Front matter (continued 4)

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