Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

"What do you mean," I said curtly.

"I heer'd you was called over thar, yesterday. Reckon you'll have enough to do if you take on with all the crazy folks round here."

I looked at him hard.

"Oh, I ain't got nothing special against Mr. Lessing. He's a pleasant-spoken chap, all I've seen of him. On'y when a man gits to meddlin' with things it ain't no person's business to meddle with he's liable to git called crazy--ef not worse. I ain't holdin' with what people say when they get to talkin'--no sir! I got enough to do tendin' my own business. But there's plenty won't go near Mr. Lessing's place after dark nor no other time, an' if you was to listen to them I reckon they got their reasons. They say his wife's as crazy as he is. Seems when he ain't traipsin' round the woods all hours o' the night he's shut up there in that stoodio place doin' his vivisectin'----"

"_What?_"

I laughed in spite of myself. Mr. Johnson looked sulky.

"Ain't that what they call it? I ain't no doctor."

"Mr. Lessing happens to be a student of chemistry, not a medical student, so if anyone's been trying to get round you with bogy tales they're talking nonsense. I'm surprised at a man of your education, Mr. Johnson, listening to such absurdities!"

"Then what does he shut himself up for, with a lamp you can see two miles off, unless he's up to suthin' he don't want folks to know?"

"Probably because he doesn't want a pack of ignoramuses meddling with his affairs."

"Well, that's what they say, and there's folks as believes it," he said sullenly. "An' as fur his walkin' in the woods, I ain't tellin' you anything but what's so. He was seen the same night as Jake Menning got killed goin' down Dutchman's Hill. It was Jakey's half-brother as seen him, an' Aaron ain't one to be tellin' lies. No, sir! An' if Doctor Lennox was here now he would tell you the same, for he was called out to see a sick child at the Bend that same night and it was him as found Jake Menning there the next mornin'."

"Do you know you're saying things you might get into trouble over?" I asked sternly.

"Oh, I ain't sayin' he had no hand in it," he returned promptly. "Everyone knows Jakey got killed through bein' too drunk to look whar he was goin'!"

I pushed a quarter over to him.

"Well, give me some stamps, Mr. Johnson. If you take my advice you won't pay quite so much attention to idle gossip."

I drove home, thinking. Lennox, or someone, had been chattering; that was clear. How far I had no means at present of knowing, for I was not going to pursue any further conversation with Johnson, ready as he was. A doctor who gives himself to gossip is no better than an old hen. I felt a sharp contempt for Lennox that overrode whatever interest I might once have had for him. If he had got himself into any tangle down here he deserved it thoroughly.

A light covered wagon, such as hucksters use, was outside the gate when I got back, and a man, who had evidently been bargaining with Mrs. Searle at the back door, came round and climbed into it. I had to pull the mare up to one side to give him room to drive off, and as I waited I happened to notice him rather closely, the more so as he gave me a civil but obvious scrutiny himself as he climbed over the wagon-wheel. He was a man of about forty, in a tightly buttoned coat of greasy black oilskin and a peaked cap, which might have belonged earlier in its career to a seafaring man, pulled down over his forehead. His face, with unpleasantly close-set eyes, was scarred by smallpox, and apart from the repugnance which this disfigurement always inspires more or less, I think I have seldom seen a countenance which impressed me more disagreeably. He was a man whom I would have ordered off my own premises anywhere at first sight, and I replied with a curt nod to his over-subservient greeting.

I left the mare in the yard and went into the parlor. Mrs. Searle had evidently been interrupted in her morning tidying, and she came back, duster in hand, as I stood there. I had enough experience to know her for a woman who did not give herself to gossip, though she probably knew all that was afoot, by the curious intuitive sense so highly developed in all women of her class. With her I would be perfectly safe in any inquiries I chose to make.

She apologized for her intrusion and set about completing her tour of the furniture, with noiseless briskness.

"I see you've been down to the village, sir," she said after a moment. "I was going to ask whether you'd order some more coal up for tomorrow, from Harkness's. It's most finished."

"I'll send Pete this afternoon. He can walk in. By the way, Mrs. Searle, what was this story about Jake Menning? I just heard something of it in the village today."

"Jake Menning..." She paused in her dusting, setting back a vase carefully on the mantelshelf. "I suppose you'd have heard of it, sir. He was killed last March, goin' down Dutchman's Hill. There isn't much water now, but it's generally deep there, long after the spring rains. Some did say it was done a-purpose, but the most of 'em thinks he jest had a fit an' fell in. Doctor Lennox found him, about six o'clock in the mornin', driving back from a night call. He was lyin' jest at the foot of the hollow, where them planks begin, with his face in the water. It wasn't deep enough to drown anyone ordinarily, an' that's why they thought it was a seizure.

