely, she resented and
punished her own thrill of happiness that Vail should be so concerned
for her safety.

The man flushed. But he set his lips and said nothing. Dropping the
pistol back into the open drawer, he prepared to join the two others in
the library. But the nerve-exhausted girl was vexed at his failure to
resent her slur. And, like an over-tired child, she turned pettish.

“I’m sure you’ll be safe,” she said, in affected jocosity, “if you’ll
push your bed and your chiffonier against your door and see that all
your bedroom windows are fast locked. Or you might room with Willis
Chase. He has plenty of pluck. He’ll protect you.”

Unexpectedly Vail went up to her and took tight hold of both her hands,
resisting her peevish efforts to pull them free.

“Listen to me,” he said in a maddeningly parental fashion. “You’re a
naughty and disagreeable and cross little girl, and you ought to have
your fingers spatted and be stood in a corner. I’m ashamed of you. Now
run off to bed before you say anything else cranky; you--you _bad_ kid!”

She fought to jerk her hands away from his exasperatingly paternal
hold. In doing so she bruised one of her fingers against the seal
ring he wore. The hurt completed the wreck of her self-control which
humiliation had undermined.

“Let go of my hands!” she stormed. “You haven’t proved to-night that
your own are any too clean.”

On the instant he dropped her fingers as if they were white hot. His
face went scarlet, then gray.

“Oh!” she stammered, in belated horror of what she had said. “Oh, I
didn’t mean that! Thax, honestly I didn’t! I--”

Miss Gregg and Chase came out into the hall as she was still
speaking--as she was still looking appealingly up into the hurt face
of the man she had affronted so grievously.

“Come, dear!” hailed the old lady. “It’s almost as late as it ever gets
to be. Let’s go to bed.”

“Good night,” said Thaxton, stiffly, ignoring Doris’s eyes and setting
off on his round of the windows.

Doris lagged a step after her aunt. Willis Chase made as though to
speak lightly to her. Then he caught the look on her remorseful face,
glanced quickly toward the back of the departing Vail, and, with a
hasty good night to her, made his way upstairs. On the landing he
turned and called back to Thaxton:

“If I can’t live through the horrors of the magenta room to-night,
Thax, I hope they send you to the hoosgow, as contributory cause. Me, I
wouldn’t even coop up Oz Creede in a room like that.”

Vail made no reply. Stolidly he continued to lock window after window,
Macduff pacing along behind him with an air of much importance. Doris
Lane took an impulsive step to follow him. But Chase was still leaning
over the banisters, above, chanting his plaint about the magenta room.
So she sighed and went up to bed.

Less than five minutes later, when Thaxton returned to the hallway, his
guests had all retired. There was an odd air of desolation and gloom
about the usually homelike hall. Vail stood there a moment, musing.
Then, subconsciously, he noted that the lowboy drawer still stood open.
In absentminded fashion he went over to close it.

He paused for a moment or so, with his hand on the open drawer.

“Mac,” he muttered, his other hand on the collie’s head, “she didn’t
mean that. She didn’t mean it, Mac. And I’m a fool to let it get past
my guard and sting so deep. She was worn out and nervous. We won’t let
it hurt us, will we, Mac? Still I wish she’d taken the gun. So far as I
know it’s the only real weapon of any kind in the house. And if there’s
danger, I wish she had it beside her. I--I wonder if I should carry it
upstairs and knock at the door. Perhaps I could coax Miss Gregg to take
it, Mac. What do you think?”

Putting his disjointed words into action, Vail fumbled in the drawer
for the pistol.

It was not there.

He yanked the drawer wider open and groped among its heterogeneous
contents. Then impatiently he began tossing those contents to the
floor. A pair of crumpled and stained riding gauntlets, an old silk
cap, wadded into a corner, a dog-leash without a snapper, odds and
ends of string, a muffler, a pack of dog-eared cards, a broken box of
cartridges. But no pistol.

The revolver was gone, unmistakably gone--taken from its hiding place,
during the past five minutes.

Thaxton went through his pockets on the bare chance he might have
stuck the pistol into one of them, although he remembered with entire
clearness that he had dropped it back into the drawer.

Subconsciously, the thought of weapons lingered in his mind. He felt in
his hip pocket for the big army knife. It was not there.

Then he remembered the use it had been put to in drawing the cork of
the vial of smelling salts. And he went back into the living room, on
the chance he might have left the knife lying on floor or table. But he
could not find it.

“Mac,” he confided to the collie--for, like many lonely men, he had
grown to talk sometimes to his dog as if to a fellow-human--“Mac, all
this doesn’t make any kind of a hit with us, does it? Up to to-day this
was the dearest old house on earth. Since this afternoon it’s haunted.
That gun, for instance! The front door was locked, Mac. Nobody could
have come in from the kitchen quarters, for the baize door is bolted.
Nobody could have gotten into the house, this past five minutes. And
every one in the house except you and me has gone to bed, Mac. Yet some
one has frisked my gun out of that drawer. And the big knife seems to
have melted, too. What’s the answer, Mac?”

Naturally the collie, as usual, did not understand the sense of one
word in twenty. Yet the frequent repetitions of his own name made him
wag his plumed tail violently. And the subnote of worried unhappiness
in Thaxton’s voice made him look up in quick solicitude into the man’s
clouded face. For dogs read the voice as accurately as humans read
print.

Thaxton petted the classic head, spoke a pleasant word to the collie
and then switched off all the lights except one burner in the front of
the hall and a reading lamp in his study across from the dining room.
After which he bade Macduff lie down at the foot of the stairs and to
remain there.

Up the steps Vail made his way. At his own room he paused. Then with
a half-smile he went along the corridor to a door at the far end of an
ell. He knocked lightly at this.

“Come in!” grumbled Willis Chase.

Vail obeyed the summons, entering the stuffy little magenta room with
its kitchen smell and its slanting low ceiling pierced by a single tiny
window. Chase had thrown off coat and waistcoat and his tight boots. He
had thrust his feet luxuriously into a pair of loose tennis shoes he
had worn during their muddy tramp that afternoon. He was adding to the
room’s breathlessness by smoking a cigarette as he riffled the leaves
of a magazine he had taken from his bag.

“What’s up?” he asked as his host came in.

“I think you’ve had a big enough dose of medicine,” said Vail. “You
needn’t sleep in this hole of a clothes-closet. Take my bedroom for the
night. To-morrow I’ll have Horoson fix a decent room for you. Scratch
your night things together. Never mind about moving all your luggage.
That can wait till morning.”

“I’m to share your room with you, eh?” asked Chase ungratefully.
“Thanks, I’ll stay in this dump here. I’d as soon share a bed with a
scratching collie pup as with another man. You’d snore and you’d kick
about and--”

“Probably I should,” admitted Thaxton. “But I shan’t. Because I shan’t
be there. I didn’t ask you to share my room but to take it. I’m bunking
in my study for the night.”

“To give me a chance to sleep in a real room? That’s true repentance. I
can almost forgive you for the time you’ve made me stay in this magenta
chamber of horrors. But just the same I’m not going to turn you out of
your own pleasant quarters. I’ll swap, if you like, and let you have
this highly desirable magenta room. Then your nose will tell you what
we’re going to have for breakfast before the rest of us are awake.”

“I say I’m going to bunk on the leather couch in my study,”
insisted Vail. “There are a whole lot of things I don’t like about
this evening’s happenings. And I’m going to stand guard--or sleep
guard--along with Mac. You know the way to my room. Go over there as
soon as you want to. Good night.”

“Hold on!” urged Chase. “Suppose I spell you, on this nocturnal vigil
business? We can take turns guarding; if you really think there’s any
need. Personally I think it’s a bit like locking the cellar door after
the booze is gone. But--”

“No, thanks. No use in both of us losing a full night’s sleep. Take my
room, and--”

“Just as you like. I’ve the heart of a lion and the soul of a paladin
and the ruthlessness of an income tax man. But all those grand
qualities crumple at the chance of getting away from the magenta room
for the night. Thanks, a lot. I’d as soon swig homemade hootch as stay
a night in this dump. The kind of hootch that people make by recipe and
offer to their guests the same evening. They forget rum isn’t built in
a day. I--”

“By the way,” interrupted Vail as he started for the door, “you don’t
happen to have a pistol, do you?”

Perhaps it was the uncertain light which made him fancy a queer
expression flitted swiftly across Willis Chase’s eyes. But, glibly,
laughingly, the guest made answer:

“A pistol? Why, of course not! What’d be the sense in packing a gun
here in the peaceful Berkshires? Thax, this burglar flurry has made you
melodramatic. Good night, old man. Don’t snore too loudly over your
sentry duty.”

Vail departed for the study while Chase stuffed an armful of clothes
into a handbag and made his way along the dark hall to Thaxton’s
bedroom. At the stair-foot Vail all but stumbled over the collie. Then,
refusing the dog’s eagerly mute plea to accompany him into the study,
he whispered:

“No, no, Mac! Lie down! Stay there on guard! _Stay_ there!”

With a grunt of disappointment Macduff slumped down again at the foot
of the stairs. Head between white paws, he lay looking wistfully after
the departing man.

The night wore on.

Perhaps half an hour before the first dim gray tinged the sentinel
black summit of old South Mountain to northwestward, the deathly
silence of the sleeping house was broken by a low whistling cry--a
sound not loud enough nor long enough to rouse any slumberer--scarce
audible to human ears not tensely listening.

Yet to the keen hearing of Macduff as he drowsed at the stair-foot the
sound was vividly distinct. The collie reared himself excitedly to his
feet. Then, remembering Thaxton Vail’s stern command to stay there on
guard, the dog hesitated. Mute, statuelike, attentive, he stood, his
teeth beginning to glint from up-curling lips, his hackles abristle.

Macduff was listening now, listening with all that uncanny perception
which lurks in the eardrums of a thoroughbred dog. He whined softly
under his breath at what he heard. And he trembled to dash in the
direction of the sound. But Vail’s mandate held him where he was.

Presently a new sense allied itself to his hearing. His miraculously
keen nostrils flashed to his brain the presence of an odor which
would have been imperceptible to any human but which carried its own
unmistakable meaning to the thoroughbred collie.

Perhaps, too, there came to him, as sometimes to dogs, a strange
perception that was neither sound nor smell nor sight--something no
psychologist has ever explained, but which every close student of dogs
can verify.

The trembling changed to a shudder. Up went Macduff’s pointed muzzle,
skyward. From his shaggy throat issued an unearthly wolf-howl.

Again and again that weird scream rang through the house; banishing
sleep and reëchoing in hideous cadences from every nook and corner and
rafter. A hundredfold more compelling than any mere fanfare of barking,
it shrieked an alarm to every slumbering brain.

In through the open front doorway from the veranda rushed Thaxton Vail.

“Mac!” he cried. “Shut up! What’s the matter?”

For answer the collie danced frantically, peering up the stairway
and then beseechingly back at Vail. No dogman could have failed to
interpret the plea.

“All right,” vouchsafed Thaxton. “_Go!_”

Like a furry whirlwind the dog scurried up the stairs into the regions
of the house which had been so silent but whence now came the murmur of
startledly questioning voices and the slamming of doors.

Forced on by a nameless fear, Vail ran up, three steps at a time, in
the dog’s wake. He reached the second floor, just as two or three of
his guests, in the sketchiest attire, came stumbling out into the broad
upper hall.

At sight of Thaxton on the dim-lit landing they broke into a clamor of
questions. For reply Vail pressed the light switch, throwing the black
spaces into brilliant illumination. Then his glance fell on Macduff.

The collie had halted his headlong run just outside a door at the head
of the hall. At the oaken panels of this he was tearing madly with
claws and teeth.

As Vail hurried to him, the dog ceased his frantic efforts; as though
aware that the man could open the door more easily than could he. And
again he tossed his muzzle aloft, making the house reverberate to that
hideously keening wolf-howl.

The hall was full of jabbering and gesticulating people, clad in
night clothes. Vail pushed through them to the door at which Mac had
clamored. It was the door of Thaxton’s own bedroom. He turned the knob
rattlingly. The door was locked. The others crowded close, wildly
questioning, getting in one another’s way.

Vail stepped back, colliding with Clive Creede and Joshua Q. Mosely.
Then, summoning all his strength, he hurled himself at the door. The
stout oak and the old-fashioned lock held firm.

Thaxton stepped back again, his muscular body compact. And a second
time he crashed his full weight at the panels. Under the catapult
impact the lock snapped.

The door burst open, flinging Vail far into the dense blackness. Clive
Creede, close behind him, groped for the light switch just inside the
threshold and pressed it, flooding the room with light.

There was an instant of blank hush. Then Mrs. Mosely screamed, shrilly,
in mortal terror.




CHAPTER XI

WHAT LAY BEYOND THE SMASHED DOOR


Dr. Ezra Lawton had come home an hour earlier from enacting the trying
rôle of Stork’s Assistant. He had sunk to sleep wearily and embarked at
once on a delightful dream of his unanimous election as Chairman of the
Massachusetts State Medical Board.

All Aura, apparently, celebrated this dream election. For the three
church bells were ringing loudly in honor of it. There were also a
few thousand other bells which had been imported from somewhere for
the occasion. The result was a continuous loud jangle which was as
deafeningly annoying to the happy old doctor as it was gratifying.

Presently annoyance got the better of gratification and he awoke. But
even though his beautiful dream had departed the multiple bell-ringing
kept noisily on. And with a groan he realized the racket emanated from
the telephone at his bedside.

“Well,” he snarled, vicious with dead sleepiness, as he lifted the
receiver, “what the devil do you want?”

He listened for a second, then said in a far different voice:

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Gregg. I didn’t guess it was you. Nothing
the matter, I hope?” he added, as though elderly spinsters were in the
habit of calling him up at three in the morning when nothing was the
matter.

Again, this time much longer, he listened. Then he ejaculated:

“Good Lord! Oh, good _Lord_!”

The genuine horror in his voice waked wide his slumbrous wife. By dint
of thirty years as a country doctor’s spouse Mrs. Lawton had schooled
herself to doze peacefully through the nocturnal telephone ringing and
three A. M. smalltalk which fringed her busy husband’s career.

Mrs. Lawton sat bolt upright in bed. Her husband was listening once
more. Through the dark his wife could hear the scratchedly buzzy tones
of Miss Gregg, desiccated and attenuated by reason of the faulty
connection. But, try as she would, she could catch no word. At last
Lawton spoke again, the hint of horror still in his voice:

“I’ll start over as soon as I can get dressed, Miss Gregg. You’ve
notified the police, of course? Huh? Well, do, at once. I’ll be right
there.”

He hung up the receiver and floundered out of bed.

“What’s the matter?” cried his wife. “What’s happened? What’s she want
you for? What’s that about the police? What’s wrong? Why is she--?”

“Young Willis Chase has been murdered,” replied the doctor, wriggling
into his scarce-cooled clothes. “Found dead in bed, with a knifeblade
sticking into his right carotid.”

“_Oh! OH!_” babbled Mrs. Lawton. “Oh, it isn’t _possible_, Ezra!
Who--who did it?”

“The murderer neglected to leave his card,” snapped the doctor. “At
least Miss Gregg didn’t mention it.... Where in hell’s hot hinges is my
other shoe?”

“But what was he doing at Miss Gregg’s? How did it happen? Who--”

“It wasn’t at Miss Gregg’s. It was at Vailholme. Houseparty, I gather.
Thax Vail’s dog woke them all up by howling and then ran to Chase’s
room. They broke the door in. Chase was lying there stone dead with
a knife in his throat. And--it was that big German army knife Thax
showed us one day. Remember it? About a million blades. One of them a
sort of three-cornered punch. That was the blade, she says. Stuck full
length in the throat. They’re all upside down there. It seems she had
presence of mind enough to send for me but not enough to send for the
police.”

“Oh, the poor, _poor_ boy! I--I never liked him.”

“Maybe he killed himself on that account,” grumbled her husband, lacing
his second shoe and rising puffingly from the task. “He--”

“Oh, it was suicide then? The--”

“Nobody seems to know what it was,” he rejoined. “I suppose later on
I’ll have to sit on that question, too, in my capacity of coroner.
Good-by. Don’t wait breakfast for me.”

He was gone. Presently through the open window his wife could hear the
throaty wheeze of his car’s engine as the self-starter awakened it.
Then there was a whirr and a rattle through the stillness, and the car
was on its fast flight to Vailholme.

