CHAPTER V

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

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

He stood there listening for the sound of retreating footsteps but it was another sound that caught his ear. What he heard was the far off chugging of an automobile engine. He remembered now that the place was on a corner; that he had walked what had seemed miles after turning that corner before he had come to the iron gate. He was thinking rapidly.

This was his one hope. If he could manage to get out to that gate by the time the motor-car reached it, he could get help. How ill the woman upstairs might be he could not guess, but they were both terribly in need of aid. At any cost he must get out to the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then for G.o.d's sake come in here and help me!" Kenwick entreated. "I don't know whose place this is but it ought to be investigated. There's a woman in here who's ill, and somebody has locked her into her room.

I'm not able to do a thing for her or for myself. Do you know what house this is?"

The stranger shook his head. "No, I'm just out here on a visit." Kenwick groaned. There flashed into his mind the stories of some of his friends who had toured California and who were unanimous in their conclusion that everybody in the southern part of the state was merely a visitor.

"But whom do they visit?" Everett Kenwick had once inquired and n.o.body could supply him with an answer.

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

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

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

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

Cold desolation seized Kenwick. But he felt certain that the stranger would return. There was nothing mysterious nor uncanny about him. But how long would he have to wait there on the drenched gravel before help could get back to him? It wouldn't do to catch cold in that leg and add a fever to his other troubles. He must get back into the house. Out there on the bleak road he thought longingly of its warm comfort.

Everything that he had done since he came into it seemed now to have been the wrong thing. A horrible sense of incompetency, the first that he had ever known in all his vivid, effective life, surged over him. And added to this was a curious sense of having lost something. Was it Marcreta Morgan's picture that he missed? He told himself that it was, but he was only half satisfied with this a.s.surance.

Arguing the matter with himself, he had covered half the distance around the driveway when suddenly a sharp reverberation rang through the air.

It was the report of a gun. Almost immediately this was followed by a woman's scream.

Kenwick stood still, balancing himself unsteadily upon his well foot.

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

CHAPTER VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, standing there at that half-open door, Kenwick suddenly lost his headlong impatience. For the realization came to him at last that his experiences of the last twenty-four hours were no casual adventure.

This was a game, perhaps even a trap. He had inadvertently stepped into a carefully laid plot. That it had been obviously prepared for somebody else did not alter the seriousness of his present position. Whoever was engineering the thing had a.s.sumed that he would do and say certain things. And now, he reminded himself angrily, he had probably done and said them all. Certainly his every move had been direct, impetuous, glaringly obvious. He would have to change his course unless he wanted to die in this accursed house. This game, whatever it was, couldn't be won by throwing all the cards face up on the table and demanding a reckoning. The other players wore masks. If he was to have any chance against them he must adopt their tactics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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