"There was two half-brothers, Jake an' Aaron, both livin' over near the Bend. Aaron's took the whole business over now. Jake was always kind o' queer; they called him crazy sometimes, round the village. They was as like as two peas, which was queer, seein' they was on'y half related, so to speak. Down to the smallpox scars an' all. They'd both took the smallpox, but Jake took it worse, and they said that was what affected his brain some. You couldn't tell 'em apart, on'y for Aaron's stutterin'.

"Aaron was the best of the two. He's a good chapel member, and he's done a lot better in the business since Jakey's out of it. I heard they used to quarrel a lot in Jake's lifetime. Aaron's savin', and a bit close with his money too, and I recon he kep' Jake under some. He was an awful ill-lookin' man, Jake Menning--not that I like to say wrong of the dead, but I know a bad-lookin' man when I see one, an' Jake was that, for all his craziness. There weren't anyone liked him much, so they said he was harmless as a child, and right smart in business, an' now they ain't content with his being dead but they must get to startin' nonsense about his walking---excuse me mentionin' any such silly talk to you, sir!"

"Walking?" I stared.

"What they call it, sir," she explained apologetically. "You see," she went on, taking up her duster again, "Dutchman's Hill always did have a bad name, account of a pedlar bein' drowned there years ago, and now with this other business they try to make out the place is haunted again.. They don't seem to know rightly whether it's Crazy Jake or the pedlar I told you of, but there's quite a lot of folks now won't go nigh the place after dark, no more'n if it had the plague."

"So that's what all this nonsense has been about!" I said, a light beginning to dawn on me. "I suppose Pete is right in it all?"

"Pete is like all the niggers, sir. They ain't happy unless they've got some sort of a ha'nt to tell about. Not that the other folks here is any better, an' I will say that of 'em. I never met such a gossipin' set in my life till I come here!"

Mrs. Searle herself was originally from New England, and eight years' residence here had not altered her original opinion of the people. For this reason, if for none other, I knew that she kept herself very sternly aloof from the minor scandal-making of the place.

"I suppose there was an inquest on this man?"

"Oh, yes, sir. They brought it in accidental causes, an' Doctor Lennox seemed to think the man died of heart-failure, an' he must have been dead before he fell in. Anyway it wasn't drownin', simple. I don't know. It was Aaron had heart-weakness in the family, as I heard, so it was queer Jake bein' the one took off that way!"

I rose.

"Well, I suppose the people here have precious little to gossip about, and they like to make a mystery of whatever does happen!"

"That's about as I take it, sir." She moved toward the door. "An' now I think, it was funny your asking me about Jake Menning, just this moment. That was Aaron as came round to the back door a while ago, as you drove up. He wanted to know if we'd like any chickens, so I took one for Sunday, seen' he only gets round once a fortnight now he has the whole business to attend to. I don't know whether it's thinkin' over it, but it seems to me he's getting to look more like Jakey every day. If it wer'n't for his stutterin' I could take him for a ghost myself!"

So that was Aaron Menning. Well, he might be a good chapel member, but he had a face that would hang him if my impressions went for anything. All the same, this put me no nearer to clearing up the mystery at the Bend, which was what interested me at the moment. Jake Menning and the alleged ghost of Dutchman's Hill were ordinary enough features in a village drama, but they could have no direct bearing on the problem that occupied my mind.

After lunch I told Peter to put the mare in. He lingered about the buggy when I came out, making unnecessary adjustments to the harness. I could see he was anxious to learn the outcome of yesterday's visit, and where I was going now.

"Is yoh gwine by de village, doctah?" he asked finally, with the air of one with a commission to request.

"No, I'm going to the Bend. There is no need for you to drive me," I added as I took the reins up.

I could have sworn the old sinner looked relieved as he went back to the coach-house. When I reached the bungalow I found Lessing himself on the porch. As he rose to greet me I saw that he was taller than I had thought; there was a certain wiry strength about him when he stood upright. What amazed me was the man's extraordinary endurance and resiliency; his face showed scarcely a sign of the exhaustion of yesterday. He was dressed in corduroy trousers and a soft silk shirt, under which the outline of the bandaging was visible as he moved.

