The Circular Staircase

“We talked for a few minutes, discussing a plan Mr. Bailey had in mind. Then I went to the stables, where I kept my car, and got it out.”

“Leaving Mr. Bailey alone in the billiard-room?”

Halsey hesitated.

“My sister was there?”

Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh had the courage to turn and eye Gertrude through her lorgnon.

“And then?”

“I took the car along the lower road, not to disturb the household. Mr. Bailey came down across the lawn, through the hedge, and got into the car on the road.”

“Then you know nothing of Mr. Armstrong’s movements after he left the house?”

“Nothing. I read of his death Monday evening for the first time.”

“Mr. Bailey did not see him on his way across the lawn?”

“I think not. If he had seen him he would have spoken of it.”

“Thank you. That is all. Miss Gertrude Innes.”

Gertrude’s replies were fully as concise as Halsey’s. Mrs. Fitzhugh subjected her to a close inspection, commencing with her hat and ending with her shoes. I flatter myself she found nothing wrong with either her gown or her manner, but poor Gertrude’s testimony was the reverse of comforting. She had been summoned, she said, by her brother, after Mr. Armstrong had gone.

She had waited in the billiard-room with Mr. Bailey, until the automobile had been ready. Then she had locked the door at the foot of the staircase, and, taking a lamp, had accompanied Mr. Bailey to the main entrance of the house, and had watched him cross the lawn. Instead of going at once to her room, she had gone back to the billiard-room for something which had been left there. The card-room and billiard-room were in darkness. She had groped around, found the article she was looking for, and was on the point of returning to her room, when she had heard some one fumbling at the lock at the east outer door. She had thought it was probably her brother, and had been about to go to the door, when she heard it open. Almost immediately there was a shot, and she had run panic-stricken through the drawing-room and had roused the house.

“You heard no other sound?” the coroner asked. “There was no one with Mr. Armstrong when he entered?”

“It was perfectly dark. There were no voices and I heard nothing. There was just the opening of the door, the shot, and the sound of somebody falling.”

“Then, while you went through the drawing-room and upstairs to alarm the household, the criminal, whoever it was, could have escaped by the east door?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. That will do.”

I flatter myself that the coroner got little enough out of me. I saw Mr. Jamieson smiling to himself, and the coroner gave me up, after a time. I admitted I had found the body, said I had not known who it was until Mr. Jarvis told me, and ended by looking up at Barbara Fitzhugh and saying that in renting the house I had not expected to be involved in any family scandal. At which she turned purple.

The verdict was that Arnold Armstrong had met his death at the hands of a person or persons unknown, and we all prepared to leave. Barbara Fitzhugh flounced out without waiting to speak to me, but Mr. Harton came up, as I knew he would.

“You have decided to give up the house, I hope, Miss Innes,” he said. “Mrs. Armstrong has wired me again.”

“I am not going to give it up,” I maintained, “until I understand some things that are puzzling me. The day that the murderer is discovered, I will leave.”

“Then, judging by what I have heard, you will be back in the city very soon,” he said. And I knew that he suspected the discredited cashier of the Traders’ Bank.

Mr. Jamieson came up to me as I was about to leave the coroner’s office.

“How is your patient?” he asked with his odd little smile.

“I have no patient,” I replied, startled.

“I will put it in a different way, then. How is Miss Armstrong?”

“She—she is doing very well,” I stammered.

“Good,” cheerfully. “And our ghost? Is it laid?”

“Mr. Jamieson,” I said suddenly, “I wish you would do one thing: I wish you would come to Sunnyside and spend a few days there. The ghost is not laid. I want you to spend one night at least watching the circular staircase. The murder of Arnold Armstrong was a beginning, not an end.”

He looked serious.

“Perhaps I can do it,” he said. “I have been doing something else, but—well, I will come out tonight.”

We were very silent during the trip back to Sunnyside. I watched Gertrude closely and somewhat sadly. To me there was one glaring flaw in her story, and it seemed to stand out for every one to see. Arnold Armstrong had had no key, and yet she said she had locked the east door. He must have been admitted from within the house; over and over I repeated it to myself.

That night, as gently as I could, I told Louise the story of her stepbrother’s death. She sat in her big, pillow-filled chair, and heard me through without interruption. It was clear that she was shocked beyond words: if I had hoped to learn anything from her expression, I had failed. She was as much in the dark as we were.

CHAPTER XVIII

A HOLE IN THE WALL

My taking the detective out to Sunnyside raised an unexpected storm of protest from Gertrude and Halsey. I was not prepared for it, and I scarcely knew how to account for it. To me Mr. Jamieson was far less formidable under my eyes where I knew what he was doing, than he was of in the city, twisting circumstances and motives to suit himself and learning what he wished to know, about events at Sunnyside, in some occult way. I was glad enough to have him there, when excitements began to come thick and fast.

A new element was about to enter into affairs: Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, would find Doctor Walker back in his green and white house in the village, and Louise’s attitude to him in the immediate future would signify Halsey’s happiness or wretchedness, as it might turn out. Then, too, the return of her mother would mean, of course, that she would have to leave us, and I had become greatly attached to her.

From the day Mr. Jamieson came to Sunnyside there was a subtle change in Gertrude’s manner to me. It was elusive, difficult to analyze, but it was there. She was no longer frank with me, although I think her affection never wavered. At the time I laid the change to the fact that I had forbidden all communication with John Bailey, and had refused to acknowledge any engagement between the two. Gertrude spent much of her time wandering through the grounds, or taking long cross-country walks. Halsey played golf at the Country Club day after day, and after Louise left, as she did the following week, Mr. Jamieson and I were much together. He played a fair game of cribbage, but he cheated at solitaire.

The night the detective arrived, Saturday, I had a talk with him.

I told him of the experience Louise Armstrong had had the night before, on the circular staircase, and about the man who had so frightened Rosie on the drive. I saw that he thought the information was important, and to my suggestion that we put an additional lock on the east wing door he opposed a strong negative.

“I think it probable,” he said, “that our visitor will be back again, and the thing to do is to leave things exactly as they are, to avoid rousing suspicion. Then I can watch for at least a part of each night and probably Mr. Innes will help us out. I would say as little to Thomas as possible. The old man knows more than he is willing to admit.”

I suggested that Alex, the gardener, would probably be willing to help, and Mr. Jamieson undertook to make the arrangement. For one night, however, Mr. Jamieson preferred to watch alone. Apparently nothing occurred. The detective sat in absolute darkness on the lower step of the stairs, dozing, he said afterwards, now and then. Nothing could pass him in either direction, and the door in the morning remained as securely fastened as it had been the night before. And yet one of the most inexplicable occurrences of the whole affair took place that very night.

Liddy came to my room on Sunday morning with a face as long as the moral law. She laid out my, things as usual, but I missed her customary garrulousness. I was not regaled with the new cook’s extravagance as to eggs, and she even forbore to mention “that Jamieson,” on whose arrival she had looked with silent disfavor.

“What’s the matter, Liddy?” I asked at last. “Didn’t you sleep last night?”

“No, ma’m,” she said stiffly.

“Did you have two cups of coffee at your dinner?” I inquired.

“No, ma’m,” indignantly.

I sat up and almost upset my hot water—I always take a cup of hot water with a pinch of salt, before I get up. It tones the stomach.

“Liddy Allen,” I said, “stop combing that switch and tell me what is wrong with you.”

Liddy heaved a sigh.

“Girl and woman,” she said, “I’ve been with you twenty-five years, Miss Rachel, through good temper and bad—“the idea! and what I have taken from her in the way of sulks!—“but I guess I can’t stand it any longer. My trunk’s packed.”

“Who packed it?” I asked, expecting from her tone to be told she had wakened to find it done by some ghostly hand.

“I did; Miss Rachel, you won’t believe me when I tell you this house is haunted. Who was it fell down the clothes chute? Who was it scared Miss Louise almost into her grave?”

“I’m doing my best to find out,” I said. “What in the world are you driving at?” She drew a long breath.

“There is a hole in the trunk-room wall, dug out since last night. It’s big enough to put your head in, and the plaster’s all over the place.”

“Nonsense!” I said. “Plaster is always falling.”

But Liddy clenched that.

“Just ask Alex,” she said. “When he put the new cook’s trunk there last night the wall was as smooth as this. This morning it’s dug out, and there’s plaster on the cook’s trunk. Miss Rachel, you can get a dozen detectives and put one on every stair in the house, and you’ll never catch anything. There’s some things you can’t handcuff.”

Liddy was right. As soon as I could, I went up to the trunk-room, which was directly over my bedroom. The plan of the upper story of the house was like that of the second floor, in the main. One end, however, over the east wing, had been left only roughly finished, the intention having been to convert it into a ball-room at some future time. The maids’ rooms, trunk-room, and various store-rooms, including a large airy linen-room, opened from a long corridor, like that on the second floor. And in the trunk-room, as Liddy had said, was a fresh break in the plaster.

Not only in the plaster, but through the lathing, the aperture extended. I reached into the opening, and three feet away, perhaps, I could touch the bricks of the partition wall. For some reason, the architect, in building the house, had left a space there that struck me, even in the surprise of the discovery, as an excellent place for a conflagration to gain headway.

“You are sure the hole was not here yesterday?” I asked Liddy, whose expression was a mixture of satisfaction and alarm. In answer she pointed to the new cook’s trunk—that necessary adjunct of the migratory domestic. The top was covered with fine white plaster, as was the floor. But there were no large pieces of mortar lying around—no bits of lathing. When I mentioned this to Liddy she merely raised her eyebrows. Being quite confident that the gap was of unholy origin, she did not concern herself with such trifles as a bit of mortar and lath. No doubt they were even then heaped neatly on a gravestone in the Casanova churchyard!

I brought Mr. Jamieson up to see the hole in the wall, directly after breakfast. His expression was very odd when he looked at it, and the first thing he did was to try to discover what object, if any, such a hole could have. He got a piece of candle, and by enlarging the aperture a little was able to examine what lay beyond. The result was nil. The trunk-room, although heated by steam heat, like the rest of the house, boasted of a fireplace and mantel as well. The opening had been made between the flue and the outer wall of the house. There was revealed, however, on inspection, only the brick of the chimney on one side and the outer wall of the house on the other; in depth the space extended only to the flooring. The breach had been made about four feet from the floor, and inside were all the missing bits of plaster. It had been a methodical ghost.

It was very much of a disappointment. I had expected a secret room, at the very least, and I think even Mr. Jamieson had fancied he might at last have a clue to the mystery. There was evidently nothing more to be discovered: Liddy reported that everything was serene among the servants, and that none of them had been disturbed by the noise. The maddening thing, however, was that the nightly visitor had evidently more than one way of gaining access to the house, and we made arrangements to redouble our vigilance as to windows and doors that night.

Halsey was inclined to pooh-pooh the whole affair. He said a break in the plaster might have occurred months ago and gone unnoticed, and that the dust had probably been stirred up the day before. After all, we had to let it go at that, but we put in an uncomfortable Sunday. Gertrude went to church, and Halsey took a long walk in the morning. Louise was able to sit up, and she allowed Halsey and Liddy to assist her downstairs late in the afternoon. The east veranda was shady, green with vines and palms, cheerful with cushions and lounging chairs. We put Louise in a steamer chair, and she sat there passively enough, her hands clasped in her lap.

We were very silent. Halsey sat on the rail with a pipe, openly watching Louise, as she looked broodingly across the valley to the hills. There was something baffling in the girl’s eyes; and gradually Halsey’s boyish features lost their glow at seeing her about again, and settled into grim lines. He was like his father just then.

We sat until late afternoon, Halsey growing more and more moody. Shortly before six, he got up and went into the house, and in a few minutes he came out and called me to the telephone. It was Anna Whitcomb, in town, and she kept me for twenty minutes, telling me the children had had the measles, and how Madame Sweeny had botched her new gown.

When I finished, Liddy was behind me, her mouth a thin line.

“I wish you would try to look cheerful, Liddy,” I groaned, “your face would sour milk.” But Liddy seldom replied to my gibes. She folded her lips a little tighter.

“He called her up,” she said oracularly, “he called her up, and asked her to keep you at the telephone, so he could talk to Miss Louise. A THANKLESS CHILD IS SHARPER THAN A SERPENT’S TOOTH.”

“Nonsense!” I said bruskly. “I might have known enough to leave them. It’s a long time since you and I were in love, Liddy, and—we forget.”

Liddy sniffed.

“No man ever ,made a fool of me,” she replied virtuously.

“Well, something did,” I retorted.

CHAPTER XIX

CONCERNING THOMAS

Mr. Jamieson,” I said, when we found ourselves alone after dinner that night, “the inquest yesterday seemed to me the merest recapitulation of things that were already known. It developed nothing new beyond the story of Doctor Stewart’s, and that was volunteered.”

“An inquest is only a necessary formality, Miss Innes,” he replied. “Unless a crime is committed in the open, the inquest does nothing beyond getting evidence from witnesses while events are still in their minds. The police step in later. You and I both know how many important things never transpired. For instance: the dead man had no key, and yet Miss Gertrude testified to a fumbling at the lock, and then the opening of the door. The piece of evidence you mention, Doctor Stewart’s story, is one of those things we have to take cautiously: the doctor has a patient who wears black and does not raise her veil. Why, it is the typical mysterious lady! Then the good doctor comes across Arnold Armstrong, who was a graceless scamp—de mortuis—what’s the rest of it?—and he is quarreling with a lady in black. Behold, says the doctor, they are one and the same.”

“Why was Mr. Bailey not present at the inquest?”

The detective’s expression was peculiar.

“Because his physician testified that he is ill, and unable to leave his bed.”

“Ill!” I exclaimed. “Why, neither Halsey nor Gertrude has told me that.”

“There are more things than that, Miss Innes, that are puzzling. Bailey gives the impression that he knew nothing of the crash at the bank until he read it in the paper Monday night, and that he went back and surrendered himself immediately. I do not believe it. Jonas, the watchman at the Traders’ Bank, tells a different story. He says that on the Thursday night before, about eight-thirty, Bailey went back to the bank. Jonas admitted him, and he says the cashier was in a state almost of collapse. Bailey worked until midnight, then he closed the vault and went away. The occurrence was so unusual that the watchman pondered over it an the rest of the night. What did Bailey do when he went back to the Knickerbocker apartments that night? He packed a suitcase ready for instant departure. But he held off too long; he waited for something. My personal opinion is that he waited to see Miss Gertrude before flying from the country. Then, when he had shot down Arnold Armstrong that night, he had to choose between two evils. He did the thing that would immediately turn public opinion in his favor, and surrendered himself, as an innocent man. The strongest thing against him is his preparation for flight, and his deciding to come back after the murder of Arnold Armstrong. He was shrewd enough to disarm suspicion as to the graver charge?”

The evening dragged along slowly. Mrs. Watson came to my bedroom before I went to bed and asked if I had any arnica. She showed me a badly swollen hand, with reddish streaks running toward the elbow; she said it was the hand she had hurt the night of the murder a week before, and that she had not slept well since. It looked to me as if it might be serious, and I told her to let Doctor Stewart see it.

The next morning Mrs. Watson went up to town on the eleven train, and was admitted to the Charity Hospital. She was suffering from blood-poisoning. I fully meant to go up and see her there, but other things drove her entirely from my mind. I telephoned to the hospital that day, however, and ordered a private room for her, and whatever comforts she might be allowed.

Mrs. Armstrong arrived Monday evening with her husband’s body, and the services were set for the next day. The house on Chestnut Street, in town, had been opened, and Tuesday morning Louise left us to go home. She sent for me before she went, and I saw she had been crying.

“How can I thank you, Miss Innes?” she said. “You have taken me on faith, and—you have not asked me any questions. Some time, perhaps, I can tell you; and when that time comes, you will all despise me,—Halsey, too.”

I tried to tell her how glad I was to have had her but there was something else she wanted to say. She said it finally, when she had bade a constrained good-by to Halsey and the car was waiting at the door.

“Miss Innes,” she said in a low tone, “if they—if there is any attempt made to—to have you give up the house, do it, if you possibly can. I am afraid—to have you stay.”

That was all. Gertrude went into town with her and saw her safely home. She reported a decided coolness in the greeting between Louise and her mother, and that Doctor Walker was there, apparently in charge of the arrangements for the funeral. Halsey disappeared shortly after Louise left and came home about nine that night, muddy and tired. As for Thomas, he went around dejected and sad, and I saw the detective watching him closely at dinner. Even now I wonder—what did Thomas know? What did he suspect?

At ten o’clock the household had settled down for the night. Liddy, who was taking Mrs. Watson’s place, had finished examining the tea-towels and the corners of the shelves in the cooling-room, and had gone to bed. Alex, the gardener, had gone heavily up the circular staircase to his room, and Mr. Jamieson was examining the locks of the windows. Halsey dropped into a chair in the living-room, and stared moodily ahead. Once he roused.

“What sort of a looking chap is that Walker, Gertrude?” he asked!

“Rather tall, very dark, smooth-shaven. Not bad looking,” Gertrude said, putting down the book she had been pretending to read. Halsey kicked a taboret viciously.

“Lovely place this village must be in the winter,” he said irrelevantly. “A girl would be buried alive here.”

It was then some one rapped at the knocker on the heavy front door. Halsey got up leisurely and opened it, admitting Warner. He was out of breath from running, and he looked half abashed.

“I am sorry to disturb you,” he said. “But I didn’t know what else to do. It’s about Thomas.”

“What about Thomas?” I asked. Mr. Jamieson had come into the hall and we all stared at Warner.

“He’s acting queer,” Warner explained. “He’s sitting down there on the edge of the porch, and he says he has seen a ghost. The old man looks bad, too; he can scarcely speak.”

“He’s as full of superstition as an egg is of meat,” I said. “Halsey, bring some whisky and we will all go down.”

No one moved to get the whisky, from which I judged there were three pocket flasks ready for emergency. Gertrude threw a shawl around my shoulders, and we all started down over the hill: I had made so many nocturnal excursions around the place that I knew my way perfectly. But Thomas was not on the veranda, nor was he inside the house. The men exchanged significant glances, and Warner got a lantern.

“He can’t have gone far,” he said. “He was trembling so that he couldn’t stand, when I left.”

Jamieson and Halsey together made the round of the lodge, occasionally calling the old man by name. But there was no response. No Thomas came, bowing and showing his white teeth through the darkness. I began to be vaguely uneasy, for the first time. Gertrude, who was never nervous in the dark, went alone down the drive to the gate, and stood there, looking along the yellowish line of the road, while I waited on the tiny veranda.

Warner was puzzled. He came around to the edge of the veranda and stood looking at it as if it ought to know and explain.

“He might have stumbled into the house,” he said, “but he could not have climbed the stairs. Anyhow, he’s not inside or outside, that I can see.” The other members of the party had come back now, and no one had found any trace of the old man. His pipe, still warm, rested on the edge of the rail, and inside on the table his old gray hat showed that its owner had not gone far.

He was not far, after all. From the table my eyes traveled around the room, and stopped at the door of a closet. I hardly know what impulse moved me, but I went in and turned the knob. It burst open with the impetus of a weight behind it, and something fell partly forward in a heap on the floor. It was Thomas—Thomas without a mark of injury on him, and dead.

CHAPTER XX

DOCTOR WALKER’S WARNING

Warner was on his knees in a moment, fumbling at the old man’s collar to loosen it, but Halsey caught his hand.

“Let him alone?” he said. “You can’t help him; he is dead.”

