The Indian Drum - William MacHarg (fastest ebook reader txt) 📗

passageway beside the house which led in one direction to the street and in the other to a gate opening on the alley. He ran forward to the street and looked up and down, but found it empty; then he ran back to the alley. At the end of the alley, where it intersected the cross street, the figure of the man running away appeared suddenly out of the shadows, then disappeared; Alan, following as far as the street, could see nothing more of him; this street too was empty.

He ran a little farther and looked, then he went back to the house. The side door had swung shut again and latched. He felt in his pocket for his key and went around to the front door. The snow upon the steps had been swept away, probably by the servant who had come to the house earlier in the day with Constance Sherrill, but some had fallen since; the footsteps made in the early afternoon had been obliterated by it, but Alan could see those he had made that evening, and the marks where some one else had gone into the house and not come out again. In part it was plain, therefore, what had happened: the man had come from the south, for he had not seen the light Alan had had in the north and rear part of the house; believing no one was in the house, the man had gone in through the front door with a key. He had been some one familiar with the house; for he had known about the side door and how to reach it and that he could get out that way. This might mean no more than that he was the same who had searched through the house before; but at least it made his identity with the former intruder more certain.

Alan let himself in at the front door and turned on the light in the reading lamp in the library. The electric torch still was burning on the floor and he picked it up and extinguished it; he went up-stairs and brought down his shoes. He had seen a wood fire set ready for lighting in the library, and now he lighted it and sat before it drying his wet socks before he put on his shoes. He was still shaking and breathing fast from his struggle with the man and his chase after him, and by the strangeness of what had taken place.

When the shaft of light from the torch had flashed across Alan's face in the dark library, the man had not taken him for what he was—a living person; he had taken him for a specter. His terror and the things he had cried out could mean only that. The specter of whom? Not of Benjamin Corvet; for one of the things Alan had remarked when he saw Benjamin Corvet's picture was that he himself did not look at all like his father. Besides, what the man had said made it certain that he did not think the specter was "Ben"; for the specter had "got Ben." Did Alan look like some one else, then? Like whom? Evidently like the man—now dead for he had a ghost—who had "got" Ben, in the big man's opinion. Who could that be?

No answer, as yet, was possible to that. But if he did look like some one, then that some one was—or had been—dreaded not only by the big man who had entered the house, but by Benjamin Corvet as well. "You got Ben!" the man had cried out. Got him? How? "But you can't get me!" he had said. "You—with the bullet hole above your eye!" What did that mean?

Alan got up and went to look at himself in the mirror he had seen in the hall. He was white, now that the flush of the fighting was going; he probably had been pale before with excitement, and over his right eye there was a round, black mark. Alan looked down at his hands; a little skin was off one knuckle, where he had struck the man, and his fingers were smudged with a black and sooty dust. He had smudged them on the papers up-stairs or else in feeling his way about the dark house, and at some time he had touched his forehead and left the black mark. That had been the "bullet hole."

The rest that the man had said had been a reference to some name; Alan had no trouble to recollect the name and, while he did not understand it at all, it stirred him queerly—"the Miwaka." What was that? The queer excitement and questioning that the name brought, when he repeated it to himself, was not recollection; for he could not recall ever having heard the name before; but it was not completely strange to him. He could define the excitement it stirred only in that way.

He went back to the Morris chair; his socks were nearly dry, and he put on his shoes. He got up and paced about. Sherrill had believed that here in this house Benjamin Corvet had left—or might have left—a memorandum, a record, or an account of some sort which would explain to Alan, his son, the blight which had hung over his life. Sherrill had said that it could have been no mere intrigue, no vulgar personal sin; and the events of the night had made that very certain; for, plainly, whatever was hidden in that house involved some one else seriously, desperately. There was no other way to explain the intrusion of the sort of man whom Alan had surprised there an hour ago.

The fact that this other man searched also did not prove that Benjamin Corvet had left a record in the house, as Sherrill believed; but it certainly showed that another person believed—or feared—it. Whether or not guilt had sent Benjamin Corvet away four days ago, whether or not there had been guilt behind the ghost which had "got Ben," there was guilt in the big man's superstitious terror when he had seen Alan. A bold, powerful man like that one, when his conscience is clear, does not see a ghost. And the ghost which he had seen had a bullet hole above the brows!

