Just before the dinner hour I met Slatterly on the lower floor, and we
had a moment's talk together. "You've been in on most everything that's
happened around here," he said. "You might as well be with us to-night.
We're going to watch the lagoon."
The truth was I had made other plans for this evening--plans that
included Edith Nealman--so I made no immediate answer. The official
noticed my hesitancy, and of course misunderstood.
"Speak right up, if you don't want to do it," he said, not unkindly. The
sheriff was a man of human sympathies, after all. "I wouldn't hold it
against any man living if he didn't want to sit out there in the dark
watching--after what's happened the last three nights. I don't know that
I'd do it myself if it wasn't in line of duty."
"I don't think I'd be afraid," I told him.
"It isn't a question of being afraid. It's simply a matter of human
make-up. To tell the truth, I'm afraid myself--and I'm not ashamed of
it. More than once I've had to conquer fear in my work. A man who ain't
afraid, one time or another, hasn't any imagination. Some men are cold
as ice, I've had deputies that were--and they wouldn't mind this a bit.
I know, Killdare, that you'd come in a pinch. Any man here, I think--any
white man--would be down there with me to-night if something vital--some
one's life or something--depended on it. But I don't want to take any
one that it will be hard for, that--that is any one to whom it would be
a real ordeal. I'm picking my bunch with some care."
"Who is going?"
"Weldon, Nopp, you and myself--if you want to come. If not, don't mind
saying so."
"I want to come!" We smiled at each other, in the hall. After all, no
other decision could be made. The high plans I had made for an evening
with Edith would have to be given over. In the first place the night
might solve the mystery into which I had been drawn. In the second it
was the kind of offer that most men, over the earth, find it impossible
to refuse. Human beings, as a whole, are not particularly brave. They
are still too close to the caves and the witch-doctors of the young
world. They are inordinately, incredibly shy, also, and like little
children, sometimes, in their dreads and superstitions. Yet through some
blessing they have a high-born capacity to conquer the fear that
emburdens them.
No white man in the manor house would have refused Slatterly's offer.
Mostly, when men see that they are up against a certain hard deal, some
proposition that stirs the deep-buried, inherent instinct that is
nothing more or less than a sense of duty--that deep-lying sense of
obligation that makes the whole world beautiful and justifiable--they
simply stand up and face it. No normal young man likes war. Yet they all
go. And of course this work to-night promised excitement--and the love
of excitement is a siren that has drawn many a good man to his doom.
"Good," the sheriff told me simply, not in the least surprised. "What
kind of a gun can you scare up?"
"I can get a gun, all right. I've got a pistol of my own."
Nopp came up then, and he and the sheriff exchanged significant glances.
And the northern man suddenly turned to me, about to speak.
Until that instant I hadn't observed the record that the events of the
past three nights had written in his face. Nopp had nerves of steel;
but the house and its mystery had got to him, just the same. The sunset
rays slanted in over the veranda, poured through the big windows, and
showed his face in startling detail. The inroads that had been made upon
it struck me with a sudden sense of shock.
The man looked older. The lines of his face seemed more deeply graven,
the flesh-sacks were swollen under his eyes, he was some way shaken and
haggard. Yet you didn't get the idea of impotence. The hands at his side
had a man's grasp in them. Nopp was still able to handle most of the
problems that confronted him.
Slatterly, too, had not escaped unscathed. The danger and his own
failure to solve the mystery had killed some of the man's conceit, and
he was more tolerant and sympathetic. There was a peculiar, excited
sparkle in his eyes, too.
Slatterly turned to Nopp. "He says he's got a pistol."
The second that ensued had an unmistakable quality of drama. Nopp turned
to me, exhaling heavily. "Killdare, we've beat the devil around the
stump all along--and it's time to stop," he said. "I don't like to talk
like a crazy man, but we've got to look this infernal matter in the
face. When you come out to-night come armed with the biggest gun you can
find--a high-powered rifle."
No man argued with another, at a time like this. "I don't know where I
can get a rifle," I told him.
"Every man in the house has got some kind or another. I'm going to be
frank and tell you what I'm carrying--a big .405, the biggest
quick-shooting arm I could get hold of. Whatever comes to-night--we've
got to stop."
We gathered again at the big mahogany table, dined quietly, and the four
of us excused ourselves just before dessert. The twilight was already
falling--like gray shadows of wings over land and sea--and we wanted to
be at our post. We didn't desire that the peril of the lagoon should
strike in our absence. And we left a more hopeful spirit among the other
occupants of the manor house.
They were all glad that armed men would guard the lagoon shore that
night. I suppose it gave them some sense of security otherwise not
known. The four of us procured our rifles, and walked, a grim company,
down to the shore of the lagoon.
"We want to guard as much of the shore line as we can, and still keep
each other in sight," Slatterly said. "And there's no getting away from
it that we want to be in easy rifle range of each other."