"Well, how are you?" I asked as we shook hands.

"All right. Come into the house--or shall we stay here?"

"I'll have a look at you first." I followed him into the room. "A bit stiff?"

"Nothing much."

"Sleep?"

"Like a log."

I need hardly have asked him. He stripped up his shirt and I made a brief readjustment of the dressings. The wounds were going on all right. He must have had a magnificent constitution despite his slightness of build. We sat down on the divan, and Lessing produced a box of cigarettes.

There was a small wooden table near the window, littered with test-tubes and odds and ends, and I nodded toward it.

"Been busy?"

"I was just working out something. I have a sort of laboratory fitted outside, though. I had it built."

"That sort of studio place?"

"It's just like a workshop--where I muddle occasionally! I'll show you sometime, if you like."

"I should be delighted."

"My experiments have, unfortunately, given rather a bad name to the place. They had a bad effect on old Lennox, too. I believe I was too progressive for him. You wouldn't expect that from a medical man, would you? Did you know Lennox very well?"

He knocked the ash off his cigarette, waiting for my reply. If he was guarded, so was I.

"I knew him at the University, a good while ago. Since then I had not seen him till the other day."

"He's a queer old bird! I used to tell him he made the ideal country practitioner. It made him mad because it was so exactly true. We used to disagree frightfully, you know. It's the only relaxation in a place like this. I shall miss Lennox...."

It struck me he was trying, in a casual way, to find out how far Lennox had spoken of him to me, and whether we had been at any time since his departure in correspondence.

"Lennox has quaint theories," he went on, leaning back against the cushions. "One of them is that nothing exists outside the pharmacopœia and Burton's 'North American Fauna.' We used to argue it at great length. I don't believe he's convinced yet."

"He was never an easy man to convince."

"So? It's habit that survives. How do you like it down here, by the way?"

"Oh, I'm putting in a good time," I smiled. "I fish a little, tramp a little. There ought to be good shooting in these woods by and by."

"They are interesting," said Lessing drily.

"Have you been here long?" I asked.

"Over a year." He rose and went into the kitchen, whence he returned a moment later, saying: "I thought I heard my wife there. We might as well have some tea."

It was Miss Lessing who brought the tea in, a few minutes later. She greeted me pleasantly, setting the tray down on the little table I pulled forward for her.

"Kate is lying down for a while," she said to her brother. "She has a headache. Do you take sugar, Doctor Haverill?"

I sat chatting there for nearly an hour. Lessing seemed at all events disposed to be friendly. All the while I was trying to reconcile this man who sat talking boyishly on trivial subjects with the outstretched figure I had seen twenty-four hours ago. If I had felt any resentment for his treatment of me yesterday it would have vanished utterly, and his complete absence of restraint now showed me, if I had needed it, how all memory of that mood had changed with his physical condition.

When I rose to go it was under promise to dine with them the following week. I fancied that Miss Lessing glanced hesitatingly at her brother before she seconded his invitation. It might have been only fancy; she was certainly cordial enough as we shook hands.

"Next Thursday, then," Lessing called after me from the doorway. I drove home no less mystified than before.

V

THE DEAD CYCLIST

Lennox sent me a note from Queenstown. I wondered, reading the brief cheerful account of his crossing, if he guessed how much I would give to have him cornered for a half-hour's interview. That he could throw considerable light on the puzzle I did not doubt, any more than that he had promptly put the ocean between us with a view to avoiding the very question I wanted to put to him. Anyway he was securely out of reach, and there was no use in wasting speculation.

My motor-cycle had arrived some time ago, but up to now I had not made use of it. It was housed in the carriage-shed, to Peter's great curiosity. Once I had caught him meddling with it surreptitiously, and my lecture, garnished with many lies as to what would happen to him if he pursued investigations, wrought the desired effect on his superstitious mind. Devils offered to Peter the most natural explanation for anything he failed to understand. Having a free morning, it occurred to me to put the engine in order, and Peter, cleaning harness nearby, watched my proceedings with distrustful curiosity.

"Is yoh gwine _ride_ dat 'ar thing, doctah?" he asked me.

"Sure!" I stood up, wiping my grimed hands on a piece of cotton waste. "Don't you think it's a likely thing to scare the ha'nts with, Pete?"

"Yoh talk er de ha'nts, doctah, 'cause yoh ain' done _seen_ 'em. When yoh's done seen 'em, doctah, I raikon yose gwine talk er suthin' eke."

