A PACKAGE OF DEATH
A low, distant rumble of thunder denoted a new gathering of storm.
Five minutes passed, and then the lightning flashed across the
firmament directly overhead. A crash like the splitting of the heavens
followed, and the rain came down as if it poured through the slit.
The violence lasted hardly more than five minutes, after which the
downpour abated a little of its fury. But a steadier, quieter
precipitation continued, with the swiftly moving center of disturbance
already far across the sky.
The rain in his face, and the brisk puff of newly washed ozone in his
heavily moving lungs, aroused Garrison's struggling consciousness by
slow degrees. Strange, fantastic images, old memories, weird phantoms,
and wholly impossible fancies played through his brain with the dull,
torturing persistency of nightmares for a time that seemed to him
endless.
It was fully half an hour before he was sufficiently aroused to roll to
an upright position and pass his hand before his eyes.
He was sick and weak. He could not recall what had happened. He did
not know where he was.
He was all but soaked by the rain, despite the fact that a tree with
dense foliage was spread above him, and he had lain beneath protecting
shrubberies. Slowly the numbness seemed to pass from his brain, like
the mist from the surface of a lake. He remembered things, as it were,
in patches.
Dorothy--that was it--and something had happened.
He was stupidly aware that he was sitting on something uncomfortable--a
lump, perhaps a stone--but he did not move. He was waiting for his
brain to clear. When at length he hoisted his heavy weight upon his
knees, and then staggered drunkenly to his feet, to blunder toward a
tree and support himself by its trunk, his normal circulation began to
be restored, and pain assailed his skull, arousing him further to his
senses.
He leaned for some time against the tree, gathering up the threads of
the tangle. It all came back, distinct and sharp at last, and, with
memory, his strength was returning. He felt of his head, on which his
hat was jammed.
The bone and the muscles at the base of the skull were sore and
sensitive, but the hurt had not gone deep. He felt incapable of
thinking it out--the reasons, and all that it meant. He wondered if
his attacker had thought to leave him dead.
Mechanically his hands sought out his pockets. He found his watch and
pocketbook in place. Some weight seemed dragging at his coat. When
his hand went slowly to the place, he found the lump on which he had
been lying. He pulled it out--a cold, cylindrical affair, of metal,
with a thick cord hanging from its end. Then a chill crept all the
distance down his spine.
The thing was a bomb!
Cold perspiration and a sense of horror came upon him together. An
underlying current of thought, feebly left unfocused in his brain--a
thought of himself as a victim, lured to the park for this deed--became
as stinging as a blow on the cheek.
The cord on this metal engine of destruction was a fuse. The rain had
drenched it and quenched its spark of fire, doubtless at some break in
the fiber, since fuse is supposedly water-proof. Nothing but the
thunder-storm had availed to save his life. He had walked into a trap,
like a trusting animal, and chance alone had intervened to bring him
forth alive.
His brain by now was thoroughly active. Reactionary energy rushed in
upon him to sharpen all his faculties. There was nothing left of the
joyous throbbing in his veins which thoughts of his tryst with Dorothy
had engendered. He felt like the wrathful dupe of a woman's wiles, for
it seemed as plain as soot on snow that Dorothy, fearing the
consequences of his recent discoveries in the Hardy case, had made this
park appointment only with this treacherous intent.
All his old, banished suspicions rushed pell-mell upon his mind, and
with them came new indications of her guilt. Her voice on the
telephone had been weak and faltering. She had chosen the park as
their meeting place, as the only available spot for such a deed. And
then--then----
It seemed too horrible to be true, but the wound was on his head, and
death was in his hand. It was almost impossible that anyone could have
heard their talk over the 'phone. He was left no alternative theory to
work on, except that perhaps the Robinsons had managed, through some
machination, to learn that he and Dorothy were to meet at this
convenient place.
One struggling ray of hope was thus vouchsafed him, yet he felt as if
perhaps he had already given Dorothy the benefit of too many reasonable
doubts. He could be certain of one thing only--he was thoroughly
involved in a mesh of crime and intrigue that had now assumed a new and
personal menace. Hereafter he must work more for Garrison and less for
romantic ideals.
Anger came to assist in restoring his strength. Far from undergoing
any sense of alarm which would frighten him out of further effort to
probe to the bottom of the business, he was stubbornly determined to
remain on the case till the whole thing was stripped of its secrets.
Not without a certain weakness at the knees did he make his way back to
the path.
He had no fear of lurking enemies, since those who had placed the bomb
in his pocket would long before have fled the scene to make an alibi
complete. The rain had ceased. Wrapping the fuse about the metal
cartridge in his hand, he came beneath a lamp-post by the walk, and
looked the thing over in the light.
There was nothing much to see. A nipple of gas-pipe, with a cap on
either end, one drilled through for the insertion of the fuse,
described it completely. The kink in the fuse where the rain had found
entrance to dampen the powder, was plainly to be seen.
Garrison placed the contrivance in his pocket. He pulled out his
watch. The hour, to his amazement, was nearly ten. He realized he
must have lain a considerable time unconscious in the wet. Halting to
wonder what cleverness might suggest as the best possible thing to be
done, he somewhat grimly determined to proceed to Dorothy's house.