The Thrill Book/Volume 1/Issue 4/Down the Coast of Shadows
CHAPTER I.
After hours.
Swan, night watchman in the Wycherly Building, put down his can of coffee, hastily wiped his heavy yellow mustache with the back of his hand, and listened. There it was again—the thin, fine shrill of a muted electric buzzer. There was an excuse for it, if the thing seemed incredible to Swan. He had been night watchman in the Wycherly Building for going on twenty years, and this was the first time that anything like this had happened. To conceive of any burglar, or any other trespasser whatsoever, choosing the Wycherly Building as a place for a raid would require more imagination than Swan possessed.
He was a big, heavy man. Massive would have described him. A Swede. In his cap and uniform he was not so much the Viking as he was the ogre—mammoth and pale, magnified by the light of the lantern at his side. A moment before he had been eating and drinking his midnight lunch with the brutal gusto of a hungry giant. There was the look about him now of the roused ferocity of any primitive creature disturbed at its feeding.
He started to his feet. He pawed out a big revolver and held it ready in his hand.
Now, had there been some one to shoot or grapple with, Swan would have been instantly ready. But there was a mental problem involved—a number of them, in fact. And while Swan's brain was capable enough, in an emergency like this it was apt to be slow.
His mind still reverberated with the original shock. What sort of an intruder could this be?
Midnight. The Wycherly Building. The heart of New York's financial district—far within the dead line cast about this part of town by the regular police. The Wycherly Building itself, a thing of awe even in the daytime, because of the man whose name it bore and the power and the craft he represented.
Another buzzer sounded in a slightly different key.
That first buzzer had announced that the intruder had entered by the front door. The second buzzer revealed the intruder passing through the hall.
There had been scarcely any delay, and yet a locked inner door protected the hall from the entry, and the whole building was dark. There was no electricity in the whole vast building except that of the small batteries supplying the alarm signals. The building was old. It was so complicated—intentionally so—that no ordinary visitor could find his way about it, even in the daytime, without a guide. Wycherly had enemies. He lived in dread of assassination. No madman was ever going to drop in on him un expectedly with a bomb in his hand. Madmen had tried it, and other cranks, merely to be lost in the maze of passages and dragged away before they could find the man they were looking for.
All this was a part of the mental problem confronting Swan.
Another element of the problem was the fact that none of the five or tenscore employees of Wycherly having access to the building would ever dream of coming here at night—not even in the early night, let alone midnight.
It was as if all of them shared Wycherly's own well-known fear of the dark. Not in twenty years or more, or ever, to Swan's precise knowledge, had any member of the Wycherly office force come back to the building after hours.
Another buzzer rang.
Swan cast a final glance about him with his big blue eyes—lantern, unfinished food, dollar clock ticking noisily and unconcernedly at the minute past mid night. He abandoned all this. His slow mind clicked to another point of progressive thought. Still holding his revolver, he reached down with his left hand and unfastened his heavy brogans. He scraped them off. A moment later this cubby-hole of his was deserted.
Outside the cubby-hole there was a corridor. Along one side of this were a number of windows, heavily grated, a little lower than the sidewalk, but through which the street lamps cast an uncertain light. But even without this pale-blue illumination that Swan knew so well, he would have been perfectly at home. It was his habit to roam the building in the dark—through the labyrinth of passages and anterooms, public and private offices.
There was something in his nature that made him braver in the dark—a matter of heritage or training or both—like certain Great Danes that are mere overgrown puppies by day, tigers at night. Not that Swan was absolutely fearless. There was a chill of fear about him now. And yet this fear was not altogether native, either. There wasn't a burglar in the two hemispheres that he wouldn't have grappled with or shot at or clubbed.
But was this a burglar? And, if so, what sort of a burglar?
Instead of following the corridor in a direction that would have brought him to the stairs leading to the front hall, and thus up and back of whoever it was that had entered there, Swan had trotted off in the other direction, around the acreage of storage vaults in the basement of the Wycherly Building. A turn to the left, then to the right, and he would be at the foot of a secret stairway leading up into the very heart of the Wycherly maze—a stairway that had been designed, in fact, as one of the several avenues of escape at Wycherly's disposition in case of danger or annoyance.
Wycherly had never been photographed, never been interviewed, never been served with a process.
Swan crept up the secret stairs.
The faint—the very faint—hum of the alarm signals that had come to him during his silent but speedy progress had told him that the intruder was coming this way. It was this that was so ghostly about it; not even he, with all his long training and familiarity with this place, and his pass-keys and his general liking for the dark, could have come faster, could have come with greater directness.
Swan pushed the door at the head of the stairs wide open. He was just in time. He heard a quick, light footstep, then the lisp of a key.
He himself was in the darkness. To the left were the offices of Grierson, Wycherly's factotum and private secretary—a man almost as greatly feared as was Wycherly himself. To the right were the offices of Wycherly. Separating these two groups of offices was this small private passage, one of the myriad. And Swan's mind, slow but sure, had served him well. The passage was one of the best lit in the building—lit whitely and almost brilliantly by an arc lamp just outside a neighboring window, and through this brilliance the intruder would have to pass.
Swan tilted up the muzzle of his big revolver—ready to fire, ready to spring; a Great Dane in the dark, so far as strength and courage were concerned, but a coiled adder in his power of sudden death.
CHAPTER II.
The Wycherlys.
Is that you, Swan?”
“I—I—good heavens—I”
“You are a faithful guardian, Swan.”
The intruder was Wycherly himself. Yet, even while Swan's slow brain was compelled to a belief of this amazing fact, it was compelled to an acceptance of facts even more amazing.
Nor yet was the acceptance complete. Was it Wycherly? Or was it a ghost? Was that Wycherly's voice—Jacob Wycherly's voice? Or was it the voice of that Joseph Wycherly, Jacob's brother, who had died upward of a year ago? In other words, who was it—Jacob Wycherly alive, or Joseph Wycherly dead?
If any one had asked Swan—say an hour ago—if he believed in ghosts, Swan would have laughed at him. He was that type. All beef and brawn. He believed in what his eyes could see and in what his hands could feel, what he could taste and what he could smell. His was the make-up of a perfect night watchman. His perfection in this respect would have been no less had he been the nocturnal guardian of a cemetery or a morgue.
But it was this very quality that was undermining his confidence now. These were facts that he was up against—facts that stood the test of even his hard-and-fast ideas as to what constituted facts.