"If I meet one on this, Pete, it'll give him such fits he won't do any han'ting for a week. Give me that monkey-wrench."

He eyed me gloomily.

"Dat ar thing's got a debbil in 'um sure, an' yoh ain' git no better er one debbil by mixin' 'um up wid anuffer--no, _sah_!"

"Peter," I said, "you are too conservative."

"I d'know dat. I d'know dat! De debbil's de dibbil, an' dar ain' no good yet come er mixin' up wid him. 'Tain' in de Bible nor 'tain' in nature, an' I ain' holdin' wid no such dealin's."

"Well, Pete, I'm going to back my devil against your rabbit's foot, anyhow."

Pete looked suspicious.

"Who's been talkin' 'bout rabbit's foots, doctah?"

"No one. Turn your pockets out, Pete!"

His hand clapped involuntarily to the side of his trousers.

"I got ter put dat harness away, an' I ain' got the time t' be hindered in! Sholy to Gawd, doctah, yoh ain' s'pose _I_ carry no trash like that!"

He straightened himself with dignity, hanging the harness up on its pegs. I finished my job and went into the surgery. I had written to the city for the drug I wanted for Lessing. It arrived yesterday, and I had made up the powders. They were lying on the desk with a rubber band about them, and the packet caught my eye as I came in. I called to Pete.

"I want you to take a prescription over to Mr. Lessing," I said. "You can take the buckboard and bring back that sack of feed from Sliefer's at the same time."

I held the packet out to him. He eyed first it, then me.

"Well?" I said impatiently.

"I'se gwine, I'se gwine. I was thinkin' on'y dis mawnin' how dat feed done oughter be fetched. Yessir, I was sayin' dat out in de car'ge-house. It done oughter be fetched _today_."

"It'll be right on your road after you leave Mr. Lessing's."

"Yessir, dat so! On'y dat packet, doctah ... I was jest considerin' dat packet. Ef I was to put dat packet in de buckboard longer de feed sack I'd be right scared 'er losing it. It don't seem to me, doctah, dat 'ar packet gwine t' be very safe dat way."

"But you've got a pocket, you old idiot!"

"Yessir, I done got pockets. I was on'y jest a-studyin', doctah. I don' recommend pockets, not when a pusson's got a commission to 'tend to. When a pusson puts suthin' in his pocket, it happens sometime dat a pusson's gwine _forget_ it."

"If it happens to you," I assured him, "I'll find a way of operating on your memory, so you'd better be careful!"

He took the packet without more ado and went off to get the buckboard ready. It was too fine a day to waste about the house, and I had it in mind to take the cycle out for a spin. Telling Mrs. Searle I would probably be away for lunch, I got into my cycling suit and set off.

I followed the road for some distance past the Bend, and then branched off to the right, joining the Pike. The machine was in good running order, and I did some twenty miles before I slowed up finally at a little village with the hope of getting something to eat.

There was the usual hotel and saloon combined, with its array of spruce bushes in tubs before the entrance. I leaned my cycle against the porch and went in to interview the landlord about a meal.

Dinner was by luck just ready. I cleaned off some of the grime of my ride and wandered into the commercial room, which was garnished with horsehair furniture, a mildewed engraving of Washington, and two plates of sticky fly-paper, buzzing and noxious, set out on the soiled tablecloth. There was one other midday guest, a young man in a gray suit who sat watching the struggles of the latest addition to the fly-paper colony while he waited for dinner. I placed him immediately as a newspaper man, and the first dozen words we exchanged, as I took my place opposite to him at the table, proved me right. He had been sent down on the trial of one of those dull and elusive scandals which serve to lighten the papers during the dead season, and had to put in two hours' waiting for his train back to the city.

He had a considerable fund of anecdote which needed only the barest encouragement to set going, and he transferred his interest from the fly-paper to myself with complimentary promptitude. He had a trick of raising his voice a full three tones at the beginning of each sentence, and as his dissertations were lengthy I found myself speculating at to what new and rasping height his voice might next reach.

There was a week-old copy of a local paper lying on the table, and in a pause of the meal he pushed it over to me.

"There's a thing that might interest you, being a cyclist," he said. "What do you make of that kind of an accident?"

