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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76059 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE THING
+  IN THE WOODS
+
+
+  BY
+
+  HARPER WILLIAMS
+
+
+
+  Robert McBride & Company
+  New York
+  1924
+
+
+
+
+  Copyright, 1924, by
+  ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
+
+
+  Printed in the
+  United States of America
+
+
+  Published :: 1924
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+  CHAPTER
+
+  I. Lennox Says Good-Bye
+  II. The Light in the Woods
+  III. A Mysterious Call
+  IV. Dutchman's Hill
+  V. The Dead Cyclist
+  VI. A Boycotted Household
+  VII. What Happened in the Laboratory
+  VIII. I Go Fishing
+  IX. Problems
+  X. The Chicken-Huckster's Hoe
+  XI. Jakey Walks
+  XII. Mr. Crowfoot
+  XIII. An Afternoon Drive
+  XIV. The Cry in the Night
+  XV. Suspicions
+  XVI. I Catch a Burglar
+  XVII. A Midnight Chase
+  XVIII. Lennox's Story
+  XIX. The Mill Dam
+  XX. What We Found in the Saw-Mill
+  XXI. The Thing in the Woods
+  XXII. The Silver Bullet
+
+
+
+
+  THE THING
+  IN THE WOODS
+
+
+
+
+THE THING IN THE WOODS
+
+
+
+I
+
+LENNOX SAYS GOOD-BYE
+
+I had just made my rounds of the wards for the last time, that June
+evening, fifteen years ago, when Murchison, my chief, came to me with
+the open letter in his hand.
+
+"Here's the very chance to suit you, Haverill," he said.  "Read that!
+A chap named Lennox, in Pennsylvania, wants a substitute for three
+months.  Small country practice--no work of any account, I
+imagine--and a good holiday thrown in.  Just reached me tonight, by
+chance."
+
+I had finished my term as _interne_, and was leaving the hospital the
+next day.  The whole summer was before me, for after three years of
+heavy work I owed myself one good vacation before settling to the
+task of building up a private practice, and I was glad enough of the
+chance to turn it to advantage.  Every dollar I had saved I had put
+aside for the future struggle, and Murchison knew it.  How to take a
+three months' vacation on next to nothing was no easy problem, and
+only such an opportunity as this, for which I had been searching
+vainly for weeks past, could solve it.
+
+I glanced at the signature below the letter.
+
+"George Lennox....  I used to know a George Lennox at college."
+
+"Probably the same man.  He asks me to recommend some one reliable.
+Funny idea.  He can't have much opinion of his country colleagues, or
+he'd simply hand the patients over.  There can't be so many of them,
+in a place like that.  Rather fussy, I gather!  Well, it might suit
+you.  I thought I'd ask you before I spoke to anyone else."
+
+It suited me so well, in prospect, that I sat down at Murchison's
+desk and wrote off my application then and there.  Lennox's answer
+came promptly, dated from the small town in Pennsylvania where he had
+been settled for the past five years.  Beyond a few details about the
+place, his letter told me very little.  He was leaving for his
+health, to take a three months' holiday abroad, and he wanted a
+substitute as early as possible.  The practice was that of the
+average country doctor in a not over-populous neighbourhood.  It was
+a bracing district, not far from the mountains; there was good
+fishing, and some shooting in the fall, and with the arrangements he
+offered it fell in perfectly with my own plans.  He was urgent that I
+should take over the work as soon as I could, and after a brief
+correspondence I settled up my affairs in the city--they were not
+many--packed my few belongings, and went down.
+
+It was a small and primitive station at which I was deposited, after
+a somewhat uninteresting train journey.  The place struck me, even in
+those days, as a survival of an earlier age; one of those little
+backwaters left behind in the flow of progress.  As I stood looking
+about me at the stretch of dusty road, the hotel, and the few
+clustered shops that marked the beginning of the village street, the
+station-master came up.
+
+"You're for Doctor Lennox, ain't you?" he began.  "His buggy's there
+waitin'.  I reckon Pete's over at the saloon, puttin' in time!  I'll
+step over an' tell him."
+
+I put my valise in the solitary vehicle he indicated, with a smart
+roan mare in the shafts, and a moment later "Pete" appeared, drawing
+a furtive black hand over his mouth.  I addressed him curtly; if he
+was to be my factotum during the next three months there would have
+to be less of these rather free-and-easy ways.  He eyed me civilly,
+with some curiosity, muttering a darkie's invariable ready excuses;
+climbed to the buggy seat, tilting his straw hat over his eyes, and
+we set off.
+
+The village was not large.  It seemed that Lennox's place was some
+mile and a half out, and our road led for the most part through
+woods.  It was pretty country.  The trees were tall and
+close-growing, hickory and oak, with young saplings pushing a sturdy
+growth between.  There were boulders everywhere, the sullen granite
+that in this district crops out through the earth's scant surface,
+making the small farmer's life a perpetual harvest of stone picking.
+To me, fresh from the city pavements, it was picturesque enough.
+Once a hare loped across our path, and I saw Pete shift the reins to
+scrabble in his coat pocket.  He cast a half-sheepish glance at me as
+he did so.
+
+"Have you lost something?" I asked.
+
+"No, sah!  I jest recollected suthin'.  Raikon dat hyar remin' me!"
+
+"Meeting a rabbit is supposed to be lucky, isn't it?" I remarked,
+lighting a cigarette.  "It seems to me I've heard so."
+
+He looked at me suspiciously, and I knew that I had divined correctly
+the reason of that sudden dive.  "Dat so, sah?" he said guilelessly.
+"I 'spect all dem things jes' depend!"
+
+A few yards further the road took a bend.
+
+Along the narrow footpath at the side a girl was walking.  She was
+dressed in a short golf-skirt and cotton blouse, with a man's Panama
+on her head, and from her look I took her for a chance summer visitor
+rather than a resident.  I noticed her only casually, but as the
+buggy drew abreast she lifted her head, and instantly I felt Pete
+swerve against me on the seat.  His clumsy action made the horse
+start.  The girl laughed, a little mocking ripple--I heard her with a
+glow of annoyance--and we shot off at increased pace up the road.
+
+I turned to the man angrily; he had drunk even more than I supposed.
+His face was actually pale, as pale as a darkie's can be.  His hand
+was in his pocket again, and he turned my blame promptly on the horse.
+
+"Yoh clumsy trash, ain' yoh look whar yoh goin' a-skeerin' folks that
+way!  I'se larn yoh suthin' some day!"
+
+"What's the matter with you?" I said.  "Can't you drive steadily?"
+
+He fell to muttering, apologetic, conciliatory.
+
+"'Deed, sah, dat hoss ain' got no sainse!  I done druv dat hoss two
+years, an' I _know_ her, sah!  Dere ain' no hoss round got less
+sainse.  Sho as we met dat hyar I knew there was suthin' boun' ter
+happen!  I ain' got no use fur meetin' hyars in de mawnin'--no, sah!
+I ain' doin' no business wiv 'em!"
+
+We reached Lennox's house without further incident.  It was a grey
+stone house, standing back in a pleasant garden, with barn and small
+orchard adjoining.  Lennox was out on the porch to welcome me.  Pete
+led the mare swiftly round to the side and began to unharness; I
+think he was anxious to escape any possible comment I might make to
+the doctor on his condition.
+
+"Well, so you've got here!" Lennox said as we shook hands.  "I'm very
+glad.  Did you have a tiresome journey?  Come inside.  I'm very glad
+to see you!"
+
+His tone was cordiality itself.  To my ears it had even a note of
+relief.  It struck me instantly, as I looked at him, that he had been
+through some recent stress of worry, if not ill-health.  He had aged
+considerably.  He was older than I, and his hair already a little
+grey at the temples.  His face was lined and troubled, and he had an
+uneasy way with his hands I did not like.  I had known him always as
+a rather steady-going, plodding sort of fellow, not given to excess
+of nervous energy in any form, and his present appearance gave me
+something of a shock.
+
+He led the way into the house.  Dinner was already served.  Lennox
+followed the country custom in dining early.  I don't know how the
+staid elderly woman, who was both cook and housekeeper, and who was
+to fulfil the same offices for me, would take to such an innovation
+as dinner at seven.  I ate well after my journey, Lennox but
+sparingly.  He offered me a high ball with the meal, but drank only
+water himself.
+
+"I've got into country ways," he said.  "I'm afraid you'll find the
+place a bit dull, Haverill, but you'll manage all right.  You can get
+most things you want, down here; the tradespeople aren't bad."
+
+Over our meal we talked chiefly of the University days when we had
+been more or less friends, though Lennox was already a senior when I
+entered, of the men we had mutually known and of their careers, and
+lightly only, of our own.  Lennox was not over-talkative, but he
+seemed more at ease as the day wore on.  I could see he was glad to
+have me definitely there, was anxious to start, but I was not quite
+prepared for his answer when I asked him what day he thought of
+leaving.
+
+"Oh, tomorrow!  I shall get the twelve-thirty to the city.
+Everything is ready."
+
+I suppose I looked rather blank, for I had counted on a couple of
+days at least in his company before I was left alone.
+
+"You'll find everything easy to hand.  I'll go over things with you
+this evening.  It isn't a specially busy place here, you know!"
+
+"And you'll be away three months?" I asked.
+
+"More or less....  My dear fellow, I want a change!  I want it
+frightfully!"  I agreed with him.  His eyes were wandering round the
+room as he spoke.  "The work's nothing here--worse luck!  You'll have
+practically a holiday.  But I'm quite run down.  There've been some
+... some family worries.  What's the matter, Pete?"
+
+The coloured man had come into the room.
+
+"De mare's done got anudder shoe loose.  I 'specs I'll hev to take
+her into town."
+
+"Again?  You should have had it seen to this morning early."  He
+spoke irritably.  "Take her in, and don't be late back!"
+
+"Yessah!"
+
+Pete went out lingeringly, and I more than suspected from his entry
+that he had been listening, or attempting to listen, to our talk.
+
+"That man," I said when he had gone.  "Do you find him all right?"
+
+"Pete?"  Lennox lit a cigar.  "He's invaluable!  You'll find him a
+splendid servant.  He's been with me three years, and I wouldn't part
+with him for a good deal.  He has his faults, as all darkies have,
+but he's thoroughly trustworthy!"
+
+I thought of the furtive groping in his pocket when we passed the
+hare.
+
+"A bit superstitious, eh?"
+
+"What do you mean," Lennox fairly wheeled on me.  "Has he been
+talking?"
+
+"I imagine he carries an assortment of amulets about with him."
+
+"Oh, that!"  He looked vaguely relieved.  "All of 'em do.  He's a
+walking catalogue of superstitions.  It's the only thing we have rows
+about.  I detest all that nonsense!"
+
+"I'll have a talk with him, some day," I said.
+
+"I wouldn't advise you to.  In fact, I wouldn't advise you to
+encourage him on the subject in any way.  I think it's better to
+leave those things alone.  Darkies are darkies, and no power on earth
+would persuade Pete against his rabbit's foot.  No!  Steer clear of
+that, my dear fellow, and you'll find him all right."
+
+We spent the afternoon in the surgery.  Lennox showed me a detailed
+account of his cases--they were very few--in a notebook.  He had
+evidently been at pains that I should find no trouble in taking over
+the work.
+
+"I've left some things in rather a mess," he said.  "I told you I'd
+been upset lately ... but I think you'll find it all right."
+
+Supper was at six.  Pete, true to his word, brought the mare back
+well before dusk.  I could hear him whistling in the coach-house as
+he hung the harness away.
+
+"I suppose you'd find use for a motor-cycle here?" I asked Lennox as
+we sat in the dining-room after supper.  It was barely dark outside,
+but the housekeeper had already drawn the curtains and lighted the
+lamp.  I would have infinitely preferred my pipe on the porch, but if
+Lennox chose to stew indoors this weather it was no business of mine,
+and it would only be forced on me for one evening.
+
+"I used to have one," he said, "but I gave it up.  The roads aren't
+very good here, and I found a horse better.  Did you bring one?"
+
+"It's coming on tomorrow."
+
+"Oh?  Well, you'll suit yourself.  The roads aren't very good at
+night, but the mare is used to them.  Not that I have many night
+calls."
+
+It was a few minutes after that he looked at me suddenly as we sat
+opposite one another across the unlighted hearth.
+
+"I suppose you're fit--in good health and all that.  I didn't ask."
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"That's good.  Never had any nerve trouble, for instance?"
+
+"Not an atom!"
+
+"I'm glad.  It's as well to be sure, you know."  He laughed, rather
+apologetically.  "I was quite lucky to get you."
+
+It seemed that Lennox kept early hours.  It was barely half-past ten
+when he proposed turning in.  The heavy country air had made me
+sleepy, and I was ready enough to follow his lead.
+
+Lennox's room was directly over the surgery, with which it
+communicated by a little staircase, convenient for night calls.  Both
+the surgery and the room above it had been built as a later addition
+to the house.  The bedroom would be mine later; for the present I was
+put into a small extra bedroom across the landing from his own.
+
+I slept heavily, but a little after midnight, as I judged, I was
+roused by hearing movements below stairs.  People were talking; I
+fancied I heard a woman's voice, low and querulous.  Evidently it was
+not a call too urgent to wait for daylight, for a few moments later I
+heard the floor of Lennox's room creak as he returned to bed.  I fell
+asleep again easily, and when I woke the second time it was broad
+daylight.
+
+I asked Lennox at breakfast if there was any fresh call for the day.
+He looked at me narrowly.
+
+"Only the scarlatina case in the village and the woman at the Bend,"
+he said, referring to the two cases he had mentioned the day before.
+"The woman is doing all right, but you might look in during the
+afternoon.  The buggy will be back by one o'clock."
+
+I smoked a pipe out in the orchard while he finished his packing.  No
+one came up the road the whole morning except the baker and a
+travelling tinsmith; Lennox was right when he said I could take my
+work easily.  The house stood in a pretty enough position.  There
+were woods behind and about, skirting the orchard, and in front, on
+the other side of the road, a strip of pasture sloped to a little
+brook.  The nearest dwelling was some two hundred yards away, down
+the road to the village.  It belonged to a small farmer, I learned, a
+Pennsylvania Dutchman, as were most of the people about.
+
+At twelve the mare was hitched and waiting, and Lennox came to bid me
+good-bye, after a few final instructions.  We shook hands, and as he
+climbed into the buggy and took up the reins I don't think I ever saw
+a man's face express more utter and absolute relief.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE LIGHT IN THE WOODS
+
+My first week passed uneventfully.  I was called out twice only, on
+trivial cases, and I put in my spare time exploring the neighbourhood
+generally.  I was jaded with city life, and hospital work in
+particular, and it was a perfect tonic to do nothing.  I was too lazy
+even to fish, though an excellent trout stream ran not far from the
+house, through the woods at the back.  Neighbours were not likely to
+trouble me, nor I them.  So far I had had but little intercourse with
+the people about, except for professional visits and the usual
+country exchange of greetings when I drove into the town for my mail.
+In Lennox's time this task had fallen to Peter, but it was some years
+since I had enjoyed the use of a horse, and I took pleasure in these
+short trips.
+
+The housekeeper was subdued but efficient; she looked after my wants
+methodically enough and rarely offered conversation, which suited me.
+With Peter I got on all right.  As Lennox had said, he was docile,
+willing and capable, and did his work reliably.  He seemed devoted to
+the mare, and would converse with her at great length over the
+morning grooming.
+
+Lennox had a fairly good library.  In ways the house was comfortable
+enough, and I fancy he must have had some small private income in
+addition to the proceeds of his practice.
+
+I had my first tiff with Pete when I had been there nearly a
+fortnight.  Kerosene had given out; the oilman had omitted to call as
+usual, and Mrs. Searle, the housekeeper, only made me aware of the
+deficiency at supper-time.  After the meal I ordered Peter to hitch
+up and drive down to the village to get it.
+
+To my utter amazement he refused almost point-blank to go.  He had a
+lot of work to do; the buggy wasn't washed down yet; the mare hadn't
+finished her feed.  He'd go first thing in the morning.
+
+"Nonsense, Pete," I said.  "The oil's wanted now.  The mare hasn't
+done five miles today, and it'll do her good!  You washed the buggy
+this afternoon, because I saw you."
+
+"Dat so, sah?"  He rubbed his head.  "Yes, I specs dat's so, now I
+think.  I dis-remembered it."
+
+"Then hurry up.  You can be back by eight."
+
+His eyes rolled on me.
+
+"But it done get _dark_ by eight, sah!"
+
+"Well, you can take the carriage lamps!"
+
+"I ain't gwine take no kerridge lamps--no, sah!  All de time I wuk
+fur Doc' Lennox he ain' ask me to do no thing like that--no, sah; an'
+ef he ask me _now_ I ain' gwine do it."
+
+"But you've driven the doctor at night, you fool, time and again!" I
+cried, losing patience with him.  "Don't stand there and tell me
+lies!"
+
+He kept his ground, obstinate, deferential.
+
+"Yessir, I done druv Doc' Lennox.  I ain' sayin' nothin' 'bout that.
+I'se gwine drive you, doctah, ef yoh ask me, but I ain' gwine no
+village affer dark tonight ter git no ker'sine.  I ain' gwine
+monkeyin' wi' no ha'ants, an' I d'want no ha'ants monkeyin' wid _me_!"
+
+That potent darkie word "ha'ants" gave me a clue.  I strode out into
+the kitchen to Mrs. Searle.
+
+"What's this nonsense with Peter?  What is he afraid of?" I asked her.
+
+Mrs. Searle's grey faded eyes rested on me a moment inquisitively.
+Then she went on with her dish-washing.
+
+"I reckon Peter's scared of the dark, sir," she answered civilly.
+"Them niggers is jest like that!  The oil can wait, as well as not.
+There's more'n I thought, or I wouldn't have mentioned it to you."
+
+"It isn't going to wait," I said.  "I'm not going to have this
+absurdity in any house I live in!"
+
+I went back to Pete in the dining-room.  I had left the doors
+purposely open, and I swear he fairly squirmed when he saw me come in.
+
+"Now, Pete," I said.  "You put the mare in at once.  You're going
+after that oil and I'm going with you, if you're such a holy coward
+that you're afraid to drive a mile of road after dark alone!"
+
+If I had hoped to shame him, it was without result.
+
+"All right, sah!" he answered grandly, though I saw the relief in his
+eyes.  "Ef you'se gwine I'se gwine.  Dey ain' no one gwine call _me_
+no cowa'd, doctah!"
+
+He went off to put the mare in, and in ten minutes I heard the grate
+of wheels before the house.  It was already dark outside, but a moon
+was rising, and before we had driven far the carriage lamps were
+scarcely needed.  Pete was subdued; I think he was trying to preserve
+his dignity in silence.  I was tempted to a lecture, but remembered
+what Lennox had said of the futility of trying to combat darkie
+superstition.  I was sure that Pete still carried his beloved rabbit
+foot, and I hope it gave him comfort on the drive.
+
+We reached the village, took in our can of oil, which Pete stowed
+under the buggy seat, and started to drive back.  The moon was full
+overhead now, but obscured more or less by fleeting clouds.  I saw
+Pete glancing several times at the buggy lamps.  Presently he
+slackened the reins a little.
+
+"I reckon we mought put dem out now, sah!  Dey ain' no need er dem
+lamps to see by."
+
+"As you like, Pete.  Get down and put them out.  I'll hold the reins."
+
+"I ain't got no need er gittin' out, sah!  I kin raich 'em from here."
+
+He leaned over the splashboard at some inconvenience and extinguished
+the lamps, it seemed to me with unnecessary alacrity.  I could not
+put his anxiety down altogether to the price of kerosene.
+
+"What's your worry about those lamps, Pete?" I asked.
+
+He turned guileless yet uneasy eyes upon me.
+
+"Dey jest ain' no _sainse_ burnin' 'em!  Dey worry a pusson drivin'
+dem lamps do."
+
+I let it go as one of his unplumbed darkie mysteries, and we drove
+on.  We were just entering upon the densest stretch of wood between
+the house and the village when a curious sound caught my ears.  It
+was like the scrambling rush of some big bird through the trees to
+the left of us; a night-hawk, probably, though the confused
+wing-flaps were more like a turkey-buzzard.  Coming unexpectedly on
+the silence it startled me, but before I could turn to Pete he had
+dropped the reins and flung himself upon me, a frenzied babbling
+lump.  He clung and muttered, while I strove to hold him off, and the
+mare, taking fright at the moment, sent the light buggy rocking from
+side to side on the road.  I gave the man a push that nearly threw
+him out.  Once free of his clutch it was only a moment's work to
+secure the reins, but we shaved a bad accident by the skin of our
+teeth.  Luckily we were not far from the house.  My grip startled
+Pete into sanity--it was at least flesh and blood that had him
+there--and by the time I had pulled the mare to a standstill before
+the gate he was able to get out, shaking still miserably from head to
+foot, and seize the bridle.
+
+Between us we got the mare unharnessed and into the stable.  She was
+in a lather over head and shoulders, and I stood over the cringing
+Pete while he rubbed her down.  I think he never ceased praying the
+whole time.
+
+Whatever the noise was that had frightened him--and I put it down to
+no worse than an owl at the most--it had frightened him thoroughly.
+There was no use attempting reason or rebuke with the abject
+tooth-chattering being that followed me to the house, and I sent him
+to bed with a grim reminder that I would talk to him on the morrow.
+He did not go up immediately, however.  For a long while I heard his
+voice in confabulation with Mrs. Searle in the kitchen, where I did
+not doubt he had made haste to secure every door and window against
+the outside air.
+
+I lit a pipe and threw myself down in an armchair in the surgery,
+where I had been in the habit of spending the last few evenings,
+putting things to rights after my own fashion.  If Pete's
+superstition was going to obsess him to this extent my summer was
+likely to be a lively one!  No bird that ever flew was sufficient to
+justify the extraordinary state into which he had thrown himself.
+Whiskey might be at the root of it, despite Lennox's faith; I had
+kept him under my eye in the village, but I knew that no human
+vigilance is sharp enough to keep a darkle from drink if he has the
+tendency.  The sideboard was usually unlocked, but tomorrow I
+determined to take the key into my own possession.
+
+Wanting something to read, and to lazy to go back into the
+sitting-room, I fell to examining the contents of the surgery
+bookshelves.  There were the usual array of medical books, some new,
+some old; apparently Lennox had kept himself more or less up to date.
+At one end, on the upper shelf, were several volumes on mental
+diseases, "Lunacy and its Causes," Hoffman's "Congenital Insanity,"
+and one or two recent pathological treatises that I knew only by
+title.  There was a well-known medical work on criminology among them
+also, and from their number and disposition, and the several paper
+bookmarks that caught my eye here and there, I judged that this
+particular study must have had some attraction for Lennox.  There was
+nothing, however, that interested me for the moment, or that promised
+cheerful reading.  I had not come down here to dive into works on
+mental disorders or the bound reports of Lunacy Commissions as
+preliminary to passing a healthful holiday, and I fell back on a
+month-old magazine that was lying on the surgery table.
+
+When I had finished it I turned the lamp slightly down and went out
+on the porch, with the idea of trying to locate again the noise that
+had caused such catastrophe that evening.
+
+The woods about were very still; not a leaf moved.  The silence had
+an intensity that was almost oppressive.  Clouds had gathered,
+obscuring the moon, and it was quite dark.
+
+Presently, above the line of the farther tree-tops, a gleam of light
+shot up.  It moved and swept, like a white arm outstretched against a
+black curtain.  So near as I could judge, it came from the direction
+of Sliefer's dam, a point some two miles away, and at first glimpse I
+thought it might be a fire, but the whiteness of it put that out of
+the question.  It had the appearance of a crude searchlight, but it
+was less definite in ray and moved less steadily.  More than anything
+else, it reminded me of those "jackies" that children love to make
+with a bit of prism refracted on a wall.
+
+For several minutes I watched it, then, as suddenly, it was
+extinguished, twitching back into darkness, and I turned and went
+indoors.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A MYSTERIOUS CALL
+
+I had prepared a stern lecture for Pete while I was shaving next
+morning, but I was destined not to give it.  While I was yet in my
+room Mrs. Searle called me from below stairs.
+
+"You're wanted over to the Bend, doctor, for Mr. Lessing."
+
+I finished my dressing quickly and went downstairs.  Coffee was on
+the table.  Mrs. Searle sniffed as she set a cup before me.
+
+"You'd best take something to eat before you start, doctor.  It's a
+two'n-a-half-mile drive.
+
+"Who is this Mr. Lessing?  Did they say what it was for?"
+
+I fancied she looked at me rather curiously.
+
+"He has the new bungalow in the woods there.  It's just before the
+turnin' to Sliefer's dam."
+
+She spoke as though with a reluctance to name either the house or its
+owner, and there flashed across my mind instantly a remembrance of
+the first day Peter had driven me to the Bend, a few clustered
+cottages, hardly enough to be called a village, situated some few
+miles up the road.  We had passed near the house then, just visible
+through the trees, and I had asked him who lived there.  He had
+answered with the same reluctance I traced in Mrs. Searle's reply.
+Evidently this Mr. Lessing had for some reason managed to make
+himself unpopular in the district.
+
+Peter had the buggy ready, and I started off.  The mare was fresher
+than usual this morning, and covered the two and a half miles at a
+brisk pace.
+
+The road ran level for some distance, then dipped to the little
+hollow known as Dutchman's Hollow, where it crossed a shallow stream,
+nearly dry in the summer.  At the top of the hill, when you had
+crossed the stream, was the turning to the new bungalow.
+
+The woods were emerald with early sunlight, and the dew hung heavily
+on brambles and undergrowth.  Birds were everywhere, and I saw a
+Baltimore oriole, a rare flash of black and orange, fly across my
+path as we neared the stream.  Above the marshy space at the foot of
+the hollow many dragon-flies were glancing, jewelled and wonderful,
+and a small spotted turtle flopped from his stone in midstream at the
+near crunch of wheels.
+
+I let the mare take her own pace climbing the hill.  The morning was
+too fine for hurry, even on an unknown errand.  When we reached the
+top a glint of unpainted timber through the trees led me to the left,
+and a few yards up the cross-road I came out on a little clearing in
+which the house stood.
+
+It was an ordinary one-story cottage, newly built, and as yet with no
+attempt at garden or enclosure.  What struck my eye immediately was a
+curious sort of annex, standing near it.  It was a rather high,
+square building, windowless, but with one big skylight like an
+artist's studio.  Yet it had not the look of a studio, and the
+skylight was so raised on four glass sides as to suggest a rude
+attempt at an observatory.
+
+I tied the mare to a sapling in the shade, and went up to the house.
+The front door stood open, and the interior showed the usual
+living-room of a summer cottage.  It was furnished scantily but
+artistically.  There were a few good rugs on the floor, a divan
+heaped with cushions, a piano, and a set of low bookshelves
+supporting a great bronze jar filled with wild-flowers.  There were
+few ornaments about, but those few were chiefly of Eastern origin and
+good of their kind.  It looked a room belonging to people of taste
+rather than wealth.
+
+The divan was so placed in one corner, near a window screened by
+drawn curtains, that it was a full moment before I realized that it
+was occupied.  A man lay there face downward among the tumbled
+cushions, in what seemed the apathy of complete exhaustion.  He was
+clothed only in a suit of thin woolen pyjamas, that showed the
+meagreness of his frame.  He was so thin and slight that he seemed to
+fill scarcely any space on the wide couch.  He was evidently not
+asleep, but he had not turned his head at my entrance--I could see
+only a patch of rumpled dark hair against the pillows--and I crossed
+the room and paused beside him.
+
+"Mr. Lessing...."
+
+He moved, looking at me with petulant, questioning eyes from a face
+that showed every sign of physical and nervous exhaustion.
+
+"Who are you?  I sent for Doctor Lennox."
+
+"My name is Haverill.  I am taking Doctor Lennox's place for a few
+months."
+
+"The devil you are!"  He lifted his head, regarding me again intently
+with those queer dark eyes, the eyes of a boy set in a prematurely
+worn face.  "Then Lennox has bolted!"
+
+"He has gone to Europe for the summer," I said, looking him full in
+the face.  "He told me he needed a change, and I gathered from his
+looks he was pretty overworked.  So I'm afraid you'll have to put up
+with me for a while."
+
+"That's like old Lennox!  I thought he'd do it some day."  He slipped
+back again among the cushions.  "Where are you from?"
+
+I told him.  He repeated the name of the hospital after me
+mechanically.  "I didn't know Lennox had gone when I sent over."
+
+The tone was ungracious, but it was more the ungraciousness of a
+child than a rational being.  I could see that the man's nerves were
+fairly on the raw.  Judging roughly, I should say that he had not
+slept for several nights.  I ignored the hint.
+
+"As I'm here," I said pleasantly, "I might as well look you over,
+don't you think?  What's the trouble?"
+
+For a full minute he did not answer.  I fancied he was turning me
+over very closely in his mind.
+
+"The usual thing," he said then.  "Overwork--like Lennox's!"  A grim
+smile flashed momentarily on me.  "I've been scratched up.  That's
+what I want you to see to."
+
+"An accident?"
+
+"You may call it a dog!"
+
+He turned, with a visible effort.  Until now he had been lying almost
+upon his face.  The light came obscured from the window, but as I
+bent forward I realized with a thrill of what extraordinary physical
+endurance that slight body was capable.  The right sleeve of his
+pyjamas had been torn down--it seemed at one single rip--and the
+edges of the flannel were caked and sodden with blood.  As he threw
+open the jacket with the other hand I saw two long parallel scratches
+of the same depth running transversely across his chest.
+
+My first act was to draw the curtain aside.  He lay there blinking at
+me in the full light, watchful to see what change my face betrayed.
+
+"What you think, eh?"
+
+"I think," I said quietly, "that the sooner that dog is shot the
+better."
+
+I made a movement to draw the jacket down, but at the touch of my
+hand on his shoulder he winced for the first time.
+
+"I must have warm water," I said.  "I suppose you are not alone here?"
+
+Almost as I spoke a woman came into the room by a second door;
+evidently his wife.  She was young, and her face would have been
+noticeably beautiful but for its expressionlessness.  She had deep
+eyes, well-moulded features, and a very clear pallid complexion, but
+her whole appearance suggested a slatternliness, evinced in the
+tumbled silk wrapper, the carelessly combed-back hair.  I think I
+have never seen a woman, least of all in any crisis, look so utterly
+stupid and bewildered.  Her eyes were pink about the edges, where
+powder had been hastily dabbed to hide recent tear-marks.  I imagined
+that her first impulse in any emergency would be to weep.
+
+"Have you warm water in the house?"
+
+"I'll get it."
+
+She disappeared toward the kitchen, and I followed her in.  I wanted
+for the moment to be out of range of the man on the couch, and I
+thought it would give her a chance to say something to me herself of
+what had happened.
+
+She took up a bowl haphazard from the dresser, put it down again and
+took another, always with the scurrying half-frightened movement with
+which she had entered the room; went finally through a doorway into
+what appeared to be an outer kitchen to fetch the water.  There I
+heard another woman's voice, clear-cut, decisive, with what seemed an
+undertone of forced cheerfulness to it.  Scraps of a conversation
+reached me while I waited.
+
+"They won't send it up.  I'll have to go down later.  And Scholl will
+let us have bread if I fetch it.  I thought I'd better bring three
+now."
+
+"Mary, it's awful!"
+
+"Did that new man get here?"
+
+Mrs. Lessing's voice was discreetly dropped, drowned by the
+accompanying splash of water from a kettle.  But I heard the other
+say: "Is he any good?"
+
+"Mary, sh-h!"
+
+She fluttered back, and I took the bowl of water from her hands.
+Lessing was stretched on the divan just as I had left him, waiting my
+return.  There was no chair near, and I looked about me impatiently
+for something on which to set the bowl, while the woman stood by in a
+sort of helpless indecision.  Just as I was about to put it on the
+floor someone pushed Mrs. Lessing gently but promptly aside and came
+forward.  It was the girl whose voice I had heard in the kitchen, and
+I saw in the second's glance I gave her that it was she whom I had
+seen on the road the first morning I came down.
+
+"Give me the bowl," she said.  "You can manage better if I hold it."
+
+I stripped Lessing's jacket off as gently as I could, sponging the
+sleeve where it adhered to the torn flesh.  He must have been lying
+untended there for some considerable time before my arrival.  When I
+had laid bare his chest and shoulder to the light I set my lips to an
+involuntary whistle.  The man looked as if he had been fighting with
+some wild animal.  No dog had made those wounds.  They were not
+bites; they were long raking cuts, as if the flesh had been torn by
+heavy blunt-pointed claws.  A bear might have done it, but there was
+no sign of bruising or tooth-prints.  The scratch on the shoulder was
+a good half-inch deep in one place--it nearly laid bare the bone.
+
+He had bled freely; the jacket sleeve was soaked and stiff.  I set to
+work to cleanse the blood from his chest, and as I did so I saw other
+wounds of the same order, some old cicatrices, others newly healed
+scars of perhaps a month old, but none so deep as the present ones.
+I glanced sharply at the man's hands.  They were well kept, the
+fingers stained a little with acids as though in photography, the
+nails smooth and closely trimmed.
+
+The scratches were ugly.  I had slipped an emergency case of tabloids
+into my pocket on starting, and asking for fresh water, I dissolved
+two in it.  The girl watched me steadily, holding the bowl of
+solution while I cleansed the cuts carefully, bit by bit, and I
+fancied that in her presence Lessing was at particular pains not to
+flinch.  The man's endurance was extraordinary.  I had noticed
+something else on his arm, but of that I did not immediately speak.
+
+"You want iodoform?" said the girl.  "There is some in the house."
+
+She fetched it, with diachylon and a roll of sterilized gauze such as
+is used in hospitals, from the drawer of a Japanese cabinet.  I
+dressed the cuts--it took some little time--and helped him into the
+clean shirt she brought me.  When I straightened my back at last we
+were alone.
+
+"Do you mind," said Lessing, "going to the cabinet there and getting
+me a bottle that's in the top left-hand cupboard?  There's a glass
+with it."
+
+I found both.  I drew the glass stopper from the bottle and smelled
+it.  It contained a familiar cardiac stimulant.
+
+"It's all right.  It's the stuff Lennox gave me."
+
+I poured him a dose and he drank it.  Then he dropped back on the
+cushions again, watching me.  I drew a chair up, but on second
+thought remained standing.
+
+"Well, Mr. Lessing," I said, "I don't know that I'm able to do
+anything more for you under the present circumstances.  If you feel
+like wanting me you know where to send."
+
+"What are you in a hurry for?"
+
+"I am in no hurry."
+
+"Then sit down."
+
+"If you think there is anything to be gained."
+
+I sat down.  I had dealt with his type before, and I waited.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"You must know, my good fellow, that there's no use calling a medical
+man in to tell this kind of nonsense!  I'm not a fool."
+
+"Then there," he answered, "you differ most charmingly from old
+Lennox!"
+
+I could no more be angry with him than with a sick child.
+
+"No dog made these scratches!"
+
+"I said you might call it a dog," he reminded me.
+
+"I might call it an ourang-outang and be nearer the mark!  Am I to
+conclude that you keep a menagerie in your house, Mr. Lessing?"
+
+"Suppose I told you I did it myself?"
+
+"I should call you a liar," I said.  "I have seen your hands."
+
+"Old Lennox swore I did.  I told you he was a fool."
+
+"We'll drop the scratches," I said, walking to the window.  "I don't
+know that it really matters if you choose to tell me they were done
+by a tame mud-turtle in the back yard.  But one or two things you'll
+have to stop if I'm looking after you."
+
+"Such as?"
+
+"You want sleep, man!  You look as if you hadn't seen bed for a week."
+
+"I sleep in the daytime.  I have to work at night."
+
+"What--photography?"
+
+"Chemistry ... of sorts."
+
+"Chemistry doesn't have to be done at night, of necessity," I
+answered.  "You're overworked and you're using yourself up.  You know
+you've hardly a whole nerve left in your body at this moment."
+
+"I've plenty in my shoulder," he returned drily, and I smiled
+involuntarily as our eyes met.  There was a fascination in the man,
+despite his eccentricity, his absurd persistence in what seemed to be
+a tissue of childish and reasonless lies, to which I held no clue.
+
+"That won't hurt you long.  I'll look in again tomorrow."  I wheeled
+on him abruptly, of purpose.  "How long have you been taking morphia?"
+
+I expected denial.  Instead his eyes merely narrowed, appreciatively.
+
+"A year, more or less.  I take it when I can't sleep."
+
+"Lately?"
+
+"Not for several weeks."
+
+"Yes, you have," I thought.  Aloud I said: "I'll make you up
+something else, for a change.  Can you sleep now?"
+
+"I'll have a try."
+
+"Better get to bed."
+
+"I sleep better here," he said, and without more ado turned over with
+his face to the wall.  I waited a moment, but he took no further
+notice of my presence, and I went out.
+
+The girl who had helped me with the dressing was outside, feeding
+sugar to the mare.  The two seemed old friends.  I saw, as I drew
+near, that she bore a strong resemblance to Lessing himself,
+sufficient to proclaim her his sister.  She had the same deep hazel
+eyes, but her hair was lighter; it showed a bronze glint as she stood
+bare-headed in the sunshine.  It would have been an attractive face
+but for a look of cynicism, almost a hardness, in the lines of her
+mouth.  I was glad that it was she I encountered instead of Mrs.
+Lessing.  Here was at least one practical person in this puzzling
+household.
+
+She turned as I came near, but without moving.
+
+"Your brother will do all right," I said without preamble.  "Keep him
+quiet today, and if possible make him sleep.  He wants rest badly."
+
+She nodded, brushing the crumbs of sugar from her hands.
+
+"How long has this been going on?"
+
+"The not sleeping?"  She looked at me sharply.  "About four or five
+nights."
+
+"I thought so.  Can't you make him?"
+
+She looked at me almost contemptuously, as though wondering that my
+interview with Lessing had taught me so little.  "Does he look as if
+I could?"
+
+"You can do it if anyone can," I said.  "I shall be back tomorrow.
+If by any chance I am wanted..."
+
+"I'll come and fetch you," she said.
+
+"Good."  I turned to unfasten the mare, then paused.  "You have a dog
+here, I think.  May I see it?"
+
+For a moment she seemed about to hesitate.  "If you like," she said
+then.
+
+I followed her round to the side of the house.  A small sort of
+tool-shed stood not far from the odd building I had noticed, and
+which I saw now was not an annex, but separate from the house.  The
+door of the shed was closed, and from within a whining and scratching
+greeted our approach.  Without a word she turned the key and threw
+open the door.
+
+A magnificent orange setter rushed out nearly knocking her down.