We stood there, each avoiding the other’s eyes; we spoke low and reverently in the presence of death, and we tacitly avoided any mention of the suspicion that was in every mind. When Mr. Jamieson had finished his cursory examination, he got up and dusted the knees of his trousers.

“There is no sign of injury,” he said, and I know I, for one, drew a long breath of relief. “From what Warner says and from his hiding in the closet, I should say he was scared to death. Fright and a weak heart, together.”

“But what could have done it?” Gertrude asked. “He was all right this evening at dinner. Warner, what did he say when you found him on the porch?” Warner looked shaken: his honest, boyish face was colorless. “Just what I told you, Miss Innes. He’d been reading the paper downstairs; I had put up the car, and, feeling sleepy, I came down to the lodge to go to bed. As I went upstairs, Thomas put down the paper and, taking his pipe, went out on the porch. Then I heard an exclamation from him.”

“What did he say?” demanded Jamieson. “I couldn’t hear, but his voice was strange; it sounded startled. I waited for him to call out again, but he did not, so I went downstairs. He was sitting on the porch step, looking straight ahead, as if he saw something among the trees across the road. And he kept mumbling about having seen a ghost. He looked queer, and I tried to get him inside, but he wouldn’t move. Then I thought I’d better go up to the house.” “Didn’t he say anything else you could understand?” I asked. “He said something about the grave giving up its dead.”

Mr. Jamieson was going through the old man’s pockets, and Gertrude was composing his arms, folding them across his white shirt-bosom, always so spotless.

Mr. Jamieson looked up at me. “What was that you said to me, Miss Innes, about the murder at the house being a beginning and not an end? By jove, I believe you were right!” In the course of his investigations the detective had come to the inner pocket of the dead butler’s black coat. Here he found some things that interested him. One was a small flat key, with a red cord tied to it, and the other was a bit of white paper, on which was written something in Thomas’ cramped hand. Mr. Jamieson read it: then he gave it to me. It was an address in fresh ink—

LUCIEN WALLACE, 14 Elm Street, Richfield.

As the card went around, I think both the detective and I watched for any possible effect it might have, but, beyond perplexity, there seemed to be none. “Richfield!” Gertrude exclaimed. “Why, Elm Street is the main street; don’t you remember, Halsey?”

“Lucien Wallace!” Halsey said. “That is the child Stewart spoke of at the inquest.”

Warner, with his mechanic’s instinct, had reached for the key. What he said was not a surprise.

“Yale lock,” he said. “Probably a key to the east entry.”

There was no reason why Thomas, an old and trusted servant, should not have had a key to that particular door, although the servants’ entry was in the west wing. But I had not known of this key, and it opened up a new field of conjecture. Just now, however, there were many things to be attended to, and, leaving Warner with the body, we all went back to the house. Mr. Jamieson walked with me, while Halsey and Gertrude followed.

“I suppose I shall have to notify the Armstrongs,” I said. “They will know if Thomas had any people and how to reach them. Of course, I expect to defray the expenses of the funeral, but his relatives must be found. What do you think frightened him, Mr. Jamieson?”

“It is hard to say,” he replied slowly, “but I think we may be certain it was fright, and that he was hiding from something. I am sorry in more than one way: I have always believed that Thomas knew something, or suspected something, that he would not tell. Do you know hour much money there was in that worn-out wallet of his? Nearly a hundred dollars! Almost two months’ wages—and yet those darkies seldom have a penny. Well—what Thomas knew will be buried with him.”

Halsey suggested that the grounds be searched, but Mr. Jamieson vetoed the suggestion.

“You would find nothing,” he said. “A person clever enough to get into Sunnyside and tear a hole in the wall, while I watched downstairs, is not to be found by going around the shrubbery with a lantern.”

With the death of Thomas, I felt that a climax had come in affairs at Sunnyside. The night that followed was quiet enough. Halsey watched at the foot of the staircase, and a complicated system of bolts on the other doors seemed to be effectual.

Once in the night I wakened and thought I heard the tapping again. But all was quiet, and I had reached the stage where I refused to be disturbed for minor occurrences.

The Armstrongs were notified of Thomas’ death, and I had my first interview with Doctor Walker as a result. He came up early the next morning, just as we finished breakfast, in a professional looking car with a black hood. I found him striding up and down the living-room, and, in spite of my preconceived dislike, I had to admit that the man was presentable. A big fellow he was, tall and dark, as Gertrude had said, smooth-shaven and erect, with prominent features and a square jaw. He was painfully spruce in his appearance, and his manner was almost obtrusively polite.

“I must make a double excuse for this early visit, Miss Innes,” he said as he sat down. The chair was lower than he expected, and his dignity required collecting before he went on. “My professional duties are urgent and long neglected, and”—a fall to the every-day manner—“something must be done about that body.”

“Yes,” I said, sitting on the edge of my chair. “I merely wished the address of Thomas’ people. You might have telephoned, if you were busy.”

He smiled.

“I wished to see you about something else,” he said. “As for Thomas, it is Mrs. Armstrong’s wish that would allow her to attend to the expense. About his relatives, I have already notified his brother, in the village. It was heart disease, I think. Thomas always had a bad heart.”

“Heart disease and fright,” I said, still on the edge of my chair. But the doctor had no intention of leaving.

“I understand you have a ghost up here, and that you have the house filled with detectives to exorcise it,” he said.

For some reason I felt I was being “pumped,” as Halsey says. “You have been misinformed,” I replied.

“What, no ghost, no detectives!” he said, still with his smile. “What a disappointment to the village!”

I resented his attempt at playfulness. It had been anything but a joke to us.

“Doctor Walker,” I said tartly, “I fail to see any humor in the situation. Since I came here, one man has been shot, and another one has died from shock. There have been intruders in the house, and strange noises. If that is funny, there is something wrong with my sense of humor.”

“You miss the point,” he said, still good-naturedly. “The thing that is funny, to me, is that you insist on remaining here, under the circumstances. I should think nothing would keep you.” “You are mistaken. Everything that occurs only confirms my resolution to stay until the mystery is cleared.” “I have a message for you, Miss Innes,” he said, rising at last. “Mrs. Armstrong asked me to thank you for your kindness to Louise, whose whim, occurring at the time it did, put her to great inconvenience. Also—and this is a delicate matter—she asked me to appeal to your natural sympathy for her, at this time, and to ask you if you will not reconsider your decision about the house. Sunnyside is her home; she loves it dearly, and just now she wishes to retire here for quiet and peace.” “She must have had a change of heart,” I said, ungraciously enough. “Louise told me her mother despised the place. Besides, this is no place for quiet and peace just now. Anyhow, doctor, while I don’t care to force an issue, I shall certainly remain here, for a time at least.”

“For how long?” he asked. “My lease is for six months. I shall stay until some explanation is found for certain things. My own family is implicated now, and I shall do everything to clear the mystery of Arnold Armstrong’s murder.” The doctor stood looking down, slapping his gloves thoughtfully against the palm of a well-looked-after hand. “You say there have been intruders in the house?” he asked. “You are sure of that, Miss Innes?”

“Certain.”

“In what part?”

“In the east wing.” “Can you tell me when these intrusions occurred, and what the purpose seemed to be? Was it robbery?” “No,” I said decidedly. “As to time, once on Friday night a week ago, again the following night, when Arnold Armstrong was murdered, and again last Friday night.” The doctor looked serious. He seemed to be debating some question in his mind, and to reach a decision. “Miss Innes,” he said, “I am in a peculiar position; I understand your attitude, of course; but—do you think you are wise? Ever since you have come here there have been hostile demonstrations against you and your family. I’m not a croaker, but—take a warning. Leave before anything occurs that will cause you a lifelong regret.”

“I am willing to take the responsibility,” I said coldly.

I think he gave me up then as a poor proposition. He asked to be shown where Arnold Armstrong’s body had been found, and I took him there. He scrutinized the whole place carefully, examining the stairs and the lock. When he had taken a formal farewell I was confident of one thing. Doctor Walker would do anything he could to get me away from Sunnyside.

CHAPTER XXI

FOURTEEN ELM STREET

It was Monday evening when we found the body of poor old Thomas. Monday night had been uneventful; things were quiet at the house and the peculiar circumstances of the old man’s death had been carefully kept from the servants. Rosie took charge of the dining-room and pantry, in the absence of a butler, and, except for the warning of the Casanova doctor, everything breathed of peace.

Affairs at the Traders’ Bank were progressing slowly. The failure had hit small stock-holders very hard, the minister of the little Methodist chapel in Casanova among them. He had received as a legacy from an uncle a few shares of stock in the Traders’ Bank, and now his joy was turned to bitterness: he had to sacrifice everything he had in the world, and his feeling against Paul Armstrong, dead, as he was, must have been bitter in the extreme. He was asked to officiate at the simple services when the dead banker’s body was interred in Casanova churchyard, but the good man providentially took cold, and a substitute was called in.

A few days after the services he called to see me, a kind-faced little man, in a very bad frock-coat and laundered tie. I think he was uncertain as to my connection with the Armstrong family, and dubious whether I considered Mr. Armstrong’s taking away a matter for condolence or congratulation. He was not long in doubt.

I liked the little man. He had known Thomas well, and had promised to officiate at the services in the rickety African Zion Church. He told me more of himself than he knew, and before he left, I astonished him—and myself, I admit—by promising a new carpet for his church. He was much affected, and I gathered that he had yearned over his ragged chapel as a mother over a half-clothed child.

“You are laying up treasure, Miss Innes,” he said brokenly, “where neither moth nor rust corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal.”

“It is certainly a safer place than Sunnyside,” I admitted. And the thought of the carpet permitted him to smile. He stood just inside the doorway, looking from the luxury of the house to the beauty of the view.

“The rich ought to be good,” he said wistfully. “They have so much that is beautiful, and beauty is ennobling. And yet—while I ought to say nothing but good of the dead—Mr. Armstrong saw nothing of this fair prospect. To him these trees and lawns were not the work of God. They were property, at so much an acre. He loved money, Miss Innes. He offered up everything to his golden calf. Not power, not ambition, was his fetish: it was money.” Then he dropped his pulpit manner, and, turning to me with his engaging smile: “In spite of all this luxury,” he said, “the country people here have a saying that Mr. Paul Armstrong could sit on a dollar and see all around it. Unlike the summer people, he gave neither to the poor nor to the church. He loved money for its own sake.”

“And there are no pockets in shrouds!” I said cynically.

I sent him home in the car, with a bunch of hot-house roses for his wife, and he was quite overwhelmed. As for me, I had a generous glow that was cheap at the price of a church carpet. I received less gratification—and less gratitude—when I presented the new silver communion set to St. Barnabas.

I had a great many things to think about in those days. I made out a list of questions and possible answers, but I seemed only to be working around in a circle. I always ended where I began. The list was something like this:

Who had entered the house the night before the murder?

Thomas claimed it was Mr. Bailey, whom he had seen on the footpath, and who owned the pearl cuff-link.

Why did Arnold Armstrong come back after he had left the house the night he was killed?

No answer. Was it on the mission Louise had mentioned?

Who admitted him?

Gertrude said she had looked the east entry. There was no key on the dead man or in the door. He must have been admitted from within.

Who had been locked in the clothes chute?

Some one unfamiliar with the house, evidently. Only two people missing from the household, Rosie and Gertrude. Rosie had been at the lodge. Therefore—but was it Gertrude? Might it not have been the mysterious intruder again?

Who had accosted Rosie on the drive?

Again—perhaps the nightly visitor. It seemed more likely some one who suspected a secret at the lodge. Was Louise under surveillance?

Who had passed Louise on the circular staircase?

Could it have been Thomas? The key to the east entry made this a possibility. But why was he there, if it were indeed he?

Who had made the hole in the trunk-room wall?

It was not vandalism. It had been done quietly, and with deliberate purpose. If I had only known how to read the purpose of that gaping aperture what I might have saved in anxiety and mental strain!

Why had Louise left her people and come home to hide at the lodge?

There was no answer, as yet, to this, or to the next questions.

Why did both she and Doctor Walker warn us away from the house?

Who was Lucien Wallace?

What did Thomas see in the shadows the night he died?

What was the meaning of the subtle change in Gertrude?

Was Jack Bailey an accomplice or a victim in the looting of the Traders’ Bank?

What all-powerful reason made Louise determine to marry Doctor Walker?

The examiners were still working on the books of the Traders’ Bank, and it was probable that several weeks would elapse before everything was cleared up. The firm of expert accountants who had examined the books some two months before testified that every bond, every piece of valuable paper, was there at that time. It had been shortly after their examination that the president, who had been in bad health, had gone to California. Mr. Bailey was still ill at the Knickerbocker, and in this, as in other ways, Gertrude’s conduct puzzled me. She seemed indifferent, refused to discuss matters pertaining to the bank, and never, to my knowledge, either wrote to him or went to see him.

Gradually I came to the conclusion that Gertrude, with the rest of the world, believed her lover guilty, and—although I believed it myself, for that matter—I was irritated by her indifference. Girls in my day did not meekly accept the public’s verdict as to the man they loved.

But presently something occurred that made me think that under Gertrude’s surface calm there was a seething flood of emotions.

Tuesday morning the detective made a careful search of the grounds, but he found nothing. In the afternoon he disappeared, and it was late that night when he came home. He said he would have to go back to the city the following day, and arranged with Halsey and Alex to guard the house.

Liddy came to me on Wednesday morning with her black silk apron held up like a bag, and her eyes big with virtuous wrath. It was the day of Thomas’ funeral in the village, and Alex and I were in the conservatory cutting flowers for the old man’s casket. Liddy is never so happy as when she is making herself wretched, and now her mouth drooped while her eyes were triumphant.

“I always said there were plenty of things going on here, right under our noses, that we couldn’t see,” she said, holding out her apron.

“I don’t see with my nose,” I remarked. “What have you got there?”

Liddy pushed aside a half-dozen geranium pots, and in the space thus cleared she dumped the contents of her apron—a handful of tiny bits of paper. Alex had stepped back, but I saw him watching her curiously.

“Wait a moment, Liddy,” I said. “You have been going through the library paper-basket again!”

Liddy was arranging her bits of paper with the skill of long practice and paid no attention.

“Did it ever occur to you,” I went on, putting my hand over the scraps, “that when people tear up their correspondence, it is for the express purpose of keeping it from being read?”

“If they wasn’t ashamed of it they wouldn’t take so much trouble, Miss Rachel,” Liddy said oracularly. “More than that, with things happening every day, I consider it my duty. If you don’t read and act on this, I shall give it to that Jamieson, and I’ll venture he’ll not go back to the city to-day.”

That decided me. If the scraps had anything to do with the mystery ordinary conventions had no value. So Liddy arranged the scraps, like working out one of the puzzle-pictures children play with, and she did it with much the same eagerness. When it was finished she stepped aside while I read it.

“Wednesday night, nine o’clock. Bridge,” I real aloud. Then, aware of Alex’s stare, I turned on Liddy.

“Some one is to play bridge tonight at nine o’clock,” I said. “Is that your business, or mine?”

Liddy was aggrieved. She was about to reply when I scooped up the pieces and left the conservatory.

“Now then,” I said, when we got outside, “will you tell me why you choose to take Alex into your confidence? He’s no fool. Do you suppose he thinks any one in this house is going to play bridge tonight at nine o’clock, by appointment! I suppose you have shown it in the kitchen, and instead of my being able to slip down to the bridge tonight quietly, and see who is there, the whole household will be going in a procession.”

“Nobody knows it,” Liddy said humbly. “I found it in the basket in Miss Gertrude’s dressing-room. Look at the back of the sheet.” I turned over some of the scraps, and, sure enough, it was a blank deposit slip from the Traders’ Bank. So Gertrude was going to meet Jack Bailey that night by the bridge! And I had thought he was ill! It hardly seemed like the action of an innocent man—this avoidance of daylight, and of his fiancee’s people. I decided to make certain, however, by going to the bridge that night.

After luncheon Mr. Jamieson suggested that I go with him to Richfield, and I consented.

“I am inclined to place more faith in Doctor Stewart’s story,” he said, “since I found that scrap in old Thomas’ pocket. It bears out the statement that the woman with the child, and the woman who quarreled with Armstrong, are the same. It looks as if Thomas had stumbled on to some affair which was more or less discreditable to the dead man, and, with a certain loyalty to the family, had kept it to himself. Then, you see, your story about the woman at the card-room window begins to mean something. It is the nearest approach to anything tangible that we have had yet.”

Warner took us to Richfield in the car. It was about twenty-five miles by railroad, but by taking a series of atrociously rough short cuts we got there very quickly. It was a pretty little town, on the river, and back on the hill I could see the Mortons’ big country house, where Halsey and Gertrude had been staying until the night of the murder.

Elm Street was almost the only street, and number fourteen was easily found. It was a small white house, dilapidated without having gained anything picturesque, with a low window and a porch only a foot or so above the bit of a lawn. There was a baby-carriage in the path, and from a swing at the side came the sound of conflict. Three small children were disputing vociferously, and a faded young woman with a kindly face was trying to hush the clamor. When she saw us she untied her gingham apron and came around to the porch.

“Good afternoon,” I said. Jamieson lifted his hat, without speaking. “I came to inquire about a child named Lucien Wallace.”

“I am glad you have come,” she said. “In spite of the other children, I think the little fellow is lonely. We thought perhaps his mother would be here to-day.”

Mr. Jamieson stepped forward.

“You are Mrs. Tate?” I wondered how the detective knew.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mrs. Tate, we want to make some inquiries. Perhaps in the house—”

“Come right in,” she said hospitably. And soon we were in the little shabby parlor, exactly like a thousand of its prototypes. Mrs. Tate sat uneasily, her hands folded in her lap.

“How long has Lucien been here?” Mr. Jamieson asked.

“Since a week ago last Friday. His mother paid one week’s board in advance; the other has not been paid.”

“Was he ill when he came?”

“No, sir, not what you’d call sick. He was getting better of typhoid, she said, and he’s picking up fine.”

“Will you tell me his mother’s name and address?”

“That’s the trouble,” the young woman said, knitting her brows. “She gave her name as Mrs. Wallace, and said she had no address. She was looking for a boarding-house in town. She said she worked in a department store, and couldn’t take care of the child properly, and he needed fresh air and milk. I had three children of my own, and one more didn’t make much difference in the work, but—I wish she would pay this week’s board.”

“Did she say what store it was?”

“No, sir, but all the boy’s clothes came from King’s. He has far too fine clothes for the country.”

There was a chorus of shouts and shrill yells from the front door, followed by the loud stamping of children’s feet and a throaty “whoa, whoa!” Into the room came a tandem team of two chubby youngsters, a boy and a girl, harnessed with a clothes-line, and driven by a laughing boy of about seven, in tan overalls and brass buttons. The small driver caught my attention at once: he was a beautiful child, and, although he showed traces of recent severe illness, his skin had now the clear transparency of health.

“Whoa, Flinders,” he shouted. “You’re goin’ to smash the trap.”

Mr. Jamieson coaxed him over by holding out a lead-pencil, striped blue and yellow.

“Now, then,” he said, when the boy had taken the lead-pencil and was testing its usefulness on the detective’s cuff, “now then, I’ll bet you don’t know what your name is!”

“I do,” said the boy. “Lucien Wallace.”

“Great! And what’s your mother’s name?”

“Mother, of course. What’s your mother’s name?” And he pointed to me! I am going to stop wearing black: it doubles a woman’s age.

“And where did you live before you came here?” The detective was polite enough not to smile.

“Grossmutter,” he said. And I saw Mr. Jamieson’s eyebrows go up.

“German,” he commented. “Well, young man, you don’t seem to know much about yourself.”

