IX

The following day was Monday. When I came downstairs I found a neat

bundle lying in the hall, and addressed to me. My wife had followed me

down, and we surveyed it together.

I had a curious feeling about the parcel, and was for cutting the cord

with my knife. But my wife is careful about string. She has always

fancied that the time would come when we would need some badly, and it

would not be around. I have an entire drawer of my chiffonier, which I

really need for other uses, filled with bundles of twine, pink, white

and brown. I recall, on one occasion, packing a suit-case in the dusk,

in great hasty, and emptying the drawer containing my undergarments into

it, to discover, when I opened it on the train for my pajamas, nothing

but rolls of cord and several packages of Christmas ribbons. So I was

obliged to wait until she had untied the knots by means of a hairpin.

It was my overcoat! My overcoat, apparently uninjured, but with the

collection of keys I had made missing.

The address was printed, not written, in a large, strong hand, with

a stub pen. I did not, at the time, notice the loss of certain papers

which had been in the breast pocket. I am rather absent-minded, and it

was not until the night after the third sitting that they were recalled

to my mind.

At something after eleven Herbert Robinson called me up at my office.

He was at Sperry’s house, Sperry having been his physician during his

recent illness.

“I say, Horace, this is Herbert.”

“Yes. How are you?”

“Doing well, Sperry says. I’m at his place now. I’m speaking for him.

He’s got a patient.”

“Yes.”

“You were here last night, he says.” Herbert has a circumlocutory manner

over the phone which irritates me. He begins slowly and does not know

how to stop. Talk with him drags on endlessly.

“Well, I admit it,” I snapped. “It’s not a secret.”

He lowered his voice. “Do you happen to have noticed a walking-stick in

the library when you were here?”

“Which walking-stick?”

“You know. The one we--”

“Yes. I saw it.”

“You didn’t, by any chance, take it home with you?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certainly I’m sure.”

“You are an absent-minded beggar, you know,” he explained. “You remember

about the fire-tongs. And a stick is like an umbrella. One is likely to

pick it up and--”

“One is not likely to do anything of the sort. At least, I didn’t.”

“Oh, all right. Every one well?”

“Very well, thanks.”

“Suppose we’ll see you tonight?”

“Not unless you ring off and let me do some work,” I said irritably.

He rang off. I was ruffled, I admit; but I was uneasy, also. To tell the

truth, the affair of the fire-tongs had cost me my self-confidence. I

called up my wife, and she said Herbert was a fool and Sperry also. But

she made an exhaustive search of the premises, without result. Whoever

had taken the stick, I was cleared. Cleared, at least, for a time. There

were strange developments coming that threatened my peace of mind.

It was that day that I discovered that I was being watched. Shadowed,

I believe is the technical word. I daresay I had been followed from my

house, but I had not noticed. When I went out to lunch a youngish man in

a dark overcoat was waiting for the elevator, and I saw him again when I

came out of my house. We went downtown again on the same car.

Perhaps I would have thought nothing of it, had I not been summoned to

the suburbs on a piece of business concerning a mortgage. He was at the

far end of the platform as I took the train to return to the city, with

his back to me. I lost him in the crowd at the downtown station, but he

evidently had not lost me, for, stopping to buy a newspaper, I turned,

and, as my pause had evidently been unexpected, he almost ran into me.

With that tendency of any man who finds himself under suspicion to

search his past for some dereliction, possibly forgotten, I puzzled over

the situation for some time that afternoon. I did not connect it with

the Wells case, for in that matter I was indisputably the hunter, not

the hunted.

Although I found no explanation for the matter, I did not tell my wife

that evening. Women are strange and she would, I feared, immediately

jump to the conclusion that there was something in my private life that

I was keeping from her.

Almost all women, I have found, although not over-conscious themselves

of the charm and attraction of their husbands, are of the conviction

that these husbands exert a dangerous fascination over other women, and

that this charm, which does not reveal itself in the home circle, is

used abroad with occasionally disastrous effect.

My preoccupation, however, did not escape my wife, and she commented on

it at dinner.

“You are generally dull, Horace,” she said, “but tonight you are

deadly.”

After dinner I went into our reception room, which is not lighted unless

we are expecting guests, and peered out of the window. The detective, or

whoever he might be, was walking negligently up the street.