Dr. Lawton found the house glaringly lighted from end to end. The front
door stood wide. So did the baize door which led back to the kitchen
quarters. Through the latter issued the gabble and strident terror of
mixed voices.

As the doctor came into the lower hall, Thaxton Vail emerged from the
living room to meet him. Vail’s face was ghastly. Behind him was Miss
Gregg.

The others of the party were grouped in unnatural postures in the
living room, their chairs huddled close together as though their
occupants felt subconscious yearning for mutual protection. Joshua Q.
Mosely--mountainous in a yellow dustcoat that swathed his purple silk
pajamas--was holding tight to the hand of his sniveling little wife.
Doris was crouched low in a corner chair. Beside her sat Clive Creede
trying awkwardly to calm the convulsive tremors which now and then
shook her.

“Take me up there,” Dr. Lawton bade Vail. “You can tell me about it
while I’m--”

He left the sentence unfinished and followed Thaxton up the stairs.

“We had a robbery at dinner time,” explained Vail as they went. “I was
afraid the thieves might make a try, later, for more things than they
could grab up at first. Foolish idea, I suppose. But anyhow I decided
to spend the night downstairs. I let poor Chase have my room. Macduff,
here, set up a most ungodly racket a few minutes ago. We followed him
to my room and broke in. Chase was lying there in bed. You remember
that big knife of mine--the one Clive Creede gave me? He had been
stabbed with that. He-- Here’s the room.”

As he stood aside for the doctor to pass in, another car rattled up to
the porte-cochère.

“Wait a second,” said Thaxton. “That may be Quimby. Miss Gregg said she
phoned him just after she notified you. He--”

The chief of police bustled into the hallway, and, at Vail’s summons,
he came lumbering importantly upstairs. Together he and Dr. Lawton
entered the deathly still room, Thaxton following.

“We left him as--as he was,” explained Vail. “Clive says the law
demands that.”

Neither of the others paid any heed to him. Both were leaning over the
bed. Thaxton stood awkwardly behind them, feeling an alien in his own
room. Presently Dr. Lawton spoke almost indignantly.

“I wondered why he should be lying as if he were asleep; with a wound
like that,” said he. “Except for the look on his face there’s no sign
of disturbance. I see now.”

As he spoke he picked from the floor beside the bed a heavy metal water
carafe which belonged on the bedside stand. Its surface was dented far
more deeply than so short a tumble warranted.

“Stabbed him,” said the doctor. “Then, as he cried out, stunned him.
See, Chief?”

The chief nodded. Then he turned from the bed and swept the room with
his beetle-browed gaze. His eyes focused on the nearest window. It
stood open, as did all the room’s other windows, on that breathless
night.

But its short muslin curtain was thrust aside so far as to be torn
slightly from its rod. On the white sill was the distinct mark of a
scrape in the paint and a blob of dried mud as from the instep of a
boot.

“Got in and out through the window,” decreed Quimby. “In a hurry going
out.”

“The door was locked,” put in Vail. “Locked from the inside.”

“H’m!” mused the chief, crossing to the splintered portal. “I see. You
folks broke it in, eh? Where’s the key?”

“What key?”

“Key of the door, of course. If Mr. Chase locked himself in he must
have done it with a key. And it isn’t likely he took the key out of
the lock afterward. Where is it? It isn’t in the keyhole.”

“The door flew open pretty hard,” said Vail. “Perhaps the key was
knocked out onto the floor. Shall I look?”

“Never mind,” refused the chief. “It isn’t immediate. My men can look
for it in the morning. I’m going to seal this room, of course, and keep
some one on guard. That knife, now--that ought to be easy to trace. It
isn’t like any other _I_ ever saw. It--”

“You’re right,” acceded Vail, nettled at his lofty air, “it’s quite
easy to trace. It’s mine.”

“Yours?”

The chief fairly spat the word at him. Again the heavy gray brows bent,
the eyes mere slits of quizzical light between the puckered lids.

“Yes,” said Vail. “I had it out, earlier in the evening. I used it to
draw a cork. I didn’t put it back in my pocket. I must have left it
lying somewhere. I looked afterward but I couldn’t find it. Some one
must have--”

“You left the knife in this room?”

“No,” denied Vail, after a moment’s thought. “I couldn’t have done
that. I didn’t come up here again. No, if I left it anywhere it was
downstairs.”

“H’m!” grunted the chief, non-committally.

Irritated afresh by the official’s manner, Thaxton turned to the
doctor, who was once more leaving the bedside.

“Dr. Lawton,” he asked, “is there any chance he killed himself?”

“Not the slightest,” replied Lawton with much emphasis. “He was lying
on his left side. The point entered the carotid from behind. He could
not possibly have struck the blow. And in any event he could not have
stunned himself with that metal water bottle afterward. No, there is
every proof it was not suicide. The man was murdered.”

“And the murderer escaped through the window,” supplemented the chief.
“Also, he entered by the same route. Now, we’ll leave everything as it
is, and I’ll take my flashlight and examine the ground just below here.”

But before he left the room he leaned far out of the window looking
downward. Vail had no need to follow the chief’s example. He knew the
veranda roof was directly outside and that any active man could climb
up or down the vine trellis which screened that end of the porch.

He also knew no man could have done so without making enough noise to
have attracted Thaxton’s notice in the night’s stillness before the
crime. Nor could any man have walked on the tin veranda roof, even
barefoot, without the crackle and bulge of the tin giving loud notice
of his presence. A tin roof cannot be traversed noiselessly, even by a
cat, to say nothing of a grown man.

As the three trooped downstairs they found the others assembled in the
hall nervously awaiting them.

“Well?” asked Miss Gregg.

“He was murdered!” pronounced the chief, portentously.

“You amaze me,” said the old lady. “But then, of course, you have the
trained police mentality. By whom?”

“That is what we intend to find out,” answered the chief, tartly.
“Where’s the phone? I want to send for a couple of my men. When I’ve
done that I want to ask a few questions.”

“We may as well go back into the living room and sit down,” suggested
Doris. “It’s chilly out here.”

But as the rest were following her suggestion she took occasion to slip
back into the hall whither Vail was returning after showing Quimby
where to find the telephone.

“Thax!” she whispered hurriedly. “I’m so sorry I was cross! I spoke
abominably to you. Won’t you _please_ forgive me? You know perfectly
well I didn’t mean a word of the nasty things I said.”

“I know,” he said soothingly. “I know. Don’t think any more about it.
It’s all right. I--”

“And, Thax,” she went on, thrilling oddly as his hand clasped hers,
“I did what you asked me to, after all. I took the pistol upstairs
with me. I hid it under the scarf I was carrying, and I smuggled it up
there. I wanted you to know--”

“They’ll be here in ten minutes now,” interrupted the chief, returning
from the telephone.

He preceded them into the living room. Briefly, at his request, Vail
told of the collie’s amazing behavior and of the finding of Chase.

“You say you hadn’t gone to bed?” asked Quimby, when the short recital
was ended. “Why not?”

“It is my own house. It had been robbed. I felt responsible. It seemed
safer for some one to stay on guard.”

“In case the thief or thieves should return?” inquired the chief. “If
you had any practical experience in such matters, you would know a
house which has just been robbed is safer than any other. Thieves don’t
rob the same house a second time the same night. Police annals show
that a house in which a crime has just been committed is immune from an
immediate second crime.”

“If robbery and murder may both be classified as crimes and not as
mere outbursts of playfulness,” said Miss Gregg, “that theory has been
proven with beautiful definiteness here to-night. So the second crime
was probably imaginary or only--”

“I was talking of thefts,” said Quimby, glowering sulkily at her.

Then stirred to professional sternness by the hint of ridicule, he
turned majestically once more to Vail.

“You were sitting up?” he prompted. “You were guarding your house--or
trying to--from a second series of thefts? Is that it?”

Thaxton nodded.

“You are sure you didn’t go to sleep all night?”

“I am.”

“Be careful, Mr. Vail! Many a man is willing to swear he hasn’t slept
a wink when really he dozed off without knowing it. That is a common
error.”

“Common or not, I don’t think it is likely I was asleep when Chase was
killed. Because I was on my feet and walking.”

“_So?_”

The chief was interested, formidably interested.

“You know then just when Mr. Chase was killed?”

“I know when the dog set up that racket. Presumably that was the time.
I know because I had looked at my watch as I left the house, just
before. It was five minutes past three when I looked.”

Dr. Lawton glanced at his own watch.

“It is seven minutes of four,” said he. “My examination proved Mr.
Chase cannot have been dead quite an hour. The two times agree.”

“You say you left the house,” pursued the chief, deaf to this
interpolation and bending forward, his eyes gripping Vail. “Why did you
leave the house?”

“To make a tour of it,” returned Thaxton. “It was the second time since
the others went to bed that I had gone out to make the rounds of the
veranda path. The time between, I was sitting in my study except for
one trip through the interior of the house at about one o’clock. That
time I went from cellar to attic.”

“But you had left the house shortly before the approximate time of Mr.
Chase’s death?” insisted the chief. “You went out through the front
door?”

“Yes. I--”

“And came back again through the front door?”

“Of course.”

“Shortly _after_ the murder?”

“The moment I heard Macduff howl. And I hadn’t been outside for more
than--”

“We’ll come back to that if necessary. At present we have established
the fact that you left the house shortly before the killing and that
you came in again shortly afterward.”

Again Vail nodded, this time a trifle sullenly. Like Miss Gregg,
he found the chief’s hectoring manner annoyed him. Nor did he care
to admit that at the instant of Macduff’s howling he had been
standing motionless under the window of Doris Lane’s room in all but
reverent--if absurd--sense of watching over her safety while she
slumbered.




CHAPTER XII

WHEREIN CLIVE PLAYS THE FOOL


“Mr. Vail,” spoke up the chief, a new smoothness and consideration in
his manner, “it is my duty to mention for the second time this evening
that anything you may say is liable to be used against you. I merely
speak of it. Now that I’ve done so, if you care to go on answering my
questions--”

“Fire away!” said Vail.

“The slayer of Willis Chase,” said the chief portentously “was outside
the house. He climbed in by an open window. His deed accomplished, he
climbed hastily out again. In other words _he_, too, was outside the
house shortly before and shortly after the crime.”

“What do you mean?”

“You say you made the rounds outside the house. You declare you were
awake and on guard. Did you not see or hear any one climbing to the
veranda roof or walking on it or getting into that open window? From
your own statement you could not have been far from that window, at
least once, in circling or starting to circle the house. You could not
have avoided seeing or hearing any trespasser on the trellis or on the
roof just above you. It is established that you were out there at the
time the murder must have been committed.”

“I did not see any one or hear any one out there,” said Vail.

“Yet you admit _you_ were there?”

“Yes. And nobody else was. I’d have heard him on the roof. And I’d have
heard the vines rustle.”

“I agree with you. You would. Mr. Vail, I have had much respect for
you. I had still more for your great-uncle, Mr. Osmun Vail. But I am
afraid it will be my painful duty to place you under arrest. Unless
we--”

“Reuben Quimby, you old fool!” shrilled Miss Gregg. “Why, this boy is--”

“Now, now!” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely. “Don’t you go calling bad names,
ma’am, prematoorely. I get the chief’s drift. He’s dead right. The
evidence is clear. Don’t you see? Vail here admits he went outside a
little before the murder and that he came in again a little after it.
He says he wasn’t farther off than the walk that borders the porch.
He admits he didn’t see or hear any one else. That can’t mean but
just one thing. It means he shinned up those vines and into the window
and--and did what he went there to do--and came back in time to run
upstairs when the dog waked us. And I heard you tell the doctor on the
phone that it was Vail’s own knife the murder was done with. There’s
nothing else to it. He--”

“It’s _you_ who are the old fool, Mosely, not only the chief!”
exclaimed Clive Creede, wrathfully, as the rest sat open-mouthed with
dismay at the linking of the chain of seemingly stupid questions.
“If you knew Mr. Vail as we know him--as the chief _ought_ to know
him--you’d know he couldn’t do such a thing. He couldn’t! Why, what
motive could he have? Absolutely none. It needs a terrific motive to
make a man commit murder. Juries take that into account.”

“But--”

“Thax had no such motive. I could swear to that. If his butler or any
other servant should have overheard and testify to the petty quarrel
between him and Chase that I walked in on early in the morning, when I
came here, any jury would laugh at such a squabble leading to a crime.
I speak of it because the butler was in the outer hall at the time and
may give a wrong impression of the spat; and some shyster lawyer may
try to magnify it. It was nothing. Chase wanted to come to board and
Vail, for some reason, didn’t want him to. At least that is all of the
quarrel I heard. But men don’t kill each other for puerile causes like
that. Any more than for the silly dispute I overheard them having a few
days ago at the Hunt Club in Stockbridge when Vail threatened he’d--”

“You idiot!” growled Thaxton. “What are you trying to get at? You’ve
known Chase and me all our lives. You know we were good chums. And you
know we were forever bickering, in fun, and having mock disputes and
insulting each other; from the time we were kids. So--”

“That’s just what I’m saying,” urged Clive eagerly. “That’s what I’m
trying to hammer into the chief’s head. You had no real motive, no
matter what servants or other people may be dragged forward to testify
about hearing spats and squabbles between you. You were his friend.
Why, Chief, you’re out of your mind when you threaten to arrest him!”

“From all I’m hearing,” said the chief grimly, “I figure I’m less and
less out of my mind. Mr. Vail, do you care to tell the nature of
the quarrel between you and the deceased--the one Mr. Creede says he
‘walked in on’?”

“I’ve told you,” interposed Creede vehemently, “and so has he, that
it was just a sort of joke. It has no bearing on the case. As Vail
says, he and Chase were always at swords’ points--in a friendly way.
Besides,” he went on, triumphantly, “I can attest to the truth of at
least one important part of what he’s just told you. I can swear to it.
He said a few minutes ago that he made a round of the house from top to
bottom, about one o’clock. He did. I heard him. I couldn’t get to sleep
till nearly two. I heard the stable clock strike one. Then almost right
afterward I heard soft steps come upstairs and tiptoe along the hall. I
heard them pause at the room next to mine, and I heard a rattle as if
the door was being tried. Then the steps passed on to--”

“Sounded as if he tiptoed to the room next to yours and tried the
door?” interrupted the chief. “Who was occupying the room next to you?”

Clive’s lips parted for a reply. Then, as his eyes suddenly dilated his
mouth clamped.

“Who was occupying that room?” repeated Quimby in augmented interest.
“The room he stopped at and whose door he tried.”

“I--I don’t know,” stammered Clive. “And it’s of no importance anyhow.
I mentioned it to prove Vail could be corroborated in part of his
account of how he spent the night, and that if part of his story was
true it all was true. He--”

“I don’t agree with you that it’s ‘of no importance,’ whose locked door
he tried to open,” snapped the chief. “It is highly important in every
way. If--”

“Then I can clear up the mystery,” said Vail wearily. “My own bedroom
is next to Creede’s. That is the room in which Chase was sleeping.”

“Ah! Then--”

“Only,” pursued Vail, “my loyal friend here is mistaken in saying I
tried the door. I didn’t try that or any other door.”

“I never said you did, Thax!” protested Clive eagerly. “I said I
heard a rattle, as if a door was being tried. It may have been a door
somewhere rattling in the wind, or it may have been--”

“On a windless night?” cut in the chief. “Or did the killer of Willis
Chase try first to get into his room by way of the door and then,
finding that locked, enter the room later by the open window? In that
case--”

“_Shame!_”

It was Doris Lane who broke in furiously upon the chief’s deductions.

“Oh, it is _shameful_!” she hurried on, her eyes ablaze, her slender
body tense. “You are trying to weave a filthy net around him! And
this poor sick blundering friend of his is inadvertently helping you!
Thaxton Vail could no more have done a thing like that than--than--”

Choking, she glanced at her aunt for reënforcement. To her astonishment
old Miss Gregg had lost her momentary excitement and was sitting
unruffled, hands in lap, a peaceful half-smile on her shrewd face.
Apparently she was deriving much pleasing interest from the scene.

“But, Chief!” stammered the luckless Clive, looking miserably at Vail.
“I can’t even be sure it was Thax whose steps I heard up there. It may
have been any one else’s. I only spoke of it to corroborate him. Oh,
why didn’t Chase stay in the magenta room? There’s no way of climbing
into that from the ground. If only Thax hadn’t made him change rooms--”

“_Will_ you be quiet?” stormed Doris, aflame with indignation. “Isn’t
he suffering enough from these senseless questions; without your
making it worse?”

