His three or four labourers are quite content. Of course a thing like
that makes a tremendous sensation in a place like this. You may see as
many as five men talking together almost any day now. And here, on the
top if it, comes another case at Stone’s. It looks like one of those
outbreaks that crop up from time to time for no obvious reason and then
die out again.”
“No reason, Jim?”
“Well, if it isn’t revenge, and if it isn’t food, what is there to be
got by it?”
“What is there to be got when an animal is killed?”
Tulloch stared without enlightenment.
“What is there that I am here to trace?”
“Godfrey Dan’l, Wynn! You don’t mean to say that there is any connection
between----?”
“I don’t say it,” declared Carrados promptly. “But there is very strong
reason why we should consider it. It solves a very obvious question that
faces us. A pricked thumb does not produce a pool. Did you microscope
it?”
“Yes, I did. I can only say that it’s mammalian. My limited experience
doesn’t carry me beyond that. Then what about the entrails, Wynn? Why
take those?”
“That raises a variety of interesting speculations certainly.”
“It may to you. The only thing that occurs to me is that it might be a
blind.”
“A very unfortunate one, if so. A blind is intended to allay
curiosity--to suggest an obvious but fictitious motive. This, on the
contrary, arouses curiosity. The abstraction of a haunch of mutton would
be an excellent blind. Whereas now, as you say, what about the
entrails?”
Tulloch shook his head.
“I’ve had my shot,” he answered. “Can you suggest anything?”
“Frankly, I can’t,” admitted Carrados.
“On the face of it, I don’t suppose anyone short of an oracle could.
Pity our local shrine has got rusty in the joints.” He levelled his whip
and pointed to a distant silhouette that showed against the last few red
streaks in the western sky a mile away. “You see that solitary old
outpost of paganism----”
The splendid little horse leapt forward in indignant surprise as the
extended whip fell sharply across his shoulders. Tulloch’s ingenuous
face seemed to have caught the rubicundity of the distant sunset.
“I’m beastly sorry, Wynn, old man,” he muttered. “I ought to have
remembered.”
“My blindness?” contributed Carrados. “My dear chap, everyone makes a
point of forgetting that. It’s quite a recognised form of compliment
among friends. If it were baldness I probably should be touchy on the
subject; as it’s only blindness I’m not.”
“I’m very glad you take it so well,” said Tulloch. “I was referring to a
stone circle that we have here. Perhaps you have heard of it?”
“The Druids’ altar!” exclaimed Carrados with an inspiration. “Jim, to my
everlasting shame, I had forgotten it.”
“Oh, well, it isn’t much to look at,” confessed the practical doctor.
“Now in the church there are a few decent monuments--all Aynosfordes, of
course.”
“Aynosfordes--naturally. Do you know how far that remarkable race goes
back?”
“A bit beyond Adam I should fancy,” laughed Tulloch. “Well, Darrish told
me that they really can trace to somewhere before the Conquest. Some
antiquarian Johnny has claimed that the foundations of Dunstan’s Tower
cover a Celtic stronghold. Are you interested in that sort of thing?”
“Intensely,” replied Carrados; “but we must not neglect other things.
This gentleman who owned the unfortunate sheep, the second victim, now?
How far is Daneswood away?”
“About a mile--mile and a half at the most.”
Carrados turned towards the back seat.
“Do you think that in seven minutes’ time you would be able to
distinguish the details of a red mark on the grass, Parkinson?”
Parkinson took the effect of three objects, the sky above, the herbage
by the roadside, and the back of his hand, and then spoke regretfully.
“I’m afraid not, sir; not with any certainty,” he replied.
“Then we need not trouble Mr Stone to-night,” said Carrados
philosophically.
After dinner there was the peaceful pipe that Tulloch had forecast, and
mutual reminiscences until the long clock in the corner, striking the
smallest hour of the morning, prompted Tulloch to suggest retirement.
“I hope you have everything,” he remarked tentatively, when he had
escorted the guest to his bedroom. “Mrs Jones does for me very well, but
you are an unknown quantity to her as yet.”
“I shall be quite all right, you may be sure,” replied Carrados, with
his engagingly grateful smile. “Parkinson will already have seen to
everything. We have a complete system, and I know exactly where to find
anything I require.”
Tulloch gave a final glance around.
“Perhaps you would prefer the window closed?” he suggested.
“Indeed, I should not. It is south-west, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And a south-westerly breeze to bring the news. I shall sit here for a
little time.” He put his hand on the top rail of a chair with
unhesitating precision and drew it to the open casement. “There are a
thousand sounds that you in your arrogance of sight ignore, a thousand
individual scents of hedge and orchard that come to me up here. I
suppose it is quite dark to you now, Jim? What a lot you seeing people
must miss!”