I read the paragraph he pointed out. It was the account of an inquest held on the body of a young man identified as one George Powell, salesman in a Philadelphia dry-goods store. He had been found on a stretch of road a few miles beyond Coopersville by a farmer taking an early load of milk to the Coopersville creamery. The handle-bars and front part of his wheel, near by, were damaged, and the broken lamp was picked up a few yards further on. The man was dead, but the curious part, which had evidently struck my acquaintance also, was that there were no injuries found on the body except a single diagonal scratch across the face, which was of sufficient depth to have destroyed one eye and to lay the entire cheek open. This in itself had not produced death, and the coroner's autopsy had revealed no symptom of concussion. The medical officer's verdict had been death from heart failure.

The injuries suggested attack, but there had been no robbery, and though the man's clothing was torn his pockets were apparently untouched. They contained thirty-five dollars in notes, in a pocket-book, some small change, and the papers that had led to his identification.

"Well?" said my acquaintance.

"It looks queer."

He laid a finger on the paragraph.

"You see the body was picked up fifteen yards from the edge of the wood. If anyone had laid for him, they'd have laid right in the woods, where there was cover. But whatever hit him, it hit him before he reached there."

"He might have run into something."

"As what?"

"I don't know." And there struck me instantly the thought that my companion put into words. "If you run into anything on a bicycle, at full speed, it doesn't generally happen that the handle-bars get the worst injury. You see that the front wheel was not much broken. And he was riding toward the woods, and it's going to take a pretty phenomenal shock to throw a man and his bicycle fifteen yards backwards. I'll tell you another thing. I happen to know that stretch of road, because I spent part of last summer near there, with some people. It's a level stretch, cleared both sides, and there isn't anything larger than a stone to run into."

I waited, wondering what he was driving at. He chose a toothpick from the holder and began to employ it, leisurely.

"You'd reckon those things would strike the jury, wouldn't you? But they're so dam' simple down here that they're content to come up against facts like that, and they say: Well, here's a man got killed and we don't know what hit him. Guess we'll let it go at misadventure and go get a drink!' That's their mental attitude, and there isn't anything going to shake them out of it."

"What's your theory?" I asked.

He revolved the toothpick meditatively.

"If I knew, I guess I'd be up against a story that would make every newspaper in the country sit up. There's something queer there, and I'll tell you why, and you'll see just how enterprising these country juries are. Last April"--he raised his voice again, giving the toothpick an extra twirl in emphasis--"precisely the same thing happened to another man, not twelve miles from where this was. He was killed under much about the same circumstances, and the jury then returned the same old verdict, with a caution about the dangers of scorching. I happen to know, because I was down there on some story the time the thing occurred. I saw the man." He paused, and without knowing why I felt my pulses quicken suddenly in anticipation. "He had marks on his body that a wild-cat couldn't have made! He was picked up at the side of the path, among some stiff under-brush, so of course they said the fall did it. I tell you he was ripped, like I've seen a dog's face ripped by a badger. I've seen murder cases and I've seen accidents, but I've never seen the precise accident that would leave that kind of marks."

"You think it was murder?"

"The man wasn't murdered. He hit his head against a stone and died of concussion that time, right enough. But it was near enough to murder, if you assume an assailant who'd strap two-inch steel claws on to his hands." He laughed. "It's an original outfit! But that's what I'm asking _you_? What's the animal that goes round in these woods that's strong enough to wreck the steel tubing of a bicycle, that attacks with its claws and not with its teeth, and that's quick enough to knock a man down without the chance of a struggle?"

"There were no traces?"

"None. Not a single footprint."

All the while he spoke there had been before my mind the picture of Lessing--Lessing with those inexplicable scratches on his chest. Whatever had attacked these two had attacked Lessing also; that I would swear to. I was conscious that the young man was watching me rather closely.

"Heard something of this before, have you?"

"No. It interests me. But I think you're on a wrong tack."

"How?"

"Man alive, you don't suppose there could conceivably be any animal of that kind loose in the country without people knowing it! Someone would have seen it."

"I guess two people did see it," he suggested.

"If anything escaped from a menagerie there'd be a hue and cry raised. The woods around here couldn't give cover to any animal of that size and ferocity for three months without some track of it being found."

He said: "How about the murders in the Rue Morgue?"

"Those scratches weren't made by a monkey!"

I was unguarded. He looked up sharply.

"You didn't see them."

"You have described them," I reminded him. "Besides, an ape's instinct is to strangle."

"Not necessarily."

"Put the first down as a murder. The second might not have had any connection. There is nearly three months between. The medical officer suggested himself that the injuries might have been caused by falling on the broken bicycle framework."

"Medical officers aren't infallible. They've got to say something."

I laughed. "Well, stick to your escaped simian theory! If a third case turns up we'll see who's right."