As that was the night of the third seance, I find that my record covers

the fact that Mrs. Dane was housecleaning, for which reason we had not

been asked to dinner, that my wife and I dined early, at six-thirty, and

that it was seven o’clock when Sperry called me by telephone.

“Can you come to my office at once?” he asked. “I dare say Mrs. Johnson

won’t mind going to the Dane house alone.”

“Is there anything new?”

“No. But I want to get into the Wells house again. Bring the keys.”

“They were in the overcoat. It came back today, but the keys are

missing.”

“Did you lock the back door?”

“I don’t remember. No, of course not. I didn’t have the keys.”

“Then there’s a chance,” he observed, after a moment’s pause. “Anyhow,

it’s worth trying. Herbert told you about the stick?”

“Yes. I never had it, Sperry.”

Fortunately, during this conversation my wife was upstairs dressing.

I knew quite well that she would violently oppose a second visit on my

part to the deserted house down the street. I therefore left a message

for her that I had gone on, and, finding the street clear, met Sperry at

his door-step.

“This is the last sitting, Horace,” he explained, “and I feel we ought

to have the most complete possible knowledge, beforehand. We will be

in a better position to understand what comes. There are two or three

things we haven’t checked up on.”

He slipped an arm through mine, and we started down the street. “I’m

going to get to the bottom of this, Horace, old dear,” he said.

“Remember, we’re pledged to a psychic investigation only.”

“Rats!” he said rudely. “We are going to find out who killed Arthur

Wells, and if he deserves hanging we’ll hang him.”

“Or her?”

“It wasn’t Elinor Wells,” he said positively. “Here’s the point: if he’s

been afraid to go back for his overcoat it’s still there. I don’t expect

that, however. But the thing about the curtain interests me. I’ve been

reading over my copy of the notes on the sittings. It was said, you

remember, that curtains--some curtains--would have been better places

to hide the letters than the bag.”

I stopped suddenly. “By Jove, Sperry,” I said. “I remember now. My notes

of the sittings were in my overcoat.”

“And they are gone?”

“They are gone.”

He whistled softly. “That’s unfortunate,” he said. “Then the other

person, whoever he is, knows what we know!”

He was considerably startled when I told him I had been shadowed, and

insisted that it referred directly to the case in hand. “He’s got your

notes,” he said, “and he’s got to know what your next move is going to

be.”

His intention, I found, was to examine the carpet outside of the

dressing-room door, and the floor beneath it, to discover if possible

whether Arthur Wells had fallen there and been moved.

“Because I think you are right,” he said. “He wouldn’t have been likely

to shoot himself in a hall, and because the very moving of the body

would be in itself suspicious. Then I want to look at the curtains. ‘The

curtains would have been safer.’ Safer for what? For the bag with the

letters, probably, for she followed that with the talk about Hawkins.

He’d got them, and somebody was afraid he had.”

“Just where does Hawkins come in, Sperry?” I asked.

“I’m damned if I know,” he reflected. “We may learn tonight.”

The Wells house was dark and forbidding. We walked past it once, as

an officer was making his rounds in leisurely fashion, swinging his

night-stick in circles. But on our return the street was empty, and we

turned in at the side entry.

I led the way with comparative familiarity. It was, you will remember,

my third similar excursion. With Sperry behind me I felt confident.

“In case the door is locked, I have a few skeleton keys,” said Sperry.

We had reached the end of the narrow passage, and emerged into the

square of brick and grass that lay behind the house. While the night

was clear, the place lay in comparative darkness. Sperry stumbled over

something, and muttered to himself.

The rear porch lay in deep shadow. We went up the steps together. Then

Sperry stopped, and I advanced to the doorway. It was locked.

With my hand on the door-knob, I turned to Sperry. He was struggling

violently with a dark figure, and even as I turned they went over with a

crash and rolled together down the steps. Only one of them rose.

I was terrified. I confess it. It was impossible to see whether it

was Sperry or his assailant. If it was Sperry who lay in a heap on the

ground, I felt that I was lost. I could not escape. The way was blocked,

and behind me the door, to which I now turned frantically, was a barrier

I could not move.

Then, out of the darkness behind me, came Sperry’s familiar, booming

bass. “I’ve knocked him out, I’m afraid. Got a match, Horace?”

Much shaken, I went down the steps and gave Sperry a wooden toothpick,

under the impression that it was a match. That rectified, we bent over

the figure on the bricks.