In the first place, how had Wycherly seen him when he, Swan, had been standing in the pitch darkness here at the head of the stairs?
In the second place, how had Wycherly himself come so speedily through all those dark rooms and corridors that separated this place from the remote outer door?
And, in the third place, how came it that Wycherly spoke so gently—so with a voice that was like the all-but-forgotten voice of this Wycherly's dead brother Joseph?
These three questions—and there may have been others—knocked on Swan's brain with cold knuckles lightly, swiftly in those first few instants of recognition and broken speech. And there was no telling what old dormant superstitions they may not have waked in Swan; for, after all, Swan sprang from a race that had believed in trolls and things down through the ages.
No, it was Wycherly himself—Jacob Wycherly.
He had stepped out into the comparative glare of the light that came from the street. He stood there looking across at Swan with a slight smile, although Swan was still crouched in the darkness. Swan had not had the sense yet, nor scarcely the time, to put his gun away. Swan was still at grips with those facts that were not facts, was still chilling in response to the spirit raps of those cold knuckles on his brain.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Swan.
“Did I frighten you?”
“No, sir, but”
“My coming was unexpected.”
“Yes, sir.”
Not like Jacob Wycherly to talk like this to an employee, and him among the humblest. Joseph Wycherly might have done it. But Joseph Wycherly was dead.
The two brothers had looked alike. The thought was Swan's. Both had been small men, spare of build, slightly stooped, lean of face, high of forehead. But no one would ever have taken one for the other. In his heart the big night watchman swore at himself. Why should he be thinking of Joseph Wycherly at all, when Mr. Joseph was dead? It was the voice. It was the smile. It was the soft speech.
“You're a fool,” said Swan to himself.
He felt like a fool as he himself stepped forward into the confusing light from the street lamp in his stocking feet. Shoving back his revolver into the holster against his stomach and making a mess of it, his hands were trembling so. He explained.
“I am glad to find that you are so faithful,” said Mr. Wycherly, pausing with his hand on the door bf his office and smiling at him again.
“Thank you, Mr. Wycherly.”
It was Mr. Wycherly—Mr. Jacob Wycherly—that square-topped derby with the broad brim that the cartoonists had made familiar throughout the world, pulled down to the ears—ears that were thin and outstanding—and down to the eyebrows—eyebrows that were white and beetled. Ah, no! No one would ever mistake Jacob Wycherly for any one else on earth—or off the earth, like that dead brother of his—after one good look into or from the small eyes under those beetled eyebrows.
Yet, even now Swan Swensen was struggling with his facts.
“That's a formidable-looking weapon, Swan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what would you have done had you found—a stranger here?”
“I guess—I'd make him throw up his hands.”
“And if he had declined?”
“I'd maybe have had to shoot.”
“But who could wish to come here without authority at this hour? There is nothing to steal—certainly nothing worth a human life.”
Swan's mind was struggling with these new complications.
“But you've—I've heard it said”
“Go on, Swan. You needn't be afraid to express yourself. What was it you were about to say?”
“I beg your pardon, sir; but, you know, they do say you've some bad enemies.”
“Eh? Quite so! Well, perhaps I have earned them.”
A statement like that, coming from old Jacob Wycherly, sounded so odd that even Swan's slow mind expressed itself almost instantly in a look of added amazement.
“Shall I—light the gas—in your office for you, sir?”
Wycherly apparently hadn't heard him. He stood there, slender and stooped, in the pale radiance, his eyes on the floor.
“Perhaps I have earned them,” he repeated. His thought must have taken a correlative turn. “Tell me, Swan, do you happen to remember my brother?”
“You mean”
“Joseph.”
“Him who died?”
Swan was trying to cover his confusion by a bush of words. His confusion grew as he saw that his employer was looking at him with a vague smile.
“What's the matter, Swan? Why are you so confused?”
Swan dodged the later question, answered the previous one. “Yes, sir. Indeed I do, sir. Everybody remembers him.”
“Ah! Why?”
“He was so good, so kind. Why, it seems to me like only yesterday that he stood here—where you are standing now—and talked to me in this same gentle way. It was that—I was thinking of him—and when you spoke of him—I kind of felt—you won't think me crazy, sir—I kind of felt somehow as if you was him.”
The Swede started a laugh—a rueful laugh. But he checked himself at the other's gravity, fearful that he had given offense. Anyway, Swan hadn't really wanted to laugh. He had come too close to expressing a sober—not to say a solemn—truth; and once more it had been as if there were cold knuckles rapping, softly rapping at the top of his head.
“What if I should tell you,” said Wycherly in a voice that was sweet—if sweetness in his connection were imaginable—“that—my brother—still lives?”
“Still lives?”
“Aye! Down that Coast of Shadows—where we all cruise a while—before we go out of sight of land”
CHAPTER III.
Written in the dark.
There are two explanations of what followed. One explanation is that there was one of those momentary failures of electric current or a fault in the carbon or a flare of wind, causing an unexpected shadow to fall across the place where Wycherly had stood. Another explanation is the equally simple, albeit less material, one that Swan's own perceptions had suffered a momentary lapse. Such lapses are common enough—you are looking at the pages of a book, some thought intervenes, and there for a moment the book has disappeared; or you are listening to a speaker, your attention flickers, and during that instant the speaker's voice is lost.
In any case, Wycherly disappeared.
Nothing but an echo and a memory did he leave behind him—a memory of that shadowy, haunting presence, and then the echo of those strange words of his:
“Aye! Down that Coast of Shadows—where we all cruise a while—before we go out of sight of land”
Swan Swensen put up a beefy but tremendous hand, and found his forehead damp. He was shaken by a slight chill, and ascribed this—knowing it to be a lie—to the fact that he had been standing here without his shoes. And all the time some other part of that primitive mind of his was throwing up a vision out of his boyhood in Sweden—the shore of the sea, misty, a coast of shadows as ever was, with the illimitable ocean on one side and the illimitable land on the other.
He had a poetic flash: Wasn't life like that?
Then he pulled himself together and was Swan Swansen, the night watchman, again. He catfooted forward to the door of the private office and leaned his ear against a panel of it. Some one was moving in there. Wycherly! Who else could it be? And what had unnerved him so?
But as Swansen started to withdraw he was unnerved again. He heard his employer's voice:
“Come in, Swan.”
Yet Swan was sure that he himself had made no sound. How had the man in the office known that he was listening there? It was but another detail in keeping with all that had already occurred. It was to be followed by another.