Alan did not flatter himself that in any physical sense he had triumphed over that man; so far as it had gone, his adversary had had rather the better of the battle; he had endeavored to stun Alan, or perhaps do worse than stun; but after the first grapple, his purpose had been to get away. But he had not fled from Alan; he had fled from discovery of who he was. Sherrill had told Alan of no one whom he could identify with this man; but Alan could describe him to Sherrill.

Alan found a lavatory and washed and straightened his collar and tie and brushed his clothes. There was a bruise on the side of his head; but though it throbbed painfully, it did not leave any visible mark. He could return now to the Sherrills'. It was not quite midnight but he believed by this time Sherrill was probably home; perhaps already he had gone to bed. Alan took up his hat and looked about the house; he was going to return and sleep here, of course; he was not going to leave the house unguarded for any long time after this; but, after what had just happened, he felt he could leave it safely for half an hour, particularly if he left a light burning within.

He did this and stepped out. The wind from the west was blowing hard, and the night had become bitter cold; yet, as Alan reached the drive, he could see far out the tossing lights of a ship and, as he went toward the Sherrills', he gazed out over the roaring water. Often on nights like this, he knew, his father must have been battling such water.

The man who answered his ring at the Sherrills' recognized him at once and admitted him; in reply to Alan's question, the servant said that Mr. Sherrill had not yet returned. When Alan went to his room, the valet appeared and, finding that Alan was packing, the man offered his service. Alan let him pack and went down-stairs; a motor had just driven up to the house.

It proved to have brought Constance and her mother; Mrs. Sherrill, after informing Alan that Mr. Sherrill might not return until some time later, went up-stairs and did not appear again. Constance followed her mother but, ten minutes later came downstairs.

"You're not staying here to-night?" she said.

"I wanted to say to your father," Alan explained, "that I believe I had better go over to the other house."

She came a little closer to him in her concern. "Nothing has happened here?"

"Here? You mean in this house?" Alan smiled. "No; nothing."

She seemed relieved. Alan, remembering her mother's manner, thought he understood; she knew that remarks had been made, possibly, which repeated by a servant might have offended him.

"I'm afraid it's been a hard day for you," she said.

"It's certainly been unusual," Alan admitted.

It had been a hard day for her, too, he observed; or probably the recent days, since her father's and her own good friend had gone, had been trying. She was tired now and nervously excited; but she was so young that the little signs of strain and worry, instead of making her seem older, only made her youth more apparent. The curves of her neck and her pretty, rounded shoulders were as soft as before; her lustrous, brown hair was more beautiful, and a slight flush colored her clear skin.

It had seemed to Alan, when Mrs. Sherrill had spoken to him a few minutes before, that her manner toward him had been more reserved and constrained than earlier in the evening; and he had put that down to the lateness of the hour; but now he realized that she probably had been discussing him with Constance, and that it was somewhat in defiance of her mother that Constance had come down to speak with him again.

"Are you taking any one over to the other house with you?" she inquired.

"Any one?"

"A servant, I mean."

"No."

"Then you'll let us lend you a man from here."

"You're awfully good; but I don't think I'll need any one to-night. Mr. Corvet's—my father's man—is coming back to-morrow, I understand. I'll get along very well until then."

She was silent a moment as she looked away. Her shoulders suddenly jerked a little. "I wish you'd take some one with you," she persisted. "I don't like to think of you alone over there."

"My father must have been often alone there."

"Yes," she said. "Yes." She looked at him quickly, then away, checking a question. She wanted to ask, he knew, what he had discovered in that lonely house which had so agitated him; for of course she had noticed agitation in him. And he had intended to tell her or, rather, her father. He had been rehearsing to himself the description of the man he had met there in order to ask Sherrill about him; but now Alan knew that he was not going to refer the matter even to Sherrill just yet.

Sherrill had believed that Benjamin Corvet's disappearance was from circumstances too personal and intimate to be made a subject of public inquiry; and what Alan had encountered in Corvet's house had confirmed that belief. Sherrill further had said that Benjamin Corvet, if he had wished Sherrill to know those circumstances, would have told them to him; but Corvet had not done that; instead, he had sent for Alan, his son. He had given his son his confidence.

Sherrill had admitted that he was withholding from Alan, for the time being, something that he knew about Benjamin Corvet; it was nothing, he had said, which would help Alan to learn about his father, or what had become of him; but