The Flying Death - Samuel Hopkins Adams (story reading .txt) 📗

Chapter Thirteen The New Evidence

The morning of September 21 impended in sullen splendour from a bank of cloud. As the sudden sun struggled into the open it brought a brisk blow from the southwest, dispelling a heavy mist. The last of the fog was being scoured from the earth’s face when Dick Colton was awakened from an unrefreshing sleep by a quick step passing down the hall. Jumping out of bed, he threw open the door and faced Haynes.

“Don’t wake the others,” said the reporter in a low voice.

“Where are you off to?” inquired Colton.

“To the beach. I’ve got a notion that I can settle this Serdholm question here and now.”

“Wait fifteen minutes and I’ll go with you.”

“If you don’t mind, Colton, I’d rather you wouldn’t. I want to go over the ground alone, first. But if I’m not back for breakfast, meet me there and I’ll probably have something to tell you.”

“Very well. It’s your game to play. Good luck! Oh, hold on. Have you got a gun?”

“No, mine hasn’t come yet.”

“Better take mine.”

“You must have been having bad dreams,” said the other lightly. “What sleep I’ve had has banished the professor’s cretaceous jub-jub bird from my mental premises. Anyhow, I don’t think a revolver would be much use against it, do you?”

“Take it, anyway,” urged Colton.

“All right,” assented the reporter. “Much obliged. I’ll take it along if you want me to.”

The doctor handed out his long Colt’s. “Well, good luck!” he said again, and with a strange impulse he stretched out his hand.

Haynes seemed a little startled; but he said nothing, as he shook hands, except: “See you in a couple of hours, then.”

Although it was only six o’clock, Dick Colton could not get back to sleep. A sound of splashing water from Everard’s room showed that he too was up. Dick was dressing with those long pauses between each process which are the surest sign of profound thought in the masculine creature, when he heard a knock on Haynes’ door followed by the music of Helga Johnston’s voice.

“Petit P�re. Oh, Petit P�re!”

Before Dick could reach the door and explain, the low call came again:

“Petit P�re! Oh, please wake up!”

“Miss Helga,” began Dick, thrusting out his head.

“Oh, Dr. Colton, I’ve—I’ve had such a dreadful dream again. I want to speak to Mr. Haynes.”

“He started for the beach fifteen minutes ago.”

“Oh-h-h!” It was a long, shuddering gasp. The next instant he heard her swift footsteps patter downstairs, through the living-room and out upon the porch. A few minutes later Everard Colton in trousers and shirt came into the room.

“Was that Helga’s voice I heard?”

“Yes.”

“Anything wrong?” asked the young man anxiously.

“Haynes has gone to the beach, and she has followed. She’s had a dream-warning or some fool thing”—Colton had the professional impatience of the supernatural—“and would be hysterical if she was of that type.”

Everard exploded into a curse. “And you let her go alone?”

“Am I likely to do a cross-country run in my underclothes?” demanded his brother.

The young man was down the stairs in two leaps, and out upon the lawn. Helga’s fair head shone far to the south on a hillock’s top. She was running.

“Take the cross-cut!” shouted Dick Colton. “You can head her off at Graveyard Point. I’ll follow.”

There were few men of his time who could keep near Everard Colton to the end of a mile run. Heartbreaking country this was, with its ups and downs; but the young man had the instinct of a cross-country runner, and subconsciously his feet led him along the easiest course. When he came out on the summit of the cliff above Graveyard Point, his eyes, eagerly searching, saw the flying figure of the girl he loved coming down the beach, a quarter of a mile away.

“Helga, Helga!” he shouted. “I’m coming to you!”

Her ringing soprano came back to him, like an echo magically transmuted into golden beauty: “The other side! Around the point.”

She waved him vehemently toward the hidden shore beyond the headland. Something of her foreboding terror passed into the soul of her lover. Plunging down into the gully, Everard ran out upon the beach and doubled the point. Whatever peril there was, if any existed, lay there; he would reach it first. The waves almost washed his feet as he toiled through the loose sand at the base of the little ravine. Breathless, he pushed on until he reached the point, where he had full view of the stretch of sand. Then at what he saw the breath came back to him in one gasping inhalation. He stopped short in his tracks, and stood shaking.

The sun had just risen above the cloudbank. Black, on the shining glory of the beach, a man lay sprawled grotesquely. It was almost at the spot where Serdholm had been found. Though the face was hidden and the posture distorted, Everard knew him instantly for Haynes, and as instantly knew that he was dead. He ran forward and bent over the body.