“Hush, Doris, dear!” soothed Miss Gregg. “Don’t interfere. I’m
sure Reuben Quimby is doing very well indeed--for Reuben Quimby.
His questions aren’t stupid either. A few of them have been almost
intelligent.”

“Thanks, dear little girl,” whispered Vail, leaving his seat of
inquisition and bending above the tremblingly angry Doris. “It’s _fine_
of you. But you mustn’t let yourself get wrought up or unhappy on my
account. I--”

“There’s something else, Chief,” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely, “something
that maybe’ll have a bearing on this, in the way of character
testimony. I can swear to the prisoner’s homicidal temper. See this
swelling on my chin? He knocked me down early in the evening. Mrs. M.
and all these others can testify to that. The prisoner--”

“There is no ‘prisoner,’ Mr. Mosely,” gravely corrected the chief. “No
arrest has actually been made--yet. But in view of the circumstantial
testimony, Mr. Vail,” he proceeded, rising and advancing on the
unflinching Thaxton, “in view of the testimony, I fear it is my very
painful duty to--”

“To stop making a noise like Rhadamanthus,” interpolated Miss Gregg,
“and sit down and listen for a minute to the first gleam of sane common
sense that has filtered into this mess. Thax, is the old Elzevir Bible
still on its lectern in the study?”

“Why--yes,” answered Vail, puzzled. “But--”

“You remember it, don’t you, Doctor?” she asked, as she wheeled
suddenly on the gaping physician.

“The Elzevir Bible?” repeated Dr. Lawton, coming garrulously out of
the daze into which an unduly swift and unforeseen sequence of events
is wont to plunge the old. “Why shouldn’t I remember it? It was Osmun
Vail’s dearest possession. He paid a fortune for it. I remember how
you used to scold him for putting it on a lectern in his study instead
of locking it up. And I remember the day you insisted on protecting it
with that ugly gray cloth cover because you said the damp was getting
into the precious old leather. If Oz Vail had cared less for you or
been less afraid of you he’d never have allowed such a sacrilege. But
what’s that got to do with--”

She had not waited to hear him out, but had left the room. The
chief fidgeted annoyedly. The others looked blank. As Quimby cleared
his throat noisily, as if to speak, the little old lady returned.
Reverently between her veined hands she bore a large volume neatly
covered with a sleazy dark gray muslin binding.

“Do you recognize it, Doctor?” she asked.

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Lawton, impatiently. “But at a time like
this, surely--”

He paused. For she was paying no attention to his protest. Advancing to
the table, Miss Gregg laid the Book reverently upon it. Then she placed
both hands on its cover.

“Chief,” she said with a queer solemnity in her imperious voice, “I
have something to say. On the chance you may not otherwise believe me,
I am attesting to my statement’s truth on this Book of Books. Will you
hear me?”

“Why--why, of course, Miss Gregg!” exclaimed the chief. “But you are
not called upon to take oath. This is not a courtroom, nor am I a
magistrate. Besides, your unsupported word--”

“I prefer to make my statement with my hands upon this Book,” she
insisted, “in order that there can be no question, now or later, as to
my veracity. I hoped I might be able to avoid making the statement at
all. It is not a pleasant confession to make, and it may hold me up to
ridicule or to possible misconception. But I have no right to consider
my own wishes when a net of silly circumstantial evidence is closing
around an innocent man. You will hear me out?”

“Certainly, ma’am. But perhaps later it might--”

“Not later,” she refused, with a brief return to the imperiousness
which was her birthright. “Here is my story: Last evening after I went
to bed I got to thinking over the robberies. And no matter what courses
of reasoning I might follow I couldn’t make it seem that any one but
Thaxton Vail had committed them. So I--”

“Auntie!” cried Doris, in keen distress.

Vail’s face flushed. He looked with pitiful dismay at his old friend.
But Miss Gregg went on without glancing at either of the two young
people:

“I deduced that he might be sitting up examining his plunder or might
even be planning to steal more while the rest of us were asleep. By
the time the stable clock struck one I couldn’t lie there inactive any
longer. I got up and put on this dressing gown and slippers. That is
how I chanced to have them on when the alarm was given. Doris was sound
asleep. I crept out of our suite without waking her. She was asleep; as
I said. I could hear her. That is one of the joys of being young. Young
folks’ consciences are so tough from many sins that they sleep like
babes.”

She caught herself up in this philosophical digression. Then, clasping
the Book a little tighter, she continued:

“I tiptoed out into the passageway. There was a faint light in the
lower hall. I looked down. Macduff was lying at the foot of the stairs.
I think he heard me, for he lifted his head from between his paws and
wagged his tail. Then I peered over the banisters. And I saw Thax
sitting at his study table. He was dressed--as he is now. The coast was
clear for a peep into his room in case he had left any of the stolen
things lying around there. So I tiptoed to his door and tried it. It
was locked. Of course,” she added primly, “I didn’t dream Willis Chase
was in there. Yes, I tiptoed to his room and tried the knob. That was
the rattling sound Clive Creede heard just after the stable clock
struck.”

She glanced sharply at Creede. Clive nodded in wordless gratitude.

“As I was starting back toward my suite,” she went on, “I heard Thax
begin to climb the stairs. I crouched back behind the highboy in the
upper hall. I didn’t care to be seen at that time of night rambling
around my host’s house in such costume--or lack of costume. (It was not
coyness, understand. It was fear of ridicule. Coyness, in a woman of my
age, is like a scarecrow left in a field after the crop is gathered.)”

“Auntie!” protested Doris again, but Miss Gregg went on unchecked:

“Well, there I hid while he went past me, near enough for me to have
stuck a pin in him. And, by the way, he did _not_ try the knob of the
room where Willis Chase was. He didn’t try any doors at all. He just
groped along till he came to the third story stairs. Then he went up
them.”

There was a slight general rustle at this announcement. Miss Gregg
resumed:

“I wondered what he had been doing in his study alone at one o’clock. I
wondered if he was looking over the loot there. I couldn’t resist the
temptation to find out. (You know, Chief, I believe that Providence
sends us our temptations in order that we may yield to them gracefully.
If we resist them, the time will come when Providence will rebuke our
stubbornness by sending us no more temptations. And a temptationless
old age is a hideous thing to look forward to. But that is beside the
point. Excuse me for moralizing. The idea just occurred to me, and it
seemed too good to keep to myself.) Let me see--where was I?”

“You said you were tempted to go down to the study while Mr. Vail was
in the third story,” prompted Quimby. “To see if you could find--”

“Oh, yes,” she recalled herself. “Quite so. I was tempted. That means
I yielded. I scuttled down there as fast and as quietly as I could. I
almost fell over the dratted dog at the bottom of the stairs. I got
to the study at last. But I barely had time to inspect the desk top
and one or two drawers--no sign of the plunder in any of them--when I
heard Thax Vail coming downstairs. There was no chance to run back to
my room. So I--I-- In short, I so far lost the stately dignity which
I like to believe has always been mine, as to--in fact, to dodge down
behind the desk--in the narrow space between it and the wall. By the
way, Thax, you must--you simply _must_--tell Horoson to see the maids
sweep more carefully in that cranny. I was deathly afraid the dust
would make me sneeze. It was shamefully thick.”

“Well, ma’am?” again prompted Quimby.

“Excuse me, Chief. I am a housewife myself. (That’s the only kind of
wife I or any one else ever cared for me to be, by the way.) Well,
there I hid. Thax came into the study. And as he wouldn’t go out of it
I had to sit there on the floor. I suppose it was only for a couple of
hours at most, though I could have sworn it was at least nine Arctic
winters. All of me went to sleep except my brain. My legs were dead
except when they took turns at pringling. So was my back till I got a
crick in it. And the dust--”

“While you were there,” asked the chief, “did Mr. Vail leave the room?”

“If he had,” she retorted, in fierce contempt, “do you suppose I’d have
kept on sitting there in anguish, man? No, the inconsiderate ruffian
stayed. He didn’t even have the decency to go to sleep so I could
escape. I heard the stable clock strike two, and then, several months
later, I hear it strike three. (Oh, I forgot! My hands are on the Book.
It struck three an hour later. Not several months later.) Then, just
after it struck three that wretched man got up and stretched and went
out.”

“Yes?”

“He walked to the front door and opened it. By that time I was on my
feet. Both of them were asleep--both my feet, I mean--and I had to
stamp them awake. It took me perhaps five seconds, and it hurt like
the very mischief. Then I was for creeping up to bed. But as I saw the
open front door I was tempted again. I thought perhaps he had had some
signal from an accomplice outside--a signal I hadn’t heard. I went
toward the door. And at that instant the collie here set up the most
awful yowling. I bolted past him up the stairs. As I got to the top I
looked back. Macduff was still yowling. And Thax Vail came running into
the house to see what ailed the cur.”

“Then--”

“What I am getting at is that Thax was not out of my sight for more
than thirty seconds in all--thirty seconds at the very _most_,” she
concluded. “And I leave it to your own common sense if he could have
climbed to the window of his room in that time, found and killed Willis
Chase in the dark (he carried no flashlight--I saw that through the
kneehole of the desk as he went out), climbed down again and gotten
into the house--all inside of thirty seconds. He couldn’t. And you know
he couldn’t.”




CHAPTER XIII

HOW ONE OATH WAS TAKEN


She glared defiance at the chief, then, in placid triumph, let her eyes
roam the circle of faces. The Moselys were wide-eyed with interest.
Doris avoided her aunt’s searching gaze. Her own eyes were downcast,
her face was working. Clive Creede gave a great sigh as of relief. Vail
came forward, lifted one of the little old lady’s hands from the Book
and kissed it. He said nothing. It was the chief who broke the brief
silence which followed the testimony.

“You--you are certain, Miss Gregg, that the time Mr. Vail was out of
your sight was not longer than thirty seconds?” he asked, troubled.

“I didn’t have a stop watch,” she retorted tartly. “But the time was
just long enough for me to stand up, stamp the pringles out of my
joints, go to the front hall, and then to run to the top of one short
flight of stairs. In that time if he had committed the murder he must
have traversed the whole distance around the veranda walk to a spot
below his own room, climbed the vines (making sure not to let them
rustle loudly), crawl across the roof to the window, wriggle in, locate
the bed and the man on it, kill him, and repeat the whole process of
getting through the window to the roof and from the roof to the ground
and from the ground to the front door. If he could do that in thirty
seconds or less he deserves immunity for his speed record.”

“He could not have done it in less than several minutes,” said the
chief, consideringly. “And if you were out in the front hall for part
of that time you couldn’t have failed to hear the rustle of the vines
or the steps on the roof. That would cut the time down to even less
than the thirty seconds you speak of. No, he could not have done it.”

“That’s what I told you all along!” chimed in Clive Creede. “And I told
you he couldn’t possibly have had any motive. He--”

“Clive!” said Miss Gregg, her voice acid. “Did you ever hear a wise old
maxim that runs: ‘Save me from my friends and I’ll save myself from
my enemies’? Stop wringing your hands in that silly nervous way and
clap both of them tight over your mouth and keep them there. A little
more of your staunch friendship and Thax would be on his way to jail.
Please--”

“You did not lose sight of Mr. Vail,” summed up the chief with visible
reluctance, “from about one o’clock until less than thirty seconds
before the alarm was given? You could swear to that if necessary, Miss
Gregg?”

“Do you suppose I’ve been keeping my palms on this scratchy old muslin
just for fun?” she snapped.

“Oh, yes, I remember!” Quimby corrected himself in some confusion. “I
forgot you have already sworn--that you made your statement with your
hands resting on the Holy Bible. In that event, Mr. Vail, I can only
apologize for my hint at arresting you. I see no evidence at present to
hold you or any one else on. Miss Gregg’s word--to say nothing of her
solemn oath-would convince any jury in this county and would clear you.
Doctor, you will be ready to testify at the inquest that Mr. Chase had
been dead less than one hour when you examined him?”

“I shall,” replied Lawton, unhesitatingly.

“One question more, Mr. Vail, if you will permit,” said the chief,
with marked increase of deference, as he turned again to Thaxton. “Or,
rather, two questions. In the first place, what was the cause and the
nature of your quarrel with Mr. Chase--the quarrel which Mr. Creede
says he interrupted this morning?”

“Mr. Creede has told you all there is to tell about that,” answered
Thaxton, with some coldness of tone and manner. “Mr. Chase had read
in the paper that I was obliged to maintain Vailholme as a hotel. He
insisted on coming here. Not as a guest but to board. He thought it
was a great joke. I did not. That is where we differed. There was no
quarrel as he and I understood it. Nothing but an exchange of friendly
abuse. It remained for Mr. Creede to construe it into a quarrel.”

“I see,” said the chief, doubtfully. “The second and last question is:
Why did you, late in the evening, insist on transferring Mr. Chase from
the room assigned to him to your own room?”

“Because the night was hot, and his room was uncomfortable and mine was
cool and comfortable, and I was not going to occupy my own room all
night.”

“H’m!” murmured Quimby.

The tramp of feet in the front hall put an end to any further queries
he might have been framing. Whitcomb and two other constables stood in
the living room doorway, arriving in answer to the telephone summons.

At once the chief ranged from inquisitor to policeman.

“First of all,” he directed his men, “bring your flashlights, and we’ll
examine the ground under that window. Then we’ll climb up, the same
way, if we can borrow a ladder. The vines may--”

“Flashlight?” repeated Whitcomb. “Why, Chief, it’s broad _daylight_! In
another ten minutes the sun’ll be up.”

He went over to the nearest long window and threw open the
old-fashioned wooden shutters. Into the room surged the strong
dawnlight, paling the electric lamps to a sickly yellow.

In, too, through the window itself as he swung it wide, wafted a breath
of sweet summer morning air, heavy of dew-soaked earth and of flowers
and vibrant with the matin song of a million birds.

The lightning transition from spectral night to flush daylight came
as a shock to the group. It jolted them back to normality. Joshua Q.
Mosely was the first to speak.

“Guess we’ll hunt up Pee-air and have him bring the car around,” said
he briskly. “I and Mrs. M. did our packing last night. No sense in our
sticking here any longer. I’ll leave my _address_ with you, Chief, and
a memo about the reward. Guess we’ll move along to Lenox or maybe down
to Lee for breakfast. See you before we go, Mr. Vail. So long!”

He followed the chief and his men from the room, Mrs. Mosely in tow.
Dr. Lawton drifted aimlessly after Quimby.

The four who remained stood for a moment looking after the receding
outlanders. Then Clive turned impulsively, remorsefully, to Vail.

“I’m so sorry old man!” he exclaimed. “So rotten sorry! I never meant--”

“Sorry?” echoed Miss Gregg. “You needn’t be. You did your best. It’s no
fault of yours that Thax isn’t to be held for the Grand Jury.”

Creede winced as though she had spat in his face. He was ghastly pale,
and he slumped rather than stood. He looked desperately ill.

“I was trying to help,” he pleaded, his ghastly face working.
“Honestly, I was, Thax. I suppose that gas attack at my lab has dulled
whatever brains I had. It seemed to me I was backing you up, and then
all at once I realized I had said things that might make him think--”

“They made him think, all right,” assented the grim old lady. “And you
backed Thax up, too--backed him clear up against the wall. If I hadn’t
had the rare good luck to be able to prove he was innocent--”

“Oh, it’s all right, Clive,” said Vail, pitying his friend’s utter
demoralization. “You meant all right. I--”

“It’s all wrong,” denied Creede brokenly. “I’ve harmed the best friend
I have in the world. The fact that I was trying to help doesn’t make
any difference. If you don’t mind, I’ll follow the sweet Moselys’
example--pack up and go home.”

“Nonsense!” scoffed Vail. “No harm’s done. Stay on here. You meant all
right--”

“Hell is paved with the skulls of people who ‘meant all right,’”
interpolated Miss Gregg, severely. “The vilest insult one rational
human can heap upon another is that damning phrase, ‘He meant all
right!’ It’s a polite term for ‘mischief maker’ and for ‘hoodoo.’”

Clive turned his hollowly sick eyes on her in hopeless resignation. But
the sight did not soften her peppery mood.

“Clive,” she rebuked, “I’ve known you always. I knew your father. I
know your brother--though I don’t mention that when I can help it. All
of you have had plenty of faults. But not one of you was ever a fool.
You, least of all. The war must have done queer things to your head as
well as to your lungs and heart. No normal man, with all the brains you
took with you to France, could have come back with so few. It isn’t in
human nature. There’s a catch in this, somewhere.”

