DORIS LANE followed him with her admiring gaze, noting how lightly he bore the invalid and with what tenderness he overrode Creede’s petulant remonstrances.
“Yes,” said Miss Gregg, as though answering a question voiced by her niece. “Yes, he is splendidly strong. And he’s gentle, too. A splendid combination—for a husband. I mean, for one’s own husband. It is thrown away, in another woman’s.”
“I don’t understand you at all,” rebuffed Doris.
“No? Well, who am I, to scold you for denying it, just after my longwinded lecture on the virtues of lying?”
“Auntie,” said the girl, speaking in feverish haste in her eagerness to shift the subject, “have you any idea at all who committed the robberies? Have you?”
“Yes,” returned the old lady, with no hesitation at all. “I know perfectly well who did it.”
“I haven’t an atom of doubt. It was Osmun Creede.”
“Why, Auntie, it couldn’t have been! It couldn’t!”
“I know that. I know it as well as you. Just the same, I believe he did.”
“But he wasn’t even here!” urged the girl. “You heard what he said about having dined at the Country Club, and that a dozen people there could prove it.”
“Yes,” assented Miss Gregg. “I heard him.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“Yes. I believe him implicitly. For nobody would want to testify in Osmun Creede’s behalf who didn’t have to. He knows that as well as we do. So if he says a dozen people can prove he was there, he’s telling the truth. He’d like nothing better than to bother those people into admitting they saw him there. Especially if they could send him to jail by denying it. Oh, he was there, fast enough, at the Country Club while the rooms here were being looted. I believe that.”
“Then how could he have done the robbing?” insisted the girl, sore perplexed.
“I don’t know,” admitted her aunt. “In fact, I suppose he couldn’t. But I’m equally certain he did.”
“But what makes you think so?”
“What makes me know so?” amended Miss Gregg. “You’re a woman. And yet you ask that! Are you too young to have the womanly vice of intuition—the freak faculty that tells you a thing is true, even when you know it can’t be? Osmun Creede stole our jewelry. I know it, for a number of reasons. The first and greatest reason is because I don’t like Osmun Creede. The second and next greatest reason is that Osmun Creede doesn’t like me. A third reason is that there’s positively nothing too contemptible for Osmun Creede to do. He cumbers the earth! I do wish some one would put him out of our way. Take my word, he stole—”
“Isn’t that rather ridiculous?” gravely asked Doris, from the lofty wisdom of twenty-two years.
“Of course it is. Most real things are. Is it half as ridiculous as for Thaxton Vail to have the stolen Argyle watch in his pocket when it couldn’t possibly be there? Is it?”
“I—I can’t understand that, myself,” confessed Doris. “But—”
“But you know it’s somehow all right? Because you trust Thax. Precisely. Well, I can’t understand how Oz Creede could have committed the robberies when he wasn’t here. But I know he did. Because I distrust him. If it comes down to logic, mine is as good as yours.”
“But,” urged Doris, giving up the unequal struggle, “why should he do such a thing? He is well off. He doesn’t need the things that were stolen. That was your argument to prove Thax didn’t steal them. Besides, with all the horrid things about him, nobody’s ever had reason to doubt that Osmun is as honest as the day.”
“Honest as the day!” scoffed Miss Gregg. “You’re like every one else. You get your similes from books written by people who don’t know any more than you do. ‘Honest as the day?’ Do you know that only four days, out of three hundred and sixty-five, are honest? On the four solstices the time of day agrees absolutely with the sun. And on not one other day of them all. Then a day promises to be lovely and fair, and it lures one out into it in clothes that will run and with no umbrella. Up comes a rain, as soon as one is far enough from home to get nicely caught in it. ‘Honest as the day!’ The average day is an unmitigated swindler! Why—”
The return of Vail and Chase from their task of getting Clive to bed interrupted the homily.
“He seems all right now,” reported Willis. “He’s terribly broken up, though, at having fainted. And he’s as ashamed as if he’d been caught stealing pennies from a blind beggar.”