+There was nothing savage in his demeanor; he licked her hands and
+face and even tried to include me in the demonstration, but what
+caught my attention was his inexplicable behavior the next moment.
+He bounded straight toward the big outbuilding, but within a few
+paces of it he stopped, whining and sniffing, his ears laid back, his
+body trailed near to the ground, as though in some abject fear.
+Whining still, he dragged himself back to our feet and crouched
+there, trembling.  Miss Lessing's voice broke the silence.
+
+"Do you advise," she said, "that he should be destroyed as dangerous?"
+
+"I think," I replied, "that is hardly necessary, at present.  What's
+the matter with him?"
+
+Her lip curled a little as she looked at me.  She shrugged her
+shoulders.
+
+"He is frightened.  Do you believe in the instinct of dogs, Doctor
+Haverill?"
+
+"What is that building used for?" I asked curtly.
+
+"It is my brother's laboratory."
+
+"Then what in heaven's name----?"  I checked the exclamation on my
+lips.  She was looking at me as her brother had done, but she seemed,
+at all events, to make up her mind more quickly.  "Come with me," she
+said quietly.
+
+We walked to the building.  There was a door at the side fitted with
+a Yale lock, but it stood slightly ajar.  She pushed it open.  The
+interior consisted of one single room, that seemed from its fittings
+half laboratory, half workshop.  There were shelves around,
+containing bottles, chemical apparatus, a few books stacked together.
+A long table, littered with tubes and glasses, stood almost directly
+under the skylight.  One corner of the room, to the right of the
+table, was screened off to form a dark-room, with the ordinary square
+of red glazed fabric let into the door.
+
+I looked around the place with curiosity.  There was nothing here to
+account for the dog's behavior.  The contents of the table at one end
+were confused and overthrown, and a strip of cocoa matting, which had
+evidently lain under or near the table, had been rolled and flung in
+one corner.  The boards were noticeably cleaner where it had been
+lying, and near the edge of this clean space there was a stain,
+smudged as though purposely by someone's foot, but to my eyes an
+obvious blood-stain.
+
+Directly under the skylight, which was some four feet square, was the
+apparatus that for the moment puzzled me.  It was mounted on a high
+stand that brought it near to the glass, and it looked like an
+acetylene lamp with very powerful concave reflectors; the kind of
+reflector, on a smaller scale, that is used in some lighthouses.  The
+size of the lamp was quite outside the requirements of the room for
+ordinary lighting purposes, and the reflector seemed planned to throw
+the light outside the building, and in any desired direction.  As I
+looked at it there flashed across my mind the recollection of the
+curious sort of searchlight I had seen the night before from my
+porch.  Here was the solution of it, but I was puzzled to imagine
+what Lessing could be doing with an apparatus of this kind in such a
+place.
+
+I turned to Miss Lessing.
+
+"Was it here that your brother spent last evening?"
+
+"Yes.  He came out here about nine o'clock, after dinner.  He often
+works late, and we never sit up for him.  My sister-in-law went to
+bed soon after; she had one of her bad headaches that she has been
+subject to for the last eighteen months.  I sleep in the room next to
+hers, and I went to bed about eleven.  I am an early riser, as a
+rule, and when I came out of my room this morning I met my brother
+just coming into the house."  She paused, and I could see that she
+was struggling with the recollection.  "He wouldn't let me touch him,
+and he only said something about wanting to sleep, and that I should
+send Doctor Lennox up to him.  I left him in the sitting-room and
+went straight off."
+
+"Cycled?"
+
+"No, walked.  I have no cycle here.  My brother doesn't like me using
+one.  If I had, it would have saved time.  I came through the woods."
+
+"You were quick, anyway," I said approvingly.  "Now listen, Miss
+Lessing.  Your brother has had a severe shock; of what sort I know no
+more than you.  He will probably tell us in his own time.  For the
+present, I don't want him worried in any way.  I shall come again
+tomorrow.  If I may advise you, I would lock this place and keep the
+key until he asks you for it.  Have you touched anything in the room
+since this morning?"
+
+"No.  It is as he left it."
+
+Then Lessing himself had removed the tell-tale carpet.  I thought a
+moment.
+
+"Was your brother wearing pyjamas when he went out last evening?"
+
+"He changed into them after dinner, I remember.  It is hot in here of
+an evening, and he nearly always wears them to work in."
+
+"Did you hear any noise last night?"
+
+"No."  She hesitated a moment.  "My sister-in-law was very restless
+last night, and she was talking in her sleep.  She seemed to be in
+pain, so I went in to her, but she was sound asleep and I went back
+to bed.  I heard nothing outside."
+
+"Where was the dog?"
+
+"Shut up.  We used to have him loose, but he's sometimes noisy at
+night, and lately my brother has taken a fancy to have him shut up."
+
+"It doesn't seem likely that he would trouble him here," I said.
+
+She bit her lip.
+
+"Doctor Haverill, what is it?"
+
+"My dear young lady," I said, "I can know nothing until your brother
+is able to give us some account."  I had almost said "chooses," but I
+changed the word on a look at her face.  "After all," I said lightly,
+"you must remember I am here only as a doctor, and a stranger at
+that!"
+
+I turned back to where the mare was waiting, and she followed me,
+locking the door behind her.
+
+"I shall be at the house all day, if I'm wanted, but I don't think I
+shall be.  Meantime, you'll remember what I've told you.  Your
+brother will have to make up sleep before he can tell us anything at
+all."
+
+She seemed to take it quite as a matter of course that I should be
+giving my directions to her instead of Mrs. Lessing.  It was as if
+she took the responsible place instinctively in the household.  I
+climbed into the buggy, turning the mare around, and she nodded a
+good-bye to me.  My last glimpse, as I left the house, was of her
+slim bare-headed figure, wistful in its very air of self-reliance,
+standing there in the sunshine with the setter by her side.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+DUTCHMAN'S HILL
+
+To say the thing puzzled me would be to put it lightly enough.  For
+the rest of the day my thoughts kept turning to that enigmatic
+household at the Bend.  The most puzzling point of all, to my mind,
+was why Lennox, in speaking of the people about, had not so much as
+mentioned Lessing's name.  Here was a patient to whom he had, as I
+surmised, been called once before at least on the same mysterious
+errand as my own that morning, with whom he was more or less on terms
+of intimacy, and who must have provided almost his sole educated
+companionship in the village, and yet he had not seen fit so much as
+to touch upon Lessing's existence in my talk with him.  Considering
+the words with which my own advent had been that morning greeted, I
+would have given much to be able to corner Lennox just then for ten
+minutes' conversation.
+
+I had heard nothing from him so far, and the following morning, on
+the chance of there being a letter, I drove down to the village after
+breakfast.  As I entered the post office Miss Lessing was just coming
+out.  She had a brown-paper parcel--an obvious butcher's parcel--in
+her hand, together with a couple of mail packets, and as I stood
+aside to let her pass she stopped to exchange a few words with me.
+Her brother was better, she said; he looked forward to seeing me that
+afternoon.  We chatted a moment, and when she turned to go I said
+naturally:
+
+"You might let me give you a lift up the road.  I'm going straight
+back."
+
+She smiled.  "I'm used to walking, thanks all the same!  Besides,
+there's a short cut through the woods I've found.  It takes off
+nearly half the distance."
+
+"You don't mind the woods alone?"
+
+"I've got the dog with me."
+
+I watched her straight slim little figure up the street, the dog
+following at her heels, and turned into the post office.  The clerk
+had grown familiar during our daily intercourse.  He handed me two
+letters with a ready grin--Lennox's handwriting was not among
+them--then leaned his elbows on the shabby counter and spat
+reflectively into the space below.
+
+"Mr. Lessing had another attack, ain't he?"
+
+"What do you mean," I said curtly.
+
+"I heer'd you was called over thar, yesterday.  Reckon you'll have
+enough to do if you take on with all the crazy folks round here."
+
+I looked at him hard.
+
+"Oh, I ain't got nothing special against Mr. Lessing.  He's a
+pleasant-spoken chap, all I've seen of him.  On'y when a man gits to
+meddlin' with things it ain't no person's business to meddle with
+he's liable to git called crazy--ef not worse.  I ain't holdin' with
+what people say when they get to talkin'--no sir!  I got enough to do
+tendin' my own business.  But there's plenty won't go near Mr.
+Lessing's place after dark nor no other time, an' if you was to
+listen to them I reckon they got their reasons.  They say his wife's
+as crazy as he is.  Seems when he ain't traipsin' round the woods all
+hours o' the night he's shut up there in that stoodio place doin' his
+vivisectin'----"
+
+"_What?_"
+
+I laughed in spite of myself.  Mr. Johnson looked sulky.
+
+"Ain't that what they call it?  I ain't no doctor."
+
+"Mr. Lessing happens to be a student of chemistry, not a medical
+student, so if anyone's been trying to get round you with bogy tales
+they're talking nonsense.  I'm surprised at a man of your education,
+Mr. Johnson, listening to such absurdities!"
+
+"Then what does he shut himself up for, with a lamp you can see two
+miles off, unless he's up to suthin' he don't want folks to know?"
+
+"Probably because he doesn't want a pack of ignoramuses meddling with
+his affairs."
+
+"Well, that's what they say, and there's folks as believes it," he
+said sullenly.  "An' as fur his walkin' in the woods, I ain't tellin'
+you anything but what's so.  He was seen the same night as Jake
+Menning got killed goin' down Dutchman's Hill.  It was Jakey's
+half-brother as seen him, an' Aaron ain't one to be tellin' lies.
+No, sir!  An' if Doctor Lennox was here now he would tell you the
+same, for he was called out to see a sick child at the Bend that same
+night and it was him as found Jake Menning there the next mornin'."
+
+"Do you know you're saying things you might get into trouble over?" I
+asked sternly.
+
+"Oh, I ain't sayin' he had no hand in it," he returned promptly.
+"Everyone knows Jakey got killed through bein' too drunk to look whar
+he was goin'!"
+
+I pushed a quarter over to him.
+
+"Well, give me some stamps, Mr. Johnson.  If you take my advice you
+won't pay quite so much attention to idle gossip."
+
+I drove home, thinking.  Lennox, or someone, had been chattering;
+that was clear.  How far I had no means at present of knowing, for I
+was not going to pursue any further conversation with Johnson, ready
+as he was.  A doctor who gives himself to gossip is no better than an
+old hen.  I felt a sharp contempt for Lennox that overrode whatever
+interest I might once have had for him.  If he had got himself into
+any tangle down here he deserved it thoroughly.
+
+A light covered wagon, such as hucksters use, was outside the gate
+when I got back, and a man, who had evidently been bargaining with
+Mrs. Searle at the back door, came round and climbed into it.  I had
+to pull the mare up to one side to give him room to drive off, and as
+I waited I happened to notice him rather closely, the more so as he
+gave me a civil but obvious scrutiny himself as he climbed over the
+wagon-wheel.  He was a man of about forty, in a tightly buttoned coat
+of greasy black oilskin and a peaked cap, which might have belonged
+earlier in its career to a seafaring man, pulled down over his
+forehead.  His face, with unpleasantly close-set eyes, was scarred by
+smallpox, and apart from the repugnance which this disfigurement
+always inspires more or less, I think I have seldom seen a
+countenance which impressed me more disagreeably.  He was a man whom
+I would have ordered off my own premises anywhere at first sight, and
+I replied with a curt nod to his over-subservient greeting.
+
+I left the mare in the yard and went into the parlor.  Mrs. Searle
+had evidently been interrupted in her morning tidying, and she came
+back, duster in hand, as I stood there.  I had enough experience to
+know her for a woman who did not give herself to gossip, though she
+probably knew all that was afoot, by the curious intuitive sense so
+highly developed in all women of her class.  With her I would be
+perfectly safe in any inquiries I chose to make.
+
+She apologized for her intrusion and set about completing her tour of
+the furniture, with noiseless briskness.
+
+"I see you've been down to the village, sir," she said after a
+moment.  "I was going to ask whether you'd order some more coal up
+for tomorrow, from Harkness's.  It's most finished."
+
+"I'll send Pete this afternoon.  He can walk in.  By the way, Mrs.
+Searle, what was this story about Jake Menning?  I just heard
+something of it in the village today."
+
+"Jake Menning..."  She paused in her dusting, setting back a vase
+carefully on the mantelshelf.  "I suppose you'd have heard of it,
+sir.  He was killed last March, goin' down Dutchman's Hill.  There
+isn't much water now, but it's generally deep there, long after the
+spring rains.  Some did say it was done a-purpose, but the most of
+'em thinks he jest had a fit an' fell in.  Doctor Lennox found him,
+about six o'clock in the mornin', driving back from a night call.  He
+was lyin' jest at the foot of the hollow, where them planks begin,
+with his face in the water.  It wasn't deep enough to drown anyone
+ordinarily, an' that's why they thought it was a seizure.
+
+"There was two half-brothers, Jake an' Aaron, both livin' over near
+the Bend.  Aaron's took the whole business over now.  Jake was always
+kind o' queer; they called him crazy sometimes, round the village.
+They was as like as two peas, which was queer, seein' they was on'y
+half related, so to speak.  Down to the smallpox scars an' all.
+They'd both took the smallpox, but Jake took it worse, and they said
+that was what affected his brain some.  You couldn't tell 'em apart,
+on'y for Aaron's stutterin'.
+
+"Aaron was the best of the two.  He's a good chapel member, and he's
+done a lot better in the business since Jakey's out of it.  I heard
+they used to quarrel a lot in Jake's lifetime.  Aaron's savin', and a
+bit close with his money too, and I recon he kep' Jake under some.
+He was an awful ill-lookin' man, Jake Menning--not that I like to say
+wrong of the dead, but I know a bad-lookin' man when I see one, an'
+Jake was that, for all his craziness.  There weren't anyone liked him
+much, so they said he was harmless as a child, and right smart in
+business, an' now they ain't content with his being dead but they
+must get to startin' nonsense about his walking---excuse me
+mentionin' any such silly talk to you, sir!"
+
+"Walking?" I stared.
+
+"What they call it, sir," she explained apologetically.  "You see,"
+she went on, taking up her duster again, "Dutchman's Hill always did
+have a bad name, account of a pedlar bein' drowned there years ago,
+and now with this other business they try to make out the place is
+haunted again..  They don't seem to know rightly whether it's Crazy
+Jake or the pedlar I told you of, but there's quite a lot of folks
+now won't go nigh the place after dark, no more'n if it had the
+plague."
+
+"So that's what all this nonsense has been about!" I said, a light
+beginning to dawn on me.  "I suppose Pete is right in it all?"
+
+"Pete is like all the niggers, sir.  They ain't happy unless they've
+got some sort of a ha'nt to tell about.  Not that the other folks
+here is any better, an' I will say that of 'em.  I never met such a
+gossipin' set in my life till I come here!"
+
+Mrs. Searle herself was originally from New England, and eight years'
+residence here had not altered her original opinion of the people.
+For this reason, if for none other, I knew that she kept herself very
+sternly aloof from the minor scandal-making of the place.
+
+"I suppose there was an inquest on this man?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir.  They brought it in accidental causes, an' Doctor
+Lennox seemed to think the man died of heart-failure, an' he must
+have been dead before he fell in.  Anyway it wasn't drownin', simple.
+I don't know.  It was Aaron had heart-weakness in the family, as I
+heard, so it was queer Jake bein' the one took off that way!"
+
+I rose.
+
+"Well, I suppose the people here have precious little to gossip
+about, and they like to make a mystery of whatever does happen!"
+
+"That's about as I take it, sir."  She moved toward the door.  "An'
+now I think, it was funny your asking me about Jake Menning, just
+this moment.  That was Aaron as came round to the back door a while
+ago, as you drove up.  He wanted to know if we'd like any chickens,
+so I took one for Sunday, seen' he only gets round once a fortnight
+now he has the whole business to attend to.  I don't know whether
+it's thinkin' over it, but it seems to me he's getting to look more
+like Jakey every day.  If it wer'n't for his stutterin' I could take
+him for a ghost myself!"
+
+So that was Aaron Menning.  Well, he might be a good chapel member,
+but he had a face that would hang him if my impressions went for
+anything.  All the same, this put me no nearer to clearing up the
+mystery at the Bend, which was what interested me at the moment.
+Jake Menning and the alleged ghost of Dutchman's Hill were ordinary
+enough features in a village drama, but they could have no direct
+bearing on the problem that occupied my mind.
+
+After lunch I told Peter to put the mare in.  He lingered about the
+buggy when I came out, making unnecessary adjustments to the harness.
+I could see he was anxious to learn the outcome of yesterday's visit,
+and where I was going now.
+
+"Is yoh gwine by de village, doctah?" he asked finally, with the air
+of one with a commission to request.
+
+"No, I'm going to the Bend.  There is no need for you to drive me," I
+added as I took the reins up.
+
+I could have sworn the old sinner looked relieved as he went back to
+the coach-house.  When I reached the bungalow I found Lessing himself
+on the porch.  As he rose to greet me I saw that he was taller than I
+had thought; there was a certain wiry strength about him when he
+stood upright.  What amazed me was the man's extraordinary endurance
+and resiliency; his face showed scarcely a sign of the exhaustion of
+yesterday.  He was dressed in corduroy trousers and a soft silk
+shirt, under which the outline of the bandaging was visible as he
+moved.
+
+"Well, how are you?" I asked as we shook hands.
+
+"All right.  Come into the house--or shall we stay here?"
+
+"I'll have a look at you first."  I followed him into the room.  "A
+bit stiff?"
+
+"Nothing much."
+
+"Sleep?"
+
+"Like a log."
+
+I need hardly have asked him.  He stripped up his shirt and I made a
+brief readjustment of the dressings.  The wounds were going on all
+right.  He must have had a magnificent constitution despite his
+slightness of build.  We sat down on the divan, and Lessing produced
+a box of cigarettes.
+
+There was a small wooden table near the window, littered with
+test-tubes and odds and ends, and I nodded toward it.
+
+"Been busy?"
+
+"I was just working out something.  I have a sort of laboratory
+fitted outside, though.  I had it built."
+
+"That sort of studio place?"
+
+"It's just like a workshop--where I muddle occasionally!  I'll show
+you sometime, if you like."
+
+"I should be delighted."
+
+"My experiments have, unfortunately, given rather a bad name to the
+place.  They had a bad effect on old Lennox, too.  I believe I was
+too progressive for him.  You wouldn't expect that from a medical
+man, would you?  Did you know Lennox very well?"
+
+He knocked the ash off his cigarette, waiting for my reply.  If he
+was guarded, so was I.
+
+"I knew him at the University, a good while ago.  Since then I had
+not seen him till the other day."
+
+"He's a queer old bird!  I used to tell him he made the ideal country
+practitioner.  It made him mad because it was so exactly true.  We
+used to disagree frightfully, you know.  It's the only relaxation in
+a place like this.  I shall miss Lennox...."
+
+It struck me he was trying, in a casual way, to find out how far
+Lennox had spoken of him to me, and whether we had been at any time
+since his departure in correspondence.
+
+"Lennox has quaint theories," he went on, leaning back against the
+cushions.  "One of them is that nothing exists outside the
+pharmacopœia and Burton's 'North American Fauna.'  We used to
+argue it at great length.  I don't believe he's convinced yet."
+
+"He was never an easy man to convince."
+
+"So?  It's habit that survives.  How do you like it down here, by the
+way?"
+
+"Oh, I'm putting in a good time," I smiled.  "I fish a little, tramp
+a little.  There ought to be good shooting in these woods by and by."
+
+"They are interesting," said Lessing drily.
+
+"Have you been here long?" I asked.
+
+"Over a year."  He rose and went into the kitchen, whence he returned
+a moment later, saying: "I thought I heard my wife there.  We might
+as well have some tea."
+
+It was Miss Lessing who brought the tea in, a few minutes later.  She
+greeted me pleasantly, setting the tray down on the little table I
+pulled forward for her.
+
+"Kate is lying down for a while," she said to her brother.  "She has
+a headache.  Do you take sugar, Doctor Haverill?"
+
+I sat chatting there for nearly an hour.  Lessing seemed at all
+events disposed to be friendly.  All the while I was trying to
+reconcile this man who sat talking boyishly on trivial subjects with
+the outstretched figure I had seen twenty-four hours ago.  If I had
+felt any resentment for his treatment of me yesterday it would have
+vanished utterly, and his complete absence of restraint now showed
+me, if I had needed it, how all memory of that mood had changed with
+his physical condition.
+
+When I rose to go it was under promise to dine with them the
+following week.  I fancied that Miss Lessing glanced hesitatingly at
+her brother before she seconded his invitation.  It might have been
+only fancy; she was certainly cordial enough as we shook hands.
+
+"Next Thursday, then," Lessing called after me from the doorway.  I
+drove home no less mystified than before.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE DEAD CYCLIST
+
+Lennox sent me a note from Queenstown.  I wondered, reading the brief
+cheerful account of his crossing, if he guessed how much I would give
+to have him cornered for a half-hour's interview.  That he could
+throw considerable light on the puzzle I did not doubt, any more than
+that he had promptly put the ocean between us with a view to avoiding
+the very question I wanted to put to him.  Anyway he was securely out
+of reach, and there was no use in wasting speculation.
+
+My motor-cycle had arrived some time ago, but up to now I had not
+made use of it.  It was housed in the carriage-shed, to Peter's great
+curiosity.  Once I had caught him meddling with it surreptitiously,
+and my lecture, garnished with many lies as to what would happen to
+him if he pursued investigations, wrought the desired effect on his
+superstitious mind.  Devils offered to Peter the most natural
+explanation for anything he failed to understand.  Having a free
+morning, it occurred to me to put the engine in order, and Peter,
+cleaning harness nearby, watched my proceedings with distrustful
+curiosity.
+
+"Is yoh gwine _ride_ dat 'ar thing, doctah?" he asked me.
+
+"Sure!"  I stood up, wiping my grimed hands on a piece of cotton
+waste.  "Don't you think it's a likely thing to scare the ha'nts
+with, Pete?"
+
+"Yoh talk er de ha'nts, doctah, 'cause yoh ain' done _seen_ 'em.
+When yoh's done seen 'em, doctah, I raikon yose gwine talk er suthin'
+eke."
+
+"If I meet one on this, Pete, it'll give him such fits he won't do
+any han'ting for a week.  Give me that monkey-wrench."
+
+He eyed me gloomily.
+
+"Dat ar thing's got a debbil in 'um sure, an' yoh ain' git no better
+er one debbil by mixin' 'um up wid anuffer--no, _sah_!"
+
+"Peter," I said, "you are too conservative."
+
+"I d'know dat.  I d'know dat!  De debbil's de dibbil, an' dar ain' no
+good yet come er mixin' up wid him.  'Tain' in de Bible nor 'tain' in
+nature, an' I ain' holdin' wid no such dealin's."
+
+"Well, Pete, I'm going to back my devil against your rabbit's foot,
+anyhow."
+
+Pete looked suspicious.
+
+"Who's been talkin' 'bout rabbit's foots, doctah?"
+
+"No one.  Turn your pockets out, Pete!"
+
+His hand clapped involuntarily to the side of his trousers.
+
+"I got ter put dat harness away, an' I ain' got the time t' be
+hindered in!  Sholy to Gawd, doctah, yoh ain' s'pose _I_ carry no
+trash like that!"
+
+He straightened himself with dignity, hanging the harness up on its
+pegs.  I finished my job and went into the surgery.  I had written to
+the city for the drug I wanted for Lessing.  It arrived yesterday,
+and I had made up the powders.  They were lying on the desk with a
+rubber band about them, and the packet caught my eye as I came in.  I
+called to Pete.
+
+"I want you to take a prescription over to Mr. Lessing," I said.
+"You can take the buckboard and bring back that sack of feed from
+Sliefer's at the same time."
+
+I held the packet out to him.  He eyed first it, then me.
+
+"Well?" I said impatiently.
+
+"I'se gwine, I'se gwine.  I was thinkin' on'y dis mawnin' how dat
+feed done oughter be fetched.  Yessir, I was sayin' dat out in de
+car'ge-house.  It done oughter be fetched _today_."
+
+"It'll be right on your road after you leave Mr. Lessing's."
+
+"Yessir, dat so!  On'y dat packet, doctah ... I was jest considerin'
+dat packet.  Ef I was to put dat packet in de buckboard longer de
+feed sack I'd be right scared 'er losing it.  It don't seem to me,
+doctah, dat 'ar packet gwine t' be very safe dat way."
+
+"But you've got a pocket, you old idiot!"
+
+"Yessir, I done got pockets.  I was on'y jest a-studyin', doctah.  I
+don' recommend pockets, not when a pusson's got a commission to 'tend
+to.  When a pusson puts suthin' in his pocket, it happens sometime
+dat a pusson's gwine _forget_ it."
+
+"If it happens to you," I assured him, "I'll find a way of operating
+on your memory, so you'd better be careful!"
+
+He took the packet without more ado and went off to get the buckboard
+ready.  It was too fine a day to waste about the house, and I had it
+in mind to take the cycle out for a spin.  Telling Mrs. Searle I
+would probably be away for lunch, I got into my cycling suit and set
+off.
+
+I followed the road for some distance past the Bend, and then
+branched off to the right, joining the Pike.  The machine was in good
+running order, and I did some twenty miles before I slowed up finally
+at a little village with the hope of getting something to eat.
+
+There was the usual hotel and saloon combined, with its array of
+spruce bushes in tubs before the entrance.  I leaned my cycle against
+the porch and went in to interview the landlord about a meal.
+
+Dinner was by luck just ready.  I cleaned off some of the grime of my
+ride and wandered into the commercial room, which was garnished with
+horsehair furniture, a mildewed engraving of Washington, and two
+plates of sticky fly-paper, buzzing and noxious, set out on the
+soiled tablecloth.  There was one other midday guest, a young man in
+a gray suit who sat watching the struggles of the latest addition to
+the fly-paper colony while he waited for dinner.  I placed him
+immediately as a newspaper man, and the first dozen words we
+exchanged, as I took my place opposite to him at the table, proved me
+right.  He had been sent down on the trial of one of those dull and
+elusive scandals which serve to lighten the papers during the dead
+season, and had to put in two hours' waiting for his train back to
+the city.
+
+He had a considerable fund of anecdote which needed only the barest
+encouragement to set going, and he transferred his interest from the
+fly-paper to myself with complimentary promptitude.  He had a trick
+of raising his voice a full three tones at the beginning of each
+sentence, and as his dissertations were lengthy I found myself
+speculating at to what new and rasping height his voice might next
+reach.
+
+There was a week-old copy of a local paper lying on the table, and in
+a pause of the meal he pushed it over to me.
+
+"There's a thing that might interest you, being a cyclist," he said.
+"What do you make of that kind of an accident?"
+
+I read the paragraph he pointed out.  It was the account of an
+inquest held on the body of a young man identified as one George
+Powell, salesman in a Philadelphia dry-goods store.  He had been
+found on a stretch of road a few miles beyond Coopersville by a
+farmer taking an early load of milk to the Coopersville creamery.
+The handle-bars and front part of his wheel, near by, were damaged,
+and the broken lamp was picked up a few yards further on.  The man
+was dead, but the curious part, which had evidently struck my
+acquaintance also, was that there were no injuries found on the body
+except a single diagonal scratch across the face, which was of
+sufficient depth to have destroyed one eye and to lay the entire
+cheek open.  This in itself had not produced death, and the coroner's
+autopsy had revealed no symptom of concussion.  The medical officer's
+verdict had been death from heart failure.
+
+The injuries suggested attack, but there had been no robbery, and
+though the man's clothing was torn his pockets were apparently
+untouched.  They contained thirty-five dollars in notes, in a
+pocket-book, some small change, and the papers that had led to his
+identification.
+
+"Well?" said my acquaintance.
+
+"It looks queer."
+
+He laid a finger on the paragraph.
+
+"You see the body was picked up fifteen yards from the edge of the
+wood.  If anyone had laid for him, they'd have laid right in the
+woods, where there was cover.  But whatever hit him, it hit him
+before he reached there."
+
+"He might have run into something."
+
+"As what?"
+
+"I don't know."  And there struck me instantly the thought that my
+companion put into words.  "If you run into anything on a bicycle, at
+full speed, it doesn't generally happen that the handle-bars get the
+worst injury.  You see that the front wheel was not much broken.  And
+he was riding toward the woods, and it's going to take a pretty
+phenomenal shock to throw a man and his bicycle fifteen yards
+backwards.  I'll tell you another thing.  I happen to know that
+stretch of road, because I spent part of last summer near there, with
+some people.  It's a level stretch, cleared both sides, and there
+isn't anything larger than a stone to run into."
+
+I waited, wondering what he was driving at.  He chose a toothpick
+from the holder and began to employ it, leisurely.
+
+"You'd reckon those things would strike the jury, wouldn't you?  But
+they're so dam' simple down here that they're content to come up
+against facts like that, and they say: Well, here's a man got killed
+and we don't know what hit him.  Guess we'll let it go at
+misadventure and go get a drink!'  That's their mental attitude, and
+there isn't anything going to shake them out of it."
+
+"What's your theory?" I asked.
+
+He revolved the toothpick meditatively.
+
+"If I knew, I guess I'd be up against a story that would make every
+newspaper in the country sit up.  There's something queer there, and
+I'll tell you why, and you'll see just how enterprising these country
+juries are.  Last April"--he raised his voice again, giving the
+toothpick an extra twirl in emphasis--"precisely the same thing
+happened to another man, not twelve miles from where this was.  He
+was killed under much about the same circumstances, and the jury then
+returned the same old verdict, with a caution about the dangers of
+scorching.  I happen to know, because I was down there on some story
+the time the thing occurred.  I saw the man."  He paused, and without
+knowing why I felt my pulses quicken suddenly in anticipation.  "He
+had marks on his body that a wild-cat couldn't have made!  He was
+picked up at the side of the path, among some stiff under-brush, so
+of course they said the fall did it.  I tell you he was ripped, like
+I've seen a dog's face ripped by a badger.  I've seen murder cases
+and I've seen accidents, but I've never seen the precise accident
+that would leave that kind of marks."
+
+"You think it was murder?"
+
+"The man wasn't murdered.  He hit his head against a stone and died
+of concussion that time, right enough.  But it was near enough to
+murder, if you assume an assailant who'd strap two-inch steel claws
+on to his hands."  He laughed.  "It's an original outfit!  But that's
+what I'm asking _you_?  What's the animal that goes round in these
+woods that's strong enough to wreck the steel tubing of a bicycle,
+that attacks with its claws and not with its teeth, and that's quick
+enough to knock a man down without the chance of a struggle?"
+
+"There were no traces?"
+
+"None.  Not a single footprint."
+
+All the while he spoke there had been before my mind the picture of
+Lessing--Lessing with those inexplicable scratches on his chest.
+Whatever had attacked these two had attacked Lessing also; that I
+would swear to.  I was conscious that the young man was watching me
+rather closely.
+
+"Heard something of this before, have you?"
+
+"No.  It interests me.  But I think you're on a wrong tack."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Man alive, you don't suppose there could conceivably be any animal
+of that kind loose in the country without people knowing it!  Someone
+would have seen it."
+
+"I guess two people did see it," he suggested.
+
+"If anything escaped from a menagerie there'd be a hue and cry
+raised.  The woods around here couldn't give cover to any animal of
+that size and ferocity for three months without some track of it
+being found."
+
+He said: "How about the murders in the Rue Morgue?"
+
+"Those scratches weren't made by a monkey!"
+
+I was unguarded.  He looked up sharply.
+
+"You didn't see them."
+
+"You have described them," I reminded him.  "Besides, an ape's
+instinct is to strangle."
+
+"Not necessarily."
+
+"Put the first down as a murder.  The second might not have had any
+connection.  There is nearly three months between.  The medical
+officer suggested himself that the injuries might have been caused by
+falling on the broken bicycle framework."
+
+"Medical officers aren't infallible.  They've got to say something."
+
+I laughed.  "Well, stick to your escaped simian theory!  If a third
+case turns up we'll see who's right."
+
+I rose, paid my bill and went out, leaving him, I have no doubt, with
+the impression that I was a particularly hidebound idiot.  But I had
+my own reasons for making no further contribution to his data.  I
+would see this thing through without any assistance from a too
+enterprising press.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+A BOYCOTTED HOUSEHOLD
+
+Thursday evening found me at the Lessing's bungalow.  Mrs. Lessing
+was in evidence this time, in a soft black gown that accentuated the
+pallor of her face.  The evening did not correct my first impressions
+of her.  She shook hands limply, contributed a few remarks about the
+weather, and then subsided on the couch in silence.  Dinner was laid
+on a small round table near the window, and Mary Lessing came in from
+the kitchen with uprolled sleeves and a big apron tied about her.
+
+"We do our own chores here, Doctor Haverill," she said.  "Do you want
+to make yourself useful?"
+
+I rose promptly.  Lessing had not yet appeared and my _tête-à-tête_
+with his wife was not exhilarating.  I followed her out into the
+kitchen, where she gave me a can-opener and a box of sardines.
+
+"Turn those out for me, please.  And if you have any hygienic
+aversion to canned goods, smother it.  We live on them here."
+
+"You find it far from the village?"
+
+She smiled, quizzically.  "A good way.  Besides, the tradespeople
+here aren't exactly genial.  So we subsist on boxes from the city.
+It gives you all the real pleasure of a desert island without the
+risks.  Put them on that plate, will you?  You see, by the time the
+box arrives and gets hauled up from the station we've generally
+forgotten what we ordered, so there's all the excitement of discovery
+as well.  This time it was olives.  Do you realize the joy of
+unexpected olives in the wilderness?"
+
+"I'm going to."
+
+"That's the right spirit!  Living in the country teaches one a
+becoming humility.  There are more things to open.  Perhaps it was a
+mistake to ask you out here, but in any case I could hardly have
+palmed off these peaches as grown in our own garden, because we
+haven't got one."
+
+She was standing at the table, drying crisp salad on a white cloth.
+The position showed me only her profile, with a little wave of bronze
+hair escaping near one ear.  "Do you think gardening is worth the
+trouble?"
+
+"When things like this grow in every department store?  Perhaps not.
+Good heavens, Doctor Haverhill, but you must _wash_ that can-opener!
+Give it to me!"
+
+I gazed at the jagged gash already achieved in the peach-can.
+
+"Don't tell anyone and they won't taste it!"
+
+"I thought bachelors knew how to do everything."
+
+"Sardines and peaches go excellently together," I maintained.  "They
+call it _salade de fruits poissonnés_."
+
+Lessing lounged in.
+
+"I admire the way Mary sets you to work," he said.  "She has a talent
+for being industrious by proxy.  Here----"  He pulled a parcel out of
+his pocket "I've brought your cheese, but I won't answer for the
+state of it."
+
+Miss Lessing cast a quick glance at me.  "Where----?"
+
+"_Not_ at Johnson's.  I don't know if my sister has explained to you,
+Doctor Haverhill, that we are a boycotted household?  We find it
+quite amusing.  It leads to a practice of expedience which is
+excellent training for the young.  Mary has learned to make quite
+creditable bread already."
+
+"Out of the sawdust they pack the canned goods in," put in his sister
+promptly.  "Carry that dish in without spilling it, Dick, and don't
+talk nonsense!"
+
+We sat down to one of the most cheerful meals four young people have
+ever enjoyed.  I would except Mrs. Lessing, but that even her limp
+and monosyllabic presence failed to dampen our spirits.  Afterwards
+Lessing made Turkish coffee over a spirit lamp while the two girls
+cleared the table, refusing my assistance high-handedly.
+
+I moved about the room in the familiarity which our informal meal had
+fostered, looking at the knick-knacks, the row of books on the
+shelves.  They were a pretty varied collection, poetry, some modern
+French scientific books and novels, and one of the most complete
+collections of detective literature I have ever encountered, side by
+side with a few text-books on chemistry and some volumes on occultism
+and black magic, some familiar to me by title, others unknown.  There
+was a monthly magazine lying near which I recognized as occupying
+itself largely with the subject of psychic phenomena, and turning it
+over I noticed Lessing's name in the index.
+
+"You write?" I asked.
+
+"Once in a blue moon!"  He looked up from a critical stage in his
+coffee-making.  "Does that sort of thing interest you?"
+
+"Indifferently--if it happens to be genuine."
+
+"There's so little genuine."  He withdrew the coffee deftly, blowing
+out the lamp, and stood the little copper pot aside.  "That's the
+worst of it.  One endures hours of boredom for no result."
+
+"You belong to the P.R.S.?"
+
+"A most respectable and unexciting body."  He smiled.  "I would give
+in my demission, only they afford me a patient hearing from time to
+time.  Besides, it gives me the opportunity of wrangling with
+someone, and contention is the spice of life, as I was saying.  It
+was with that truism that I strove to console Lennox, when I bored
+him to extinction."
+
+Involuntarily my ears pricked.
+
+"Was that often?"
+
+"No, I can't say the boredom predominated, in the long run."  He
+surveyed his coffee with the air of an artist, his boyish head on one
+side.
+
+"Where are those cups, Mary?"
+
+"Your system of boredom seemed to have a remarkable effect on Lennox,
+anyway," slipped from me involuntarily.
+
+Lessing laughed.  "Oh, that was when the boredom ended!  He stood it
+nobly to a point."  He turned toward me.  "Would you like to see what
+frightened Lennox, sometime?"
+
+Before I could answer Mary Lessing came in with the coffee-cups, and
+the subject was dropped.
+
+It was ten o'clock when I rose to leave, my departure hastened by a
+suspicion that Mrs. Lessing had glanced several times of purpose at
+the clock.  They all came out on the porch to say good night, and at
+the last moment Lessing added: "I'll walk down the hill with you."
+
+"I've got my bicycle," I said quickly, as Miss Lessing looked up.
+"There's no need to bring you out."
+
+"Oh, it'll do me good!"
+
+It was a still, sultry night, with a humidity in the air that had
+arisen since nightfall.  We walked leisurely, smoking, as far as the
+crossroad at the top of Dutchman's Hill.  The hollow below was alive
+with fireflies, gleaming and vanishing alternately in the soft dusk.
+There should be a moon, but within the past hour premonitory
+rainclouds had gathered, blotting it out.  Lessing glanced at the sky.
+
+"How long will it take you to get back?"
+
+"Ten minutes, more or less.  It won't rain till I get there."
+
+I scratched a match, stooping toward my bicycle lantern.
+
+"Is it necessary to light that?" he asked.
+
+"Why not?  There's a bad bit of road at the bottom there."
+
+"I find the glare of a lamp like that always makes it worse.  What is
+it, acetylene?"