For, as Swan opened the door in response to the summons, he was surprised to find the room in complete darkness. There were no windows in this room. It suited Wycherly better so. It was ventilated by a system of vents instead of windows; for windows were dangerous when a man had enemies. Sometimes cranks threw things through windows. And, this time, as Swan stood there on the threshold of darkness he was frankly shivering.
“I think,” came the pleasant voice, “you may light the gas, after all, Swan.”
And was he also hearing the scratch of a pen—the scratch of a pen in this dark room? He was. He saw that he hadn't been mistaken the moment that the match flared up, for there at his desk sat Wycherly writing. He had already written half a dozen lines. He went on writing without looking up as Swan brought the tremulous flame to the hood of the desk lamp. Apparently it made no difference to the writer when the hood went incandescent and the room that had previously been so dark took on white radiance, especially the top of the desk.
Still Wycherly went on writing—went on writing as Swan stood there and stared down at him with pale and bulging eyes. Wycherly still had his hat and his overcoat on. He had been wearing gloves and carrying a cane. These lay on the desk at the side of the blotting pad. Swan recognized the cane.
“My best friend,” as Wycherly had once called it, as he used it to smash the camera of some overbold newspaper man. It was a heavy ebony stick with a gold knob.
Then Wycherly looked swiftly up. Said he:
“This was the cane I did it with. Do you think you can remember?”
Remember what? And what had Mr. Wycherly done with this cane? “You are Mr. Wycherly,” the night watchman was saying to himself. “There's the long thin face—the long thin mouth—the long thin nose—and the paleness—and the eyes—ah, those bright little eyes looking out from under the overhanging white brows—like a hungry ferret in winter.” But aloud Swan said:
“Yes, sir!”
“This was the cane I did it with,” Wycherly repeated. “But there; I hope that you shall never have occasion to refer to it, Swan. By the way, you are alone here in the building. I wonder if—of course I could summon my secretary, but it would be a pity to disturb him—I wonder if”
Wycherly had been speaking softly. He was blotting what he had already written. He stopped both speech and action in response to a pounding that ran through the silence of the building as of some one trying to break in a door. Swan also had forgotten the queer and nebulous occupations that had been secretly occupying him just now.
“Cavanaugh,” he said. “That must be Cavanaugh.” Swan knew the sound. “He's the policeman on the beat—a friend of mine. He's a good man, sir—you won't misjudge him—but sometimes he'd drop in”
“A policeman! A friend of yours! Just the thing! Go let him in. Ask him to be good enough to step this way a moment. I shan't detain him.”
Swan was emboldened.
“He's got a big family, sir. One of his children is sick. It would go hard for him if”
“I'm glad you mentioned it. Go let him in.”
Swan hurried away. There must have been some little commotion when he mentioned to Cavanaugh that Wycherly was on the premises and asking to see him.
“'Twould be like him,” whispered Cavanaugh, “to report me—get me broke.”
“There's something queer about him,” whispered Swan.
It was a conversation they were to renew later. Cavanaugh was of a race that has ever dealt with the invisible side of life as much as it has with the visible and material side—more with the invisible side perhaps, although none would have suspected it on looking at Cavanaugh himself. Not quite so heavy as Swan, but stalwart, clean, and pink. And Cavanaugh, even more than had Swan, might have suspected that there was something “queer” about Jacob Wycherly this night. For, as the big policeman, accompanying Swan, came to the open door of the private office there sat the man so many execrated, and there was something about him to suggest the picture of a saint.
For Wycherly had taken off his hat, lifted his face as if in reverie. His thin white hair was glistening in the dusk like a nimbus. There was a whiteness and a chastity about his face seldom seen on any face except in death or in the almost equal detachment of a purifying sleep.
And Cavanaugh thought that he had known Wycherly-—had known him as the police knew him—the “Tenement King”—owner o£ a thousand drab homes and a thousand drab shops, incubus of the very poor, fabricator of the raw human material for hospitals and prisons. Cavanaugh knew no lack of imagination. Also Cavanaugh had known families whom this same Wycherly had dispossessed.
“No, s'help me, it couldn't have been him!” said Cavanaugh to himself.
CHAPTER IV.
“In witness whereof.”
Good evening, Cavanaugh,” said Wycherly, coming out of his apparent reverie. “I am sorry to trouble you.”
“No trouble, Mr. Wycherly.”
The policeman had raised his gloved hand to a salute. His hand lingered to remove his uniform cap altogether.
“But I wanted a couple of witnesses to my signature,” said the millionaire. “I couldn't have been more fortunate; two better men for the purpose I couldn't have found in New York.”
Swan and Cavanaugh exchanged a swift glance. Here was confirmation, had any been needed, that what Swan had intimated was true enough. Wycherly was glancing over what he had written. His face was still sober and white as he looked up again.
“It won't be necessary for you to read what I have written here,” he said. “Of course you may if you desire. But that may be depressing to you. I'd rather that you wouldn't.”
“That's all right, sir,” said Cavanaugh.
“Thank you. And, after all, your signatures have nothing to do with the contents of the paper; they merely attest to the genuineness of my own. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
The paper was the private stationery of Wycherly—the official stationery would be the better term—for Wycherly held private correspondence with no man.
“See. I sign here,” said Wycherly, and he signed. “You may well watch me,” he said, with a slight laugh. “I dare say that this signature hasn't been written out in full for the past twenty years.”
“How do you sign your checks?” asked Cavanaugh, with frank curiosity.
“Grierson does that. A heartless creature, that secretary of mine—as heartless as a machine, but as honest, or should I say exact? There: Jacob—Corlears—Wycherly! I dare say not a dozen persons in New York even know that my middle name is Corlears.”
“They mostly refer to you, sir,” said Cavanaugh, “as 'J.C.'”
Wycherly smiled. “Yes, 'Old J. C.'”
Swan scrawled his laborious fist onto the paper at a place indicated by the millionaire. It took every ounce of Swan's mental and physical power to write his name. In the present circumstances it did. It was different with Cavanaugh.
There was an intuitional quality about Cavanaugh. Even if there hadn't been, the years that he had spent on the police force had been educational in a way, had made him something of the specialist. The police force had been a university for him, one that had given him a degree, so to speak—Doctor of Humanity. He couldn't help it. He wished to violate no confidence. The rich man had expressed a wish that he should not read this paper that was thus being attested with such formality. On the other hand, it had been expressly stated that there was no objection to such a perusal.
“Shall I sign in full?” asked Cavanaugh.
And already his eyes had sought the top of the sheet.