“He needn’t be,” snapped Miss Gregg. “If I’d had to be Oz Creede’s twin brother as long a time as Clive has, I’d be too inured to feel shame for anything short of burning an orphanage. Just the same, he’s a dear boy, Clive is. I like the way he came to the front, this evening, when—”
“We’ve been clear through the house, from cellar to garret,” announced the chief, from the doorway. “And we’ve been all around it from the outside with flashlights. Not a clue.”
“Behold an honest cop!” approved Chase. “One who’ll admit he hasn’t a dozen mysterious clues up his sleeve! It’s a record!”
“I’m going back to the station now,” resumed Quimby, ignoring him, “to write my report. There’s nothing more I can do to-night. I’ll be around, of course, the first thing in the morning. I’ve thrown the fear of the Lord into the whole staff of servants. They won’t dare budge till I get back. No danger of one of them confusing things by leaving on the sly.”
Vail followed the two officers to the front door and watched them climb into their rattling car and make off down the drive. As they disappeared, he wished he had asked the chief to leave his man on guard outside the house for the night.
The mystery of the thefts and the evening’s later complications had gotten on Vail’s nerves. If the supposedly secure rooms could be plundered by a mysterious robber when a score of people were awake, in and around the building, could not the same robber return to complete his work when all the house should be sleeping and unguarded?
Thaxton’s worries found themselves centering about Doris Lane. If the intruder should alarm her at dead of night—!
“Mac,” he said under his breath to the collie standing at his side on the veranda. “You’re going to do real guard duty to-night. I’m going to post you at the foot of the stairs, and there I want you to stay. No comfy snoring on the front door mat this time. You’ll lie at the foot of the stairs where you can catch every sound and where you can block any one who may try to go up or down. Understand that, old boy?”
Macduff did not understand. All he knew was that Vail was talking to him and that some sort of response was in order. Wherefore the collie wagged his plumed tail very emphatically indeed and thrust his cold nose affectionately into Thaxton’s cupped hand.
Vail turned back into the house, Macduff at his heels. He locked the front door, preparatory to making a personal inspection of every ground floor door and window. As he entered the front hall he encountered Doris Lane.
The girl had left her aunt in the living room, listening with scant patience to a ramblingly told theory of Chase’s as to how best the stolen goods might be traced. Doris had slipped away to bed, leaving them there. She was very tired and her nerves were not at their best. The evening had been an ordeal for her—severe and prolonged.
“Going to turn in?” asked Vail as they met.
“Yes,” she made listless reply. “I’m a bit done up. I didn’t realize it till a minute ago. Good night.”
“Excuse me,” he said uncomfortably, “but have you and Miss Gregg got a gun of any sort with you in your luggage?”
“Why, no,” she said. “We don’t own such a thing between us. Auntie won’t have a pistol in the house. It’s a whim of hers.”
“So you go unprotected, just for a woman’s whim?”
“You don’t know Aunt Hester. She is a woman of iron whim,” said Doris with tired flippancy. “So we live weaponless. We—”
“Then—just as a favor to a crotchety host whose own nerves are jumpy on your account—won’t you take this upstairs with you and keep it handy, alongside your bed? Please do.”
He had gone to the Sheraton lowboy which did duty as a hall table. From the bottom of one of its drawers he took a small-caliber revolver.
“I keep this here as a balm to Horoson’s feelings,” he explained. “Out in the hills, like this, she’s always quite certain we’ll be attacked some day by brigands or Black Handers or some other equally mythical foes. And it comforts her to know there’s a pistol in the hall. Take it, please.”
“What nonsense!” she laughed—and there was a tinge of nerve-fatigue in the laugh. “Of course I shan’t take it. Why should I?”
“Just to please me, if there’s no better reason,” he begged.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to think up some better reason,” she said stubbornly. “I refuse to make myself ludicrous by carrying an arsenal to bed, to please you or any one else, Thax. If you’re really timid I suggest you cling to the pistol, yourself.”
It was a catty thing to say; and she knew it was, before the words were fairly spoken. But she was weary. And, perversely, she resented and punished her own thrill of happiness that Vail should be so concerned for her safety.
The man flushed. But he set his lips and said nothing. Dropping the pistol back into the open drawer, he prepared to join the two others in the library. But the nerve-exhausted girl was vexed at his failure to resent her slur. And, like an over-tired child, she turned pettish.