+
+He bent over the lantern to examine it, and in the pause the match
+burned down and went out.  I felt for the box again in my pocket, and
+as I did so Lessing let go his hold on the bicycle.  The machine
+slipped by its weight, and reaching quickly to catch it I heard the
+unmistakable sound of escaping air.
+
+"Now you've done it!" cried Lessing boyishly.
+
+"Damn!"  I groped for the rear tire.  It was flat.  "Here's a
+cheerful business.  How the dickens----"
+
+Lessing laughed.  "We'll have to walk it now!  Never mind.  I know
+the road."
+
+"I'm not going to bring you all that way," I said.  "I shall be all
+right."
+
+"Nonsense!  I like a walk before I turn in."
+
+He took hold of the bicycle on one side, I on the other, and together
+we set off to walk down the hill.  There is an exhilaration in
+walking through woods at night, even tempered by the necessity of
+pushing a heavy motor-cycle before you, and my brief annoyance at the
+accident rapidly vanished.  Lessing was boyishly high-spirited;
+between us we made a fairly rowdy trip of it.  We had just finished
+the ascent of the other side of the hollow when he laid a sudden hand
+on my arm.
+
+"Did you hear anything?"
+
+"No.  Why?"
+
+I thought he was still joking, but his cloak of nonsense had dropped
+from him abruptly.  He pulled me to the side of the road.
+
+"Listen!"
+
+There seemed nothing to listen for.  I waited, rather impatiently.
+Lessing threw back his head, scanning the line of the trees that shut
+us in.  "There!"
+
+It was still in my mind that he was trying to play some game on me.
+
+"It's nothing but a bird," I said.
+
+"Bird?  You heard nothing else?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Come on," Lessing said.  He seemed abruptly sobered, and I fancied
+he was at pains to quicken our pace over the remaining stretch of
+road.  When we sighted the glimmer of the orchard palings I pulled up.
+
+"Come on into the house and have a drink," I said.
+
+"No, thanks.  I must get back.  By the way, do you carry a revolver?"
+
+"What on earth for?"
+
+"I only wondered.  I should advise you to, around here."  His hand
+slipped down to his pocket, and I heard a soft click.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"Have a pot at the birds, going back."  He smiled.  "Good night.
+Look in sometime during the week."
+
+And he went off without further delay, whistling softly.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LABORATORY
+
+Instead, it was Lessing who came a day or two later to see me.  He
+lounged in one evening when I was sitting smoking on the porch, after
+supper, and my first advice of his presence was the clatter of a zinc
+pail which Pete let fall promptly in the side yard.  When Lessing
+rounded the corner of the porch he was grinning.
+
+"Your nigger must have a bad conscience," he said.  "I never saw
+anyone so afraid of the devil in all my life!"
+
+I made a sound of annoyance.  Evidently I had not finished with Pete
+yet.  "He's a born idiot!" I said.
+
+"I'm not so sure," Lessing returned.  "He has a very practical regard
+for his own skin.  I appreciate that."
+
+"You ought to."
+
+He gave me one of those habitual quick looks, his head on one side.
+
+"Thanks!  Do you find the mosquitoes bad around here?  I got all
+bitten up coming past Dutchman's Hollow."
+
+I took the hint.
+
+"We'll sit indoors," I said.  "It's pretty cool in the surgery."
+
+He followed me into the room, glancing curiously about him.
+
+"So this is where old Lennox hung out ... the place has a look of
+him.  What's that, butterflies?  He always had a weakness for things
+he could stick a pin into and label nicely!"
+
+"Have you never been here before?"
+
+"Never.  He used to come to my place.  I have an idea you know, that
+Lennox still thinks I'm not right in the head."
+
+I lit the student lamp on the table and set out whisky and a couple
+of glasses.  Lessing settled himself in the shabby armchair opposite
+me, and for a little while we smoked in silence.  In the half-shadow
+beyond the ring of lamplight I could see his face, fine and clear cut
+against the shabby morocco of the chair back, the dark hair tumbled
+over his forehead.  He was staring up at the smoke wreaths in a
+curious intensity of abstraction.
+
+"I suppose," he began at last, "that I owe you some sort of an
+explanation, as things go."
+
+I made a little gesture of indifference.  I was beginning to know my
+man.  If it pleased him to work upon my curiosity I was prepared to
+give him the least possible satisfaction.
+
+"You offered me one," I corrected him.  "I believe we decided to let
+it go at that."
+
+He turned his gaze upon me, with a rather charming impertinence.
+
+"That was when I took you for a fool.  As I admit the error you ought
+to forgive my expression of it.  The truth is..."  He paused so long
+that I reached for a fresh cigarette to break the interval.  "I'll be
+damned if I know what the truth is myself!"  He finished almost
+violently.  "I can give you facts--all you want.  When it comes to
+putting things together....  Do you know how maddening it is to have
+your hand on a thing--actually on it--and feel it all the while
+slipping through your fingers?"
+
+He threw his cigarette away.  "Let's drop all this nonsense, anyway.
+I came over here tonight to have a talk with you.  I tell you
+frankly, because you're about the only sane man I'm likely to cross
+down here.  I tried Lennox once, and Lennox thought I was batty, and
+there the matter ended.  But I've got to a point now where it's
+absolutely necessary, for the sake of my own mental balance, that I
+should have someone else's opinion about things.  I'm going to put
+certain facts before you, and you'll say what you think about them."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"About eighteen months ago," Lessing began, "my wife was in rather
+bad health.  It was some sort of nervous trouble, which I need not
+enter into here, but the doctor said she needed complete change, and
+that she must positively live in the country for some time, a year or
+two at least.  We came down here.  I bought the piece of ground up
+the hill there and built the little bungalow we are living in, with
+the idea of using it later on, when her health is restored, simply as
+a summer cottage.  I have a fondness for dabbling in chemistry, as I
+think I told you, and shortly after we moved down here I built that
+sort of outdoor study you have seen, so that I could have a place,
+perfectly quiet, that I could work in without being disturbed, and
+without messing the house up with my things.  I am not a good
+sleeper.  I sit up pretty late at night as a rule, and it worries me
+to know I'm disturbing other people in the house or that the women
+are liable to drop in in their dressing-gowns at half-past one or so,
+to ask whether I'm going to bed or not.
+
+"My laboratory has a top light for day use, and I have rigged up an
+acetylene lamp just over my table, with a pretty strong light.  One
+night last fall I happened to be working rather late.  As a rule I
+have no difficulty whatever about keeping awake--it's the other way
+about, in fact--but along about one o'clock I began to get rather
+drowsy.  It might have been the fumes of the chemicals I was using,
+but I'm used to that, and anyway I don't think they could have
+affected me.  My interest in what I was doing was still awake, but
+the other side of my mind seemed to get drowsy at the same time.  I
+fought against it a long while, and then gradually I seemed to get
+the consciousness of something--some presence--in or near the room.
+I don't know if you have ever attended a séance, Haverill?"
+
+"Never--of any account."
+
+My cigarette had burned down to my fingers, and I threw it away.  I
+was beginning to get keenly interested in his story.
+
+"Well, if you had, you would know that one sometimes gets the sense
+of a materialization some minutes before it actually takes place.  I
+suppose the subconscious part of one's mind acts more quickly than
+the senses in receiving an impression.  Anyway that was what seemed
+to happen with me.  I waited.  I was awake; I want you to understand
+that clearly.  I was as awake as I am now.  I saw everything about
+me, but I seemed to see it in a quite impersonal sort of way.
+
+"The top light is arranged to open in sections, the top as well as
+the four sides.  The side glasses were my idea for bad weather, so
+that I could always have ventilation on one side or the other without
+rain driving in, as it will with an ordinary skylight.  I had the
+middle section raised, and one side open as well.  Presently I was
+conscious that something was trying to enter at the glass.  There
+were no sound on the roof itself, which is galvanized, but I could
+hear plainly a sort of scraping at the window.  The inside light was
+so strong that I could see nothing, but something was gradually
+obscuring the opening.  I had a conviction that the thing, whatever
+it was, was attracted by my light, and I made an effort, with the
+strange drowsiness gaining on me, to reach the lamp and turn it out.
+
+"I was on my feet, reaching across the table, with the glare of the
+lamp full in my eyes, when something--I don't know what--struck me
+and threw me to the ground.  My hand was already on the lamp, and I
+must have managed to turn it out actually in the moment of falling.
+I have a recollection of struggling for a moment there in the
+darkness, of trying, with some sort of hazy instinct, to drag myself
+under cover of the table, and then I suppose I became unconscious.
+
+"When I came to it was broad daylight.  I was lying on the floor,
+near the table.  There was broken glass near me, and I seemed to
+remember the crash of it before I lost consciousness.  My clothes
+were torn, my arms and chest were badly scratched--I must have
+somehow defended my face without knowing it--and I was stiff all over
+when I moved.  When I got into the open I was seized with an intense
+nausea, which lasted for several minutes.  My wife and sister are
+used to my being up till all hours, so that my absence had caused no
+uneasiness.  I went into the house, washed myself as well as I could,
+and went to sleep.  It was then five o'clock, so that I must have
+been nearly four hours unconscious."
+
+"Did you notice any other symptoms besides the nausea?" I interrupted.
+
+"Yes; an intense fatigue.  It was not sleepiness.  I was tired out,
+as if I had been through some great exertion."
+
+"Well?" I said, for I knew he had not finished.
+
+"That was last October, the twenty-fourth, to be exact.  Since then
+the thing has happened twice again.  On each occasion I have had the
+same premonitory drowsiness.  I have struggled against it, and it has
+mastered me at just the critical moment.  The second time when I came
+to I was more badly hurt than before.  My sister happened to be up
+early that morning, and there was no disguising my condition from
+her.  She went off for Lennox.  When he came he fixed me up and gave
+me a sleeping draught--which I didn't need--and I slept nearly the
+whole day.  He held the opinion, which I wrested from him later, that
+I had had some sort of seizure, the result of overwork, and that I
+had inflicted the injuries on myself during unconsciousness.  The
+rest he put down to hallucination.  He was a fool, and I told him so.
+Whatever the thing was, it was no hallucination."
+
+"How wide was the skylight open?"
+
+"About eighteen inches."
+
+"Did you find any traces in the morning?"
+
+"Not a mark.  The building is high, as you know, and the sides are of
+perfectly plain boarding.  There is nothing that could give foothold,
+except to a monkey, and the nearest tree is eight feet off.  Oh, I
+went over the whole ground carefully!  Whatever it was that came, it
+did not reach me from the ground."
+
+I moved impatiently.  "But what other way could it have reached you?"
+
+"That's what I ask myself," said Lessing grimly.  "Do I look like a
+man subject to brain trouble?"
+
+"No," I said.  "I gave that theory up almost immediately."
+
+"Then what do you make of it?" he asked quietly.
+
+"Make of it!" I cried.  "Good heavens, man, do you realize that
+you're asking me to believe a thing that's outside the range of all
+human possibility!"
+
+"Human possibility!  What is human possibility?  I tell you the thing
+as it happened, simply."  He rose and began to pace to and fro in the
+room.  "I'm a sane man.  I'm not given to imaginary things.  And
+besides--you saw yourself----"
+
+"Wait a moment," I said.  "About this light.  Have you used the same
+lamp right along?"
+
+Lessing gave a quick look.  I wondered if he had divined my visit to
+the laboratory that first morning.
+
+"No.  I altered it after the second time.  There was an interval of
+over four months when nothing happened at all.  I tried to reason it
+all out, and I concluded that in some way the lamp had had to do with
+it.  From the position of the building, and the woods about it, the
+light I was at first using could be visible only from one certain
+direction.  I wanted to investigate the whole thing systematically,
+and with that idea I raised the lamp and fitted a strong reflector
+that would throw the light outside the building at will, and in any
+direction."
+
+His description corresponded with the light I had seen above the
+tree-tops, the night of Pete's adventure with the turkey-buzzard.
+
+"You were using this the last time?"
+
+"Yes.  I had been experimenting with it, off and on, for several
+weeks."
+
+"Have you any idea of the shape of the thing?" I asked him.
+
+"So far as I could make out anything, outside the glass, I might
+describe it as some kind of dog.  It seemed to be greyish....  But
+that as a theory is sheer nonsense.  You know that no dog could have
+made the scratches you saw."
+
+One thing still puzzled me.
+
+"You say that you put the light out yourself the first time?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And the second?"
+
+"There was scarcely time to get any definite impression," he answered
+evasively.  "I was struck down almost at once."
+
+"But you had the impression of a dog?"
+
+"What does it matter?" he cried, with a sudden change of voice.  "I
+tell you, Haverill, it was like nothing that I can describe!"
+
+We sat there for some minutes in silence.  I can see now the turn of
+Lessing's head, the restless movement of his fingers on the
+chair-arm.  It seemed incongruous that we should be sitting here in
+this common-place room, amid surroundings which spoke so emphatically
+of the practical routine of life, discussing that which should have
+branded us both as madmen.
+
+It was Lessing who broke the silence first.
+
+"What the good?" he said, with a short laugh.  "I've told you the
+whole business, and it's up to you to make what you choose of it.
+The only conclusion seems to be that we are up against something
+which is, as you put it, outside the range of experience.  Good.  But
+suppose I told you that it wasn't outside the range of
+experience--that what I saw has been seen by other people, upon
+independent testimony, ten, twenty, thirty years ago?"
+
+I thought of the reporter's story.  But there would be time to
+contribute my data presently, after Lessing had told me all that he
+knew.
+
+"Did you ever hear of an apparition called the Jersey Devil?" he
+asked.
+
+"I don't remember it."
+
+"You probably wouldn't," Lessing replied.  He took a fresh cigarette
+from the box and lit it.  "The tale afforded some stray paragraphs in
+the papers, at different times, much as the periodical accounts of
+'authentic' ghosts do, but I don't believe anyone gave the slightest
+credence to it.  The Jersey Devil, to sum up all that I have been
+able to glean on the subject, was a legendary monster, reputed to
+have been seen, on the evidence of several persons, at different
+periods during the past fifty or sixty years.  The legend goes back,
+I believe, to just before the Civil War.  According to the story, its
+appearance gives warning to some national trouble or calamity.  It
+was said to have been seen before Lincoln's assassination, before the
+Spanish-American War, and before the assassination of President
+McKinley.  It is described as a creature having the body of a bat and
+the head of a horse--sometimes as a quasi-human head on a winged
+animal body--and it haunts certain counties of New Jersey, chiefly
+Monmouth and Ocean counties, and has also been seen as far north as
+Pennsylvania.  The legend goes that it is a changeling, that is to
+say, a devil which took possession of a child's body at birth and
+flew off in the shape of a monster.  Why it should have developed the
+sort of national solicitude they claim for it is unexplained.  Of
+course the evidence is almost entirely that of superstitious country
+people who saw it, or thought they saw it, but the fact remains that
+the evidence in every case tallies, even after intervals of ten or
+twenty years.
+
+"We may take it that very legend has somewhere some natural origin,
+however much it may be subsequently exaggerated or distorted.  Why,
+if this particular legend is purely imaginary, should it be confined
+to certain districts and not to others?  We are not dealing with an
+apparition reputed to haunt one particular place.  It has a pretty
+wide range of country, on the contrary, and its appearance has been
+vouched for, almost simultaneously, in places a great many miles
+apart.  Why should it be seen in one certain county and not in the
+adjoining ones, where the inhabitants are probably equally
+superstitious?  Also it is not seen actually at the time of trouble,
+when people's minds might be most naturally influenced by
+superstition, but days and sometimes weeks before the event.  That
+fact in itself I attach no importance to.  There is a coincidence,
+and people naturally connect the two ideas.  But I mention it to
+prove that in no instance was the thing seen because it was expected
+to be seen; its appearance in each case was entirely without warning
+or predisposition."
+
+I moved in my chair.
+
+"We've got enough to deal with as the thing stands.  If you're going
+to back it up with any old wives' tales of a bat-winged horse----"
+
+"I'm not backing it up," Lessing retorted.  "I'm only asking myself
+whether the experiences that give rise to the tale of the Jersey
+Devil have any connection with my own.  The details don't matter.  I
+want to get at the origin of the thing."
+
+"The two don't even tally!" I spoke sharply, for I had still
+uncomfortably before my eyes the vision of the dead cyclist on the
+stretch of empty road.
+
+"They don't, on this point," Lessing continued coolly.  "The Jersey
+Devil has never, to my knowledge, been credited with any malevolent
+intent.  At the worst, assuming the tales to have some basis of
+truth, it has merely scared one or two respectable farmers driving
+home at night.  Now the thing that attacked me, attacked me
+deliberately, and with an almost extraordinary ferocity of onslaught.
+I don't think there can be any question about that.  That fact alone
+puts the apparition theory out of the game.  We are not dealing with
+any mere visual phenomena.  We are dealing with some actual existing
+menace.  There is just one point that can lead up to the connection,
+if there is one, between the two."
+
+"The attraction of the lamp?"
+
+"Exactly.  Those other people may have been carrying a lamp or they
+may not.  In any case, it was probably a lantern of so slight a power
+as to escape notice.  I said that the thing attacked me.  But the
+real object of its attack might very well have been the lamp, and not
+me at all.  I merely happened in each instance to be near it."
+
+"But even admitting," I objected, "for the sake of argument, that the
+thing was a bat, I am not certain about bats being actually attracted
+by light.  They blunder into it."
+
+"Nor am I.  As I say, I give you my only theory.  And if you assume a
+bat, you must assume a bat of sufficient size to strike a man down at
+one blow.  The whole thing's grotesque."  He pulled out his watch,
+and rose abruptly.  "I must get back, or Mary will be worrying about
+me.  We'll talk over this another time.  If you go into the thing
+with me, we'll go into it thoroughly.  Only you know now why I warned
+you against cycling with a strong lantern."
+
+"Even to the extent of slitting my bicycle tire?"
+
+"Even to that extent," returned Lessing gravely.  "You see, I wasn't
+taking any risks."
+
+We shook hands, and I followed him out to the porch.  There was a
+clear moon, and the road glimmered white between the black line of
+the woods.  As I watched the swing of his shoulders down the path I
+was left, I admit, with a definite sense of comfort at the proximity
+of my own four walls.  And before sleep overtook me that night the
+words of the reporter came back again and again to my mind:
+
+"What's the animal that goes round in these woods that's strong
+enough to wreck the steel tubing of a bicycle, that attacks with its
+claws instead of its teeth, and that's quick enough to knock a man
+down without the chance of a struggle?"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+I GO FISHING
+
+The next morning was one of the most glorious that I remember in that
+whole summer.  I rose early, throwing the windows wide open while I
+dressed to let in the full blaze of sunshine, and set myself, while
+the morning common-sense mood was still upon me, to go over carefully
+in my mind every detail of Lessing's story.  Somewhere there must be
+a natural explanation; it was only the question of finding it.  Among
+other things it occurred to me that someone, for reasons unknown,
+might be playing a series of practical jokes upon him, but it was
+difficult to credit a hoax of such malignant and serious intent, and
+even assuming for a moment that Lessing was the victim of any such
+plot, it did not explain those mysterious deaths which, I felt more
+and more convinced, were in some way connected with his own
+experiences.
+
+It was at least certain that I was in for a fairly interesting
+vacation.  I remembered with grim humour Lennox's assurance that I
+would find the practice a quiet one; opinions might well differ on
+that point.  Even if Lennox came back at the time agreed upon, I had
+still another six weeks before me, and in six weeks a good deal might
+happen.  It would be my own fault if I did not get some part of the
+mystery cleared up before then.
+
+Everyone has his own private specific for clearing the mind.  Mine
+was fishing.  After breakfast I hunted out my tackle, asked Mrs.
+Searle to pack me a lunch, and set out resolutely, with the
+determination to remain in the open air until nightfall.
+
+Part of the creek that lay behind the house I had already explored,
+and this morning I decided to work upstream, in the direction of the
+dam.  The air was clear and fresh and the woods were alive with
+birds.  Here and there the sumach and poison ivy were already
+beginning to turn colour, showing patches of tawny scarlet against
+the green of the undergrowth.  Great painted butterflies flitted
+across my path, and once, as I sat quietly on a boulder in midstream,
+a kingfisher flashed near me in the broken sunlight.
+
+The creek ran with a pleasant sound in its bed, now swirling between
+great boulders, now trickling over shallows of waving bronze-tinted
+weed, here and there forming deep pools, outside the stress of the
+current, where one might catch a glimpse of shadowy forms moving
+through the gold-brown sun-shot water.
+
+I made desultory casts, taking more interest in the morning and in my
+surroundings than in the actual pursuit upon which I was engaged.
+Out here under the trees, with the music of the stream in one's ear,
+it was impossible to feel anything but sane and healthy.
+
+The silence of these woods was intense.  In pine woods there is
+always some stir of movement, however faint, but these trees, giant
+hickories and dense-foliaged oaks, grew so tall that sound seemed
+lost amid their branches.  One had the impression of miles of
+far-reaching solitude.  To break the spell I began to whistle as I
+moved upstream, pausing now and then to try some likely pool, picking
+my way over the big rocks that dotted the bed of the stream.  The
+creek was fairly deep in places; a child, losing its footing, could
+be easily drowned in the strong current.  It was an ideal stream for
+sport, but either the fish were wary this morning or I was giving but
+scant attention to my task, for by midday I had only one small
+half-pounder and a missing hook to my score.  Mrs. Searle's luncheon
+packet bulged in my pocket, reminding me presently of hunger.  I was
+reeling in, preparatory to settling down by some comfortable
+tree-trunk, when something rushed at me with a splash and a scurry.
+I was standing at the moment on a rounded boulder near midstream, and
+the impact threw me off my balance knee-deep into the water.  I
+turned to see the Lessings' orange setter.
+
+"Oh, you _bad_ dog!" a voice exclaimed from the bushes.
+"Whatever----  Oh, Doctor Haverill, I am so sorry!"
+
+Mary Lessing stood on the bank, bareheaded, in a short golf-skirt and
+uprolled sleeves.  The dog bounded back to her, and she dealt him a
+summary and ineffectual cuff on the ear.
+
+"Don't do that!" I cried.  "I was just thinking how cool it looked in
+here, anyway!"
+
+I waded to the shore and joined her.  "I can't shake hands, because
+I'm wet," I added.  "How are you?  I've been trying to fish, but the
+trout here are entirely too sophisticated!"
+
+"You've frightened them for good now!" she laughed.  "What a shame!
+Did you catch anything?"
+
+"One wretched half-pounder.  I put him back for luck."
+
+"A poor luck!"
+
+"I'm not so sure," I rejoined, smiling, and she stooped hastily down
+to address the setter, who sat regarding us with lolling tongue.
+
+"When are you going to learn manners, you wretched animal?  You
+haven't even the grace to apologize!"
+
+The setter put up a muddied paw and scraped appealingly at her skirt.
+"You deserve to go without biscuit for a month," she continued.  "Go
+away from me; don't shake yourself here!"
+
+The command came too late, and we both dodged to avoid the jubilant
+shower of water drops.  Mary Lessing shook her skirt and sat down.
+
+"Do you often explore up this way?" she asked.
+
+"No.  It's the first time.  I've no idea now how far I've come."
+
+"You're about ten minutes from the dam," she said.  "Our cottage is
+not very far off.  I was just going back to lunch."
+
+"And I was just going to have mine here."  I clapped a sudden hand to
+my pocket; the paper parcel was still luckily intact.  "Suppose we
+were to consider it a picnic?  I don't know what Mrs. Searle has put
+up for me, but I have a recollection that she baked apple-cake
+yesterday.  It's too entirely gorgeous a day to eat indoors."
+
+"Oh, as for that----" she began.
+
+"As for that, you must admit that lunch indoors doesn't tempt you in
+the very least."
+
+"It doesn't," she said.  "I came out here this morning because----"
+
+She stopped rather abruptly.  I was looking about me for a likely
+spot in the shade, and when I had found it, at the base of two
+towering hickories, I pulled Mrs. Searle's parcel out from my pocket.
+The setter watched my proceedings with a keen interest, intent on the
+chance of the moment.
+
+"I'm convinced," she objected, "that you ought to go home and change
+your boots."
+
+"It's impertinent," I reminded her, untying the pink grocery string
+from the parcel, "to give medical advice to a doctor.  Do you like
+Uneeda biscuits?  Because they seem to have occupied an important
+place in my housekeeper's mind this morning."
+
+We sat down on the moss beneath the hickories, and I divided the
+single gigantic sandwich with my pocket-knife.  Luckily Mrs. Searle
+had over-estimated my hunger.  We ate healthily, with open-air
+appetites, and what was left over the setter finished at one watchful
+snap.
+
+"When does Doctor Lennox come home?" Mary asked presently.
+
+"He's due in another six weeks, unless he finds Europe too
+fascinating.  Then I shall have to go back and grind, I suppose.  It
+won't be an attractive prospect, after this holiday."
+
+"You have a practice in New York?"
+
+"Not yet.  I've been _interne_ up to now.  I expect it'll end in the
+East Side.  A friend of mine has a settlement there, and I'd like to
+join him if I can.  There's always plenty to do."
+
+"I know," she nodded.  "I've seen something of it.  Do you know a man
+named Herrick, there?"
+
+"Herrick!" I sat upright.  "If you mean Jack Herrick, that's the
+friend I was speaking of.  Then you----"
+
+"Then _you_," she corrected, "are the college chum he was always
+talking about.  Why, I've known Jack Herrick ever since I used to
+play dolls!"
+
+"Three and a half years..." I said pensively.  "The world's a small
+place."
+
+"You are rude, Doctor Haverill.  It's a long enough time, anyway."
+
+She was looking at the branches overhead, and in her upturned face I
+caught fleetingly a likeness that had puzzled me more than once
+before.  I knew now.  On Herrick's mantelshelf, in his shabby
+comfortable room at the settlement, there had stood always a
+photograph in a silver frame.  It was the portrait of a child of
+perhaps thirteen, in a gingham overall, and with her hair braided in
+two short tails down her back.  Herrick had said once: "That's an old
+sweetheart of mine."
+
+Singularly enough, the recollection did not at this moment greatly
+please me.  But I merely said:
+
+"You wore your hair in two pig-tails."
+
+She brought her eyes to earth swiftly.  "Who told you?"
+
+"All proper little girls do at that age," I reminded her shamelessly.
+
+"I see.  But we were talking of John Herrick."
+
+"Go on."
+
+"Don't you think he's splendid?" she continued, turning to me.  "He's
+done no end of good.  And he works ... I don't believe he ever takes
+a real holiday.  Doctor Haverill, you ought to get him----"
+
+"To come down here for a while?  I will--if it would please you."
+
+She looked at me so frankly that I was at once ashamed.
+
+"Why, of course it would!  But I don't know why I said that.  I don't
+suppose he'd take the time."
+
+I watched a dragon-fly that was wheeling over the stream..  She sat
+near me, her hands locked about her knees.
+
+"My brother was at your house last night," she said after a moment.
+
+"Yes."
+
+I could feel her eyes fixed on me, and I knew what was in her mind.
+
+"He told you something?"
+
+"We were talking about chemistry," I said.  "It's a subject your
+brother is very interested in."
+
+"Chemistry!"  She put out her hand with a little gesture.  "Doctor
+Haverill, do you take me for a child?  What is the matter?  You can
+tell me; he has spoken to you.  I want to know."
+
+"What do you want to know?" I said, lamely enough.
+
+"The whole thing--what is happening here.  I know something threatens
+him, that he is in danger, and neither he nor you will tell me what
+it is."
+
+"How can I tell you," I fenced, "what I don't even know myself?"
+
+She was quick.  "Then there is something?"
+
+I ignored the unfinished sentence.
+
+"Miss Lessing, why can't you get your brother to go away from here,
+for a time?"
+
+"I can't.  I've tried.  He wouldn't leave, now.  You don't know him.
+He's the last person in the world to give a thing up until he's
+proved it down to the ground, one way or another.  Whatever's at the
+bottom of this, he won't rest till he's found it out.  It's just a
+scientific problem to him, and nothing else."
+
+"And you?" I said.
+
+"I?"  She moved her shoulders.  "What can I think?  I had hoped just
+now--But I only know what he has told me, what I have seen.  If one
+began to think----"
+
+"Listen to me," I said.  "You must not think!  You and I are two sane
+people.  Look at these wood around!  I ask you, is it possible to
+feel anything but sane and incredulous in a place like this?  I want
+you to get into your head, right now, that there is nothing--nothing
+at all in this world--that a man has any reason to be afraid of.  And
+there are very few things in the world, to my belief, that cannot be
+explained.  Has it ever occurred to you that this whole conviction of
+your brother's may be nothing more than hallucination?"
+
+"But the injuries----"
+
+"I have known hysteric patients, before now, inflict as severe
+injuries upon themselves without consciousness or recollection.  I
+don't say it is your brother's case; I'm only trying to form a
+possible rational explanation such as any doctor would put forward.
+I have had one or two such cases within my own experience.  What I
+propose to do is this, but I shall do it only with your consent.  I
+will write to Herrick and ask him down here for a fortnight.  It will
+be a new brain to bear on the problem, and I shall ask your brother
+to let us join these investigations with him."
+
+"You'll do that."  She put out her hand to me impulsively.
+
+"I'll do it to-night.  Only ... I shall have to give Herrick a
+detailed account of everything that has happened, so far as we know
+it, and I can't do that without your brother's approval."
+
+"Yes ... I see."
+
+"You will excuse one question.  Are they on good terms?"
+
+It struck me that I had never heard Lessing mention his name.
+
+"Yes."  She paused doubtfully.  "It's funny you should ask that.
+They had a disagreement, about two years ago.  It was when my brother
+first took up this ... this kind of study.  Having séances and that.
+Doctor Herrick wanted him to give it up."
+
+I moved involuntarily.  Here was a new light on Lessing's attitude of
+mind, which he himself had been at pains, it seemed to me, to touch
+on very lightly.  I remembered stray references of his, the signed
+article I had noticed on my first evening at the house.
+
+"Your brother used to attend séances often?"
+
+"Didn't he tell you?  I don't know that I would have mentioned it,
+but I don't see that it matters.  It was before I came to live with
+them.  He and some friends of his were very interested, and Doctor
+Herrick used to join them too sometimes.  They met at a friend's
+studio.  Doctor Herrick was rather against it from the first, but I
+know he used to be there.  Of course I understand very little about
+it, but ... things did happen.  I don't mean that they banged on
+tambourines or rapped out the alphabet or anything like that.  It
+wasn't spiritualism.  And then Doctor Herrick stopped.  I think he
+knew more than any of them, but he said it was dangerous and it
+didn't lead to anything, and he wanted my brother to give it up
+altogether.  Kate--that's my sister-in-law, you know--was their
+medium, and I think it was on her account.  Doctor Herrick thought it
+was bad for her.  And then one night something happened, I don't know
+just what, but Kate got some sort of a shock.  She's very highly
+strung at any time, and I always supposed something frightened her,
+but anyway she was quite ill for a long time after that.  She used to
+get queer sort of nervous spells, and she couldn't be left alone, and
+that was why I first came to live with them, on her account.  Of
+course my brother gave the whole business up then.  The physician who
+attended her said simply that she was in poor health, and had had a
+nervous breakdown, and he told her she must live in the country
+awhile till she got stronger, but I know Doctor Herrick thought at
+the time that the séances had been the cause of it.  He told my
+brother so."
+
+I listened attentively.  It was news to me that Herrick, the
+essential level-headed, should have lent himself at any time to
+experiments of this order.  He had never mentioned the subject to me
+in our many talks, and I had even gathered, as one gathers an
+impression without any very definite grounds, that he was a confirmed
+sceptic on all matters of occultism.
+
+"You say they had a disagreement?"
+
+"It was exactly that," she made haste to say, "They didn't quarrel,
+but I know Herrick was very much opposed to Dick's views, and they
+used to have arguments.  But it didn't amount to more than that."
+
+"Good!"
+
+She had risen to her feet, and at her movement the setter himself
+lazily rose and came towards us.
+
+"Then we're going to see this thing out?" I said.
+
+"We'll see it out."
+
+We shook hands, and I fancied that her fingers rested in mine a
+moment voluntarily before she drew them away.
+
+"Are you coming up to see my brother today?" she asked.
+
+"Presently ... I'd like to."  I looked at my watch.  "I thought of
+taking a stroll up to the dam, as I'm so close; I've never been
+there.  You say it's only a few minutes?"
+
+"Not more than ten, through the woods."
+
+"Let's walk up together," I suggested, "if you aren't too tired."
+
+She assented readily, and we struck off up a little footpath, barely
+traceable, that followed the course of the stream.  It was, as she
+had said, a scant ten minutes before the sound of the sluice broke on
+our ears, and through a sudden clearing of the woods the dam lay
+before us, a black sinister sheet of water, covered with masses of
+floating weed and pond-lilies, and darkened by the trees and
+underbrush that grew closely down to its edge.  An old scow, long
+past use and sunken low in the water, lay pad-locked to a slimy stump
+near the shore.
+
+Following an old cart-track, we skirted the edge of the dam in the
+direction of the saw-mill, a dilapidated building with broken roof,
+that seemed to have stood for many years of disuse.  To reach it we
+had to cross the sluice itself, and Mary Lessing, who was a few paces
+ahead of me, paused to look down over the single rough handrail that
+protected one from a misstep.
+
+There is something forbidding about a mill-sluice at any time,
+especially when dissociated, as this was, from the companionable
+sound of human labour.  The sheer depth, the knowledge of the vast
+imprisoned force behind one, the sound of water gushing here and
+there between the slimy weed-grown timbers, give always, to me at
+least, an indefinable sense of the sinister.
+
+I leaned my rod against the railing, and we looked down side by side
+at the black oozing wall below.
+
+"I like this place," Mary Lessing said.  "There's something queer and
+creepy about it.  I often come here.  I suppose they haven't worked
+the sluice for years."
+
+"I doubt if the machinery would move now," I said.  "Of course this
+is never opened.  There should be a smaller sluice for the millstream
+further on."
+
+I glanced as I spoke at the clumsy wooden levers near me that
+controlled the sluice.  They looked to be rotting in their place, but
+as I pushed one, idly, a sudden change in the sound of escaping water
+below warned me that the machinery was not in such ill repair as it
+would seem.  I exerted my strength to pull the lever back, and my
+attention was momentarily distracted from the girl beside me.  She
+was leaning out over the hand-rail, and when I turned it was with a
+sudden cry of warning.
+
+"Look out!" I said.  "That may not be safe!"
+
+I caught her arm instinctively as I spoke, and on the instant the
+rail bent outward with a slight sound of cracking.  In another moment
+she would have been over the edge.  We looked at one another, and
+Mary laughed, a little nervously on the stillness.  Her face had
+flushed.
+
+"I thought that rail was all right," she said rather awkwardly.
+
+"Dick walked over here with me not a week ago, and we tested it then
+to see."
+
+"It isn't all right now," I returned sharply.
+
+I put my two hands on the rail, giving it a slight wrench outward.
+It gave easily to my touch, and looking closer, I saw that the
+surface towards the water had been half cut through.  Someone had
+tampered with it deliberately and within the last few days.
+
+"What is it?" Mary Lessing asked.
+
+"Merely rotten, as I thought!"
+
+I turned away, and walked thoughtfully on towards the saw-mill.  The
+thing puzzled me, but it had an ugly look.  It was no idle mischief
+that had prompted the act.  Whoever had done it, had done it
+maliciously, and the purpose was not very far to seek.  Hitherto I
+had not attached much importance to the Lessings' occasional laughing
+references to their unpopularity in the village.  Now it assumed
+suddenly a significance.
+
+I turned to Mary Lessing, walking beside me.
+
+"I want you to promise me something," I said, "whether it seems to
+you irrelevant or not.  I want you not to come here again by
+yourself, at any time.  It's a lonely place and it isn't particularly
+safe.  If you come at all, bring your brother with you."
+
+The smile that was on her lips at first faded abruptly, leaving her
+face serious.
+
+"The rail was cut," she said quietly.  "Is that what you mean?  It
+must have been, because it was perfectly solid a few days ago."
+
+"Someone has been up to mischief.  If there are characters of that
+kind in the neighbourhood, it's best to run no risks, that's all."
+
+We walked on a few paces, silently.  The mill was on our right, a
+desolate-looking building enough, with its surrounding litter of
+sodden chips and piles of cut logs lying here and there In the open.
+A heavy smell of decaying wood was in the air, added to the stagnant
+odour of the dam itself.
+
+The setter was in front of us, sniffing to and fro on the trail of
+the rats that infested the wood piles.  Suddenly he stood still, his
+ears laid back, growling ominously.  A short, thick-set figure
+slipped from the angle of the mill wall and vanished in the woods on
+the farther side of the cart-track.
+
+"Aaron Menning," Miss Lessing said.  She put her hand and called the
+dog back.  I was staring up the track where the chicken-huckster had
+so adroitly disappeared.
+
+"Does he live near here?"
+
+"Not very far off.  I suppose he comes here to fish.  There are a
+good many in the dam."
+
+"Very probable," I said.
+
+"I dislike that man," Mary said after a moment.  "I guess it's
+mutual, too.  The other one, Jake, you know, had a quarrel with my
+brother one time.  He was always loitering round the house, and Dick
+turned him away.  Aaron's always very civil when we meet, but I don't
+believe he likes us any more than Jakey did."
+
+We took a turning past the mill that led us, without further event,
+to the Lessings' bungalow.  Within sight of the house I parted from
+her.  I wanted to see Lessing again, but there were a few points that
+needed readjustment in my own mind first.  As I walked slowly home
+down the familiar slope of Dutchman's Hill I was thinking that the
+industrious and chapel-going Aaron might very well bear a little
+watching.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PROBLEMS
+
+I wrote to Herrick that same evening and his answer came a couple of
+days later, saying that he hoped to get away towards the end of the
+month.  I had said nothing in my letter about the events of the
+summer, but merely mentioned that the Lessings were my neighbours for
+the time being.
+
+Herrick wrote: "I shall be glad to meet Lessing again.  He seems to
+have buried himself in obscurity for the last twelve months.  Is he
+still as enthusiastic a theorist as ever, or has the country sobered
+his ideas?  In any case you are to be congratulated on having for
+neighbours three of the most charming people it has ever been my luck
+to meet."
+
+I smiled at the "three."  In my own mind I could have substituted
+another numeral which would explain much of Herrick's promptitude in
+accepting my invitation.  He was very much mistaken if he thought
+that any such artless device would put me off the track.  In
+imagination I already saw myself playing the rôle of a reluctant
+gooseberry during his visit.
+
+Lessing, when I mentioned my expected guest, made a comment almost
+identical with Herrick's own.
+
+"Herrick?" he said.  "Good!  We shall have some arguments, Haverill,
+that will eclipse even your own.  If Herrick gets to the bottom of
+this by any of his cut-and-dried theories and deductions I'll give
+him best once and for all!"