I rose, paid my bill and went out, leaving him, I have no doubt, with the impression that I was a particularly hidebound idiot. But I had my own reasons for making no further contribution to his data. I would see this thing through without any assistance from a too enterprising press.

VI

A BOYCOTTED HOUSEHOLD

Thursday evening found me at the Lessing's bungalow. Mrs. Lessing was in evidence this time, in a soft black gown that accentuated the pallor of her face. The evening did not correct my first impressions of her. She shook hands limply, contributed a few remarks about the weather, and then subsided on the couch in silence. Dinner was laid on a small round table near the window, and Mary Lessing came in from the kitchen with uprolled sleeves and a big apron tied about her.

"We do our own chores here, Doctor Haverill," she said. "Do you want to make yourself useful?"

I rose promptly. Lessing had not yet appeared and my _tête-à-tête_ with his wife was not exhilarating. I followed her out into the kitchen, where she gave me a can-opener and a box of sardines.

"Turn those out for me, please. And if you have any hygienic aversion to canned goods, smother it. We live on them here."

"You find it far from the village?"

She smiled, quizzically. "A good way. Besides, the tradespeople here aren't exactly genial. So we subsist on boxes from the city. It gives you all the real pleasure of a desert island without the risks. Put them on that plate, will you? You see, by the time the box arrives and gets hauled up from the station we've generally forgotten what we ordered, so there's all the excitement of discovery as well. This time it was olives. Do you realize the joy of unexpected olives in the wilderness?"

"I'm going to."

"That's the right spirit! Living in the country teaches one a becoming humility. There are more things to open. Perhaps it was a mistake to ask you out here, but in any case I could hardly have palmed off these peaches as grown in our own garden, because we haven't got one."

She was standing at the table, drying crisp salad on a white cloth. The position showed me only her profile, with a little wave of bronze hair escaping near one ear. "Do you think gardening is worth the trouble?"

"When things like this grow in every department store? Perhaps not. Good heavens, Doctor Haverhill, but you must _wash_ that can-opener! Give it to me!"

I gazed at the jagged gash already achieved in the peach-can.

"Don't tell anyone and they won't taste it!"

"I thought bachelors knew how to do everything."

"Sardines and peaches go excellently together," I maintained. "They call it _salade de fruits poissonnés_."

Lessing lounged in.

"I admire the way Mary sets you to work," he said. "She has a talent for being industrious by proxy. Here----" He pulled a parcel out of his pocket "I've brought your cheese, but I won't answer for the state of it."

Miss Lessing cast a quick glance at me. "Where----?"

"_Not_ at Johnson's. I don't know if my sister has explained to you, Doctor Haverhill, that we are a boycotted household? We find it quite amusing. It leads to a practice of expedience which is excellent training for the young. Mary has learned to make quite creditable bread already."

"Out of the sawdust they pack the canned goods in," put in his sister promptly. "Carry that dish in without spilling it, Dick, and don't talk nonsense!"

We sat down to one of the most cheerful meals four young people have ever enjoyed. I would except Mrs. Lessing, but that even her limp and monosyllabic presence failed to dampen our spirits. Afterwards Lessing made Turkish coffee over a spirit lamp while the two girls cleared the table, refusing my assistance high-handedly.

I moved about the room in the familiarity which our informal meal had fostered, looking at the knick-knacks, the row of books on the shelves. They were a pretty varied collection, poetry, some modern French scientific books and novels, and one of the most complete collections of detective literature I have ever encountered, side by side with a few text-books on chemistry and some volumes on occultism and black magic, some familiar to me by title, others unknown. There was a monthly magazine lying near which I recognized as occupying itself largely with the subject of psychic phenomena, and turning it over I noticed Lessing's name in the index.

"You write?" I asked.

"Once in a blue moon!" He looked up from a critical stage in his coffee-making. "Does that sort of thing interest you?"

"Indifferently--if it happens to be genuine."

"There's so little genuine." He withdrew the coffee deftly, blowing out the lamp, and stood the little copper pot aside. "That's the worst of it. One endures hours of boredom for no result."

"You belong to the P.R.S.?"

"A most respectable and unexciting body." He smiled. "I would give in my demission, only they afford me a patient hearing from time to time. Besides, it gives me the opportunity of wrangling with someone, and contention is the spice of life, as I was saying. It was with that truism that I strove to console Lennox, when I bored him to extinction."

Involuntarily my ears pricked.

"Was that often?"