Tulloch guffawed, with his hand on the door knob.
“Well, don’t let your passion for nocturnal nature study lead you to
miss breakfast at eight. My eyes won’t, I promise you. Ta-ta.”
He jigged off to his own room and in ten minutes was soundly asleep. But
the oak clock in the room beneath marked the quarters one by one until
the next hour struck, and then round the face again until the little
finger stood at three, and still the blind man sat by the open window
that looked out over the south-west, interpreting the multitudinous
signs of the quiet life that still went on under the dark cover of the
warm summer night.
“The word lies with you, Wynn,” remarked Tulloch at breakfast the next
morning--he was twelve minutes late, by the way, and found his guest
interested in the titles of Dr Darrish’s excellent working library. “I
am supposed to be on view here from nine to ten, and after that I am due
at Abbot’s Farm somewhere about noon. With those reservations, I am at
your disposal for the day.”
“Do you happen to go anywhere near the ‘Swinefield’ on your way to
Abbot’s Farm?” asked Carrados.
“The ‘Swinefield’? Oh, the Druids’ circle. Yes, one way--and it’s as
good as any other--passes the wheel-track that leads up to it.”
“Then I should certainly like to inspect the site.”
“There’s really nothing to see, you know,” apologised the doctor. “Only
a few big rocks on end. They aren’t even chiselled smooth.”
“I am curious,” volunteered Carrados, “to discover why fifteen stones
should be called ‘The Judge and Jury.’”
“Oh, I can explain that for you,” declared Tulloch. “Two of them are
near together with a third block across the tops. That’s the Judge. The
twelve jurymen are scattered here and there. But we’ll go, by all
means.”
“There is a public right of way, I suppose?” asked Carrados, when, in
due course, the trap turned from the highway into a field track.
“I don’t know about a right,” said Tulloch, “but I imagine that anyone
goes across who wants to. Of course it’s not a Stonehenge, and we have
very few visitors, or the Aynosfordes might put some restrictions. As
for the natives, there isn’t a man who wouldn’t sooner walk ten miles to
see a five-legged calf than cross the road to look at a Phidias. And for
that matter,” he added thoughtfully, “this is the first time I’ve been
really up to the place myself.”
“It’s on Aynosforde property, then?”
“Oh yes. Most of the parish is, I believe. But this ‘Swinefield’ is part
of the park. There is an oak plantation across there or Dunstan’s Tower
would be in sight.”
They had reached the gate of the enclosure. The doctor got down to open
it, as he had done the former ones.
“This is locked,” he said, coming back to the step, “but we can climb
over easy enough. You can get down all right?”
“Thanks,” replied Carrados. He descended and followed Tulloch, stopping
to pat the little horse’s neck.
“He’ll be all right,” remarked the doctor with a backward nod. “I fancy
Tommy’s impressionable years must have been spent between the shafts of
a butcher’s cart. Now, Wynn, how do we proceed?”
“I should like to have your arm over this rough ground. Then if you will
take me from stone to stone.”
They paced the broken circle leisurely, Carrados judging the appearance
of the remains by touch and by the answers to the innumerable questions
that he put. They were approaching the most important monument--the
Judge--when Tulloch gave a shout of delight.
“Oh, the beauty!” he cried with enthusiasm. “I must see you closer.
Wynn, do you mind--a minute----”
“Lady, Jim?” murmured Carrados. “Certainly not. I’ll stand like Tommy.”
Tulloch shot off with a laugh and Carrados heard him racing across the
grass in the direction of the trilithon. He was still amused when he
returned, after a very short interval.
“No, Wynn, not a lady, but it occurred to me that you might have been
farther off. A beautiful airy creature very brightly clad. A Purple
Emperor, in fact. I haven’t netted a butterfly for years, but the sight
gave me all the old excitement of the chase.”
“Tolerably rare, too, aren’t they?”
“Generally speaking, they are. I remember waiting in an oak grove with a
twenty-foot net for a whole day once, and not a solitary Emperor crossed
my path.”
“An oak grove; yes, you said there was an oak plantation here.”
“I didn’t know the trick then. You needn’t go to that trouble. His
Majesty has rather peculiar tastes for so elegant a being. You just hang
a piece of decidedly ripe meat anywhere near.”
“Yes, Jim?”
“Do you notice anything?” demanded the doctor, with his face up to the
wind.
“Several things,” replied Carrados.
“Apropos of high meat? Do you know, Wynn, I lost that Purple Emperor
here, round the blocks. I thought it must have soared, as I couldn’t
quite fathom its disappearance. This used to be the Druids’ altar, they
say. I don’t know if you follow me, but it would be a devilish rum go
if--eh?”
Carrados accepted the suggestion of following Jim’s idea with
impenetrable gravity.
“I haven’t the least doubt that you are right,” he assented. “Can you
get up?”
“It’s about ten feet high,” reported Tulloch, “and not an inch of
crevice to get a foothold on. If only we could bring the trap in
here----”
“I’ll give you a back,” said Carrados, taking a position against one of
the pillars. “You can manage with that?”
“Sure you can stand it?”
“Only be as quick as you can.”
“Wait a minute,” said Tulloch with indecision. “I think someone is
coming.”
“I know there is,” admitted Carrados, “but it is only a matter of
seconds. Make a dash for it.”
“No,” decided Tulloch. “One looks ridiculous. I believe it is Miss
Aynosforde. We’d better wait.”
A young girl with a long thin face, light hair and the palest blue eyes
that it would be possible to imagine had come from the wood and was
approaching them hurriedly. She might have been eighteen, but she was
“dressed young,” and when she spoke she expressed the ideas of a child.
“You ought not to come in here,” was her greeting. “It belongs to us.”
“I am sorry if we are trespassing,” apologised Tulloch, coloring with
chagrin and surprise. “I was under the impression that Mrs Aynosforde
allowed visitors to inspect these ruins. I am Dr Tulloch.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said the girl vaguely. “But Dunstan
will be very cross if he sees you here. He is always cross if he finds
that anyone has been here. He will scold me afterwards. And he makes
faces in the night.”
“We will go,” said Tulloch quietly. “I am sorry that we should have
unconsciously intruded.”
He raised his hat and turned to walk away, but Miss Aynosforde detained
him.
“You must not let Dunstan know that I spoke to you about it,” she
implored him. “That would be as bad. Indeed,” she added plaintively,
“whatever I do always makes him cruel to me.”
“We will not mention it, you may be sure,” replied the doctor.
“Good-morning.”
“Oh, it is no good!” suddenly screamed the girl. “He has seen us; he is
coming!”
Tulloch looked round in the direction that Miss Aynosforde’s frightened
gaze indicated. A young man whom he knew by sight as her brother had
left the cover of the wood and was strolling leisurely towards them.
Without waiting to encounter him the girl turned and fled, to hide
herself behind the farthest pillar, running with ungainly movements of
her long, wispish arms and uttering a low cry as she went.
As young Aynosforde approached he courteously raised his hat to the two
elder men. He appeared to be a few years older than his sister, and in
him her colourless ovine features were moulded to a firmer cast.
“I am afraid that we are trespassing,” said the doctor, awkward between
his promise to the girl and the necessity of glossing over the
situation. “My friend is interested in antiquities----”
“My unfortunate sister!” broke in Aynosforde quietly, with a sad smile.
“I can guess what she has been saying. You are Dr Tulloch, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“Our grandmother has a foolish but amiable weakness that she can keep
poor Edith’s infirmity dark. I cannot pretend to maintain that
appearance before a doctor ... and I am sure that we can rely on the
discretion of your friend?”
“Oh, certainly,” volunteered Tulloch. “He is----”
“Merely an amateur,” put in Carrados, suavely, but with the incisiveness
of a scalpel.
“You must, of course, have seen that Edith is a little unusual in her
conversation,” continued the young man. “Fortunately, it is nothing
worse than that. She is not helpless, and she is never violent. I have
some hope, indeed, that she will outgrow her delusions. I suppose”--he
laughed a little as he suggested it--“I suppose she warned you of my
displeasure if I saw you here?”
“There was something of the sort,” admitted Tulloch, judging that the
circumstances nullified his promise.
Aynosforde shook his head slowly.
“I am sorry that you have had the experience,” he remarked. “Let me
assure you that you are welcome to stay as long as you like under the
shadows of these obsolete fossils, and to come as often as you please.
It is a very small courtesy; the place has always been accessible to
visitors.”
“I am relieved to find that I was not mistaken,” said the doctor.
“When I have read up the subject I should like to come again,”
interposed Carrados. “For the present we have gone all over the ground.”
He took Tulloch’s arm, and under the insistent pressure the doctor
turned towards the gate. “Good-morning, Mr Aynosforde.”
“What a thing to come across!” murmured Tulloch when they were out of
earshot. “I remember Darrish making the remark that the girl was simple
for her years or something of that sort, but I only took it that she was
backward. I wonder if the old ass knew more than he told me!”
They were walking without concern across the turf and had almost reached
the gate when Carrados gave a sharp, involuntary cry of pain and
wrenched his arm free. As he did so a stone of dangerous edge and size
fell to the ground between them.
“Damnation!” cried Tulloch, his face darkening with resentment. “Are you
hurt, old man?”
“Come on,” curtly replied Carrados between his set teeth.
“Not until I’ve given that young cub something to remember,” cried the
outraged doctor truculently. “It was Aynosforde, Wynn. I wouldn’t have
believed it but I just caught sight of him in time. He laughed and ran
behind a pillar when you were hit.”
“Come on,” reiterated Carrados, seizing his friend’s arm and compelling
him towards the gate. “It was only the funny bone, fortunately. Would
you stop to box the village idiot’s ears because he puts out his tongue
at you?”
“Village idiot!” exclaimed Tulloch. “I may only be a thick-skulled,
third-rate general practitioner of no social pretension whatever, but
I’m blistered if I’ll have my guests insulted by a long-eared pedigree
blighter without putting up a few plain words about it. An Aynosforde or
not, he must take the consequences; he’s no village idiot.”
“No,” was Carrados’s grim retort; “he is something much more
dangerous--the castle maniac.”
Tulloch would have stopped in sheer amazement, but the recovered arm
dragged him relentlessly on.
“Aynosforde! Mad!”
“The girl is on the borderline of imbecility; the man has passed beyond
the limit of a more serious phase. The ground has been preparing for
generations; doubtless in him the seed has quietly germinated for years.
Now his time has come.”
“I heard that he was a nice, quiet young fellow, studious and interested
in science. He has a workshop and a laboratory.”
“Yes, anything to occupy his mind. Well, in future he will have a padded
room and a keeper.”
“But the sheep killed by night and the parts exposed on the Druids’
altar? What does it mean, Wynn?”
“It means madness, nothing more and nothing less. He is the receptacle
for the last dregs of a rotten and decrepit stock that has dwindled down
to mental atrophy. I don’t believe that there is any method in his
midnight orgies. The Aynosfordes are certainly a venerable line, and it
is faintly possible that its remote ancestors were Druid priests who
sacrificed and practised haruspicy on the very spot that we have left. I
have no doubt that on that questionable foundation you would find
advocates of a more romantic theory.”
“Moral atavism?” suggested the doctor shrewdly.
“Yes. Reincarnation. I prefer the simpler alternative. Aynosforde has
been so fed up with pride of family and traditions of his ancient race
that his mania takes this natural trend. You know what became of his
father and mother?”
“No, I have never heard them mentioned.”
“The father is in a private madhouse. The mother--another cousin, by the
way--died at twenty-five.”
“And the blood stains on the stairs? Is that his work?”
“Short of actual proof, I should say yes. It is the realisation of
another family legend, you see. Aynosforde may have an insane grudge
against his grandmother, or it may be simply apeish malignity, put into
his mind by the sight of blood.”
“What do you propose doing, then? We can’t leave the man at large.”
“We have nothing yet to commit him on. You would not sign for a
reception order on the strength of seeing him throw a stone? We must
contrive to catch him in the act to-night, if possible.”
Tulloch woke up the little horse with a sympathetic touch--they were
ambling along the highroad again by this time--and permitted himself to
smile.
“And how do you propose to do that, Excellency?” he asked.
“By sprinkling the ninth step with iodide of nitrogen. A warm night ...
it will dry in half-an-hour.”
“Well, do you know, I never thought of that,” admitted the doctor.
“Certainly that would give us the alarm if a feather brushed it. But we
don’t possess a chemist’s shop, and I very much doubt if I can put my
hand on any iodine.”
“I brought a couple of ounces,” said Carrados with diffidence. “Also a
bottle of ·880 ammonia to be on the safe side.”
“You really are a bit of a _sine qua non_, Wynn,” declared Tulloch
expressively.
“It was such an obvious thing,” apologised the blind man. “I suppose
Brook Ashfield is too far for one of us to get over to this afternoon?”
“In Dorset?”
“Yes. Colonel Eustace Aynosforde is the responsible head of the family
now, and he should be on the spot if possible. Then we ought to get a
couple of men from the county lunatic asylum. We don’t know what may be
before us.”
“If it can’t be done by train we must wire or perhaps Colonel Aynosforde
is on the telephone. We can go into that as soon as we get back. We are
almost at Abbot’s Farm now. I will cut it down to fifteen minutes at the
outside. You don’t mind waiting here?”
“Don’t hurry,” replied Carrados. “Few cases are matters of minutes.
Besides, I told Parkinson to come on here from Daneswood on the chance
of our picking him up.”
“Oh, it’s Parkinson, to be sure,” said the doctor. “Thought I knew the
figure crossing the field. Well, I’ll leave you to him.”
He hastened along the rutty approach to the farm-house, and Tommy, under
the pretext of being driven there by certain pertinacious flies,
imperceptibly edged his way towards the long grass by the roadside. In a
few minutes Parkinson announced his presence at the step of the vehicle.
“I found what you described, sir,” he reported. “These are the shapes.”
Tulloch kept to his time. In less than a quarter of an hour he was back
again and gathering up the reins.
“That little job is soon worked off,” he remarked with mild
satisfaction. “Home now, I suppose, Wynn?”
“Yes,” assented Carrados. “And I think that the other little job is
morally worked off.” He held up a small piece of note-paper, cut to a
neat octagon, with two long sides and six short ones. “What familiar
object would just about cover that plan, Jim?”
“If it isn’t implicating myself in any devilment, I should say that one
of our four-ounce bottles would be about the ticket,” replied Tulloch.
“It very likely does implicate you to the extent of being one of your
four-ounce bottles, then,” said Carrados. “The man who killed Stone’s
sheep had occasion to use what we will infer to be a four-ounce bottle.
It does not tax the imagination to suggest the use he put it to, nor
need we wonder that he found it desirable to wash it afterwards--this
small, flat bottle that goes conveniently into a waistcoat pocket. On
one side of the field--the side remote from the road, Jim, but in the
direct line for Dunstan’s Tower--there is a stream. There he first
washed his hands, carefully placing the little bottle on the grass while
he did so. That indiscretion has put us in possession of a ground plan,
so to speak, of the vessel.”
“Pity it wasn’t of the man instead.”
“Of the man also. In the field the earth is baked and unimpressionable,
but down by the water-side the conditions are quite favourable, and
Parkinson got perfect reproductions of the footprints. Soon, perhaps, we
may have an opportunity of making a comparison.”
The doctor glanced at the neat lines to which the papers Carrados held
out had been cut.
“It’s a moral,” he admitted. “There’s nothing of the hobnailed about
those boots, Wynn.”
* * * * *
Swarbrick had been duly warned and obedience to his instructions had
been ensured by the note that conveyed them bearing the signature of
Colonel Aynosforde. Between eleven and twelve o’clock a light in a
certain position gave the intelligence that Dunstan Aynosforde was in
his bedroom and the coast quite clear. A little group of silent men
approached the Tower, and four, crossing one of the two bridges that
spanned the moat, melted spectrally away in a dark angle of the walls.
Every detail had been arranged. There was no occasion for whispered
colloquies about the passages, and with the exception of the butler’s
sad and respectful greeting of an Aynosforde, scarcely a word was
spoken. Carrados, the colonel and Parkinson took up their positions in
the great dining hall, where Dr Tulloch had waited on the occasion of
his vigil. A screen concealed them from the stairs and the chairs on
which they sat did not creak--all the blind man asked for. The doctor,
who had carried a small quantity of some damp powder wrapped in a
saturated sheet of blotting-paper, occupied himself for five minutes
distributing it minutely over the surface of the ninth stair. When this
was accomplished he disappeared and the silence of a sleeping house
settled upon the ancient Tower.
A party, however, is only as quiet as its most restless member, and the
colonel soon discovered a growing inability to do nothing at all and to
do it in absolute silence. After an exemplary hour he began to breathe
whispered comments on the situation into his neighbour’s ear, and it
required all Carrados’s tact and good humour to repress his impatience.
Two o’clock passed and still nothing had happened.
“I began to feel uncommonly dubious, you know,” whispered the colonel,
after listening to the third clock strike the hour. “We stand to get
devilishly chaffed if this gets about. Suppose nothing happens?”
“Then your aunt will probably get up again,” replied Carrados.
“True, true. We shall have broken the continuity. But, you know, Mr
Carrados, there are some things about this portent, visitation--call it
what you will--that even I don’t fully understand down to this day.
There is no doubt that my grandfather, Oscar Aynosforde, who died in
1817, did receive a similar omen, or summons, or whatever it may be. We
have it on the authority----”
Carrados clicked an almost inaudible sound of warning and laid an
admonishing hand on the colonel’s arm.
“Something going on,” he breathed.