+
+One thing at least pleased me.  I gathered from both their remarks
+that whatever difference had occurred between them had been purely a
+battle of opinion, and had no influence on their fundamental regard
+for one another.  Meantime my meeting with Mary Lessing, and the
+subsequent incident of the broken hand-rail, had settled my mind on
+one point at least.  There was some malicious influence at work in
+the neighborhood which was distinctly and obviously human, whether it
+bore any relation to the laboratory experiences or not, and at any
+cost, even if necessary in the face of Lessing's opposition, she must
+be kept clear of it.
+
+Three-fourths of the neighbouring population were Pennsylvania Dutch,
+and I had learned enough, in my own infrequent dealings with them, to
+recognize their sullen aloofness, amounting almost to a hostility,
+towards any stranger settled in their midst.  The Lessings were for
+some reason disliked in the village, and I fancied that much of the
+distrust towards them was due to their having chosen for their
+dwelling a spot which already had a sufficiently bad reputation in
+the eyes of the country people about.  Lessing was by no means the
+sort of man to make himself popular here, or even friendly.  He was
+more or less of a recluse; he had erected a mysterious building in
+which, engaged upon equally mysterious pursuits, he chose to isolate
+himself until all hours of the night, and he displayed an open
+indifference towards all the current gossip and superstition of the
+neighbourhood.  Following the primitive psychology of these people,
+narrow-minded to a degree and distrustful of anything unfamiliar, his
+habits alone were sufficient to brand him as an ungodly character.
+According to his sister, he had already fallen foul of Jake Menning
+soon after his arrival, and I had no doubt whatever that Aaron, out
+of revenge, had since done his best to foster the already
+antagonistic feeling towards him.  The huckster's trade lends itself
+to all the back-door gossip of the countryside, and it seemed to me
+that I could trace easily enough the fruit of Aaron's house-to-house
+visits.  Aaron himself was civil-spoken, industrious, religious to
+all accounts, and a highly respected member of the community; but all
+this did not weigh very far against the man's face.  Whatever ill
+blood ran in the Menning family, it was certainly not confined to the
+deceased Jakey.
+
+I mentioned my suspicions to Lessing a day or two later, when I was
+at the bungalow.
+
+"Oh, the man's right enough," he returned.  "I don't like his kind,
+that's all.  I had a row with Jakey because I didn't want him hanging
+round the place and I told him so.  Aaron has never annoyed us in any
+way; on the contrary, he takes pains to be particularly civil.  I
+think he's like all the rest around, glad enough to keep clear of
+Dutchman's Hill and all its inhabitants, dead or living!"
+
+Mary Lessing had asked me, on our homeward walk, not to mention the
+cut railing to her brother, and I had not done so.  It was sufficient
+for the moment that she had agreed to keep away from the mill-dam and
+its immediate neighbourhood.  She was a sensible girl and I had no
+fear that she would break her promise out of any spirit of bravado or
+curiosity.
+
+We were in the sitting-room.  Mary had gone down to the village on an
+errand, and Mrs. Lessing was as usual invisible.  For the time being
+we were free from interruption, and it struck me as a good moment to
+tell Lessing what I had heard from the reporter concerning the two
+mysterious cycling 'fatalities.
+
+He took it even more seriously than I had expected.  It was even with
+scant patience that he heard me out.
+
+"But good heavens, man," he cried, "why didn't you tell me all this
+sooner?  Don't you see that it's what I've been expecting, what I've
+been watching the papers for month after month?  It puts my
+experience clear of all doubt.  I have felt certain--as certain as I
+am standing here--that sooner or later some accident of this sort
+would turn up."
+
+"It was a good fifteen miles from here," I said.  "Besides----"
+
+"What's fifteen miles?  I don't care if it was fifty!  Have you got
+the cutting with you?"
+
+I had.  I had torn off the corner with the paragraph, unobserved of
+my reporter friend, and I took the fragment now from my pocketbook
+and gave it to Lessing.  He read it through eagerly.
+
+"The facts correspond.  The man was killed in the open; he had no
+chance of shelter.  The thing hit him as he was riding."
+
+"It's not proved."
+
+"There's the damage to the bicycle."
+
+"There's exactly that," I said, "which to my mind puts a different
+light on the whole thing.  If the impact of the blow was sufficient
+to damage the bicycle to that extent, how was it that the rider
+escaped all injury except a single scratch on the face?  It's out of
+all reason.  There were no marks on the body.  That is testified to.
+If a man is knocked off his bicycle while riding at even an average
+speed, he'll have some marks to show for it.  He died from heart
+failure, probably resultant upon fright and the shock of the wound.
+Very good.  But that doesn't account for the bicycle.  It seems to me
+that whatever attacked him wreaked its spite on the machine
+afterwards."
+
+"He had time to dismount?"
+
+"Possibly.  It doesn't say how near to the bicycle he was lying.  If
+he fell at all he must have fallen clear of it.  The lamp was picked
+up several yards away."
+
+"The lamp..." said Lessing.
+
+The same thought was in both our minds.
+
+"What date did this happen?" he asked.
+
+"It was a week-old paper.  I was there ... wait a moment."  I made a
+rough calculation in my mind.  "This happened, apparently, on the
+Thursday previous.  That should bring it to about the third of the
+month."
+
+"The third was a Thursday," said Lessing.  He pulled out an almanac
+from the bookshelves and ran the pages over.  I saw him frown.
+
+"There was a full moon on that evening.  It is just possible he was
+riding without a light at all.  If so, that throws my whole theory
+out."
+
+"The whole thing," said I, "looks to me like the work of a maniac.
+Take the lamp.  It was picked up some yards away.  Now a bicycle
+lantern isn't merely hung on; it's screwed on, and you can't imagine
+any sort of blow struck from above that would dislodge it and throw
+it that distance.  It must have been either unscrewed or torn off,
+deliberately, and that in itself suggests human agency."
+
+Lessing barely heard me.  He was staring at the scrap of paper spread
+out on his knee.
+
+"The first man, according to your reporter was killed actually in the
+woods.  The second was picked up some twenty feet from the edge of
+the woods, on the open road.  That's important.  It was a clear
+night.  Why should he be attacked in the open when there were woods
+within half a dozen yards that would have given ample ambush?"
+Unconsciously he was repeating the reporter's argument.  "That
+doesn't look like the work of a human being.  Besides, the man wasn't
+robbed.  I tell you, Haverill, there's something that doesn't satisfy
+me in all this.  Either they made some extraordinary mistake, or ...
+but he was riding _towards_ the woods!"
+
+"Apparently."
+
+"On what evidence?"
+
+"I suppose the position of the bicycle," I said lamely.
+
+"There had been no rain for some days.  The roads are hard about
+here, and a bicycle wouldn't be likely to leave tracks, especially on
+the edge of the path.  You're a doctor, Haverill.  Suppose a man died
+from heart failure, would he necessarily die at the instant of the
+shock?"
+
+"Only in romances.  Actually, there would be several seconds'
+interval at least."
+
+"He might run, say, twenty feet and then drop?"
+
+"Quite possibly.  But I don't see how that helps."
+
+"It means just this," said Lessing, "that according to my idea the
+man was not riding towards the woods at all.  He was attacked
+actually in the woods or at the edge of them, and he ran the twenty
+feet to where his body was found.  Listen.  The moon did not rise
+that evening until 10.30.  Anyone riding through the woods the
+earlier part of the evening would have used a lamp.  He was a
+stranger in the district and was identified only by papers.  No one
+in Coopersville knew him or had apparently ever seen him before.
+Coopersville is not a large place, and a case like this makes
+sufficient talk.  If he had passed through there during the evening
+someone would have seen him, and it would have been mentioned at the
+inquest.  The chances are that he had come from a distance, and that
+he was riding _towards_ Coopersville with the idea of putting up
+there for the night.  Assuming that, and that he was carrying a lamp
+at the time, we have our facts fairly clear.  He was attacked just
+within cover of the woods, that is to say, where the light would be
+more clearly noticeable than on an open stretch of moonlit road.  The
+overhanging trees would break the attack more or less, which accounts
+for the comparative slightness of his own injury.  The primary object
+of attack being the lamp, the rider would have the chance of escape,
+whereas if he had been struck actually in the open, at full force, he
+would have been probably killed on the spot."
+
+The whole theory was fairly ingenious, but it didn't account for the
+wrecking of the bicycle, for its being found where it was, some
+distance clear of the woods and near the man's own body.  I told
+Lessing so.  He looked at me queerly.
+
+"Have you ever seen a dog worry a stick?" he asked.
+
+"We aren't dealing with dogs."
+
+"Whatever wrecked the bicycle could have dragged it that distance."
+
+"If your theory has anything in it the bicycle was carried.  If it
+had been dragged they would have found traces.  Don't tell me that
+any animal capable of such insensate fury as you suggest would have
+had the intelligence to conceal its tracks!"
+
+We were both getting rather heated over the argument.  It seemed to
+me that Lessing was bent obstinately on maintaining his own views, to
+the point of extravagance.  For my part, I was equally positive that
+the affair was due to some human agency.  Neither of us, therefore,
+was aware of a shadow in the doorway until Mary Lessing's pleasant
+mocking voice broke in upon our discussion.
+
+"What on earth," she said, "are you two people scrapping about so
+vehemently?"
+
+"We weren't scrapping," I smiled.  "We were discussing a problem--you
+might call it a scientific riddle.  It concerns the law which governs
+the movement of bodies through space."
+
+Mary turned on me her invariable reproachful glance when she
+suspected that anyone was making fun of her.  She sat down, pulling
+the pins from her hat, and let the sunlight strike on her roughened
+bronze-coloured hair.
+
+"Is it anything," she inquired, "with which my inferior feminine mind
+might be capable of grappling?"
+
+"Certainly," I returned promptly.  "We will illustrate it with the
+simple objects now before us.  How would it be possible, for
+instance, for that extremely solid book-case to be moved, say, to the
+other end of the room, without being dragged or carried?"
+
+Mary affected to consider, her head on one side.
+
+"Simple enough," she said, laughing.  "It would have to fly through
+the air, that's all."
+
+There was a moment's silence in the room, while I looked at Lessing
+and he looked at me.
+
+"Suppose we have some tea?" he said then.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE CHICKEN-HUCKSTER'S HOUSE
+
+It was the last week-end in August that Herrick arrived.  For nearly
+two days before it had rained steadily, and I had spent the time
+indoors, discounting old scores in the shape of letters, and
+enlivened only by a visit from Lessing, who walked over in oilskins
+on the Thursday afternoon to spend a couple of hours smoking on a
+sheltered corner of the front porch.  The weather lifted on Friday
+night, and by Saturday morning the roads were passable.  As I did not
+expect Herrick before the 5.40 train I took my bicycle out after
+lunch and went for a spin to stretch my limbs.
+
+I set out by way of the village, posting my letters on the way, and
+intending to make a circuit that would bring me home from the
+opposite direction.  I managed, however, to lose my bearings, and
+after some fruitless bungling stopped at a farmhouse to ask my way.
+The farmer seemed rather less taciturn than most of the folk about,
+and readily pointed me out a short cut which, according to him, would
+bring me out at the cross roads just above the dam.
+
+The road, which lay for the first few miles through cultivated land,
+entered eventually upon a stretch of sparsely wooded country,
+desolate and inhospitable enough.  Stunted spruce trees, powdered
+with blue berries, clung tenaciously to the barren ground, and
+everywhere the grey monotonous boulders cropped out, scattered as
+though in the idle finish to some giant's play.  Their uncouth
+rounded outlines suggested from a distance a field dotted with grey
+misshapen sheep, for ever movelessly browsing.  The road was bad; a
+horse would have had difficulty in picking his way, and I cursed the
+well-meaning farmer roundly as I dismounted to push my heavy machine.
+
+A little distance on, however, things became better.  I reached the
+beginning of a wood, gaunt ragged hickories interspersed with tangles
+of wild grape-vine, and matted creepers, and a few hundred yards
+beyond a broken snake-fence suggested the whereabouts of a house.
+
+I came upon it at the turn of the road, a square, red-painted frame
+house and barn, surrounded by a medley of small sheds and outhouses
+in every degree of dilapidation.  There was no gate, merely a couple
+of bars let down in the fencing, and I left the bicycle a moment and
+went inside.
+
+The yard upon which I entered was a litter of old junk of every
+description, ancient packing-cases, broken barrels, scrap-iron, and
+bones flung into piles.  The wagon-ruts leading up to the house were
+sunken deep in filth, and an indescribable odour filled the air, in
+which the smell of badly kept fowls predominated.  They ran
+everywhere, a ragged nondescript crew, scratching, cackling, gazing
+at me from evil yellow-rimmed eyes.  Many more were confined in the
+coops, mere oblong boxes of lath from which protruded gaunt heads and
+outstretched necks, whose mournful protest mingled with the clamour
+of their untrammelled brethren.  So far as I could see, every shed
+held its prisoners, all in the same state of filth and neglect, a
+sore to the eyes and offence to the nostrils.  There was that in the
+look and smell of the place that stuck in my throat, used as I was to
+poverty in both town and country.  There seemed no one about, and
+after a moment's hesitation I retraced my steps across the black mire
+of the yard and regained the roadway.
+
+On the opposite side of the way a little ragged girl of about
+thirteen watched my retreat with keen eyes.  She had been in the
+woods gathering the small uneatable nuts that children call
+pig-hickories; her apron was filled with the green unripe hulls.  She
+grinned, backing a little at my approach.
+
+"Hello, sis," I said.  "Who lives in that house there?"
+
+"'S Mister Menning's."
+
+"Ah!"  I took another backward glance at the ill-kept yard, with its
+indescribable litter.  As I did so a low moan, almost human in its
+misery, came from the barn behind the jumbled sheds.  It was
+repeated, long-drawn and mournful, the protest of a dumb thing
+exhausted by suffering.  I turned to the child sharply.
+
+"What's the matter there?"
+
+"It's the cow."  She shuffled her bare toes in the dust, looking with
+a fascinated curiosity towards the place whence the sound came.  "She
+hollers awful sometimes."
+
+"Is it ill?"
+
+"Mennin beats her."  She said with the curious indifference of the
+country-bred child towards animal suffering.  "He's allus beatin'
+her.  Gran'pap's spoke to him, onct.  He says she don't make no
+profit an' Gran'pa says she can't make no profit if he's allus
+beatin' her."
+
+I remembered her face suddenly.
+
+"Aren't you Mrs. Nevill's little girl, from the Bend?"
+
+"Yep.  Gran'pa's house is jest back there."  She jerked her head up
+the road.
+
+"How's your mother?  I'll step in and see her, as I'm here."
+
+"Mother's up.  She's been washin'."
+
+She began to retreat up the road, with the sudden movement of a
+half-wild thing, and I followed her, glad enough to turn my back on
+the chicken-huckster's dwelling.  The moaning of the cow was in my
+ears again as I walked on.
+
+I knew the Nevills' cottage, and my road from there lay straight
+enough.  I had never approached the Bend before from this side, and
+so the lie of the land was unfamiliar to me.  The Nevills were one of
+the few Irish families about.  The household consisted of a rheumatic
+old grandfather, his daughter, whom I had attended a short while ago,
+and her husband, a steady young fellow who worked at a harness
+factory in the village.
+
+Paddy was an old sinner if there ever lived one, but now, along in
+the green seventies, he confined himself to the cultivation of
+religion and the smoking of a particularly vile corncob pipe.  He had
+been employed most of his life on the railway, and his rheumatism was
+the result of six weeks' work in a flooded cutting.  Providence had
+released him some two years ago from a vituperative wife, whose
+latter years had been soured by the burden of an invalid husband; I
+gathered from the old man's talk that she had to her last day
+regarded his rheumatism as a form of criminal idleness, and since her
+death Paddy had taken a fresh lease of life.
+
+I found him on his usual corner of the cottage porch, his square old
+head with its bristly jaws--Paddy still shaved once a week--framed by
+the window-ledge and its row of flowering plants in tin cans.  His
+daughter was inside, getting supper, and the new baby lay in a
+ramshackle baby-coach near Paddy's elbow.  He was rocking the coach
+with one toe on the wheel while he smoked, the smell of his
+unspeakable tobacco mingling with that of the frying onions in the
+kitchen, through the open door.
+
+I always felt like holding my breath when I approached the Nevill
+cottage.  The stuffiness was of that permanent, impenetrable sort
+which seems to encompass the house solidly for a radius of five yards
+at least.
+
+I sat down on the porch step and asked after Paddy's rheumatism.  He
+looked down at his feet, shapeless in list slippers, like fearsome
+parcels.
+
+"I ain't long fur this world, doctor, and that's truth I'm tellin'
+yer.  Don't I know it?  We ain't a long-lived fam'ly.  Me father died
+at seventy-eight an' me brother at eighty, an' I'm thinkin' I won't
+be long after thim."  He raised his voice suddenly to a shout,
+without turning, "Mary, git a cheer out fur th' doctor!"
+
+I refused the chair hastily; the porch step at least bordered on
+fresh air.
+
+"I've just come round by Aaron Menning's place," I said.  "I met the
+little girl there."
+
+Paddy's face darkened.
+
+"Ain't I allus tellin' the young limb I won't hev her hangin' round
+the likes of thim dirrty Dutchmen!  It's her mother'll be after
+takin' the strap to her fur that.  The place ain't fit fur a dog
+these days.  Did ye take heed to the cow there?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"The poor baste do be after cryin' day an' night, like a Christian.
+I've told him again an' again, but he's a bad man is Aaron.  He's
+took after his brother, an' that's sayin' ill enough of anyone.  Ye
+wouldn't mind Jake Mennin', doctor?"
+
+"No.  It was before I came here."
+
+"Sure I've lived neighbors to thim fifteen years, an' I've seen
+things to turn your stomach on yer.  He had a bad streak in him,
+Jake, an' it was the devil took him in the end.  They had a little
+girl there workin', the year before Jake died....  That's why I tell
+Lizzie I'll break her neck before I see her hangin' round there.  The
+ould mother's a decent woman, or used to be.  God knows the poor
+soul's had enough to turn her crazy."
+
+"There is a mother, then?"
+
+"Sure, but ye don't see her nowadays.  'Tis Aaron keeps her to the
+house, most like.  I used to be civil spoke to Aaron a while back,
+but sence Jake died there ain't no good to him at all.  Would any
+Christian man treat a dumb baste the way he does?  An' he treats his
+ould mother the same, if all's known."
+
+He pulled on his pipe.
+
+"Two weeks ago, it would be, as we saw her last.  Yes, I mind now it
+was the day I was thinkin' of puttin' the new winder-pane in.  She
+come over to borry a half-cup o' sugar, an' I says to Mary to let her
+have it, the poor soul.  She had her hand all wrapped up to here"--he
+measured a space on his gaunt grimy wrist--"an' she says to Mary as
+she'd scalded it in the kitchen.  Aaron was away with the wagon, or
+she wouldn't 'a' come then."
+
+"I suppose Aaron does a good business," I said casually.
+
+"By the talk he does.  I do be thinkin' he does most of it in the
+next county, fur I don't see him drivin' the village way more'n onct
+in a week or so.  He'll be gone three days on a stretch wid the
+wagon, an' Lizzie's seen him come home mornin's wid the poor baste in
+a lather.  Lizzie says he has hundreds o' chickens there, an' he
+can't be after sellin' thim all.  They die on him all the time, fur
+she's seen him pull 'em out o' the coops and throw 'em to the pigs."
+
+I asked after his son and rose to go, after turning the half of my
+tobacco pouch into Paddy's old tin box.  It was getting on toward
+five o'clock, and I would have just time to clean up, get the mare
+put in, and drive to the depot for the afternoon train.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+JAKEY WALKS
+
+It did me good to see Herrick's cheery face on the platform, and to
+feel the hand-grip he gave me.  Our friendship dated back to college
+days, and unlike so many of those early intimacies, it had
+strengthened instead of decreased with the passage of time.  Then, as
+now, Herrick had been the same curious mixture of enthusiast and
+practical hard-headed worker, and in spite of the inevitable
+schooling of experience and years of exacting and often discouraging
+labour, he had carried into the early forties a certain boyish
+confidence, a freshness of outlook, which gave to one instinctively,
+on meeting him, the impression of indomitable health and vitality.
+
+When we had tucked his valise into the back of the buggy and turned
+the mare about, he looked at me with a laugh.
+
+"Well, Haverill, you look quite the country practitioner already!
+Seven weeks' change--ye gods!  But you haven't grown a beard yet!"
+
+"I'm keeping the beard for my leisure moments," I told him.  "So far
+they haven't been many."
+
+"Don't tell me this place is in the throes of an epidemic!  It looks
+like one of those ideal Sleepy Hollows where you get about one call
+for whooping-cough every six months.  I came here for repose, you
+know."
+
+"Oh, you'll get it," I assured him.  "You'll get the kind of repose
+that keeps you awake nights wondering where it's going to hit you
+next.  They don't want a doctor down here; they want a new lunacy
+commission officer, and the first suspect will be me.  Oh, I'm going
+to make you work, Jack!  Have no idle dreams on the subject."
+
+"Work!  You look as if you'd forgotten the meaning of the word!  If
+ever a man had the luck to stumble on a good excuse for a holiday
+it's you.  This air, this sky, these woods to fish and loaf in----
+Hello, what's up?  The whooping-cough I spoke of, or have you
+arranged a little semblance of business for my benefit!  That good
+lady seems about to welcome us with open arms."
+
+A woman was hurrying down the road toward us, from the direction of
+my house.  She had a gingham sunbonnet on which flapped at each step
+as she walked, and on catching sight of the buggy with the familiar
+roan mare in the shafts she waved her hand in unmistakable signal.  I
+pulled Bess up, and by the time the woman came pantingly abreast of
+us I recognized her for Mrs. Sliefer, who lived in the first
+farm-house beyond the Bend, past the cross roads.
+
+"I been to your house, doctor," she began, "an' Mis' Searle told me
+you weren't to hum, so I come right on.  My niece is took bad an'
+she's been queer sence the mornin', and I'd like you to come straight
+back with me an' see her."
+
+She spoke with an air somewhat of indignation, born of her toilsome
+walk.  Mrs. Sliefer was a stout lady, to put it at the mildest, and
+the heat and exercise had obviously tried her.  I leaned from the
+buggy.
+
+"Get right up, Mrs. Sliefer!  There's plenty of room, and you can
+tell me as we drive."
+
+She hoisted herself laboriously into the buggy, with our combined
+help, and collapsed, rather than sat down, between us.  Luckily the
+seat was a broad one.  As it was, her generous proportions all but
+crushed us.
+
+I kept the mare at a walk while Mrs. Sliefer told her errand.
+Briefly, as I gathered from her rather spasmodic utterance, the facts
+were these.
+
+Her niece, Rebecca Durn, who lived with Mr. and Mrs. Sliefer at the
+farm, was keeping company with the young man from Haskell's grocery
+store.  The young couple were in the habit of meeting of an evening,
+after Rebecca had washed her supper dishes, in the woods near the
+sawmill, some fifteen minutes from the farm-house and in the line of
+the short cut which the young man used to walk up from the village.
+They usually took a short stroll about the dam before returning to
+the farm, to finish the evening in the older folks' company on the
+home porch.  Yesterday, as I have said, was rainy, and Rebecca had
+expected her sweetheart at the house.  As he did not arrive, however,
+and the weather had lifted since five o'clock, Rebecca, thinking he
+might possibly have gone to the usual trysting-place, put on a shawl
+and her rubber shoes and went out to find him.  He was not to seen,
+and she loitered a few moments in the neighborhood of the dam before
+returning home.  It was then just getting dusk.  According to her
+account, she was strolling near the saw-mill when the ghost of Jakey
+Menning, surrounded by light and with flames coming from his mouth,
+sprang out from the bushes and yelled at her.  Rebecca, struck of a
+heap, as she expressed it, had still the sense to turn and run, and
+being a sturdy young woman she speedily outdistanced the alleged
+ghost and gained the shelter of her own home.  Once on the porch,
+however, she collapsed in hysterics, and it was not until she came
+to, a good half-hour after, that her aunt and uncle could learn what
+had happened.  Rebecca's sweetheart had meantime arrived, and being a
+strong-minded young man had at once induced Mr. Sliefer to set out
+with him, armed with a stout cudgel and the farmer's shotgun, to
+investigate.  They patrolled the neighborhood of the saw-mill
+thoroughly, but needless to say nothing was found.
+
+Rebecca recovered, but this morning, on the matter being mentioned at
+breakfast, had promptly gone off again into hysterics, a state which
+had lasted all day, off and on, and which her aunt had been unable to
+check.  The hysteria had brought on sickness, and the girl, so Mrs.
+Sliefer told me, was now in bed in a state of utter collapse.
+
+I told Herrick I would drop him at the house.
+
+"On the contrary," he returned, "I'll come along, with Mrs. Sliefer's
+permission."
+
+We drove on accordingly, the three of us, covering the distance past
+Dutchman's Hill and the Lessing's bungalow at a smart trot.  A few
+minutes beyond the saw-mill, along the road Mary Lessing and I had
+taken some mornings ago, the Sliefer's farm-house came in sight, a
+comfortable low-built dwelling standing back in a good-sized orchard
+with the barn and out-buildings clustered near it.
+
+We found Rebecca in an upper bedroom, watched over by a mute and
+scared-looking neighbor, who had been fetched in to sit with her
+while her aunt was away.  The girl lay in bed, her eyes rolling, her
+hands twitching nervously on the covers.  There was nothing alarming
+in her condition, which had been brought about as much by Mrs.
+Sliefer's well-meant home physicking as by the original fright.
+
+I went to the bedside and put my hand on her wrist.
+
+"Now then," I said, "what's all this nonsense about bogies?  A big
+strong girl like you ought to have better sense than to imagine such
+things."
+
+She began to whimper.
+
+"I seen it--I seen it!  It was all spoutin' fire!  It was Jakey
+Menning as sure as there's a livin' God!  Oh-h--I don't want to look
+at it ... I don't want to!"
+
+She went off into another hysterical spasm, and it took all my force
+to hold her still while her aunt went for water.  When it was over,
+and she lay back on the pillows, still sobbing exhaustedly, I took
+Mrs. Sliefer aside.
+
+"Give me pen and ink," I said, "and have someone drive down to the
+drug store with this prescription at once.  I'll wait here till it's
+brought back.  Your niece will probably be all right tomorrow, after
+a night's sleep, but keep her in bed a day in any case."
+
+She took the prescription and gave it to her husband.  We heard his
+heavy boots creaking out to the back door.  I turned to Mrs. Sliefer.
+
+"And now," I said, "you're a clever, sensible woman.  What's your
+idea of all this nonsense?"
+
+Mrs. Sliefer was obviously flattered by my description.  She mopped
+her flat round face, still shining from the walk.
+
+"Rebecca ain't no liar," she said.  "She's a good up-standin' girl,
+an' she ain't never showed no foolishness before this.  We was
+talking about Dutchman's Hill on'y a few nights ago, and Rebecca was
+the first to laugh about it.  'I'd like to see the ghost'd scare me!'
+she said, right there.  No.  Rebecca seen suthin, or she wouldn't ha'
+come home the state she did.  An' as for it's bein' Jakey, she'd
+oughter know Jakey Mennin' well enough, seein' he's brought the wagon
+round here time an' ag'n when Aaron was busy."
+
+"You don't tell me you believe in the foolish talk there's been, Mrs.
+Sliefer!"
+
+She stiffened.
+
+"No, an' I ain't sayin' I do, but sperrits or no sperrits, Mr.
+Sliefer's goin' to get to the bottom of this.  Seems to me there' a
+law had ought to deal with respectable girls bein' frightened out of
+their wits ten yards from their own door-step!"
+
+"Listen," I said.  "It seems that your niece has been the victim of a
+very cruel and foolish practical joke, but there's no good going into
+the matter here and now.  Only look after her.  If anyone is playing
+tricks around the saw-mill, keep her away from there.  She's in no
+state to risk any more shocks.  Don't let her go wandering about
+alone."
+
+"I wouldn't ha' let her last night, on'y she was so sure of findin'
+George Freeman there.  Rebecca was born an' brought up here, and she
+knows the woods as well as our own front yard.  But there'll be an
+end of these doin's, an' I told her so."
+
+"That's right."  I paused a moment.  "Who was here, the evening that
+your niece spoke of not being frightened?"
+
+"Only us an' Mis' Scholl there, an' George Freeman.  There wasn't one
+of 'em would play a trick on her.  An' George Freeman was in at the
+house a'ready when Rebecca come runnin' back."
+
+I did not leave until the farmer returned, and I had seen Rebecca
+already quiet and subdued under the influence of the sleeping draught
+I had prescribed for her.  Then Herrick and I drove home through the
+dusk to the ruined supper which Mrs. Searle had prepared so
+painstakingly for six o'clock.
+
+"Well," I said to him, "what do you make of it?"
+
+Herrick smiled.
+
+"Ghosts don't usually 'holler,'" he said, "and Rebecca seems to have
+been very clear on the hollering, if on nothing else.  I think we may
+dismiss the theory of the defunct Jakey.  And by the way, who was
+Jakey Menning, and what is this extraordinary tangle about a place
+called Dutchman's Hill?"
+
+I gave the mare a light touch with the whip.
+
+"We are passing Dutchman's Hill at this moment," I said, "and I'll
+give you the history over our supper."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MR. CROWFOOT
+
+I outslept Herrick by a good hour the next morning; in fact, he was
+already up and out by the time I came down to a belated breakfast.  I
+had one call to make in the village, and after that, Herrick being
+still absent, I sat down on the porch with my pipe and a newspaper to
+await his return.
+
+There was no mail for me at the office, only a couple of letters for
+Herrick, forwarded from New York, and as I slipped these in my pocket
+I wondered again at the curious silence of Lennox.  Since that short
+note from Queenstown I had heard nothing from him, and he had
+neglected even to provide me with the promised address by which I
+could communicate with him in case of need, an oversight by which he
+had certainly secured to himself a free and uninterrupted holiday,
+and which left me no choice meantime but to await his return or such
+news as he might ultimately choose to send.  I must admit that
+Lessing's phrase "bolted" stuck unpleasantly in my mind, little as it
+accorded with my estimate of Lennox's character.  His haste to be
+off, the lack of any communication from him since, had more than a
+look of flight, but why, or from what he had bolted I was still at a
+loss to understand.
+
+I was still turning this over in my mind when Herrick sauntered into
+view down the road, accompanied by a stranger.  Visitors were
+sufficiently rare in the neighbourhood, and as the two approached the
+house leisurely I studied the new-comer with some curiosity.  He was
+a small man, of apparently some fifty years, sparsely bearded, and
+dressed in a very shabby knickerbocker suit of greenish tweeds.  A
+soft felt hat covered his head and at least half his forehead; he
+wore dark glasses and carried a botanical collecting-box slung over
+his shoulder.  There was something quaintly rabbit-like in his
+appearance, enhanced by the air of timidity with which he hung back
+while Herrick strode forward to the porch to greet me.
+
+"I want to introduce Mr. Crowfoot," Herrick said, with a gesture
+which had an effect of herding the mild little man up to the porch
+step as he might have herded some curious and inoffensive zoological
+specimen.  "He is down here hunting orchids, and I came across him in
+the woods and brought him along to have a chat with you.  You might
+be able to give him some hints about the country."
+
+I shook hands with the little man and gave him a chair on the porch,
+where he settled himself shyly, his collecting-box across his knee.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't know much about the flora round here," I said,
+"but I imagine Mr. Crowfoot will find a good deal to interest him."
+
+"Oh, I am only an amateur," said the little man.  "I s----  I s----
+I s-s----"
+
+He undoubtedly did, and the reason for his shyness stood forthwith
+revealed.  He stammered, and had more than the usual sensitiveness of
+his infirmity.
+
+"S-simply indulge a hobby," he finished heroically.  "It gives me an
+object for my leisure time.  I s-s---- _presume_ you have lived here
+some time, Mr.----?"
+
+"Haverill--Doctor Haverill," Herrick prompted.
+
+"Haverill."  He repeated it in a certain child-like way, as though to
+place the name definitely in his memory, and immediately I was
+conscious of a liking for him.  He was at once so diffident and so
+meticulously polite.
+
+"On the contrary, I've been here only a month or so, taking a
+friend's place for the time.  The country about is delightful, so far
+as I know it."
+
+"Delightful!" he echoed, and lapsed into a pleased silence, which
+lasted so long that Herrick rose.
+
+"I want to change my shoes," he said.  "I've been up to the neck in
+bog.  I don't know our resources, Austin, but I guess we can offer
+Mr. Crowfoot a drink?"
+
+"Water--I should l-like very much a plain glass of water," said the
+little botanist.
+
+"And a cigar at all events," I supplemented.  "I should have some
+pretty decent cigars somewhere around that my predecessor left here.
+Look in the drawer in the surgery, Jack, will you?"
+
+Herrick reappeared a moment later with the box.
+
+"Excellent," said our new friend as he helped himself.  "Excellent!
+Apparently you d-d-don't care for these cigars then, Doctor Haverill?"
+
+I laughed.  "Oh, I only smoke a pipe, as a rule!"
+
+"You make, if I may s-say so, a great error," he said gravely.
+
+He smoked for a few moments tranquilly, his gaze, behind the dark
+glasses, seeming to rest dreamily on the stretch of road before the
+house.
+
+"I suppose you are staying in the village?" I asked.
+
+"Over there."  He made a vague gesture which included half the
+visible landscape.  "With some excellent people of the name of
+S-S-Sliefer."
+
+"Oh, Sliefer's," I said, interested.  "I know them slightly.  The big
+farm-house past the saw-mill."
+
+"Precisely," he agreed, and gave me a look before relapsing again
+into silence.
+
+Our conversation, if it could be called so, languished.  It was
+evident to me that his shyness was battling with the desire to be
+off--I judged that Herrick had fairly dragged him here out of a
+mistaken cordiality--and after the exchange of a few more spasmodic
+sentences I accepted his courteous and timid explanation that the
+Sliefers dined at midday and would be expecting him back, and rose to
+shake hands.
+
+"A queer chicken!" said Herrick as we watched his jerky little figure
+disappear down the road.  "I picked him up back in the woods there,
+grubbing around the saw-mill, and brought him along for your
+benefit--a quaint example of the Pennsylvanian fauna!  Timidicus
+professus, or ground-dwelling goo-goo bird.  Difficult of approach
+and does not thrive in captivity.  Guess he's more than a bit batty,
+by his looks."
+
+"Mrs. Sliefer never mentioned a boarder," I remarked.  "He must be a
+new arrival.  It's to be hoped he won't come to any grief in his
+grubbing around, as you call it."
+
+"Oh, the gods protect the innocent," laughed Herrick.  "Even the
+alleged ghost of Jakey Menning would have pity.  By the way, the fair
+Rebecca's tale is still firmly believed in, by the Sliefers at any
+rate.  The latest village version is that she was chased clear to the
+garden fence and that her skirt still shows five scorched prints
+where the ghostly fingers clutched.  The neighbourhood must have been
+quite worked up.  It was bad enough when Jakey had the decency to
+keep to one place at least, but now he has taken, like the wind, to
+blowing where he listeth, folks are getting scary.  I got that much
+from our guileless little friend, though he professes himself to be
+quite indifferent on the subject.  Of course you, as the village
+doctor, are above such gossip, so I thought I'd go gleaning for you."
+
+"Someone's doing it," I said.
+
+"Of course someone did, in the case of Rebecca at least.  Real ghosts
+don't holler, as I said before, and the blue-fire details smell
+strongly of the common or garden matchbox.  But as our little
+professor-bird spends most of his time in the woods about there, I
+thought his observations might come in useful."
+
+"Private detective, eh?"
+
+Herrick smiled.
+
+"Oh, I'm sufficiently interested in the Lessing problem to be anxious
+to clear out the undergrowth, if you follow me.  That done, one can
+judge a bit more clearly.  If there's any foolery going on we'll run
+it to the ground, and Crowfoot may come in useful there."
+
+"I've a good notion," I said, knocking my pipe out, "to try some
+watching round that locality myself one of these nights."
+
+"It wouldn't be any good," he returned, "for the simple reason that
+Jakey wouldn't demonstrate to you or me any more than he's
+demonstrated to Lessing.  He chooses those he wants to favour.  As a
+matter of fact, by the aid of my bedroom window, the convenience of
+which you have probably under-estimated, Austin, I spent last night
+prowling myself.  No, I didn't let you into it because I wanted to be
+alone.  Needless to say, there was nothing doing.  But I've found out
+one thing.  There's someone else interested in the game besides us.
+I don't know who.  But we narrowly escaped collision, and gave each
+other mutually a wide berth."
+
+"It couldn't have been the ghost himself, whoever he is?"
+
+"I think not.  It was too obvious we were both out on the same
+errand.  Like the Irishman, we each thought we were someone else and
+when we met it was neither of us!"  He smiled at the recollection.
+"Well, I suppose we'll get at the root of the thing some day!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+AN AFTERNOON DRIVE
+
+It was towards the end of that week that we drove over to the
+bungalow, one afternoon, for tea.  The teacups were set out on the
+porch, and Mary Lessing, in a white frock, sprang up from one of the
+big basket-chairs to greet us with a comical dismay.
+
+"I've dragged you over here," she began promptly, "and now I'll tell
+you the worst at once.  There is not--one--lump--of sugar in the
+entire house.  I've looked.  So either you will drink your tea
+sugarless, smile sweetly, and say it doesn't matter, or else one of
+you has got to come right down to the village with me and get some.
+You can take your full choice about it.  I'm glad to see you had the
+thoughtfulness to drive, anyway."
+
+Herrick sat down with alacrity.
+
+"I am a tired man," he announced, "supposed to be on a holiday, and
+I'm not going to the village to get anything till I've had tea, and
+I'm not going to drink tea without sugar, not even if you promise to
+smile in the teacup, Mary Lessing.  So I guess it's up to you and
+Haverill.  And I think that after all my excellent instructions of
+the past fourteen years you ought to be a better housekeeper.  It's
+scandalous and disgusting of you.  Where's Dick?"
+
+"In the laboratory."
+
+"A day like this!  I'll rout him out of that in just two seconds.
+Ho, Dick!"
+
+There was no response, and he rose grumbling, and trailed round to
+the laboratory door.  Mary looked at me.
+
+"Do you mind?" she said meekly.
+
+I slipped off the mare's hitching-strap, and Mary climbed into the
+buggy beside me.  We took the road past Sliefer's, and it is to be
+admitted that I made no effort to hurry.  Our errand might reasonably
+be supposed to take an hour, and since chance had so obligingly given
+me that hour I was going to make the most of it.
