After the dinner hour Nealman came for me, in the room just off the hall
from his own that he had designated for my use. I'd never seen him in
quite so gay a humor. His eyes sparkled; happiness rippled in his voice.
His tone was more companionable too, lacking that faint but unmistakable
air of patronage it had always previously held. He had never forgotten,
until now, that he was the employer, I the employee. Now his accent and
manner was one of equality, and he addressed me much as he had addressed
his wealthy guests.
He had been drinking; but he was not in the least intoxicated. Perhaps
he had been stimulated, very slightly. He wore a dinner coat with white
trousers.
"Killdare, I want you to come downstairs," he said. "Some of my friends
want to talk to you about shootin' and fishin'. They're keen to know
what their prospects are."
"I'd like to," I answered. "But I'll have to come as I am. I haven't a
dinner coat----"
"Of course come as you are."
His arm touched mine, and he headed me down the hallway to the stairs.
Then we walked side by side down the big, wide stairway to the big
living-room.
Already I heard the sound of the guests' laughter. As I went further the
hall seemed simply ringing with it. There could be no further doubt of
the success of Nealman's party. Evidently his distinguished guests had
thrown all dignity to the winds, entering full into the spirit of play.
The glimpse of the big living-room only verified this first impression.
The guests were evidently in that wonderful mood of merriment that is
the delight and ambition of all hosts, but which is so rarely obtained.
Most men know the doubtful temper of a mob. Few had failed to observe
that the same psychology extends to the simplest social gatherings. How
often stiffness and formality haunt the drawing-room or dining-table,
where only merriment should rule! How many times the social spirit
wholly fails to manifest itself. To-night, evidently, conditions were
just right, and hilarity ruled at Kastle Krags.
As I came in Joe Nopp--the portly man with the clear, gray eyes--was
telling some sort of an anecdote, and his listeners were simply shouting
with laughter. Major Dell and Bill Van Hope were shooting craps on the
floor, ten cents a throw, carrying on a ridiculous conversation with the
dice. A big phonograph was shouting a negro song from the corner.
There was a slight lull, however, when Nealman and I came in. Van Hope
spoke to me first--he was the only one of the guests I had met--and the
others turned toward me with the good manners of their kind. In a moment
Nealman had introduced me to Joe Nopp's listeners and, an instant later,
to Major Dell.
"Mr. Killdare is down here doing some work in zoology for his
university," Nealman explained, "and he's agreed to show you chaps where
to find game and fish. He knows this country from A to Izzard."
I held the center of the floor, for a while, as I answered their
questions; and I can say truly I had never met, on the whole, a
better-bred and more friendly company of men. They wanted to know all
about the game in the region, what flies or lures the bass were taking,
as to the prevalence of diamond-backs, and if the tarpon were striking
beyond the natural rock wall. In their eagerness they were like boys.
"You'll talk better with a shot of something good," Nealman told me at
last, producing a quart bottle. "Have a little Cuban cheer."
The bottle contained old Scotch, and its appearance put an end to all
serious discussion. From thence on the mood of the gathering was ever
lighter, ever happier; and I merely sat and looked on.
"The question _ain't_," Hal Fargo said of me with considerable emphasis,
"whether he knows where the turkeys are, but whether or not he knows his
college song!"
I pretended ignorance, but soon Van Hope and Nealman were singing "A
Cow's Best Friend" at the top of their voices, while Nopp tried to drown
them out with "Fill 'em up for Williams."
Even now it could not be said that any of the group were intoxicated.
Fargo was certainly the nearest; his cheeks were flushed and his speech
had that reckless accent that goes so often with the first stages of
drunkenness. The distinguished Pescini was only animated and fanciful,
Van Hope and Marten perhaps slightly stimulated. For all the charm of
their conversation I couldn't see that Nopp or Major Dell were receiving
the slightest exhilaration from their drinks.
But the spirit of revelry was ever higher. These men were on a holiday,
they had left their business cares a thousand miles to the north, mostly
they were tried companions. None of us was aware of the passing of time.
I saw at once that my presence was not objectionable to the party, so I
lingered long after the purpose for which I had been brought among them
had been fulfilled--purely for the sake of entertainment. I had never
seen a frolic of millionaires before, and needless to say I enjoyed
every moment of it.
In the later hours of night the revellers ranged further over the house.
Joe Nopp was in the billiard room exhibiting fancy shots and pretending
to receive the plaudits of a great multitude; Pescini and Van Hope were
in conversation on the veranda, and Fargo was wholly absent and
unaccounted for. I had missed Marten, the financier, for a moment; but
his reappearance was the signal for a fresh rush to the living-room.
The whole party met him with a yell. In the few moments of his absence
he had wrought a startling change in his appearance. Over his shoulders
he had thrown a gayly colored Indian blanket, completely hiding his trim
dinner coat. He had tied a red cloth over his head and waxed the points
of his iron-gray mustache until they stood stiff and erect, giving an
appearance of mock ferocity to his face. A silver key-ring and his own
gold signet dangled from his ears, tied on with invisible black thread.
And to cap the climax he carried a long, wicked-looking carving-knife
between his teeth.
Of course he was Godfrey Jason himself--the same character I had
portrayed in the invitations. Fargo made him do a Spanish dance to the
clang of an invisible tambourine.