“I’ve tried it all week,” Mrs. Tate broke in. “The boy knows a word or two of German, but he doesn’t know where he lived, or anything about himself.”

Mr. Jamieson wrote something on a card and gave it to her.

“Mrs. Tate,” he said, “I want you to do something. Here is some money for the telephone call. The instant the boy’s mother appears here, call up that number and ask for the person whose name is there. You can run across to the drug-store on an errand and do it quietly. Just say, `The lady has come.’”

“`The lady has come,’” repeated Mrs. Tate. “Very well, sir, and I hope it will be soon. The milk-bill alone is almost double what it was.”

“How much is the child’s board?” I asked.

“Three dollars a week, including his washing.”

“Very well,” I said. “Now, Mrs. Tate, I am going to pay last week’s board and a week in advance. If the mother comes, she is to know nothing of this visit—absolutely not a word, and, in return for your silence, you may use this money for—something for your own children.”

Her tired, faded face lighted up, and I saw her glance at the little Tates’ small feet. Shoes, I divined—the feet of the genteel poor being almost as expensive as their stomachs.

As we went back Mr. Jamieson made only one remark: I think he was laboring under the weight of a great disappointment.

“Is King’s a children’s outfitting place?” he asked.

“Not especially. It is a general department store.”

He was silent after that, but he went to the telephone as soon as we got home, and called up King and Company, in the city.

After a time he got the general manager, and they talked for some time. When Mr. Jamieson hung up the receiver he turned to me.

“The plot thickens,” he said with his ready smile. “There are four women named Wallace at King’s none of them married, and none over twenty. I think I shall go up to the city tonight. I want to go to the Children’s Hospital. But before I go, Miss Innes, I wish you would be more frank with me than you have been yet. I want you to show me the revolver you picked up in the tulip bed.”

So he had known all along!

“It WAS a revolver, Mr. Jamieson,” I admitted, cornered at last, “but I can not show it to you. It is not in my possession.”

CHAPTER XXII

A LADDER OUT OF PLACE

At dinner Mr. Jamieson suggested sending a man out in his place for a couple of days, but Halsey was certain there would be nothing more, and felt that he and Alex could manage the situation. The detective went back to town early in the evening, and by nine o’clock Halsey, who had been playing golf—as a man does anything to take his mind away from trouble—was sleeping soundly on the big leather davenport in the living-room.

I sat and knitted, pretending not to notice when Gertrude got up and wandered out into the starlight. As soon as I was satisfied that she had gone, however, I went out cautiously. I had no intention of eavesdropping, but I wanted to be certain that it was Jack Bailey she was meeting. Too many things had occurred in which Gertrude was, or appeared to be, involved, to allow anything to be left in question.

I went slowly across the lawn, skirted the hedge to a break not far from the lodge, and found myself on the open road. Perhaps a hundred feet to the left the path led across the valley to the Country Club, and only a little way off was the foot-bridge over Casanova Creek. But just as I was about to turn down the path I heard steps coming toward me, and I shrank into the bushes. It was Gertrude, going back quickly toward the house.

I was surprised. I waited until she had had time to get almost to the house before I started. And then I stepped back again into the shadows. The reason why Gertrude had not kept her tryst was evident. Leaning on the parapet of the bridge in the moonlight, and smoking a pipe, was Alex, the gardener. I could have throttled Liddy for her carelessness in reading the torn note where he could hear. And I could cheerfully have choked Alex to death for his audacity.

But there was no help for it: I turned and followed Gertrude slowly back to the house.

The frequent invasions of the house had effectually prevented any relaxation after dusk. We had redoubled our vigilance as to bolts and window-locks but, as Mr. Jamieson had suggested, we allowed the door at the east entry to remain as before, locked by the Yale lock only. To provide only one possible entrance for the invader, and to keep a constant guard in the dark at the foot of the circular staircase, seemed to be the only method.

In the absence of the detective, Alex and Halsey arranged to change off, Halsey to be on duty from ten to two, and Alex from two until six. Each man was armed, and, as an additional precaution, the one off duty slept in a room near the head of the circular staircase and kept his door open, to be ready for emergency.

These arrangements were carefully kept from the servants, who were only commencing to sleep at night, and who retired, one and all, with barred doors and lamps that burned full until morning.

The house was quiet again Wednesday night. It was almost a week since Louise had encountered some one on the stairs, and it was four days since the discovery of the hole in the trunk-room wall.

Arnold Armstrong and his father rested side by side in the Casanova churchyard, and at the Zion African Church, on the hill, a new mound marked the last resting-place of poor Thomas.

Louise was with her mother in town, and, beyond a polite note of thanks to me, we had heard nothing from her. Doctor Walker had taken up his practice again, and we saw him now and then flying past along the road, always at top speed. The murder of Arnold Armstrong was still unavenged, and I remained firm in the position I had taken—to stay at Sunnyside until the thing was at least partly cleared.

And yet, for all its quiet, it was on Wednesday night that perhaps the boldest attempt was made to enter the house. On Thursday afternoon the laundress sent word she would like to speak to me, and I saw her in my private sitting-room, a small room beyond the dressing-room.

Mary Anne was embarrassed. She had rolled down her sleeves and tied a white apron around her waist, and she stood making folds in it with fingers that were red and shiny from her soap-suds.

“Well, Mary,” I said encouragingly, “what’s the matter? Don’t dare to tell me the soap is out.”

“No, ma’m, Miss Innes.” She had a nervous habit of looking first at my one eye and then at the other, her own optics shifting ceaselessly, right eye, left eye, right eye, until I found myself doing the same thing. “No, ma’m. I was askin’ did you want the ladder left up the clothes chute?”

“The what?” I screeched, and was sorry the next minute. Seeing her suspicions were verified, Mary Anne had gone white, and stood with her eyes shifting more wildly than ever.

“There’s a ladder up the clothes chute, Miss Innes,” she said. “It’s up that tight I can’t move it, and I didn’t like to ask for help until I spoke to you.”

It was useless to dissemble; Mary Anne knew now as well as I did that the ladder had no business to be there. I did the best I could, however. I put her on the defensive at once.

“Then you didn’t lock the laundry last night?”

“I locked it tight, and put the key in the kitchen on its nail.”

“Very well, then you forgot a window.”

Mary Anne hesitated.

“Yes’m,” she said at last. “I thought I locked them all, but there was one open this morning.”

I went out of the room and down the hall, followed by Mary Anne. The door into the clothes chute was securely bolted, and when I opened it I saw the evidence of the woman’s story. A pruning-ladder had been brought from where it had lain against the stable and now stood upright in the clothes shaft, its end resting against the wall between the first and second floors.

I turned to Mary.

“This is due to your carelessness,” I said. “If we had all been murdered in our beds it would have been your fault.” She shivered. “Now, not a word of this through the house, and send Alex to me.”

The effect on Alex was to make him apoplectic with rage, and with it all I fancied there was an element of satisfaction. As I look back, so many things are plain to me that I wonder I could not see at the time. It is all known now, and yet the whole thing was so remarkable that perhaps my stupidity was excusable.

Alex leaned down the chute and examined the ladder carefully.

“It is caught,” he said with a grim smile. “The fools, to have left a warning like that! The only trouble is, Miss Innes, they won’t be apt to come back for a while.”

“I shouldn’t regard that in the light of a calamity,” I replied.

Until late that evening Halsey and Alex worked at the chute. They forced down the ladder at last, and put a new bolt on the door. As for myself, I sat and wondered if I had a deadly enemy, intent on my destruction.

I was growing more and more nervous. Liddy had given up all pretense at bravery, and slept regularly in my dressing-room on the couch, with a prayer-book and a game knife from the kitchen under her pillow, thus preparing for both the natural and the supernatural. That was the way things stood that Thursday night, when I myself took a hand in the struggle.

CHAPTER XXIII

WHILE THE STABLES BURNED

About nine o’clock that night Liddy came into the living-room and reported that one of the housemaids declared she had seen two men slip around the corner of the stable. Gertrude had been sitting staring in front of her, jumping at every sound. Now she turned on Liddy pettishly.

“I declare, Liddy,” she said, “you are a bundle of nerves. What if Eliza did see some men around the stable? It may have been Warner and Alex.”

“Warner is in the kitchen, miss,” Liddy said with dignity. “And if you had come through what I have, you would be a bundle of nerves, too. Miss Rachel, I’d be thankful if you’d give me my month’s wages to-morrow. I’ll be going to my sister’s.”

“Very well,” I said, to her evident amazement. “I will make out the check. Warner can take you down to the noon train.”

Liddy’s face was really funny.

“You’ll have a nice time at your sister’s,” I went on. “Five children, hasn’t she?”

“That’s it,” Liddy said, suddenly bursting into tears. “Send me away, after all these years, and your new shawl only half done, and nobody knowin’ how to fix the water for your bath.”

“It’s time I learned to prepare my own bath.” I was knitting complacently. But Gertrude got up and put her arms around Liddy’s shaking shoulders.

“You are two big babies,” she said soothingly. “Neither one of you could get along for an hour without the other. So stop quarreling and be good. Liddy, go right up and lay out Aunty’s night things. She is going to bed early.”

After Liddy had gone I began to think about the men at the stable, and I grew more and more anxious. Halsey was aimlessly knocking the billiard-balls around in the billiard-room, and I called to him.

“Halsey,” I said when he sauntered in, “is there a policeman in Casanova?”

“Constable,” he said laconically. “Veteran of the war, one arm; in office to conciliate the G. A. R. element. Why?”

“Because I am uneasy tonight.” And I told him what Liddy had said. “Is there any one you can think of who could be relied on to watch the outside of the house tonight?”

“We might get Sam Bohannon from the club,” he said thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t be a bad scheme. He’s a smart darky, and with his mouth shut and his shirt-front covered, you couldn’t see him a yard off in the dark.”

Halsey conferred with Alex, and the result, in an hour, was Sam. His instructions were simple. There had been numerous attempts to break into the house; it was the intention, not to drive intruders away, but to capture them. If Sam saw anything suspicious outside, he was to tap at the east entry, where Alex and Halsey were to alternate in keeping watch through the night.

It was with a comfortable feeling of security that I went to bed that night. The door between Gertrude’s rooms and mine had been opened, and, with the doors into the hall bolted, we were safe enough. Although Liddy persisted in her belief that doors would prove no obstacles to our disturbers.

As before, Halsey watched the east entry from ten until two. He had an eye to comfort, and he kept vigil in a heavy oak chair, very large and deep. We went upstairs rather early, and through the open door Gertrude and I kept up a running fire of conversation. Liddy was brushing my hair, and Gertrude was doing her own, with a long free sweep of her strong round arms.

“Did you know Mrs. Armstrong and Louise are in the village?” she called.

“No,” I replied, startled. “How did you hear it?”

“I met the oldest Stewart girl to-day, the doctor’s daughter, and she told me they had not gone back to town after the funeral. They went directly to that little yellow house next to Doctor Walker’s, and are apparently settled there. They took the house furnished for the summer.”

“Why, it’s a bandbox,” I said. “I can’t imagine Fanny Armstrong in such a place.”

“It’s true, nevertheless. Ella Stewart says Mrs. Armstrong has aged terribly, and looks as if she is hardly able to walk.”

I lay and thought over some of these things until midnight. The electric lights went out then, fading slowly until there was only a red-hot loop to be seen in the bulb, and then even that died away and we were embarked on the darkness of another night.

Apparently only a few minutes elapsed, during which my eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness. Then I noticed that the windows were reflecting a faint pinkish light, Liddy noticed it at the same time, and I heard her jump up. At that moment Sam’s deep voice boomed from somewhere just below.

“Fire!” he yelled. “The stable’s on fire!”

I could see him in the glare dancing up and down on the drive, and a moment later Halsey joined him. Alex was awake and running down the stairs, and in five minutes from the time the fire was discovered, three of the maids were sitting on their trunks in the drive, although, excepting a few sparks, there was no fire nearer than a hundred yards.

Gertrude seldom loses her presence of mind, and she ran to the telephone. But by the time the Casanova volunteer fire department came toiling up the hill the stable was a furnace, with the Dragon Fly safe but blistered, in the road. Some gasolene exploded just as the volunteer department got to work, which shook their nerves as well as the burning building. The stable, being on a hill, was a torch to attract the population from every direction. Rumor had it that Sunnyside was burning, and it was amazing how many people threw something over their night-clothes and flew to the conflagration.

I take it Casanova has few fires, and Sunnyside was furnishing the people, in one way and another, the greatest excitement they had had for years.

The stable was off the west wing. I hardly know how I came to think of the circular staircase and the unguarded door at its foot. Liddy was putting my clothes into sheets, preparatory to tossing them out the window, when I found her, and I could hardly persuade her to stop.

“I want you to come with me, Liddy,” I said. “Bring a candle and a couple of blankets.”

She lagged behind considerably when she saw me making for the east wing, and at the top of the staircase she balked.

“I am not going down there,” she said firmly.

“There is no one guarding the door down there,” I explained. “Who knows?—this may be a scheme to draw everybody away from this end of the house, and let some one in here.”

The instant I had said it I was convinced I had hit on the explanation, and that perhaps it was already too late. It seemed to me as I listened that I heard stealthy footsteps on the east porch, but there was so much shouting outside that it was impossible to tell. Liddy was on the point of retreat.

“Very well,” I said, “then I shall go down alone. Run back to Mr. Halsey’s room and get his revolver. Don’t shoot down the stairs if you hear a noise: remember—I shall be down there. And hurry.”

I put the candle on the floor at the top of the staircase and took off my bedroom slippers. Then I crept down the stairs, going very slowly, and listening with all my ears. I was keyed to such a pitch that I felt no fear: like the condemned who sleep and eat the night before execution, I was no longer able to suffer apprehension. I was past that. Just at the foot of the stairs I stubbed my toe against Halsey’s big chair, and had to stand on one foot in a soundless agony until the pain subsided to a dull ache. And then—I knew I was right. Some one had put a key into the lock, and was turning it. For some reason it refused to work, and the key was withdrawn. There was a muttering of voices outside: I had only a second. Another trial, and the door would open. The candle above made a faint gleam down the well-like staircase, and at that moment, with a second, no more, to spare, I thought of a plan.

The heavy oak chair almost filled the space between the newel post and the door. With a crash I had turned it on its side, wedging it against the door, its legs against the stairs. I could hear a faint scream from Liddy, at the crash, and then she came down the stairs on a run, with the revolver held straight out in front of her.

“Thank God,” she said, in a shaking voice. “I thought it was you.”

I pointed to the door, and she understood.

“Call out the windows at the other end of the house,” I whispered. “Run. Tell them not to wait for anything.”

She went up the stairs at that, two at a time. Evidently she collided with the candle, for it went out, and I was left in darkness.

I was really astonishingly cool. I remember stepping over the chair and gluing my ear to the door, and I shall never forget feeling it give an inch or two there in the darkness, under a steady pressure from without. But the chair held, although I could hear an ominous cracking of one of the legs. And then, without the slightest warning, the card-room window broke with a crash. I had my finger on the trigger of the revolver, and as I jumped it went off, right through the door. Some one outside swore roundly, and for the first time I could hear what was said.

“Only a scratch… . Men are at the other end of the house… . Have the whole rat’s nest on us.” And a lot of profanity which I won’t write down. The voices were at the broken window now, and although I was trembling violently, I was determined that I would hold them until help came. I moved up the stairs until I could see into the card-room, or rather through it, to the window. As I looked a small man put his leg over the sill and stepped into the room. The curtain confused him for a moment; then he turned, not toward me, but toward the billiard-room door. I fired again, and something that was glass or china crashed to the ground. Then I ran up the stairs and along the corridor to the main staircase. Gertrude was standing there, trying to locate the shots, and I must have been a peculiar figure, with my hair in crimps, my dressing-gown flying, no slippers, and a revolver clutched in my hands I had no time to talk. There was the sound of footsteps in the lower hall, and some one bounded up the stairs.

I had gone Berserk, I think. I leaned over the stair-rail and fired again. Halsey, below, yelled at me.

“What are you doing up there?” he yelled. “You missed me by an inch.”

And then I collapsed and fainted. When I came around Liddy was rubbing my temples with eau de quinine, and the search was in full blast.

Well, the man was gone. The stable burned to the ground, while the crowd cheered at every falling rafter, and the volunteer fire department sprayed it with a garden hose. And in the house Alex and Halsey searched every corner of the lower floor, finding no one.

The truth of my story was shown by the broken window and the overturned chair. That the unknown had got upstairs was almost impossible. He had not used the main staircase, there was no way to the upper floor in the east wing, and Liddy had been at the window, in the west wing, where the servants’ stair went up. But we did not go to bed at all. Sam Bohannon and Warner helped in the search, and not a closet escaped scrutiny. Even the cellars were given a thorough overhauling, without result. The door in the east entry had a hole through it where my bullet had gone.

The hole slanted downward, and the bullet was embedded in the porch. Some reddish stains showed it had done execution.

“Somebody will walk lame,” Halsey said, when he had marked the course of the bullet. “It’s too low to have hit anything but a leg or foot.”

From that time on I watched every person I met for a limp, and to this day the man who halts in his walk is an object of suspicion to me. But Casanova had no lame men: the nearest approach to it was an old fellow who tended the safety gates at the railroad, and he, I learned on inquiry, had two artificial legs. Our man had gone, and the large and expensive stable at Sunnyside was a heap of smoking rafters and charred boards. Warner swore the fire was incendiary, and in view of the attempt to enter the house, there seemed to be no doubt of it.

CHAPTER XXIV

FLINDERS

If Halsey had only taken me fully into his confidence, through the whole affair, it would have been much simpler. If he had been altogether frank about Jack Bailey, and if the day after the fire he had told me what he suspected, there would have been no harrowing period for all of us, with the boy in danger. But young people refuse to profit by the experience of their elders, and sometimes the elders are the ones to suffer.

I was much used up the day after the fire, and Gertrude insisted on my going out. The machine was temporarily out of commission, and the carriage horses had been sent to a farm for the summer. Gertrude finally got a trap from the Casanova liveryman, and we went out. Just as we turned from the drive into the road we passed a woman. She had put down a small valise, and stood inspecting the house and grounds minutely. I should hardly have noticed her, had it not been for the fact that she had been horribly disfigured by smallpox.

“Ugh!” Gertrude said, when we had passed, “what a face! I shall dream of it tonight. Get up, Flinders.”

“Flinders?” I asked. “Is that the horse’s name?”

“It is.” She flicked the horse’s stubby mane with the whip. “He didn’t look like a livery horse, and the liveryman said he had bought him from the Armstrongs when they purchased a couple of motors and cut down the stable. Nice Flinders—good old boy!”

Flinders was certainly not a common name for a horse, and yet the youngster at Richfield had named his prancing, curly-haired little horse Flinders! It set me to thinking.

At my request Halsey had already sent word of the fire to the agent from whom we had secured the house. Also, he had called Mr. Jamieson by telephone, and somewhat guardedly had told him of the previous night’s events. Mr. Jamieson promised to come out that night, and to bring another man with him. I did not consider it necessary to notify Mrs. Armstrong, in the village. No doubt she knew of the fire, and in view of my refusal to give up the house, an interview would probably have been unpleasant enough. But as we passed Doctor Walker’s white and green house I thought of something.

“Stop here, Gertrude,” I said. “I am going to get out.”

“To see Louise?” she asked.

“No, I want to ask this young Walker something.”

She was curious, I knew, but I did not wait to explain. I went up the walk to the house, where a brass sign at the side announced the office, and went in. The reception-room was empty, but from the consulting-room beyond came the sound of two voices, not very amicable.