“Yes, in full.”
“J-a-m-e-s” wrote Cavanaugh. But his eyes of a humanitarian specialist had already taken in the upper lines of the manuscript. First, the place and the date; then the address:
My Dear Mary
“H-e-n-r-y” wrote Cavanaugh.
He was leaning close to the paper. He knew that Wycherly could see nothing but the back of his head. He read:
For your own protection . . .
And then Cavanaugh got a thrill all his own, one that went right to the core of his Celtic soul. Wycherly had spoken to him.
“She is my—my niece,” said Wycherly. “She is—Joseph's daughter.”
“Excuse me,” said Cavanaugh.
“That's all right,” said Wycherly gently. “Go on and read all of it, if you care to. I said that you were free to do so.”
Cavanaugh finished his signature, and straightened up with an added pinkness. There was a good deal of the schoolboy in the big policeman. But he was none the less very much the man.
“I did start to read it,” he confessed.
“You also have a daughter named Mary,” Wycherly put in. “Be a friend to—this Mary of mine—should she need one.” He had drawn an envelope from a drawer. He wrote the name and address:
Miss Mary Wycherly,
13 Segur Place, N. Y. C.
Wycherly folded the paper he had written and put it into the envelope. He started to seal the envelope. He hesitated. He looked up at Cavanaugh, and Cavanaugh was still wondering why the great millionaire should desire that a humble cop show friendship for a member of the millionaire's own family.
Said Wycherly:
“Cavanaugh, I'm going to ask you to deliver this to Miss Wycherly yourself. Ask her to read it in your presence. She may want to ask you some questions.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cavanaugh took the envelope, placed it in the top of his cap, prepared to return the cap to his head as soon as the interview should end.
“And, Cavanaugh, listen; let no one else read it—not even—not even—myself!”
As Wycherly completed this odd declaration he closed his eyes, dropped back in his chair. The night watchman and the policeman saw a slight spasm as of pain or sudden recollection ripple across his face. They heard him whispering like a man holding an altercation and not wishing to be overheard.
Both Swan and Cavanaugh may have been a little frightened. Afterward they were agreed that all they could make out were the words, repeated several times: “Not yet! Not yet!” Then Wycherly was seen to tremble. He opened his eyes. He was staring at them.
“You can trust me, sir,” said Cavanaugh, referring to Wycherly's recommendation and wishing to put Wycherly at his ease. Cavanaugh had tact. For all he knew—so he was telling himself—Mr. Wycherly took drugs. For all he knew, the old gentleman had taken a drop too much. And Wycherly was staring so.
Swan spoke up: “Shall I get you a glass of water, sir?”
Then, had Wycherly set upon them with that ebony cane of his it would have been a surprise like this—would have shocked them, startled them no more.
For suddenly, without premonition, Wycherly's eyes had gone fierce. His mouth opened, and the voice that came out was harsh and bitter:
“What are you—you damned—eh? Eh”
He had checked himself. Or he had been checked. Again it was the Wycherly who had been talking to them but a moment ago. He smiled at them a trifle startled, at a loss.
“Oh, yes!” he exclaimed softly and gently. “I pray that you will not consider it a bribe—either of you—but I feel that you have earned an honorarium—a modest honorarium.” He arose from his chair, went over to the private safe, knelt in front of it, began to count the combination: “Three times round to thirty-three”
CHAPTER V.
The riddle.
Dawn came up over lower Manhattan as sweetly as over a land of meadows and woods. In fact there was a smell of meadows and woods in the air—down here where streets were ancient and dark and the high buildings soared and no flower had blossomed for a hundred years. It was as if this quarter of the town were like every other human thing—not all good, nor yet all bad; old to the shocks of misery and violence, yet maintaining through it all some gift of the primitive innocence, something of the child.
“It reminds me of some of the things that I've heard since I joined the force,” said Cavanaugh. “There's many a man serving time up the river now who was a kind father and a faithful husband. Crime was his business. That was all. Maybe old J. C. is like that—making money by ways that are dark, doing good on the sly.”
“There's something in that, too,” said Swan. “I know of a number of acts of kindness that he's done—all since his brother's death—as if—as if, you might say, he'd been trying to make up for his brother's being dead. And yet”
Off and on. Swan and Cavanaugh had talked the morning hours away—ever since they had watched together, while old Jacob Wycherly ghosted off through the darkness of those lonely and deserted downtown streets. Cavanaugh's beat was a short one. It centered about the Wycherly Building. To and fro went Cavanaugh, like some human pendulum, covering his beat, “ringing up his box.” But each time that he passed this way he had stopped and he and the Swede night watchman had talked about the amazing visit of the night. And each time each had felt that the other was holding something back to balance, so to speak, that which he himself was holding back.
Said Swan to himself: “Now what did the old man mean when he said that he 'did it' with that heavy gold cane of his?”
Said Cavanaugh to himself: “Wurra! Wurra! What the devil is in that message he's given me to deliver? And why did my eyes take in that one word 'killed?'”
“We all have sins on our conscience,” said Cavanaugh, responsive to Swan's suggestion that yet there were things in Wycherly's career that needed explanation.
“Why did he break out like that all of a sudden in a rage?” asked Swan.
“It reminds me,” said Cavanaugh, “of an old gentleman I once found strolling about one dark night in the darkest part of Pearl Street. He had just tried a door. 'Come out of that,' I says. 'T'ell with you,' he says, and he tries to cut me with his knife. It wasn't the knife that scares me, though. It's the look in his face. I was younger then. 'So it's a fight you want,' and I hits him with my stick. Down he goes. I kneels beside him. He wasn't so badly hurt. I was, though. Such a face! Such a smile! He comes to himself. He says: 'Officer, where am I? What has happened?' as gentle as a lamb, and him that had the face of a fiend two minutes before.”
“Who was it?”
“That's what I'm telling you. The papers had been full of his disappearance for a month. For a month, so to speak, he'd been walking in his sleep. 'Twas my rap that woke him up. He was one of the best-known preachers of the West.”
“There was a fellow in my country named Odin,” said Swan, “and they tell a lot of stories about him. He was something like that—going around in disguise and giving presents. And also the other way round. He got a lot of people hung, and finally got hung himself—<on a tree.”
“What I'm trying to get at,” said Cavanaugh, “is who was it or what was it that was using the preacher's body, you might say, to go around in?”
“The preacher himself.”
“It wasn't the preacher who tried the door, now, was it—and tried to give me the dirk?”