+
+As a matter of fact, I got precious little good out of it.
+
+Romance probably demands, here, that I should describe how Mary and I
+drove side by side through the mellow autumn-tinted woods, how we
+spoke of the beauty of nature around us, and how gradually a sweet
+sense of companionship grew up in our young and sympathetic souls.
+
+Instead Mary spoilt the whole thing by her hurry to get that sugar.
+If the life of the whole household, including Herrick, had depended
+upon it, she couldn't have been more sternly anxious to get to the
+village, to buy that sugar and to convey that sugar swiftly and
+relentlessly home.  Looking back, I can see now that her attitude in
+the matter was only part of a constraint that had been growing
+between us subtly ever since Herrick's arrival.  A certain frank
+comradeship, as I had been pleased to think it, that had sprung into
+being on the morning of our impromptu picnic, had wavered and
+dropped, leaving nothing in its place.  I could not decide that she
+actually avoided me, though she certainly devoted a good deal of
+attention to Herrick when we were all together.  Be that as it may,
+her professed anxiety on the sugar question that afternoon justly
+irritated me.  We began with constraint, and ended in something very
+like open warfare.
+
+It was probably not the first time that a perverse imp of
+circumstance, or call it what you will, has induced two young people,
+who started out on apparently good terms, to waste the precious
+moments of each other's uninterrupted company in being pointedly and
+deliberately disagreeable, and that for no reason that either of them
+could frame.  The imbecility of that drive stands out in my memory
+now.  We should both of us have known better.  The whole thing had
+begun in such a meaningless way as to have no possible excuse.  We
+had started, as I say, on good terms, with every equipment for a
+pleasant hour, and instead we each, in our own way, chose to behave
+abominably.
+
+After one unique and disastrous attempt at conversation, I remember,
+we said no more, but drove on side by side in a ridiculous and stony
+silence, each thinking how disagreeable the other was, and wondering
+mutually what we had ever liked in one another.
+
+There was the usual group of loafers gathered on the porch of
+Haskell's grocery store when we reached the village.  I left Mary
+seated in the buggy outside while I went in to buy the sugar.  A
+brisk-mannered young man, with fair hair, served me, and it was my
+fancy that he dawdled a little over making up the parcel.  The
+proprietor was busy near by at the time, and from the side-glance the
+assistant gave him I gathered that the latter was purposely
+stretching out his task to gain time.  I was not wrong.  Upon the
+proprietor crossing to the back of the store, where the cash register
+stood, the young man leaned forward across the counter.
+
+"Doctor," he began, "I would like a few words with you sometime when
+you aren't busy."
+
+"Why, certainly," I answered.  "Any time you like.  You want advice
+about something?"
+
+It was almost the first time I had had occasion to go into the store,
+and the assistant was quite a stranger to me.  I was probably known
+to him by sight, but I wondered at his choosing such a confidential
+way to approach me if he merely wanted medical advice; I kept the
+same office hours as Lennox had done, and everyone in the village
+knew where and when to find me.
+
+"I'm George Freeman," he said.  "It wasn't advice exactly.  I just
+... wanted to see you."
+
+George Freeman ... suddenly I remembered.  It was the name of Rebecca
+Burn's sweetheart, the young man who had shown such decision on the
+evening of the ghost scare at Sliefer's farm.  I looked at him with
+new interest.
+
+"I shall be in this evening after nine o'clock," I said.  "Come round
+to the house.  You know where it is?"
+
+"Yes.  I'll be round."
+
+"All right."  I put down a quarter on the counter, taking up the
+parcel he held out to me.  As I did so a step creaked behind me and I
+turned quickly.
+
+Aaron Menning stood near us.  For a second his eyes moved shiftily
+from one to the other; then he put up a hand to the greasy peaked cap
+he wore.
+
+"Arternoon, doctor," he drawled; "arternoon, F-Freeman.  Gimme some
+p-plug terbaccer."
+
+His face was impassive and stupid, but when he pushed his cap back I
+noticed the veins on his temples stand out.  He approached the
+counter with something of a swagger, his hands in the pockets of his
+black oilskin coat, and spat on the floor.  There was something in
+the movements of the man which I disliked, at that moment, more
+intensely than ever.  He had a curious shambling way when he walked,
+which, added to his thick-set figure, gave me the feeling of
+something half animal, almost simian.  It amounted to an actual
+repugnance.  I gave him a curt nod while I waited for my change, and
+lost no time in hastening out to the buggy.
+
+I put the parcel under the seat and took the reins from Mary's hands.
+Curiously, my mood of a few moments ago was all but forgotten as I
+climbed in beside her.
+
+"Did the fellow say anything to you?" I asked her as we drove off.  A
+sudden suspicion had struck me when I came out and found her waiting
+there.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Aaron Menning."
+
+"No.  I just saw him go into the store."
+
+She spoke with a studied indifference that put me on the alert.
+Instantly I was sure that he had spoken.
+
+"Why do you ask?"
+
+I set my teeth.
+
+"Because if he had," I answered rashly, "I'd take the occasion to
+break his neck next time we meet."
+
+Mary gave a soft little laugh.
+
+"Really, Doctor Haverill, I didn't know you were so violent."
+
+"I'm not," I retorted, "at least, not as a rule.  But the sight of
+that man always rouses in me a peculiar and earnest desire to kick
+him."
+
+"I dare say he's really quite a simple and kind-hearted man," said
+Mary, with no other purpose, I felt sure, than to irritate me.
+
+"The rugged exterior that hides a beautiful soul," I suggested,
+remembering that sinister farmyard beyond the Bend.  "That's as it
+may be.  The exterior is good enough for me, or bad enough, as you
+choose to put it.  If I get the report of a S.P.C.A. inspector on
+that farm of his, as I intend to do one of these days, we'll see how
+Aaron's simple kind-heartedness stands out."
+
+The words slipped out almost without my knowledge.  Mary looked at me
+quickly.
+
+"What's wrong at the place?"
+
+"Merely that the condition of it isn't particularly pretty.  I
+shouldn't have mentioned it.  Only a man that keeps animals in the
+filth and neglect that he does ought to be made an example of in any
+civilized community.  I don't know that there's anything to be gained
+by interfering at the present moment, but I've seen enough to make me
+keep an eye on him."
+
+For a little time we drove in silence.  Mary's face was grave and
+troubled.  I was angry with myself.  I was a fool to mention Menning
+or his place at all.  Presently I turned to her.
+
+"Look here, you're not upset by what I said just now?  Because you've
+no need to think twice about it.  I said it because ... well, because
+I hated to hear you speak about him that way, even for a minute."
+
+"No.  I wasn't thinking about Aaron just then."  She gave me a queer
+little smile.  "Doctor Haverill, I guess I've behaved pretty
+abominably this afternoon."
+
+I flicked the mare with the whip.
+
+"Shall we say we both did, and call it quits?  I suppose it was in
+the air, somehow."
+
+"In the air," she repeated, smiling again, then shivered suddenly.
+"Things are in the air ... that's just it.  I had a dream last night.
+I suppose you'll call it silly nonsense, but it's made me queer and
+restless all day.  Doctor Haverill, has Herrick said anything to you
+about my brother yet?"
+
+"We talked one evening."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"We ... didn't get to any conclusions, that's all.  He has some
+theory.  He hasn't told me yet what it is."
+
+She looked at me steadily.
+
+"If he said that, it is because he knows something.  I am absolutely
+certain of that.  And if he knows ... Doctor Haverill, you are
+keeping something back from me, you and Herrick together!"
+
+"I am not.  I wouldn't do it."  I looked at the girl beside me.  "If
+you want me to swear."
+
+"No."  She put out a hand.  "Yes, one thing.  Can you swear to me
+that to your knowledge there is no suspicion in his mind of any ...
+brain trouble with Dick?"
+
+"Yes, I can swear to that, absolutely!"
+
+"I am glad."  She was looking straight ahead, down the road before
+us.  "I don't think even Herrick would have kept that from me, if he
+thought it.  Well ... I suppose I've got to wait."
+
+We spoke of other things during the rest of the drive, and she did
+not once mention Herrick's name, or her brother's, again.  We were
+passing Sliefer's place when I caught sight once of our queer little
+acquaintance of the morning.  He was just turning in at the gateway,
+his hat pulled well forward, his little tin box under his arm, and I
+nodded to him as we drove by.  He jerked his head in response,
+peering short-sightedly up at the buggy through his round dark
+glasses.
+
+"What a funny little man!" said Mary, after we had passed by.  "Is he
+staying down here?"
+
+"At the Sliefers'.  Herrick found him in the woods this morning.  He
+appears to spend his time orchid-hunting in the neighbourhood."
+
+"Orchid-hunting..." said Mary.  She turned her head and looked back
+at Mr. Crowfoot rather deliberately.  Following her gaze, I was
+surprised to see that he too had turned, and was standing looking
+after us from the Sliefers' gateway.  Seeing himself observed, he
+moved hurriedly, and disappeared in the direction of the house like a
+disturbed rabbit going abruptly to earth.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE CRY IN THE NIGHT
+
+A few minutes after we reached the bungalow Mrs. Searle appeared.
+She brought a letter for Herrick which had come by the afternoon mail.
+
+"It had a special-delivery stamp on, so I thought it might be
+important," she said.  "Pete was busy, so I took the liberty of
+bringin' it over myself.  I was glad of the walk, anyway."
+
+I had my own opinion of Pete's busyness, when it came to an errand up
+the hill, and I tried to catch Mrs. Searle's eye, but her gaze was
+discreetly lowered.
+
+"It's awfully good of you," said Herrick.  He slipped the envelope in
+his pocket, with a glance at the writing.  "Won't you rest a minute,
+Mrs. Searle?  I'm sure Miss Lessing would like you to."
+
+Mary was getting tea at the moment, but Lessing seconded him
+promptly.  Mrs. Searle shook her head.
+
+"I'll be gettin' back, sir, thanks just the same.  There's things to
+see to.  It's done me good to get the walk."
+
+"You needn't walk back, anyway," I put in.  "I'd be glad for the mare
+to be home, and Mr. Herrick and I can walk over, later.  You can
+drive yourself, Mrs. Searle, can't you?"
+
+"Certainly, sir, if you'd rather."
+
+She untied the mare and turned the buggy carefully around before
+getting in.  "Ask Pete to give her a good rub down," I called.  "Mr.
+Herrick and I will be back by supper-time."
+
+As it happened, we stayed fairly late.  The tea resolved itself into
+a semi-supper, with the addition of chocolate cake, canned pineapple,
+and sardines prepared by some special and deadly recipe of Lessing's
+in a chafing-dish.  It was a combination that induced a certain
+languor afterwards in soul and body.  Later, Lessing having
+re-engaged Herrick in the game of chess that our return had
+interrupted, Mary and I found ourselves once more left to each
+other's company at the far end of the porch.  She had attempted some
+quite ridiculous excuse about dish-washing, but either the sense of
+Herrick's near presence or the meal just finished lent me moral
+courage to vanquish her objections on the spot.
+
+"Either you invite people to your house," I said, "or you don't
+invite them.  If you do, it's your business to entertain them.  I'm
+not an exacting person, but if it comes to contesting my rights
+against those of mere crockery, I warn you that I'm going to be
+exceedingly disagreeable."
+
+Our talk on the homeward drive had broken the aloofness of the past
+week, and I was minded not to let her slip back into it at will.  She
+sat down on the wicker armchair opposite me, her hands folded on her
+lap.
+
+"Would you like to see the family photograph album?" she suggested.
+"We none of us collect picture-postcards, so I'm afraid that's the
+only interesting object I can offer you.  Or I might take you round
+the garden and show you the site for next year's rose bushes."
+
+"I should be delighted!" I said ruthlessly.
+
+She made a mouth at me.
+
+"I don't think you are in a mood to appreciate the exquisite
+sentiment of next year's rose bushes," she returned.  "It calls for a
+totally different range of sympathies from yours."
+
+I lit a cigarette.
+
+"You don't know anything about my range of sympathies," I remarked.
+"For all you know, they may extend to objects even more ethereal than
+unborn roses."
+
+"Impossible!"  She pulled a spray off the woodbine that grew round
+the porch pillar, and began to pull it to pieces, leaf by leaf.  "By
+the way," she said after a moment, "did you tell me that that queer
+little friend of yours was a botanist?"
+
+"Of Herrick's," I corrected.  "I entirely disclaim him.  He described
+himself as an amateur, whatever he may mean by that.  I gather that
+it's his way of amusing himself on a holiday.  There are a good many
+people who seem to feel lost unless they have some definite hobby for
+their vacations.  I suppose really it gives him mild exercise and an
+excuse for grubbing about in the open."
+
+"He takes other mild exercise," said Mary, her mouth curving in
+sudden recollection.  "He was engaged in some the other morning, and
+that's what made me so interested.  I'm afraid I interrupted him."
+
+"You'd seen him before, then?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"I was taking Leo for a run before breakfast, down the hill, the
+other morning, and I came upon him just in the hollow there near
+where the stream is, and I'd give you a hundred dollars to guess his
+occupation.  I don't know if you've ever noticed a cedar there,
+Doctor Haverill, growing quite near the road, on the right-hand side?
+It branches off some little way from the ground.  Well, there he was
+engaged, of all things in the world, in solemnly climbing up into
+this tree and jumping out again.  I was walking along the footpath
+where the ground is soft, so he never heard me coming, and the
+performance struck me as so interesting that I stood still for a
+minute and watched him.  He did it four or five times, and it looked
+as if he was trying to see how far he could jump.  The last time he
+landed quite near to the edge of the stream, and that seemed to
+satisfy him, for he didn't try any more after that.  Then he looked
+about on the ground and began to smooth over all the footprints he'd
+made.  He'd just finished when he caught sight of me.  He had taken
+his glasses off for jumping, I suppose in case he smashed them, and
+as soon as he saw me he grabbed them out of his pocket and walked
+off.  It was for all the world as if he was ashamed at having been
+caught doing it.  I suppose it did look ridiculous for a man of his
+age to go doing stunts like a schoolboy.  I guess it was some sort of
+an exercise, and he does it pretty often, for he was certainly active
+at it.  I thought maybe he was a physical-culture crank."
+
+"A mild lunatic, more like!" I smiled.  "Perhaps the giddiness of
+youth returns to him at times and he has to work it off.  Maybe it's
+a religious exercise--some obscure sect of jumping Baptists.  I'll
+ask him when we meet."
+
+Mary laughed, but her brows were drawn in a puzzled frown.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "I have a conviction that I have seen that
+man before.  I don't know in the least why.  Generally I remember
+people quite well.  I feel that I have not only seen him, but spoken
+to him.  A thing like that bothers me, because I ought to remember
+it.  I will sometime."
+
+"You'd remember if you had spoken to him," I said.  "He stammers
+quite badly."
+
+"Then that settles it," returned Mary gaily.  "I have only known two
+people who stammered in my whole life, with the exception of Aaron
+Menning, and one was a chemistry professor at school and the other a
+spinster aunt!"
+
+My appointment with George Freeman was at nine, and it was nearly
+that hour when we left the bungalow.  Herrick and I walked briskly
+down the hill, and as we passed Dutchman's Hollow I cast a curious
+glance at the tree which had been the scene of Mr. Crowfoot's
+acrobatic performances.  It stood, as Mary had said, almost
+overhanging the footpath, a strong twisted-limbed cedar, noticeable
+as being the only tree of its kind along the road.  The fork was a
+good six feet from the ground, and I reflected that Crowfoot must
+possess more agility than his appearance warranted.
+
+Herrick followed my glance.
+
+"A queer tree, that," he said.  "Looks as if it had been stuck there
+for some purpose.  Do you ever notice, Haverill, how some inanimate
+things--if I may call a tree inanimate--strike one unpleasantly?  Now
+that tree, to me, suggests a suicide every time I look at it.  A man
+might hang himself among the upper branches, and you'd merely take
+his body for a part of the tree."
+
+"Another horror to the mystery of Dutchman's Hill!" I said lightly.
+"Heaven's sake, Jack, but you're in a cheerful mood tonight!  You
+seem to have creepy things on the brain.  It you stood and looked at
+any tree long enough you could hypnotize yourself into seeing things."
+
+"I merely called it unpleasant," returned Herrick argumentatively.
+"To me it is.  You think that because I have taken a fancy to dislike
+a tree I'm ready to imagine unpleasant things about it.  I believe
+that if it impresses me that way, for no apparent reason, it is
+because the unpleasant things have in all probability already
+happened."
+
+"Oh, argue that stuff with Lessing," I protested good-humoredly.
+"It's more in his line.  I heard you at it tonight.  I'm a normal
+man, and I object to having my free imagination harrowed over things
+that don't count.  That tree is a tree, and that's all about it."
+
+Our fooling had brought us to a pause at the beginning of the little
+plank bridge, and Herrick, leaning against the rail, had employed the
+interval in making a cigarette.  He smiled, slipping his tobacco
+pouch back, and began to feel through his pockets for the little
+automatic tinder-box he always carried.  He was methodical over
+trifling things to a degree that occasionally irritated me.
+
+"Then go up and touch it," he said.  "I would like to test that
+sensitiveness which you boast that you don't possess."
+
+"All right."
+
+I walked up to the tree, impatient at my own encouragement of such
+nonsense, and laid my hand on the trunk.  Almost as my fingers
+touched the bark I heard distinctly a low cry, cut suddenly and
+horribly short.  The woods, especially at night, are deceptive both
+as to direction and distance, and, already half-expectant of some
+trick, I could have sworn that Herrick himself had done it.  I
+wheeled on him angrily.  He was standing in the roadway, the
+cigarette at his lips, the tiny flame of the tinder-box flickering in
+his lifted hand, and by its light I saw his face white and startled.
+
+"Did you do that?"
+
+"Do you think I'm a fool?"  He caught my arm and swung me round,
+facing the woods, of a sudden ominously silent.  For a moment we
+listened acutely.  Then Herrick flung his unlighted cigarette away.
+"Come on.  It was over there."
+
+He started forward, in the direction where the dam lay, breaking
+through the underbrush.  I followed at his heels.  Along the road
+there had been still a glimmer of light, but once under cover of the
+trees we stumbled through dense blackness, with nothing to guide us
+save Herrick's vague sense of direction.  Once he stood still to
+shout.  There was no answer.
+
+"Follow the stream," I said.
+
+We had struck the edge of it again; I felt my boots sink in marshy
+ground, and thereafter we made quicker pace.  The brook was narrow at
+this time of year, running a mere trickle in its bed.  It branched
+off from the creek just below the mill sluice, and in spring carried
+off some of the excess of water when the creek itself was swollen.
+Just now, as I knew, there was a scant foot of water at its deepest.
+I was taking no particular heed therefore to my steps when Herrick, a
+few paces to my left, called out.
+
+"Take care!" he said.  "We're nearly in the creek!"
+
+As he spoke I heard, somewhere near us in the darkness, the
+unmistakable sound of rushing water.  I stopped abruptly, bewildered,
+with the sense of having somehow lost my bearings.  As we were going,
+the creek should have been a good hundred yards on our left.
+
+And the sound was not the sound of the creek.  I had paused at the
+moment near the edge of the brook; I could feel soft, saturated moss
+underfoot, and I fancied that it grew even softer and damper as I
+stood.  Something swirled at my ankles, and taking a step forward I
+was knee-deep in sudden icy flood.
+
+Incredible as it seemed, the stream was rising.  I had barely grasped
+the meaning of it when Herrick shouted again.  This time he was
+answered.  A strong shout caught up the echo of his voice.
+
+"Hello, there!  Where are you?"  It was Herrick.
+
+And the answer came promptly, near at hand now in the darkness:
+
+"Hello!  By the dam.  Keep clear of the stream; the sluice-gate is
+giving!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+SUSPICIONS
+
+The warning came just in time.  Herrick sang out and sprang, and I
+could hear the splash as he landed close beside me.  Together we
+forced a way through the bushes and tall weeds and began to scramble
+up the sloping bank.  It was a thicket of alders and brambles; the
+briars caught and tore at our clothes as we pushed through.  We came
+out not far from the sluice, with the rush of escaping water still in
+our ears, and above the turmoil of it I called again.
+
+"Where are you?  Is there something wrong?"
+
+"I want help here!"
+
+The voice answered almost from under our feet, midway down the bank
+up which we had just scrambled.  In a cleared space of the little
+thicket a man was standing; my eyes, used by now to the darkness,
+could make out his figure outlined against the surrounding bushes.
+It was Mr. Crowfoot, and he was bending over something that lay
+stretched and ominous among the trampled weeds at his feet.  I had
+not recognized his voice in the darkness, though it sounded vaguely
+familiar.  Herrick reached him first, and was on his knees beside the
+prostrate figure when I came up.
+
+"An accident, Haverill.  I thought so.  No, he's alive.  How did it
+happen?"
+
+"He must have fallen off the gate," said Crowfoot.  In the excitement
+he forgot to stammer.  "I heard him call out and went down after him.
+I had only just time to drag him out."
+
+Herrick wiped his hand on the grass.
+
+"Cut his head open," he said briefly.  "I think there's an arm
+broken.  Give me a hand, Austin.  We must get him up to the top."
+
+"Compound fracture and a broken collar-bone," said Crowfoot in his
+precise tones, oddly precise even in this moment.  "I'm glad you
+gentlemen came along.  The head wound isn't much, but there's
+probably a slight concussion.  If you will help me----"
+
+It struck me that he took the man's injuries with a remarkable
+coolness, utterly at variance with the impression of nervousness he
+had given me that morning.  It was as if he were the medical man and
+we mere lay beings who had happened along.  Herrick growled.  He had
+found his tinder-box, and it flashed a tiny glimmer on the man's face.
+
+"George Freeman!" I exclaimed.
+
+"You know him?" said Herrick quickly.
+
+"The sweetheart of that girl at Sliefer's.  He had an appointment
+with me this evening.  He must have been on his way----"
+
+I stopped short.  I thought Crowfoot gave a faint exclamation, but he
+said nothing.  Together we got the limp figure to the roadway at the
+top of the bank, and laid him down.  Herrick turned to Crowfoot.
+
+"Was he with you?"
+
+"No.  I was walking along the side of the dam.  I often take a stroll
+of an evening; I sleep rather badly without.  He was lying at the
+bottom of the sluice-gate when I found him, half in the water, and I
+dragged him out.  I supposed he had missed his footing in the dark
+and cried out as he fell."
+
+Herrick and I exchanged glances.  So far the story might be true; we
+had both heard the cry.
+
+"Isn't there a railing?" Herrick asked.
+
+"It was broken," said Crowfoot, "and has never been properly
+repaired.  I have spoken about it several times at the farm, but Mr.
+Sliefer has neglected to mend it."
+
+"That's so," I confirmed.  "It's been broken a good three weeks.
+Hardly anyone passes this way, now the mill isn't working, so I
+suppose they haven't bothered."
+
+"Well..." said Herrick.  He rose from his knees.  "As he's known at
+the farm he'd better be taken there.  He must be properly moved.  We
+can't handle him like this."
+
+"I'll go and get help," said Crowfoot.
+
+Herrick looked at him squarely.
+
+"I prefer that we should go together," he said drily.  "Austin, do
+you mind staying here for ten minutes?  I suppose you haven't your
+revolver?"
+
+I hadn't.  I carried one usually in accordance with Lessing's
+suggestion, but at this moment it was locked in one of the surgery
+drawers.
+
+"Never mind," I said.  "I don't need it."
+
+Mr. Crowfoot hesitated.  Then his hand slipped to his pocket.
+Herrick had been cleverer than I gave him credit for.
+
+"If you allow me, Doctor Haverill," he said gravely, "I will leave
+you my own.  I should much prefer it.  We are two, and it would be
+better that you should not remain here unarmed."
+
+Again Herrick and I glanced at one another.
+
+"Do you usually carry a revolver when you take your evening strolls,
+Mr. Crowfoot?" he asked.
+
+"It is a precaution," replied the little botanist, "which I consider
+to be quite harmless.  As you put a similar question to your friend
+just now I presume the habit is not confined to myself."
+
+"Take it," said Herrick curtly.  "We'll be back in a quarter of an
+hour."  And he disappeared with Crowfoot along the path toward
+Sliefer's farm.
+
+Left alone, my first and perhaps pardonable impulse was to examine
+the chambers of the revolver Mr. Crowfoot had just given me.  One of
+the cartridges had been discharged.  I slipped it back into my jacket
+pocket, where it would be ready to hand, and took out my cigarette
+case.  There was nothing to be done for the man beside me until
+further help arrived.  I reassured myself as to his condition.  It
+was as Crowfoot had said.  The head wound had bled freely, but we had
+already partially stanched it with Herrick's handkerchief.  The right
+arm and shoulder were fractured, and I suspected a rib as well.  He
+could not have fallen directly from the sluice-gate, but from one
+side, with the bushes and the water to break his fall.  If he had
+struck one of the heavy timbers immediately below he would have had
+his back broken on the spot.  As it was he was in no immediate
+danger, unless from a concussion the extent of which we could not as
+yet ascertain.
+
+I sat down on the beam which marked the beginning of the sluice-wall,
+and fell to thinking.  The thing had not, to me, entirely the look of
+an accident.  Crowfoot, on a moment's consideration, and in spite of
+the empty cartridge, I exonerated.  Freeman had not been shot, and
+Crowfoot could have had no object in pushing him over only to rescue
+him afterwards, and undoubtedly he had saved his life.  Possibly they
+had quarrelled, and Freeman had lost his footing, which would account
+for Crowfoot's prompt action.  Crowfoot was staying at the Sliefers',
+in the same house with Freeman's sweetheart, and where a young woman
+like Rebecca is concerned there is always a possibility of
+misunderstandings; but the idea of little Crowfoot playing the rustic
+Don Juan seemed rather absurd.  And that question of the sluice-gate
+worried me.  It had been a dry season, the water in the dam was even
+lower than usual; there was no earthly reason why the gate should
+give way just then with no extra pressure to account for it.
+
+Sitting on the wall, swinging my feet, with the sound of the water in
+my ears, I found myself listening mechanically to its rush.  Suddenly
+a thought occurred to me.  There had been no increase in the volume
+of sound since I had been sitting there.  If the sluice-gate had
+given way only in part, the force of the escaping water would by this
+time have widened the fissure.
+
+I rose, and walked the few paces to the top of the gate.
+
+It was as I thought.  The lever that controlled the sluice had been
+pulled half over.  Bracing my feet firmly, I threw all my strength
+against it.  I had the force of the water to contend with; as I
+pushed, the whole neglected structure of the gate seemed to vibrate
+and tremble, but little by little I could hear the gush gradually
+decreasing, the seething and bubbling below me quieted.
+
+I pushed the lever back as far as I could; it refused to go the whole
+way, and I feared to do further damage unwittingly by forcing it.
+But the greater part of the escape was checked.  I went back to the
+wall again and waited.
+
+The minutes dragged.  It was a relief to see presently the glimmer of
+a light through the trees and to hear Mr. Sliefer's anxious
+deep-throated hail.  They had taken one of the stable doors off its
+hinges, and Herrick and the farmer carried it between them while
+Crowfoot walked ahead with the lantern.
+
+I saw Crowfoot glance toward the sluice, but he said nothing.  With
+as little jarring as might be we lifted Freeman's unconscious weight
+on to the door, and I took Herrick's place in the slow procession
+back to the farmhouse.
+
+Mrs. Sliefer, with Rebecca, white-faced and stricken, met us in the
+yard.  They had prepared a room upstairs, and there we got Freeman to
+bed and did all that was possible for him.  Unconsciousness spared
+him the pain of our handling; the fracture was as ugly a one as I
+have seen.  The concussion was graver even than we had supposed; it
+would be days certainly, possibly weeks, before he would be in a
+state to answer any questions.
+
+I decided to stay the night, and Herrick, with the Sleifers' hired
+man, drove over in the buggy to take a message to Mrs. Searle and
+bring back what was needful from the surgery.
+
+In his absence I set myself to gather what information I could from
+the Sliefers themselves.  George Freeman had been there that evening.
+He had arrived earlier than usual, it being his weekly evening off,
+and stayed only a short time, saying that he had an appointment in
+the village.  On Rebecca teasing him, he had said that it was a
+business appointment and that she should hear all about it in good
+time.
+
+He had left the house at a quarter-past eight.  His appointment was
+for nine, and it would have taken him nearly that time to walk over,
+even by the short cut.  It was already close upon nine when we left
+the Lessing's cottage to walk home, and at least twenty minutes must
+have elapsed before we heard Freeman's cry.  How had he employed that
+interval, and with what object had he lingered nearly three-quarters
+of an hour near the dam?  Instinctively I thought of Crowfoot.  He
+was not in the room, and in the light of what had happened I felt no
+hesitation in questioning the Sliefers about their guest.
+
+He had come to them a fortnight ago, engaging his room by letter.
+They often took a boarder in the summer, and someone who once stayed
+there had recommended them to him.  He was quiet and
+pleasant-mannered, and anxious to give no trouble, an ideal boarder
+from Mrs. Sliefer's point of view, though Rebecca inclined to
+consider him "queer."  He had stipulated for a ground-floor room,
+explaining that for some heart affection he was forbidden to mount
+stairs.  (I smiled, thinking of the acrobatic exercises Mary Lessing
+had witnessed.)  They had accordingly arranged the back parlor for
+him, which had a door opening directly on the side porch.  His meals
+were served to him there.  Beyond the necessary service they had very
+little to do with him.  He was not at all talkative on account of his
+infirmity, but always pleasant in manner.  To their knowledge, George
+Freeman had never so much as spoken to him, though it was his
+unfailing joke to tease Rebecca about the "handsome young city
+gentleman."
+
+So much for Mr. and Mrs. Sliefer's account.  Rebecca differed.
+Rebecca didn't hold with "queerness," nor with mucking one's room up
+with rubbishy weeds, nor with going out at night to hunt toadstools.
+
+"Toadstools?" I said.
+
+"Fungy, he calls 'em.  It's the same thing.  He says there's some
+that shines in the dark, like rotten wood.  I've never seen 'em, nor
+I wouldn't go touchin' 'em if I did.  Anything would need to shine
+good and hard for him to see it with those blue goggles on!"
+
+"Rebecca's jest set against him because he wears glasses," said Mrs.
+Sliefer.
+
+"I like to see a folk's eyes," Rebecca insisted.  "I hate to have 'em
+lookin' at you when you think they ain't."
+
+For some reason she seemed to distrust Crowfoot, but there was
+certainly no suspicion, even in her mind, of any possible quarrel
+between the two men.  Rebecca herself admitted his courage in having
+pulled Freeman out.  No mention was made of the sluice, and I
+concluded that neither Herrick nor Crowfoot had spoken of it at the
+house.
+
+Mrs. Sliefer volunteered to sit up with Freeman the first part of the
+night, and having seen her settled in a capacious armchair near his
+bed, I returned to Herrick in the parlor below.  There was a couch in
+the room, but we were neither inclined to make use of it.  It was my
+first chance of speaking privately to Herrick since his return to the
+house, and having closed the staircase door leading upstairs, I told
+him briefly all that I had learned that evening.
+
+"Crowfoot couldn't have opened the sluice," he said when I had
+finished.  "How does the thing work?  Do you suppose Freeman could
+have caught at the lever as he fell and pulled it over on him?  It
+doesn't sound likely."
+
+"Impossible.  The lever works in the opposite direction."
+
+Herrick pondered.
+
+"He might have been fooling with the thing and opened it, and then
+lost his balance trying to get it back."
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"He knows the dam well enough, and he doesn't strike me as the sort
+of man to go fooling with a thing like that out of mischief.
+Besides, he didn't fall from where the lever is.  If he had, and the
+sluice was already open, he'd have been soaked through and probably
+drowned to boot.  Remember the rush of that water!  Crowfoot got him
+out, and Crowfoot was only wet to the knees.  He must have fallen
+partially clear of the pool, across one of the timbers.  The thing
+looks much more to me as though someone had deliberately opened the
+sluice on them while they were both down there.  Either the machinery
+stuck, or they were interrupted before they could do the worst.  In
+any case Crowfoot knows more than he has chosen to tell us.  He may
+be shielding someone; the whole business looks ugly."
+
+"I'm going to handle Crowfoot in the morning," said Herrick grimly.
+"It's a case where he'll find it best to tell all he knows.  A man
+who goes hunting toadstools at night with a revolver lays himself
+open to misconstruction."  He stared a moment at the purple crocheted
+mat on which the Sleifers' parlor lamp sat enthroned.  "Why on earth
+was he so keen on your keeping that revolver, I wonder?"
+
+"Possibly for the same reason that had caused him to fire one of the
+cartridges himself, this evening," I said drily.
+
+"He had?" Herrick looked up.  "Why didn't we hear the shot?"
+
+"It happens to be one of those special revolvers which are built to
+make as slight a report as possible.  I know the pattern.  The sound
+carries practically no distance.  If Crowfoot carries that revolver
+habitually it is because he has good reason to be afraid of someone,
+and he wouldn't have used it without serious cause."
+
+"Have you any idea," asked Herrick, "what Freeman wanted to see you
+about tonight?"
+
+"Yes," I said slowly, "I have.  You know the night you came down
+here, Jack?  It was Freeman who was the most determined to sift that
+ghost story to the bottom, if you remember.  From all accounts, he is
+not the young man to take half-way measures in a thing that concerns
+his sweetheart.  I think that he has been working on his own
+initiative, that he found out something, and it was about that that
+he wanted to see me.  He made the appointment for after dark, at an
+hour when he was not likely to be seen coming or going from my house,
+and he even took the precaution of coming by way of the woods.
+Someone had an interest in preventing him from keeping the
+appointment.  They watched him to the Sliefers' house, and laid up
+for him by the sluice, which he would have to cross on his way to me."
+
+"You mean Crowfoot himself?"
+
+"Crowfoot wasn't here at the time of the ghost scare, and he didn't
+know of Freeman's appointment tonight.  Moreover, I don't think he
+had even an idea who the man was till you flashed your lamp on him.
+Remember it was pretty dark there.  But two people might have known
+of it.  They were both in the store at the time.  One was Mr.
+Haskell, whom I think we may dismiss immediately.  The other was
+Aaron Menning."
+
+"Aaron Menning...."  There was that in Herrick's tone that confirmed
+instantly my own conclusions.  "Then if that's so, Aaron Menning is
+at the bottom of the ghost business, and of the whole Dutchman's Hill
+story.  Aaron, the pious chapel member!  But why in heaven's
+name----?"
+
+"There's a streak of insanity in the whole family," I said.  "Don't
+forget that Jakey was said to be half crazy.  Aaron has the look of a
+criminal degenerate.  How on earth he has maintained his reputation
+in the village so long I can't think.  He is cunning and malicious,
+if no worse."
+
+"I'd like to know just what hold that type of man could have over
+Crowfoot," Herrick said.  "Crowfoot comes in somewhere.  If it was
+Aaron pushed Freeman over, what reason could Crowfoot have for
+shielding him deliberately?  There's more behind it yet than we can
+lay hand on."
+
+There was, but our plans for finding out were destined to receive a
+rude shock in the morning.
+
+About two o'clock I left Herrick on the couch and went to take Mrs.
+Sliefer's place upstairs.  Against my will I half dozed in the
+chintz-covered arm-chair, and through my brain there chased puzzling
+dreams in which Herrick and I were trying feverishly to conceal
+George Freeman's body in the mill-dam, while Crowfoot, continually
+changing and rechanging into the likeness of Aaron, leapt up and down
+from the dizzy heights of a butternut tree and chattered at us
+angrily as he sprang.
+
+Herrick was already drinking coffee when I came downstairs.  Rebecca
+had brought it in, and with it a note addressed to me.
+
+I broke it open.  There was a second bulkier envelope inside with the
+note.  Both note and address were printed in small neat capitals,
+such as a child might use.
+
+
+"MY DEAR HAVERILL,
+
+"I REGRET THAT I HAVE BEEN OBLIGED TO LEAVE FOR THE CITY BY AN EARLY
+TRAIN, AND SO MUST POSTPONE THE PLEASURE OF MEETING YOU AND YOUR
+FRIEND AGAIN TILL A LATER DATE.
+
+"ALEXANDER CROWFOOT."
+
+
+On the second envelope was printed:
+
+"TO BE OPENED ONLY IF NOT RECLAIMED WITHIN THREE DAYS."
+
+"Stung!" said Herrick.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+I CATCH A BURGLAR
+
+I found Rebecca in the kitchen, weeping.  It was easy to see that she
+had spent half the night crying, and I hastened to reassure her so
+far as I could as to her sweetheart's condition.
+
+"And now about Mr. Crowfoot," I said.  "What time did he leave here?"
+
+"It must have been early," Rebecca answered.  "I was down an' about
+by five."
+
+"He gave you the note?"
+
+"He left it in his room.  I went to put his coffee like I always do,
+outside, an' the door was open.  He left another envelope for mother
+with his week's board in.  His bed hadn't been slept in.  He was
+writin' in his room all last evenin', after he came in."
+
+"And his things?"
+
+"He didn't have more'n a suit-case, and he must have took that with
+him."
+
+I went back to Herrick in the parlour.  Crowfoot's enclosure still
+lay on the table, and as I took it up to put it in my pocket I felt
+sorely tempted to break the seal there and then.
+
+"So he's lit out, temporarily," said Herrick.  "Well ... it doesn't
+look particularly wise under the circumstances, but I suppose he
+knows his own business."
+
+"Should we open the letter?"
+
+"No," Herrick said decidedly.  "That point is quite clear.  The
+instructions are definite.  He gives us a certain date, and if he
+does not reclaim his letter personally by then we are free to act on
+our discretion, but not before.  Meantime we can only put two and two
+together.  Crowfoot was down here on some job in which he anticipated
+personal danger, or he wouldn't have gone armed.  The cartridge he
+used was not fired on Freeman, and unless I am much mistaken the
+affair of last night upset, or at all events abruptly altered, his
+own schemes.  He's learned something that we haven't, and I'd give a
+good deal to know just what, but we can't force his hand.  Unless I
+under-estimate him, he'll turn up to claim that letter all right."
+
+"Unless----" I recalled the provisional clause on the envelope.
+
+Herrick smiled.
+
+"He doesn't strike me as the sort of person to step off a plank
+bridge in the dark!  That's a pure bit of dramatic effect, in my
+opinion."
+
+When we had finished breakfast I drove down to the drug store and
+telephoned for a trained nurse.  She arrived by the midday train, and
+Freeman's condition being satisfactory, I was able to leave him in
+her charge and go home with Herrick.
