Nealman did not come down to dinner. He sent his apologies to the
guests, pleading a headache, and through some mayhap of circumstance the
coroner took his place at the head of the great, red-mahogany table.
There was a grim symbolism in the thing. No one mentioned it, not one of
those aristocratic sportsmen were calloused enough to jest about it, but
we all felt it in the secret places of our souls.
The session at Kastle Krags was no longer one of revelry. I could fancy
the wit, the repartee, the gaiety and laughter that had reigned over the
board the evening previous; but Nealman's guests were a sober group
to-night. At the unspoken dictates of good taste no man talked of last
night's tragedy. Rather the men talked quietly to one another or else
sat in silence. A burly negro, rigged out in a dinner coat of ancient
vintage, helped with the serving in Florey's place.
After dinner I halted the sheriff in the hall, and we had a single
moment of conversation. "Slatterly," I said, "I want you to give me some
authority."
"You do, eh?" He paused, studying my face. "What do you want to do?"
"I want your permission--to go about this house and grounds where and
when I want to--and no complications in case I am caught at it. Maybe
even go into some of the private rooms and effects of the guests. I want
to follow up some ideas that I have in mind."
"And when do you want to do it?"
"Any time the opportunity offers. I'm not going to do anything
indiscreet. I won't get in your way. But I'm deeply interested in this
thing, I've had scientific training, and I want to see if I can't do
some good."
His eyes swept once from my shoes to my head. "From amateur detectives,
as a rule--Good Lord deliver us," he said with quiet good humor. "But
Killdare--I don't see why you shouldn't. Two heads are better than
one--and I don't seem to be getting anywhere. Really, the more
intelligent help we can get--from people we can co-operate with, of
course--the better."
"I'm free, then, to go ahead?"
"Of course with reasonable limits. But ask my advice before you make any
accusations--or do anything rash."
By previous arrangement Mrs. Gentry, the housekeeper, was waiting for
me on the upper floor. There could be no better chance to search the
guests' rooms. All of the men were on the lower floor, smoking their
after-dinner cigars and talking in little groups in the lounging-room
and the veranda. Of course Nealman was in his room, but even had he been
absent, a decent sense of restraint would have kept me from his
threshold. And of course Marten and Van Hope had established perfect
alibis at the inquest.
We entered Fargo's room first. It was cluttered with his bags, his guns
and rods, but the thing I was seeking did not reveal itself. I looked in
the inner pockets of his coat, in the drawers of his desk, even in the
waste-paper basket without result. Such personal documents as Fargo had
with him were evidently on his person at that moment.
Nopp's room was next, but I was less than twenty seconds across his
threshold. He had been writing a letter, it lay open on his desk, and I
needed to glance but once at the script. If my theory was right Nopp
could be permanently dropped from the list of suspects of Florey's
murder.
But the next room yielded a clew of seemingly inestimable importance.
After the drawers had been opened and searched, and the desk examined
with minute care, I searched the inner pocket of a white linen coat that
the occupant of the room had worn at the time of his arrival. In it I
found a letter, addressed to some New York firm, sealed, stamped, and
ready to send.
How familiar was the bold, free hand in which the address was written!
Not a little excited, I compared it with the script of the "George"
letter I had taken from Florey's room. As far as my inexperienced eye
could tell the handwriting was identical.
The room was that of Lucius Pescini. If I had not been mistaken in the
handwriting, I had proven a previous relationship and acquaintance,
extending practically over the whole lifetime of both men, between the
distinguished, bearded man that came as Nealman's guest and the gray
butler who had died on the lagoon shore the previous night.
I put the letter back in the man's coat-pocket; then joined Mrs. Gentry
in the hall. She went to her own room. I turned down the broad stairs to
the hall. And the question before me now was whether to report my
discovery to the officials of the law.
I had started down the stairs with the intention of telling them all I
knew. By the time I had reached the hall I had begun to have serious
doubts as to the wisdom of such a course. After all I had learned
nothing conclusive. Handwriting evidence is at best uncertain; even
experts have made mistakes in comparing signatures. In this regard it
was quite different from finger-prints--those tell-tale stains that
never lie. True, the handwriting looked identical to the naked eye, but
a microscope might prove it entirely dissimilar. Was I to cast suspicion
on a distinguished man on such fragile and uncertain grounds?
Pescini had been in the lounging-room only a few minutes before the
crime was committed. It seemed doubtful that he would have had time to
cover the distance between the house and the lagoon, strike Florey low,
and get back to the place where we met him in the short time of his
absence.
Besides, I wanted to work alone. I couldn't bring myself to share my
discoveries with Slatterly and Weldon.
The hall below was deserted and half in darkness. I met Marten and Nopp
on the way to their rooms: passing into the library I found Hal Fargo
seated under a reading-lamp, deep in "Floridan fauna." Major Dell was
smoking quietly on the veranda, gazing out over the moonlit lawns. Van
Hope and Pescini himself were seated at the far end of the
lounging-room, evidently in earnest conversation.