“I guess maybe not.”
“Then who and what? And where was the preacher himself all this time?”
“Of course we're all like that to some extent, Cavanaugh. We all got our good points and our bad points, our good days and our bad days. I've known days when I wanted nothing so much in the world as to take one good wallop at my old woman, and yet she's as good a wife as any, since twenty-three years, come August.”
“That's only natural.”
“But as I was saying. Here's Mr. Wycherly. Off and on, you know, I hear a lot of gossip about him. Before his brother died it was nip and tuck between them, Jacob doing things to make the people howl, Joseph coming around here and protesting in his quiet way. They all hated Jacob. They felt just the other way round for Joseph. Queer that there should be two brothers so different.”
“Brothers are always different. Go on.”
“Well, since Mr. Joseph's death it seems as how, every now and then, Mr. Jacob takes an idea to do something, as you might say, in honor of Mr. Joseph's memory—to do something kind, like he done to-night. And then, the first thing you know, he turns right around and gives the contrary orders. There's been a lot of talk.”
“I'm wondering how he knew that 1 had a little girl named Mary. What about this Mary of his?”
“Joseph's daughter. There's a touch of the queer there, too, in line with what I've been telling you. He's treated her rough.”
“How so?”
“Well, there was a nice young fellow working here that the girl was going to marry. Mr. Wycherly—Mr. Jacob Wycherly, that is—accused him of theft, had him jailed, fired him.”
“He should have fired him if he was a thief.”
“But the boy wasn't a thief. The case never came to trial.”
“That proves nothing.”
“Maybe not. But you didn't know this lad—a gentleman. And it appears that since then—I'm merely repeating what I hear—old J. C. has been following him up, making him lose other jobs.”
“It's a dirty lie. Since the way he treated us to-night, I'd take my oath on it.”
“And stranger yet the way he's treated the girl herself. It appears that he's mad that she won't come to live with him. They do say as how that was an old quarrel J. C. had with his brother Joseph; wanted Joseph and the girl to come and live with him in that big house of his up on Park Avenue. You know how he is—domineering—must have his way—goes crazy—and no disrespect meant when I say it—if anybody goes against him.”
“He's a right to. 'Tis his own affair.”
“Yes, but they say not a month ago he up and sends the girl a check one day for ten thousand dollars. The next day he finds it out and damn' near kills Grierson—that's his secretary—and he sends for the girl and raises merryell; says that he never sent her the money and that, if he did, it was a mistake. And she turns it back to him, all except forty dollars she had spent. Poor! And she starts to pay that forty dollars back, too—three and four and five dollars at a time—and him letting her do it.,”
“Maybe he slept in the moonlight.”
“What's that?”
“My old father used to say that if you slept with the moon on your face there were evil spirits who would come into your brains.”
“Those things don't happen any more. They belong to the times when this fellow Odin I was telling you about was still alive.”
“There are as many ghosts in the world as ever,” said Cavanaugh. “Sniff that breeze. The wind is in the south. It smells like flowers, and when the wind smells like that—even here in ugly old New York—they say the Little People are about.”
“You'll have me believing in them things myself,” said Swan.
CHAPTER VI.
“The unknown guest.”
There may have been a feeling about Jacob Corlears Wycherly himself that he had slept in the moonlight when he opened his eyes that morning. His bedroom was large and of a style that was almost regal in the matter of furnishing. The walls were hung with blue silk. There was a blue silk canopy over his bed. The bed itself was white lacquer.
But there hovered about Wycherly's brain a fog of dream—like a morning mist held over from the night—a miasma, slightly chilling, smelling of death.
“I've been dreaming again,” he muttered, “about those cursed tenements.”
Yes, that was it. Through the brain fog that lingered from his sleep he could see the block after block of swarming tenements over near the East River, far downtown; the block after block of similar tenements, only more sinister yet, covering what had once been a gentleman's estate on the banks of the Hudson. That gentleman had been Wycherly's great-great-grandfather.
Then a peculiar feature of his reflection came to Wycherly. It was as if he could see himself hastening down one of these squalid streets in the dark—the only person visible. He wondered if he had dreamed this, too. It was like a memory, and yet not altogether like the memory of a dream.
The effort of thought that he brought to this problem was sufficient to awaken him altogether. He gave a start. He sat up. He stared down at his own hand lying there on the counterpane somewhat as if this hand belonged to somebody else, and there was a reason for this, too, for the hand held a piece of paper that Wycherly couldn't explain. He regarded it with a slight shiver.
It was characteristic of Wycherly that before he satisfied his curiosity as to what the paper contained, if anything, in the way of message or warning, he sat perfectly still, listening, watching. There was no untoward sound. Even the noises of the vast city reached him but faintly, for the bedroom windows gave on a deep garden at the back of the house, and the garden was surrounded by other houses where silence reigned—no children, no noisy servants, no hurdy-gurdies or vociferous hawkers—and the avenue itself, in front of the house, was as sumptuously silent as a country road.
Nothing but wealth—vast wealth—could have commanded a silence as complete as this here in the heart of the city.
And one would have thought that such wealth would have insured a perfect protection as well. Perhaps it did, against all the known and visible dangers. But there for a moment Wycherly—even Wycherly, who believed in nothing that his eyes could not see—-had a feeling that there was some danger that he could not see. It must have been a bit of that mental fogginess handed over by his dream. So he told himself.
But there was the paper in his hand.
He looked at it—did so cautiously and keenly, as some old cashier might have looked at a suspicious bank note. His private stationery. He had recognized it instantly as such. But the kind that he used exclusively downtown, at his offices in the Wycherly building. How did it get here? Folded thrice, like a letter with a little of the ink showing through, for the paper was cheap. No use to waste good paper on people he detested! No use to buy paper that his clerks would steal for their private correspondence!
Still he did not read what was there.
He put the paper on the small table at the side of his bed. With infinite caution, avoiding all noise, he got out of his bed. He was like one of those mummies occasionally discovered in the land of the Incas—a mere dried relic of what once was man, but this wrapped up in the untarnished glory of ceremonial robes. He was small and shrunken, mummified to a degree, but clad in a sleeping suit of the softest blue silk. He put his feet into quilted Morocco slippers. He drew about him a lavender dressing robe, also of quilted silk.
Again he listened.
He went over to a door that led Into his dressing room and considered it. The key was in the lock on his side of the door. The door was not only locked, but bolted.