“Knocked out, for sure,” said Sperry, “but I think it’s not serious. A

watchman, I suppose. Poor devil, we’ll have to get him into the house.”

The lock gave way to manipulation at last, and the door swung open.

There came to us the heavy odor of all closed houses, a combination

of carpets, cooked food, and floor wax. My nerves, now taxed to their

utmost, fairly shrank from it, but Sperry was cool.

He bore the brunt of the weight as we carried the watchman in, holding

him with his arms dangling, helpless and rather pathetic. Sperry glanced

around.

“Into the kitchen,” he said. “We can lock him in.”

We had hardly laid him on the floor when I heard the slow stride of the

officer of the beat. He had turned into the paved alley-way, and was

advancing with measured, ponderous steps. Fortunately I am an agile man,

and thus I was able to get to the outer door, reverse the key and turn

it from the inside, before I heard him hailing the watchman.

“Hello there!” he called. “George, I say! George!”

He listened for a moment, then came up and tried the door. I crouched

inside, as guilty as the veriest house-breaker in the business. But he

had no suspicion, clearly, for he turned and went away, whistling as he

went.

Not until we heard him going down the street again, absently running his

night-stick along the fence palings, did Sperry or I move.

“A narrow squeak, that,” I said, mopping my face.

“A miss is as good as a mile,” he observed, and there was a sort of

exultation in his voice. He is a born adventurer.

He came out into the passage and quickly locked the door behind him.

“Now, friend Horace,” he said, “if you have anything but toothpicks for

matches, we will look for the overcoat, and then we will go upstairs.”

“Suppose he wakens and raises an alarm?”

“We’ll be out of luck. That’s all.”

As we had anticipated, there was no overcoat in the library, and after

listening a moment at the kitchen door, we ascended a rear staircase to

the upper floor. I had, it will be remembered, fallen from a chair on

a table in the dressing room, and had left them thus overturned when I

charged the third floor. The room, however, was now in perfect order,

and when I held my candle to the ceiling, I perceived that the bullet

hole had again been repaired, and this time with such skill that I could

not even locate it.

“We are up against some one cleverer than we are, Sperry,” I

acknowledged.

“And who has more to lose than we have to gain,” he added cheerfully.

“Don’t worry about that, Horace. You’re a married man and I’m not. If a

woman wanted to hide some letters from her husband, and chose a

curtain for a receptacle, what room would hide them in. Not in his

dressing-room, eh?”

He took the candle and led the way to Elinor Wells’s bedroom. Here,

however, the draperies were down, and we would have been at a loss, had

I not remembered my wife’s custom of folding draperies when we close the

house, and placing them under the dusting sheets which cover the various

beds.

Our inspection of the curtains was hurried, and broken by various

excursions on my part to listen for the watchman. But he remained quiet

below, and finally we found what we were looking for. In the lining of

one of the curtains, near the bottom, a long, ragged cut had been made.

“Cut in a hurry, with curved scissors,” was Sperry’s comment. “Probably

manicure scissors.”

The result was a sort of pocket in the curtain, concealed on the chintz

side, which was the side which would hang toward the room.

“Probably,” he said, “the curtain would have been better. It would have

stayed anyhow. Whereas the bag--” He was flushed with triumph. “How in

the world would Hawkins know that?” he demanded. “You can talk all you

like. She’s told us things that no one ever told her.”

Before examining the floor in the hall I went downstairs and listened

outside the kitchen door. The watchman was stirring inside the room, and

groaning occasionally. Sperry, however, when I told him, remained cool

and in his exultant mood, and I saw that he meant to vindicate Miss

Jeremy if he flung me into jail and the newspapers while doing it.

“We’ll have a go at the floors under the carpets now,” he said. “If he

gets noisy, you can go down with the fire-tongs. I understand you are an

expert with them.”

The dressing-room had a large rug, like the nursery above it, and

turning back the carpet was a simple matter. There had been a stain

beneath where the dead man’s head had lain, but it had been scrubbed and

scraped away. The boards were white for an area of a square foot or so.

Sperry eyed the spot with indifference. “Not essential,” he said. “Shows

good housekeeping. That’s all. The point is, are there other spots?”

And, after a time, we found what we were after. The upper hall was

carpeted, and my penknife came into requisition to lift the tacks. They

came up rather easily, as if but recently put in. That, indeed, proved

to be the case.

Just outside the dressing-room door the boards for an area of two square

feet or more beneath the carpet had been scraped and scrubbed. With the

lifting of the carpet came, too, a strong odor, as of ammonia. But the

stain of blood had absolutely disappeared.

Sperry, kneeling on the floor with the candle held close, examined the

wood. “Not only scrubbed,” he said, “but scraped down, probably with

a floor-scraper. It’s pretty clear, Horace. The poor devil fell here.

There was a struggle, and he went down. He lay there for a while, too,

until some plan was thought out. A man does not usually kill himself in

a hallway. It’s a sort of solitary deed. He fell here, and was dragged

into the room. The angle of the bullet in the ceiling would probably

show it came from here, too, and went through the doorway.”

We were startled at that moment by a loud banging below. Sperry leaped

to his feet and caught up his hat.

“The watchman,” he said. “We’d better get out. He’ll have all the

neighbors in at that rate.”

He was still hammering on the door as we went down the rear stairs, and

Sperry stood outside the door and to one side.

“Keep out of range, Horace,” he cautioned me. And to the watchman:

“Now, George, we will put the key under the door, and in ten minutes you

may come out. Don’t come sooner. I’ve warned you.”

By the faint light from outside I could see him stooping, not in front

of the door, but behind it. And it was well he did, for the moment

the key was on the other side, a shot zipped through one of the lower

panels. I had not expected it and it set me to shivering.

“No more of that, George,” said Sperry calmly and cheerfully. “This is a

quiet neighborhood, and we don’t like shooting. What is more, my friend

here is very expert with his own particular weapon, and at any moment he

may go to the fire-place in the library and--”

I have no idea why Sperry chose to be facetious at that time, and my

resentment rises as I record it. For when we reached the yard we heard

the officer running along the alley-way, calling as he ran.

“The fence, quick,” Sperry said.

I am not very good at fences, as a rule, but I leaped that one like a

cat, and came down in a barrel of waste-paper on the other side. Getting

me out was a breathless matter, finally accomplished by turning the

barrel over so that I could crawl out. We could hear the excited voices

of the two men beyond the fence, and we ran. I was better than Sperry at

that. I ran like a rabbit. I never even felt my legs. And Sperry pounded

on behind me.

We heard, behind us, one of the men climbing the fence. But in jumping

down he seemed to have struck the side of the overturned barrel.

Probably it rolled and threw him, for that part of my mind which was not

intent on flight heard him fall, and curse loudly.

“Go to it,” Sperry panted behind me. “Roll over and break your neck.”

This, I need hardly explain, was meant for our pursuer.

We turned a corner and were out on one of the main thoroughfares.

Instantly, so innate is cunning to the human brain, we fell to walking

sedately.

It was as well that we did, for we had not gone a half block before we

saw our policeman again, lumbering toward us and blowing a whistle as he

ran.

“Stop and get this street-car,” Sperry directed me. “And don’t breathe

so hard.”

The policeman stared at us fixedly, stopping to do so, but all he saw

was two well-dressed and professional-looking men, one of them rather

elderly who was hailing a street-car. I had the presence of mind to draw

my watch and consult it.

“Just in good time,” I said distinctly, and we mounted the car step.

Sperry remained on the platform and lighted a cigar. This gave him a

chance to look back.

“Rather narrow squeak, that,” he observed, as he came in and sat down

beside me. “Your gray hairs probably saved us.”

I was quite numb from the waist down, from my tumble and from running,

and it was some time before I could breathe quietly. Suddenly Sperry

fell to laughing.

“I wish you could have seen yourself in that barrel, and crawling out,”

he said.

We reached Mrs. Dane’s, to find that Miss Jeremy had already arrived,

looking rather pale, as I had noticed she always did before a seance.

Her color had faded, and her eyes seemed sunken in her head.

“Not ill, are you?” Sperry asked her, as he took her hand.

“Not at all. But I am anxious. I always am. These things do not come for

the calling.”

“This is the last time. You have promised.”

“Yes. The last time.”

X

It appeared that Herbert Robinson had been reading, during his

convalescence, a considerable amount of psychic literature, and that

we were to hold this third and final sitting under test conditions. As

before, the room had been stripped of furniture, and the cloth and rod

which formed the low screen behind Miss Jeremy’s chair were not of her

own providing, but Herbert’s.

He had also provided, for some reason or other, eight small glass cups,

into which he placed the legs of the two tables, and in a business-like

manner he set out on the large stand a piece of white paper, a pencil,

and a spool of black thread. It is characteristic of Miss Jeremy, and of

her own ignorance of the methods employed in professional seances, that

she was as much interested and puzzled as we were.

When he had completed his preparations, Herbert made a brief speech.

“Members of the Neighborhood Club,” he said impressively, “we have

agreed among ourselves that this is to be our last meeting for the

purpose that is before us. I have felt, therefore, that in justice to

the medium this final seance should leave us with every conviction of

its genuineness. Whatever phenomena occur, the medium must be, as

she has been, above suspicion. For the replies of her ‘control,’ no

particular precaution seems necessary, or possible. But the first seance

divided itself into two parts: an early period when, so far as we could

observe, the medium was at least partly conscious, possibly fully so,

when physical demonstrations occurred. And a second, or trance period,

during which we received replies to questions. It is for the physical

phenomena that I am about to take certain precautions.”

“Are you going to tie me?” Miss Jeremy asked.

“Do you object?”

“Not at all. But with what?”

“With silk thread,” Herbert said, smilingly.

She held out her wrists at once, but Herbert placed her in her chair,

and proceeded to wrap her, chair and all, in a strong network of fine

threads, drawn sufficiently taut to snap with any movement.

He finished by placing her feet on the sheet of paper, and outlining

their position there with a pencil line.

The proceedings were saved from absurdity by what we all felt was the

extreme gravity of the situation. There were present in the room Mrs.

Dane, the Robinsons, Sperry, my wife and myself. Clara, Mrs. Dane’s

secretary, had begged off on the plea of nervousness from the earlier

and physical portion of the seance, and was to remain outside in the

hall until the trance commenced.

Sperry objected to this, as movement in the circle during the trance

had, in the first seance, induced fretful uneasiness in the medium. But

Clara, appealed to, begged to be allowed to remain outside until she

was required, and showed such unmistakable nervousness that we finally

agreed.

“Would a slight noise disturb her?” Mrs. Dane asked.

Miss Jeremy thought not, if the circle remained unbroken, and Mrs. Dane

considered.

“Bring me my stick from the hall, Horace,” she said. “And tell Clara

I’ll rap on the floor with it when I want her.”

I found a stick in the rack outside and brought it in. The lights were

still on in the chandelier overhead, and as I gave the stick to Mrs.

Dane I heard Sperry speaking sharply behind me.

“Where did you get that stick?” he demanded.

“In the hall. I--”

“I never saw it before,” said Mrs. Dane. “Perhaps it is Herbert’s.”

But I caught Sperry’s eye. We had both recognized it. It was Arthur

Wells’s, the one which Sperry had taken from his room, and which, in

turn, had been taken from Sperry’s library.

Sperry was watching me with a sort of cynical amusement.

“You’re an absent-minded beggar, Horace,” he said.

“You didn’t, by any chance, stop here on your way back from my place the

other night, did you?”

“I did. But I didn’t bring that thing.”

“Look here, Horace,” he said, more gently, “you come in and see me some

day soon. You’re not as fit as you ought to be.”

I confess to a sort of helpless indignation that was far from the

composure the occasion required. But the others, I believe, were fully

convinced that no human agency had operated to bring the stick into Mrs.

Dane’s house, a belief that prepared them for anything that might occur.

A number of things occurred almost as soon as the lights were out,

interrupting a train of thought in which I saw myself in the first

stages of mental decay, and carrying about the streets not only

fire-tongs and walking-sticks, but other portable property belonging to

my friends.

Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium. She was uneasy

and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight. She was

distinctly fretful. But after a time she settled down in her chair.

Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room, seemed

sagged--seemed, in some indefinable way, smaller. But there was none of

the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.

Then, suddenly, a bell that Sperry had placed on the stand beyond

the black curtain commenced to ring. It rang at first gently, then

violently. It made a hideous clamor. I had a curious sense that it was

ringing up in the air, near the top of the curtain. It was a relief to

have it thrown to the ground, its racket silenced.

Quite without warning, immediately after, my chair twisted under me. “I

am being turned around,” I said, in a low tone. “It as if something has

taken hold of the back of the chair, and is twisting it. It has stopped

now.” I had been turned fully a quarter round.

For five minutes, by the luminous dial of my watch on the table before

me, nothing further occurred, except that the black curtain appeared to

swell, as in a wind.

“There is something behind it,” Alice Robinson said, in a terrorized

tone. “Something behind it, moving.”

“It is not possible,” Herbert assured her. “Nothing, that is--there is

only one door, and it is closed. I have examined the walls and floor

carefully.”

At the end of five minutes something soft and fragrant fell on to the

table near me. I had not noticed Herbert when he placed the flowers from

Mrs. Dane’s table on the stand, and I was more startled than the others.

Then the glass prisms in the chandelier over our heads clinked together,

as if they had been swept by a finger. More of the flowers came. We were

pelted with them. And into the quiet that followed there came a light,

fine but steady tattoo on the table in our midst. Then at last silence,

and the medium in deep trance, and Mrs. Dane rapping on the floor for

Clara.

When Clara came in, Mrs. Dane told her to switch on the lights. Miss

Jeremy had dropped in her chair until the silk across her chest was held

taut. But investigation showed that none of the threads were broken and

that her evening slippers still fitted into the outline on the paper

beneath them. Without getting up, Sperry reached to the stand behind

Miss Jeremy, and brought into view a piece of sculptor’s clay he had

placed there. The handle of the bell was now jammed into the mass. He

had only time to show it to us when the medium began to speak.

I find, on re-reading the earlier part of this record, that I have

omitted mention of Miss Jeremy’s “control.” So suddenly had we jumped,

that first evening, into the trail that led us to the Wells case, that

beyond the rather raucous “good-evening,” and possibly the extraneous

matter referring to Mother Goose and so on, we had been saved the usual

preliminary patter of the average control.

On this night, however, we were obliged to sit impatiently through

a rambling discourse, given in a half-belligerent manner, on the

deterioration of moral standards. Re-reading Clara’s notes, I find that

the subject matter is without originality and the diction inferior. But

the lecture ceased abruptly, and the time for questions had come.

“Now,” Herbert said, “we want you to go back to the house where you saw

the dead man on the floor. You know his name, don’t you?”

There was a pause. “Yes. Of course I do. A. L. Wells.”

Arthur had been known to most of us by his Christian name, but the

initials were correct.

“How do you know it is an L.?”

“On letters,” was the laconic answer. Then: “Letters, letters, who has

the letters?”

“Do you know whose cane this is?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell us?”

Up to that time the replies had come easily and quickly. But beginning

with the cane question, the medium was in difficulties. She moved

uneasily, and spoke irritably. The replies were slow and grudging.

Foreign subjects were introduced, as now.

“Horace’s wife certainly bullies him,” said the voice. “He’s afraid of

her. And the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs!”

“Whose cane is this?” Herbert repeated.

“Mr. Ellingham’s.”

This created a profound sensation.

“How do you know that?”

“He carried it at the seashore. He wrote in the sand with it.”

“What did he write?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“He wrote ‘ten o’clock’ in the sand, and the waves came and washed it

away?”

“Yes.”

“Horace,” said my wife, leaning forward, “why not ask her about that

stock of mine? If it is going down, I ought to sell, oughtn’t I?”

Herbert eyed her with some exasperation.

“We are here to make a serious investigation,” he said. “If the members

of the club will keep their attention on what we are doing, we may get

somewhere. Now,” to the medium, “the man is dead, and the revolver is

beside him. Did he kill himself?”

“No. He attacked her when he found the letters.”

“And she shot him?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Try very hard. It is important.”

“I don’t know,” was the fretful reply. “She may have. She hated him. I

don’t know. She says she did.”

“She says she killed him?”

But there was no reply to this, although Herbert repeated it several

times.

Instead, the voice of the “control” began to recite a verse of

poetry--a cheap, sentimental bit of trash. It was maddening, under the

circumstances.

“Do you know where the letters are?”

“Hawkins has them.”

“They were not hidden in the curtain?” This was Sperry.

“No. The police might have searched the room.”

“Where were these letters?”

There was no direct reply to this, but instead:

“He found them when he was looking for his razorstrop. They were in the

top of a closet. His revolver was there, too. He went back and got it.

It was terrible.”

There was a profound silence, followed by a slight exclamation from

Sperry as he leaped to his feet. The screen at the end of the room,

which cut off the light from Clara’s candle, was toppling. The next

instant it fell, and we saw Clara sprawled over her table, in a dead

faint.