+
+We refused the farmer's buggy and walked over, following the short
+cut that had so nearly proved fatal to one man at least the night
+before.  The water below the sluice-gate was at its normal level, but
+looking over we could see the line of uptorn weeds and flattened
+grasses that showed where the brief flood had swept.  An alder bush
+on the left side, overhanging the timbered edge of the pool, was
+partly broken, indicating the point of Freeman's fall.
+
+We examined the upper part of the sluice-gate carefully.  On the wood
+near the lever I found a few dried spots of blood.  Herrick nodded
+appreciatively when he saw them.
+
+"Looks as if Crowfoot's cartridge wasn't wasted!  Someone got hit,
+though not badly; there's none tracked along the road.  My respect
+for our friend increases.  Austin, why was he so careful we didn't
+see his handwriting?"
+
+"Give it up.  He's a queer bird anyway."
+
+I told him of what Mary Lessing had seen that morning, by Dutchman's
+Hill.  Hitherto it had presented itself to me merely as a whim on
+Crowfoot's part.  Now I began to think he might have had some object
+in the performance.  Herrick smiled when it came to the jumping, but
+his face grew serious again immediately.
+
+"Austin," he said, "I give you a problem.  What is it about that
+particular tree that attracts me and attracts Crowfoot?  There's
+something more than coincidence in it.  Crowfoot wasn't amusing
+himself.  To my mind, he was testing a theory, and if we knew what
+that theory was...."  He broke off, thoughtfully, and I turned to him.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Nothing much.  Austin, whereabouts was Jake's body found, last
+spring?"
+
+"Face downwards in the water, just near the plank bridge.  Why?"
+
+"Taken with Crowfoot's action, does that suggest anything to you?"
+
+"Nothing to do with suicide.  Jake had a fit and fell in the water."
+
+"Exactly."  He walked a few paces in silence.  "Has it ever occurred
+to you what a really admirable country coroner you would make?"
+
+"I don't see what that's got to do with it."
+
+"Listen."  He swung round.  "Jake's death was not accident, though he
+may have died actually in a fit.  He was frightened by someone or
+something that sprang out at him from that tree as he passed, and
+Crowfoot, depend upon it, was merely trying to find out whether that
+jump was within the limits of an ordinarily active man."
+
+We were both tired that evening and we turned in early after supper.
+I had left instructions to call me if there was any change in
+Freeman's condition, but I anticipated none before the morning.  The
+nurse seemed a competent woman, and I felt easy in leaving him to her
+care.  I slept like a log, my rest untroubled by any dreams.
+
+Towards morning, as it seemed to me, I woke up with that curious
+sense of something happening which arouses one at times by appeal
+through some subconscious perception.  Five minutes before a
+thunderstorm would have failed to rouse me; now instinct dragged me
+up sitting in my bed, of a sudden keenly and alertly awake.
+
+I listened.  Someone was moving in the surgery below.  Mrs. Searle
+went to bed always at ten, and I had the impression of having slept
+already for several hours.  I struck a match softly and looked at my
+watch.  It was a quarter to twelve, earlier than I had thought.  I
+felt on the bureau for my revolver, which I had taken to my room that
+evening, and opened the door noiselessly.
+
+It was not Herrick, for I could hear his regular breathing through
+the keyhole opposite.  At the foot of the little flight of stairs a
+faint light glimmered.  The stairs opened directly from the surgery,
+and it was my custom to leave the door at the bottom open during the
+night.  Now it was closed, and the light that I saw filtered through
+the crack.  I crept quietly down and pushed it open, revolver in hand.
+
+A pocket electric lamp lay on the desk, and by its light a man was
+searching through one of the desk drawers.  It was a small drawer
+which had been always locked; I fancied that it contained some
+private papers and affairs of Lennox's which he had put together
+there before leaving.  The man's back was towards me, but I
+recognized instantly the shabby tweed coat, the soft felt hat pulled
+low down over his head.  It was Crowfoot.
+
+I don't know what I had expected; certainly not him.  I lowered the
+revolver and stepped forward.
+
+"Were you looking for anything, Mr. Crowfoot?"
+
+At the sound of my voice he turned; his hand shot out towards the
+electric lamp, and instantly the room was in darkness.
+
+For a second we stood there, neither moving, and we could hear each
+other's breathing across the room.
+
+"Light that lamp," I said quietly.  "If you have any explanation I am
+ready to hear it.  I have a revolver in my hand, and if you attempt
+to move I shall be compelled to treat you like any other common
+housebreaker."
+
+"Listen here," he began, "and don't for heaven's sake play the fool!"
+His voice sounded excited, impatient, but with an assurance in it
+that was somehow vaguely familiar to me, and, as on the night before,
+there was no trace of his usual stammering.  It was the voice of a
+man interrupted in important business rather than caught red-handed
+in an attempt at common theft.  "Put that revolver down, Haverill.  I
+tell you, you don't know what you're meddling with!  I'm in a hurry.
+Let me go out of the house now, without any questions, and I swear to
+heaven I'll come back tomorrow and tell you everything you want to
+know.  I'll tell you everything!  But don't stop me now!"
+
+"You will, eh?"
+
+I laid the revolver down on a chair that stood behind me, but only to
+have both hands free.  He made a movement, chancing the darkness, but
+the room was too small.  I collided with him somewhere near the
+armchair--the solid mahogany caught my knee an ugly whack through my
+thin pajamas--and for a moment we grappled together fruitlessly.
+
+"Haverill, you idiot--let me go!"
+
+He gasped and struggled, but I held my grip.
+
+"Not so easy.  I want the lamp."
+
+He swore, wrenching an arm free, and the little white bulb glowed
+out.  He must have slipped it in his pocket when he turned.  The
+light shone on our two blinking faces.  Crowfoot's hat had fallen off
+in the struggle, and for the first time I saw him without his black
+glasses.
+
+It was Lennox!
+
+Stupefied, I let go my hold.
+
+"Now will you let me go?" he snarled.
+
+"I thought you were in Europe!  What's it all about?  Are you crazy?"
+
+"Oh, you idiot!"  There was a savage patience in his voice.  "Get on
+your trousers, then, and come along.  You were always an obstinate
+devil, Haverill!  Bring that revolver with you and don't wake the
+house, and don't for God's sake stand wasting any more time!  I'll
+wait for you."
+
+I ran upstairs.  A hundred wild ideas passed through my mind as I
+groped my way hurriedly into sweater and trousers, in the dark, not
+even staying to light a candle.  I hardly knew, in my bewilderment,
+whether Lennox had been impersonating Crowfoot or Crowfoot Lennox;
+the whole thing seemed inextricably and extravagantly mixed.
+Curiously, Herrick had not even been roused by our scuffle.  I
+carried my boots down to avoid waking him now, and pulled them on in
+the surgery.
+
+"Take your revolver," said Lennox.
+
+We passed out through the door; he had used his own latchkey to come
+in with.
+
+"Will you tell me----?" I began, when we were clear of the house.
+
+"All in good time."
+
+A few paces up the road an automobile was standing.  Two men were
+already seated in it, besides the chauffeur.  One leaned out,
+watching, and he gave an exclamation as the two of us stepped into
+the light of the lamps.
+
+"It's all right," said Lennox.  He almost pushed me into the tonneau,
+where I tumbled into a big broad-shouldered Irishman, and swung up
+himself to the front seat.  "This is Doctor Haverill; he's coming
+along.  Haverill, this is Mr. Keary, the county sheriff, and
+Inspector McWade."
+
+The chauffeur let in the clutch and the big car swung forward in the
+direction of Dutchman's Hill.
+
+"And now, Haverill," Lennox said, turning to me, "you wanted to be in
+it, and you're in it.  These gentlemen are accompanying me to the
+Bend with a warrant for the arrest of the man known as Aaron Menning."
+
+"Ah!"  I looked at the burly Irish inspector beside me, and the
+conviction of yesterday grew clear in my mind.  "For assault on
+George Freeman!"
+
+"No," said the sheriff, speaking for the first time.  "For the
+manslaughter of his brother on the seventeenth of last March."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+A MIDNIGHT CHASE
+
+We swept on at a steady pace, through a silence broken only by the
+throbbing of the engine and the hissing whir of tires over the dust.
+On either side of the road the woods stretched black and inscrutable.
+Just before we came to Dutchman's Hill Lennox said a word to the
+chauffeur, and he paused to extinguish the two headlights.
+Thereafter we drove more slowly.
+
+A few paces beyond the bridge, at the beginning of the hill, the car
+stopped suddenly.  Something had gone wrong with the engine, and
+while the chauffeur got out to attend to it Lennox and the sheriff
+took the opportunity to walk back to the bridge we had just crossed.
+
+"Have to get a light on it," the chauffeur said, unhooking one of the
+side lamps.  "The blame thing might have held out a bit longer!  We
+ain't far from Dutchman's Hill, by all accounts."
+
+"This is Dutchman's Hill," I said.
+
+"It is, eh?"  He glanced at the inspector; who was holding the lamp
+for him.  "Well, they say one cuss leads to another, and be darned if
+I don't give this place a worse name than it's had yet!"
+
+Alone in the car, I leaned back against the cushions, speculating as
+to the chance that had drawn me into this midnight adventure and what
+its outcome would be--the climax, for aught I knew, of all the
+summer's mysteries.  Of Lennox's part in it I could but guess, but
+the experience of the last forty-eight hours gave me a confidence in
+him that overrode all earlier impressions.  Mentally I contrasted the
+vision of Crowfoot, alert, cool-headed, decisive, with the Lennox of
+my first evening's arrival, and marvelled at the grip he had brought
+to bear on himself in the two months' interval.
+
+The air was still and oppressive in the hollow; the stench of
+gasoline rose in a warm reek mingled with the stagnant smell of the
+swamp close by.  The mosquitoes were thick; they descended in swarms
+upon us with the stopping of the car, and a host of moths and midges
+fluttered round the lamp, attracted by its glare.  The two men, bent
+over the engine, joked and grumbled in undertones, as cheerfully as
+though we were out on no more serious errand than a mere pleasure
+ride.
+
+The sheriff rejoined us.
+
+"How long will you be, Jackson?"
+
+The chauffeur straightened his back.
+
+"Twenty minutes, sir, more or less.  I can't fix it under."
+
+There was a brief consultation, and the sheriff turned to Lennox.
+
+"How far are we from the Bend?"
+
+"Three-quarters of a mile, by road.  We can strike a short cut at the
+top of the hill."
+
+"We'd better walk it.  There's no good wasting time.  Get your job
+through, Jackson, bring the car on to the top of the hill and wait
+for us there, along the road.  I suppose..."
+
+Lennox caught my eye.
+
+"I can rely on Doctor Haverill," he said promptly.  "As we are one
+man short already I don't think it advisable that we should divide."
+
+"Very good.  Have either of you gentlemen an extra revolver?"
+
+I pulled mine out and gave it to the chauffeur.  He grinned
+cheerfully as he slipped it in his pocket.
+
+"Right, sir!  If any spook puts a game on me I won't start tellin' my
+beads!  Give me twenty minutes, Mr. Keary, and I'll have the car
+right there!"
+
+We left him at his task and set off up the hill, following the little
+footpath at the side of the road, Lennox and the sheriff in front,
+the inspector and myself at the rear.  When we were nearly at the top
+the inspector paused.
+
+"There's fire somewhere," he said.  "I can smell it."
+
+"Someone been burning bush, most likely," said Lennox.  "We can tell
+further on."
+
+At the top of the hill it was unmistakable, a sickly charred odor
+that hung heavily on the air.  Lennox gave an exclamation and
+quickened his pace involuntarily.  A moment later the Lessing
+bungalow came in sight; there were lights in the windows, and I
+caught sight of a slim shawl-wrapped figure on the porch.  Lennox and
+the sheriff were well ahead, and as they reached the bungalow someone
+stepped out and joined them in the roadway.  I heard Lessing's voice
+raised in amazement.  "Lennox, by all that's holy!"
+
+"It's Menning's place," said Lennox as we came up.  "I thought as
+much!  The game's up."
+
+"Burned to tinder an hour ago," said Lessing cheerfully.  "Hello,
+Haverill!  Have you all joined the local fire-brigade?"  He caught
+sight of the inspector's square shoulders behind me, and whistled.
+"So that's it!  Well, if you're wanting an interview with Menning, I
+guess his present address is somewhere in the woods between here and
+Coopersville!"
+
+We ran on hastily to the Bend, taking a short cut across the fields
+behind the bungalow.  It was as Lessing had said.  The fire had
+broken out some three hours ago, and his first intimation had been
+the sudden lurid glare across the tree-tops as he sat on the porch
+smoking a final cigarette before turning in.  The house, a
+dilapidated structure at best, had caught from the basement upward,
+and by the time he arrived on the scene it was already beyond hope of
+saving.  He had given what help he could to the neighbours, hastily
+collected, but with the limited appliances at hand the task was
+hopeless from the first.
+
+The huckster's yard with its strewn debris, desolate enough by
+daylight, was made doubly sinister by the red wavering light that
+still played and flickered among the broken boxes and tumble-down
+sheds, lit up the loathsome scrap-heaps and the trampled mire
+underfoot.  The prisoned chickens, startled from sleep, kept up a
+mournful squawking, pushing and struggling in their coops.  The
+efforts of the men had been directed to the barn and cowshed.  They
+stood now, an awed, strangely silent little group, gathered near a
+broken bureau and a pile of household goods that had been dragged
+somewhere from the burning and huddled forlornly in the open yard.  I
+remember that a wooden clock, still ticking, and a filthy and ancient
+foot-tub were among the collection.  I spoke to one of the men; it
+was old Paddy's son-in-law.
+
+"We done all we could; the old place was no better'n tinder.  Pop was
+fur lettin' it burn an' not lift a hand.  We got Miss Mennin' out.
+Hiram Scholl he bust the door in an' got her.  She's over to the
+house now.  Aaron ain't here.  It's funny about him.  He ain't took
+the horse anyway.  They was sayin'..."
+
+He stopped short and looked at me, the glare of the fire on his
+sweat-streaked face.
+
+"They was sayin' he started it.  I dunno.  It broke out downstairs.
+They ain't no one seen Aaron."
+
+And after a moment he added: "He'd oughter be insured.  There's no
+savin' anything."
+
+I went back to Lennox and the sheriff, standing a little apart.
+
+"Aaron's gone," I said.
+
+"I know.  There's nothing to be done here.  We'll go and see the old
+woman."
+
+I stayed behind with the inspector and Lessing while the other two
+went over to the Nevills' cottage, and together we made a thorough
+search of the barn and outhouses.  There was nothing to be learned.
+Filth and disorder reigned everywhere.  To describe the condition of
+the place, as we found it, would only be to recall the actual
+physical sickness that overtook me during the task.
+
+The neighbours had gradually dispersed during our search.  By the
+time the others rejoined us the place was deserted.  The fire had
+completely burned itself out; only a tiny smouldering flame pulsed up
+here and there, to die down again immediately into blackness.
+
+McWade and the sheriff exchanged a few words, and the latter turned.
+"Well, gentlemen, I think there's nothing more to be done," he said.
+"I expect Jackson has the car ready by now.  We'll walk back to the
+house, and if Mr. Lessing has no objection I should like a few words
+with him before we go."
+
+We did not meet the car, nor was it in sight when we reached the
+bungalow.  Mary Lessing was on the porch, and while the others went
+indoors I stayed outside to smoke a cigarette in the open air and
+watch the road in case Jackson turned up.
+
+"I'm glad it was Menning's house, if it had to be somebody's," said
+Mary, with really feminine lucidity.  "I wanted to go, but Dick
+wouldn't let me.  I guess I wouldn't have been much use.  Doctor
+Haverill, is it ... Aaron they're after?"
+
+"They think he had something to do with that business last spring.
+It's Lennox's story.  I haven't had a chance to talk to him yet.
+Anyway I'll take back all I said against him last night."
+
+She had heard nothing of the accident at the dam, and I told her as
+briefly as I could all that had happened since we left the bungalow
+last evening.  She listened breathlessly.
+
+"So it was Doctor Lennox all the time!  Now I know why he didn't want
+to meet me that morning.  I was sure I knew him, somehow."
+
+"You were smarter than we were," I admitted.  "He took us in.  Only I
+don't see why, now."
+
+"Sliefer's is near to Aaron's place," said Mary, "and if he was
+watching Aaron he wouldn't want anyone to know who he was.  You think
+it was Aaron who attacked Freeman last night?"
+
+"I am nearly sure of it."
+
+Mary shivered.  "It's horrible," she said.  "It's horrible!  I wish
+now----"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I wish I'd known," she said quickly.  "That poor girl!  I shall go
+over and see her first thing tomorrow.  I know Rebecca quite well.
+We get our milk from there."
+
+"Do," I said.  "You'll cheer her up a bit."  I rose as I spoke and
+peered down the road.  "It's time that car put in an appearance."
+
+"Your car?  Where did you leave it?"
+
+"Just down the hill there.  It had a breakdown," I explained.  "The
+man was going to catch us up."
+
+"I thought I heard a car," she said, "a little while ago.  It was
+while you were over at the fire.  It didn't come past here.  Do you
+suppose Menning knew what you came for?"
+
+"Lennox thinks he must have suspected it.  Anyhow he's far enough
+away by this time."
+
+She looked at me, as I thought, a little uneasily.
+
+"You aren't afraid of Menning?" I exclaimed.  "Far or near, he'll
+take good enough care to keep out of anyone's way just now.  Well,
+I'll go and see if I can find the car.  He may have misunderstood the
+directions.  You might tell the others if they're looking for me."
+
+As it happened, I had barely gone a dozen paces up the road before I
+heard the cheerful approaching throb of a motor, and a moment later
+the car, with Jackson in it, swung into sight.
+
+"I was just coming along to look for you," I said as he drew up.  "I
+thought you'd missed us."
+
+"Thought the spooks had got me!"  He grinned appreciatively.  "No,
+sir!  I just pulled up the road a bit--didn't know which way you'd
+gone.  I guess they weren't huntin' company tonight."  He laughed.
+"Mighty thick these woods are.  I don't know this part of the country
+much.  Do you get any big animals, round about?"
+
+"Nothing bigger than a badger," I said.  "Why?"
+
+"There was something crossed my path, coming up the hill there.  It
+might have been a dog, now I think of it, but it didn't look like no
+dog I've ever seen.  Rather high in the hindquarters, and grayish ...
+I on'y saw the back of it.  It slunk off in the bushes as I come up."
+
+"There aren't any very big dogs that I know," I said, "except Mr.
+Lessing's setter, and that's generally chained up at night."
+
+"It weren't no setter," said Jackson.  "Weren't the build of a
+setter.  And it weren't no badger, for I've seen 'em.  Low-running,
+brownish beasts they are....  Is this the house, sir?"
+
+We drew up outside the bungalow, and I jumped down to join the
+others, waiting on the porch.
+
+"It wasn't anything _like_ a dog, now I think of it," said Jackson.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+LENNOX'S STORY
+
+Lennox's face, when the car had deposited us once more at our door,
+expressed utter chagrin and annoyance.  He flung himself down in the
+surgery arm-chair and lit a cigar.
+
+"That's what comes of not acting on the minute," he said.  "I had my
+hand on the man last night.  I tell you, Haverill, you can't drive
+plain facts into people's heads.  There's formality and formality,
+and the end is your man gets a clear twelve hours to lay his plans
+and the game's up."
+
+"Bad luck," I rejoined.
+
+He sat staring moodily down at the carpet.
+
+"While I think of it," I remembered, "I've got some property of
+yours.  You might as well have it back."
+
+I pulled out the envelope he had left for me that morning.  Lennox
+took it without a glance and thrust it into his pocket.
+
+"Considering that I didn't have the opportunity to open it," I
+remarked, "I think you might let me into the story now."
+
+He pulled out his watch.  "Well, I don't know but what sleep's out of
+the question, anyway, tonight.  Get the whisky out, Haverill, there's
+a good chap, and we'll go into it."
+
+"One moment," I said as I unlocked the cupboard.  "Have you any
+objection if I fetch Herrick down?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+I roused Herrick accordingly, and he bundled sleepily into a
+dressing-gown and joined us below, where his sleepiness rapidly
+vanished in the few moments that it took to grasp the new turn of
+events, and the part that Lennox himself had played in last night's
+happenings.
+
+Put briefly, this was the story as Lennox put it to us, gathered
+round the surgery table in the chilly half-hour that precedes dawn.
+
+The Menning household, when Lennox first came here, had consisted of
+the two half-brothers, Jake and Aaron, and the old mother, who kept
+house for them and helped more or less in the business.  They were of
+Westphalian origin, but had settled in this country for two
+generations.  The mother, according to Lennox, was a curious survival
+of the original peasant stock.  Stolid, hard-working, and
+uncommunicative, she preserved always a certain aloofness from her
+neighbours, a taciturnity that marked her out even among the Dutch
+families about.  She had preserved a great deal of her native
+superstition and traditions, and was reputed to have a great
+knowledge of herbs and some skill in home doctoring and decoctions,
+when she could be induced to use it, by reason of which the
+neighbours, ready enough in such gossip, believed her to have actual
+powers of witchcraft.  Superstition dies hard, even in a new country,
+and there was at all events a marked unwillingness among them to
+annoy or "cross" her in any way.  About thirty years ago she had
+married a young Pennsylvania Dutchman, Menning by name, who had
+deserted her shortly after.  Aaron, their son, had his mother's
+characteristics in a modified degree.  He was inclined to be
+friendly, if not sociable, a good business man, thrifty but
+honest-dealing, and very religious.  Jake, the half-brother, was some
+years older than Aaron, and, in Lennox's phrase, a "throw-back."
+There was considerable mystery and gossip about his birth.  Some said
+that he was born before the mother's marriage, some after.  He was
+certainly only half related to Aaron, and the wide difference between
+them was in curious contrast to their strong physical resemblance, a
+result in both cases of the virile persistence of the mother's
+peasant type.  Jakey was mentally deficient, but not enough to debar
+him from ordinary tasks.  He occupied himself in the huckstering
+business, and took the wagon round in turn with Aaron, week and week
+about.  In many ways he could be trusted, but he was malicious and
+cunning, and the bad streak seemed to predominate with age.  Lennox
+never considered him safe.  There was always the possibility, in his
+opinion, of a serious outbreak, and he had even gone so far as to
+suggest to Aaron the advisability of having him put under definite
+restraint.  At first Aaron had been disposed to consider the idea
+favourably, then later, for no given reason, he changed his mind.
+His manner, at about this time, in regard to any discussion about
+Jakey, changed also so noticeably that Lennox supposed there must
+have been words between Aaron and the mother about his (Lennox's)
+interference in the matter, and that Aaron had perhaps been naturally
+induced to range himself upon the mother's side.  Lennox urged him at
+least to have his brother medically examined, but he always met with
+a dogged refusal.
+
+"Jakey's all right in the daytime," Aaron persisted.  "He ain't doin'
+harm to nobody.  Nights we lock him in."
+
+Once only he went so far as to say that if it became necessary he
+would take his own steps in the matter, rather implying a resentment
+at outside interference, and Lennox, to avoid making further bad
+blood, was forced to let the matter drop.  So things went on till
+last March, and the events which led to the finding of Jakey's body
+by the creek at Dutchman's Hill.
+
+Lennox saw the body, and there was no doubt in his mind at the time
+that death was due to an epileptic seizure.  There were no marks of
+any sort on the body.  The ground was fairly soft at the time--a thaw
+had set in that same afternoon--but there were no footprints to be
+found other than those of the man himself, leading down to the creek,
+and the tracks of some large dog which had evidently passed that way
+in the night, sniffed at the body and gone on.  At the word "large
+dog" I saw Herrick shift in his chair.
+
+"Do the Mennings keep a dog?" he asked.
+
+"A watchdog, I believe.  Most people do."
+
+"Nothing else was found near the place?"
+
+"Nothing but this, which I myself happened on a few days later.
+Either of the brothers might have dropped it, or it might have been
+dropped by another person altogether.  It was lying some little
+distance from the creek, beyond the bridge there.  The inspector
+attached no particular importance to it.  There is a certain amount
+of traffic along this road, and there is no indication that this
+wasn't dropped by some passing person a day or two after the body was
+found."
+
+He drew from his waistcoat pocket a small round silver object,
+slightly larger than a pea.
+
+"Looks like some boy's treasure," I said.  "A button, isn't it?"
+
+"It has been a button," Herrick said.  "The shank has been broken off
+and it's been hammered.  Well, Lennox, go on."
+
+"Of course there was an inquest," Lennox said.  "They found that the
+man died during an epileptic seizure, which carried out my own
+conclusions.  And now I am coming to the queer part of my tale.  It
+was Aaron who formally identified the body.  I saw him and spoke with
+him at the inquest, and I saw him again the day after Jakey's
+funeral."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Six weeks after the inquest, Haverill, I was walking down the short
+cut from the Bend, and I met Jake Menning face to face.  I am as
+certain of it as that I am sitting here.  He made off without giving
+me a chance to speak to him.  But that it was Jake, in solid flesh
+and blood, I had no shadow of a doubt.
+
+"The next day I went to the house.  I asked for Aaron.  The old woman
+met me.  She said that Aaron was away with the wagon.  I asked when I
+could see him, and she became evasive.  It seemed that he was very
+busy, that he was away a good deal of the time; she could not say at
+all when he was likely to be found.
+
+"Her answers, and more particularly her manner, set me to thinking.
+I had not seen Aaron since the day after Jakey's funeral.  No one, so
+far as I could learn without pushing inquiries unduly, had seen much
+of Aaron since the inquest.  His trade had always lain further afield
+than the immediate neighbourhood, where most people raised their own
+chickens for use, and few in sufficient quantity to sell.  Mrs.
+Searle had seen him, certainly, and Mrs. Searle had remarked a change
+in him.  She said that he was queer and silent; she thought that the
+shock of his brother's death had preyed on his mind.  In her own
+words, he was 'getting just like Jakey in his ways.'
+
+"It was about this time that the talk first began about the haunting
+of Dutchman's Hill.  I am not a credulous man where ghosts are
+concerned, and I scoffed any idea of the supernatural.  One stranger,
+a pedlar, said that a 'something' had jumped out and chased him to
+the bridge, where it stopped.  Others declared that it was the ghost
+of Jakey that haunted the place.  On top of all this came
+the--er--the very singular attacks upon Mr. Lessing.  I don't want to
+go into Lessing's case now.  His own story was of course untenable,
+and I strongly believe that he knew a great deal more than he chose
+to tell me at the time--in other words, that he found amusement in
+trying, deliberately, to see how much I would believe.  We were
+always strongly opposed on certain questions, though in general I
+found him a most courteous and charming man, and I am afraid he was
+not above trying, in this matter, to take a rise out of me, as they
+say.  If he had taken me into his confidence then, instead of
+inventing the ridiculous sort of bogy-tale he did, we should have
+been at the truth of this matter much earlier."
+
+Herrick and I exchanged glances.  I fancied he was about to speak,
+but on second thoughts changed his mind.  Lennox continued.
+
+"The problem resolved itself into this.  If Jakey was still alive,
+and I could swear to it that he was, whose was the body that had been
+identified and buried in March, and how was it that no one, save
+myself, guessed at his continued existence?  _Who was Aaron Menning?_
+
+"I tell you, Haverill, the thing became a nightmare.  I had no proof
+to go upon, nothing but my own instinct.  The more I thought over it,
+the more clear it grew to me.  The man whose body had been found at
+Dutchman's Hill was not Jakey at all, it was Aaron."
+
+"But----"
+
+"Listen here, Haverill," Lennox said.  "I know what I am saying
+sounds incredible to you.  But consider for a moment, on what
+superficial observations we base our recognition of people, every
+day.  Remember the very strong likeness which existed between the two
+brothers, even to the scarring and thickening of the skin by
+smallpox, which in itself blunts the individuality of a face.  The
+face of the dead man was swollen both by the manner of death and the
+partial immersion in mud.  Remember that there were no intimate
+relatives to impose upon, for the mother undoubtedly knew the truth.
+The farmer who found the body identified it as that of a huckster
+named Menning who had called upon him the week before.  Aaron was
+away from home that night, and he did not return with the wagon till
+the afternoon.  It was the mother who first identified the body as
+that of Jakey, and the news was already spread when I arrived on the
+scene.  Aaron appeared at the inquest, but with the exception of
+myself there were not three men there who knew him at all intimately,
+or who could have sworn to his actual identity unless they saw the
+two brothers side by side.  Both Aaron and the mother opposed the
+inquest strongly, and the neighbours told me that she would let no
+one help her in preparing the body for burial.  She had always kept
+herself rather aloof, as I said, and at the time her refusal did not
+strike me as peculiar.
+
+"Given the clue, the thing was easy enough to construct.  I believe
+myself it was fear of his brother's placing him under restraint that
+first suggested the attack.  He must have concealed himself in the
+tree near the footbridge, knowing that Aaron had an errand in the
+village and would pass that way, and so sprung out upon him.  The
+impact of his body bore them both down to the edge of the stream.
+There was no struggle.  The shock brought on the seizure in which
+Aaron died, and Jakey, leaving him there, had sufficient cunning
+either to follow the stream or swing himself up by the bridge, and so
+avoid leaving any traces.  He returned to the house, and with his
+mother concocted the story of Aaron's absence with the wagon,
+harnessed the horse and made off ready to return the following
+afternoon, when the dead man's identity would have been safely
+established.  People might have suspected Jakey of killing Aaron, but
+no one would suspect Aaron of killing Jakey.
+
+"I think now that he was on his guard against me at the inquest, and
+that his suspicion must have deepened as time went on.  I was morally
+convinced that the man was a dangerous homicidal lunatic, but I had
+no evidence to convict him.  He would have been cunning enough to
+defeat me, since no one would have credited my story.  Aaron was
+known and respected.  It would have been folly to bring any hasty
+charge against him.  Convinced that he already mistrusted me, and
+that my only safety was in disarming his suspicion, I took the only
+course possible.  I determined to go away for a time, and I took the
+precaution of letting it be supposed that I went for my health.  I
+wanted Menning to think that he had driven me away, and I believe I
+succeeded.  Up to last night he had no suspicion of my identity with
+Crowfoot.  I counted on his relaxing his caution once I was out of
+the way, and I was right.
+
+"Freeman must have suspected something of the truth, since that
+Rebecca swore she had seen Jakey's ghost near the mill-dam, and if it
+had not been for Freeman's well-meant imprudence we should have had
+Jakey under lock and key at this moment.  He got suspicious of
+Freeman, laid up for him last night, and pushed him over the sluice.
+I heard Freeman's cry and the splash, and guessed instinctively what
+had happened.  It was then that Jakey's mania came out.  He
+disappeared when Freeman fell, but in a paroxysm of rage and fear
+came back and tried to pull the gate open on us while we were both
+down there.  I had to fire on him in defence, and he made off.  He
+had taken the alarm, however, and instead of waiting the one more day
+I had intended, I judged it best to post straight off and lay my
+facts as I knew them before the sheriff then and there.  The rest of
+course you know."
+
+"Then you had no intention of going to Europe?" I asked.
+
+"Not in the least.  A friend posted my note from Queenstown, a wise
+precaution, since Menning would undoubtedly hear of it through the
+postmaster's gossip.  I went to the Sliefers' because they were near
+enough to the Bend to enable me to carry out a few investigations
+without arousing too much interest, and also because they happened to
+be about the only people in the village whom I never attended
+professionally, and they would therefore be less likely to recognize
+me.  You were the only person I was afraid of, Haverill, and you I
+had to chance.  We spent only a few hours together before I left, and
+before that we hadn't met for years; it was only my voice that
+troubled me, and there I took a leaf out of Jakey's book.  Mr.
+Herrick would make a better detective than you.  He played me a neat
+trick over that revolver last night!"
+
+Herrick smiled.  "You must admit that things looked ugly for you!
+Now I see why you were so reluctant to be dragged up to the house
+that morning."
+
+"My old training in college theatricals came in useful anyway!" He
+looked at his watch.  "Give me another of those cigars of which you
+are so lavish, Haverill, and I'll turn in.  I'm dog-tired, and
+there's plenty before me tomorrow, yet."
+
+He betook himself with a blanket to the dining-room sofa, to get a
+few hours' sleep.  The first violet light of dawn was already
+filtering between the curtains, and Herrick stood up abruptly and
+extinguished the lamp.
+
+"Lord," he said, "it's stuffy in here!  Well, Austin, what do you
+make of it all?"
+
+"It may be true," I said.  "It throws sufficient doubt anyway for the
+arrest of this man.  They might prove manslaughter.  Lennox's idea
+evidently is that if he can be once arrested on this charge they can
+have him medically examined, and the whole truth will come out."
+
+"Exactly."  He walked to the window, pulling aside the curtains, and
+threw up the sash.  The clean fresh air of the dawn, faintly cold,
+swept past him into the room.  "Austin, what points struck you
+particularly in this story?"
+
+"If he really saw Jakey that disposes of the ghost tales.  Only one
+doesn't know..."
+
+"His doubts about his own judgment, in the earlier case, weakens
+this," Herrick supplemented.  "I agree.  He seems certain at one
+moment and uncertain at another.  But he is more positive, I take it,
+on that point, than on any other.  It was _apparently_ Jakey's body,
+it was _apparently_ Aaron at the inquest, but it was definitely Jakey
+himself whom he saw and recognized later."
+
+"Jakey is alive.  Whether Aaron was actually killed, or whether Jakey
+in some extraordinary way came to life again....  There have been
+cases."
+
+"There have been cases," Herrick said.  "The inquest was held the
+next day, and no one apparently saw the body after the inquest.
+People have been buried alive before now.  And we must remember that
+Lennox, for all the skill and ingenuity he has brought to bear in
+this matter afterwards, has only the experience of the average
+country practitioner.  You know what that's worth."
+
+"It seems to me," I said, grappling with an idea which had somehow
+forced itself upon me all through Lennox's narrative, "that--I don't
+want to criticize unduly--but I do feel that Lennox's tale has been
+more evolved to fit existing facts than suggested by them.  He seems
+to me to be trying to convince himself just as much as us.  And----"
+
+"Yes?" said Herrick.
+
+I hesitated.
+
+"I--well, hang it all, Herrick, I saw the man before he left, and
+whatever the cause, or however temporary the effect, I am pretty sure
+that the story he told us tonight is not sufficient to account for
+the state of nerves he was in then.  You saw how touchy he was about
+Lessing?"
+
+Herrick nodded.
+
+"Lessing said once that Lennox only cared for things he could stick a
+pin into and label."
+
+"And unless I am much mistaken," said Herrick quietly, "it will take
+a bolder man than Lennox to label the real truth of this business.
+However, Austin, we'll drop that part of it for the moment.  There
+are one or two points I want to recall to you particularly."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"They are these."  He spoke deliberately.  "The character of
+Menning's mother.  She is important.  The rather curious isolation in
+which the family seem always to have kept themselves.  Aaron's sudden
+change of mind about having Jakey put under restraint.  And ... the
+two other details to which Lennox himself seems to attach the least
+importance.  One is that of the footprints, presumably of a dog--a
+large dog--noticed near the spot where Menning's body was found."
+
+"And the other?"
+
+"The other," said Herrick, "I have here in my hand, and to me it
+provides the most significant clue in the whole case."
+
+He opened his hand, and I saw lying on the palm the battered silver
+button that had been picked up on Dutchman's Hill.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+THE MILL DAM
+
+I could get nothing further from Herrick just then.  He went back to
+his room, but not to sleep, for I could hear him pacing up and down
+overhead.  For myself, I dozed fitfully in the surgery arm-chair, and
+when I finally opened my eyes with a start it was to find the room
+filled with sunlight and Herrick standing over me, fully dressed, a
+cup of steaming coffee in his hand.
+
+"Wake up, Austin," he said.  "I've stolen a march on Mrs. Searle.
+It's hot, if it isn't otherwise drinkable."
+
+I rubbed my eyes.
+
+"Where's Lennox?"
+
+"Sleeping the sleep of the just.  By the look of him he won't wake up
+till midday.  That's the reward of an easy conscience for you----
+'Something accomplished, something done.'  Which reminds me.  Are you
+using your motorcycle today?"
+
+"I don't think so."  I drank the coffee--it was strong and scalding
+hot, and it pulled me together.  "Why, do you want it?"
+
+"I'd like it for today, yes."
+
+"Sure."  I looked at him curiously.  "Have you got something in mind?"
+
+"Only a little tour of investigation.  You needn't look injured,
+Austin!  Just something I want to check up on.  Are you going over to
+Sliefer's today?"
+
+"Later on.  I've got two calls in the village."
+
+"Well, if you see the Lessings tell them I'll be over tomorrow--or
+tonight if I get back in time."
+
+We got the cycle out without rousing Pete, and I watched Herrick off
+down the road.  When he had gone I lit my pipe and set out for a
+little stroll until such time as the household should be awake.
+
+There had been a heavy fall of dew, and the weeds by the roadside
+were drenched and silvered.  Spider webs like jewel-work upon the
+brambles.  I was reminded of the first time I had driven over to the
+bungalow, early in the summer, on just such a morning as this, and of
+how little thought had been in my mind then of what I should find at
+my journey's end.  To me, then, these far stretching woods, dense and
+close-grown, the hollow with its rank growth of teeming insect life,
+the little creek that followed threadlike among the emerald mosses
+and tufts of sedge, suggested nothing more than the idle peace and
+pleasure of a summer's holiday.  I had envied whoever lived here all
+the year round.  These cool depths of shadow, with the freckled at
+nothing more dreadful than the tragedy of play of sunlight through
+the branches, hinted weasel and rabbit, of hawk and thrush.  Now
+their aspect was to me indefinably changed.  I felt them sinister,
+secretive, their peace a mere deceptive veil for the evil that lurked
+beneath.
+
+What was the secret that overshadowed the place?  What had Herrick
+meant by his insistence upon the silver button and those queer
+footprints by the cedar where Aaron had met his death?  Did Lennox's
+story after all explain anything?  I felt that it did not and yet I
+felt, in a strange, unexplained way, that somehow, in connection with
+the Mennings, and the Menning homestead, loathsome and sinister, was
+to be found the answer to our whole problem.  But how?
+
+Retracing my steps, I reached the house to find smoke curling
+cheerfully from the chimney and Lennox, contrary to Herrick's
+prophecy, dressed and on the porch.  Mrs. Searle had breakfast ready,
+bacon, buckwheat cakes and coffee which obliterated the lingering
+taste of the decoction Herrick had pressed upon me before starting
+out.
+
+Lennox was not very communicative.  I think he was still inwardly
+chagrined by the failure of last night's expedition.
+
+After breakfast Pete hitched the mare and I set out on my rounds.