He studied all the windows. They were fastened with brass, burglar-proof clamps that no power on earth could have operated from the outside short of an acetylene lamp or dynamite. He went into his bathroom. The window there was barred like the window of a prison. There was another door. It was a sliding panel ingeniously concealed in the wall—a sheet of steel covered with silk—and giving access to a private stairway leading to the large library and residential office on the floor below. This door also was bolted on the inside, simply and effectively, by the dropping of a steel molding across the base of it.
For Wycherly was one of those men who feared a number of things and lived perpetually prepared. He hated to be alone. He hated the dark. Yet he himself was the only one he would trust in the dark. He had taken this into consideration when he had planned this house. This bedroom of his was a citadel.
How had it been invaded? Had it been invaded?
He answered his questions: “By no one but myself.”
And not until he had settled all this would he go back to the table where he had left the paper. From a drawer of the table he took his reading gasses. He adjusted these with care. He bore the still-folded paper to one of the windows. He opened the paper.
“My handwriting!” And he didn't know whether this confirmation of his deductions brought him relief or an added touch of disquiet.
This was what he read:
I am learning how. It is as hard for us of this side as it is for those who have not yet “gone out of sight of land.” Last night was the longest. I visited much of the property. I went to the office and got off the letter I have so long been wanting to write to Mary. Dear child! She is like her mother, of those who will never see, of those who will never hear. Jacob—Jacob—though it lose your body and save your
“Of all the infamous nonsense!” said Wycherly.
There quavered back into his thought a whiff of that foggy memory that was with him when he awoke.
“Have I taken to walking in my sleep?”
He thrust out his lower lip. His narrow breast began to heave. Those who knew Wycherly best were aware that these signs meant battle.
For this wasn't the first time that something like this had happened to Wycherly. There had been, sure enough, those peculiar kinks in his will referred to by Swan Swansen, the night watchman. And, if the truth were known, these had caused consternation to Wycherly himself more than to any man. But he was fighting—fighting mad. He would have been madder yet had he guessed the complications that even now were piling up.
CHAPTER VII.
13 Segur Place.
Cavanaugh had found at last the obscure street mentioned on the envelope that old Wycherly had given him—Segur Place.
“'Tis New York and not New York,” he meditated.
He was in civilian clothes. Perhaps that added a little to his sense of strangeness. And yet that characterization of his, “New York and not New York,” would have struck more than one old Gothamite as apt. There were the familiar bridges across the East River, but seen from an unfamiliar angle, no longer friendly, towering strangely huge and somehow terrible far overhead, magnified, moreover, by the smallness and age of all the buildings hereabouts.
“'Tis like an old ladies' home for houses,” said Cavanaugh to himself.
He was right again. These houses also looked shrunken and aged, neglected of youth, neglected of the rich, forgotten of fortune. It was one of those neighborhoods, several acres in extent, as land goes, which, by some freak of the expanding city and new thoroughfares brought into being by the new bridges, had had misfortune stamped upon them—too hideous for any one to live in who had the price to live somewhere else, too inconvenient for any but the most penurious of trades and shops.
And of this desert place in the rich land of Gotham Segur Place was the quintessence. But there was a clean little old woman in front of No. 13, and No. 13 itself looked clean, if poor—again like the woman herself. It was a little old house, not more than a story and a quarter in height, one of a row, each with a little square of earth in front of it and obviously intended originally for a garden. But of the row of such inclosures the one in front of No. 13 was the only one that bore a trace of flowers or of verdure of any kind.
There was a small plot of petunias in front of No. 13. Around this there was quite a lush growth of unclipped grass.
Cavanaugh noticed all this while he was drawing near. For some reason or other, it brought him a shade of satisfaction. It was a pleasant memory he had brought away with him, albeit a trifle strange, from that interview he had had last night with the millionaire, and he didn't want to have it spoiled by finding the millionaire's niece—“Dear Mary”—in such squalor as he had feared. Then Cavanaugh was speaking to the little old woman of the broom.
“Good morning, mother.”
She was old enough for that—old enough to smile.
“Good morning,” she said, with a pleasant accent on the first word.
“And will you be so good as to tell me whether Miss Wycherly is in?”
The old lady had been inclined to go on with her sweeping. Now she stopped and looked at Cavanaugh.
“Miss—who?”
“Miss Mary Wycherly.”
“Are you sure—you've the right name?”
Cavanaugh smiled down at her. He wondered why she was trying to evade the question. Lying was about as much in her line as safe-blowing.
“This is No. 13, ain't it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, this was the address that was given me.”
“By whom?”
“What's the idea, mother? I'm' honest. I have a wife—one of the best—and three children.”
“May I ask what your business is?”
“Why, certainly. This hasn't anything to do with business—this errand—but there's my badge.” He showed it to her playfully.
The old lady looked at the badge. She raised bland eyes to Cavanaugh, studied him for a moment. There was no anger in her voice as she spoke, just a shade of reproof:
“Don't you think that a nice, clean young man like you, with a good wife and three beautiful children”
“Thanks! They're all of that.”
“would be better engaged than in hounding a young woman?”
“Hounding—a—young woman!”
“Do you deny that you're here at the behest of Mr. Wycherly—Mr. J. C. Wycherly?”
“You guessed it right that time. But why the 'hounding?'”
“'Hounding's' the word,” said the old lady, with a hint of indignation, and with rather more than a hint of tears. “She's been hounded and hounded.”
Cavanaugh was the policeman again, for all his civilian attire. He felt a glint of heat in his breast. He dropped his banter.
“Hounding, is it? Say, tell me about it. Let me find anybody who's been hounding her, and I'll hound him. Why, I'll eat him alive. So will a lot of the other lads—any of them, for that matter. I'd do it, anyway. So would they. But, say, after the way Mr. Wycherly spoke to me last night, and what he did for me”
“What did he say? What did he do?”
“Listen! For one thing, he found I was living in one of his own flats, and he gave me an order on his agent to have the place all fixed up.”
“Jacob Wycherly did that?”
“Sure! And—I didn't want to take it—but he gave me—keep this to yourself—five hundred dollars, so that I could send the wife and the kids to the country for the summer”
“So that you'd do—his dirty work!”
“No, no! You've got him wrong. A lot of people have. Why, there's a Swede night watchman, a friend of mine, and when Mr. Wycherly found out that old Swan had been taking care of the building nights for twenty years and never a night off he gave Swan five hundred, too, and an order on his agent for a little farm up the river that Swan had been saving up to buy—saving about a nickel a year; wanted to raise hogs.