I sat down across the room where from time to time I could glance up and
observe the bearded face of my suspect. How animated he was, how
effective the gestures of his firm, strong hands. Was that the hand I
had seen in the flashlight over my table the preceding night? He had
rather thin, esthetic lips, half concealed by his mustache. Yet it
wasn't a cruel or degenerate face.
But soon I forgot about Pescini to marvel at the growing, oppressive
heat of the night. The chill that usually drops over the West coast in
the first hours of darkness, did not manifest itself to-night. It was
the kind of heat that brings a flush to the face and a ghastly crawling
to the brain, swelling the neck glands until the linen collar chokes
like strangling fingers, and heightens the temper clear to the
explosion-point. Van Hope and Pescini tore at their collars, seemingly
at first unaware as to the source of their discomfort.
In reality the heat wave had overspread us rather swiftly, and what was
its source and by what shiftings of the air currents it had been sent
to harry us was mostly beyond the wit of man to tell. The temperature
must have been close to a hundred in that big, coolly furnished room,
and the veranda outside seemed to offer no relief. The dim warmth from
the electric lights above, added to the sweltering heat of the air, was
wholly perceptible on the heated brain, and seemed to stretch the
over-taut nerves to the breaking-point.
"Isn't this the devil?" Van Hope exclaimed as I came out. "It wasn't
half so hot at sunset. For Heaven's sake let's have a drink."
"Whiskey'd only make us hotter, would it not?"
"The English don't think so--but they're full of weird ideas. Have that
big coon bring us some lemonade then--iced tea--anything. This is the
kind of night that sets men crazy."
Men who have spent July in India, when the humidity is on the land,
could appreciate such heat, but it passed ordinary understanding. It
harassed the brain and fevered the blood, and warned us all of lawless
demons that lived just under our skins. A man wouldn't be responsible,
to-night. The devil inside of him, recognizing a familiar temperature,
escaped his bonds and stood ready to take any advantage of openings.
It was a curious thing that there was no perceptible wind over the
lagoon. Perhaps the reason was that we invariably associate wind with
coolness, rather than any sort of a hushed movement of the air--and the
impulse that brushed up on the veranda to us was as warm as a child's
breath on the face. There was simply no whisper of sound on shore or sea
or forest. The curlews were stilled, the wild creatures were likely
lying motionless, trying to escape the heat, the little rustlings and
murmurings of stirring vegetation was gone from the gardens. But that
first silence, remarkable enough, seemed to deepen as we waited.
There is a point, in temperature, that seems the utter limit of cold.
Mushers along certain trails in the North had known that point--when
there seems simply no heat left in the bitter, crackling, biting air.
The temperature, at such times, registers forty--fifty--sixty below. Yet
the scientist, in his laboratory, with his liquid hydrogen vaporizing in
a vacuum, can show that this temperature is not the beginning of the
fearful scale of cold. To-night it was the same way with the silence.
There simply seemed no sound left. But as we waited the silence grew and
swelled until the brain ceased to believe the senses and the image of
reality was gone. It gave you the impression of being fast asleep and
in a dream that might easily turn to death.
The mind kept dwelling on death. It was a great deal more plausible than
life. The image of life was gone from that bleak manor house by the
sea--the sea was dead, the air, all the elements by which men view their
lives. The forest, lost in its silence, its most whispered voices
stilled, was a dead forest, incomprehensible as living.
I went upstairs soon after. I thought it might be cooler there.
Sometimes, if you go a few feet off the ground, you find it XXXX
cooler--quite in opposition to the fact that hot air rises. There was no
appreciable difference, however; but here, at least, I could take off my
outer clothes. Then I got into a dressing-gown and slippers and waited,
with a breathlessness and impatience not quite healthy and normal, for
the late night sea breeze to spring up.
Seemingly it had been delayed. The hour was past eleven, the sweltering
heat still remained. There was no way under Heaven to pass the time. One
couldn't read, for the reason that the mental effort of following the
lines of type was incomprehensibly fatiguing. I had neither the energy
nor the interest to work upon the cryptogram--that baffling column of
four-lettered words. Yet the brain was inordinately active. Ungoverned
thought swept through it in ordered trains, in sudden, lunging waves,
and in swirling eddies. Yet the thoughts were not clean-cut, wholly
true--they overlapped with the bizarre and elfin impulses of the fancy,
and the fine edge of discrimination between reality and dreams was some
way dulled. It wasn't easy to hold the brain in perfect bondage.
To that fact alone I try to ascribe the curious flood of thoughts that
swept me in those midnight hours. Except for the heat, perhaps in a
measure for the silence, I wouldn't have known them at all. I got to
thinking about last night's crime, and I couldn't get it out of mind.