Creede bowed his head in weary acceptance of her tirade. Then he looked
with furtive appeal at Doris. But the girl was again sitting with
tight-clenched hands, her eyes downcast, her soft lips twitching. From
her averted face he looked to Vail.

“I’m sorry, Thax,” he repeated heavily. “And I’m going. I’d rather.
It’ll be pleasanter all around. If I can bother you to phone for a taxi
I’ll go up and get my things together.”

“No!” urged Thaxton, touched by his chum’s misery. “No, no, old man.
Don’t be so silly. I tell you it’s all--”

But Creede had slumped out of the room. Vail followed at his heels,
still protesting noisily against the invalid’s decision.

Miss Gregg watched them go. Then she turned to Doris. There was
something defiant, something almost apprehensive, in the old lady’s
aspect as she faced her niece.

“Well?” she challenged.

Doris sprang to her feet, her great dark eyes regarding Miss Gregg with
fascinated horror.

“Oh, Auntie!” she breathed, accusingly. “_Auntie!_”

“Well,” bluffed the old lady with a laudable effort at swagger, “what
then?”

“Aunt Hester!” exclaimed the girl. “It was _I_ who couldn’t sleep a
wink last night. Not _you_. I heard the stable clock strike every
single hour from twelve to three. And--”

“Well,” argued Miss Gregg, “what if you did? It’s nothing to boast
about, is it? Have you any monopoly on hearing stable clocks strike?
Have--?”

“I had, last night,” responded the girl, “so far as our suite was
concerned. I lay there and listened to you snoring. You went to sleep
before you had been in bed ten minutes. And you never stopped snoring
one moment till Macduff began to howl so horribly. Then you jumped up
and--”

“People always seem to think there’s something degrading about a
snore,” commented Miss Gregg. “Personally, I like to have people
snore. (As long as they do it out of earshot from _me_.) There’s
something honest and wholesome about snoring. Just as there is in a
hearty appetite. I’ve no patience with finicky eaters and noiseless
sleepers. There’s something so disgustingly superior about them! Now
when _I_ eat or sleep--”

“Aunt Hester!” Doris dragged her back from the safety isles of
philosophy to the facts of the moment. “You were sound asleep in your
own bed all night--till the dog waked us. But you told the chief you
didn’t sleep at all and you told him that awful rigmarole about hiding
behind lowboys and--”

“_High_boys, dear,” corrected the old lady. “Highboys. Or, to be
accurate, one highboy and one desk. A highboy and a lowboy are two very
different articles of furniture, as you ought to know by this time.
Now, that table out in the hall there is a low--”

“You told him all that story,” Doris drove on remorselessly, “when not
one single syllable of it was true. _Auntie!_”

“My dear,” demanded Miss Gregg, evasion falling from her as she came at
last to bay, “would you rather have had me tell one small lie or have
Thaxton Vail lose one large life? Circumstantial evidence--his own
knife and his absence from the house at just the critical time and all
that--and Clive Creede’s rank idiocy in blabbing the very worst things
he could have blabbed--all that would have sent Thax to prison without
bail to wait his trial. And, ten to one, it would have convicted him.
I was thinking of that when my inspiration came. Direct from On High,
as I shall always believe. And I spoke up. Then my own niece tries to
blame me for saving him! Gratitude is a--”

“But, Auntie!” protested the confused Doris. “Surely you could have
told the story without taking oath on it. Perjury is a terrible thing.
Even to save a life. Oh, _how_ could you?”

“I didn’t commit perjury,” stoutly denied Miss Gregg. “I did nothing of
the kind. I didn’t take any oath at all. Not one.”

“You laid your hands on the Bible,” insisted Doris. “You brought it in
from the lectern. And you laid both hands on it when you testified. You
said you did it in case your bare word should be doubted. You laid your
dear wicked hands on it and--”

“On what?” challenged Miss Gregg, sullenly.

“On the Elzevir Bible,” replied Doris, with all of youth’s intolerance
at such infantile dodging.

But to the girl’s surprise the old lady glared indignantly at her.

“I did nothing of the sort!” declared Miss Gregg. “Absolutely nothing
of the sort. In the first place, I took care not to say I was on oath
and not to swear to anything at all. In the second place, the Elzevir
Bible is in the bottom drawer of Thax’s desk. I know, because I put it
there not half an hour ago.”

She crossed to the table and snatched up the muslin-swathed book,
this time with no reverence at all. Peeling off the sleazy cover, she
disclosed the volume itself to the girl’s wondering eyes.

It was a bulky copy of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

“Auntie!” babbled the astounded Doris.

“I have every respect for Noah Webster,” remarked Miss Gregg. “The
world owes him a great debt. But I refuse to believe his excellent
dictionary was inspired from Heaven or that I committed perjury when I
laid my hands on it in endorsement of the story I told.”

“_Auntie!_ I--”

“And, by the way,” pursued the old lady, “I shall persuade Ezra Lawton
to hold the inquest here, and I shall see that this book is placed
on the table for the witnesses’ oaths to be taken on. Personally, I
shall tell him I have conscientious objections to swearing, and when I
testify I shall merely ‘affirm’ (that is permissible in law, you know)
with my saintly hands resting on this equally saintly tome.”

She ceased and glared once more at her marveling niece, this time with
an unbearable air of virtue. Doris returned the look for a second.
Then, racked by a spasm of mingled tears and laughter, she caught the
little old woman tight in her strong young arms.

“_Oh!_” she gasped between laughing and weeping. “How I pity poor Saint
Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates! Five minutes after he refuses
to let you in you’ll make a triumphant entrance, carrying along his
bunch of keys and his halo! But it was glorious in you to save Thax
that way. You’re _wonderful_! And--and it was all a--a fib about your
thinking he had stolen those things? Please say it was! _Please_ do!”

“My dear,” Miss Gregg instructed her, “if I had said I lay awake
through utter faith in the boy it wouldn’t have carried half the weight
as if I made them think I started out on my vigil with a belief in his
guilt. Can’t you see that? Of course, he never stole those things. I
made that quite clear to you last evening, didn’t I?”

“And--and, Auntie--you--you KNOW he’s innocent of--of this other awful
charge, don’t you? _Say_ you do!”

“The worst affront that can be offered is an affront to the
intelligence,” Miss Gregg informed her. “Which means your question
is a black insult to me. I didn’t grip his hand as Clive did,
or shout ‘Shame!’ as you did when he was accused. None of those
‘Hands-Across-the-Sea’ demonstrations were needed to show my faith
in him. My faith isn’t only in the man himself, but in his sanity.
Whatever else Thax Vail is he’s not a born fool. Not brilliant.
But assuredly not a fool. He wouldn’t kill young Chase or any one
else--with a knife that every one would recognize at once as Thax’s
own--and then go away, leaving it in the wound for the police to find.
No, Thax didn’t kill Chase. But some one who hates Thax did.”

“What--”

“Why else should he do it with that knife? There must have been plenty
of more suitable weapons at hand--unless he has killed so many people
this week that all his own weapons are in the wash.”

“But who--?”

“He must have picked up the knife here,” insisted Miss Gregg, “after
I used it for a corkscrew--either right afterward or else finding it
here in the night after we’d all gone to bed. These windows with their
backnumber clasps are ridiculously easy to open from outside. And from
where Thax sat or lay in the study the sound of any one entering this
room carefully couldn’t have been heard. Whoever came in to kill Willis
Chase must have planned to do it with some other weapon--some weapon
he brought along to do it with. Then he saw the knife, and he knew it
would switch suspicion to Thax. So he used that.”

“But the windows here were still fastened from inside, just now,”
argued Doris. “Besides, it’s proved the murderer got in through a
window upstairs. He couldn’t have come in through these windows and
gotten the knife and then have gone out again and closed and locked
them from the inside. He couldn’t. And Thax was the last person
downstairs here last night. So nobody from _inside_ the house, either,
could have gotten down here and stolen the knife and gone upstairs
with it again. The study door is right at the foot of the stairs. Thax
couldn’t have helped seeing and hearing him, even if he’d been able to
step twice over Macduff without disturbing the dog. No, it couldn’t be.”

“You are quite right,” agreed Miss Gregg. “It couldn’t. Lots of things
in this mystery-drama world _can’t_ be. But most of them _are_. Which
reminds me I must wake Horoson and have her get some coffee made. We’ll
all be the better for breakfast.”

She bustled to the hall as she spoke. Thaxton Vail was standing in the
front doorway looking disconsolately out into the sunrise.

“He went,” reported Vail, turning back into the house as Miss Gregg and
Doris emerged into the hallway. “I’m sorry. For he isn’t fit to. He’s
still all in.”

“Who?” asked Doris, her mind still adaze.

“Clive Creede. This thing has cut him up fearfully. He talked a lot
of rot about having injured me and not having the courage to face me
again. I told him it was absurd. But he went. He wouldn’t even wait for
a taxi. Just went afoot, leaving his luggage to be sent for. Poor chap!”

Miss Gregg passed on into the kitchen regions. The police, their
inspection of the house’s exterior completed, were trooping ponderously
upstairs, Lawton still trailing along dully in their wake. Doris and
Vail stood alone in the glory of sunrise that flooded the wide old hall.

For another few moments neither of them spoke again, but stood there
side by side looking out on the fire-red eastern sky and at the marvel
of sunrise on trees and lawn. Unconsciously their hands had met and
were close clasped. It was Doris who spoke at last.

“It was splendid of you,” she said, “not to be angry with Clive for his
awful blunders. I--somehow I feel as if I never want to set eyes on him
again. My father used to say: ‘I can endure a criminal, but I hate a
fool.’ I thought it was a brutally cynical thing to say. But now--well,
I can understand what Dad meant.”

“You mustn’t blame old Clive!” begged Vail. “He’s sick and upset and
hardly knows what he’s saying or doing. He thought I was in trouble.
And he came to my defense. If he did it bunglingly his muddled brain
and not his heart went back on him. I’m sorry Miss Gregg spoke to him
as she did. It cut him up fearfully.”

“Dear little Aunt Hester!” sighed Doris. “She knew us all when we were
babies. And she can’t get over the notion we’re still five years
old and that we must be scolded when we’re bad or when we blunder.
She’s--she’s a darling!”

“I ought to think so if any one does,” assented Vail. “If it hadn’t
been for her testimony I’d be on my way to jail before now. But to
think of her having to sit behind my desk all those hours! It was an
outrage! The dear old soul!”

Doris reddened, made as though to enlighten him, then shut her lips in
a very definite line. Knowing the man as she did, she believed he was
quite capable of refusing to profit by Miss Gregg’s subterfuge, and
that he would announce at the inquest that the old lady had sacrificed
the truth in a splendid effort to save him. Wherefore, being a wise
girl, Doris held her peace.

“In books,” said Vail, presently, “the falsely suspected hero thanks
the heroine eloquently for her trust in him. I’m not going to thank
you, Doris. But I think you know what your glorious trust means to me.”

She looked down; under the strange light in his eyes. And in doing
so she realized her hand was still interclasped with his. She made a
conscientious effort to withdraw it. But the last few hours apparently
had sapped her athletic young strength. For she lacked the muscular
power to resist his tender grasp. That grasp grew tighter as he said,
hurriedly, incoherently:

“When I get out of this tangle--and I’m not going to let you be mixed
up in it with me--there are all sorts of things I’m going to say to
you, whether I have the right to or not. Till then--”

He checked himself, his ardent words ending in a growl of disgust. Up
the driveway toward the house was striding Osmun Creede.




CHAPTER XIV

A CLUELESS CLUE


Creede had changed his dark habiliments of the preceding night for a
suit of flannels. His sagging shoulder and slight limp were accentuated
by the outdoor garb. Doris drew back from the doorway at sight of him.
But Vail stood where he was.

“I met Clive down the road,” began Osmun, with no salutation, as he
mounted the veranda steps. “I was driving here to see him--to try once
more to persuade him to come to Canobie with me. I made him drive
on home in my runabout--he wouldn’t come back here with me--while I
stopped to get his luggage. May I trouble you to have it brought down?”

He spoke with studied formality, his rasping voice icy and aloof.

“The servants aren’t up yet,” said Vail, no more warmly. “If you’ll
wait here a minute I’ll go and get it for you myself.”

He did not ask Osmun to enter, nor did Creede make any move to do so.

As Vail retired into the house on his quest, Osmun’s blinking eyes,
behind their thick spectacles, caught sight of Doris Lane just within
the shadow of the hall.

“Doris,” he said quickly, “if you and Miss Gregg want to get away I can
have a car of mine here inside of twenty minutes. And if you and she
will stay on at Canobie till Stormcrest is ready for you to go back to
it I’ll be happier than I can say.”

“Thank you,” she made cold answer. “But we are very comfortable here.
We--”

“Here?” echoed Creede. “But, dear girl, you can’t possibly stay on,
either of you, after what’s happened. Clive told me about it just now.
It’s unbelievable! And I know how eager you both must be to get away.”

“You are entirely mistaken,” she returned. “Why should we go away? Of
course, poor Willis Chase’s death is an awful shock. But he was never
a very dear friend to any of us, long as we’d all known him. And Aunt
Hester has decided that as soon as the inquest is over, we can settle
down to life here as well as anywhere until Stormcrest is--”

“I wasn’t thinking of the associations that must hang over this house,”
explained Creede. “I suppose Chase’s body will be taken away directly
after the inquest. I was thinking of the man who is your host. Clive
has just left me in a huff because I told him I believed Thaxton Vail
is the only person with the motive or the opportunity for killing
Chase. It is true. A thousand things point to it.”

“I am afraid nobody whose opinion is worth while will agree with you,”
she answered. “I don’t care to discuss it, please. You’ll excuse me,
won’t you, if I go in? I must find Aunt Hester and--”

She finished the sentence by turning on her heel and disappearing
down the dusky hall. Halfway in her retreat, she passed Quimby and
Dr. Lawton and two of the three constables coming down from their
examination of the upper rooms.

“Anything new, Doctor?” she asked Lawton, detaining him as the three
others continued their progress to the front door.

The doctor waited until the trio passed out of earshot. Then, lowering
his voice, he said quizzically:

“The chief’s got another bee in his bonnet now. He’s all up in the air
over it. He says it lands the case against a blank wall.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled at his hint.

“Why,” said the doctor, as if ashamed to mention so fantastic a thing,
“you know there was a shoe mark on the window-sill and a scrap of mud
where the killer had stepped on the sill on the way out.”

“Or in,” suggested Doris.

“Out,” corrected Lawton.

“How do you know?”

“The chief put his magnifying glass over it in the strong light just
now,” said Dr. Lawton. “Then he made us all take a peep. There was a
faint outline of the ball of a shoe pressed against the white woodwork
of the sill. And the shoe faced outward. That was clear from the curve
of its outer edge. It was a left foot at that. A tennis shoe.”

“He wore tennis shoes to muffle the sound of his steps?” cried Doris.

“That’s what I thought first,” answered Lawton. “So did the chief. But
we both changed our minds.”

“Why?”

Again the doctor hesitated almost shamefacedly.

“It’s so--so queer,” said he. “I can’t expect you to believe it. I
didn’t believe it myself till the chief made me examine the marks under
the magnifier and again under his pocket microscope. It was a tennis
shoe. Of course Quimby began to ransack Thaxton Vail’s boot trees and
to compare his soles with the size of this. Well, the sole-mark on the
sill was fully two sizes larger than any of Thaxton’s soles.”

“I don’t see anything unbelievable about that,” she commented. “It
clears Thax all the more completely.”

“You’re right,” said Lawton. “It clears Thax all right as far as it
goes. But that isn’t the unbelievable part of it. There was a pair of
tennis shoes under the edge of the bed. Lying a yard or so apart and
in the shadow. We none of us saw them first on account of the light.
Not till we had tested all Vail’s shoes by that imprint on the sill.
Then the chief hit his toe against one of them. He stooped down and
hauled them out. They had bits of mud still sticking to their instep.
But the left one had much less than the other. They were bigger than
any of Vail’s shoes. But we didn’t notice that till we had tested the
left one--the one with the least mud on it--against the sill’s imprint.
It fitted exactly. It did more. The sole-grips were new rubber with a
funny crisscross pattern. And those grips were precisely the same as
the marks on the sill. The microscope proved it. The step on the sill
was made by that very shoe. There couldn’t be any doubt of it.”

“But--”

“Then came the oddest part,” continued the doctor. “You’ve seen
Cooley, the night constable? He clerks, part-time, in the new shoe
store they’ve opened this year at Aura. And he grabbed hold of those
tennis shoes and gave them one good look. Then he vowed they are a
pair his boss had sent for--all the way from New York--to a pedic
specialist--for Willis Chase.”