The old lady found her broom insufficient to prop her up. She tottered a step or two and leaned against the paling fence of her garden.
“Do you mean,” she said, “J. C. Wycherly?”
“Jacob Corlears Wycherly! He even told us what his middle name was. Some one hounding his niece? Say, lead me to him! Hounding the niece of that good old man”
“Good old man!”
“Yes, ma'am. Mr. Wycherly!”
“Wycherly!”
“What's the matter?”
“Why, it's him that's been hounding her—has driven her to the verge of suicide! Go back and tell him so, if you love him so much. Tell him God'll punish him. Tell him Amanda Carson told you so. That's me. Tell him I said God'll punish him if his fellow men don't.”
She expressed her gentle old wrath with a few dabs of her broom at the already swept sidewalk. She expressed it even more, perhaps, by the tear that trickled unexpectedly from one of her gentle eyes.
“Hold on,” said Cavanaugh softly.
“I've held on about long enough,” said Amanda Carson.
“But he mentioned you, too; said that he thought I'd find you with”
“I don't want to hear it.”
“But he sent you this.” Cavanaugh plunged a hand into his pocket and pulled out a bank book. “Look! It's got your name on it.”
“Where—where'd that come from?”
“He just happened to find it when he was looking in the safe.”
CHAPTER VIII.
Out of the past.
The bank book that Cavanaugh had brought away with him from that amazing midnight interview of his in the Wycherly Building showed that there had been deposited to the account of Amanda Carson in a certain savings institution a sum upward of two thousand dollars. As the old lady looked at the book and let her mind struggle with the realization of all that such a sum meant to her, Cavanaugh himself was not without a mental struggle.
There were still more things about all this that Cavanaugh couldn't understand—plenty of things.
For example, there were those subsequent interviews he had had with his friend Swan Swansea That was after Mr. Wycherly had told them good night. And Swan had spoken about the queer way in which Wycherly had entered the building; how Wycherly had seen him in the dark, and, while still in the dark, had written the first part of that communication he had given Cavanaugh to deliver.
Again, there was that disquieting reference Mr. Wycherly had made to his dead brother, Joseph, saying that perhaps Joseph wasn't dead, that living and dead alike cruised along some “Coast of Shadows,” before passing “out of sight of land.”
And Swan, who had known both Wycherlys, had told how he himself had believed there for a moment that this Wycherly was not that feared and hated brother who survived, but the gentler brother who was gone.
Ghost stuff! That appealed to some essential of Cavanaugh's nature
But here was something now before his eyes which was different—related to all that had already happened, and yet which was different. It required no detective training to see that Amanda Carson was poor, extremely poor. There was every indication that she had been in touch with Wycherly, and him with her. So, how could Wycherly have forgotten that he had this bank book representing the old lady's fortune? It was her fortune. He could see that. About Amanda Carson there was that unmistakable look of one who has recovered that which was lost
“Didn't you know that you had this coming to you?” Cavanaugh asked, sympathetic.
“I hoped. I believed. I had about given up hope and belief.” She was still a little dazed. “I can't believe it yet,” she added. “I've been keeping boarders here—poor girls. It's been hand to mouth. They couldn't pay me much. I've tried to give them the best.”
She was groping about blindly in her mind, saying things that didn't matter very much, while her thought was occupied with the present revelation.
“But why didn't you ask Mr. Wycherly about this bank book?”
“I did.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said that there was no such account.”
“He must have misunderstood.”
“No, he understood too well.”
“But you must have known what bank it was. You could have asked there.”
“I didn't know. This money was deposited for me by the other Mr. Wycherly—Joseph—the one who died. And when—Mr. Jacob told me that there was no such account I was afraid—God forgive me—afraid to investigate for fear”
“Of finding out that Joseph had used the money for himself. Look here, Mrs. Carson”
“Miss Carson.”
“Look here, Miss Carson. I've got a little time on my hands. There's something about all this that I'd like to have cleared up.”
“But you come from—him!”
“I do. But the 'him' I come from can't be the 'him' you mean.” He stopped a little short as there glimmered into his mind a recollection of that uncanny moment, back there in the private office, when the millionaire seemed to be having some sort of a struggle within himself. He recalled that “Not yet! Not yet!”
“But this,” said Miss Carson, “comes from that other.”
“You knew the other?”
“Knew him and loved him. None knew him who didn't love him.” She searched Cavanaugh's face “Why were you looking for his daughter?”
“The neighbors are beginning to stare.”
“Come in.”
There was a tiny parlor, scrupulously clean—not only clean, but with an unexpected air of refinement about it. To this refinement even the prevalent poverty had been forced to contribute One table, two chairs, a narrow divan—all white and attractive, albeit painted by an amateur hand; white cotton curtains at the windows, a few colored prints framed in dark cardboard against the whitened walls.
“Her room, when she's here,” said Miss Carson.
“And how long has it been since you've seen her?” asked Cavanaugh, feeling that, after a fashion, he had already seen Miss Wycherly herself from having seen her room.
“A week.”
“Why did she leave?”
“She thought—that she'd bring down her uncle's wrath on me by staying here.”
“Her uncle's wrath!”
“Is it possible that you still believe him to be a good man?”
“I'm telling you the truth,” said Cavanaugh, “when I tell you that I don't know any more what I believe. If you can straighten me out, I wish you would. I admit that I had heard plenty about Mr. Wycherly that was not to his credit. I've been a tenant of his for the past five years; I've seen the families dispossessed; I've even been stationed in front of some of the houses that belonged to him when we were trying to clean up the town; and I know—or thought I knew—how he works the courts and the inspectors and such with dirty money. But, I tell you, when I saw him last night—saw the kind look in his eyes, heard his soft voice, found him so generous”
“One would think,” said Miss Carson, “that you were talking of his brother.”
“The brother who died?”
“in my arms.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Two years ago this autumn. I was his cousin by marriage—a cousin of Mary's mother—and had kept house for them ever since Mary's mother died.”
“Were they rich then?”
“Rich enough. Joseph was a student and a writer. I suppose that most people would have called him poor. Jacob considered him poor. But Joseph was the happier of the two. He had friends among the great in half a dozen countries. He had written a book.”
“The wife likes to read novels.”
“This was no novel. It was a learned book. Joseph had devoted the better part of his life to the making of it. I think it was about this that Jacob quarreled with him. Jacob called it all nonsense. He threw the manuscript into the fire, right in front of Joseph's eyes. And then, when Joseph tried to rescue it, he fell and struck his head”
“There, there,” said Cavanaugh; “be the brave lady. And where did all this happen?'