+The news of the fire had already spread.  Everyone was talking about
+it, and from what I could gather no one had any sympathy over it,
+unless it was for the old woman now rendered houseless.  The current
+belief was that Menning, heavily insured, had fired the place
+himself.  There was even a suggestion that he had intended the old
+woman to perish with the house.  Disaster works strangely in
+loosening people's tongues, and I gathered that though the supposed
+Aaron had outwardly enjoyed the respect of the community there was
+inwardly very little liking lost between him and his neighbours.  At
+all events they were ready enough now to speak of his queerness, his
+surliness, the way the farm was kept--in itself a sufficient ground
+of condemnation in a hard-working neighbourhood--and above all of the
+way he had, of late months, neglected and ill-treated his old mother.
+Odds and ends of scandal, restrained up to now I imagined through a
+lurking fear of Menning himself, found free tongue.  But in all this
+talk there was no clear idea as yet of the real reason for the
+sheriff's visit.  Menning was "wanted" for something, but no one
+quite knew what, and gossip confined itself so far to dark hints and
+speculations which fell very wide of the real mark.
+
+I reached the Sliefers' house about midday.  Freeman was progressing
+favorably, though not yet out of danger.  Mrs. Sliefer pressed me to
+eat dinner with them, and over the meal the talk turned naturally on
+the excitement of the night before.  Mrs. Sliefer was very definite
+in her opinion of the Menning household, almost as vehement as old
+Paddy had been that day I talked to him of his neighbours.
+
+"If there was ever call for a place to be burned," she declared, "it
+was that one, though I ain't one for wishing ill to my neighbours
+without cause.  But there's a bad streak in that family an' always
+has been.  The old woman's grown feeble of late and I'm sorry enough
+for her, poor soul, by all I hear, but there was a day when I'd 'a
+crossed the road sooner than pass the time of day with her, and so
+would many another.  I never believed all these ignorant tales of old
+Ma Menning bein' a witch, for there ain't no witches and we well know
+it, but there was something about her that wasn't like other folks,
+and though we was neighbours in a way, she never took to me nor I to
+her.  Things did get better in the two years Jakey was away, an' then
+it did seem like Aaron had a chance to take hold an' run things
+decent, till he come back again.  And after his death one would have
+thought there'd been a turn for the better, but it didn't last.  I
+guess the bad streak was in the whole family, an' after Jakey died I
+suppose it preyed on Aaron's mind, in a way, an' he got to goin' the
+same road as his brother."
+
+It was on my tongue to mention the truth, but I checked myself in
+time.  Evidently the police hoped to gain something by keeping the
+real facts dark, at least until after Jakey's arrest.
+
+After dinner I drove round, by way of the Bend, to the Lessings'
+bungalow.  The Menning place was a mere charred ruin, except for the
+outhouses which stood empty and deserted.  The few remaining
+chickens--Menning had sold out the greater part of his stock a few
+days before the fire, which was another reason why his neighbours
+thought it premeditated--had been taken elsewhere; the cow, filthy
+and gaunt from weeks of neglect, poor brute, was grazing hungrily in
+a small stony pasture adjoining, thankful to be at liberty.
+
+Old Paddy, with a greasy, old velvet cap on and his feet in slashed
+shoes, was leaning over his fence-railing, smoking his black pipe.  I
+asked about Menning's mother.
+
+"The old woman, she's took an' cleared out.  Scared er Aaron, I
+guess.  She got a wheelbarrer an' loaded her bits o' truck on it, an'
+carted it up to that little empty shack back off the road yonder,
+what belongs to Scholl.  Reckon the Scholls don't mind her usin' it.
+She wouldn't have no help neither--carted the lot herself, in two
+journeys, an' I'll say she's still pretty spry on her feet fur an old
+lady, though she does look so feeble.  My darter, she was sorry fur
+the old soul, an' she gives her some potatoes an' a bag o' flour, but
+she didn't git so much as a thank you for it.  Jest chucked 'em on
+the barrer an' went off.  Kinder dazed that night, she was, but she
+come round pretty quick once the excitement was over."
+
+He paused to spit, with precision, at a white stone by the fence rail.
+
+"No one ain't seen nothin' of Aaron."
+
+"No," I said.
+
+"Guess they won't, neither.  He's cleared out for good, by the looks
+of it."
+
+"Maybe it's well."
+
+"No one round here ain't grumblin'.  It's a case o' good riddance.  I
+don't trust Aaron.  My darter, she ain't lettin' her young 'un run
+through the woods, neither.  He'd orter be jailed an' done with it."
+
+I found Mary and Lessing on the porch.  They hailed me cheerfully,
+and I hitched the mare in the shade and joined them.
+
+"Poor old Crowfoot," said Lessing.  "I don't think the arm of the law
+was best pleased at being fetched out on a wild goose chase last
+night.  It's my private opinion that Lennox has solaced his
+loneliness by reading up on detective novels.  I always thought he
+had some bats in his belfry.  Did he tell you anything more last
+night?"
+
+"Quite a lot."
+
+I told them the story as briefly as I could.
+
+"Lennox is crazy," Dick said when I had finished.  "The thing doesn't
+hang together.  And when he gets to a point where he can't trust his
+judgment as to the identity of a man in one case, how can he trust it
+in another?  What did Herrick think?"
+
+"He didn't say definitely."
+
+"So like Herrick!  What?"
+
+"He seemed to lay more stress on the dogs' footprints and the button
+Lennox picked up than on anything else.  Oddly enough, someone else
+spoke of dogs, now I think of it."  And I told him what the chauffeur
+had said last night.
+
+"Queer," said Lessing.  "You'd think he'd know a dog when he saw one.
+I'd like to have a look at that button."
+
+"Herrick has it."
+
+"He has..."  Lessing was silent a moment.  "Even if Jakey did kill
+Aaron, and Aaron is really his brother--hang it all, the thing's so
+mixed--I don't see that that gets us any further on.  Does Lennox
+think he's at the back of everything?  What's he playing at?"
+
+"He was at the back of Rebecca's scare, and that business of Freeman.
+If Freeman were only well enough to speak....  I don't know that he
+could tell us much then, that we haven't found out for ourselves."
+
+"Grant that Jakey did kill his brother, and has succeeded in putting
+it over.  He was at the bottom of all these Dutchman's Hill scares,
+and that business with Rebecca.  Freeman found out something, and he
+laid for Freeman ... and got him.  That doesn't explain the cyclist
+affair, nor what happened to me."
+
+"And it doesn't explain another thing, either," said Mary, breaking
+in for the first time.  "It doesn't explain what the one point was
+that Lennox himself was unwilling to face, what it was he tried to
+avoid by ridiculous explanations that wouldn't satisfy a child.  I
+don't mean recently, I mean further back, almost in the beginning,
+the second time he was here to attend Dick."  She turned to her
+brother.  "Perhaps I haven't told you this before.  But it did strike
+me at the time, and afterwards I've been thinking of it more and more.
+
+"I was standing out here on the porch, wondering whether I could
+leave you with Kate and slip over to Lennox's house, or whether I
+could get hold of anyone to send, when Lennox himself came by,
+driving.  I ran out to stop him and tell him what had happened.  He
+pulled up as soon as he saw me, before I had time to call out, and I
+tell you if I ever saw a man frightened it was then.  He was afraid,
+and he was afraid before he saw me, or even knew what I had to say.
+Something had happened, something that gave him a shock, before he
+came up the road there.  He tried to pass it off, but I'm not a fool;
+I know when a person is just puzzled, and I know when he is afraid,
+and I tell you that Lennox was afraid.  And I'd like to know just
+what it was that frightened him."
+
+"Where was he coming from?" Lessing asked.
+
+"Down the road here, the way Austin came just now.  He came from the
+Bend."
+
+"From Menning's place."
+
+"It might have been.  I don't know.  He didn't say and I didn't ask
+him.  But something, that morning, had happened to upset him before
+he got here.  And it was as if he knew--or at least expected, what he
+was going to find."
+
+"Did you ask him?"
+
+"I said something about it.  He told me he'd been up all night on a
+case some miles away, that he'd only left at daybreak to drive back,
+and that he felt all in.  But it was something more than that, I feel
+certain, to have thrown him into the state he was in."
+
+"I shall ask him tonight," I said.  "If he's keeping anything
+back----"
+
+"Ask him!" said Mary.  "Ask him, and get the truth!  You can tell him
+just what I said."
+
+I had promised to look in at the Sliefers' again, later in the
+evening, and instead of doing so on my way back, Mary proposed that I
+should walk across with her, after tea, while Lessing got some
+letters written.
+
+"I want some cream for supper," she said, "and I want to see Rebecca
+too.  I meant to go this morning.  If you don't mind the walk we'll
+take Leo along.  He hasn't had a run today yet."
+
+She called the setter and he came bounding up, glad enough of the
+prospect of a walk.
+
+"Poor old Leo!" Mary said.  "He doesn't get half enough exercise.
+We'll take the leash, Austin, if you don't mind.  There's a collie at
+the farm and the two are sworn enemies.  I always have to fasten him
+if I go there."
+
+I put the leash in my pocket and we set off through the woods by a
+short cut that brought us out eventually upon the cart-track near the
+old saw-mill.  On the other side of this road the Sliefers' land
+began, and only a couple of pasture fields, with low snake-fences,
+separated us from the farm.  Leo had dropped behind after we passed
+the mill, and as we stopped by the fence to wait for him we saw a
+woman coming along the path.  She wore a faded check cotton dress and
+a sunbonnet that almost hid her face, and she was carrying a basket
+filled with chips, evidently gathered near the mill.  As she drew
+near I caught a flash of very keen eyes, set in a dark wrinkled face,
+directed upon us in a glance that was by no means friendly.
+
+Mary stepped forward and spoke to her, and I saw her slip something
+into the old woman's hand.  The gnarled fingers closed on it
+unwillingly; she muttered something and passed on.
+
+"Do you know her?" I asked.
+
+"It's old Mrs. Menning," Mary said.  "Poor old soul!  She's
+crotchety, but I can't help feeling sorry for her.  Is it true they
+are sending her to the poorhouse?"
+
+"I've no idea.  Old Paddy Nevill told me she'd moved her things up to
+some little empty shack near her old place.  I suppose they'll let
+her stay there till something can be arranged."
+
+I watched the bent, dragging figure out of sight.  As Paddy had said,
+she covered the ground fairly spryly, for all her feebleness of gait.
+It was my first acquaintance with this woman to whose personality
+Herrick had particularly drawn my attention the night before.  If
+Lennox were right, she had played an almost incredibly cunning part
+throughout, even if her brain had not itself evolved the whole plot.
+
+"You'd think she could find chips nearer than the saw-mill," Mary
+said.  "It's a good walk from the Nevills' place, if she's near
+there.  I wouldn't wonder if the old body were unhinged by the fire
+altogether.  She's never friendly at her best, but she looked quite
+queer just now.  Did you notice how she was muttering to herself?"
+
+I let down the bars and we passed through into the field.
+
+"Austin," Mary said, as we picked our way over the boulder-strewn
+pasture, "do you know that I've got a confession to make, and it's
+worrying me."
+
+I smiled.
+
+"Anything very dreadful?"
+
+"I don't just know," she said.  "It's about last night.  You know I
+stayed out on the porch while you were all over at the fire.  Well,
+it was while I was sitting there, about a quarter of an hour after
+you went, I saw Menning come up by the road.  I don't think he even
+saw me.  He was going at a sort of shambling trot, and he never
+looked up when he passed the house.  I am sure it was he, though."
+
+"And you never told us!" I exclaimed.
+
+"I knew you'd be angry, but I couldn't help it.  I didn't know about
+this whole story then, and--and I hate the idea of any man being
+hunted that way, no matter what he's done.  I thought he might have
+some sort of chance to get away, and that's why I didn't say anything
+last night, even to Dick!"
+
+"Which way was he going?"
+
+"Toward the hill.  Your chauffeur must surely have met him.  That's
+what I couldn't make out."
+
+"He saw no one at all.  The man may have turned off into the woods
+when he saw the car.  I suppose you know what the sheriff would say
+to this?"
+
+"Compounding a felony!" Mary laughed.  "Anyway he never asked me, so
+I didn't have to tell any lies about it.  Only after what you said
+last night it worried me, and I thought I'd better own up.  Now if he
+is caught it won't be on my conscience that I had a direct hand in
+it."
+
+"Oh, woman!" I exclaimed.
+
+"You'd have done the same in my case," she retorted.  "Besides, I
+wasn't supposed to know.  You never told me anything."
+
+"You are sure it was Menning?"
+
+"Quite sure.  I had left the house door open, and he passed right
+into the light.  I wondered why he was going away from the fire
+instead of toward it, and I thought at first he might be going to get
+more help.  I didn't know then.  He hadn't been there all along."
+
+We reached the farm, and I left her below while I saw my patient.
+Either I was longer than I thought, or we must have loitered
+unconsciously on our way over, for when I joined her again on the
+porch the light was already fading.  Then there was a delay about the
+cream.  Rebecca had to fetch it, and while she was gone Mary turned
+to me.
+
+"This farm is still bewitched," she said.  "It's the cream-pans now.
+Rebecca swears that the milk has gone, these last few nights.  Last
+night she set out three pans in the spring-house and this morning one
+of them was two-thirds empty.  I suspect cats, but anyway the problem
+takes Rebecca's mind off her other trouble, poor girl.  Here she is.
+Can you spare this, Rebecca?"
+
+"It's a bit scant, Miss Lessing, but it's the best I can do.  We'll
+be short for churning this week, as it is.  Whatever ails the milk I
+don't know!  I've never had it go before."
+
+"Well, it isn't witches' work;" Mary smiled.  "They turn the milk,
+you know, Rebecca, they don't steal it!  I'd keep an eye on the cat.
+If you'll take Leo a moment, Austin, till we're out of the grounds,
+I'll carry the pail--no, it isn't heavy, and I don't trust men
+anyway.  They spill everything.  Good night, Rebecca!"
+
+"Carry your old cream yourself," I retorted.  "I won't help you--not
+after that.  And the way I've condoned your offences, too!  Come on,
+Leo!  Can I let him loose here, do you think?"
+
+"Wait till we're quite clear of the house.  He had a dreadful fight
+here once.  It'll be all right now.  We'd better take the path along
+the dam; it's a little shorter."
+
+We followed the footpath along which they had carried Freeman that
+night to the house.  Given any other time and place, I should have
+been tempted to do my best in prolonging this stroll, but I had none
+too pleasant associations with the place and its surroundings, and
+with twilight closing rapidly upon us I was in no mind to loiter.  A
+stagnant weedy smell rose from the dam, a gloomy stretch of water
+with enclosing trees that darkened it still more effectually.  Frogs
+croaked in monotonous chorus from the weeds at the edge and the
+midges were thick.  In the end Mary had to give in ignominiously, and
+I carried the pail while she fought their attacks off with a
+handkerchief.
+
+It was here that Rebecca and her sweetheart used to walk of an
+evening, and I wondered at their choice of a trysting-place.
+
+"It's romantic," said Mary, "in a way.  Can't you imagine this the
+deserted moat, with the ruined castle of Lord Thingummy in the
+background?  I am sure that Rebecca reads Laura Jean Libbey on the
+sly.  What spot more suggestive of lovers' vows and maidens palely
+loitering!  Rebecca's too healthy not to be romantic at her age."
+
+"Romance?" I said.  "Fiddlesticks!  The Sliefers ought to have this
+place drained if they aren't going to work the mill any more.  As a
+plain medical man I have no use for picturesque sheets of water that
+smell bad after sunset."
+
+"So you'd sacrifice all this----" she waved the hand that was not
+occupied in keeping nudges at bay--"and plant cabbages on it!"
+
+"Why cabbages?"
+
+"Aren't they the symbol of all that is practical?"
+
+"Including myself!" I snapped.  I was getting badly bitten, and with
+no opportunity for redress.
+
+"Oh, I didn't say that!"  She stopped short.  "Did you see that big
+fish jump just then?  Right beyond the pond-lilies there.  This place
+must be full of them."
+
+"Carp, most likely.  It's pretty deep up at this end."
+
+She stopped to watch the circle widen and disappear, leaving the
+water black.  "Austin ... do you suppose I ought to have spoken about
+Menning before?"
+
+"I don't know that it matters.  They'll get him anyhow."
+
+There was no good in mere speculation, and I didn't want to enlarge
+on the subject of Menning.  She had come into contact with sufficient
+ugliness this summer already.  "It's more than probable that he has
+cleared out altogether by this time.  In any case, until we know, I
+think it would be better that you kept near the house unless one of
+us is with you.  There's no good running any risks."
+
+We had passed the mill and were just turning into the little path
+that would bring us to the road near the bungalow, when Lessing met
+us.
+
+"I thought you two would never turn up," he said.  "I'm dying of
+hunger.  How's the patient, Austin?"
+
+"Getting on.  You can carry the pail if you want to work.  Where's
+that dog got to?"
+
+I had released the setter some little way back, and he had kept
+within sight nearly all the way.  Missing him now, I turned to
+whistle, and saw Leo, a pale shadow in the dusk, nosing eagerly about
+the scattered logs that lay in the clearing near the mill.  Lessing
+called him several times by name, sharply, but he paid no attention.
+
+"Got a rabbit, most likely.  Wait a minute.  I'll soon fetch him out
+of that."
+
+He walked back the few paces to the clearing, and Mary sat down at
+the edge of the path with a little sigh of resignation.  I offered
+her a cigarette, and for some minutes we smoked in silence, listening
+for her brother's step.  Presently Mary stood up.
+
+"I'm not going to wait here all evening!  We'll go on to the house
+and let him catch up to us."
+
+We had nearly reached the bungalow before Lessing overtook us.  He
+was holding Leo by a handkerchief knotted through his collar.  The
+dog came unwillingly, cringing against his master's legs, the hair
+along his spine bristling and his ears kid back.
+
+"Why, look at that!" Mary exclaimed.  "I've never seen him act that
+way before.  You haven't been beating him, Dick?"
+
+"I'd like to!"  Lessing stooped to take a fresh grip on the dog's
+collar.  "Be quiet, you brute!  You aren't going back there now."
+
+Mary patted the setter's head.  "Poor old boy!  Did he get a rat, and
+wouldn't they let him have it!  Was it a good rat, Leo?"
+
+But the dog only twisted impatiently from her touch, his head turned
+backwards and his nose working.
+
+"It was a darn good rat," said Lessing, "but he won't have it now.
+Go open the shed door, Mary, till I get him in."
+
+She threw open the door of the tool-shed, and Lessing thrust the dog
+inside, pushing him in with his foot, and fastened the latch.
+
+"That's that!  Aren't you staying for supper, Austin?"
+
+"Wish I could!  I must get the mare back, and I want to be there when
+Herrick gets in."
+
+I untied the mare and backed her around.  Mary was standing on the
+porch.
+
+"Do you notice you can smell that stagnant water at the dam?  We seem
+to get it in whiffs, every once in a while.  I noticed it very
+strongly last night, sitting out here.  I wonder the Sliefers can
+stand it, living as close as they do."
+
+There was a slight taint on the air.  As Mary said, it seemed to come
+in whiffs.  It might have been the dam, but it carried my mind back,
+as a smell will do, to some vague recollection I could not quite
+place.
+
+"There's a lot of rotting vegetation there.  Maybe it isn't so bad at
+their end.  Sometimes you smell things much more at a distance."
+
+"It just comes and goes.  I don't notice it now.  You'll be over this
+evening?"
+
+"I'll bring Herrick along if he's back."
+
+I paused, held by a vague trouble in her eyes.
+
+"You aren't worried, Mary?"
+
+"Worried?  No.  I just feel ... restless.  It's the sort of feeling
+you get before a storm.  As if we were all waiting for something, and
+you don't know what."
+
+"You've been upset about this Menning affair."
+
+"It isn't that.  I don't know what it is.  The place, maybe ... I
+always liked woods before, and now I feel as if I should never like
+them again."  Her grave clear eyes held mine.  "Austin, I wish I
+knew.  If only ... sometimes I almost wish we'd never come to this
+place at all."
+
+"Mary, you don't really wish that?"
+
+"No, I don't.  I ought to, but I can't.  But ... I do wish we were
+all away--out of here--somewhere else."
+
+"We shall be, soon enough."  I was thinking of the end of my holiday,
+the breaking-up of a summer that, if it had brought danger and
+ugliness and all but tragedy, had brought also something infinitely
+precious into my life--something I was far from ready to lose.
+
+"The summer has done Kate good, anyway.  We had a letter from her
+this morning."
+
+"Where is she?"  I knew that Mrs. Lessing had left a few days before,
+to stay with some friends.
+
+"On Long Island.  A place on the Sound.  We'll probably join her
+there in a couple of weeks.  I wish you could come--you and Jack
+both.  I think the sea air would blow sense into all of us!"  She
+laughed.  "I'm talking like an old woman, and I've got Dick's supper
+to get and nothing ready!  Well, we'll see you tonight."
+
+"Would you rather I stayed?"
+
+"Nonsense!  You'll begin to think I'm developing nerves, next!"
+
+She waved her hand as I climbed into the buggy.  Gathering up the
+reins, I turned the mare's head homeward.  It was already nearly
+dark, but I could still see the road before me.  Was it presage, or
+only the desire for Mary's company that made me wish, even before I
+had turned the corner by Dutchman's Hill, that I had after all
+accepted Lessing's invitation and stayed on?
+
+As I reached the point where the road dipped to the hollow it seemed
+to me that I could smell once more that queer unplaceable odour of
+which Mary had spoken.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+WHAT WE FOUND IN THE SAW-MILL
+
+Herrick had not yet returned when I reached the house.  Lennox was
+just sitting down to supper, in which I joined him.  While we were
+lingering over our coffee I remembered what Mary had said that
+morning, and asked him point-blank about it.
+
+He gave me a curious look before replying:
+
+"So Mary Lessing told you that, did she?  Well, I give her credit for
+observation.  I remember that morning perfectly.  She was quite
+right; something _had_ happened."
+
+He paused to light a cigar over the lamp-chimney before saying:
+"Shall we go into the surgery, Haverill?"
+
+I followed him in, leaving the dining-room to Mrs. Searle, and closed
+the door between us, while Lennox threw himself back into the
+armchair and smoked for a few moments in silence.
+
+"I've told you, Haverill, that between one thing and another my
+nerves were in a pretty unreliable state early this summer.  I
+mention that now, because I still think it had a certain bearing on
+what happened.  When Mary Lessing stopped me that morning in the road
+it was just a case of one shock on top of another."
+
+"Then----"
+
+"Wait a minute," Lennox said.  "If I tell this thing I've got to tell
+it my own way.  I'll tell you just what happened and I haven't got
+any explanation of it at all.  You can take it or leave it.  And
+you'll understand that I don't even claim to be telling you facts.
+The whole thing might have been just an impression in my own mind.
+That's what I want to make clear, regardless of any effect it may
+have had on me at the time.
+
+"I had been out on an all-night case.  I was physically tired, and
+through a particular anxiety in this instance, just about all in.  I
+had a seven-mile drive home, and I could almost have fallen asleep
+there in the buggy.  I had left my patient out of danger, and coming
+back I remembered that Mrs. Searle wanted a couple of chickens from
+Aaron and that I'd told her the day before I would stop in some time
+and get them.  It was very little after daybreak, but I chanced the
+Mennings being early risers and turned out of my way to go by the
+Bend.  There was smoke coming from the chimney, so I got out and
+knocked at the door, and the old woman opened it.  I guess she was
+just dressing; she looked half asleep, and she told me Aaron wasn't
+up yet, but that the chickens were ready, and she'd get them for me
+if I didn't mind waiting a minute.
+
+"I stood about outside.  It was a chilly morning, and a bit foggy.  I
+guess I had my mind more on a cup of hot coffee than anything else,
+and I wondered if the old woman would give me some if I asked for it
+when she came back, though I'd be needing coffee pretty badly before
+I'd drink it in that house.  You knew the Menning place, before it
+was burned?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"There are a lot of tumble-down outbuildings there where they used to
+keep the chickens he bought, and one in particular--I don't know if
+you noticed it--a sort of lean-to near the open wagon shed, painted
+green.  I don't know what it was built for, but it had a door and a
+square window-hole, high up, about the height of a man's head.  I
+don't suppose the whole floor space inside would be more than about
+eight foot square, about the size of a calf-pen, and I shouldn't
+wonder if that was what it was.  I'd walked over to it because I
+wanted to get my pipe started, out of the breeze.  The door was shut,
+and I'm certain there wasn't anything moving in there, or I'd have
+heard it.
+
+"I'd struck a match, and was just bending over to draw on my pipe
+when something shot past me.  It seemed to come out of the uncleared
+patch of woods back of the sheds.  I didn't get more than a half
+glimpse of it, and I can't even tell you what it looked like, except
+that it was biggish, and it seemed to shamble on all fours, and it
+panted, the way an animal does that's been running, and it _smelt_
+like an animal too--I seemed to get a whiff of it as it went past.
+It came by me so close I could almost have touched it, and flung
+itself straight at that window-hole and slithered through, and I
+could hear the thud of its body on the inside.
+
+"I'm a short man.  That window-hole was well above the level of my
+head.  My first thought was to pull myself up and look through, and
+then--well, you can put it down to what you like, but the thing had
+given me such a queer turn when it shot past, like cold water down my
+spine, and I believe if I could have touched that window I wouldn't
+have had the physical strength to pull myself up and look through.
+Instead I backed away and just stood there, staring.  The door was
+tight shut.  It had all happened in such a flash that I began to
+wonder, then, if I'd imagined the whole thing.  I might have stood
+there for a couple of minutes, though it seemed to me longer, and
+then suddenly the door was flung wide open and Aaron himself--or as I
+know now, Jakey--walked out.
+
+"The door opened outward, and I could see straight past into the
+shed.  There was a heap of broken harness and some rags lying in one
+corner, and except for that the place was as bare as my hand.
+
+"I daresay I must have looked queer--I know I felt it--for Menning
+gave me a pretty surly look.  He asked me what I wanted, and I told
+him I'd stopped for the chickens.  He said they weren't ready, that
+he'd bring them over, but just at that minute his mother came out
+from the house with them in her hand, and I tell you I was glad
+enough to grab those chickens and drive off.  I didn't want to ask
+questions or to stop near the place."
+
+"This thing--what did you think it looked like?"
+
+"I can't even tell you.  It--it didn't look like anything."
+
+"But it ran?"
+
+"Yes, it ran.  It's no good trying to tell you what my impression
+was, any more than I have done."
+
+"Do you suppose Menning kept something shut up there?"
+
+"If he did, where was it when he opened the door?  I tell you the
+shed was empty."
+
+"There was no trapdoor?"
+
+"I went back to see.  I didn't just give it up, either.  I went back
+a few days later, one time when Menning had passed our house and I
+knew he'd be away on his rounds some time.  I saw the old woman.  She
+was surly in a way, but friendly to me.  You see, I'd tended her
+before when Menning had been beating her up--oh, yes, he'd done that
+more than once to my knowledge.  The Nevills knew it, but there was
+no good interfering; she'd deny it, and no one dared tackle Menning.
+But she had to come to me, once, and though she put up some story, I
+could tell what had happened.  Well, I chatted with her there, and
+just to see what she'd say I asked her if they didn't keep some sort
+of a dog on the place.  She said no, that they'd had a dog and her
+son shot it because it howled at night.  After a while I left her
+settled there in the kitchen and before I left I took my chance to go
+over every hole and corner out of doors.  Except for the cow and a
+couple of pigs there wasn't the sign of any animal round the place
+bigger than a cat.  And there was no opening in that shed except the
+window and the door Menning came out by.
+
+"So now you know the whole thing--all Mary Lessing claimed I was
+keeping back from you--and I imagine you're about as wise as I am,
+and that isn't much."
+
+"Why didn't you tell us sooner?" I asked.
+
+"What could I do?  If I went telling that around anyone would have a
+right to say I was crazy and that I'd imagined the whole thing.  You
+might say--and I've tried to think myself--that what I heard was just
+something running in the bushes and what I saw was an old hen
+fluttering in at the window.  And maybe it was.  And I've known men
+who've been just as startled, and have told circumstantial tales,
+over nothing more."
+
+"You could have told it at its face value."
+
+"No," said Lennox, "I couldn't.  My mind doesn't work that way.  I've
+got to weigh things.  And I've got to exhaust every possible
+reasonable explanation, including my own physical state at the time,
+before I'll admit that a thing is so when I know it can't be so.  If
+I've kept this to myself it's because I wanted to find some sort of
+explanation in my own mind first."
+
+He faced me, stolid and obstinate.  Even in that moment I admired his
+self-possession, his dogged, common sense determination not to be
+drawn into admission of the existence of any thing that, as Lessing
+said, he couldn't stick a pin into and label.  And I knew, too, that
+it had cost him something to tell me that story.
+
+"Well," I said, "that's only one more to the list of things we don't
+seem able to clear up.  There's one point; that whatever the
+explanation may be, it all seems to centre, in the end, round Menning
+himself."
+
+Lennox rose and went to his desk.  "It's what I've always said," he
+threw back over his shoulder.  "Get Menning, and you get the root of
+all this mystery."
+
+I sat pondering his story.  It was not long before my ears caught the
+sound of a motor cycle along the road, and a few minutes after
+Herrick appeared.  He looked as if he had ridden far and fast; his
+clothes were covered with dust and there were grimy circles round his
+eyes.
+
+"No, I don't want to eat," he said.  "I got a sandwich coming along.
+Just let me get this dirt off, that's all."
+
+He went through to the kitchen, and we could hear him splashing at
+the sink.  When he came back, still vigorously towelling his face,
+Lennox had already mixed him a drink at the sideboard.
+
+"Well," Herrick said, settling himself in the chair Lennox had
+vacated, "let's begin at the beginning.  When I left this morning,
+Austin, I couldn't tell you where I was going, because I didn't know
+myself.  I had to pick up my information on the way.  I was on the
+track of something which, it seems to me, none of us has so far taken
+into account, and that is, Jakey Menning's early life."
+
+"He was born right in this county," said Lennox.
+
+"He was not.  That's where you make your mistake.  He was between
+eight and nine years old when he first came here.  His mother, when
+we first hear of her, was employed with a travelling show, owned by a
+German Jew called Goldstein, a sort of fourth rate circus that used
+to do one-night stands in the small towns and villages.  She cooked
+for the men and looked after the wardrobe.  While she was working
+with them Jakey was born.  No one seems to have known just who his
+father was.  The mother passed as a kind of half-wit.  She was
+cunning under an appearance of heavy stupidity, spoke a poor English,
+was easily teased and enraged, and seems to have been treated as the
+butt of the company.  They wintered usually in Pottsville, where the
+proprietor's brother kept a saloon.  The proprietor's wife took
+rather a fancy to Jakey, and later on, when Jakey's mother, during
+the slack season, took a job as cook in a cheap eating-joint there,
+she simply abandoned the baby to the circus people.  While she was
+employed there she met Menning, married him, and doesn't seem to have
+troubled about Jakey for several years.  Probably she never told
+Menning of his existence.
+
+"They settled in the country, where Aaron was born, and a few years
+after, for reasons unknown, Menning deserted her.  Then, for the
+first time, she seems to have remembered Jakey, now growing to an age
+when he might begin to make himself useful about the farm.  She set
+about claiming him.  The circus people, from what I could hear, made
+some opposition.  Jakey was being trained as an acrobat and showed
+some promise, though he was a difficult child to manage.  Moreover,
+they had kept him all this time and expected some return.  Times,
+however, were slack, they probably foresaw trouble with the school
+inspectors also, and in the end they let the boy go.
+
+"He worked about the farm, off and on, for some eight or ten years,
+and got himself thoroughly disliked, as you know, by all the
+Mennings' neighbours.  The criminal streak in him was already
+apparent, though in those days it only took the form of spitefulness
+and mental deficiency.  He was idle and vagrant and finally, at about
+seventeen years old, took himself off one fine day and went back to
+the travelling show, which he managed to trace up through the
+Pottsville saloon-keeper.  They took him back as an extra hand, to
+help with the wagons.  He was not good enough for a performer, his
+training being interrupted, but the proprietor about that time had
+the idea of running one or two freak side-shows, and they tried Jakey
+out as the hoary old fake of 'wild man.'"
+
+Herrick paused a moment to light a fresh cigarette, and in that
+instant I saw Lennox's eye turn to me with something very like relief.
+
+"It seems," Herrick went on, "that he was quite a successful
+attraction and I can certainly believe it.  There was naturally
+something apish and uncouth about him, and very little make-up would
+have turned the trick most naturalistically.  He stayed with the show
+nearly two years, doing odd jobs by day and playing his wild-man
+stunt at the performances.  And then some sort of queer thing must
+have happened.
+
+"I couldn't get the whole truth of it from the Pottsville brother,
+who told me most of the story.  Either he didn't know or he was
+unwilling to tell, but the gist of it is that there was some row and
+Jakey got suddenly fired.  From what the Pottsville brother
+'guessed,' Jakey played his rôle too realistically, and the
+proprietor refused then and there to keep him another day.  He had a
+little money in his pockets, he turned up in Pottsville, where he
+hung about for two or three days, and then made his way back to the
+farm.
+
+"I would give a great deal to have ten minutes with Goldstein
+himself, and know exactly what did happen and why Jakey was fired.  I
+gathered that it was something pretty unpleasant.  But Goldstein is
+somewhere out in Ohio, and try as I would, I could get nothing more
+from the brother than what I have told you.  I think myself there was
+something hushed up at the time, and that he is afraid even now of
+its coming out.  But I got enough I think to throw some interesting
+light on what has happened since."
+
+"Did you get any idea," Lennox asked, "of Jakey's make-up when he was
+with these people?"
+
+"No.  Why?"
+
+"Tell him your story, Lennox," I said.
+
+He repeated briefly what he had already told me.  Herrick listened,
+his face intent.
+
+"So that was----"  He pulled himself up short.  "Well, it isn't
+difficult to put two and two together.  The obvious explanation is
+that Jakey has fallen back on his old circus stunt as a means of
+terrorizing the neighbourhood.  It wouldn't be difficult.  No one
+here, from what I can make out--possibly not even his own
+family--knew how he spent those two years while he was away.  There
+is a form of mania which takes just that expression, and it is
+possible that in Jakey's case it began out of sheer maliciousness,
+and developed later into something a great deal worse--a fixed mania
+which, with the rousing of the homicidal instinct, turned him
+actually, at moments, into the wild beast he pretended to be."
+
+"You think it was Menning--it was--well, what I saw--that attacked
+Lessing?"
+
+"I am certain of it.  Go over the thing carefully, Lennox.  There was
+no stunt outside the possibility of a man with unusual physical
+strength and ability, who had had acrobatic training in boyhood.  And
+remember that a maniac can perform feats that in his sane moments
+might be outside his powers.  We are not dealing with a normal
+person.  That's the one thing in this whole business we've got to
+remember."  He rose.  "Austin, will you come over to the bungalow
+with me?  I'd like to see Lessing tonight."
+
+I looked at my watch.  "Ten o'clock.  I told them I'd be over.  We'll
+take the cycle.  It'll carry two of us."
+
+He had left the motor cycle outside the porch.  As we wheeled it out
+to the roadway I said: "You think that is the explanation of the
+whole thing?"
+
+Herrick gave me a quick look.
+
+"I said it was the obvious explanation.  It is.  But there's more
+mixed up with it than that.  And it's the other side of it that we
+shall never get to the truth of until we get hold of Menning himself."
+
+I thought of Lennox's description of what he had seen, in that
+fleeting glimpse, and in spite of myself a shudder went over me.
+
+"Do you mean that mania can actually transform a human being to that
+degree?"
+
+"Haven't you see enough, Austin, in your own experience, to answer
+that question?"
+
+I was silent.  Every doctor, I imagine, has had experiences which he
+is glad enough to put out of his mind, and though my own were limited
+so far, I had heard enough tales of abnormality, at second hand, to
+know that there was truth in Herrick's words.
+
+I took my seat on the back of the motor cycle, and in a few minutes
+we had reached the rise of hill.  Turning the corner, we could see
+the bungalow through the trees.  There was still a light burning.  As
+we approached, the deep melancholy howl of the dog broke on our ears.
+Evidently Lessing had not yet let him out.
+
+We left the cycle against a tree and went up to the porch.  The door
+stood wide open, the light streaming through it from the lamp on the
+table inside.  Of Lessing or his sister there was no sign.  Except
+for the steady howling of the dog in the shed, the place was
+absolutely silent.
+
+We went through the empty rooms, came out again on the porch.  A
+chair was drawn up near the doorway, with a book dropped in it
+face-downward, as though someone had risen in haste.  That, and the
+lamp left flaring on the table, gave me for the first time a definite
+thrill of uneasiness.
+
+Herrick went back and lowered the flame.  "They can't have gone far,"
+he said.  "They wouldn't have left the light that way.  Let's try the
+studio."
+
+We crossed the little space of ground beside the house.  The studio
+was dark; the door was locked and the key on the outside.  As we
+passed the tool-shed there was a tumult within.  The dog, hearing our
+footsteps, flung himself against the door in a frenzy of eagerness,
+whining, scratching, tearing at the wood with his nails.  There was
+something in the deep, agonized, almost human anxiety in his voice,
+raised, not in yelps, but in steady entreaty, that sent a queer
+thrill down by spine.  Herrick felt it too.  He stopped short.
+
+"What's _got_ that dog?"
+
+"Lessing shut him in this evening.  It was after----"
+
+I paused.  All at once there came back to my mind the dog's behaviour
+that afternoon, when Lessing dragged him back from the saw-mill,
+bristling and rebellious--Lessing's own face when he joked about the
+rat.  It was near the identical spot where we had missed the dog
+before, when he broke away from us on our way down, just before we
+saw Menning's mother.  Menning's mother ... and Menning himself had
+been seen in the neighbourhood the night before.  In a flash I saw
+the whole thing clearly--Freeman's action, the ghost that haunted the
+milldam, Rebecca's rifled cream-pans and the old woman with her
+basket of chips.  What a fool I had been!
+
+In a moment I had drawn the bolt and the setter was free.  He barely
+stopped to notice us; with a flash of his white chest and a
+wide-flung yelp of relief he was off across the road and into the
+woods.
+
+I caught Herrick's arm.  "Lessing is at the saw-mill.  Come on--I'll
+tell you later!"
+
+"The saw-mill?"
+
+I saw his hand slip down to his pocket as we ran.  The same thought
+was in both our minds.  We broke through the underbrush on the far
+side of the road, stumbled by chance on the footpath and were racing
+along it, shoulder to shoulder, while the setter's barking still
+echoed in our ears.