“It is an outrageous figure,” some one was storming. Then the doctor’s quiet tone, evidently not arguing, merely stating something. But I had not time to listen to some person probably disputing his bill, so I coughed. The voices ceased at once: a door closed somewhere, and the doctor entered from the hall of the house. He looked sufficiently surprised at seeing me.

“Good afternoon, Doctor,” I said formally. “I shall not keep you from your patient. I wish merely to ask you a question.”

“Won’t you sit down?”

“It will not be necessary. Doctor, has any one come to you, either early this morning or to-day, to have you treat a bullet wound?”

“Nothing so startling has happened to me,” he said. “A bullet wound! Things must be lively at Sunnyside.”

“I didn’t say it was at Sunnyside. But as it happens, it was. If any such case comes to you, will it be too much trouble for you to let me know?”

“I shall be only too happy,” he said. “I understand you have had a fire up there, too. A fire and shooting in one night is rather lively for a quiet place like that.”

“It is as quiet as a boiler-shop,” I replied, as I turned to go.

“And you are still going to stay?”

“Until I am burned out,” I responded. And then on my way down the steps, I turned around suddenly.

“Doctor,” I asked at a venture, “have you ever heard of a child named Lucien Wallace?”

Clever as he was, his face changed and stiffened. He was on his guard again in a moment.

“Lucien Wallace?” he repeated. “No, I think not. There are plenty of Wallaces around, but I don’t know any Lucien.”

I was as certain as possible that he did. People do not lie readily to me, and this man lied beyond a doubt. But there was nothing to be gained now; his defenses were up, and I left, half irritated and wholly baffled.

Our reception was entirely different at Doctor Stewart’s. Taken into the bosom of the family at once, Flinders tied outside and nibbling the grass at the roadside, Gertrude and I drank some home-made elderberry wine and told briefly of the fire. Of the more serious part of the night’s experience, of course, we said nothing. But when at last we had left the family on the porch and the good doctor was untying our steed, I asked him the same question I had put to Doctor Walker.

“Shot!” he said. “Bless my soul, no. Why, what have you been doing up at the big house, Miss Innes?”

“Some one tried to enter the house during the fire, and was shot and slightly injured,” I said hastily. “Please don’t mention it; we wish to make as little of it as possible.”

There was one other possibility, and we tried that. At Casanova station I saw the station master, and asked him if any trains left Casanova between one o’clock and daylight. There was none until six A.M. The next question required more diplomacy.

“Did you notice on the six-o’clock train any person—any man—who limped a little?” I asked. “Please try to remember: we are trying to trace a man who was seen loitering around Sunnyside last night before the fire.”

He was all attention in a moment.

“I was up there myself at the fire,” he said volubly. “I’m a member of the volunteer company. First big fire we’ve had since the summer house burned over to the club golf links. My wife was sayin’ the other day, `Dave, you might as well ‘a’ saved the money in that there helmet and shirt.’ And here last night they came in handy. Rang that bell so hard I hadn’t time scarcely to get ‘em on.”

“And—did you see a man who limped?” Gertrude put in, as he stopped for breath.

“Not at the train, ma’m,” he said. “No such person got on here to-day. But I’ll tell you where I did see a man that limped. I didn’t wait till the fire company left; there’s a fast freight goes through at four forty-five, and I had to get down to the station. I seen there wasn’t much more to do anyhow at the fire—we’d got the flames under control”—Gertrude looked at me and smiled—“so I started down the hill. There was folks here and there goin’ home, and along by the path to the Country Club I seen two men. One was a short fellow. He was sitting on a big rock, his back to me, and he had something white in his hand, as if he was tying up his foot. After I’d gone on a piece I looked back, and he was hobbling on and—excuse me, miss—he was swearing something sickening.”

“Did they go toward the club?” Gertrude asked suddenly, leaning forward.

“No, miss. I think they came into the village. I didn’t get a look at their faces, but I know every chick and child in the place, and everybody knows me. When they didn’t shout at me—in my uniform, you know—I took it they were strangers.”

So all we had for our afternoon’s work was this: some one had been shot by the bullet that went through the door; he had not left the village, and he had not called in a physician. Also, Doctor Walker knew who Lucien Wallace was, and his very denial made me confident that, in that one direction at least, we were on the right track.

The thought that the detective would be there that night was the most cheering thing of all, and I think even Gertrude was glad of it. Driving home that afternoon, I saw her in the clear sunlight for the first time in several days, and I was startled to see how ill she looked. She was thin and colorless, and all her bright animation was gone.

“Gertrude,” I said, “I have been a very selfish old woman. You are going to leave this miserable house tonight. Annie Morton is going to Scotland next week, and you shall go right with her.”

To my surprise, she flushed painfully.

“I don’t want to go, Aunt Ray,” she said. “Don’t make me leave now.”

“You are losing your health and your good looks,” I said decidedly. “You should have a change.”

“I shan’t stir a foot.” She was equally decided. Then, more lightly: “Why, you and Liddy need me to arbitrate between you every day in the week.”

Perhaps I was growing suspicious of every one, but it seemed to me that Gertrude’s gaiety was forced and artificial. I watched her covertly during the rest of the drive, and I did not like the two spots of crimson in her pale cheeks. But I said nothing more about sending her to Scotland: I knew she would not go.

CHAPTER XXV

A VISIT FROM LOUISE

That day was destined to be an eventful one, for when I entered the house and found Eliza ensconced in the upper hall on a chair, with Mary Anne doing her best to stifle her with household ammonia, and Liddy rubbing her wrists—whatever good that is supposed to do—I knew that the ghost had been walking again, and this time in daylight.

Eliza was in a frenzy of fear. She clutched at my sleeve when I went close to her, and refused to let go until she had told her story. Coming just after the fire, the household was demoralized, and it was no surprise to me to find Alex and the under-gardener struggling downstairs with a heavy trunk between them.

“I didn’t want to do it, Miss Innes,” Alex said. “But she was so excited, I was afraid she would do as she said—drag it down herself, and scratch the staircase.”

I was trying to get my bonnet off and to keep the maids quiet at the same time. “Now, Eliza, when you have washed your face and stopped bawling,” I said, “come into my sitting-room and tell me what has happened.”

Liddy put away my things without speaking. The very set of her shoulders expressed disapproval.

“Well,” I said, when the silence became uncomfortable, “things seem to be warming up.”

Silence from Liddy, and a long sigh.

“If Eliza goes, I don’t know where to look for another cook.” More silence.

“Rosie is probably a good cook.” Sniff.

“Liddy,” I said at last, “don’t dare to deny that you are having the time of your life. You positively gloat in this excitement. You never looked better. It’s my opinion all this running around, and getting jolted out of a rut, has stirred up that torpid liver of yours.”

“It’s not myself I’m thinking about,” she said, goaded into speech. “Maybe my liver was torpid, and maybe it wasn’t; but I know this: I’ve got some feelings left, and to see you standing at the foot of that staircase shootin’ through the door—I’ll never be the same woman again.”

“Well, I’m glad of that—anything for a change,” I said. And in came Eliza, flanked by Rosie and Mary Anne.

Her story, broken with sobs and corrections from the other two, was this: At two o’clock (two-fifteen, Rosie insisted) she had gone upstairs to get a picture from her room to show Mary Anne. (A picture of a LADY, Mary Anne interposed.) She went up the servants’ staircase and along the corridor to her room, which lay between the trunk-room and the unfinished ball-room. She heard a sound as she went down the corridor, like some one moving furniture, but she was not nervous. She thought it might be men examining the house after the fire the night before, but she looked in the trunk-room and saw nobody.

She went into her room quietly. The noise had ceased, and everything was quiet. Then she sat down on the side of her bed, and, feeling faint—she was subject to spells—(“I told you that when I came, didn’t I, Rosie?” “Yes’m, indeed she did!”)—she put her head down on her pillow and—

“Took a nap. All right!” I said. “Go on.”

“When I came to, Miss Innes, sure as I’m sittin’ here, I thought I’d die. Somethin’ hit me on the face, and I set up, sudden. And then I seen the plaster drop, droppin’ from a little hole in the wall. And the first thing I knew, an iron bar that long” (fully two yards by her measure) “shot through that hole and tumbled on the bed. If I’d been still sleeping” (“Fainting,” corrected Rosie) “I’d ‘a’ been hit on the head and killed!”

“I wisht you’d heard her scream,” put in Mary Anne. “And her face as white as a pillow-slip when she tumbled down the stairs.”

“No doubt there is some natural explanation for it, Eliza,” I said. “You may have dreamed it, in your `fainting’ attack. But if it is true, the metal rod and the hole in the wall will show it.”

Eliza looked a little bit sheepish.

“The hole’s there all right, Miss Innes,” she said. “But the bar was gone when Mary Anne and Rosie went up to pack my trunk.”

“That wasn’t all,” Liddy’s voice came funereally from a corner. “Eliza said that from the hole in the wall a burning eye looked down at her!”

“The wall must be at least six inches thick,” I said with asperity. “Unless the person who drilled the hole carried his eyes on the ends of a stick, Eliza couldn’t possibly have seen them.”

But the fact remained, and a visit to Eliza’s room proved it. I might jeer all I wished: some one had drilled a hole in the unfinished wall of the ball-room, passing between the bricks of the partition, and shooting through the unresisting plaster of Eliza’s room with such force as to send the rod flying on to her bed. I had gone upstairs alone, and I confess the thing puzzled me: in two or three places in the wall small apertures had been made, none of them of any depth. Not the least mysterious thing was the disappearance of the iron implement that had been used.

I remembered a story I read once about an impish dwarf that lived in the spaces between the double walls of an ancient castle. I wondered vaguely if my original idea of a secret entrance to a hidden chamber could be right, after all, and if we were housing some erratic guest, who played pranks on us in the dark, and destroyed the walls that he might listen, hidden safely away, to our amazed investigations.

Mary Anne and Eliza left that afternoon, but Rosie decided to stay. It was about five o’clock when the hack came from the station to get them, and, to my amazement, it had an occupant. Matthew Geist, the driver, asked for me, and explained his errand with pride.

“I’ve brought you a cook, Miss Innes,” he said. “When the message came to come up for two girls and their trunks, I supposed there was something doing, and as this here woman had been looking for work in the village, I thought I’d bring her along.”

Already I had acquired the true suburbanite ability to take servants on faith; I no longer demanded written and unimpeachable references. I, Rachel Innes, have learned not to mind if the cook sits down comfortably in my sitting-room when she is taking the orders for the day, and I am grateful if the silver is not cleaned with scouring soap. And so that day I merely told Liddy to send the new applicant in. When she came, however, I could hardly restrain a gasp of surprise. It was the woman with the pitted face.

She stood somewhat awkwardly just inside the door, and she had an air of self-confidence that was inspiring. Yes, she could cook; was not a fancy cook, but could make good soups and desserts if there was any one to take charge of the salads. And so, in the end, I took her. As Halsey said, when we told him, it didn’t matter much about the cook’s face, if it was clean.

I have spoken of Halsey’s restlessness. On that day it seemed to be more than ever a resistless impulse that kept him out until after luncheon. I think he hoped constantly that he might meet Louise driving over the hills in her runabout: possibly he did meet her occasionally, but from his continued gloom I felt sure the situation between them was unchanged.

Part of the afternoon I believe he read—Gertrude and I were out, as I have said, and at dinner we both noticed that something had occurred to distract him. He was disagreeable, which is unlike him, nervous, looking at his watch every few minutes, and he ate almost nothing. He asked twice during the meal on what train Mr. Jamieson and the other detective were coming, and had long periods of abstraction during which he dug his fork into my damask cloth and did not hear when he was spoken to. He refused dessert, and left the table early, excusing himself on the ground that he wanted to see Alex.

Alex, however, was not to be found. It was after eight when Halsey ordered the car, and started down the hill at a pace that, even for him, was unusually reckless. Shortly after, Alex reported that he was ready to go over the house, preparatory to closing it for the night. Sam Bohannon came at a quarter before nine, and began his patrol of the grounds, and with the arrival of the two detectives to look forward to, I was not especially apprehensive.

At half-past nine I heard the sound of a horse driven furiously up the drive. It came to a stop in front of the house, and immediately after there were hurried steps on the veranda. Our nerves were not what they should have been, and Gertrude, always apprehensive lately, was at the door almost instantly. A moment later Louise had burst into the room and stood there bareheaded and breathing hard!

“Where is Halsey?” she demanded. Above her plain black gown her eyes looked big and somber, and the rapid drive had brought no color to her face. I got up and drew forward a chair.

“He has not come back,” I said quietly. “Sit down, child; you are not strong enough for this kind of thing.”

I don’t think she even heard me.

“He has not come back?” she asked, looking from me to Gertrude. “Do you know where he went? Where can I find him?”

“For Heaven’s sake, Louise,” Gertrude burst out, “tell us what is wrong. Halsey is not here. He has gone to the station for Mr. Jamieson. What has happened?”

“To the station, Gertrude? You are sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “Listen. There is the whistle of the train now.”

She relaxed a little at our matter-of-fact tone, and allowed herself to sink into a chair.

“Perhaps I was wrong,” she said heavily. “He—will be here in a few moments if—everything is right.”

We sat there, the three of us, without attempt at conversation. Both Gertrude and I recognized the futility of asking Louise any questions: her reticence was a part of a role she had assumed. Our ears were strained for the first throb of the motor as it turned into the drive and commenced the climb to the house. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, twenty. I saw Louise’s hands grow rigid as they clutched the arms of her chair. I watched Gertrude’s bright color slowly ebbing away, and around my own heart I seemed to feel the grasp of a giant hand.

Twenty-five minutes, and then a sound. But it was not the chug of the motor: it was the unmistakable rumble of the Casanova hack. Gertrude drew aside the curtain and peered into the darkness.

“It’s the hack, I am sure,” she said, evidently relieved. “Something has gone wrong with the car, and no wonder—the way Halsey went down the hill.”

It seemed a long time before the creaking vehicle came to a stop at the door. Louise rose and stood watching, her hand to her throat. And then Gertrude opened the door, admitting Mr. Jamieson and a stocky, middle-aged man. Halsey was not with them. When the door had closed and Louise realized that Halsey had not come, her expression changed. From tense watchfulness to relief, and now again to absolute despair, her face was an open page.

“Halsey?” I asked unceremoniously, ignoring the stranger. “Did he not meet you?”

“No.” Mr. Jamieson looked slightly surprised. “I rather expected the car, but we got up all right.”

“You didn’t see him at all?” Louise demanded breathlessly.

Mr. Jamieson knew her at once, although he had not seen her before. She had kept to her rooms until the morning she left.

“No, Miss Armstrong,” he said. “I saw nothing of him. What is wrong?”

“Then we shall have to find him,” she asserted. “Every instant is precious. Mr. Jamieson, I have reason for believing that he is in danger, but I don’t know what it is. Only—he must be found.”

The stocky man had said nothing. Now, however, he went quickly toward the door.

“I’ll catch the hack down the road and hold it,” he said. “Is the gentleman down in the town?”

“Mr. Jamieson,” Louise said impulsively, “I can use the hack. Take my horse and trap outside and drive like mad. Try to find the Dragon Fly—it ought to be easy to trace. I can think of no other way. Only, don’t lose a moment.”

The new detective had gone, and a moment later Jamieson went rapidly down the drive, the cob’s feet striking fire at every step. Louise stood looking after them. When she turned around she faced Gertrude, who stood indignant, almost tragic, in the hall.

“You KNOW what threatens Halsey, Louise,” she said accusingly. “I believe you know this whole horrible thing, this mystery that we are struggling with. If anything happens to Halsey, I shall never forgive you.”

Louise only raised her hands despairingly and dropped them again.

“He is as dear to me as he is to you,” she said sadly. “I tried to warn him.”

“Nonsense!” I said, as briskly as I could. “We are making a lot of trouble out of something perhaps very small. Halsey was probably late—he is always late. Any moment we may hear the car coming up the road.”

But it did not come. After a half-hour of suspense, Louise went out quietly, and did not come back. I hardly knew she was gone until I heard the station hack moving off. At eleven o’clock the telephone rang. It was Mr. Jamieson.

“I have found the Dragon Fly, Miss Innes,” he said. “It has collided with a freight car on the siding above the station. No, Mr. Innes was not there, but we shall probably find him. Send Warner for the car.”

But they did not find him. At four o’clock the next morning we were still waiting for news, while Alex watched the house and Sam the grounds. At daylight I dropped into exhausted sleep. Halsey had not come back, and there was no word from the detective.

CHAPTER XXVI

HALSEY’S DISAPPEARANCE

Nothing that had gone before had been as bad as this. The murder and Thomas’ sudden death we had been able to view in a detached sort of way. But with Halsey’s disappearance everything was altered. Our little circle, intact until now, was broken. We were no longer onlookers who saw a battle passing around them. We were the center of action. Of course, there was no time then to voice such an idea. My mind seemed able to hold only one thought: that Halsey had been foully dealt with, and that every minute lost might be fatal.

Mr. Jamieson came back about eight o’clock the next morning: he was covered with mud, and his hat was gone. Altogether, we were a sad-looking trio that gathered around a breakfast that no one could eat. Over a cup of black coffee the detective told us what he had learned of Halsey’s movements the night before. Up to a certain point the car had made it easy enough to follow him. And I gathered that Mr. Burns, the other detective, had followed a similar car for miles at dawn, only to find it was a touring car on an endurance run.

“He left here about ten minutes after eight,” Mr Jamieson said. “He went alone, and at eight twenty he stopped at Doctor Walker’s. I went to the doctor’s about midnight, but he had been called out on a case, and had not come back at four o’clock. From the doctor’s it seems Mr. Innes walked across the lawn to the cottage Mrs. Armstrong and her daughter have taken. Mrs. Armstrong had retired, and he said perhaps a dozen words to Miss Louise. She will not say what they were, but the girl evidently suspects what has occurred. That is, she suspects foul play, but she doesn’t know of what nature. Then, apparently, he started directly for the station. He was going very fast—the flagman at the Carol Street crossing says he saw the car pass. He knew the siren. Along somewhere in the dark stretch between Carol Street and the depot he evidently swerved suddenly—perhaps some one in the road—and went full into the side of a freight. We found it there last night.”

“He might have been thrown under the train by the force of the shock,” I said tremulously.

Gertrude shuddered.

“We examined every inch of track. There was—no sign.”

“But surely—he can’t be—gone!” I cried. “Aren’t there traces in the mud—anything?”

“There is no mud—only dust. There has been no rain. And the footpath there is of cinders. Miss Innes, I am inclined to think that he has met with bad treatment, in the light of what has gone before. I do not think he has been murdered.” I shrank from the word. “Burns is back in the country, on a clue we got from the night clerk at the drug-store. There will be two more men here by noon, and the city office is on the lookout.”

“The creek?” Gertrude asked.

“The creek is shallow now. If it were swollen with rain, it would be different. There is hardly any water in it. Now, Miss Innes,” he said, turning to me, “I must ask you some questions. Had Mr. Halsey any possible reason for going away like this, without warning?”

“None whatever.”

“He went away once before,” he persisted. “And you were as sure then.”

“He did not leave the Dragon Fly jammed into the side of a freight car before.”

“No, but he left it for repairs in a blacksmith shop, a long distance from here. Do you know if he had any enemies? Any one who might wish him out of the way?”

“Not that I know of, unless—no, I can not think of any.”

“Was he in the habit of carrying money?”