He posted us at fifty-yard intervals along the craggy margin. I was
placed near the approach of the rock wall, overlooking a wide stretch of
the shore, Weldon's post was fifty yards above mine, the sheriff's next,
and Nopp's most distant of all. Then we were left to watch the tides and
the night and the stars probing through the darkening mantle of the sky.
We had no definite orders. We were simply to watch, to fire at will in
case of an emergency, to guard the occupants of the manor house against
any danger that might emerge from the depths of the lagoon. The tide, at
the lowest ebb at the hour of our arrival, began soon to flow again. The
glassy surface was fretted by the beat and crash of oncoming waves
against the rocky barrier. We saw the little rivulets splash through;
the water's edge crept slowly up the craggy shore. The dusk deepened,
and soon it was deep night.
We were none too close together. I could barely make out the tall figure
of Weldon, standing statuesque on a great, gray crag beside the lagoon.
His figure was so dim that it was hard to believe in its reality, the
gun at his shoulder was but a fine penciled line, and with the growing
darkness, it was hard to make him out at all. Soon it took a certain
measure of imagination to conceive of that darker spot in the mist of
darkness as the form of a fellow man.
The sense of isolation increased. We heard no sound from each other, but
the night itself was full of little, hushed noises. From my camp fire
beside Manatee Marsh I had often heard the same sounds, but they were
more compelling now, they held the attention with unswerving constancy,
and they seemed to penetrate further into the spirit. Also I found it
harder to identify them--at least to believe steadfastly the
identifications that I made.
We hadn't heard a beginning of the sounds when we had listened from the
verandas. They had been muffled there, dim and hushed, but here they
seemed to speak just in your ear. Sea-birds called and shrieked, owls
uttered their mournful complaints, brush cracked and rustled as little,
eager-eyed furry things crept through. Once I started and the gun leaped
upward in my arms as some great sea-fish, likely a tarpon, leaped and
splashed just beyond the rock wall.
"What is it, Killdare?" Weldon called. His voice was sharp and urgent.
"Some fish jumped, that was all," I answered. And again the silence
dropped down.
The tide-waves burst with ever-increasing fury. The stars were ever
brighter, and their companies ever larger, in the deep, violet spaces of
the sky. The hours passed. The lights in the great colonial house behind
us winked out, one by one.
There was no consolation in glancing at my watch. It served to make the
time pass more slowly. The hour drew to midnight, after a hundred years
or so of waiting; the night had passed its apex and had begun its swift
descent to dawn. And all at once the thickets rustled and stirred behind
me.
No man can be blamed for whipping about, startled in the last, little
nerve, in such a moment as this. Some one was hastening down to the
shore of the lagoon--some one that walked lightly, yet with eagerness. I
could even hear the long, wet grass lashing against her ankles.
"Who is it?" I asked quietly.
"Edith," some one answered from the gloom.
Many important things in life are forgotten, and small ones kept; and my
memory will harbor always the sound of that girlish voice, so clear and
full in the darkness. Though she spoke softly her whole self was
reflected in the tone. It was sweet, tender, perhaps even a little
startled and fearful. In a moment she was at my side.
"What do you mean by coming here alone?" I demanded.
"The phone rang--in the upper corridor," she told me almost
breathlessly. "The negroes were afraid to answer it. I went--and it was
a telegram for you. I thought I'd better bring it--it was only two
hundred yards, and four men here. You're not angry, are you?"
No man could be angry at such a time; and she handed me a written copy
of the message she had received over the wire. I scratched a match, saw
her pretty, sober face in its light and read:
Am sending picture of George Florey, brother of murdered
man. Watch him closely. Am writing.
It wasn't an urgent message. The picture would have reached me, just the
same, and I had every intention of watching closely the man I believed
was the dead butler's brother. Yet I was glad enough she had seen fit
to bring it to me. We would have our moment together, after all.
What was said beside that craggy, mysterious margin, what words were all
but obscured by the sound of the tide-waves breaking against the natural
wall of rock, what oaths were given, and what breathless, incredible
happiness came upon us as if from the far stars, has little part in the
working out of the mystery of Kastle Krags. Certain moments passed,
indescribably fleet, and certain age-old miracles were reenacted. Life
doesn't yield many such moments. But then--not many are needed to pay
for life.
After a while we told each other good-night, and I scratched a match to
look again into her face. Some way, I had expected the miraculous
softening of every tender line and the unspeakable luster in her blue
eyes that the flaring light revealed. They were merely part of the night
and its magic, and the joy I had in the sight was incomparable with any
other earthly thing. But what surprised me was a curious look of
intentness and determination, almost a zealot's enthusiasm in her face,
that the match-light showed and the darkness concealed again.
She went away, as quietly as she had come. Whether Weldon had seen her I
did not know. There was something else I didn't know, either, and the
thought of it was a delight through all the long hours of my watch.
Edith Nealman had worlds of common sense. I wondered how she had been
able to convince herself that the message was of such importance that
she needs must carry it through the darkness of the gardens to me at
once.