+
+For a while his voice guided us.  Then, abruptly, he was silent.  We
+paused on the edge of the clearing to take breath.  All was
+still--that closed-in stillness of the woods at night, when all
+daytime life hushed.  Before us loomed the old mill, its broken roof
+and ruined timbers black against the sky.  For a moment there was no
+sound but the pounding of the blood in our ears, the dry rustle of a
+dead bush as Herrick leaned forward, listening.
+
+Then suddenly, from somewhere in the recesses of the old building
+itself, there broke on that tense stillness another sound--more
+horrible to me than anything else--the hoarse choking breaths and
+muffled worrying of a dog at grips with his enemy.  It came, not from
+the main floor of the mill, but from the basement where the
+water-wheel hung.  There was a doorway on the near side of the mill,
+formerly used for carting away the sawdust, but it had been nailed
+up, and remembering this I called to Herrick as I ran directly for
+the steep slope on the side by the sluice.  Here there was open space
+to squeeze through, and with Herrick close on my heels I trampled a
+way through the breast-high weeds and bushes round the corner of the
+building and gained an entrance.
+
+Within all was pitch black.  The water was shut off, but a little
+trickle still flowed through, dripping from the slimy motionless bulk
+of the great wheel above us.  The air was warm, heavy with the smell
+of rotting sawdust and of something else, fetid and nauseous.  The
+worrying had ceased; we could hear the broken rapid breathing of two
+bodies, there, unseen, somewhere within a few feet of us in the
+darkness.  I made a step forward, but Herrick clutched my arm, and as
+he did so the fight broke out again with renewed fury, somewhere it
+seemed up in the far corner, among the drifted sawdust.  I could
+recognize the setter's deep-throated snarls, the snap of teeth
+seeking a grip, and with it was another voice, deeper and more
+guttural--something wholly strange and horrible--something that
+snarled and panted and coughed in choking gasps.  The darkness moved;
+there came the breath of a warm animal body, the straining of a heavy
+weight flung against resisting wood, and then the nailed planks gave
+way, the sudden square of the doorway was obscured by a tumbling,
+heaving mass and the next instant we were alone--alone in the
+darkness with silence round us and that fetid unforgettable smell on
+the air.
+
+It was the same smell that Mary had complained of that evening,
+wafted to us as we sat on the porch--the smell, I knew now, that I
+had first noticed on the day I passed the Mennings' place in the
+early summer.
+
+"Phew!" said Herrick.
+
+He struck a match, shielding the flame with his hands.  The little
+flicker threw out shadows high on the piled sawdust and gray ruined
+walls.  We could make out the huge mass of the wheel, the shafts that
+ran to the story above, the great beams supporting the broken
+flooring over our heads.  The match spluttered and went out, but in
+that instant it had shown us what we sought, a dark motionless figure
+lying huddled in the far corner, where the sawdust sloped up in a
+shadowy drift under the rafters.
+
+Herrick reached it first, his feet sinking deep at every step as he
+scrambled up.  I heard him draw his breath in sharply as I struck
+another match, and by its gleam saw Lessing, one arm doubled under
+him and the clothes nearly torn from his body, lying unconscious in a
+saturated pool of blood.
+
+Of Mary there was no sign.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+THE THING IN THE WOODS
+
+Together we managed to get Lessing back to the house and laid him on
+the couch, and while Herrick held the lamp I did the best I could for
+his injuries with the means at my disposal.  It was an ugly job.  One
+arm and shoulder were badly mangled and the collar bone broken; he
+had lost a great deal of blood and there was a nasty contused wound
+above the temple.  A flicker of consciousness came back while I was
+working over him, but the loss of blood told, and he lapsed back
+again almost immediately.  There were stitches to be taken; nothing
+much could be done except to check the bleeding with temporary
+bandages and as soon as I could manage single-handed Herrick rode off
+to Lennox for help.
+
+In reality it was not long, though it seemed to me an eternity that I
+kept that nightmare vigil, my ears strained for any sound from
+without, bending all my will-power on my task to keep me from the one
+thought that I dared not face, Mary.  Where had she gone--what had
+happened to her?  I went over a thousand possibilities, trying to
+find some reasonable explanation to which I might cling, though as
+each moment went by the stillness became more and more a torture.  If
+she had merely missed her brother and gone down the road to call for
+him we should have met her, or she would be back by now.  If she had
+been with him at the mill, or had followed there ... I thought of the
+deep blackness of the water at the end of the dam, where we had
+passed that evening, the sheer drop blow the sluice-gates, and
+shuddered.
+
+It was with infinite relief I caught the approaching noise of the
+motor cycle and saw Herrick reappear, followed only a few moments
+later by Lennox with the light spring-wagon.  It was decided to take
+Lessing straightway to the doctor's house, where he could be better
+looked after than in the bungalow.  We laid a mattress in the bottom
+of the wagon and lifted him on to this, and Herrick and I on the
+motor cycle accompanied Lennox beyond the hollow at the foot of the
+hill.  Before we started Herrick, his face grim and set in the
+lamplight, pulled out the revolver I had lent him that morning and
+handed it to me.
+
+"Keep that, Austin.  I bought another today.  Lennox has his own."
+
+"There was an extra box of cartridges," I said, "in the table-drawer."
+
+"Lennox gave them to me."
+
+When we had seen the wagon well along the road we turned, and rode
+back to the bungalow.
+
+"Now," said Herrick, when we stood once more in the lighted room,
+"the first thing is to find Mary.  And then ... there has got to be
+an end to this.  Are you ready to face it?"
+
+He did not need to ask me.  I looked round on the little room, gay
+and friendly with its rugs and books and the great bowls of
+wildflowers that Mary loved--the countless little signs of her
+occupation, a sweater flung across a chair, her work-basket of Indian
+grass on the table--the room in which I had spent so many happy
+hours, now suddenly sinister in its desertion.  And then my eye fell
+on the couch where we had laid Lessing, and the hideous litter I had
+left in my haste--stained wads of cotton and the torn strips from his
+shirt with which we had striven to check the blood before we carried
+him up from the mill.
+
+"For God's sake," I exclaimed impulsively, "let's get that cleared
+away before she gets back!"
+
+Before Mary got back ... the words died in my throat.  But I gathered
+up the telltale evidence all the same--every last scrap and
+fragment--and thrust them out of sight behind the kitchen woodbox,
+before I turned to Herrick.
+
+"We'll try Sliefers' first," he said.  "There's just the possibility
+she is there."
+
+It was a slight chance, and as it proved, fruitless.  The farmer was
+still up, and opened the door to us in stockinged feet.  No one there
+had seen Mary since the afternoon.  Sliefer heard our errand with a
+grave face.
+
+"There's no house she'd have come to but this," he said.  "There's
+only Scholl's and Nevill's at the Bend, and they were both asleep as
+you passed?  They're a-bed by ten.  Besides, if there was anything
+out of the way they'd either one of them have sent over here
+straight.  No.  Unless the young lady's missed her way, or met with
+some accident...."
+
+He looked at us doubtfully.  It was no time to mince matters.  We
+told him, as briefly as we could, what had happened that evening and
+how we had found Lessing at the mill.
+
+He heard us out, his jaw set grimly.  When we had finished he rose
+without a word, a tall, still stalwart figure in his stockinged feet,
+and crossing the kitchen took down his gun that hung on a rack above
+the door.
+
+"I guess I'm coming with you," he said.
+
+I glanced at Herrick.  He nodded.
+
+"Three are better than two, Austin.  We may be glad of an extra hand
+before the night's out."  He turned to Sliefer, who had laid his gun
+on the table, and was pulling on a pair of heavy boots.  "Have you
+got a good dog?  I don't mean the collie."
+
+"Aye.  There's old Spot, back in the barn.  He'd pick up a trail
+anywheres.  Nor he ain't none too friendly to Menning, either, that's
+one reason we've kep' him tied up, most of the time.  Now I guess
+I'll step up an' leave word with Mother."
+
+He opened the stairway door and tip-toed up, curiously noiseless on
+his heavy feet.  We heard whispering, a smothered exclamation; then
+he came down, gently closing the door behind him.
+
+"I ain't told her nothing, only that you'd missed Miss Lessing and we
+was going out to hunt her up.  There's no need she should know about
+the rest of it.  This ain't no woman's job, nor it ain't no sheriff's
+job either.  If they'd come to me first off I know every track in
+these woods back an' forth, and it won't be easy for anyone to get
+away from me, not once we pick his trail up.  Menning can run these
+woods like a fox, but he won't run far, not when I got a gun in my
+hand.  Not that I'd be scared to meet him anywheres, gun or no gun,
+and I bet he knows it."
+
+A strange expression flitted across Herrick's face as he measured the
+farmer's sturdy figure with his eye.  But he only said gravely:
+"You're a good neighbour, Mr. Sliefer.  As you say, this is no
+sheriff's job now; it's up to us.  And we're going to see it through."
+
+We closed the door behind us.
+
+"I told Mother to bolt that, once we're gone," Sliefer said.  "Reckon
+we don't need no lantern."
+
+"Better not," Herrick said.
+
+The old man crossed to the barn and came back a few minutes later
+with the dog on a chain, a cross-bred hound by the look of him,
+heavily built and brindled white and brown.
+
+"That's what they used to call a bear-dog," the farmer said, "when I
+was a boy.  The breed's pretty well died out now.  I've had old Spot
+here eleven years, and I had his mother an' grandmother before him.
+You don't see 'em nowadays, any more.  They raise these light-built
+hounds now, but they ain't the fighters these dogs were."
+
+The farmer was a brisk walker.  He picked his way through the woods,
+turning here, pausing there, at what seemed to us invisible signs and
+landmarks, making his way unerringly through the trees and
+undergrowth, the hound close to his heels, till presently we stood
+once more on the open road a little below the bungalow.  I looked
+eagerly towards the house, only to see the turned down light burning
+just as we had left it.
+
+"We'll try here first," Sliefer said.
+
+He took two or three turns about the road and clearing, but the dog
+took no interest.  We recrossed the road to the farther side, and
+here, among the underbrush near the path Herrick and I had taken, he
+showed the first signs of keenness, sniffing to and fro, his nose
+laid close to the ground.  In a few moments he was off at a leisurely
+trot along the path.
+
+"Picked up the other dog's scent, most like," said Sliefer, watching
+him.  "Come on.  We'll find him at the mill."
+
+He took us by a short cut through the bushes, across a cleared space
+of stumps and blackberry vines, and turning into the woods at the
+left again, brought us in a few minutes on the sawmill road.  The
+hound was there before us, moving shadow-like about the clearing.
+When we came up to him he was clearly puzzled and uneasy.  He moved
+warily, his forefeet stiffly braced, his ears laid back, the hair
+along his spine bristling as he snuffed to and fro.
+
+I touched Herrick's shoulder.  "Do you see that?  It's the same way
+Leo was acting this afternoon."
+
+"Give him time," said Sliefer.  "I know Spot.  He ain't made his mind
+up yet."
+
+Shifting the gun under his arm, he pulled out a can of tobacco and
+began to roll a cigarette.  Somehow that natural matter-of-fact
+action did much to relax my tense nerves.  With Herrick I watched the
+hound closely.  He approached the broken doorway, sniffed, peered,
+circled off a couple of times and then, as though suddenly making up
+his mind to it, plunged inside, only to reappear an instant after and
+set off, head down, with a queer muffled whine, through the
+underbrush.  I made a move to follow but Sliefer checked me.
+
+"Wait a bit.  He ain't sure yet.  He'll give us the holler when he's
+sure started."
+
+He was right.  After a little while Spot came back, breaking cover
+near the back of the mill, and returned to us, uneasiness and
+perplexity in every line of his taut body.  With his eyes fixed on
+his master's face he waited, eager and yet strangely reluctant, and
+again with a thrill I noticed that involuntary bristling of his
+spine, the trembling of his lower jaw, as though at some unfamiliar
+and disturbing proximity.  Twice the farmer spoke to him
+encouragingly, and twice the dog circled off, checked abruptly and
+came back.  Sliefer grew impatient.
+
+"I don't know what's got into the dog.  He ain't never acted that way
+before.  Hey there, Spot!  Get to it!  Fetch em' boy!"
+
+For a moment the hound eyed him.  Then, with the same abruptness with
+which he had entered the mill he raised his head, gave a low whine,
+and was off in a straight line through the underbrush.  Almost
+immediately we heard his first call, the warning bell-like note of a
+hound on the found trail.
+
+"He's picked it up all right," the farmer said.  "Come on.  I back
+Spot to keep a scent once he's got it."
+
+We started after him, keeping as steady a pace as we could in the
+darkness.  It was well that Sliefer was with us.  He made his way
+with the unerring ease of a man used to the woods from boyhood, to
+whom night is almost the same as day, and all we needed to do was to
+follow in his tracks.  The hound seemed to be keeping an even course,
+some couple of hundred yards ahead of us; his deep warning cry,
+pitched always on the same two notes, rang out at intervals and
+Sliefer had no difficulty in guiding his way by the sound.
+
+Once, in the neighbourhood of the Menning house, the dog was at
+fault; he hesitated and all but turned aside towards the
+out-buildings, but in the end picked up the scent again and struck
+out in a northerly direction through the woods.
+
+For nearly an hour we followed him, through tracts of dense second
+growth and across spaces of stony pasture, out again on a back road,
+with an occasional darkened house tranquil in its grassy yard,
+looping and turning here and there, but on the whole keeping a fairly
+straight course.  We crossed two sloping pastures, plunged into a
+thicket of young trees, and presently found ourselves on a space of
+rising ground, strewn with huge boulders and set with stunted juniper
+and spruce.
+
+Ahead of us the hound's voice rang out clear and mournful, as it
+seemed to me with a deepening note.  Sliefer paused and looked about
+him.  The moon was rising.  It showed the sharp line of hills,
+densely wooded on either side, with the dark cleft of a gorge
+between.  Through the gap in a ruined stone fence we could see a cart
+track, all but obliterated, that wound into obscurity.
+
+"I know this place," the farmer said.  "It's near what they call
+Rocky Hollow.  I haven't been here in years, but I used to know it
+well when I was a boy.  I sort of suspicioned he was heading for
+here, right along.  Once in them big rocks in there you won't trap a
+man easy, not if he knows his way.  If we'd had time to head him off,
+now."
+
+I glanced at Herrick.  He was staring straight at that narrow
+closed-in gorge, his eyes keen and fixed.
+
+"Is there any other outlet there?"
+
+"Not easy.  It's straight-up rock at the far end and the woods are
+pretty thick.  A man would have to make slow going, either way he
+took it.  If he's in there----"
+
+We followed the cart track till it ended in a little grassy clearing
+from which a few steps brought us to the spot Sliefer had called
+"Rocky Hollow."  It was a small, narrow valley, filled with masses of
+piled boulders, some enormous, some small, the remains evidently of
+some ancient moraine.  They looked as if giant hands had flung them
+there in sport, one upon another.  Seen by daylight, with the black
+wooded hillside shutting it in, the place would be desolate enough;
+by the faint growing moonlight it had a look indescribably grim and
+sinister.  Here, one felt, among those barren stones and piled
+boulders, that took fantastic shapes in the play of light and shadow,
+would be a fit hiding-place for anything evil.
+
+Higher up the ravine, near us but hidden from sight, the hound was
+baying furiously, no longer the bell-like note that had guided us
+through the woods, but a hoarse deep voice of warning and anger.  We
+made our way towards the sound, scrambling over the stones, and found
+him standing before an opening between two boulders, where an
+overhanging rock formed a sort of rough cavern.  There was a glimpse
+of something white within, and for a moment my heart turned sick with
+fear.  But it was only a sheet of crumpled greasy newspaper that had
+evidently contained food.  There were the charred remains of a small
+campfire and an old tin can lay in one corner.
+
+Sliefer caught the dog by his collar as we peered inside.  He picked
+up the crumpled sheet.
+
+"A week old," he said.  "Here's where he hung out, all right.  No
+tramp ever comes here; it's too far off the main road."
+
+Stooping forward, I had rested my hand on the rock at one side.  It
+was warm to the touch, and I turned quickly to the blackened embers
+near.
+
+"He's not far off, either.  That fire----"
+
+"Is cold," returned Herrick quickly, touching the ashes.
+
+The stone was warm, I could have sworn it.  Somebody, only a moment
+ago, had lain there.  There was a sudden oath from Sliefer, and I
+turned to see, a hundred feet down the gorge, something that twisted
+and moved, a stealthy misshapen shadow, between the gray boulders.
+It was a bare glimpse, seen in a flash and blotted out immediately
+against the grayish rocky background, but in that second I thought of
+Lennox and I too felt cold down my spine.
+
+The farmer's face had gone a curious sickly white.  He stood holding
+his gun stupidly, with fingers that shook.
+
+"That ... that weren't no man ... that...."
+
+"Did you see?" cried Herrick.
+
+There was a sharp note of excitement in his voice.  I nodded.  "It
+... went off down there."
+
+Sliefer had pulled himself together.  He swung round, his face
+suddenly savage.
+
+"Man or beast, by God, we'll get him now!  _That_ shan't run the
+woods another night, not if I drop in my tracks!"
+
+He shouted to the dog, but the hound, with the rare stupidity of his
+race, was still snuffing round the cave.  Dragged away, he tried one
+scent and another in and out the boulders, but the tracks had been
+crossed and confused a dozen times and we lost precious minutes
+before he picked up his right trail at last, halfway down the gorge,
+and was off again on his slow loping gait.
+
+He ran silently, this time, and in deadly earnest.  Only occasionally
+his voice came back to us, low-pitched and warning.  Downhill, over
+the shoulder of that same sloping pasture we had crossed before, then
+a wide detour to the right, skirting a swamp where our feet sunk deep
+between the tussocks--more open fields and then again back to the
+woods.  On we kept doggedly, through hours it seemed to me--more
+slowly now, for the steady pace was beginning to tell on us--in
+silence only broken by Sliefer's heavy breathing as he forged ahead,
+his ear bent always for the sound of the dog's voice.  By his old
+hunter's instinct he knew which way the hound was running, and was
+able to save many a turn by short cuts which we followed
+unquestionably, relying on that seventh sense of his which never
+seemed to fail us.
+
+It was getting on towards dawn when Sliefer paused finally at a
+cross-road which seemed to me familiar.
+
+"See that?" he said.  "There's the right-hand fork that turns back to
+the Bend, past the old Sullivan house.  He's circling back on his old
+tracks.  A while back I thought he was trying to make that tract of
+woods the other side of the State road, but the dog's headed him out
+of that.  It's getting on for daylight now, and the way I figure it
+he'll try and make for some place he knows.  He daren't show up round
+the village and I reckon he'll keep clear of the old house, for he
+knows that's been watched.  By the way he's headed now, it's either
+the saw-mill or some other place near it.  He knows he can't give
+Spot the slip again in the woods and he's hard pushed--ain't got much
+chance now to pick an' choose.  I say we won't waste time but jest
+chance it and cut in right here towards the mill.  There's an old
+wood-road just a little ways further up that'll be easier going than
+if we took the long way round."
+
+"Right," said Herrick.  He loosened the revolver in his belt.  "Are
+we agreed?  Whatever we see, close in on it, but don't fire unless
+you have to."
+
+Sliefer gave him a quick, grim look.
+
+"I reckon nothin'll get by me again.  That don't happen twice.  We
+ain't any bunch of girls that he can fool with his damn play-acting."
+
+Again that queer look flitted across Herrick's face, but he said
+nothing, only fell in silently beside me as we followed Sliefer into
+the path.
+
+It was darker here.  The trees shut in close about us.  Sliefer was a
+few paces ahead.  Presently I felt Herrick's hand on my arm.
+
+"Less than half an hour to daybreak!  God, Austin, if we can only
+beat him to it!"
+
+He quickened pace as he spoke.
+
+"What do you mean?  We'll get him anyhow."
+
+"We'll get Menning, yes ... but we mayn't get the thing that attacked
+Dick.  Yes, they're the same, but--Austin, I can't explain to you
+now, but I tell you we've got to make every effort in these last few
+minutes.  If Sliefer's right, and he's doubled back, we're all right.
+Otherwise...."
+
+"But he must know----"
+
+"He _knows_.  He isn't playing for safety; he knows that's over.  He
+wasn't playing for safety when he made that big detour, he's playing
+for time.  It's time that matters, and it's there we've got to beat
+him.  Austin, Sliefer talks of play-acting, but is it play-acting
+that can keep a man ahead of a dog for the best part of the night?
+Was it play-acting that half-killed Lessing?  No, if we're ever to
+know the truth we've got to know it now, within these next twenty
+minutes.  Ah!"
+
+It was the hound again, sudden, sharp, and near at hand.  Sliefer had
+been right after all.  We were within a few steps of the saw-mill
+clearing, but the dog was there before us.  He was circling the
+ground, barking furiously as he had done in the gorge, his attention
+divided between the mill itself and the group of trees, with an old
+dead chestnut among them, that stood within a dozen feet of the
+building and a little nearer the sluice gate.  But he left the trees
+when we came up and flung himself savagely against the boarded
+doorway.
+
+"That was open when we left it, Herrick--do you remember?"
+
+He took out his revolver.
+
+"Go round to the back, Sliefer, and take the dog with you.  Austin,
+watch this end from outside.  I'll go through; I've got the
+flashlight."
+
+"I'm coming with you," Sliefer said.
+
+"All right.  One must stay outside, in case ... Austin, it'll be you,
+then.  If anything--_anything_, you understand--tries to get past
+you, shoot to cripple it.  Fire low.  Remember what I told you!"
+
+He flung the door open; I heard the quick rush of the dog's feet.
+With every nerve tense to straining-point I listened, but the seconds
+slowly passed and there was no further sound.  I moved a few paces
+back, to get a clearer view of the building and waited.
+
+From within I fancied once I could hear Sliefer's voice.  The
+flashlight moved to and fro, its gleam visible through the cracks of
+the old walls.  Now they were going through the upper floor.
+
+There was a stillness in the air, that chill hush which comes just
+before dawn.  Already the light was changing, becoming faintly clear
+and shadowless.  Somehow, with this drawing-near of daylight, of the
+return to common day shapes and things, the nightmare feeling of
+those dark hours dropped from me; I seemed to see it as something
+fantastic, monstrous, a bad dream.  All the events of the last few
+hours crowded in upon me--the finding of Lessing, Mary's
+disappearance, our grim chase through the night woods.  How far were
+these things connected--what was Herrick's idea?  What were we
+after--a criminal, hunted and desperate, endowed with animal strength
+and cunning, but yet a man like ourselves--or a figment of Herrick's
+brain?
+
+From within the building I heard an exclamation, the dog's sharp
+whine.  Nerves suddenly taut, I waited, my eyes fixed on the broken
+doorway.  And then some instinct--I don't know what--made me turn and
+look up.
+
+I was standing almost directly under the old dead chestnut, near
+which the dog had been nosing when we arrived.  Its bare greyish
+limbs, gnarled and twisted, stretched above me, bare in the growing
+light.  Bare--but as I looked one of those twisted boughs seemed to
+stir and change, heave slowly, detach itself in some monstrous way
+from the rest and take living shape.  I tried to cry out, dragged
+helplessly at my revolver, but before I could get it free something
+fell on me, clutching, I was borne to the ground beneath a hairy
+living weight, bestial, loathesome, an unnameable horror.
+
+For an eternity, it seemed to me, we struggled there.  The thing was
+stronger than I, and strive as I would I could get no clear view of
+it.  Coarse long fur, indescribably filthy, was against my mouth and
+nose, and my clutching hands met in it helplessly.  I made a supreme
+effort and twisted my head to one side till my face pressed the
+earth, in a blind instinct of preservation.  Long curved nails caught
+at my throat, and once I fancied a hand that was partly human.
+Strangely, through it all, I kept my mind somehow clear; the fear of
+losing consciousness was stronger in me than any other.  This, I
+remember thinking, was the Thing that had attacked Lessing, that had
+killed the two cyclists, falling on them as it had fallen on me.
+Herrick was right ... I would tell Herrick ... and I wondered what
+they would say when they found me.  Darkness shut down; I was lying
+under a heavy mountain, and then the mountain lifted, I heard the
+hoarse snarl of the dog and an oath and Herrick's voice crying
+sharply: "Don't shoot!"
+
+There was a blinding report close to me.  Somehow I staggered to my
+feet.  Herrick was supporting me.  The smoke cleared away, and
+through it I could see Sliefer, the gun in his hands, and on the
+ground something that writhed and twisted in beastlike shape and yet
+cried out with a human voice and dragged itself, still dreadfully
+crying, up the slope to the water's edge, swayed there for a
+sickening instant and fell with a splash into the black depths below.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+THE SILVER BULLET
+
+Pale clear sunlight; early twittering of birds; the clean freshness
+of dawn....
+
+The lamp was still burning on the table when we reached the bungalow.
+Herrick put it out.  Then he laid a hand on my shoulder.
+
+"Austin----"
+
+There was a clatter of wheels on the road outside.  Someone had
+pulled up outside the house.  It was a boy--Hiram Scholl's
+boy--taking his load of milk-cans over to the creamery.
+
+"I don't know as you've missed that yeller dog that belongs here," he
+called out, "but if the folks were looking for him I thought I'd tell
+you.  He's over to the little house back on our wood-lot up the road.
+I called to him, an' I dunno but he's hurt or something, for he's
+just layin' there an' he wouldn't come.  So if you want to go after
+him I guess he's still there."
+
+"Leo!" I exclaimed.
+
+Herrick turned to me quickly as the boy drove off.  "What house is
+that?"
+
+"Hiram Scholl's.  It was empty, but someone said that Menning's
+mother--Herrick, there's just a chance!"
+
+I sprang for the motor-cycle, leaning where we had left it the night
+before, by the side of the house.  In a moment I had it out on the
+road and Herrick swung to the seat behind me as I started the engine
+up.
+
+Five minutes brought us to the spot where the house stood, a tiny
+frame shack set on a space of half-cleared woodland back from the
+road.  To reach it we had to climb the slope of stony pasture that
+divided Scholl's land from the woods, and as we came in sight of the
+house, half-hidden among the stunted spruce and juniper trees my eyes
+caught a yellowish spot stretched on the doorstone.
+
+It was the setter.  He whined as I called to him, but without
+turning, his gaze fixed on the closed door.  His fine coat was
+draggled and matted with blood about the throat; he sprang to his
+feet as we came near and began to paw at the doorway.
+
+I knocked.  No one moved within.  The one window was close shuttered,
+but I fancied, listening, I could hear a faint crooning sound from
+inside.
+
+Together we set our shoulders to the door.  It gave way, and we found
+ourselves in the one tiny living-room of the house.  It was dark and
+close there was a disorder of household things piled here and there.
+On a small broken rocker in the middle of the floor, Mrs. Menning sat
+huddled, swaying to and fro, with the low crooning mutter we had
+heard from outside.  She had an old coloured handkerchief tied over
+her head and a small silver cross was hung on a thin chain round her
+wrinkled neck.  Her aged face was impassive; her eyes, uncannily keen
+and bright, seemed to look straight through us into distance.
+
+"Where is Miss Lessing?" I asked.
+
+She made no sign of having heard me, only kept up that faint
+unintelligible muttering.  Herrick went over and shook her gently by
+the shoulder.
+
+"Where is Miss Lessing?  You got to tell us."
+
+She twisted her shoulder from his grasp and sunk lower into the
+chair, her eyes averted.  My ears had caught a sound overhead.  There
+was no stairway in the room, but behind a pile of furniture a wooden
+button betrayed a door that I had taken for an ordinary closet.
+Hastily, I began to drag the things aside.  The old woman saw my
+purpose and slipped with sudden agility to her feet, her eyes blazing
+with anger, but Herrick thrust her aside and in an instant we had the
+door open and were upstairs, the dog at our heels.
+
+"Mary!"
+
+I caught her in my arms--unhurt, thank God--and carried her down,
+through the shuttered room, past the old muttering woman--out into
+the open and the clean air.
+
+"Oh, Austin, that old woman!  She met me on the road--I had gone to
+call for Dick, and she said she was looking for me; that Dick had had
+an accident and they'd brought him to this house and sent for me.
+She told me to go upstairs, that he was there, and she shut the door
+and wouldn't let me out.  There was no window; no one could have
+heard me from outside.  And then Leo found me, I heard him barking
+and she tried to drive him away, but he wouldn't go.  Good old Leo!"
+She put her arm round the setter, who was trying hard to reach her
+face with his tongue.  "I knew he'd help you to find me.  Austin,
+where _is_ Dick?"
+
+I had to tell her, breaking it as gently as I could.
+
+"Will you take me to him at once, please--now!  Austin, I knew
+something was going to happen--I felt it.  That's why I was worried,
+last night--I couldn't explain.  And then shut up alone there, not
+knowing what it was....  That old woman--she was dreadful, but she
+wasn't unkind to me.  Do you suppose she _knew_--that she just wanted
+to get me somewhere safe?"
+
+Who knew?  Was there perhaps a spark of human feeling in that strange
+warped soul, half unhinged by her own troubles, something that Mary's
+chance kindness, that afternoon by the saw-mill, had reached and
+touched?  It might have been.
+
+We walked down the hill, and I took Mary on the motor-cycle behind me
+as far as Lennox's, leaving Herrick to follow on foot.  Dick was
+better.  He had passed a feverish night, Lennox said, but the fever
+had left him with dawn and he was in an exhausted but normal sleep
+when we arrived.
+
+I left Mary with him, and walked back along the road to meet Herrick.
+
+"And now," I said, "tell me--tell me the whole thing.  Jack, what was
+it?"
+
+We were near the old twisted cedar by the hollow, the tree by which
+Aaron had met his death that spring.  Herrick sat down on a boulder
+by the roadside and began to scrape slowly at his pipe.
+
+"I told you about Menning and his wild-man stunt--all that I found
+out the other day.  Menning had a criminal twist and he knew how to
+turn that trick to his own ends.  It is far easier to simulate the
+grotesque--the superhuman, if you like--than most people suppose.
+Isn't that, after all, the basis of the witch-doctors' power?  Even
+an ordinary man becomes horrible if you put a mask on him.  And
+remember that Menning had a streak of abnormality to start with, and
+the thing may very easily, as I said, have become an obsession with
+him.  Anyway that's the best explanation one can put on it, and the
+one that Lennox and our friend Sliefer, and Lessing himself, will
+agree upon.  After all, it pretty well covers the facts."
+
+I remembered his words the night before.
+
+"Then what did you mean about the dawn?"
+
+Herrick was silent a moment.
+
+"We're all well out of a bad business, Austin," he said then.  "Don't
+you think we'd better let it go at that?"
+
+"But you had another theory.  You had it that morning, after the
+fire.  You wouldn't tell me what it was.  But I don't imagine you've
+changed your mind altogether."
+
+"No, I didn't change my mind," Herrick said.  He put his hand into
+his pocket.  When he withdrew it there lay, on his palm, the little
+battered silver button that Lennox had first shown us.
+
+"You remember, Austin," he said, "that I recalled one or two facts to
+your mind that evening.  This was One of them.  I want you to look at
+it again."
+
+"It is a button," I said.  "A button such as you find on some
+European peasants' costumes."
+
+"Westphalian peasants, such as Menning's mother came from.  Lennox
+overlooked that fact, though as the button is badly defaced we can
+excuse him.  I'll help you out, Austin.  It is of pure silver, very
+soft, and it has been hammered to form a rough bullet that could be
+fired from an old-fashioned muzzle-loading gun."
+
+"I don't see how that helps you."
+
+"I want you to think," he said, "what particular associations there
+are with a silver bullet."
+
+I stared at the little pellet in my hand, striving with some vague
+recollection at the back of my mind.
+
+"They were used against ... against ... some sort of witchcraft," I
+said at last.  "I don't see----"
+
+"They were used against lycanthropy," said Herrick.
+
+I stared at him.  I suppose I looked stupid.  I felt it.  It was as
+though some spectre, strange, ghastly, altogether of another world,
+had risen up suddenly there before us in these quiet Pennsylvania
+woods.
+
+"A mania--subject imagines himself some beast, resulting in actual
+physical transformations--exhibits depraved appetites--frequently
+homicidal..."  I recalled haltingly the words of an old treatise.
+
+"They did more than believe they were animals," said Herrick dryly.
+"They seem to have succeeded in impressing their belief pretty
+strongly upon their neighbours and relatives.  Did you ever dig into
+old records of that sort, Austin?  The were-wolf stories of the
+Middle Ages?  They're rather grim reading."
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Remember our facts," he went on.  "Menning's mother came from
+Westphalia, one of the parts of Europe where the belief in
+lycanthropy is most widely spread and where its existence is still
+credited among the peasants of today.  Lycanthropy was believed to be
+a hereditary taint, as transmissible as insanity, which may lie
+dormant through one or more generations, so much so that at one time
+the relatives of an accused man or woman were all held suspect.
+There seems to have been more or less of a mystery about the Mennings
+altogether, chiefly on account of the mother's character, and most
+particularly in regard to Jakey.  Remember also what Lennox said
+about the strong persistence of type in both sons, although of
+different paternity.  We have Lennox's assertion that there was
+something peculiar, 'animal', about Jakey, which certainly impressed
+him, but which he seemed rather at a loss to describe.  Then there is
+that unexplained incident when Jakey was with the circus.  Whatever
+it was, it was something that gave such a shock to the
+proprietor--who, remember, had originally conceived the idea of the
+wild-man stunt himself, so wasn't likely to have been taken in by
+acting--that he sacrificed his best drawing card then and there
+sooner than have Jakey remain another night with the show.  All the
+brother would say was that he 'guessed Jakey acted too well,' which
+in itself is fairly significant.
+
+"That Aaron knew, or suspected, certain facts about his brother,
+there is no doubt.  Why else should he so obstinately oppose any
+medical examination, and particularly the idea of Jakey being removed
+even temporarily from their control?  Why did he make the very
+singular statement that Jakey was 'all right in the daytime,' and
+that _at night they shut him up_?"
+
+"And the bullet?" I asked.
+
+"Do you remember that Aaron promised if it became necessary he would
+take steps?  What those steps were he did not say, but I believe
+myself that this silver bullet answers the question.  Remember the
+horror in which lycanthropy was held, the revulsion it excited, and
+think whether he would not have resorted to the gravest measures
+sooner than have the whole concealed story come to light.
+
+"I think that Aaron had already determined that night, unknown to
+their mother, to put an end to the whole thing; that he went out to
+seek his half-brother at the time, and under that form, when alone it
+would be possible to bring himself to do that which he felt had to be
+done.  Jakey must have suspected.  There was a struggle between the
+two, and it was Aaron who was killed, before he had time to use the
+silver bullet which he dropped, there, in the moment of unexpected
+attack.  The old mother must have known the truth; through all her
+horror and superstition her love for her first son survived, and
+together they concocted the story of Aaron's absence with the wagon.
+That she paid bitterly, many times over, for her impulse, there is no
+doubt.  She was now completely under Jakey's dominion--the dominion
+of a being little better than a monster, whom she dared not now
+denounce, for who would have believed her story?
+
+"It is certain that what we saw last night is what attacked Lessing,
+and had attacked him previously.  It reached him through the
+skylight, but not altogether as he thought.  It climbed.  You will
+remember that in every instance the attack was from overhead."
+
+"But the thing that... that I touched..." I cried.  "It was _furry_!
+It----"
+
+I stopped short, taken with a sudden shudder.
+
+"I know," said Herrick.
+
+"I had hoped," he went on, "that you didn't retain any very definite
+impression.  That's why----"
+
+"_You_ saw it."
+
+"We all saw something.  We thought we did."
+
+"And Sliefer..."  I paused.  "Herrick, there was something else.  I
+remember now.  You were holding me.  And you told Sliefer not to
+fire.  I wondered..."
+
+"They say there is a change, one way or another, at the moment of
+death," Herrick said.  "I knew it.  I tried to stop him."  He paused
+a moment.  "I was too late.  That's all."
+
+We sat there for a moment, not speaking.  Then Herrick knocked his
+pipe out against the boulder and rose to his feet.
+
+"Come on back to the house.  Mrs. Searle will have breakfast for us,
+and we both look rather a wreck!"  He laid a hand on my shoulder.
+"Take my advice, Austin, and put this whole thing out of your mind.
+I told you in the beginning--there's the other explanation; why not
+stand by it?  As I say, it covers all the facts.  The rest is between
+us three.  Look at it how you will, whatever happened last night
+happened for the best."
+
+I remembered the thing that had cried and twisted on the ground, and
+was silent.  Herrick was right.
+
+
+As soon as Lessing was able to travel we went down, the three of us,
+to the little cottage on the Sound which they had rented for the
+remainder of the fall.  Herrick came down for an occasional long
+week-end, and it was during one of these, when we were lounging out
+on the beach before supper, that he handed me without comment a
+little cutting from a Pennsylvania local paper.
+
+It was headed "Man's Body found in Millpond" and stated briefly how
+some boys, fishing in Sliefer's dam, had discovered the body of a
+man, believed to be that of a certain Aaron Menning, chicken pedlar,
+who had disappeared from the neighborhood mysteriously some weeks
+before.  The body, which had lain for a considerable time in the
+water, showed the trace of two bullet wounds, but owing to the
+difficulties of medical evidence after so long a time had elapsed it
+was not possible to prove that either of these had been sufficient to
+cause death, which was brought in, on the finding of the coroner's
+jury, as accidental.  "It will be remembered," the article concluded,
+"that equally mysterious circumstances attended, less than a year
+ago, the death of Menning's stepbrother, whose body was found at a
+spot not half a mile from the scene of this later tragedy.  Though
+there was no suggestion of foul play at the time, rumor later
+connected Aaron's name, in no uncertain terms, with his stepbrother's
+death, a rumor which his disappearance served to strengthen in many
+persons' minds.  Whatever the circumstances which led to this second
+tragedy, and how far the two may be connected, will remain for ever a
+mystery, since Aaron's death closes definitely the last chapter in
+the story of this singularly ill-fated family."
+
+"What's that?" asked Lessing.
+
+I slipped the cutting into my pocket.  My compact with Herrick still
+held good.
+
+"Only some more nonsense of Jack's."
+
+Lessing grinned up at me from where he lounged, one bandaged arm
+stretched above his head, in the deck-chair.
+
+"I should think, as an engaged man, you ought to be getting
+impervious by this time."
+
+"I am.  Don't you worry!"
+
+Over the lawn, through the warm-scented dusk, came Mary's voice from
+the porch.
+
+"Austin!" she called.  "Dick!  Are you three going to sit there all
+night?"
+
+Herrick moved away.
+
+"Come on," he said over his shoulder.  "Supper is ready, and I won't
+risk being told again that I monopolize you all the day!"
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76059 ***