Haynes had been struck opposite the gully, by a weapon driven with fearful impetus between his ribs from the back, piercing his heart. A dozen staggering prints showed where he had plunged forward before he fell. The flight was involuntary—for he was dead almost on the stroke—the blind, mechanical instinct of escape from the death-dealing agency. There was no mistaking that great gash in the hack. Haynes had been killed as Serdholm was.

Sickening with the certainty of what he was to find, Everard Colton turned his eyes to the tablet of the sand. There, exactly as the ill-fated reporter had drawn it on his map, the grisly track of the talons stretched in double line across the clean beach, toward the gully’s mouth. Except for this the sand was blank.

For a few steps he followed the trail, then turned back to the body. In the pocket he found his brother’s revolver. So Haynes had been struck down without warning! For the moment, shock had driven from Colton’s mind the thought of Helga. Now he rose to fend her from the sight of this horror, and saw her moving swiftly around the point.

“Go back!” he cried. “You must not come nearer!”

With no more heed of him than if he were a rock in her path, the girl made a half-circle of avoidance, and sinking upon the sand gazed into the dead man’s face. The eyes were closed, and from the calm features all the expression of harshness had fled. Gone were the lines of pain; the dead face wore for Helga the same sweetness and gentleness that, living, Haynes had kept for her alone, and the lips seemed to smile to her as she lifted the head to her lap and smoothed back the hair from the forehead.

“He is dead?” she asked dully, looking up at Everard.

“Yes,” said the young man.

“I warned him,” she whispered. “I saw it so plainly—death flying across the sands to strike him. Oh, Petit P�re, why didn’t you heed me? Couldn’t you trust the loving heart of your little princess?”

In that moment Everard Colton forgot his hopes. A great surge of pity and grief for the girl rose within him. It came to him that she had loved the better man, the man who lay dead on the sands, and as the first pang of that passed there was left in him only the sense of service. Throwing his coat across Haynes’ body, he bent over Helga.

“My dear,” he said, “my dear.”

That was all; but her woman’s swift intuition recognised the new feeling and responded to it. She groped for his hand and clung to it.

“Don’t leave us!” she said pitifully.

“I will wait here with you,” he answered.

Slowly the tide rose toward the mournful little group on the sand. An investigating gull swooped down near to them, and the girl roused with a shudder from her reveries, thrusting out her hands as if to ward off the bird.

“It was like that in my dream,” she said, looking up at Everard with tearless eyes. “Oh, why did I not compel him to heed my warning! He used to say the sea-spirits that brought me in from the storm had given me second sight. Why did he not trust in that?”

“He loved you very dearly,” said Everard gently.

“Ah, you do not know what he was to me!” cried the girl. “Everything that was noble, everything that was generous. From the time when I was a child—Oh, he can’t be dead. Can’t you do something?”

Everard choked. Before he could command himself for a reply, there was a rattle of stones down the face of the cliff. Necessity for action was a boon to his tortured sensibilities. Catching up the revolver from the spot where he had laid it, he walked toward the sound. A confused noise of voices caused him to drop the muzzle of his weapon, as Dick Colton, Professor Ravenden and his daughter came into view.

“Too late, Dick,” said Everard.

“Good God!” said Dick. “Not Haynes?”

Everard nodded. “He was dead when we got here.”

With a little, broken cry, Dolly Ravenden flew to Helga and threw her arms around the girl’s neck.

Dick Colton drew the coat from the body, looked at the wound, and then followed the tracks to the spot where they disappeared in the soft rubble. Returning, he said to Dolly Ravenden:

“Get Miss Helga away.”

“She won’t come. I can’t persuade her to move,” said Dolly.

Everard came and knelt beside the girl. “Helga,” he said, “Helga, dear, you must go back home. We will bring him as soon as we can. Will you go back with me now, dear?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

Bending over, she kissed Haynes’ forehead. She got to her feet, and Everard and Dolly Ravenden led her away. Dick leaned over the dead face and looked down upon it with a great sense of sorrow and wrath. So gazing, he recalled the reporter’s half-jesting charge that he should take up the trail, “if my turn comes next.”

“It’s a promise, old man,” he said softly to the dead. “You might have left me your clue; but I’ll do my best. And until I’ve found your slayer or my turn