“He never carried it far. No, he never had more than enough for current expenses.”

Mr. Jamieson got up then and began to pace the room. It was an unwonted concession to the occasion.

“Then I think we get at it by elimination. The chances are against flight. If he was hurt, we find no trace of him. It looks almost like an abduction. This young Doctor Walker—have you any idea why Mr. Innes should have gone there last night?”

“I can not understand it,” Gertrude said thoughtfully. “I don’t think he knew Doctor Walker at all, and—their relations could hardly have been cordial, under the circumstances.”

Jamieson pricked up his ears, and little by little he drew from us the unfortunate story of Halsey’s love affair, and the fact that Louise was going to marry Doctor Walker.

Mr. Jamieson listened attentively.

“There are some interesting developments here,” he said thoughtfully. “The woman who claims to be the mother of Lucien Wallace has not come back. Your nephew has apparently been spirited away. There is an organized attempt being made to enter this house; in fact, it has been entered. Witness the incident with the cook yesterday. And I have a new piece of information.”

He looked carefully away from Gertrude. “Mr. John Bailey is not at his Knickerbocker apartments, and I don’t know where he is. It’s a hash, that’s what it is. It’s a Chinese puzzle. They won’t fit together, unless—unless Mr. Bailey and your nephew have again—”

And once again Gertrude surprised me. “They are not together,” she said hotly. “I—know where Mr. Bailey is, and my brother is not with him.”

The detective turned and looked at her keenly.

“Miss Gertrude,” he said, “if you and Miss Louise would only tell me everything you know and surmise about this business, I should be able to do a great many things. I believe I could find your brother, and I might be able to—well, to do some other things.” But Gertrude’s glance did not falter.

“Nothing that I know could help you to find Halsey,” she said stubbornly. “I know absolutely as little of his disappearance as you do, and I can only say this: I do not trust Doctor Walker. I think he hated Halsey, and he would get rid of him if he could.”

“Perhaps you are right. In fact, I had some such theory myself. But Doctor Walker went out late last night to a serious case in Summitville, and is still there. Burns traced him there. We have made guarded inquiry at the Greenwood Club, and through the village. There is absolutely nothing to go on but this. On the embankment above the railroad, at the point where we found the machine, is a small house. An old woman and a daughter, who is very lame, live there. They say that they distinctly heard the shock when the Dragon Fly hit the car, and they went to the bottom of their garden and looked over. The automobile was there; they could see the lights, and they thought someone had been injured. It was very dark, but they could make out two figures, standing together. The women were curious, and, leaving the fence, they went back and by a roundabout path down to the road. When they got there the car was still standing, the headlight broken and the bonnet crushed, but there was no one to be seen.”

The detective went away immediately, and to Gertrude and me was left the woman’s part, to watch and wait. By luncheon nothing had been found, and I was frantic. I went upstairs to Halsey’s room finally, from sheer inability to sit across from Gertrude any longer, and meet her terror-filled eyes.

Liddy was in my dressing-room, suspiciously red-eyed, and trying to put a right sleeve in a left armhole of a new waist for me. I was too much shaken to scold.

“What name did that woman in the kitchen give?” she demanded, viciously ripping out the offending sleeve.

“Bliss. Mattie Bliss,” I replied.

“Bliss. M. B. Well, that’s not what she has on he suitcase. It is marked N. F. C.”

The new cook and her initials troubled me not at all. I put on my bonnet and sent for what the Casanova liveryman called a “stylish turnout.” Having once made up my mind to a course of action, I am not one to turn back. Warner drove me; he was plainly disgusted, and he steered the livery horse as he would the Dragon Fly, feeling uneasily with his left foot for the clutch, and working his right elbow at an imaginary horn every time a dog got in the way.

Warner had something on his mind, and after we had turned into the road, he voiced it.

“Miss Innes,” he said. “I overheard a part of a conversation yesterday that I didn’t understand. It wasn’t my business to understand it, for that matter. But I’ve been thinking all day that I’d better tell you. Yesterday afternoon, while you and Miss Gertrude were out driving, I had got the car in some sort of shape again after the fire, and I went to the library to call Mr. Innes to see it. I went into the living-room, where Miss Liddy said he was, and half-way across to the library I heard him talking to some one. He seemed to be walking up and down, and he was in a rage, I can tell you.”

“What did he say?”

“The first thing I heard was—excuse me, Miss Innes, but it’s what he said, `The damned rascal,’ he said, `I’ll see him in’— well, in hell was what he said, `in hell first.’ Then somebody else spoke up; it was a woman. She said, `I warned them, but they thought I would be afraid.’”

“A woman! Did you wait to see who it was?”

“I wasn’t spying, Miss Innes,” Warner said with dignity. “But the next thing caught my attention. She said, `I knew there was something wrong from the start. A man isn’t well one day, and dead the next, without some reason.’ I thought she was speaking of Thomas.”

“And you don’t know who it was!” I exclaimed. “Warner, you had the key to this whole occurrence in your hands, and did not use it!”

However, there was nothing to be done. I resolved to make inquiry when I got home, and in the meantime, my present errand absorbed me. This was nothing less than to see Louise Armstrong, and to attempt to drag from her what she knew, or suspected, of Halsey’s disappearance. But here, as in every, direction I turned, I was baffled.

A neat maid answered the bell, but she stood squarely in the doorway, and it was impossible to preserve one’s dignity and pass her.

“Miss Armstrong is very ill, and unable to see any one,” she said. I did not believe her.

“And Mrs. Armstrong—is she also ill?”

“She is with Miss Louise and can not be disturbed.”

“Tell her it is Miss Innes, and that it is a matter of the greatest importance.”

“It would be of no use, Miss Innes. My orders are positive.”

At that moment a heavy step sounded on the stairs. Past the maid’s white-strapped shoulder I could see a familiar thatch of gray hair, and in a moment I was face to face with Doctor Stewart. He was very grave, and his customary geniality was tinged with restraint.

“You are the very woman I want to see,” he said promptly. “Send away your trap, and let me drive you home. What is this about your nephew?”

“He has disappeared, doctor. Not only that, but there is every evidence that he has been either abducted, or—” I could not finish. The doctor helped me into his capacious buggy in silence. Until we had got a little distance he did not speak; then he turned and looked at me.

“Now tell me about it,” he said. He heard me through without speaking.

“And you think Louise knows something?” he said when I had finished. “I don’t—in fact, I am sure of it. The best evidence of it is this: she asked me if he had been heard from, or if anything had been learned. She won’t allow Walker in the room, and she made me promise to see you and tell you this: don’t give up the search for him. Find him, and find him soon. He is living.”

“Well,” I said, “if she knows that, she knows more. She is a very cruel and ungrateful girl.”

“She is a very sick girl,” he said gravely. “Neither you nor I can judge her until we know everything. Both she and her mother are ghosts of their former selves. Under all this, these two sudden deaths, this bank robbery, the invasions at Sunnyside and Halsey’s disappearance, there is some mystery that, mark my words, will come out some day. And when it does, we shall find Louise Armstrong a victim.”

I had not noticed where we were going, but now I saw we were beside the railroad, and from a knot of men standing beside the track I divined that it was here the car had been found. The siding, however, was empty. Except a few bits of splintered wood on the ground, there was no sign of the accident.

“Where is the freight car that was rammed?” the doctor asked a bystander.

“It was taken away at daylight, when the train was moved.”

There was nothing to be gained. He pointed out the house on the embankment where the old lady and her daughter had heard the crash and seen two figures beside the car. Then we drove slowly home. I had the doctor put me down at the gate, and I walked to the house—past the lodge where we had found Louise, and, later, poor Thomas; up the drive where I had seen a man watching the lodge and where, later, Rosie had been frightened; past the east entrance, where so short a time before the most obstinate effort had been made to enter the house, and where, that night two weeks ago, Liddy and I had seen the strange woman. Not far from the west wing lay the blackened ruins of the stables. I felt like a ruin myself, as I paused on the broad veranda before I entered the house.

Two private detectives had arrived in my absence, and it was a relief to turn over to them the responsibility of the house and grounds. Mr. Jamieson, they said, had arranged for more to assist in the search for the missing man, and at that time the country was being scoured in all directions.

The household staff was again depleted that afternoon. Liddy was waiting to tell me that the new cook had gone, bag and baggage, without waiting to be paid. No one had admitted the visitor whom Warner had heard in the library, unless, possibly, the missing cook. Again I was working in a circle.

CHAPTER XXVII

WHO IS NINA CARRINGTON?

The four days, from Saturday to the following Tuesday, we lived, or existed, in a state of the most dreadful suspense. We ate only when Liddy brought in a tray, and then very little. The papers, of course, had got hold of the story, and we were besieged by newspaper men. From all over the country false clues came pouring in and raised hopes that crumbled again to nothing. Every morgue within a hundred miles, every hospital, had been visited, without result.

Mr. Jamieson, personally, took charge of the organized search, and every evening, no matter where he happened to be, he called us by long distance telephone. It was the same formula. “Nothing to-day. A new clue to work on. Better luck to-morrow.”

And heartsick we would put up the receiver and sit down again to our vigil.

The inaction was deadly. Liddy cried all day, and, because she knew I objected to tears, sniffled audibly around the corner.

“For Heaven’s sake, smile!” I snapped at her. And her ghastly attempt at a grin, with her swollen nose and red eyes, made me hysterical. I laughed and cried together, and pretty soon, like the two old fools we were, we were sitting together weeping into the same handkerchief.

Things were happening, of course, all the time, but they made little or no impression. The Charity Hospital called up Doctor Stewart and reported that Mrs. Watson was in a critical condition. I understood also that legal steps were being taken to terminate my lease at Sunnyside. Louise was out of danger, but very ill, and a trained nurse guarded her like a gorgon. There was a rumor in the village, brought up by Liddy from the butcher’s, that a wedding had already taken place between Louise and Doctor Walkers and this roused me for the first time to action.

On Tuesday, then, I sent for the car, and prepared to go out. As I waited at the porte-cochere I saw the under-gardener, an inoffensive, grayish-haired man, trimming borders near the house.

The day detective was watching him, sitting on the carriage block. When he saw me, he got up.

“Miss Innes,” he said, taking of his hat, “do you know where Alex, the gardener, is?”

“Why, no. Isn’t he here?” I asked.

“He has been gone since yesterday afternoon. Have you employed him long?”

“Only a couple of weeks.”

“Is he efficient? A capable man?”

“I hardly know,” I said vaguely. “The place looks all right, and I know very little about such things. I know much more about boxes of roses than bushes of them.”

“This man,” pointing to the assistant, “says Alex isn’t a gardener. That he doesn’t know anything about plants.”

“That’s very strange,” I said, thinking hard. “Why, he came to me from the Brays, who are in Europe.”

“Exactly.” The detective smiled. “Every man who cuts grass isn’t a gardener, Miss Innes, and just now it is our policy to believe every person around here a rascal until he proves to be the other thing.”

Warner came up with the car then, and the conversation stopped. As he helped me in, however, the detective said something further.

“Not a word or sign to Alex, if he comes back,” he said cautiously.

I went first to Doctor Walker’s. I was tired of beating about the bush, and I felt that the key to Halsey’s disappearance was here at Casanova, in spite of Mr. Jamieson’s theories.

The doctor was in. He came at once to the door of his consulting-room, and there was no mask of cordiality in his manner.

“Please come in,” he said curtly.

“I shall stay here, I think, doctor.” I did not like his face or his manner; there was a subtle change in both. He had thrown of the air of friendliness, and I thought, too, that he looked anxious and haggard.

“Doctor Walker,” I said, “I have come to you to ask some questions. I hope you will answer them. As you know, my nephew has not yet been found.”

“So I understand,” stiffly.

“I believe, if you would, you could help us, and that leads to one of my questions. Will you tell me what was the nature of the conversation you held with him the night he was attacked and carried off?”

“Attacked! Carried off!” he said, with pretended surprise. “Really, Miss Innes, don’t you think you exaggerate? I understand it is not the first time Mr. Innes has—disappeared.”

“You are quibbling, doctor. This is a matter of life and death. Will you answer my question?”

“Certainly. He said his nerves were bad, and I gave him a prescription for them. I am violating professional ethics when I tell you even as much as that.”

I could not tell him he lied. I think I looked it. But I hazarded a random shot.

“I thought perhaps,” I said, watching him narrowly, “that it might be about—Nina Carrington.”

For a moment I thought he was going to strike me. He grew livid, and a small crooked blood-vessel in his temple swelled and throbbed curiously. Then he forced a short laugh.

“Who is Nina Carrington?” he asked.

“I am about to discover that,” I replied, and he was quiet at once. It was not difficult to divine that he feared Nina Carrington a good deal more than he did the devil. Our leave-taking was brief; in fact, we merely stared at each other over the waiting-room table, with its litter of year-old magazines. Then I turned and went out.

“To Richfield,” I told Warner, and on the way I thought, and thought hard.

“Nina Carrington, Nina Carrington,” the roar and rush of the wheels seemed to sing the words. “Nina Carrington, N. C.” And I then knew, knew as surely as if I had seen the whole thing. There had been an N. C. on the suitcase belonging to the woman with the pitted face. How simple it all seemed. Mattie Bliss had been Nina Carrington. It was she Warner had heard in the library. It was something she had told Halsey that had taken him frantically to Doctor Walker’s office, and from there perhaps to his death. If we could find the woman, we might find what had become of Halsey.

We were almost at Richfield now, so I kept on. My mind was not on my errand there now. It was back with Halsey on that memorable night. What was it he had said to Louise, that had sent her up to Sunnyside, half wild with fear for him? I made up my mind, as the car drew up before the Tate cottage, that I would see Louise if I had to break into the house at night.

Almost exactly the same scene as before greeted my eyes at the cottage. Mrs. Tate, the baby-carriage in the path, the children at the swing—all were the same.

She came forward to meet me, and I noticed that some of the anxious lines had gone out of her face. She looked young, almost pretty.

“I am glad you have come back,” she said. “I think I will have to be honest and give you back your money.”

“Why?” I asked. “Has the mother come?”

“No, but some one came and paid the boy’s board for a month. She talked to him for a long time, but when I asked him afterward he didn’t know her name.”

“A young woman?”

“Not very young. About forty, I suppose. She was small and fair-haired, just a little bit gray, and very sad. She was in deep mourning, and, I think, when she came, she expected to go at once. But the child, Lucien, interested her. She talked to him for a long time, and, indeed, she looked much happier when she left.”

“You are sure this was not the real mother?”

“O mercy, no! Why, she didn’t know which of the three was Lucien. I thought perhaps she was a friend of yours, but, of course, I didn’t ask.”

“She was not—pock-marked?” I asked at a venture. “No, indeed. A skin like a baby’s. But perhaps you will know the initials. She gave Lucien a handkerchief and forgot it. It was very fine, black-bordered, and it had three hand-worked letters in the corner—F. B. A.”

“No,” I said with truth enough, “she is not a friend of mine.” F. B. A. was Fanny Armstrong, without a chance of doubt!

With another warning to Mrs. Tate as to silence, we started back to Sunnyside. So Fanny Armstrong knew of Lucien Wallace, and was sufficiently interested to visit him and pay for his support. Who was the child’s mother and where was she? Who was Nina Carrington? Did either of them know where Halsey was or what had happened to him?

On the way home we passed the little cemetery where Thomas had been laid to rest. I wondered if Thomas could have helped us to find Halsey, had he lived. Farther along was the more imposing burial-ground, where Arnold Armstrong and his father lay in the shadow of a tall granite shaft. Of the three, I think Thomas was the only one sincerely mourned.

CHAPTER XXVIII

A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE

The bitterness toward the dead president of the Traders’ Bank seemed to grow with time. Never popular, his memory was execrated by people who had lost nothing, but who were filled with disgust by constantly hearing new stories of the man’s grasping avarice. The Traders’ had been a favorite bank for small tradespeople, and in its savings department it had solicited the smallest deposits. People who had thought to be self-supporting to the last found themselves confronting the poorhouse, their two or three hundred dollar savings wiped away. All bank failures have this element, however, and the directors were trying to promise twenty per cent. on deposits.

But, like everything else those days, the bank failure was almost forgotten by Gertrude and myself. We did not mention Jack Bailey: I had found nothing to change my impression of his guilt, and Gertrude knew how I felt. As for the murder of the bank president’s son, I was of two minds. One day I thought Gertrude knew or at least suspected that Jack had done it; the next I feared that it had been Gertrude herself, that night alone on the circular staircase. And then the mother of Lucien Wallace would obtrude herself, and an almost equally good case might be made against her. There were times, of course, when I was disposed to throw all those suspicions aside, and fix definitely on the unknown, whoever that might be.

I had my greatest disappointment when it came to tracing Nina Carrington. The woman had gone without leaving a trace. Marked as she was, it should have been easy to follow her, but she was not to be found. A description to one of the detectives, on my arrival at home, had started the ball rolling. But by night she had not been found. I told Gertrude, then, about the telegram to Louise when she had been ill before; about my visit to Doctor Walker, and my suspicions that Mattie Bliss and Nina Carrington were the same. She thought, as I did, that there was little doubt of it.

I said nothing to her, however, of the detective’s suspicions about Alex. Little things that I had not noticed at the time now came back to me. I had an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Alex was a spy, and that by taking him into the house I had played into the enemy’s hand. But at eight o’clock that night Alex himself appeared, and with him a strange and repulsive individual. They made a queer pair, for Alex was almost as disreputable as the tramp, and he had a badly swollen eye.

Gertrude had been sitting listlessly waiting for the evening message from Mr. Jamieson, but when the singular pair came in, as they did, without ceremony, she jumped up and stood staring. Winters, the detective who watched the house at night, followed them, and kept his eyes sharply on Alex’s prisoner. For that was the situation as it developed.

He was a tall lanky individual, ragged and dirty, and just now he looked both terrified and embarrassed. Alex was too much engrossed to be either, and to this day I don’t think I ever asked him why he went off without permission the day before.

“Miss Innes,” Alex began abruptly, “this man can tell us something very important about the disappearance of Mr. Innes. I found him trying to sell this watch.”

He took a watch from his pocket and put it on the table. It was Halsey’s watch. I had given it to him on his twenty-first birthday: I was dumb with apprehension.

“He says he had a pair of cuff-links also, but he sold them—”

“Fer a dollar’n half,” put in the disreputable individual hoarsely, with an eye on the detective.

“He is not—dead?” I implored. The tramp cleared his throat.

“No’m,” he said huskily. “He was used up pretty bad, but he weren’t dead. He was comin’ to hisself when I”—he stopped and looked at the detective. “I didn’t steal it, Mr. Winters,” he whined. “I found it in the road, honest to God, I did.”

Mr. Winters paid no attention to him. He was watching Alex.

“I’d better tell what he told me,” Alex broke in. “It will be quicker. When Jamieson—when Mr Jamieson calls up we can start him right. Mr. Winters, I found this man trying to sell that watch on Fifth Street. He offered it to me for three dollars.”

“How did you know the watch?” Winters snapped at him.

“I had seen it before, many times. I used it at night when I was watching at the foot of the staircase.” The detective was satisfied. “When he offered the watch to me, I knew it, and I pretended I was going to buy it. We went into an alley and I got the watch.” The tramp shivered. It was plain how Alex had secured the watch. “Then—I got the story from this fellow. He claims to have seen the whole affair. He says he was in an empty car—in the car the automobile struck.”

The tramp broke in here, and told his story, with frequent interpretations by Alex and Mr. Winters. He used a strange medley, in which familiar words took unfamiliar meanings, but it was gradually made clear to us.

