Front matter (continued 2)

"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?"