“I’m sure you’ll be safe,” she said, in affected jocosity, “if you’ll push your bed and your chiffonier against your door and see that all your bedroom windows are fast locked. Or you might room with Willis Chase. He has plenty of pluck. He’ll protect you.”
Unexpectedly Vail went up to her and took tight hold of both her hands, resisting her peevish efforts to pull them free.
“Listen to me,” he said in a maddeningly parental fashion. “You’re a naughty and disagreeable and cross little girl, and you ought to have your fingers spatted and be stood in a corner. I’m ashamed of you. Now run off to bed before you say anything else cranky; you—you bad kid!”
She fought to jerk her hands away from his exasperatingly paternal hold. In doing so she bruised one of her fingers against the seal ring he wore. The hurt completed the wreck of her self-control which humiliation had undermined.
“Let go of my hands!” she stormed. “You haven’t proved to-night that your own are any too clean.”
On the instant he dropped her fingers as if they were white hot. His face went scarlet, then gray.
“Oh!” she stammered, in belated horror of what she had said. “Oh, I didn’t mean that! Thax, honestly I didn’t! I—”
Miss Gregg and Chase came out into the hall as she was still speaking—as she was still looking appealingly up into the hurt face of the man she had affronted so grievously.
“Come, dear!” hailed the old lady. “It’s almost as late as it ever gets to be. Let’s go to bed.”
“Good night,” said Thaxton, stiffly, ignoring Doris’s eyes and setting off on his round of the windows.
Doris lagged a step after her aunt. Willis Chase made as though to speak lightly to her. Then he caught the look on her remorseful face, glanced quickly toward the back of the departing Vail, and, with a hasty good night to her, made his way upstairs. On the landing he turned and called back to Thaxton:
“If I can’t live through the horrors of the magenta room to-night, Thax, I hope they send you to the hoosgow, as contributory cause. Me, I wouldn’t even coop up Oz Creede in a room like that.”
Vail made no reply. Stolidly he continued to lock window after window, Macduff pacing along behind him with an air of much importance. Doris Lane took an impulsive step to follow him. But Chase was still leaning over the banisters, above, chanting his plaint about the magenta room. So she sighed and went up to bed.
Less than five minutes later, when Thaxton returned to the hallway, his guests had all retired. There was an odd air of desolation and gloom about the usually homelike hall. Vail stood there a moment, musing. Then, subconsciously, he noted that the lowboy drawer still stood open. In absentminded fashion he went over to close it.
He paused for a moment or so, with his hand on the open drawer.
“Mac,” he muttered, his other hand on the collie’s head, “she didn’t mean that. She didn’t mean it, Mac. And I’m a fool to let it get past my guard and sting so deep. She was worn out and nervous. We won’t let it hurt us, will we, Mac? Still I wish she’d taken the gun. So far as I know it’s the only real weapon of any kind in the house. And if there’s danger, I wish she had it beside her. I—I wonder if I should carry it upstairs and knock at the door. Perhaps I could coax Miss Gregg to take it, Mac. What do you think?”
Putting his disjointed words into action, Vail fumbled in the drawer for the pistol.
It was not there.
He yanked the drawer wider open and groped among its heterogeneous contents. Then impatiently he began tossing those contents to the floor. A pair of crumpled and stained riding gauntlets, an old silk cap, wadded into a corner, a dog-leash without a snapper, odds and ends of string, a muffler, a pack of dog-eared cards, a broken box of cartridges. But no pistol.
The revolver was gone, unmistakably gone—taken from its hiding place, during the past five minutes.
Thaxton went through his pockets on the bare chance he might have stuck the pistol into one of them, although he remembered with entire clearness that he had dropped it back into the drawer.
Subconsciously, the thought of weapons lingered in his mind. He felt in his hip pocket for the big army knife. It was not there.
Then he remembered the use it had been put to in drawing the cork of the vial of smelling salts. And he went back into the living room, on the chance he might have left the knife lying on floor or table. But he could not find it.