On the night in question the tramp had been “pounding his ear”— this stuck to me as being graphic—in an empty box-car along the siding at Casanova. The train was going west, and due to leave at dawn. The tramp and the “brakey” were friendly, and things going well. About ten o’clock, perhaps earlier, a terrific crash against the side of the car roused him. He tried to open the door, but could not move it. He got out of the other side, and just as he did so, he heard some one groan.

The habits of a lifetime made him cautious. He slipped on to the bumper of a car and peered through. An automobile had struck the car, and stood there on two wheels. The tail lights were burning, but the headlights were out. Two men were stooping over some one who lay on the ground. Then the taller of the two started on a dog-trot along the train looking for an empty. He found one four cars away and ran back again. The two lifted the unconscious man into the empty box-car, and, getting in themselves, stayed for three or four minutes. When they came out, after closing the sliding door, they cut up over the railroad embankment toward the town. One, the short one, seemed to limp.

The tramp was wary. He waited for ten minutes or so. Some women came down a path to the road and inspected the automobile. When they had gone, he crawled into the box-car and closed the door again. Then he lighted a match. The figure of a man, unconscious, gagged, and with his hands tied, lay far at the end.

The tramp lost no time; he went through his pockets, found a little money and the cuff-links, and took them. Then he loosened the gag—it had been cruelly tight—and went his way, again closing the door of the box-car. Outside on the road he found the watch. He got on the fast freight east, some time after, and rode into the city. He had sold the cuff-links, but on offering the watch to Alex he had been “copped.”

The story, with its cold recital of villainy, was done. I hardly knew if I were more anxious, or less. That it was Halsey, there could be no doubt. How badly he was hurt, how far he had been carried, were the questions that demanded immediate answer. But it was the first real information we had had; my boy had not been murdered outright. But instead of vague terrors there was now the real fear that he might be lying in some strange hospital receiving the casual attention commonly given to the charity cases. Even this, had we known it, would have been paradise to the terrible truth. I wake yet and feel myself cold and trembling with the horror of Halsey’s situation for three days after his disappearance.

Mr. Winters and Alex disposed of the tramp with a warning. It was evident he had told us all he knew. We had occasion, within a day or two, to be doubly thankful that we had given him his freedom. When Mr. Jamieson telephoned that night we had news for him; he told me what I had not realized before—that it would not be possible to find Halsey at once, even with this clue. The cars by this time, three days, might be scattered over the Union.

But he said to keep on hoping, that it was the best news we had had. And in the meantime, consumed with anxiety as we were, things were happening at the house in rapid succession.

We had one peaceful day—then Liddy took sick in the night. I went in when I heard her groaning, and found her with a hot-water bottle to her face, and her right cheek swollen until it was glassy.

“Toothache?” I asked, not too gently. “You deserve it. A woman of your age, who would rather go around with an exposed nerve in her head than have the tooth pulled! It would be over in a moment.”

“So would hanging,” Liddy protested, from behind the hot-water bottle.

I was hunting around for cotton and laudanum.

“You have a tooth just like it yourself, Miss Rachel,” she whimpered. “And I’m sure Doctor Boyle’s been trying to take it out for years.”

There was no laudanum, and Liddy made a terrible fuss when I proposed carbolic acid, just because I had put too much on the cotton once and burned her mouth. I’m sure it never did her any permanent harm; indeed, the doctor said afterward that living on liquid diet had been a splendid rest for her stomach. But she would have none of the acid, and she kept me awake groaning, so at last I got up and went to Gertrude’s door. To my surprise, it was locked.

I went around by the hall and into her bedroom that way. The bed was turned down, and her dressing-gown and night-dress lay ready in the little room next, but Gertrude was not there. She had not undressed.

I don’t know what terrible thoughts came to me in the minute I stood there. Through the door I could hear Liddy grumbling, with a squeal now and then when the pain stabbed harder. Then, automatically, I got the laudanum and went back to her.

It was fully a half-hour before Liddy’s groans subsided. At intervals I went to the door into the hall and looked out, but I saw and heard nothing suspicious. Finally, when Liddy had dropped into a doze, I even ventured as far as the head of the circular staircase, but there floated up to me only the even breathing of Winters, the night detective, sleeping just inside the entry. And then, far off, I heard the rapping noise that had lured Louise down the staircase that other night, two weeks before. It was over my head, and very faint—three or four short muffled taps, a pause, and then again, stealthily repeated.

The sound of Mr. Winters’ breathing was comforting; with the thought that there was help within call, something kept me from waking him. I did not move for a moment; ridiculous things Liddy had said about a ghost—I am not at all superstitious, except, perhaps, in the middle of the night, with everything dark—things like that came back to me. Almost beside me was the clothes chute. I could feel it, but I could see nothing. As I stood, listening intently, I heard a sound near me. It was vague, indefinite. Then it ceased; there was an uneasy movement and a grunt from the foot of the circular staircase, and silence again.

I stood perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe.

Then I knew I had been right. Some one was stealthily-passing the head of the staircase and coming toward me in the dark. I leaned against the wall for support—my knees were giving way. The steps were close now, and suddenly I thought of Gertrude. Of course it was Gertrude. I put out one hand in front of me, but I touched nothing. My voice almost refused me, but I managed to gasp out, “Gertrude!”

“Good Lord!” a man’s voice exclaimed, just beside me. And then I collapsed. I felt myself going, felt some one catch me, a horrible nausea—that was all I remembered.

When I came to it was dawn. I was lying on the bed in Louise’s room, with the cherub on the ceiling staring down at me, and there was a blanket from my own bed thrown over me. I felt weak and dizzy, but I managed to get up and totter to the door. At the foot of the circular staircase Mr. Winters was still asleep. Hardly able to stand, I crept back to my room. The door into Gertrude’s room was no longer locked: she was sleeping like a tired child. And in my dressing-room Liddy hugged a cold hot-water bottle, and mumbled in her sleep.

“There’s some things you can’t hold with hand cuffs, she was muttering thickly.

CHAPTER XXIX

A SCRAP OF PAPER

For the first time in twenty years, I kept my bed that day. Liddy was alarmed to the point of hysteria, and sent for Doctor Stewart just after breakfast. Gertrude spent the morning with me, reading something—I forget what. I was too busy with my thoughts to listen. I had said nothing to the two detectives. If Mr. Jamieson had been there, I should have told him everything, but I could not go to these strange men and tell them my niece had been missing in the middle of the night; that she had not gone to bed at all; that while I was searching for her through the house, I had met a stranger who, when I fainted, had carried me into a room and left me there, to get better or not, as it might happen.

The whole situation was terrible: had the issues been less vital, it would have been absurd. Here we were, guarded day and night by private detectives, with an extra man to watch the grounds, and yet we might as well have lived in a Japanese paper house, for all the protection we had.

And there was something else: the man I had met in the darkness had been even more startled than I, and about his voice, when he muttered his muffled exclamation, there was something vaguely familiar. All that morning, while Gertrude read aloud, and Liddy watched for the doctor, I was puzzling over that voice, without result.

And there were other things, too. I wondered what Gertrude’s absence from her room had to do with it all, or if it had any connection. I tried to think that she had heard the rapping noises before I did and gone to investigate, but I’m afraid I was a moral coward that day. I could not ask her.

Perhaps the diversion was good for me. It took my mind from Halsey, and the story we had heard the night before. The day, however, was a long vigil, with every ring of the telephone full of possibilities. Doctor Walker came up, some time just after luncheon, and asked for me.

“Go down and see him,” I instructed Gertrude. “Tell him I am out—for mercy’s sake don’t say I’m sick. Find out what he wants, and from this time on, instruct the servants that he is not to be admitted. I loathe that man.”

Gertrude came back very soon, her face rather flushed.

“He came to ask us to get out,” she said, picking up her book with a jerk. “He says Louise Armstrong wants to come here, now that she is recovering”

“And what did you say?”

“I said we were very sorry we could not leave, but we would be delighted to have Louise come up here with us. He looked daggers at me. And he wanted to know if we would recommend Eliza as a cook. He has brought a patient, a man, out from town, and is increasing his establishment—that’s the way he put it.”

“I wish him joy of Eliza,” I said tartly. “Did he ask for Halsey?”

“Yes. I told him that we were on the track last night, and that it was only a question of time. He said he was glad, although he didn’t appear to be, but he said not to be too sanguine.”

“Do you know what I believe?” I asked. “I believe, as firmly as I believe anything, that Doctor Walker knows something about Halsey, and that he could put his finger on him, if he wanted to.”

There were several things that day that bewildered me. About three o’clock Mr. Jamieson telephoned from the Casanova station and Warner went down to meet him. I got up and dressed hastily, and the detective was shown up to my sitting-room.

“No news?” I asked, as he entered. He tried to look encouraging, without success. I noticed that he looked tired and dusty, and, although he was ordinarily impeccable in his appearance, it was clear that he was at least two days from a razor.

“It won’t be long now, Miss Innes,” he said. “I have come out here on a peculiar errand, which I will tell you about later. First, I want to ask some questions. Did any one come out here yesterday to repair the telephone, and examine the wires on the roof?”

“Yes,” I said promptly; “but it was not the telephone. He said the wiring might have caused the fire at the stable. I went up with him myself, but he only looked around.”

Mr. Jamieson smiled.

“Good for you!” he applauded. “Don’t allow any one in the house that you don’t trust, and don’t trust anybody. All are not electricians who wear rubber gloves.”

He refused to explain further, but he got a slip of paper out of his pocketbook and opened it carefully.

“Listen,” he said. “You heard this before and scoffed. In the light of recent developments I want you to read it again. You are a clever woman, Miss Innes. Just as surely as I sit here, there is something in this house that is wanted very anxiously by a number of people. The lines are closing up, Miss Innes.”

The paper was the one he had found among Arnold Armstrong’s effects, and I read it again:

“–-by altering the plans for–-rooms, may be possible. The best way, in my opinion, would be to–-the plan for–-in one of the–-rooms–-chimney.”

“I think I understand,” I said slowly. “Some one is searching for the secret room, and the invaders—”

“And the holes in the plaster—”

“Have been in the progress of his—”

“Or her—investigations.”

“Her?” I asked.

“Miss Innes,” the detective said, getting up, “I believe that somewhere in the walls of this house is hidden some of the money, at least, from the Traders’ Bank. I believe, just as surely, that young Walker brought home from California the knowledge of something of the sort and, failing in his effort to reinstall Mrs. Armstrong and her daughter here, he, or a confederate, has tried to break into the house. On two occasions I think he succeeded.”

“On three, at least,” I corrected. And then I told him about the night before. “I have been thinking hard,” I concluded, “and I do not believe the man at the head of the circular staircase was Doctor Walker. I don’t think he could have got in, and the voice was not his.”

Mr. Jamieson got up and paced the floor, his hands behind him.

“There is something else that puzzles me,” he said, stepping before me. “Who and what is the woman Nina Carrington? If it was she who came here as Mattie Bliss, what did she tell Halsey that sent him racing to Doctor Walker’s, and then to Miss Armstrong? If we could find that woman we would have the whole thing.”

“Mr. Jamieson, did you ever think that Paul Armstrong might not have died a natural death?”

“That is the thing we are going to try to find out,” he replied. And then Gertrude came in, announcing a man below to see Mr. Jamieson.

“I want you present at this interview, Miss Innes,” he said. “May Riggs come up? He has left Doctor Walker and he has something he wants to tell us.”

Riggs came into the room diffidently, but Mr. Jamieson put him at his ease. He kept a careful eye on me, however, and slid into a chair by the door when he was asked to sit down.

“Now, Riggs,” began Mr. Jamieson kindly. “You are to say what you have to say before this lady.”

“You promised you’d keep it quiet, Mr. Jamieson.” Riggs plainly did not trust me. There was nothing friendly in the glance he turned on me.

“Yes, yes. You will be protected. But, first of all, did you bring what you promised?”

Riggs produced a roll of papers from under his coat, and handed them over. Mr. Jamieson examined them with lively satisfaction, and passed them to me. “The blue-prints of Sunnyside,” he said. “What did I tell you? Now, Riggs, we are ready.”

“I’d never have come to you, Mr. Jamieson,” he began, “if it hadn’t been for Miss Armstrong. When Mr. Innes was spirited away, like, and Miss Louise got sick because of it, I thought things had gone far enough. I’d done some things for the doctor before that wouldn’t just bear looking into, but I turned a bit squeamish.”

“Did you help with that?” I asked, leaning forward.

“No, ma’m. I didn’t even know of it until the next day, when it came out in the Casanova Weekly Ledger. But I know who did it, all right. I’d better start at the beginning.

“When Doctor Walker went away to California with the Armstrong family, there was talk in the town that when he came back he would be married to Miss Armstrong, and we all expected it. First thing I knew, I got a letter from him, in the west. He seemed to be excited, and he said Miss Armstrong had taken a sudden notion to go home and he sent me some money. I was to watch for her, to see if she went to Sunnyside, and wherever she was, not to lose sight of her until he got home. I traced her to the lodge, and I guess I scared you on the drive one night, Miss Innes.”

“And Rosie!” I ejaculated.

Riggs grinned sheepishly.

“I only wanted to make sure Miss Louise was there. Rosie started to run, and I tried to stop her and tell her some sort of a story to account for my being there. But she wouldn’t wait.”

“And the broken china—in the basket?”

“Well, broken china’s death to rubber tires,” he said. “I hadn’t any complaint against you people here, and the Dragon Fly was a good car.”

So Rosie’s highwayman was explained.

“Well, I telegraphed the doctor where Miss Louise was and I kept an eye on her. Just a day or so before they came home with the body, I got another letter, telling me to watch for a woman who had been pitted with smallpox. Her name was Carrington, and the doctor made things pretty strong. If I found any such woman loafing around, I was not to lose sight of her for a minute until the doctor got back.

“Well, I would have had my hands full, but the other woman didn’t show up for a good while, and when she did the doctor was home.”

“Riggs,” I asked suddenly, “did you get into this house a day or two after I took it, at night?”

“I did not, Miss Innes. I have never been in the house before. Well, the Carrington woman didn’t show up until the night Mr. Halsey disappeared. She came to the office late, and the doctor was out. She waited around, walking the floor and working herself into a passion. When the doctor didn’t come back, she was in an awful way. She wanted me to hunt him, and when he didn’t appear, she called him names; said he couldn’t fool her. There was murder being done, and she would see him swing for it.

“She struck me as being an ugly customer, and when she left, about eleven o’clock, and went across to the Armstrong place, I was not far behind her. She walked all around the house first, looking up at the windows. Then she rang the bell, and the minute the door was opened she was through it, and into the hall.”

“How long did she stay?”

“That’s the queer part of it,” Riggs said eagerly. “She didn’t come out that night at all. I went to bed at daylight, and that was the last I heard of her until the next day, when I saw her on a truck at the station, covered with a sheet. She’d been struck by the express and you would hardly have known her—dead, of course. I think she stayed all night in the Armstrong house, and the agent said she was crossing the track to take the up-train to town when the express struck her.”

“Another circle!” I exclaimed. “Then we are just where we started.”

“Not so bad as that, Miss Innes,” Riggs said eagerly. “Nina Carrington came from the town in California where Mr. Armstrong died. Why was the doctor so afraid of her? The Carrington woman knew something. I lived with Doctor Walker seven years, and I know him well. There are few things he is afraid of. I think he killed Mr. Armstrong out in the west somewhere, that’s what I think. What else he did I don’t know—but he dismissed me and pretty nearly throttled me—for telling Mr. Jamieson here about Mr. Innes’ having been at his office the night he disappeared, and about my hearing them quarreling.”

“What was it Warner overheard the woman say to Mr. Innes, in the library?” the detective asked me.

“She said `I knew there was something wrong from the start. A man isn’t well one day and dead the next without some reason.’”

How perfectly it all seemed to fit!

CHAPTER XXX

WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN

It was on Wednesday Riggs told us the story of his connection with some incidents that had been previously unexplained. Halsey had been gone since the Friday night before, and with the passage of each day I felt that his chances were lessening. I knew well enough that he might be carried thousands of miles in the box-car, locked in, perhaps, without water or food. I had read of cases where bodies had been found locked in cars on isolated sidings in the west, and my spirits went down with every hour.

His recovery was destined to be almost as sudden as his disappearance, and was due directly to the tramp Alex had brought to Sunnyside. It seems the man was grateful for his release, and when he learned some thing of Halsey’s whereabouts from another member of his fraternity—for it is a fraternity—he was prompt in letting us know.

On Wednesday evening Mr. Jamieson, who had been down at the Armstrong house trying to see Louise—and failing—was met near the gate at Sunnyside by an individual precisely as repulsive and unkempt as the one Alex had captured. The man knew the detective, and he gave him a piece of dirty paper, on which was scrawled the words—“He’s at City Hospital, Johnsville.” The tramp who brought the paper pretended to know nothing, except this: the paper had been passed along from a “hobo” in Johnsville, who seemed to know the information would be valuable to us.

Again the long distance telephone came into requisition. Mr. Jamieson called the hospital, while we crowded around him. And when there was no longer any doubt that it was Halsey, and that he would probably recover, we all laughed and cried together. I am sure I kissed Liddy, and I have had terrible moments since when I seem to remember kissing Mr. Jamieson, too, in the excitement.

Anyhow, by eleven o’clock that night Gertrude was on her way to Johnsville, three hundred and eighty miles away, accompanied by Rosie. The domestic force was now down to Mary Anne and Liddy, with the under-gardener’s wife coming every day to help out. Fortunately, Warner and the detectives were keeping bachelor hall in the lodge. Out of deference to Liddy they washed their dishes once a day, and they concocted queer messes, according to their several abilities. They had one triumph that they ate regularly for breakfast, and that clung to their clothes and their hair the rest of the day. It was bacon, hardtack and onions, fried together. They were almost pathetically grateful, however, I noticed, for an occasional broiled tenderloin.

It was not until Gertrude and Rosie had gone and Sunnyside had settled down for the night, with Winters at the foot of the staircase, that Mr. Jamieson broached a subject he had evidently planned before he came.

“Miss Innes,” he said, stopping me as I was about to go to my room upstairs, “how are your nerves tonight?”

“I have none,” I said happily. “With Halsey found, my troubles have gone.”

“I mean,” he persisted, “do you feel as though you could go through with something rather unusual?”

“The most unusual thing I can think of would be a peaceful night. But if anything is going to occur, don’t dare to let me miss it.”

“Something is going to occur,” he said. “And you’re the only woman I can think of that I can take along.” He looked at his watch. “Don’t ask me any questions, Miss Innes. Put on heavy shoes, and some old dark clothes, and make up your mind not to be surprised at anything.”

Liddy was sleeping the sleep of the just when I went upstairs, and I hunted out my things cautiously. The detective was waiting in the hall, and I was astonished to see Doctor Stewart with him.

They were talking confidentially together, but when I came down they ceased. There were a few preparations to be made: the locks to be gone over, Winters to be instructed as to renewed vigilance, and then, after extinguishing the hall light, we crept, in the darkness, through the front door, and into the night.

I asked no questions. I felt that they were doing me honor in making me one of the party, and I would show them I could be as silent as they. We went across the fields, passing through the woods that reached almost to the ruins of the stable, going over stiles now and then, and sometimes stepping over low fences. Once only somebody spoke, and then it was an emphatic bit of profanity from Doctor Stewart when he ran into a wire fence.