"No, I can't say the boredom predominated, in the long run." He surveyed his coffee with the air of an artist, his boyish head on one side.

"Where are those cups, Mary?"

"Your system of boredom seemed to have a remarkable effect on Lennox, anyway," slipped from me involuntarily.

Lessing laughed. "Oh, that was when the boredom ended! He stood it nobly to a point." He turned toward me. "Would you like to see what frightened Lennox, sometime?"

Before I could answer Mary Lessing came in with the coffee-cups, and the subject was dropped.

It was ten o'clock when I rose to leave, my departure hastened by a suspicion that Mrs. Lessing had glanced several times of purpose at the clock. They all came out on the porch to say good night, and at the last moment Lessing added: "I'll walk down the hill with you."

"I've got my bicycle," I said quickly, as Miss Lessing looked up. "There's no need to bring you out."

"Oh, it'll do me good!"

It was a still, sultry night, with a humidity in the air that had arisen since nightfall. We walked leisurely, smoking, as far as the crossroad at the top of Dutchman's Hill. The hollow below was alive with fireflies, gleaming and vanishing alternately in the soft dusk. There should be a moon, but within the past hour premonitory rainclouds had gathered, blotting it out. Lessing glanced at the sky.

"How long will it take you to get back?"

"Ten minutes, more or less. It won't rain till I get there."

I scratched a match, stooping toward my bicycle lantern.

"Is it necessary to light that?" he asked.

"Why not? There's a bad bit of road at the bottom there."

"I find the glare of a lamp like that always makes it worse. What is it, acetylene?"

He bent over the lantern to examine it, and in the pause the match burned down and went out. I felt for the box again in my pocket, and as I did so Lessing let go his hold on the bicycle. The machine slipped by its weight, and reaching quickly to catch it I heard the unmistakable sound of escaping air.

"Now you've done it!" cried Lessing boyishly.

"Damn!" I groped for the rear tire. It was flat. "Here's a cheerful business. How the dickens----"

Lessing laughed. "We'll have to walk it now! Never mind. I know the road."

"I'm not going to bring you all that way," I said. "I shall be all right."

"Nonsense! I like a walk before I turn in."

He took hold of the bicycle on one side, I on the other, and together we set off to walk down the hill. There is an exhilaration in walking through woods at night, even tempered by the necessity of pushing a heavy motor-cycle before you, and my brief annoyance at the accident rapidly vanished. Lessing was boyishly high-spirited; between us we made a fairly rowdy trip of it. We had just finished the ascent of the other side of the hollow when he laid a sudden hand on my arm.

"Did you hear anything?"

"No. Why?"

I thought he was still joking, but his cloak of nonsense had dropped from him abruptly. He pulled me to the side of the road.

"Listen!"

There seemed nothing to listen for. I waited, rather impatiently. Lessing threw back his head, scanning the line of the trees that shut us in. "There!"

It was still in my mind that he was trying to play some game on me.

"It's nothing but a bird," I said.

"Bird? You heard nothing else?"

"No."

"Come on," Lessing said. He seemed abruptly sobered, and I fancied he was at pains to quicken our pace over the remaining stretch of road. When we sighted the glimmer of the orchard palings I pulled up.

"Come on into the house and have a drink," I said.

"No, thanks. I must get back. By the way, do you carry a revolver?"

"What on earth for?"

"I only wondered. I should advise you to, around here." His hand slipped down to his pocket, and I heard a soft click.

"What are you going to do?"

"Have a pot at the birds, going back." He smiled. "Good night. Look in sometime during the week."

And he went off without further delay, whistling softly.

VII

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LABORATORY

Instead, it was Lessing who came a day or two later to see me. He lounged in one evening when I was sitting smoking on the porch, after supper, and my first advice of his presence was the clatter of a zinc pail which Pete let fall promptly in the side yard. When Lessing rounded the corner of the porch he was grinning.

"Your nigger must have a bad conscience," he said. "I never saw anyone so afraid of the devil in all my life!"

I made a sound of annoyance. Evidently I had not finished with Pete yet. "He's a born idiot!" I said.

"I'm not so sure," Lessing returned. "He has a very practical regard for his own skin. I appreciate that."

"You ought to."

He gave me one of those habitual quick looks, his head on one side.

"Thanks! Do you find the mosquitoes bad around here? I got all bitten up coming past Dutchman's Hollow."

I took the hint.

"We'll sit indoors," I said. "It's pretty cool in the surgery."