“_What?_”

“He said Chase came into the shop last week and told them he had been
having trouble with his arches. He’d had the same trouble once before.
And that other time he had been recommended to a man in New York who
made shoes that helped him very much. He gave them the man’s address
and had them send for this pair of tennis shoes for him. The shoes came
two days ago. The clerks all studied them carefully because the ‘last’
was so peculiar. Cooley said he could swear to them. Then he proved
it. Just inside the vamp he had scribbled Chase’s initials, ‘W. A. C.,’
in pencil, when they came to the shop. He had done it to make sure
they wouldn’t get mixed up with the rest of the stock by some green
clerk before Chase could call for them. And sure enough there were the
initials. The shoes were Chase’s. Apparently he had kicked them off
under the edge of the bed when he undressed.”

The girl was staring at him in frank perplexity.

“But,” she argued, “you just said the left shoe of that pair was
the same shoe that had made the mark on the white woodwork of the
window-sill when the murderer escaped. How could it----”

“That’s the part of it none of us can understand. Chase couldn’t have
killed himself and then walked to the window with his shoes on and
stepped on the sill and then come back to bed and taken his shoes off
and lain down again. Yet there isn’t any other solution. Don’t you see
how crazily impossible the whole thing is? And the murderer couldn’t
have been wearing Chase’s shoes and then stopped on the other side of
the sill and taken them off and tossed them back under the bed. From
the position of the window they couldn’t possibly have been thrown from
there to the spot where we found them lying.”

The girl’s puzzled eyes roamed to the veranda. Osmun Creede had halted
the chief. Quimby was talking earnestly to him, presumably reciting the
impossible tale of this latest development.

Perhaps it may have been the effect of the light, but Doris as she
watched half fancied she saw Osmun’s lean face grow greenish white and
his jaw-muscles twitch convulsively as if in effort to keep steady his
expression. But at once the real or fancied look was gone, and he was
listening stolidly.

“It must be a cruel blow to him,” she mused to herself, “to find still
further proof that Thax is innocent. No wonder he seems so stricken!”

Thaxton Vail interrupted her reverie by coming downstairs, carrying
Clive’s suitcase and a light overcoat and hat. These he bore to the
veranda and without a word handed them to Osmun.

Creede took them in equal silence. Then as he turned to depart he
favored Vail with an expressionless stare.

“You’ve got more brain--more craft--than I gave you credit for, Thax,”
he said abruptly. “They’ll never convict you.”

He descended the steps and made off limpingly down the drive without
waiting for further speech.




CHAPTER XV

THE IMPOSSIBLE


The inquest had come and gone. Its jury of Aura citizens and two summer
folk, duly instructed by Lawton as to the form of their verdict, gave
opinion that Willis Chase had met his death at the hands of a person
or persons unknown, wielding a sharp instrument (to wit, a punch blade
of an identified knife) and a blunt instrument (i.e., a similarly
identified metal water carafe).

That was all.

Willis Chase’s sister and his brother-in-law came over from Great
Barrington, where they had an all-year home, and they took charge of
the dead man and his effects.

By noon Vailholme had settled to a semblance of its former pleasant
calm. Doris and her aunt were the only remaining guests. Thanks to
Horoson’s genius, enough servants consented to remain at only slightly
increased subsidy to keep the household machinery in motion.

The actors and spectators of the preceding night’s drama had a strange
sense of unreality as of having been part of some impossible nightmare.

Later the numbness would pass and the shock’s keener effects would play
havoc with nerves and thoughts. But for the moment there was dull calm.

To add to the sense of gloom and of dazed discomfort, the day was the
hottest of the year. The thermometer had passed the ninety mark before
ten o’clock. By twelve it was hovering around ninety-seven, and not a
vestige of breeze mitigated the heat.

Even in the cool old house the occupants sweltered. Outside,
ether-waves pulsed above the suffering earth. The scratch of locusts
sounded unbearably dry and shrill. The leaves hung lifeless.

The whole landscape shimmered in the murderous heat. South Mountain,
standing benevolent guard beyond the Valley, was haze-ribbed and
ghostly. The misty green range, to westward, cut by Jacob’s ladder,
threw off an emerald-and-fire reflection that sickened the eye. The
whole lovely mountain region with its sweet valleys swooned depressedly
in the awful heat.

Directly after the early lunch at Vailholme, which nobody wanted, Miss
Gregg took anxious note of Doris’s drooping weariness and ordered her
upstairs for a nap. The past twenty hours’ events and a sleepless night
had taken toll of even the girl’s buoyant young strength. Willingly she
obeyed the command to rest.

“I’ll be along presently,” said Miss Gregg, as Doris started upstairs.
“First, I want to verify or disprove a boast of my dear old friend,
Osmun Vail. Soon after he built this house he told me there was one
veranda corner where there was always a breeze even in the stiflingest
weather. If I can discover that corner I shall believe in miracles. It
will be a real sensation to sit for five minutes in a breeze on a day
like this. Come along, Thax, and show me where it is.”

Irritated by her ill-timed flippancy, Vail, with some reluctance,
left the more comfortable hall to follow her to the porch. Macduff
had stretched his furry bulk flat on the hearthstone of the big hall
fireplace in the sorry hope of deriving some coolness therefrom. As
Vail went out after Miss Gregg the dog sighed loudly in renunciation of
comfort, arose, stretched himself fore and aft in true collie fashion,
and stalked out onto the torrid veranda with the two misguided humans.

For this is the way of a dog. Tired or hungry, he will follow into rain
or snow or heat the man he calls master--sacrificing rest and ease and
food for the high privilege of being with his god.

Thaxton Vail was not Macduff’s god. Vail had had the collie for only
a few months. Yet man and dog had become good friends. And, to his
breeder, Clive Creede, the collie nowadays gave little more than
civility, having apparently forgotten Creede and their early chumship
during the twin’s absence in France.

Clive had left him at Vailholme. There Vail had found him on his own
return from overseas. When Clive came back a little later Macduff
accorded him but a tepid welcome. He showed no inclination to return
home with his old master, but exhibited a very evident preference for
his new abode and his new lord. Wherefore Clive had let him stay where
he was.

The heat waves struck through the collie’s massive tawny coat now as
he followed Vail and Miss Gregg out onto the hot veranda. He panted
noisily and began to search for some nook cooler than the rest of the
tiled floor, where he might lay him down for the remainder of his
interrupted snooze. Failing to find it, he looked yearningly toward the
dim hallway.

“See there!” proclaimed Miss Gregg. “There’s no breezy corner out
here to-day. If there was, Macduff would have discovered it. Trust
him to pick out comfort wherever it’s to be found! No dog that wasn’t
a connoisseur of comfort, would have elected to stay on at Vailholme
instead of going back to Rackrent Farm with Clive. And yet one reads
of the faithful dogs that prefer to starve and freeze with their loved
masters rather than live at ease with any one else! It was a frightful
shock to my ideals three months ago when I witnessed the meeting
between the new-returned Clive and his canine chum. I had looked
forward to a tear-stirring reunion. Why, Mac hardly took the trouble to
wag his tail. Yet he and Clive used to be inseparable in the old days.
A single year’s absence made the brute forget.”

“Mac, old man,” said Vail, rumpling the collie’s ears, “she’s
denouncing you. And I’m afraid you deserve it. I’ve always read of the
loyalty of collies. And it jarred me as much as it did the rest of
them when you passed up Clive for me. Never mind. You’re--”

The clank and chug of an automobile interrupted him. Around the
driveway curve appeared a rusty and dusty car of ancient vintage. At
its wheel was a rusty and dusty man of even more ancient vintage--to
wit, Dr. Ezra Lawton.

“Hello!” hailed Thaxton, as the car wheezed to a halt under the
porte-cochère. “What brings _you_ back so soon? I figured you would be
sleeping all day. Anything new?”

“Yes and no,” answered Lawton, scrambling up the steps to greet Miss
Gregg and his host. “I met Osmun Creede’s chauffeur as I was starting
out on a call. I asked him how Clive is. He said he didn’t know and
that Clive must be at Rackrent Farm, for he isn’t at Canobie. I got to
thinking. And I’m going to take a run over there. He’s sick. He isn’t
fit to be staying all alone or just with his two old negroes at that
gas-reeking house. If he won’t go to Canobie and if he won’t come back
here I’m going to kidnap him and make him come home with me till he’s
more on his feet again.”

“Good old Samaritan!” applauded Vail.

“But that isn’t why I stopped here on my way,” pursued Lawton. “I’ve
been thinking. You told me Clive brought that German army knife home
to you. I’m wondering if he happened to bring home several of them as
presents, or if that was the only one. If there are more than one it
may throw a light on this muddle to find out who has the other or the
others. If there are several and they’re all alike, it may not have
been yours that killed Chase.”

“I see,” answered Vail, adding: “No, he didn’t tell me whether that was
the only one or not.”

“Well, is there any mark on yours by which you can be sure one of the
other knives didn’t kill Chase--if there are any other knives like it?”

“No. I can’t help you out even that far. I’m sorry. By the way, if
you don’t mind, Doctor, I’ll go across to Rackrent Farm with you. All
morning I’ve been feeling remorseful about letting the poor chap leave
here. He’s so sensitive he’ll be brooding over the way he bungled in
trying to help me. I’ll go over and see if I can’t make him feel better
about it. Perhaps I can make him come back. It’s worth a try anyhow.”

“Come along!” approved the doctor. “Plenty of room. Hop in.”

“I think,” suddenly decided Miss Gregg, “I think I’ll do some hopping,
too. I went over the boy roughshod. I was cross and tired. I’ll tell
him I’m sorry. Besides, there may be a bit of breeze in driving.
There’s none here.”

As Vail helped her into the tonneau Macduff leaped lightly from the
veranda steps to the rear seat of the car beside her. The collie, like
many of his breed, was crazily fond of motoring and never voluntarily
missed a chance for a ride. Vail got into the front seat beside Lawton
and the car rattled on its way.

Rackrent Farm lay less than a mile from Vailholme’s farther gate. As
the car turned into the farmhouse’s great neglected front yard and
stopped there was no sign of life in or about the unkempt house as it
baked in the merciless sunshine. Neither of the old negro servants
appeared. Clive did not come to door or window in response to the
unwonted arrival of visitors at his hermitage. An almost ominous
stillness and vacancy seemed to brood over the whole place.

“I don’t like this,” commented Lawton worriedly as he drew up at the
end of the brick path which traversed the distance from carriage-drive
to front door. “And-- By the way,” he interrupted himself, “now I
remember it. Oz said something about the two negroes being made sick
by the gases and clearing out till the house could be aired. Aired! Why
every window and every door in sight is shut!”

“Clive must be here all alone if his servants decamped,” said Vail.
“Probably he hasn’t the energy to open up the house, sick as he is.
Come on!”

He got out with the doctor, turning to help Miss Gregg to alight.

Before she could step to the ground Macduff crowded past her in right
unmannerly fashion, leaping to earth and standing there.

The collie’s muscles were taut. His muzzle was pointed skyward. His
sensitive nostrils deflated and filled with lightning alternation as
he sniffed avidly at the lifeless air. He was in evident and keen
excitement, and he whimpered tremulously under his breath.

Paying no heed to the collie, the three humans were starting up the
ragged brick walk which wound an eccentric way through breast-high
patches of boxwood to the front door of the farmhouse.

The bricks radiated the scorching heat. The boxwood gave back hot
fragrance under the sun’s untempered rays. The locusts were shrilling
in the dusty tree-branches above. Over everything hung that breath of
tense silence.

Macduff, after one more series of experimental sniffs, flashed up the
winding walk past the three and toward the front door.

Within six feet of the door he shied like a frightened horse at
something which lay in his path. And he crouched back irresolutely on
his furry haunches.

At the same moment the trio rounded the curve of path between two high
boxwoods which had shut off their view of the bricked space in front of
the doorway.

There, sprawling face downward on the red-hot bricks at their feet, lay
the body of a man.

Miss Gregg flinched unconsciously and caught hold of Vail’s arm. The
doctor, his professional instincts aroused, ran forward and knelt at
the man’s side, turning him over so that the body lay face up beneath
the pitiless furnace-heat of the sky.

The dazzling white glare of sunlight poured down upon an upturned dead
visage.

“Clive!” panted Miss Gregg, dizzily. “Oh, it’s Clive _Creede_!”

“Not a mark on him,” mumbled Vail, who had bent beside the doctor
over the lifeless body. “Not a mark. Sunstroke, most likely. In his
weakened state, coming out of the house into this inferno of heat--
You’re sure he’s dead, Doctor?”

For an instant Lawton did not answer. Then he finished his deftly rapid
examination and rose dazedly to his feet.

“Yes,” he said, his face a foolish blank of bewilderment. “Yes. He is
dead. But he has been dead less than fifteen minutes. And--it wasn’t
sunstroke. He--”

The doctor paused. Then from between his amazement-twisted lips he
blurted:

“_He froze to death!_”

Miss Gregg cried out in unbelieving wonder. Thaxton Vail’s incredulity
took a wordier form.

“Froze to death?” he ejaculated, loud in his amaze. “And less than
fifteen minutes ago? Doctor, the weather’s turned your head. This is
the hottest day of the year. Out here in the sun the mercury must be
somewhere around a hundred and twenty. _Froze_ to death? Why, it’s im--”

“I tell you,” reiterated Dr. Lawton, mopping the streams of sweat from
his forehead, “I tell you HE FROZE TO DEATH!”




CHAPTER XVI

THE COLLIE TESTIFIES


In the moment of stark dumbfounded hush that followed Dr. Lawton’s
verdict the collie created a diversion on his own account.

For the past few seconds he had stood once more at gaze, muzzle
upraised, sniffing the still air. The impulse which had sent him
charging toward the house had been deflected at sight of the body on
the brick pathway, and he had checked his rush.

Perhaps it was the all-pervasive fragrance of the boxwood bushes on
every side, bakingly hot under the sun’s glare, that confused the scent
he had caught. In any event he was sniffing once more to catch the lost
odor which had guided him in his short hurricane flight.

Then he varied this by breaking into a fanfare of discordantly excited
barks.

The racket smote on its hearers with a shock of horror. Thaxton Vail
caught the dog by the collar, sternly bidding him to be silent.
Trembling, straining to break from the grasp, Macduff obeyed the fierce
command.

At least he obeyed so far as to cease his clangor of high-pitched
barks. But he did not cease for one instant to struggle to liberate
himself from the restraining grip.

Furiously his claws dug into the brick-crannies, seeking a foothold
whereby he might exert enough leverage to break free. Vail, with
another sharp command, dragged him to one side, meaning to tie him by
means of a handkerchief to one of the bush stems.

The collie’s forefeet clawed wildly in air as they were lifted
momentarily off ground. And one of the flying paws brushed sharply
across the forehead of the dead man.

There was a cry from Miss Gregg followed by a gasp from both men. The
curved claws had chanced to catch in Creede’s thick tangle of hair that
clung dankly to the forehead.

Under that momentary tug the hair gave way. A mass of it as large as a
man’s hand came loose with the receding forepaw of the dog. And lo, the
dead man’s forehead was as bald as a newborn baby’s!

The change wrought by the removal of the curling frontal hair made
a startling difference in the lifeless face. It was Miss Gregg who
exclaimed shudderingly:

“That’s not Clive! That’s--that’s _Osmun_ Creede!”

“Good Lord!” babbled the doctor. “You’re--you’re right! It’s Oz!”

Vail, still clutching the frantically struggling collie, stared in
silence. It was uncanny--the difference made by that chance removal of
the ingenious toupée. Instantly the man on the ground before them lost
his resemblance to Clive and became Clive’s twin brother.

Lawton, catching sight of an object which the shift of posture had
caused to slide into view in the prostrate man’s upper coat pocket,
drew forth a spectacle-case.

In view of the amazing identification the intruders wholly forgot for
the moment Dr. Lawton’s ridiculously incredible claim that Creede had
frozen to death on the hottest day of the year.

They had even forgotten the heat that poured down upon them in perilous
intensity. They forgot everything except this revelation that the
supposed Clive Creede, their friend, was Osmun Creede whom they had
detested.

Macduff strained and whimpered unheeded as Vail still held him
with that subconscious grip on his collar. All three were staring
open-mouthed at the sprawling figure on the bricks. For a space nobody
spoke.