We were joined at the end of five minutes by another man, who fell into step with the doctor silently. He carried something over his shoulder which I could not make out. In this way we walked for perhaps twenty minutes. I had lost all sense of direction: I merely stumbled along in silence, allowing Mr. Jamieson to guide me this way or that as the path demanded. I hardly know what I expected. Once, when through a miscalculation I jumped a little short over a ditch and landed above my shoe-tops in the water and ooze, I remember wondering if this were really I, and if I had ever tasted life until that summer. I walked along with the water sloshing in my boots, and I was actually cheerful. I remember whispering to Mr. Jamieson that I had never seen the stars so lovely, and that it was a mistake, when the Lord had made the night so beautiful, to sleep through it!

The doctor was puffing somewhat when we finally came to a halt. I confess that just at that minute even Sunnyside seemed a cheerful spot. We had paused at the edge of a level cleared place, bordered all around with primly trimmed evergreen trees. Between them I caught a glimpse of starlight shining down on rows of white headstones and an occasional more imposing monument, or towering shaft. In spite of myself, I drew my breath in sharply. We were on the edge of the Casanova churchyard.

I saw now both the man who had joined the party and the implements he carried. It was Alex, armed with two long-handled spades. After the first shock of surprise, I flatter myself I was both cool and quiet. We went in single file between the rows of headstones, and although, when I found myself last, I had an instinctive desire to keep looking back over my shoulder, I found that, the first uneasiness past, a cemetery at night is much the same as any other country place, filled with vague shadows and unexpected noises. Once, indeed—but Mr. Jamieson said it was an owl, and I tried to believe him.

In the shadow of the Armstrong granite shaft we stopped. I think the doctor wanted to send me back.

“It’s no place for a woman,” I heard him protesting angrily. But the detective said something about witnesses, and the doctor only came over and felt my pulse.

“Anyhow, I don’t believe you’re any worse off here than you would be in that nightmare of a house,” he said finally, and put his coat on the steps of the shaft for me to sit on.

There is an air of finality about a grave: one watches the earth thrown in, with the feeling that this is the end. Whatever has gone before, whatever is to come in eternity, that particular temple of the soul has been given back to the elements from which it came. Thus, there is a sense of desecration, of a reversal of the everlasting fitness of things, in resurrecting a body from its mother clay. And yet that night, in the Casanova churchyard, I sat quietly by, and watched Alex and Mr. Jamieson steaming over their work, without a single qualm, except the fear of detection.

The doctor kept a keen lookout, but no one appeared. Once in a while he came over to me, and gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“I never expected to come to this,” he said once. “There’s one thing sure—I’ll not be suspected of complicity. A doctor is generally supposed to be handier at burying folks than at digging them up.”

The uncanny moment came when Alex and Jamieson tossed the spades on the grass, and I confess I hid my face. There was a period of stress, I think, while the heavy coffin was being raised. I felt that my composure was going, and, for fear I would shriek, I tried to think of something else—what time Gertrude would reach Halsey—anything but the grisly reality that lay just beyond me on the grass.

And then I heard a low exclamation from the detective and I felt the pressure of the doctor’s fingers on my arm.

“Now, Miss Innes,” he said gently. “If you will come over—”

I held on to him frantically, and somehow I got there and looked down. The lid of the casket had been raised and a silver plate on it proved we had made no mistake. But the face that showed in the light of the lantern was a face I had never seen before. The man who lay before us was not Paul Armstrong!

CHAPTER XXXI

BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES

What with the excitement of the discovery, the walk home under the stars in wet shoes and draggled skirts, and getting upstairs and undressed without rousing Liddy, I was completely used up. What to do with my boots was the greatest puzzle of all, there being no place in the house safe from Liddy, until I decided to slip upstairs the next morning and drop them into the hole the “ghost” had made in the trunk-room wall.

I went asleep as soon as I reached this decision, and in my dreams I lived over again the events of the night. Again I saw the group around the silent figure on the grass, and again, as had happened at the grave, I heard Alex’s voice, tense and triumphant:

“Then we’ve got them,” he said. Only, in my dreams, he said it over and over until he seemed to shriek it in my ears.

I wakened early, in spite of my fatigue, and lay there thinking. Who was Alex? I no longer believed that he was a gardener. Who was the man whose body we had resurrected? And where was Paul Armstrong? Probably living safely in some extraditionless country on the fortune he had stolen. Did Louise and her mother know of the shameful and wicked deception? What had Thomas known, and Mrs. Watson? Who was Nina Carrington?

This last question, it seemed to me, was answered. In some way the woman had learned of the substitution, and had tried to use her knowledge for blackmail. Nina Carrington’s own story died with her, but, however it happened, it was clear that she had carried her knowledge to Halsey the afternoon Gertrude and I were looking for clues to the man I had shot on the east veranda. Halsey had been half crazed by what he heard; it was evident that Louise was marrying Doctor Walker to keep the shameful secret, for her mother’s sake. Halsey, always reckless, had gone at once to Doctor Walker and denounced him. There had been a scene, and he left on his way to the station to meet and notify Mr. Jamieson of what he had learned. The doctor was active mentally and physically. Accompanied perhaps by Riggs, who had shown himself not overscrupulous until he quarreled with his employer, he had gone across to the railroad embankment, and, by jumping in front of the car, had caused Halsey to swerve. The rest of the story we knew.

That was my reconstructed theory of that afternoon and evening: it was almost correct—not quite.

There was a telegram that morning from Gertrude.

“Halsey conscious and improving. Probably home in day or so. GERTRUDE.”

With Halsey found and improving in health, and with at last something to work on, I began that day, Thursday, with fresh courage. As Mr. Jamieson had said, the lines were closing up. That I was to be caught and almost finished in the closing was happily unknown to us all.

It was late when I got up. I lay in my bed, looking around the four walls of the room, and trying to imagine behind what one of them a secret chamber might lie. Certainly, in daylight, Sunnyside deserved its name: never was a house more cheery and open, less sinister in general appearance. There was not a corner apparently that was not open and above-board, and yet, somewhere behind its handsomely papered walls I believed firmly that there lay a hidden room, with all the possibilities it would involve.

I made a mental note to have the house measured during the day, to discover any discrepancy between the outer and inner walls, and I tried to recall again the exact wording of the paper Jamieson had found.

The slip had said “chimney.” It was the only clue, and a house as large as Sunnyside was full of them. There was an open fireplace in my dressing-room, but none in the bedroom, and as I lay there, looking around, I thought of something that made me sit up suddenly. The trunk-room, just over my head, had an open fireplace and a brick chimney, and yet, there was nothing of the kind in my room. I got out of bed and examined the opposite wall closely. There was apparently no flue, and I knew there was none in the hall just beneath. The house was heated by steam, as I have said before. In the living-room was a huge open fireplace, but it was on the other side.

Why did the trunk-room have both a radiator and an open fireplace? Architects were not usually erratic! It was not fifteen minutes before I was upstairs, armed with a tape-measure in lieu of a foot-rule, eager to justify Mr. Jamieson’s opinion of my intelligence, and firmly resolved not to tell him of my suspicion until I had more than theory to go on. The hole in the trunk-room wall still yawned there, between the chimney and the outer wall. I examined it again, with no new result. The space between the brick wall and the plaster and lath one, however, had a new significance. The hole showed only one side of the chimney, and I determined to investigate what lay in the space on the other side of the mantel.

I worked feverishly. Liddy had gone to the village to market, it being her firm belief that the store people sent short measure unless she watched the scales, and that, since the failure of the Traders’ Bank, we must watch the corners; and I knew that what I wanted to do must be done before she came back. I had no tools, but after rummaging around I found a pair of garden scissors and a hatchet, and thus armed, I set to work. The plaster came out easily: the lathing was more obstinate. It gave under the blows, only to spring back into place again, and the necessity for caution made it doubly hard.

I had a blister on my palm when at last the hatchet went through and fell with what sounded like the report of a gun to my overstrained nerves. I sat on a trunk, waiting to hear Liddy fly up the stairs, with the household behind her, like the tail of a comet. But nothing happened, and with a growing feeling of uncanniness I set to work enlarging the opening.

The result was absolutely nil. When I could hold a lighted candle in the opening, I saw precisely what I had seen on the other side of the chimney—a space between the true wall and the false one, possibly seven feet long and about three feet wide. It was in no sense of the word a secret chamber, and it was evident it had not been disturbed since the house was built. It was a supreme disappointment.

It had been Mr. Jamieson’s idea that the hidden room, if there was one, would be found somewhere near the circular staircase. In fact, I knew that he had once investigated the entire length of the clothes chute, hanging to a rope, with this in view. I was reluctantly about to concede that he had been right, when my eyes fell on the mantel and fireplace. The latter had evidently never been used: it was closed with a metal fire front, and only when the front refused to move, and investigation showed that it was not intended to be moved, did my spirits revive.

I hurried into the next room. Yes, sure enough, there was a similar mantel and fireplace there, similarly closed. In both rooms the chimney flue extended well out from the wall. I measured with the tape-line, my hands trembling so that I could scarcely hold it. They extended two feet and a half into each room, which, with the three feet of space between the two partitions, made eight feet to be accounted for. Eight feet in one direction and almost seven in the other—what a chimney it was!

But I had only located the hidden room. I was not in it, and no amount of pressing on the carving of the wooden mantels, no search of the floors for loose boards, none of the customary methods availed at all. That there was a means of entrance, and probably a simple one, I could be certain. But what? What would I find if I did get in? Was the detective right, and were the bonds and money from the Traders’ Bank there? Or was our whole theory wrong? Would not Paul Armstrong have taken his booty with him? If he had not, and if Doctor Walker was in the secret, he would have known how to enter the chimney room. Then—who had dug the other hole in the false partition?

CHAPTER XXXII

ANNE WATSON’S STORY

Liddy discovered the fresh break in the trunk-room wall while we were at luncheon, and ran shrieking down the stairs. She maintained that, as she entered, unseen hands had been digging at the plaster; that they had stopped when she went in, and she had felt a gust of cold damp air. In support of her story she carried in my wet and muddy boots, that I had unluckily forgotten to hide, and held them out to the detective and myself.

“What did I tell you?” she said dramatically. “Look at ‘em. They’re yours, Miss Rachel—and covered with mud and soaked to the tops. I tell you, you can scoff all you like; something has been wearing your shoes. As sure as you sit there, there’s the smell of the graveyard on them. How do we know they weren’t tramping through the Casanova churchyard last night, and sitting on the graves!”

Mr. Jamieson almost choked to death. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were doing that very thing, Liddy,” he said, when he got his breath. “They certainly look like it.”

I think the detective had a plan, on which he was working, and which was meant to be a coup. But things went so fast there was no time to carry it into effect. The first thing that occurred was a message from the Charity Hospital that Mrs. Watson was dying, and had asked for me. I did not care much about going. There is a sort of melancholy pleasure to be had out of a funeral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I shrank from a death-bed. However, Liddy got out the black things and the crape veil I keep for such occasions, and I went. I left Mr. Jamieson and the day detective going over every inch of the circular staircase, pounding, probing and measuring. I was inwardly elated to think of the surprise I was going to give them that night; as it turned out, I DID surprise them almost into spasms.

I drove from the train to the Charity Hospital, and was at once taken to a ward. There, in a gray-walled room in a high iron bed, lay Mrs. Watson. She was very weak, and she only opened her eyes and looked at me when I sat down beside her. I was conscience-stricken. We had been so engrossed that I had left this poor creature to die without even a word of sympathy.

The nurse gave her a stimulant, and in a little while she was able to talk. So broken and half-coherent, however, was her story that I shall tell it in my own way. In an hour from the time I entered the Charity Hospital, I had heard a sad and pitiful narrative, and had seen a woman slip into the unconsciousness that is only a step from death.

Briefly, then, the housekeeper’s story was this:

She was almost forty years old, and had been the sister-mother of a large family of children. One by one they had died, and been buried beside their parents in a little town in the Middle West. There was only one sister left, the baby, Lucy. On her the older girl had lavished all the love of an impulsive and emotional nature. When Anne, the elder, was thirty-two and Lucy was nineteen, a young man had come to the town. He was going east, after spending the summer at a celebrated ranch in Wyoming—one of those places where wealthy men send worthless and dissipated sons, for a season of temperance, fresh air and hunting. The sisters, of course, knew nothing of this, and the young man’s ardor rather carried them away. In a word, seven years before, Lucy Haswell had married a young man whose name was given as Aubrey Wallace.

Anne Haswell had married a carpenter in her native town, and was a widow. For three months everything went fairly well. Aubrey took his bride to Chicago, where they lived at a hotel. Perhaps the very unsophistication that had charmed him in Valley Mill jarred on him in the city. He had been far from a model husband, even for the three months, and when he disappeared Anne was almost thankful. It was different with the young wife, however. She drooped and fretted, and on the birth of her baby boy, she had died. Anne took the child, and named him Lucien.

Anne had had no children of her own, and on Lucien she had lavished all her aborted maternal instinct. On one thing she was determined, however: that was that Aubrey Wallace should educate his boy. It was a part of her devotion to the child that she should be ambitious for him: he must have every opportunity. And so she came east. She drifted around, doing plain sewing and keeping a home somewhere always for the boy. Finally, however, she realized that her only training had been domestic, and she put the boy in an Episcopalian home, and secured the position of housekeeper to the Armstrongs. There she found Lucien’s father, this time under his own name. It was Arnold Armstrong.

I gathered that there was no particular enmity at that time in Anne’s mind. She told him of the boy, and threatened exposure if he did not provide for him. Indeed, for a time, he did so. Then he realized that Lucien was the ruling passion in this lonely woman’s life. He found out where the child was hidden, and threatened to take him away. Anne was frantic. The positions became reversed. Where Arnold had given money for Lucien’s support, as the years went on he forced money from Anne Watson instead until she was always penniless. The lower Arnold sank in the scale, the heavier his demands became. With the rupture between him and his family, things were worse. Anne took the child from the home and hid him in a farmhouse near Casanova, on the Claysburg road. There she went sometimes to see the boy, and there he had taken fever. The people were Germans, and he called the farmer’s wife Grossmutter. He had grown into a beautiful boy, and he was all Anne had to live for.

The Armstrongs left for California, and Arnold’s persecutions began anew. He was furious over the child’s disappearance and she was afraid he would do her some hurt. She left the big house and went down to the lodge. When I had rented Sunnyside, however, she had thought the persecutions would stop. She had applied for the position of housekeeper, and secured it.

That had been on Saturday. That night Louise arrived unexpectedly. Thomas sent for Mrs. Watson and then went for Arnold Armstrong at the Greenwood Club. Anne had been fond of Louise—she reminded her of Lucy. She did not know what the trouble was, but Louise had been in a state of terrible excitement. Mrs. Watson tried to hide from Arnold, but he was ugly. He left the lodge and went up to the house about two-thirty, was admitted at the east entrance and came out again very soon. Something had occurred, she didn’t know what; but very soon Mr. Innes and another gentleman left, using the car.

Thomas and she had got Louise quiet, and a little before three, Mrs. Watson started up to the house. Thomas had a key to the east entry, and gave it to her.

On the way across the lawn she was confronted by Arnold, who for some reason was determined to get into the house. He had a golf-stick in his hand, that he had picked up somewhere, and on her refusal he had struck her with it. One hand had been badly cut, and it was that, poisoning having set in, which was killing her. She broke away in a frenzy of rage and fear, and got into the house while Gertrude and Jack Bailey were at the front door. She went upstairs, hardly knowing what she was doing. Gertrude’s door was open, and Halsey’s revolver lay there on the bed. She picked it up and turning, ran part way down the circular staircase. She could hear Arnold fumbling at the lock outside. She slipped down quietly and opened the door: he was inside before she had got back to the stairs. It was quite dark, but she could see his white shirt-bosom. From the fourth step she fired. As he fell, somebody in the billiard-room screamed and ran. When the alarm was raised, she had had no time to get upstairs: she hid in the west wing until every one was down on the lower floor. Then she slipped upstairs, and threw the revolver out of an upper window, going down again in time to admit the men from the Greenwood Club.

If Thomas had suspected, he had never told. When she found the hand Arnold had injured was growing worse, she gave the address of Lucien at Richfield to the old man, and almost a hundred dollars. The money was for Lucien’s board until she recovered. She had sent for me to ask me if I would try to interest the Armstrongs in the child. When she found herself growing worse, she had written to Mrs. Armstrong, telling her nothing but that Arnold’s legitimate child was at Richfield, and imploring her to recognize him. She was dying: the boy was an Armstrong, and entitled to his father’s share of the estate. The papers were in her trunk at Sunnyside, with letters from the dead man that would prove what she said. She was going; she would not be judged by earthly laws; and somewhere else perhaps Lucy would plead for her. It was she who had crept down the circular staircase, drawn by a magnet, that night Mr. Jamieson had heard some one there. Pursued, she had fled madly, anywhere—through the first door she came to. She had fallen down the clothes chute, and been saved by the basket beneath. I could have cried with relief; then it had not been Gertrude, after all!

That was the story. Sad and tragic though it was, the very telling of it seemed to relieve the dying woman. She did not know that Thomas was dead, and I did not tell her. I promised to look after little Lucien, and sat with her until the intervals of consciousness grew shorter and finally ceased altogether. She died that night.

CHAPTER XXXIII

AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS

As I drove rapidly up to the house from Casanova Station in the hack, I saw the detective Burns loitering across the street from the Walker place. So Jamieson was putting the screws on—lightly now, but ready to give them a twist or two, I felt certain, very soon.

The house was quiet. Two steps of the circular staircase had been pried off, without result, and beyond a second message from Gertrude, that Halsey insisted on coming home and they would arrive that night, there was nothing new. Mr. Jamieson, having failed to locate the secret room, had gone to the village. I learned afterwards that he called at Doctor Walker’s, under pretense of an attack of acute indigestion, and before he left, had inquired about the evening trains to the city. He said he had wasted a lot of time on the case, and a good bit of the mystery was in my imagination! The doctor was under the impression that the house was guarded day and night. Well, give a place a reputation like that, and you don’t need a guard at all,—thus Jamieson. And sure enough, late in the afternoon, the two private detectives, accompanied by Mr. Jamieson, walked down the main street of Casanova and took a city-bound train.

That they got off at the next station and walked back again to Sunnyside at dusk, was not known at the time. Personally, I knew nothing of either move; I had other things to absorb me at that time.

Liddy brought me some tea while I rested after my trip, and on the tray was a small book from the Casanova library. It was called The Unseen World and had a cheerful cover on which a half-dozen sheeted figures linked hands around a headstone.

At this point in my story, Halsey always says: “Trust a woman to add two and two together, and make six.” To which I retort that if two and two plus X make six, then to discover the unknown quantity is the simplest thing in the world. That a houseful of detectives missed it entirely was because they were busy trying to prove that two and two make four.

The depression due to my visit to the hospital left me at the prospect of seeing Halsey again that night. It was about five o’clock when Liddy left me for a nap before dinner, having put me into a gray silk dressing-gown and a pair of slippers. I listened to her retreating footsteps, and as soon as she was safely below stairs, I went up to the trunk-room. The place had not been disturbed, and I proceeded at once to try to discover the entrance to the hidden room. The openings on either side, as I have said, showed nothing but perhaps three feet of brick wall.

There was no sign of an entrance—no levers, no hinges, to give a hint. Either the mantel or the roof, I decided, and after a half-hour at the mantel, productive of absolutely no result, I decided to try the roof.