“Mac,” he confided to the collie—for, like many lonely men, he had grown to talk sometimes to his dog as if to a fellow-human—“Mac, all this doesn’t make any kind of a hit with us, does it? Up to to-day this was the dearest old house on earth. Since this afternoon it’s haunted. That gun, for instance! The front door was locked, Mac. Nobody could have come in from the kitchen quarters, for the baize door is bolted. Nobody could have gotten into the house, this past five minutes. And every one in the house except you and me has gone to bed, Mac. Yet some one has frisked my gun out of that drawer. And the big knife seems to have melted, too. What’s the answer, Mac?”
Naturally the collie, as usual, did not understand the sense of one word in twenty. Yet the frequent repetitions of his own name made him wag his plumed tail violently. And the subnote of worried unhappiness in Thaxton’s voice made him look up in quick solicitude into the man’s clouded face. For dogs read the voice as accurately as humans read print.
Thaxton petted the classic head, spoke a pleasant word to the collie and then switched off all the lights except one burner in the front of the hall and a reading lamp in his study across from the dining room. After which he bade Macduff lie down at the foot of the stairs and to remain there.
Up the steps Vail made his way. At his own room he paused. Then with a half-smile he went along the corridor to a door at the far end of an ell. He knocked lightly at this.
“Come in!” grumbled Willis Chase.
Vail obeyed the summons, entering the stuffy little magenta room with its kitchen smell and its slanting low ceiling pierced by a single tiny window. Chase had thrown off coat and waistcoat and his tight boots. He had thrust his feet luxuriously into a pair of loose tennis shoes he had worn during their muddy tramp that afternoon. He was adding to the room’s breathlessness by smoking a cigarette as he riffled the leaves of a magazine he had taken from his bag.
“What’s up?” he asked as his host came in.
“I think you’ve had a big enough dose of medicine,” said Vail. “You needn’t sleep in this hole of a clothes-closet. Take my bedroom for the night. To-morrow I’ll have Horoson fix a decent room for you. Scratch your night things together. Never mind about moving all your luggage. That can wait till morning.”
“I’m to share your room with you, eh?” asked Chase ungratefully. “Thanks, I’ll stay in this dump here. I’d as soon share a bed with a scratching collie pup as with another man. You’d snore and you’d kick about and—”
“Probably I should,” admitted Thaxton. “But I shan’t. Because I shan’t be there. I didn’t ask you to share my room but to take it. I’m bunking in my study for the night.”
“To give me a chance to sleep in a real room? That’s true repentance. I can almost forgive you for the time you’ve made me stay in this magenta chamber of horrors. But just the same I’m not going to turn you out of your own pleasant quarters. I’ll swap, if you like, and let you have this highly desirable magenta room. Then your nose will tell you what we’re going to have for breakfast before the rest of us are awake.”
“I say I’m going to bunk on the leather couch in my study,” insisted Vail. “There are a whole lot of things I don’t like about this evening’s happenings. And I’m going to stand guard—or sleep guard—along with Mac. You know the way to my room. Go over there as soon as you want to. Good night.”
“Hold on!” urged Chase. “Suppose I spell you, on this nocturnal vigil business? We can take turns guarding; if you really think there’s any need. Personally I think it’s a bit like locking the cellar door after the booze is gone. But—”
“No, thanks. No use in both of us losing a full night’s sleep. Take my room, and—”
“Just as you like. I’ve the heart of a lion and the soul of a paladin and the ruthlessness of an income tax man. But all those grand qualities crumple at the chance of getting away from the magenta room for the night. Thanks, a lot. I’d as soon swig homemade hootch as stay a night in this dump. The kind of hootch that people make by recipe and offer to their guests the same evening. They forget rum isn’t built in a day. I—”
“By the way,” interrupted Vail as he started for the door, “you don’t happen to have a pistol, do you?”
Perhaps it was the uncertain light which made him fancy a queer expression flitted swiftly across Willis Chase’s eyes. But, glibly, laughingly, the guest made answer:
“A pistol? Why, of course not! What’d be the sense in packing a gun here in the peaceful Berkshires? Thax, this burglar flurry has made you melodramatic. Good night, old man. Don’t snore too loudly over your sentry duty.”