Then, with a start, as of one who comes out of a trance, Miss Gregg
burst into hysterically rapid speech.

“I knew it all the time!” she volleyed. “I knew it all the time--clear
in the back of my head where the true thoughts grow--the thoughts that
are so true they don’t dare force themselves to the front of the mind
where the everyday thinking is done. I knew it! There were no twins at
all. There was only Osmun!”

The two others blinked stupidly at her. She rattled on with growing
certainty:

“Osmun was the only one of the Creede twins to come back alive from
France. I know it. There _is_ no Clive Creede. There never has been
since the war. He must have died over there. Stop and think, both of
you! Did you ever see the two twins together since Osmun came from
overseas? Not once. Did you?”

“Good Lord!” sputtered the doctor. “Of course I have. Often. At--at
least, I--I’m sure I must have. I--”

“She is right,” interposed Vail in something like awe, “I swear I
believe she is right. I never stopped to think about it. But I can’t
remember seeing them together once since--”

“It was Osmun, alone!” declared Miss Gregg. “He played both rôles.
Though heaven alone knows why he should have done such a queer thing.
And he worked it cleverly. Oh, Oz always had brains! Clive was supposed
to live here at Rackrent Farm, while Oz lived at Canobie--those two who
had never lived apart before! That was to make the dual rôle possible.
He couldn’t have pretended they lived in the same house without the
servants or some guest discovering there was only one of them. But a
couple of miles apart he could divide his time between Rackrent and
Canobie in a plausible enough way.”

“But--”

“Bald and lame and with a stoop and wearing thick spectacles he was
Osmun. Erect and with a mass of hair falling over his forehead and no
glasses he was Clive. There was no need to make up the face. They had
been twins.”

“It’s ingenious,” babbled Dr. Lawton, fighting for logic and for the
commonplace. “But it doesn’t make sense. Why, I--”

“It _will_ make sense when we get it cleared up!” she promised. “And
now that we’ve got hold of both ends of the string we’ll untangle it
in short order. When we do, we’ll find who killed Willis Chase and who
stole our jewelry. That isn’t all we’ll discover either. We’ll--drat
the miserable collie!” she broke off. “Has he gone crazy? Make him be
still, Thax!”

For Macduff, failing to get free by struggling and by appealing
whimpers, had now renewed his salvo of barking. Vail spoke harshly to
the dog, tightening his hold on the collar.

The brief interruption switched the current of Dr. Lawton’s thoughts
back from this mystery of identity to a more startling and more
professionally interesting mystery--to that of a man who had achieved
the garishly impossible exploit of freezing to death in a sun-scourged
temperature of 120 degrees or more. Again the doctor knelt by the body,
swiftly renewing his examination.

But even before he did so he knew he could not have been mistaken in
his diagnosis.

Lawton was a Berkshire physician of the old school. He had plied his
hallowedly needful profession as country doctor among those tumbles of
mountains and valleys for nearly half a century.

Winter and summer he had ridden the rutted byroads on his errands
of healing. Often in olden days and sometimes even now he had been
called on to toil over unfortunates who had lost their way in blizzards
with the mercury far below zero, and who had frozen to death before
help could come. Every phase of freezing to death was professionally
familiar to him. The phenomena were few and simple. They could not
possibly be mistaken.

And, past all chance of doubt, he knew now that Osmun Creede had frozen
to death--that he had died from freezing in spite of the tropical
torridity of the day.

The fact that the thermometer was registering above one hundred in the
shade and was many degrees higher here in the unchecked sun-glare--this
did not alter the far more tremendous fact that Osmun Creede had just
died from freezing.

Lawton raised the rigidly frozen body in order to slip off from it the
coat which impeded his work of inspection. Deftly he pulled the coat
from the shoulders, the sleeves turning inside out in the process, and
he tossed it aside.

The flung coat landed on a twig-tangle of the nearest box-bush, hanging
upside down from the twigs. From its inner pocket, thus reversed, fell
a fat wallet. It flapped wide open to the bricks, the jar of contact
shaking from its compartments three or four objects which glittered
like colored fire as they caught and cast back a million sun-rays.

Miss Gregg swooped down on the nearest of these glowing bits,
retrieving it and holding it triumphantly out to Thaxton.

“Doris’s marquise ring!” she announced. “And there’s my pearl-and-onyx
brooch down there by your left toe. I said last night Oz Creede was the
thief. I knew he couldn’t possibly be. But that made me know all the
more he was.”

She stooped to gather up other items of the scattered loot. Vail bent
down to help her. In doing so, instinctively, he slackened his hold on
Macduff’s collar.

The dog took instant advantage of the chance to escape. Never pausing,
he flashed toward the shut front door of the farmhouse. No time or
need now to bark or to struggle. He was free--free to follow up the
marvelous news that his sense of smell had imparted to him.

Like a whirlwind he sprang up the hot brick walk to the closed door.

“What on earth--?” began Miss Gregg, looking vexedly from her task of
jewel-collecting as the flying collie sped past her.

Then the half-uttered question died on her lips.

For as Macduff cleared the wide flagstone in front of the threshold the
farmhouse door swung open from within.

In the doorway stood--or rather swayed--a man.

The man was Clive Creede.

The three intruders gaped in dazed unbelief at him. Vail and Miss Gregg
were too stupefied to rise from the ground, but continued to crouch
there, the recovered plunder in their stiffening fingers.

Lawton blinked idiotically across the body of Osmun, his old face slack
with crass incredulity.

Yes, there in the threshold swayed Clive Creede. He was thin to
emaciation, his hair was gray at the temples, and his face was grayer.
He seemed about to topple forward from sheer weakness. His hollow eyes
surveyed the group almost unseeingly. The man looked ten years older
than did his dead brother.

With a scream of agonized rapture--a scream all but human in its stark
intensity--the collie hurled himself upon his long-absent master.

Leaping high, he sought to lick the haggard face. His white forepaws
beat an ecstatic tattoo on Clive’s chest. Dropping to earth, he swirled
around Creede in whirlwind circles stomach to the ground, wakening the
hot echoes with frantic yelps and shrieks of delight.

Then, sinking down at Clive’s feet, he licked the man’s dusty boots and
gazed up into his face in blissful adoration. The dog was shaking as
with ague.

After two years’ absence his god had come back to him. He had caught
Clive’s scent--blurredly and uncertainly--through the sharp fragrance
of the boxwood and the stillness of the air--as far off as the gateway.
Every inch of the houseward journey had confirmed more and more his
recognition of it.

Then, just as he located the scent and sprang forward to find the
unseen master, Thaxton Vail had collared him and checked his quest.

But now he had come again to the feet of the man he worshiped.
Henceforth Thaxton and all the rest of the world would be as nothing
to the dog. He had re-found his god--the god for whom he had grieved
these two dreary years--the god who most assuredly was not the “Clive
Creede” that had imposed himself upon these mere humans.

Lifting his head timidly, yearningly, Macduff stood up once more.
Rearing himself, he placed his forepaws again on Clive’s chest
and peered up into the man’s face. The collie was sobbing in pure
happiness, sobbing in a strangely human fashion. His god had been
brought back to him.

Clive laid two thin and trembling hands on the silken head.

“Mac!” he murmured huskily. “_Mac_, old friend!”

At sound of the dear voice the collie proceeded once more to go insane.
Capering, dancing, thunderously barking, he circled deliriously about
his master.

But Clive was no longer heeding him. His hollow gaze rested now on the
three humans who were clustered about his dead brother--the three who
still eyed him in vacant disbelief.

From them his glance strayed to Osmun Creede. And again Clive’s white
lips parted.

“He’s dead,” he croaked. “He’s--he’s--frozen--frozen to death. I--”

He got no further. Attempting to take a forward step, he reeled
drunkenly. As he pitched earthward Thaxton Vail sprang toward him,
catching the inert body in his arms as it fell.




CHAPTER XVII

UNTANGLING THE SNARL


Two days later, at Vailholme, Dr. Lawton stumped downstairs to the
study where Thaxton and Doris and Miss Gregg awaited him. Miss Gregg,
by the way, chanced to be in an incredibly bad humor from indigestion.
Every one knew it.

Thrice a day had the doctor come to Vailholme since he and Thaxton had
borne the unconscious Clive thither from Rackrent Farm. A nurse had
been summoned, and for forty-eight hours she and Lawton had wrought
over the senseless man.

This morning Clive had awakened. But, by the nurse’s stern orders, he
had not been allowed to talk or even to see his housemates until the
doctor should arrive.

For an hour Lawton had been closeted with the invalid. The others
greeted his descent from the sickroom in eager excitement.

“Well? Well? How is he?” demanded Miss Gregg with the imperious note
Lawton detested, firing her queries before the doctor was fairly in
the study. “Is he sane? Did he know you? Speak up, man!”

“Sane?” echoed the doctor a bit testily. “Of course he’s sane. Why
shouldn’t he be? He always was, even in the old days. And why shouldn’t
he remember me? Didn’t I bring him into the world? And haven’t I just
brought him back into it?”

“Ezra Lawton!” snapped the old lady, indignant at his tone. “You must
have been born boorish and exasperating. Nobody could have acquired so
much boorishness and crankiness in seventy short years. You’re--”

“Auntie!” begged Doris. “_Please!_ Doctor, we’ve been waiting so
anxiously! Won’t you tell us all about him? We--”

Dr. Lawton thawed at her pleading voice and look.

“The nurse tells me he came out of the coma clear-headed and apparently
quite himself--except, of course, for much weakness,” he replied,
pointedly addressing the girl and ignoring her glowering aunt. “By the
time I got here he was a little stronger. Yet I didn’t encourage him to
talk or to excite himself in any way. However, he seemed so restless
when I told him to lie still and be quiet that I thought it would do
him less harm to ask and answer questions than to lie there and fume
with impatience. So I told him--a little. And I let him tell me--a
little.”

He paused. Miss Gregg glowered afresh. Doris clasped her hands in
appeal. Lawton resumed:

“And together with the letters and so on that I found in his satchel
when I went through Rackrent Farm again yesterday I think I’ve pieced
out at least the first part of the story. I wouldn’t let him go into
many details. And when he came to accounting for his presence at
Rackrent he grew so feverish and excited that I gave him a hypo and
walked out. That part of the yarn will have to keep till he’s a good
deal stronger.”

“In brief,” commented Miss Gregg, acidly, “you pumped the poor lad,
till you had him all jumpy and queer in the head, and then you got
scared and doped him. A doctor is a man who throws medicines of which
he knows little into a system of which he knows nothing. I only wonder
you didn’t end your chat with Clive by telling him you couldn’t answer
for his life unless you operated on him for something-or-other inside
of two hours. That is the usual patter, isn’t it?”

“He has been operated on already,” returned Lawton in cold disdain.

Then maddeningly he stopped and affected to busy himself with shaking
down his clinical thermometer.

“Operated on?” repeated Doris, as her aunt scorned to come into range
by asking the question. “What for?”

Again her pleading voice and eyes won Lawton from his grievance.

“If I can do it without a million impertinent interruptions, my dear,”
said he, “I’ll tell you and Thax all about it.”

“Go ahead!” implored Vail.

“As I say,” began the doctor, “I inferred much of this from the letters
and other papers I found in Clive’s bag at the farm. He corroborated
or corrected the theory I had formed. Briefly, he was wounded at
Château-Thierry. Shell fragment lodging almost at the juncture of
the occipital and left frontal. Crushed the sutures for a space of
perhaps--”

“I’m quite sure there is a medical dictionary somewhere in the
library,” suggested Miss Gregg with suspicious sweetness. “And later
I promise myself a rare treat looking up such spicy definitions as
‘occipital’ and ‘sutures.’ In the meantime--”

Dr. Lawton shifted his position in such a way as to bring his angular
shoulder between his face and that of his tormentor. Then he went on:

“He was badly wounded. A bit of bone splinter pressed down on the
brain--if part of my audience can grasp such simple language as
that--completely destroying memory. After the Armistice, Osmun made a
search for him and found him in a base hospital, not only in precarious
bodily health but entirely lacking in recollection of any past event.
He did not so much as recall his own name. He didn’t recognize Oz or
know where he was nor how he got there.”

“Poor old Clive!” muttered Vail.

“Oz brought him back to America. For some reason that I can’t
even guess--it was at that point Clive began to get feverish and
incoherent--Oz smuggled him across the Continent and ‘planted’ him in a
sanitarium up in Northern California. He placed him there under another
name, paying for his keep, of course, and leaving word that every care
was to be taken of him. The sanitarium doctors held out absolutely no
hope for his mental recovery, though his physical health began to
improve almost at once.”

“To judge by the way he looks now,” commented Vail, “his physical
health has gone pretty far in the opposite direction since then.”

“It’s had enough setbacks to make it do that,” said the doctor. “But
he’ll pull through finely now. He’s turned the corner.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” apologized Thaxton. “Fire away.”

“Well, with Clive disposed of--presumably for life--Osmun comes
back here to Aura,” proceeded Lawton. “And here for some reason I
can’t make out, he elects to be both himself and Clive. His own long
illness--trench fever, laymen call it--had left him partly bald. He
stopped in New York and had a wigmaker-artist build him a toupée that
corrected the only difference in appearance between Clive and himself.
To make the change still greater he bought those thick-lensed specs. I
have tested them. The lenses are of plain glass, slightly smoked. And
he cultivated a limp and a sag of the shoulder. Then he embarked on his
Jekyll-Hyde career among us.”

“It didn’t seem possible when you people told me about it first,” said
Doris, as the doctor paused again for dramatic effect. “But the more
I’ve thought it over the easier it seemed. You see, their faces were
just alike. They both knew the same people and the same places and
Osmun knew every bit of Clive’s history and associations and tastes and
mannerisms. The only things he had to keep remembering all the time
were the disguise and the shoulder and the limp and to take that horrid
rasp out of his voice when he impersonated Clive. He-- Go on, please,
doctor. I’m sorry I interrupted again.”

“That’s all I actually know about Osmun’s part in it,” resumed the
doctor. “And a lot of that is only deduction. But I do know about
Clive. At the sanitarium he had tried to walk out through a door in
the dark. The door proved to be a second story window. Clive landed
on his head in the courtyard below. They picked him up for dead. Then
they found he was still breathing, but his skull was bashed in. There
was just one chance in three that a major operation might save him.
There was no time to communicate with Osmun, even if he had given them
his right name and address--which he had not. So they operated. The
operation was a success--”

“And in spite of that the patient lived?” asked Miss Gregg, innocently.

Paying no heed to her, Dr. Lawton continued:

“Clive came to himself as sound mentally as ever he had been and with
his memory entirely restored. He remembered everything. Even to Osmun’s
sticking him away in the sanitarium at the other side of the world. His
first impulse was to telegraph the good news to his twin. Then he got
to thinking and to wondering. He couldn’t understand Oz’s queer actions
toward him. And he meant to find the answer for himself.”

“That’s just like him!” commented Vail. “He would.”

“He didn’t want to give Oz a chance to build up some plausible lie or
to interfere in any way with his getting home,” said Lawton. “At last,
after all these years, he seems to have caught just an inkling of his
precious twin brother’s real character. He made up his mind to come
home unheralded and to find out how matters stood. It wasn’t normal or
natural, he figured, for Oz to have taken him clear to California and
put him in that sanitarium under an assumed name. There was mischief in
it somewhere. He decided to find where.

“He had only the clothes he wore and his father’s big diamond ring--the
one your great-uncle gave old Creede, you remember, Thax. Clive never
wore it. But he used to carry it around his neck in a chamois bag
because it had been his father’s pride. Well, as soon as he could walk
again, he sneaked out of the sanitarium, beat his way to San Francisco
on a freight, and hunted up a pawnbroker. The pawnbroker, of course,
supposed he had stolen the ring, so he gave Clive only a fraction of
its value. But it was enough cash to bring him east.

“He was still weak and shaky, and the long, hot, cross-continent ride
didn’t strengthen him. In fact, he seems to have kept up on his nerve.
He got to New York and thence to Stockbridge, and hired a taxi to
bring him over to Aura. He knew he could trust the two old negroes at
Rackrent Farm to tell him the truth about what was going on. For they
were devoted to him from the time he was a baby. So he had the taxi
drive him straight to the farm before hunting up Oz or any of the rest
of us. And there, apparently, he walked straight in on Oz himself.

“That’s as far as he got--or, rather, as far as I’d let him get--in
his story just now. For he grew so excited I was afraid he’d have a
relapse. I didn’t even dare ask him what he meant that day by mumbling
to us that Osmun had frozen to death. It’s queer he should have known,
though. Unless--”

“Unless what?” urged Doris, as Lawton paused frowning.

He made no reply, but continued to stare frowningly at the floor.

“Unless what, doctor?” coaxed Doris.

Dr. Lawton looked up, impatiently, shook his head and made answer:

“I don’t know, my dear. I don’t actually know. And until I do know I
am not going to make a fool of myself and let myself in for further
ridicule from your amiable aunt by telling my theory. I formed that
theory when I examined every inch of Rackrent farmhouse yesterday--the
time I found Clive’s satchel. But it’s such a wild notion--and besides
the thing was smashed and empty and there was no proof that it ever had
contained what I guessed it had--”

“What thing, doctor?” wheedled Doris, in her most seductive manner.
“What thing was smashed and empty? And what did you ‘guess’ it had
contained? Tell us, won’t you, _please_?”

“Not till Clive is strong enough to tell all his story,” firmly refused
Lawton. “Then if he corroborates what I--”

“In other words, Doris, my child,” explained Miss Gregg, with gentle
unction, “when Clive tells--if he ever does--our wise friend here
will say: ‘Just what I conjectured from the very first.’ It is quite
simple. Many a medical reputation has risen to towering heights on less
foundation. My dear, you are still at the heavenly age when all things
are possible and most of them are highly desirable. Ezra Lawton and I
have slumped to the period when few things are desirable and none of
those few are possible. So don’t grudge him his petty chance to score
an intellectual hit. Even if he should be forced to score it without
the intellect.”

The old lady was undergoing one of her recurrent spells of chronic
dyspepsia this day--by reason of dalliance with lobster Newburg at
dinner the night before.

At such crises her whole nature abhorred doctors of all degrees for
their failure to prevent such attacks when she had refused to live up
to their prescribed dietary.

Especially in these hours of keen discomfort did she rejoice to
berate and affront her valued old friend, Dr. Lawton, he being the
representative of his profession nearest to hand.

And always her verbal assaults, as to-day, had the instant effect of
making him forget his reverent affection for her, turning him at once
into her snarling foe.

Doris, well versed in the recurrent strife symptoms between the old
cronies, came as usual to the rescue.

“Doctor,” she sighed admiringly, “I think it’s just wonderful of you to
have pieced all this together and to have made Clive tell it without
overexciting him. Auntie thinks it’s just as wonderful as I do. Only--”

“Only,” supplemented the still ruffled Lawton, “she doesn’t care to
jeopardize her card in the Troublemakers’ Union by admitting it?”

“Personally,” said Miss Gregg with bitterly smiling frankness, “I’d
rather be a Troublemaker than an Operation-fancier. However, that is
quite a matter of opinion. And medical books have placed ignorance
within the reach of all. Medical colleges teach that sublime truth:
‘When in doubt don’t let anybody know it!’ But--”

“It’s a miracle,” intervened Vail, coming to the aid of peace, “that
poor old Clive could have come through this as he has. Wounded, then
falling out of a window, then--whatever may have happened to him when
he met Oz--and getting well in spite of it. By the way, sir, has he
asked to see any of us?”

Dr. Lawton was stalking majestically doorward. Now on the threshold he
paused. His jarred temper rejoiced at the chance to pick out any victim
at all to make uncomfortable.

“Yes,” he returned, “he has. He asked for Doris here not less than
eight times while I was up there.”

The girl flushed hotly. Vail went slightly pale. Then he followed the
doctor hastily from the room on pretense of seeing the visitor to the
front door. Doris and Miss Gregg looked silently at each other.

“Youth is stranger than fiction,” said the old lady, cryptically.

Doris, scarlet and uncomfortable, made no reply. And presently Thaxton
Vail came back into the room.

“Doris,” he said very bravely indeed, “Dr. Lawton says it won’t
do Clive any harm at all to see you after he has slept off the
quarter-grain of morphia he gave him. He says it may do him a lot of
good. I’ll tell the nurse to let you know when he wakes.”

Then, not trusting himself to say more lest he lose the pleasant smile
he maintained with such sore-hearted difficulty, he went quickly out
again, hurrying upstairs on his errand to the nurse.

His soul was heavy within him. Before the war he knew Clive Creede had
been his dangerous rival for Doris’s favor. Time and again Vail had
had to battle against pettiness in order to avoid rancor toward this
lifelong chum of his.

Then, after the supposed Clive’s return from overseas, Vail had been
ashamed of his own joy in noting that Doris’s interest in Creede seemed
to have slackened, although the man himself was still eagerly her
suitor.

And now--now that the real Clive was back--surrounded by the glamour
of mystery and of unmerited misfortune--the real Clive, whose first
question had been for Doris--Thaxton Vail’s air-castles and the golden
dreams that peopled them seemed tottering to a crash.




CHAPTER XVIII

WHEN HE CAME HOME


Yes, manfully Vail climbed the stairs to the anteroom, where the
severely stiff and iodoform-perfumed nurse sat primly reading while her
patient slept. Across the threshold of the sick chamber lay stretched a
tawny and fluffy bulk.

There, since the moment Clive Creede had been carried in, had lain
Macduff. At nobody’s orders would he desert his self-chosen post of
guard to his stricken master. He ate practically nothing, and he drank
little more.

Several times a day Vail dragged him from the doorway with gentle force
and put him out of the house. But ever, by hook or crook, the collie
made his way in again, and fifteen minutes later he would be pressing
close against the door on whose farther side was Clive.

Again and again he tried to slip past nurse or doctor into the
sickroom. Again and again nurse or doctor trod painfully on him in the
dark as he lay there.

But not once did the collie relax his vigil. His master had come back
to him. And Macduff was not minded to risk losing him again by stirring
away from his room.

Vail stooped now and patted the disconsolate head. To the nurse he
suggested:

“As soon as Mr. Creede wakes up, let Macduff go in and see him, won’t
you? He loves the dog, and I know him well enough to be sure it won’t
hurt him to have his old chum lie at his bedside instead of out here.”

“Dogs carry germs,” sniffed the nurse in strong disapproval.

“They carry friendliness, too,” he reminded her, “and companionship in
loneliness. And they carry comfort and loyalty and fun. We know they
carry those. We are still in doubt about the germs. Let him in there
when Mr. Creede wakes. If it were I, I’d rather have my chum-dog come
to my bedside when I’m sick than any human I know--except one. And that
reminds me--Dr. Lawton would like you to notify Miss Lane as soon as
Mr. Creede is wide awake. The doctor says Creede has been asking for
her and that it’ll do him good to see her.”

Vail moved wearily away. He felt all at once tired and old, and he
realized for the first time that life is immeasurably bigger than are
the people who must live it.

The world seemed to him gray and profitless. The future stretched away
before him, dreary and barren as a rainy sea.

For these be the universal symptoms that go with real or imaginary
obstacles in the love race, especially when the racer is well under
thirty and is in love for the first time.

Two hours later as Thaxton sat alone in his study laboriously trying to
occupy himself in the monthly expense accounts he heard the nurse go to
Doris’s room.

He heard (and thrilled to) the girl’s light footfall as she followed
the white-gowned guardian along the upper hallway and into the sick
room. He heard the door close behind her. Its impact seemed to crush
the very heart of him.

Then, being very young and very egregiously in love, Thaxton buried his
face in his hands above the littered desk--and prayed.

It was nearly half an hour before he heard the door reopen and heard
Doris leave.

Her step was slower now. In spite of Vail’s momentary hope she did not
pause when she reached the top of the stairs, but kept straight on to
her own room, entering it and shutting the door softly behind her.

That night the nurse reported gayly to Vail that the invalid seemed
fifty per cent better and that he had actually been hungry for his
supper. Wherefore--as though one household could hold only a certain
amount of hunger--Thaxton failed to summon up the remotest semblance of
appetite for his own well-served dinner.

But he talked very much and very gayly at times throughout the meal,
and he even forced himself to meet Doris’s gaze in exaggeratedly
fraternal fashion and to laugh a great deal more than Miss Gregg’s acid
witticisms demanded.

Macduff, too, graced the evening meal with his presence for the first
time since Clive’s arrival. For hours he had lain beside his master’s
bed, curled happily within reach of Clive’s caressing hand. The dog’s
deadly fear was gone--the fear lest he should never again be allowed to
see and to be with his god.

Clive was still there and was still his chum. And the barrier door was
no longer closed. Thus Macduff at last had scope to think of other
things than of the terror of losing his rediscovered deity. Among these
other things was the fact that he was ravenously hungry and that at
Thaxton’s side at the dinner table there was much chance for tidbits.

Hence he attended dinner, lying again on the floor at Vail’s left for
the servants to stub their toes over as of yore.

“So we have the sorrowing Macduff among us once more!” remarked Miss
Gregg. “That is what I call a decidedly limited rapture. Especially
when he registers fleas. I verily believe he is the most popular and
populous flea-caféteria in all dogdom. Why, that collie--!”

“Oh, I love to see him lying there again, so happy and proud!” spoke up
Doris, tossing him a fragment of chicken. “Dear old Mac!”

Thaxton’s smile became galvanic and forced. His heart smote painfully
against his ribs.

“Love me, love my dog!” he quoted, miserably, to himself.

Under cover of Miss Gregg’s railings against long-haired canines that
scratched fleas and lay where people stumbled over them Vail lapsed
into gloomy brooding.

“A week ago,” he told himself, chewing morbidly on the bitter
reflection, “a week ago Macduff cared more for me than for any one
else. Doris certainly cared no more for any one else than she cared
for me. And to-night--! Neither of them has a thought for any one but
Clive Creede. The half-gods may as well put up the shutters when the
whole gods arrive. Funny old world!... _Rotten_ old world!”

“Just as there are only two kinds of children--bad children and sick
children,” Miss Gregg was orating, “so there are only two kinds of
dogs--fleasome dogs and gleesome dogs. Fleasome dogs that scratch all
the time and gleesome dogs that jump up on you with muddy paws. Isn’t
that true, Thax? Now admit it!”

Hearing his own name as it penetrated, shrilly, far down into his glum
reverie, Vail recalled himself jerkily to his duties as host.

“Admit it?” he echoed fervently. “Indeed I _do_! I’d have acted just
the same way myself. I think you did the only thing any self-respecting
woman could have done under the circumstances. Of course, it was tough
on the others. But that was their lookout, not yours.”

He sank back into his black brooding; all oblivious of the glare of
angry bewilderment wherewith the old lady favored him and of Doris’s
wondering stare.

Next day Dr. Lawton declared Clive vastly improved. The following
morning he pronounced him to be firm-set on the road to quick
recovery. On the third day he ventured to let the convalescent tell his
whole story, and Clive was none the worse for the ordeal of its telling.

The doctor, going downstairs again, found awaiting him two members of
the same trio who had listened to his earlier recital. Doris had driven
in to Aura for the mail and had not yet returned. Thus only her aunt
and Thaxton greeted the doctor on his descent from the sick room.

Thanks to a scared course of diet, Miss Gregg had subdued her gastric
insurrection and therefore had lost her savage yearning to insult all
doctors in general and Dr. Lawton in particular.

She hung upon his words to-day with flattering attention, not once
interrupting or taking advantage of a single opening for tart repartee.

The doctor’s spirits burgeoned under such civility. He told his story
well and with due dramatic emphasis, seldom repeating himself more than
thrice at most in recounting any of its details.

Stripped of these repetitions and of a few moral and philosophical
sidelights of his own, the doctor’s narrative may be summed up thus:

       *       *       *       *       *

Having safely disposed of his twin in the California sanitarium, Osmun
Creede returned to Aura. There he resolved to begin life afresh. He had
several good reasons for doing this.

No one knew better than he that he had made himself the most unpopular
man in the neighborhood, and, as with most unpopular men, his greatest
secret yearning was for popularity. In the guise of his popular brother
this seemed not only possible but easy of accomplishment.

Too, he was doggedly and hopelessly in love with Doris Lane. He knew
she did not care for him. He knew she could never care for him. She had
told him so both times he had proposed to her.

But he had a strong belief that his brother Clive had been on the point
of winning her when the war had separated them. He was certain that,
in the guise of Clive, he could continue the wooing and bring it to a
victorious end.

But his foremost reason for the masquerade was that he had lost in
speculation all his own share of the $500,000 left by their father to
the twins and that he had managed secretly to misappropriate no less
than $50,000 of his brother’s share.

It was this shortage which decided him to go back to Aura in the dual
rôle of both brethren, instead of following his first impulse and going
as Clive alone.

Were it known that Osmun had vanished--were it believed he had
died--the trust company which was his executor would seek to wind up
his estate. In which case not only his own insolvency but his theft of
the $50,000 must come to light.

He trusted to time and to opportunity to make good this shortage and
to cover its tracks so completely that they could not be discovered by
officious executors or administrators. A few coups in the stock market
would do the trick.

But until such time he must continue to stay alive as Osmun. After that
it would be time enough to get rid of his Osmun-self in some plausible
way and to reign alone as Clive.

Thus it was, after his return, he strove in every way to enhance his
Clive popularity at the expense of Osmun. And in a measure he succeeded.

But almost at once he struck a snag.

That snag was his inability to counterfeit Clive’s glowingly magnetic
personality. He could impersonate his brother in a way to baffle
conscious detection. Yet, while outwardly he was Clive, he could not
ape successfully Clive’s lovable personality.

Folk did not warm to the supposed Clive as they had warmed to the real
Clive. They did not know why. Vaguely they said to one another that his
war-experiences had somehow changed him.

They liked him because they had always liked him and because he did
nothing overt to destroy that liking. But he was no longer actively
beloved.

Most of all Osmun could see this was true with Doris Lane. He felt
he had lost ground with her and that he was continuing to lose it.
She still received him on the old friendly footing. But she showed no
faintest sign of affection for him.

Conceited as to his own powers, Osmun would not admit that the fault
was with his impersonation. He attributed it wholly to the fact that
Thaxton Vail had come back from France some months earlier than himself
and had thus cut out Clive.

Hence Osmun set his agile wits to work to get Vail out of his path.
With Thaxton gone or discredited he believed his own way to Doris
would be clear. He believed it absolutely and he laid his plans in
accordance.

Always he had hated Vail. This new complication fanned his hate to
something approaching mania.

Sore pressed for ready cash or collateral to cover his stock margins
and pestered to red rage by Thaxton’s increasing favor in Doris’s eyes,
the chance of making public the “hotel clause” in Osmun Vail’s will had
struck him merely as a minor way to annoy his enemy.

Then, learning by chance that Doris and her aunt were to take advantage
of the clause by going to Vailholme, he arranged adroitly to be one of
the houseparty in the guise of Clive.

At once events played into his hands.

On inspiration he robbed the various rooms that first evening, while,
in his rôle of invalid, he was believed to be dressing, belatedly,
after his hours of rest.

Purposely he had avoided molesting any of Vail’s belongings, that the
crime might more easily be fixed upon the host. Creede had outlined a
score of ways whereby this might be done.

There was another motive for the robbery. Its plunder would be of
decided help in easing his own cash shortage. The money-plunder was
inconsiderable. But he would have only to wait a little while and then
pawn or sell discreetly the really valuable jewelry.

The theft had been achieved without rousing a shadow of doubt as to his
own honesty. As Clive, under pretense of friendship, he sought craftily
to direct suspicion to Vail. As Osmun he openly voiced aloud that
suspicion. It was well done.

He had counted on making Doris turn in horror from Thaxton as a sneak
thief. But he found to his dismay that his ruse had precisely the
opposite effect on her. Desperate, wild with baffled wrath, he resolved
on sweeping Vail forcibly and permanently from his path.

The idea came to him when he saw, lying on the living-room table, the
big knife which, as Clive, he had given to Vail. As always, Creede
carried in his hip pocket a heavy-caliber revolver. But pistols are
noisy. Knives are not.

Pouching the knife, as Thaxton carried his limp-armed body past the
table on the way to his room, he had made ready to use it in a manner
that could not attract suspicion to himself.

It had been easy for him as his fingers brushed the table, when he was
carried past it, to pick up the knife--even easier than it had been
for him to palm the Argyle watch, a little earlier, and then to pretend
to pull it from Vail’s pocket in the presence of the chief.

As a child Creede had whiled away a long scarlet-fever convalescence
by practicing sleight-of-hand tricks wherewith his nurse had sought to
entertain him. A bit of the hard learned cunning had always lurked in
his sensitive fingers.