I am not fond of a height. The few occasions on which I have climbed a step-ladder have always left me dizzy and weak in the knees. The top of the Washington monument is as impossible to me as the elevation of the presidential chair. And yet—I climbed out on to the Sunnyside roof without a second’s hesitation. Like a dog on a scent, like my bearskin progenitor, with his spear and his wild boar, to me now there was the lust of the chase, the frenzy of pursuit, the dust of battle. I got quite a little of the latter on me as I climbed from the unfinished ball-room out through a window to the roof of the east wing of the building, which was only two stories in height.

Once out there, access to the top of the main building was rendered easy—at least it looked easy—by a small vertical iron ladder, fastened to the wall outside of the ball-room, and perhaps twelve feet high. The twelve feet looked short from below, but they were difficult to climb. I gathered my silk gown around me, and succeeded finally in making the top of the ladder.

Once there, however, I was completely out of breath. I sat down, my feet on the top rung, and put my hair pins in more securely, while the wind bellowed my dressing-gown out like a sail. I had torn a great strip of the silk loose, and now I ruthlessly finished the destruction of my gown by jerking it free and tying it around my head.

From far below the smallest sounds came up with peculiar distinctness. I could hear the paper boy whistling down the drive, and I heard something else. I heard the thud of a stone, and a spit, followed by a long and startled meiou from Beulah. I forgot my fear of a height, and advanced boldly almost to the edge of the roof.

It was half-past six by that time, and growing dusk.

“You boy, down there!” I called.

The paper boy turned and looked around. Then, seeing nobody, he raised his eyes. It was a moment before he located me: when he did, he stood for one moment as if paralyzed, then he gave a horrible yell, and dropping his papers, bolted across the lawn to the road without stopping to look around. Once he fell, and his impetus was so great that he turned an involuntary somersault. He was up and off again without any perceptible pause, and he leaped the hedge—which I am sure under ordinary stress would have been a feat for a man.

I am glad in this way to settle the Gray Lady story, which is still a choice morsel in Casanova. I believe the moral deduced by the village was that it is always unlucky to throw a stone at a black cat.

With Johnny Sweeny a cloud of dust down the road, and the dinner-hour approaching, I hurried on with my investigations. Luckily, the roof was flat, and I was able to go over every inch of it. But the result was disappointing; no trap-door revealed itself, no glass window; nothing but a couple of pipes two inches across, and standing perhaps eighteen inches high and three feet apart, with a cap to prevent rain from entering and raised to permit the passage of air. I picked up a pebble from the roof and dropped it down, listening with my ear at one of the pipes. I could hear it strike on something with a sharp, metallic sound, but it was impossible for me to tell how far it had gone.

I gave up finally and went down the ladder again, getting in through the ball-room window without being observed. I went back at once to the trunk-room, and, sitting down on a box, I gave my mind, as consistently as I could, to the problem before me. If the pipes in the roof were ventilators to the secret room, and there was no trap-door above, the entrance was probably in one of the two rooms between which it lay—unless, indeed, the room had been built, and the opening then closed with a brick and mortar wall.

The mantel fascinated me. Made of wood and carved, the more I looked the more I wondered that I had not noticed before the absurdity of such a mantel in such a place. It was covered with scrolls and panels, and finally, by the merest accident, I pushed one of the panels to the side. It moved easily, revealing a small brass knob.

It is not necessary to detail the fluctuations of hope and despair, and not a little fear of what lay beyond, with which I twisted and turned the knob. It moved, but nothing seemed to happen, and then I discovered the trouble. I pushed the knob vigorously to one side, and the whole mantel swung loose from the wall almost a foot, revealing a cavernous space beyond.

I took a long breath, closed the door from the trunk-room into the hall—thank Heaven, I did not lock it—and pulling the mantel-door wide open, I stepped into the chimney-room. I had time to get a hazy view of a small portable safe, a common wooden table and a chair—then the mantel door swung to, and clicked behind me. I stood quite still for a moment, in the darkness, unable to comprehend what had happened. Then I turned and beat furiously at the door with my fists. It was closed and locked again, and my fingers in the darkness slid over a smooth wooden surface without a sign of a knob.

I was furiously angry—at myself, at the mantel door, at everything. I did not fear suffocation; before the thought had come to me I had already seen a gleam of light from the two small ventilating pipes in the roof. They supplied air, but nothing else. The room itself was shrouded in blackness.

I sat down in the stiff-backed chair and tried to remember how many days one could live without food and water. When that grew monotonous and rather painful, I got up and, according to the time-honored rule for people shut in unknown and ink-black prisons, I felt my way around—it was small enough, goodness knows. I felt nothing but a splintery surface of boards, and in endeavoring to get back to the chair, something struck me full in the face, and fell with the noise of a thousand explosions to the ground. When I had gathered up my nerves again, I found it had been the bulb of a swinging electric light, and that had it not been for the accident, I might have starved to death in an illuminated sepulcher.

I must have dozed off. I am sure I did not faint. I was never more composed in my life. I remember planning, if I were not discovered, who would have my things. I knew Liddy would want my heliotrope poplin, and she’s a fright in lavender. Once or twice I heard mice in the partitions, and so I sat on the table, with my feet on the chair. I imagined I could hear the search going on through the house, and once some one came into the trunk-room; I could distinctly hear footsteps.

“In the chimney! In the chimney!” I called with all my might, and was rewarded by a piercing shriek from Liddy and the slam of the trunk-room door.

I felt easier after that, although the room was oppressively hot and enervating. I had no doubt the search for me would now come in the right direction, and after a little, I dropped into a doze. How long I slept I do not know.

It must have been several hours, for I had been tired from a busy day, and I wakened stiff from my awkward position. I could not remember where I was for a few minutes, and my head felt heavy and congested. Gradually I roused to my surroundings, and to the fact that in spite of the ventilators, the air was bad and growing worse. I was breathing long, gasping respirations, and my face was damp and clammy. I must have been there a long time, and the searchers were probably hunting outside the house, dredging the creek, or beating the woodland. I knew that another hour or two would find me unconscious, and with my inability to cry out would go my only chance of rescue. It was the combination of bad air and heat, probably, for some inadequate ventilation was coming through the pipes. I tried to retain my consciousness by walking the length of the room and back, over and over, but I had not the strength to keep it up, so I sat down on the table again, my back against the wall.

The house was very still. Once my straining ears seemed to catch a footfall beneath me, possibly in my own room. I groped for the chair from the table, and pounded with it frantically on the floor. But nothing happened: I realized bitterly that if the sound was heard at all, no doubt it was classed with the other rappings that had so alarmed us recently.

It was impossible to judge the flight of time. I measured five minutes by counting my pulse, allowing seventy-two beats to the minute. But it took eternities, and toward the last I found it hard to count; my head was confused.

And then—I heard sounds from below me, in the house. There was a peculiar throbbing, vibrating noise that I felt rather than heard, much like the pulsing beat of fire engines in the city. For one awful moment I thought the house was on fire, and every drop of blood in my body gathered around my heart; then I knew. It was the engine of the automobile, and Halsey had come back. Hope sprang up afresh. Halsey’s clear head and Gertrude’s intuition might do what Liddy’s hysteria and three detectives had failed in.

After a time I thought I had been right. There was certainly something going on down below; doors were slamming, people were hurrying through the halls, and certain high notes of excited voices penetrated to me shrilly. I hoped they were coming closer, but after a time the sounds died away below, and I was left to the silence and heat, to the weight of the darkness, to the oppression of walls that seemed to close in on me and stifle me.

The first warning I had was a stealthy fumbling at the lock of the mantel-door. With my mouth open to scream, I stopped. Perhaps the situation had rendered me acute, perhaps it was instinctive. Whatever it was, I sat without moving, and some one outside, in absolute stillness, ran his fingers over the carving of the mantel and—found the panel.

Now the sounds below redoubled: from the clatter and jarring I knew that several people were running up the stairs, and as the sounds approached, I could even hear what they said.

“Watch the end staircases!” Jamieson was shouting. “Damnation— there’s no light here!” And then a second later. “All together now. One—two—three—”

The door into the trunk-room had been locked from the inside. At the second that it gave, opening against the wall with a crash and evidently tumbling somebody into the room, the stealthy fingers beyond the mantel-door gave the knob the proper impetus, and—the door swung open, and closed again. Only—and Liddy always screams and puts her fingers in her ears at this point— only now I was not alone in the chimney room. There was some one else in the darkness, some one who breathed hard, and who was so close I could have touched him with my hand.

I was in a paralysis of terror. Outside there were excited voices and incredulous oaths. The trunks were being jerked around in a frantic search, the windows were thrown open, only to show a sheer drop of forty feet. And the man in the room with me leaned against the mantel-door and listened. His pursuers were plainly baffled: I heard him draw a long breath, and turn to grope his way through the blackness. Then—he touched my hand, cold, clammy, death-like.

A hand in an empty room! He drew in his breath, the sharp intaking of horror that fills lungs suddenly collapsed. Beyond jerking his hand away instantly, he made no movement. I think absolute terror had him by the throat. Then he stepped back, without turning, retreating foot by foot from The Dread in the corner, and I do not think he breathed.

Then, with the relief of space between us, I screamed, ear-splittingly, madly, and they heard me outside.

“In the chimney!” I shrieked. “Behind the mantel! The mantel!”

With an oath the figure hurled itself across the room at me, and I screamed again. In his blind fury he had missed me; I heard him strike the wall. That one time I eluded him; I was across the room, and I had got the chair. He stood for a second, listening, then—he made another rush, and I struck out with my weapon. I think it stunned him, for I had a second’s respite when I could hear him breathing, and some one shouted outside:

“We—Can’t—get—in. How—does—it—open?”

But the man in the room had changed his tactics. I knew he was creeping on me, inch by inch, and I could not tell from where. And then—he caught me. He held his hand over my mouth, and I bit him. I was helpless, strangling,—and some one was trying to break in the mantel from outside. It began to yield somewhere, for a thin wedge of yellowish light was reflected on the opposite wall. When he saw that, my assailant dropped me with a curse; then—the opposite wall swung open noiselessly, closed again without a sound, and I was alone. The intruder was gone.

“In the next room!” I called wildly. “The next room!” But the sound of blows on the mantel drowned my voice. By the time I had made them understand, a couple of minutes had elapsed. The pursuit was taken up then, by all except Alex, who was determined to liberate me. When I stepped out into the trunk-room, a free woman again, I could hear the chase far below.

I must say, for all Alex’s anxiety to set me free, he paid little enough attention to my plight. He jumped through the opening into the secret room, and picked up the portable safe.

“I am going to put this in Mr. Halsey’s room, Miss Innes,” he said, “and I shall send one of the detectives to guard it.”

I hardly heard him. I wanted to laugh and cry in the same breath—to crawl into bed and have a cup of tea, and scold Liddy, and do any of the thousand natural things that I had never expected to do again. And the air! The touch of the cool night air on my face!

As Alex and I reached the second floor, Mr. Jamieson met us. He was grave and quiet, and he nodded comprehendingly when he saw the safe.

“Will you come with me for a moment, Miss Innes?” he asked soberly, and on my assenting, he led the way to the east wing. There were lights moving around below, and some of the maids were standing gaping down. They screamed when they saw me, and drew back to let me pass. There was a sort of hush over the scene; Alex, behind me, muttered something I could not hear, and brushed past me without ceremony. Then I realized that a man was lying doubled up at the foot of the staircase, and that Alex was stooping over him.

As I came slowly down, Winters stepped back, and Alex straightened himself, looking at me across the body with impenetrable eyes. In his hand he held a shaggy gray wig, and before me on the floor lay the man whose headstone stood in Casanova churchyard—Paul Armstrong.

Winters told the story in a dozen words. In his headlong flight down the circular staircase, with Winters just behind, Paul Armstrong had pitched forward violently, struck his head against the door to the east veranda, and probably broken his neck. He had died as Winters reached him.

As the detective finished, I saw Halsey, pale and shaken, in the card-room doorway, and for the first time that night I lost my self-control. I put my arms around my boy, and for a moment he had to support me. A second later, over Halsey’s shoulder, I saw something that turned my emotion into other channels, for, behind him, in the shadowy card-room, were Gertrude and Alex, the gardener, and—there is no use mincing matters—he was kissing her!

I was unable to speak. Twice I opened my mouth: then I turned Halsey around and pointed. They were quite unconscious of us; her head was on his shoulder, his face against her hair. As it happened, it was Mr. Jamieson who broke up the tableau.

He stepped over to Alex and touched him on the arm.

“And now,” he said quietly, “how long are you and I to play OUR little comedy, Mr. Bailey?”

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE ODDS AND ENDS

Of Doctor Walker’s sensational escape that night to South America, of the recovery of over a million dollars in cash and securities in the safe from the chimney room—the papers have kept the public well informed. Of my share in discovering the secret chamber they have been singularly silent. The inner history has never been told. Mr. Jamieson got all kinds of credit, and some of it he deserved, but if Jack Bailey, as Alex, had not traced Halsey and insisted on the disinterring of Paul Armstrong’s casket, if he had not suspected the truth from the start, where would the detective have been?

When Halsey learned the truth, he insisted on going the next morning, weak as he was, to Louise, and by night she was at Sunnyside, under Gertrude’s particular care, while her mother had gone to Barbara Fitzhugh’s.

What Halsey said to Mrs. Armstrong I never knew, but that he was considerate and chivalrous I feel confident. It was Halsey’s way always with women.

He and Louise had no conversation together until that night. Gertrude and Alex—I mean Jack—had gone for a walk, although it was nine o’clock, and anybody but a pair of young geese would have known that dew was falling, and that it is next to impossible to get rid of a summer cold.

At half after nine, growing weary of my own company, I went downstairs to find the young people. At the door of the living-room I paused. Gertrude and Jack had returned and were there, sitting together on a divan, with only one lamp lighted. They did not see or hear me, and I beat a hasty retreat to the library. But here again I was driven back. Louise was sitting in a deep chair, looking the happiest I had ever seen her, with Halsey on the arm of the chair, holding her close.

It was no place for an elderly spinster. I retired to my upstairs sitting-room and got out Eliza Klinefelter’s lavender slippers. Ah, well, the foster motherhood would soon have to be put away in camphor again.

The next day, by degrees, I got the whole story.

Paul Armstrong had a besetting evil—the love of money. Common enough, but he loved money, not for what it would buy, but for its own sake. An examination of the books showed no irregularities in the past year since John had been cashier, but before that, in the time of Anderson, the old cashier, who had died, much strange juggling had been done with the records. The railroad in New Mexico had apparently drained the banker’s private fortune, and he determined to retrieve it by one stroke. This was nothing less than the looting of the bank’s securities, turning them into money, and making his escape.

But the law has long arms. Paul Armstrong evidently studied the situation carefully. Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian, so the only safe defaulter is a dead defaulter. He decided to die, to all appearances, and when the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to enjoy his money almost anywhere he wished.

The first necessity was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker was suggested by his love for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead banker. What was simpler?

The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped. What she only suspected, what she really knew, we never learned. She was a chambermaid in the hotel at C—, and it was evidently her intention to blackmail Doctor Walker. His position at that time was uncomfortable: to pay the woman to keep quiet would be confession. He denied the whole thing, and she went to Halsey.

It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he disappeared. He accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the lawn, had said something cruel to Louise. Then, furious at her apparent connivance, he had started for the station. Doctor Walker and Paul Armstrong—the latter still lame where I had shot him—hurried across to the embankment, certain only of one thing. Halsey must not tell the detective what he suspected until the money had been removed from the chimney-room. They stepped into the road in front of the car to stop it, and fate played into their hands. The car struck the train, and they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the road. This they did as I have told. For three days Halsey lay in the box car, tied hand and foot, suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at times, and discovered by a tramp at Johnsville only in time to save his life.

To go back to Paul Armstrong. At the last moment his plans had been frustrated. Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney-room, had been rented without his knowledge! Attempts to dislodge me having failed, he was driven to breaking into his own house. The ladder in the chute, the burning of the stable and the entrance through the card-room window—all were in the course of a desperate attempt to get into the chimney-room.

Louise and her mother had, from the first, been the great stumbling-blocks. The plan had been to send Louise away until it was too late for her to interfere, but she came back to the hotel at C— just at the wrong time. There was a terrible scene. The girl was told that something of the kind was necessary, that the bank was about to close and her stepfather would either avoid arrest and disgrace in this way, or kill himself. Fanny Armstrong was a weakling, but Louise was more difficult to manage. She had no love for her stepfather, but her devotion to her mother was entire, self-sacrificing. Forced into acquiescence by her mother’s appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the girl consented and fled.

From somewhere in Colorado she sent an anonymous telegram to Jack Bailey at the Traders’ Bank. Trapped as she was, she did not want to see an innocent man arrested. The telegram, received on Thursday, had sent the cashier to the bank that night in a frenzy.

Louise arrived at Sunnyside and found the house rented. Not knowing what to do, she sent for Arnold at the Greenwood Club, and told him a little, not all. She told him that there was something wrong, and that the bank was about to close. That his father was responsible. Of the conspiracy she said nothing. To her surprise, Arnold already knew, through Bailey that night, that things were not right. Moreover, he suspected what Louise did not, that the money was hidden at Sunnyside. He had a scrap of paper that indicated a concealed room somewhere.

His inherited cupidity was aroused. Eager to get Halsey and Jack Bailey out of the house, he went up to the east entry, and in the billiard-room gave the cashier what he had refused earlier in the evening—the address of Paul Armstrong in California and a telegram which had been forwarded to the club for Bailey, from Doctor Walker. It was in response to one Bailey had sent, and it said that Paul Armstrong was very ill.

Bailey was almost desperate. He decided to go west and find Paul Armstrong, and to force him to disgorge. But the catastrophe at the bank occurred sooner than he had expected. On the moment of starting west, at Andrews Station, where Mr. Jamieson had located the car, he read that the bank had closed, and, going back, surrendered himself.

John Bailey had known Paul Armstrong intimately. He did not believe that the money was gone; in fact, it was hardly possible in the interval since the securities had been taken. Where was it? And from some chance remark let fall some months earlier by Arnold Armstrong at a dinner, Bailey felt sure there was a hidden room at Sunnyside. He tried to see the architect of the building, but, like the contractor, if he knew of the such a room he refused any information. It was Halsey’s idea that John Bailey come to the house as a gardener, and pursue his investigations as he could. His smooth upper lip had been sufficient disguise, with his change of clothes, and a hair-cut by a country barber.

So it was Alex, Jack Bailey, who had been our ghost. Not only had he alarmed—Louise and himself, he admitted—on the circular staircase, but he had dug the hole in the trunk-room wall, and later sent Eliza into hysteria. The note Liddy had found in Gertrude’s scrap-basket was from him, and it was he who had startled me into unconsciousness by the clothes chute, and, with Gertrude’s help, had carried me to Louise’s room. Gertrude, I learned, had watched all night beside me, in an extremity of anxiety about me.

That old Thomas had seen his master, and thought he had seen the Sunnyside ghost, there could be no doubt. Of that story of Thomas’, about seeing Jack Bailey in the footpath between the club and Sunnyside, the night Liddy and I heard the noise on the circular staircase—that, too, was right. On the night before Arnold Armstrong was murdered, Jack Bailey had made his first attempt to search for the secret room. He secured Arnold’s keys from his room at the club and got into the house, armed with a golf-stick for sounding the walls. He ran against the hamper at the head of the stairs, caught his cuff-link in it, and dropped the golf-stick with a crash. He was glad enough to get away without an alarm being raised, and he took the “owl” train to town.

The oddest thing to me was that Mr. Jamieson had known for some time that Alex was Jack Bailey. But the face of the pseudo-gardener was very queer indeed, when that night, in the card-room, the detective turned to him and said: