Before going to investigate the knocking in the dining-room, Kenwick
picked up the loaded revolver which he had brought down with him from
the upstairs sitting-room. He felt himself so completely at a
disadvantage against any chance invader that only such a weapon could
even the score. Besides, there was the sick woman upstairs. He had her
to protect. He hobbled across the hall, making as little noise as he
could. But the process of getting into the dining-room took considerable
time. There was plenty of time, he reflected, for the intruder to become
discouraged or emboldened as the case might be.
As he crossed the room an icy blast struck him from the open window, and
he told himself savagely that he wished he had left it alone. You
couldn't expect a furnace to heat a house with a gale like that blowing
into it. He had dragged himself to within a few feet of the pane when
all at once he stopped. Two wide boards had been nailed across the
aperture. It was a clumsy job, hurriedly done. Kenwick stood there
gazing at it. So it was only for this that he had made the painful
journey from the den! And the carpenter was gone. The customary deathly
stillness prevailed.
He stood there listening for the sound of retreating footsteps but it
was another sound that caught his ear. What he heard was the far off
chugging of an automobile engine. He remembered now that the place was
on a corner; that he had walked what had seemed miles after turning that
corner before he had come to the iron gate. He was thinking rapidly.
This was his one hope. If he could manage to get out to that gate by the
time the motor-car reached it, he could get help. How ill the woman
upstairs might be he could not guess, but they were both terribly in
need of aid. At any cost he must get out to the road.
He laid the revolver upon a grim, high-backed chair and threw his whole
six feet of strength against one of the wide boards. It gave under the
pressure with a long tearing noise and hung outward dangling from its
secure end. Kenwick took up the revolver again, worked himself out
through the ample opening, and landed cautiously upon the gravel walk
beneath the window. Clutching at the branch of a giant oleander bush he
called up to the patient upstairs; "I'm going out to the gate. I don't
know what will happen to me before I get back, and I don't care. But I'm
going to get help or die trying."
There was no response. He wondered, as he started along through the
blackness, whether the woman could be asleep. How could any one sleep in
this ghastly place. Some people didn't seem to have any nerves. But she
might be dead. The thought brought him to an abrupt halt. But in that
case it was more imperative than ever that he toil on.
The rain had stopped now and the lawn under his feet was soggy and
water-beaten like a carpet that has been left out in a storm. He thanked
fortune that it was not slippery but gave beneath his staggering tread
with a resilience that aided progress. It was impossible for him to
proceed at anything faster than what seemed a snail's pace. The machine
must have passed the gate by this time, but there would be others. If he
ever reached that distant goal he would stand there and wait.
Across the circle of lawn, around the arc of drive, he made his
laborious way with clenched teeth. And so at last he came to where the
tall gate loomed black and forbidding through the darkness. The heavy
chain still swung its sinister scallop before it, seeming more like a
prison precaution now than a warning against invasion. As he looked at
the stone fence, stretching away from it on both sides, and recalled the
agony with which he had scaled it, courage fled. He'd rather die, he
decided, than attempt to struggle over that parapet again. So he stood,
supporting himself by one of the iron rods of the gate, listening for
the sound of an engine. It came at last, growing louder as the car
turned the corner a quarter of a mile away. It was evidently traveling
slowly in low gear. The reason was soon apparent. Its engine was missing
fire.
On through the darkness it came, its lights blazing a path for its
faltering progress. There was a noise of violently shifted gears and
then the heavy, greasy odor of a flooded carburetor. Behind the lights
there slid into view almost opposite the tall gate a high-powered
roadster. A man wearing huge glasses that gleamed through the dark like
the eyes of some superhuman being sprang out and wrenched open the
engine hood.
For a moment Kenwick watched him, dreading to speak lest the stranger
vanish and leave him solitary as the gardener had done. And then
abruptly he sent his voice hurtling through the night. At sound of it he
recoiled. Only those who have suffered in solitude the agony of a
nameless terror know the ghastly havoc that it can work upon the human
voice. Kenwick's held now a harsh, ugly tone that had in it something
like a threat. The man at the engine wheeled about and leveled his huge
eyes at the spot from whence the summons came. "What the devil----?" he
began.
And then explanations tumbled through the barred gate in an incoherent
torrent. They left the motorist with a confused impression of an
automobile tragedy, a bed-ridden woman, a feeble-minded gardener, and a
haunted house.
In sheer perplexity he began drawing off his heavy gantlet gloves as
though to prepare for action. "Take it slower," he advised. "I don't get
you." And then he noticed that the man on the other side of the gate was
hatless and without an overcoat. "My Lord!" he cried anxiously. "You'll
freeze out here, man!"
"Then for God's sake come in here and help me!" Kenwick entreated. "I
don't know whose place this is but it ought to be investigated. There's
a woman in here who's ill, and somebody has locked her into her room.
I'm not able to do a thing for her or for myself. Do you know what house
this is?"
The stranger shook his head. "No, I'm just out here on a visit." Kenwick
groaned. There flashed into his mind the stories of some of his friends
who had toured California and who were unanimous in their conclusion
that everybody in the southern part of the state was merely a visitor.
"But whom do they visit?" Everett Kenwick had once inquired and nobody
could supply him with an answer.
"Then you don't know where the Raeburn house is?" the man inside the
gate asked hopelessly.
The motorist shook his head again. "I'll tell you what though," he
suggested. "You get back into the house out of this cold and I'll send
somebody back here. I'm having engine trouble and I've got to get into
town."
Kenwick was fumbling with numb fingers in the pocket of his coat. He
stretched an oblong of white paper through the bars of the gate. "If
you're going in town, take this," he pleaded. "It's a message I want to
send to my brother in New York. Kenwick is the name and the address is
on the outside."
The stranger stopped on his way to the gate and a curious expression
crossed his face. And just at that moment Kenwick caught the sound of
another voice speaking from inside the car. He couldn't catch the words,
for the coughing of the engine beat against his ears. The man in the
goggles climbed to the seat and the next minute the machine was moving
jerkily away.
Cold desolation seized Kenwick. But he felt certain that the stranger
would return. There was nothing mysterious nor uncanny about him. But
how long would he have to wait there on the drenched gravel before help
could get back to him? It wouldn't do to catch cold in that leg and add
a fever to his other troubles. He must get back into the house. Out
there on the bleak road he thought longingly of its warm comfort.
Everything that he had done since he came into it seemed now to have
been the wrong thing. A horrible sense of incompetency, the first that
he had ever known in all his vivid, effective life, surged over him. And
added to this was a curious sense of having lost something. Was it
Marcreta Morgan's picture that he missed? He told himself that it was,
but he was only half satisfied with this assurance.
Arguing the matter with himself, he had covered half the distance around
the driveway when suddenly a sharp reverberation rang through the air.
It was the report of a gun. Almost immediately this was followed by a
woman's scream.
Kenwick stood still, balancing himself unsteadily upon his well foot.
The sound had come from the direction of the house. Did it herald a
tragedy or was it merely a signal? Scarcely knowing why he did it,
except to relieve the physical tension and to make his presence known,
he gripped his own revolver and fired two answering shots upward into
the night.