“It was in that big house Jacob had built for himself up on Park Avenue—and where he still lives—alone—alone! And he insisted that Joseph and Mary come to live with him there. He knew people hated him and loved his brother. But Joseph didn't want to move. We were living in an old house on Tompkins Square, where Joseph was making all his experiments.”
“What sort of experiments?”
“Occult”
“I don't get yon.”
“Psychic phenomena—spirit manifestations.”
Cavanaugh had the feeling that a hand of light, cool fingers ran up and down his spinal cord.
“So that was it! And he wrote a book about them?”
“Yes; he called it: 'Down the Coast of Shadows.'”
CHAPTER IX.
The house on Park Avenue.
Only one of finer vision, though, would have thought of Jacob Wycherly as now being “alone! alone!” in that big house of his up on Park Avenue to which little old Miss Carson had referred. To the ordinary observer it would have appeared that he was anything but alone. There was a flunky who stood watchful just inside the heavy doors of bronze and glass that gave entrance from the street. There were other servants scattered elsewhere through the shadowy places of the big halls and chambers, in the wide kitchens and in the semidetached garage.
It pleased old Wycherly, if anything could please him, to give the lie to that persistent legend that he was one to sell his soul for money. Hence the style, although he hated it—hated it as he hated charities, hated almost everything. But it was the greatest hate of all because touched with fear; that was the real reason why he kept so many people about him. It had been the mastering hate of his life. It was precisely that hatred—and fear—of being “alone! alone!”
It was this that had been his motive—unconscious, perhaps—in becoming the landlord of swarming tenements. Had he lived in the old times he would have owned slaves—thousands of slaves—and thus otherwise have thrust the fibrous rootlets of his being into thousands of lives, feeding on that which he killed, like some prodigious upas tree.
He was alone now. He hated to be alone. He thrust his thumb down on one of a number of electric calls on the top of his desk.
He fidgeted about with his hands.
The room was a large one and richly furnished. There was a large marble fireplace, and in this a couple of logs were crackling, although outside the air was that of early summer, mild and clear. But there was hardly a day when a fire wasn't burning here, and when a fire wasn't necessary one would have said, because of the chill or chills, that glanced about the place.
Wycherly jabbed the call again.
“Where is that cursed monkey?” he exclaimed.
Thus far there had been only a momentary delay, but even such a delay was unusual, gave an added note of savagery to the already atrocious mood that Wycherly was in.
Suddenly he gave a quick glance over his shoulder in the direction of the fireplace, as if he had suspected the presence of something there. He clamped down his hand on the battery of call buttons, so that he must have been ringing half a dozen of them at once.
“Grierson!” And his voice was a mere squeak.
“Here, sir,” and Grierson hurried toward him from an inner door.
“Why don't you come when you're called?”
“I beg pardon”
“You're quick enough to grab your salary.” It gave Wycherly a twinge of pleasure to see Grierson flinch. Grierson was easy to hurt. That was one of the reasons why Wycherly kept him—besides his manifold capabilities and all-round cleverness. Once Grierson had been a violinist, and Wycherly had converted him to this! “Speak up! What kept you?”
Grierson was a smallish man, blond, with curly hair. It was a certain feminine quality about him that made Grierson himself terrible when he passed on to others the tortures Wycherly inflicted on him.
“Nothing, sir. I was just”
“You're lying to me!”
“The hall man, the housekeeper, and the butler had all come in a hurry in response to that multiple call, and were at the door. They grinned nervously, not without a feeling of relief, when they saw that it was Mr. Grierson who was to be the victim of the old man's humor. They all hated each other.
“No, sir, I”
“Don't contradict me!” Wycherly raised his voice so that the others would be sure to hear. “I tell you that you're lying to me. And I'm getting sick of your lies. You're losing your mind. You can't even tell an intelligent lie any more.”
“I thought”
“You don't know how to think. If you could think I'd made you butler long ago and have had Jonas, over there, to take your place.”
The butler, seeing that it was up to him, let out a discreet guffaw.
Wycherly addressed himself to the butler: “How about it, Jonas? Grierson's a liar. Isn't he?”
“My word, sir!”
“Well, he is, isn't he?”
“It must be as you say, sir.”
“Tell him so.”
“Really now”
“Say it!”
“Say wot, sir?”
“Say 'Grierson, you're a liar.'”
“Er—now we all of us 'as our misconceptions”
“Out with it! You said Grierson was a liar when he said that I left this house last night. Didn't you?”
“By your leave, sir, I said as 'ow it was likely”
“he was lying again. And a man who would lie would steal. Don't look so agitated, Grierson. It spoils your appearance. You're safe. They've arrested the night watchman, and I guess they'll be satisfied with that for a while. But I say that when you come to me with a cock-and-bull story about my having been out in the middle of the night, and that when, at the same moment, they're finding my private safe open, and you and I the only ones who know the combination What are you getting so pale about, Grierson?”
“Of course, if you suspect me”
“You're a fool, Grierson. Here, Jonas! Get Mr. Grierson a glass of port. Mr. Grierson seems to be taking this matter to heart.”
Grierson looked like a man with the neuralgia.
“I was quite sure that I saw you go out,” he said. “I had come into the library from my room. I saw you—or thought I saw you—standing here at the side of the fireplace—that I heard you talking to yourself, and that you then turned, without noticing me, and walked over there past where Mrs. Shattuck is standing and out into the hall.”
Mrs. Shattuck was the housekeeper—a thin, cold, middle-aged woman dressed in black, emotionless, or almost so, keeping her present situation because she liked the atmosphere of this house. She smiled a hard smile. She was alone there for the moment, the hall man having returned to his post at the door, the butler having gone to seek the wine.
But Grierson seemed to have found courage—and reconfirmation of what he believed to be true—in the sound of his own voice and in his rehearsal of what had happened.
He faced his employer with a movement of appeal. Curious as it may seem, Grierson felt a measure of affection for this man.
“Let me tell the rest of it!”
“Go on! Who's stopping you?”
“There was something analogous happened a moment ago, when you rang for me. I thought some one else must have rung. I thought that you—I thought that I had seen you”
Grierson paused, turned, looked sharply in the direction of Mrs. Shattuck. And right then—or maybe it was an instant afterward—the unemotional Mrs. Shattuck gave a shuddering jerk, let out the rag of a frightened screech.