As he was the first to go to bed he had no means whatever of knowing
that the man moving noisily about in Vail’s adjoining room as he
undressed was not Thaxton.

Creede waited until the house was still. Then silently he crept out
into the hallway and tried Vail’s door. It was unlocked. Barefoot, he
crept to the bed, guided only by the dim reflection of the setting moon
on the gray wall opposite.

By this faint light he made out the form of a man lying asleep on his
side. Osmun struck with force and scientific skill.

The sleeper started up with a gurgling cry. Creede, in panic, stilled
the cry with a blow from the carafe at his hand.

But, as he smote, an elusive flicker of moonlight showed him the
victim’s full face. And he knew his crime had been wasted.

Terrified, yet cooler than the average man would have been, he caught
up a shoe that his bare foot had brushed. Running to the window, he
pressed it hard on the ledge, scraping off a blob of mud that adhered
to it. Then he threw the curtain far to one side. Tossing the shoe back
under the bed, he bolted for his own room.

On the way he stopped long enough to take the key from the lock, insert
it on the outer side, lock the door, pocket the key and glide back to
his adjoining room, just as Macduff’s wild wolf-howl awakened the house.

There, shivering and cursing his own stupidity, he crouched for a
minute before venturing out into the hall to join the aroused guests.

He had made it seem the murderer had entered and gone out through the
window. He felt safe enough, but sick with chagrin.

During that eternal minute of waiting he, perforce, changed his whole
line of action. He had failed to rid himself of his foe. The only move
left to him was to strive to fix the murder on Vail. And this, both as
Clive and as Osmun, he proceeded with all his might to do.

In telling this to Clive when they met next day at Rackrent Farm he
declared passionately that he would have succeeded in sending Thaxton
to prison and perhaps to execution but for Miss Gregg’s inspired
lie--which he accepted as truth--and for the item of the shoeprint on
the window-sill.

Checkmated at every turn and dreading to see any one until he could
rearrange his shattered line of action, he went secretly to Rackrent
Farm. He calculated that his fabrication about a gas-explosion in the
laboratory, there, would prevent acquaintances from seeking him at the
farmhouse.

In endorsement of the gas story he already had given his two negro
house-servants a week’s holiday and had had them taken by taxi to
Pittsfield. So the coast would be clear.

Arrived at the farm, he strayed into the laboratory. Chemistry and
chemical experiments had ever been the chief amusement of the twins.
Their laboratory was as finely equipped as that in many a college. They
had spent money and time and brains on it for years.

When the laboratory had been moved to Rackrent Farm from Canobie it had
been set up in a large rear room. Here in leisure hours Osmun still
pottered with his loved chemicals.

And here to-day he fared; to quiet his confused brain by an hour or two
of idle research work.

Here it was that his brother Clive walked in on him.

Curtly the returned twin explained his advent and still more curtly he
demanded to know the meaning of Osmun’s treatment of him. At a glance
the horrified Osmun saw that this returned brother was in no mood to be
cajoled or lied to.

And from previous knowledge of Clive he chose the one possible method
whereby he believed he might make his peace and might even persuade the
returned wanderer to leave the field to him.

Throwing himself on his brother’s mercy, he told him the whole story,
omitting nothing.

For once in his twisted career Osmun Creede spoke the simple truth.
Judiciously used, truth is a mighty weapon of defense, and the narrator
had the sense to know it. In any event he saw it was his one chance.

But the Clive who listened with disgusted amaze to the recital was not
the untried and easy-going Clive of boyhood days, the Clive who had
allowed himself to be dominated by his brother’s crotchety will, and
who had loved Osmun.

This was an utterly new Clive--a Clive whose pliant nature had been
stiffened by peril and heroism and hardship in war and by hourly
overseas contact with death and suffering.

It was a Clive who had been betrayed by his brother while he lay sick
and stricken and deprived of memory. It was a Clive freed of Osmun’s
olden influence and fiercely resentful of his wrongs at his brother’s
hands.

He heard Osmun’s tale in grim silence. At times he winced at the
tidings it gave. Oftener his haggard face gave no sign of emotion.

The narrative finished, Osmun soared to heights of eloquence. He
pointed out how damning to himself and to his future would be the
reappearance of Clive in the Aura community. It would wreck Osmun in
pocket and in repute. It might even send him to prison.

Clive’s face as he listened was set in a stern white mask.

Osmun appealed to their boyish days, to the memory of their honored
father, and he conjured up pictures of the disgrace that must fall on
their father’s name should this secret become a local scandal.

Clive did not speak, nor did his grim face change.

Osmun painted glowing portraits of the wealth that was to be his as
soon as his new Wall Street ventures should cash in. The bulk of this
wealth he pledged to Clive if the latter would go to some foreign land
or to the Coast and there await its arrival.

Clive’s mask face at this point twitched into a momentary smile. The
smile was neither pretty nor encouraging.

Osmun, stung by his lamentable failure to recover any atom of his
former ascendancy over his brother, fell to threatening.

Again Clive’s tortured mouth relaxed into that unpromising smile. But
again the memory of Doris Lane and of the impersonation whereby Osmun
had sought to win her in his helpless brother’s guise banished the
smile into hard relentlessness. Clive was seeing this worthless twin of
his for the first time as the rest of the world had always seen him.

Pushed over the verge of desperation, Osmun Creede saw he had but one
fearsome recourse. If he would save his own liberty and perhaps his
life as well--to say nothing of fortune and position--this new-returned
brother must be made to vanish. Not only that, but to disappear
forever, leaving no trace.

Osmun must be allowed to continue playing his double rôle as before
and to follow it to the conclusion he had planned. Anything else spelt
certain destruction.

Clive must be disposed of before any neighbor or one of the servants
could drop in and discover his presence. There was always an off chance
of such intrusion.

Whipping out the heavy-caliber revolver he always carried, Osmun Creede
leveled it at the astonished Clive.

“I’m sorry,” he said evenly. “But I’ve got to do it. If I could see any
other way out I’d let you go. But you’ve brought it on yourself. I can
hide you in the cellar under here till night and then bury you with
enough of the right chemicals to make it impossible to identify you if
ever any one should blunder onto the grave. I’m sorry, Clive.”

He spoke with no emotion at all. He felt no emotion. He was oddly calm
in facing this one course open to him.

Now Clive Creede had spent more than a year in war-scourged lands where
human life was sacrificed daily in wholesale quantities and where
death was as familiar a thing as was the sunlight. Like many another
overseas veteran he had long ago lost the average man’s fear of a
leveled firearm.

Thus the spectacle of this pistol and of the coldly determined eyes
behind it did not strike him with panic. It was a sight gruesomely
familiar to him from long custom. And it did not scatter his wits.
Rather did it quicken his processes of thought.

“If you’re really set on murdering me, Oz,” he said, forcing his tired
voice to a contemptuous drawl, “suppose you do the thing properly? For
instance, why not avoid the electric chair by waiting till there are no
witnesses?”

As he spoke his eyes were fixed half-amusedly on the laboratory window
directly behind his brother. He made a rapid little motion of one hand
as if signaling to some one peering in at the window.

It was an old trick--it had been old in the days when Shakespeare made
use of it in depicting the murder of the Duke of Clarence. But it
served. Most old tricks serve. That is why they are “old” tricks and
not dead-and-forgotten tricks.

Osmun spun halfway around instinctively to get a glimpse of the
imaginary intruder who was spying through the window upon the fraternal
scene.

In the same moment, with all his waning frail strength, Clive lurched
forward and brought his right fist sharply down on Osmun’s wrist.

The pistol flew from the killer’s jarred grasp and clattered to the
floor. By the time it touched ground Clive had swooped upon it and
snatched it up.

Osmun, discovering the trick whereby he had been disarmed, grabbed at
the fallen pistol at practically the same time. But he was a fraction
of a second late.

He found himself blinking at the leveled black muzzle of his own
revolver in the hand of the brother he had been preparing to slay.

Osmun recoiled in dread, springing backward against the laboratory
wall, directly beneath a shelf of retorts and carboys.

Then his terror-haunted eyes glinted as they rested on his brother.

Clive’s sudden exertion and the shock of excitement had been too much
for his enfeebled condition of nerve and of body. Something seemed to
snap in his brain, and the taut spring that controlled his fragile
body seemed to snap with it.

The pistol wabbled in his nerveless grasp. He swayed backward, his eyes
half shut. He was on the brink of absolute collapse.

Osmun Creede gathered himself for a leap upon the half-swooning man.

With a final vestige of perception Clive noted this. Summoning all he
could of his lost strength, he sought to save his newly imperiled life
by leveling the pistol before it should be too late and by pulling the
trigger.

The laboratory echoed and reëchoed deafeningly to the report. And with
the explosion sounded the multiple tinkle of falling glass.

Clive’s bullet had had less than seven yards to travel. Yet it had
missed his brother by at least two feet. It had flown high above the
crouching Osmun’s head and had crashed through one of the vessels on
the shelf.

The receptacle shivered by the heavy-caliber ball was a huge Dewar
Bulb, silvery of surface. In other words a double container with a
vacuum between the outer and inner glass surfaces. Through both layers
of thick glass the bullet smashed its way.

The contents of the inner bulb were thus permitted to burst forth and
to cascade down upon the luckless man who was crouching for a leap
directly below the shelf.

These contents were liquid air.

Among the favorite recreations of the twins in their laboratory
had been their constant experiments with liquid air. They had
amused themselves by watching it boil violently at a temperature
of 150 degrees below zero--of seeing it turn milk into a glowingly
phosphorescent mass, of making it change an egg into an oval of
brilliant blue light, an elastic rubber band into a brittle stick, and
the like.

Because of their constant experiments they always kept an unusually
large quantity of the magic chemical in stock, the Dewar Bulb having
been made especially for their use at quadruple the customary size.

In its normal state liquid air has a mean temperature of 300 degrees
below zero. And now at this temperature it bathed the man on whom it
avalanched.

In less than ten seconds Osmun Creede was not only dead but was frozen
stiff.

In through the laboratory’s open window gushed the torrid heat of the
day, combating and partly quelling the miraculous chill.

Clive had reeled backward by instinct into the hot passageway, shutting
the laboratory door behind him. Too well he realized what had happened.
The horror and the thrill of it seemed to dispel his dizzy weakness
as a glass of raw spirits might have done. But, as in the case of the
liquor, that same collapse was due to return with double acuteness as
soon as the false stimulation of excitement should ebb.

Presently he ventured back into the terrifyingly cold space where lay
the body of the man who had been his brother.

His own mind still confused, Clive could think of but one thing to do.

As he had approached the house he had noted that the bricks of the walk
were so hot from the unshaded glare of the sun that their heat had
struck through his thin shoe-soles and had all but scorched his feet.
If Osmun could be placed out there in the sun there might be a chance
that he would thaw to life.

Creede was too much of a chemist to have imagined so idiotic a
possibility in his normal mental state. But the shock had turned his
reasoning faculties momentarily into those of a scared child.

With ever-increasing difficulty he dragged his brother’s thin body out
of the laboratory and out of the house onto the stretch of brick-paved
walk. The exertion was almost too much for him. It used up nearly all
the fictitious strength bred of shock.

He stood panting over the body and striving not to topple to earth
beside it. Then he heard the rattling approach of an automobile.

Through the tangle of boxwood boughs he could see the car stop at the
gate. In ungovernable panic he staggered back into the house. There,
shutting the front door softly behind him, he sank down on a settle in
the hall, fighting for self-control.

In a few minutes he had conquered the unreasoning fright which had made
him shun meeting any interlopers.

He had caused the death of his brother. He had done it to save his own
life. He was not ashamed. He was not sorry. He was not minded to slink
behind closed doors when it was his duty as a white man to confess what
he had done.

Staggering again to his feet, he made for the front door. With all that
was left of his departing powers he managed to open it and to reach
the threshold-stone outside, there to confront his three old friends
and the crazily welcoming collie.

Then everything had gone black.




CHAPTER XIX

A MAN AND A MAID AND ANOTHER MAN


“I’m just as glad Doris wasn’t here to listen to this,” commented Miss
Gregg, breaking the awed pause which followed Dr. Lawton’s recital.
“For a perfectly innocent and kindly girl she seems to have stirred up
no end of mischief. After the manner of perfectly innocent and kindly
girls. She’d be the first to grieve over it, of course. But a billion
Grief-Power never yet had the dynamic force to lift one ounce of any
bad situation one inch in one century.”

“Well,” said Lawton, reaching for his rusty black hat and his rustier
black bag, “I’ve wasted too much time already, gabbling here. I must
get to my miserable round of calls unless I want my patients to get
well before I arrive. Good-by. Clive will be all right now. He has had
the absolute rest he needed. He’ll be as good as new in another week or
so. It’s lucky all this has happened before Oz had a chance to squander
more than about $50,000 of the lad’s fortune. He’ll have enough left
to live on in comfort. To marry on, too.”

Off plodded the old gentleman, leaving Thaxton Vail scowling unhappily
after him.

“To marry on,” muttered Vail under his breath, not knowing he spoke
aloud.

“Yes,” chimed in Miss Gregg brightly. “Enough to marry on. Almost
enough to be engaged on. He’s a lucky man!”

“He is,” agreed Vail dully. “And a mighty white man, too. One of the
very best.”

“Yes,” assented Miss Gregg with fervor, smiling maliciously on her
victim. “One of the very best. Doris thinks so too.”

“I know she does,” sighed Vail.

He got up abruptly to leave the room. But Miss Gregg would not have it
so.

“Thax,” she said, “you remember that would-be smart thing Willis Chase
said, the evening of the burglary? He said that when a policeman blows
out his brains and survives they make him a detective. Well, here’s
something a hundred times truer: When Providence wishes to extract
a man’s few brains more or less painlessly and to make him several
thousand degrees worse than useless He makes him fall in love. That is
not an epigram. It is better. It’s a truth.... Thax, do you realize
you’ve been making my little girl very unhappy indeed?”

“_I?_” blithered Vail. “Making Doris unhappy? Why, Miss Gregg, I--!”

“Oh, don’t apologize. She enjoys it. A girl in love, without being
divinely unhappy, would feel she was defrauded of Heaven’s best gift.
Doris--”

“But I don’t understand!” protested the miserable Vail. “How on earth
have I made--?”

“Principally by being mooncalfishly and objectionably in love with
her,” said Miss Gregg, “and not taking the trouble to tell her so.”

“But how can I? In the first place, Clive loves her. He’s never loved
any one else. (Neither have I for that matter. I got into the habit
when I was a boy, and I can’t break it.) He’s lying sick and helpless
here under my roof. It wouldn’t be playing the game to--”

“Love is no more a ‘game’ than a train wreck is!” scoffed Miss Gregg.
“If you weren’t a lover, and therefore a moron, you’d know that. It--”

“Besides,” he blurted despairingly, “what would be the use? She loves
him. I can tell she does. Why, you just said yourself she--”

“I said she agrees with you in thinking he is ‘one of the very best,’”
corrected Miss Gregg impatiently. “And it’s true. But when you get to
my age you’ll know no woman ever loved a man because he was good or
even because he was ‘best.’ She may love him for his taste in ties or
because his hair grows prettily at the back of his neck or because his
voice has thrilly little organ notes in it. Or she may love him for no
visible reason at all. But you can take my word she won’t love him for
his goodness. She’ll only respect him for it. And if I were a man in
love I’d hate to have my sweetheart respect me.”

Vail was not listening. Instead he was staring moodily out of the
window. Turning in at the gates and progressing purringly up the drive
was an electric runabout. Doris Lane was its sole occupant. At sight of
her now, as always of late, Thaxton was aware of a queer little pain at
his heart.

“Thax,” said Miss Gregg, bringing the torture to an abrupt end, “last
evening Clive Creede asked Doris to marry him.”

Vail did not answer. But between him and the swiftly advancing runabout
sprang an annoying mist.

Miss Gregg surveyed his averted face as best she might. Then her tight
old lips softened.

“Doris was very nice to him, of course,” she added. “But she told
him she couldn’t marry him. She said she was in love with some one
else--that she had always been in love with this stupid some one
else.... Better go and help her out of the car, Thax.”

But with a tempestuous rush and with the glow of all the summer winds
in his face Thaxton Vail already had gone.

Miss Gregg looked after him, her hard old eyes curiously soft, her thin
lips moving. Then ashamed of her unwonted weakness, she drew herself
together with an apologetic half-smile.

To an invisible listener she said briskly:

“Thank Heaven, he’s outlived his uselessness!”


THE END




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.



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