The conceptions I had formed of it, the theories and decisions, seemed
less and less convincing as I sat overlooking those shadowed, silent
grounds. So much depends on the point of view. Ordinarily, our will
gives us strength to believe wholly what we want to believe and nothing
else. But the powers of the will were unstable to-night, the whole seat
of being was shaken, and my fine theories in regard to Pescini seemed to
lack the stuff of truth. I suppose every man present provided some
satisfactory theory to fit the facts, for no other reason than that we
didn't want to change our conception of Things as They Are. Such a
course was essential to our own self-comfort and security. But my
Pescini theory seemed far-fetched. In that silence and that heat,
anything could be true at Kastle Krags!
From this point my mind led logically to the most disquieting and
fearful thing of all. What was to prevent last night's crime from
recurring?
It isn't hard to see the basis for such a thought. Some way, in these
last, stifling, almost maddening hours, it had become difficult to rely
implicitly on our rational interpretation of things. Certain things are
credible to the every-day man in the every-day mood--things such as
aeronautics and wireless, that to a savage mind would seem a thousand
times more incredible than mere witchcraft and magic--and certain things
simply can not and will not be believed. Society itself, our laws, our
customs, our basic attitude towards life depends on a fine balance of
what is credible and what is not, an imperious disbelief in any
manifestation out of the common run of things. It is altogether good for
society when this can be so. Men can not rise up from savagery until it
is so. As long as black magic and witchcraft haunt the souls of men,
there is nothing to trust, nothing to hold to or build towards, nothing
permanent or infallible on which to rely, and hope can not escape from
fear, and there is no promise that to-day's work will stand till
to-morrow. Men are far happier when they may master their own beliefs.
There is nothing so destructive to happiness, so favorable to the
dominion of Fear, as an indiscriminate credulity. Those African
explorers who have seen the curse of fear in the Congo tribes need not
be told this fact.
But to-night this fine scorn of the supernatural and the bizarre was
some way gone from my being. It wasn't so easy to reject them now. Those
hide-and-seek, half-glimpsed, eerie phantasies that are hidden deep in
every man's subconscious mind were in the ascendancy to-night. They had
been implanted in the germ-plasm a thousand thousand generations gone,
they were a dim and mystic heritage from the childhood days of the race,
the fear and the dreads and horrors of those dark forests of countless
thousands of years ago, and they still lie like a shadow over the
fear-cursed minds of some of the more savage peoples. Civilization has
mostly got away from them, it has strengthened itself steadily against
them, building with the high aim of wholly escaping from them, yet no
man in this childlike world is wholly unknown to them. The blind,
ghastly fear of the darkness, of the unknown, of the whispering voice or
the rustling of garments of one who returns from beyond the void is an
experience few human beings can deny.
The cold logic with which I looked on life was in some way shaken and
uncertain. The fanciful side of myself crept in and influenced all my
thought-processes. It was no longer possible to accept, with implicit
faith, that last night's crime was merely the expression of ordinary,
familiar moods and human passions, that it would all work out according
to the accepted scheme of things. Indeed the crime seemed no longer
_human_ at all. Rather it seemed just some deadly outgrowth of these
weird sands beside the mysterious lagoon.
The crime had seemed a thing of human origin before, to be judged by
human standards, but now it had become associated, in my mind, with
inanimate sand and water. It was as if we had beheld the sinister
expression of some inherent quality in the place itself rather than the
men who had gathered there. It was hard to believe, now, that Florey had
been a mere actor in some human drama that in the end had led to murder.
He had been little and gray and obscure, seemingly apart from human
drama as the mountains are apart from the sea, and it was easier to
believe that he had been merely the unsuspecting victim of some outer
peril that none of us knew. Slain, with a ragged, downward cut through
the breast--and his body dragged into the lagoon!
What was to prevent the same thing from happening again? Before the
week was done other of the occupants of that house might find themselves
walking in the gardens at night, down by the craggy shore of the
lagoon! Nealman, others of the servants, any one of the guests--Edith
herself--wouldn't circumstance, sooner or later, take them into the
shadow of that curse? Who could tell but that the whole thing might be
reenacted before this dreadful, sweltering night was done!
The occupants of the house wouldn't be able to sleep to-night. Some of
them would go walking in the gardens, rambling further down the
beguiling garden paths that would take them at last to that craggy
margin of the inlet. Some of them might want a cool glimpse of the
lagoon itself. Would we hear that sharp, agonized, fearful scream again
streaming through the windows, gripping the heart and freezing the
blood in the veins? Any hour--any moment--such a thing might occur.
But at that point I managed a barren and mirthless laugh. I was letting
childlike fancies carry me away--and I had simply tried to laugh them to
scorn. Surely I need not yield to such a mood as this, to let the
sweltering heat and the silence change me into a superstitious savage.
The thing to do was to move away from the window and direct my thought
in other channels. Yet I knew, as I argued with myself, that I was
curiously breathless and inwardly shaken. But these were nothing in
comparison with the fact that I was some way _expectant_, too, with a
dreadful expectancy beyond the power of naming.
Then my laugh was cut short. And I don't know what half-strangled
utterance, what gagging expression of horror or regret or fulfilled
dread took its place on my lips as a distinct scream for help, agonized
and fearful, came suddenly, ripped through the darkness from the
direction of the lagoon.