Some of the gathering scattered out again, after his dramatic
appearance, drifting off on various enterprises and as the hour neared
midnight only four of us were left in the drawing-room. Marten stood in
the center, still in his ridiculous costume. Van Hope, Nealman, Pescini
and myself were grouped about him. And it might have been that in the
song that followed Pescini too slipped away. I know that I didn't see
him immediately thereafter.
With a little urging Marten was induced to sing Samuel Hall--a stirring
old ballad that quite fitted his costume. He had a pleasant baritone, he
sung the song with indescribable spirit and enthusiasm, and it was
decidedly worth hearing. Indeed it was the very peak of the evening--a
moment that to the assembled guests must have almost paid them for the
long journey.
"_For I shot a man in bed, man in bed--
For I shot a man in bed, and I left him there for dead,
With a bullet through his head--
Damn your eyes!_"
But the song halted abruptly. Whether he was at the middle of the verse,
a pause after a stanza, or even in the middle of a chord I do not know.
On this point no one will ever have exact knowledge. Marten stopped
singing because something screamed, shrilly and horribly, out toward the
lagoon.
The picture that followed is like a photograph, printed indelibly on my
mind. Marten paused, his lips half open, a strange, blank look of
amazement on his face. Nealman stared at me like a witless man, but I
saw by his look that he was groping for an explanation. Van Hope stood
peculiarly braced, his heavy hands open, beads of perspiration on his
temples. Whether Pescini was still with us I do not know. I tried to
remember later, but without ever coming to a conclusion. He had been
standing behind me, at first, so I couldn't have seen him anyway. I
believed, however, without knowing why, that he walked into the hall at
the beginning of the song.
The sound we had heard, so sharp and clear out of the night, so
penetrating above the mock-ferocious words of the song, was utterly
beyond the ken of all of us. It was a living voice; beyond that no
definite analysis could be made. Sounds do not imprint themselves so
deeply upon the memory as do visual images, yet the remembrance of it,
in all its overtones and gradations, is still inordinately vivid; and I
have no doubt but that such is the case with every man that heard it.
It was a high, rather sharp, full-lunged utterance, not in the least
subdued. It had the unrestrained, unguarded tone of an instinctive
utterance, rather than a conscious one--a cry that leaped to the lips in
some great extremity or crisis. Yet it went further. Every man of us
that heard it felt instinctively that its tone was of fear and agony
unimagined, beyond the pale of our ordered lives.
"My God, what's that?" Van Hope asked. Van Hope was the type of man that
yields quickly to his impulses.
None of us answered him for a moment. Then Nealman turned, rather
slowly. "It sounded like the devil, didn't it?" he said. "But it likely
wasn't anything. I've heard some devilish cries in the couple of weeks
I've been here--bitterns and owls and things like that. Might have been
a panther in the woods."
Marten smiled slowly, rather contemptuously. "You'll have to do better
than that, Nealman. That wasn't a panther. Also--it wasn't an owl. We'd
better investigate."
"Yes--I think we had better. But you don't know what hellish sounds some
of these swamp-creatures can make. We'll all be laughing in a minute."
His tone was rather ragged, for all his reassuring words, and we knew he
was as shaken as the rest of us. A door opened into the hall--evidently
some of the other guests were already seeking the explanation of that
fearful sound.
It seemed to all of us that hardly an instant had elapsed since the
sound. Indeed it still rang in our ears. All that had been said had
scarcely taken a breath. We rushed out, seemingly at once, into the
velvet darkness. The moon was incredibly vivid in the sky.
We passed into a rose-garden, under great, arching trees, and now we
could see the silver glint of the moon on the lagoon. The tide was
going out and the waters lay like glass.
Through the rifts in the trees we could see further--the stretching
sands, gray in the moonlight, the blue-black mysterious seas beyond.
What forms the crags took, in that eerie light! There was little of
reality left about them.
We heard some one pushing through the shrubbery ahead of us, and he
stopped for us to come up. I recognized the dark beard and mustache of
Pescini. "What was it?" he asked. Excitement had brought out a
deep-buried accent, native to some South European land. "Was it further
on?"
"I think so," Nealman answered. "Down by the lagoon."
He joined us, and we pushed on, but we spread out as we neared the shore
of the lagoon. Some one's shadow whipped by me, and I turned to find
Major Dell.
The man was severely shaken. "My God, wasn't that awful!" he exclaimed.
"Who is it--you, Killdare?" He stared into my face, and his own looked
white and masque-like in the moonlight. Then all of us began to search,
up and down the shore of the lagoon.
In the moonlight our shadows leaped, met one another, blended and raced
away; and our voices rang strangely as we called back and forth. But
the search was not long. Van Hope suddenly exclaimed sharply--an audible
inhalation of breath, rather than an oath--and we saw him bending over,
only his head and shoulders revealed in the moonlight. He stood just
beside the craggy margin of the lagoon.
"What is it?" some one asked him, out of the gloom.
"Come here and see," Van Hope replied--rather quietly, I thought. In a
moment we had formed a little circle.
A dead man lay at our feet, mostly obscured in the shadow of the crags
of the lagoon. We simply stood in silence, looking down. We knew that he
was dead just as surely as we knew that we ourselves were living men. It
was not that the light was good; that there was scarcely any light at
all. We knew it, I suppose, from the huddled position of his form.
Joe Nopp scratched a match. He held it perfectly steadily. The first
thing it showed to me was a gray face and gray hair, and a stain that
was not gray, but rather ominously dark, on the torn, white front of the
man's evening shirt. Nealman peered closely.
"It's my butler, Florey," he said.