Vail departed for the study while Chase stuffed an armful of clothes into a handbag and made his way along the dark hall to Thaxton’s bedroom. At the stair-foot Vail all but stumbled over the collie. Then, refusing the dog’s eagerly mute plea to accompany him into the study, he whispered:
“No, no, Mac! Lie down! Stay there on guard! Stay there!”
With a grunt of disappointment Macduff slumped down again at the foot of the stairs. Head between white paws, he lay looking wistfully after the departing man.
The night wore on.
Perhaps half an hour before the first dim gray tinged the sentinel black summit of old South Mountain to northwestward, the deathly silence of the sleeping house was broken by a low whistling cry—a sound not loud enough nor long enough to rouse any slumberer—scarce audible to human ears not tensely listening.
Yet to the keen hearing of Macduff as he drowsed at the stair-foot the sound was vividly distinct. The collie reared himself excitedly to his feet. Then, remembering Thaxton Vail’s stern command to stay there on guard, the dog hesitated. Mute, statuelike, attentive, he stood, his teeth beginning to glint from up-curling lips, his hackles abristle.
Macduff was listening now, listening with all that uncanny perception which lurks in the eardrums of a thoroughbred dog. He whined softly under his breath at what he heard. And he trembled to dash in the direction of the sound. But Vail’s mandate held him where he was.
Presently a new sense allied itself to his hearing. His miraculously keen nostrils flashed to his brain the presence of an odor which would have been imperceptible to any human but which carried its own unmistakable meaning to the thoroughbred collie.
Perhaps, too, there came to him, as sometimes to dogs, a strange perception that was neither sound nor smell nor sight—something no psychologist has ever explained, but which every close student of dogs can verify.
The trembling changed to a shudder. Up went Macduff’s pointed muzzle, skyward. From his shaggy throat issued an unearthly wolf-howl.
Again and again that weird scream rang through the house; banishing sleep and reëchoing in hideous cadences from every nook and corner and rafter. A hundredfold more compelling than any mere fanfare of barking, it shrieked an alarm to every slumbering brain.
In through the open front doorway from the veranda rushed Thaxton Vail.
“Mac!” he cried. “Shut up! What’s the matter?”
For answer the collie danced frantically, peering up the stairway and then beseechingly back at Vail. No dogman could have failed to interpret the plea.
“All right,” vouchsafed Thaxton. “Go!”
Like a furry whirlwind the dog scurried up the stairs into the regions of the house which had been so silent but whence now came the murmur of startledly questioning voices and the slamming of doors.
Forced on by a nameless fear, Vail ran up, three steps at a time, in the dog’s wake. He reached the second floor, just as two or three of his guests, in the sketchiest attire, came stumbling out into the broad upper hall.
At sight of Thaxton on the dim-lit landing they broke into a clamor of questions. For reply Vail pressed the light switch, throwing the black spaces into brilliant illumination. Then his glance fell on Macduff.
The collie had halted his headlong run just outside a door at the head of the hall. At the oaken panels of this he was tearing madly with claws and teeth.
As Vail hurried to him, the dog ceased his frantic efforts; as though aware that the man could open the door more easily than could he. And again he tossed his muzzle aloft, making the house reverberate to that hideously keening wolf-howl.
The hall was full of jabbering and gesticulating people, clad in night clothes. Vail pushed through them to the door at which Mac had clamored. It was the door of Thaxton’s own bedroom. He turned the knob rattlingly. The door was locked. The others crowded close, wildly questioning, getting in one another’s way.
Vail stepped back, colliding with Clive Creede and Joshua Q. Mosely. Then, summoning all his strength, he hurled himself at the door. The stout oak and the old-fashioned lock held firm.
Thaxton stepped back again, his muscular body compact. And a second time he crashed his full weight at the panels. Under the catapult impact the lock snapped.
The door burst open, flinging Vail far into the dense blackness. Clive Creede, close behind him, groped for the light switch just inside the threshold and pressed it, flooding the room with light.
There was an instant of blank hush. Then Mrs. Mosely screamed, shrilly, in mortal terror.