IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
Emerson had still an hour before the arrival of the last train at
Bridgeboro. He knew that his people would not be concerned until after
that. Stranger to boys though he was, he had a certain self-reliance.
Perhaps this was the result of his lonely habit of life. He was also
thoughtful. It was only the flaring, rough and ready qualities of
scouthood that he lacked; and the boy talk.
In Bridgeboro he went into the only place which was open, the Union
League Club, of which his father was a member. Here he telephoned to
Doctor Harris and said that Walter was with the scouts, searching the
woods. He did not say _combing_ the woods. They thanked him and promised
not to worry about the busy hero. Emerson mentioned that he was going
toward Little Valley on this same business but did not say why.
He then went up Main Street into Ashburton Place and thence to the
Little Valley road. He looked singularly unlike a scout in his natty,
conventional suit and shallow-crowned, telescoped hat.
His walk seemed to match his way of talking, although one could not
possibly say anything worse about it than that it was a gentlemanly
walk. Yet boys walked behind him and crudely mimicked him. It seemed
strange for him to be upon such an errand. It was unlike the adventurous
quest of the scouts in this, that it had originated wholly in his mind.
Oddly enough, it was evolved from a trifling incident observed in
school.
Soon he was beyond the last house in Bridgeboro and outside its
boundaries. The Van Dorians had been a penurious race and when they died
they seemed to have taken the village with them.
But the Van Dorian mansion, destroyed many years before by fire, seemed
reincarnated into a thing of picturesque beauty, where it sat well back
from the road, its jagged ends of masonry and broken turrets softened by
the poetical hand of time and covered with a winding robe of ivy. Small
wonder if this old ruin were thought of by one who had been reminded of
the romantic English ivy.
But no one would ever have thought of Emerson Skybrow climbing about
those broken walls and exploring the littered interiors which lay open
to the starlight. He entered through an irregular gap in the masonry
which probably had once been a doorway of the old stone mansion. Here
was a spacious unroofed interior level with the outer ground. A rank
profusion of weeds poked up through the rotted remnants of flooring and
all but covered the crumpled masses of copper which had once been part
of the roof.
The sound of his own feet moving about in this long deserted place
affected him strangely. It seemed as if they were the feet of some one
else, unseen but near him. When his foot encountered a crumpled piece of
old copper concealed in the weeds, it emitted a kind of flat ringing
sound as if the ghost of some cheery old dinner bell were faintly trying
to call the departed household to supper.
Emerson was not in the least timid. It is customary to associate
timidity, even cowardice, with such demeanor as his. It is true that he
did not face the horde of mockers and force an issue with them. But that
was because he did not fully realize that there was any issue or that he
was regarded with such humorous disdain. If he was too “grown-up” (and
unfortunately he was) he had at least the poise and self-possession of a
grown person. Any one of the Bridgeboro boys would have found something
excruciatingly funny in this little gentleman tripping about in that
grim old ruin. But none of them would have been less sensitive to the
ghostly surroundings than he.
He paused in his exploration of the chaotic place and glanced about.
Some small creature of the night, a rat, perhaps, scurried away,
breaking the solemn stillness with its flight.
“Is there any one here?” Emerson asked aloud. He waited a few seconds,
then spoke again, his voice emphasized by the stillness and darkness.
“Is there any one here?”
There was no answer but a flutter of the drooping ivy which hung on a
broken chimney near by.