He followed me into the room, glancing curiously about him.

"So this is where old Lennox hung out ... the place has a look of him. What's that, butterflies? He always had a weakness for things he could stick a pin into and label nicely!"

"Have you never been here before?"

"Never. He used to come to my place. I have an idea you know, that Lennox still thinks I'm not right in the head."

I lit the student lamp on the table and set out whisky and a couple of glasses. Lessing settled himself in the shabby armchair opposite me, and for a little while we smoked in silence. In the half-shadow beyond the ring of lamplight I could see his face, fine and clear cut against the shabby morocco of the chair back, the dark hair tumbled over his forehead. He was staring up at the smoke wreaths in a curious intensity of abstraction.

"I suppose," he began at last, "that I owe you some sort of an explanation, as things go."

I made a little gesture of indifference. I was beginning to know my man. If it pleased him to work upon my curiosity I was prepared to give him the least possible satisfaction.

"You offered me one," I corrected him. "I believe we decided to let it go at that."

He turned his gaze upon me, with a rather charming impertinence.

"That was when I took you for a fool. As I admit the error you ought to forgive my expression of it. The truth is..." He paused so long that I reached for a fresh cigarette to break the interval. "I'll be damned if I know what the truth is myself!" He finished almost violently. "I can give you facts--all you want. When it comes to putting things together.... Do you know how maddening it is to have your hand on a thing--actually on it--and feel it all the while slipping through your fingers?"

He threw his cigarette away. "Let's drop all this nonsense, anyway. I came over here tonight to have a talk with you. I tell you frankly, because you're about the only sane man I'm likely to cross down here. I tried Lennox once, and Lennox thought I was batty, and there the matter ended. But I've got to a point now where it's absolutely necessary, for the sake of my own mental balance, that I should have someone else's opinion about things. I'm going to put certain facts before you, and you'll say what you think about them."

I nodded.

"About eighteen months ago," Lessing began, "my wife was in rather bad health. It was some sort of nervous trouble, which I need not enter into here, but the doctor said she needed complete change, and that she must positively live in the country for some time, a year or two at least. We came down here. I bought the piece of ground up the hill there and built the little bungalow we are living in, with the idea of using it later on, when her health is restored, simply as a summer cottage. I have a fondness for dabbling in chemistry, as I think I told you, and shortly after we moved down here I built that sort of outdoor study you have seen, so that I could have a place, perfectly quiet, that I could work in without being disturbed, and without messing the house up with my things. I am not a good sleeper. I sit up pretty late at night as a rule, and it worries me to know I'm disturbing other people in the house or that the women are liable to drop in in their dressing-gowns at half-past one or so, to ask whether I'm going to bed or not.

"My laboratory has a top light for day use, and I have rigged up an acetylene lamp just over my table, with a pretty strong light. One night last fall I happened to be working rather late. As a rule I have no difficulty whatever about keeping awake--it's the other way about, in fact--but along about one o'clock I began to get rather drowsy. It might have been the fumes of the chemicals I was using, but I'm used to that, and anyway I don't think they could have affected me. My interest in what I was doing was still awake, but the other side of my mind seemed to get drowsy at the same time. I fought against it a long while, and then gradually I seemed to get the consciousness of something--some presence--in or near the room. I don't know if you have ever attended a séance, Haverill?"

"Never--of any account."

My cigarette had burned down to my fingers, and I threw it away. I was beginning to get keenly interested in his story.

"Well, if you had, you would know that one sometimes gets the sense of a materialization some minutes before it actually takes place. I suppose the subconscious part of one's mind acts more quickly than the senses in receiving an impression. Anyway that was what seemed to happen with me. I waited. I was awake; I want you to understand that clearly. I was as awake as I am now. I saw everything about me, but I seemed to see it in a quite impersonal sort of way.

"The top light is arranged to open in sections, the top as well as the four sides. The side glasses were my idea for bad weather, so that I could always have ventilation on one side or the other without rain driving in, as it will with an ordinary skylight. I had the middle section raised, and one side open as well. Presently I was conscious that something was trying to enter at the glass. There were no sound on the roof itself, which is galvanized, but I could hear plainly a sort of scraping at the window. The inside light was so strong that I could see nothing, but something was gradually obscuring the opening. I had a conviction that the thing, whatever it was, was attracted by my light, and I made an effort, with the strange drowsiness gaining on me, to reach the lamp and turn it out.

"I was on my feet, reaching across the table, with the glare of the lamp full in my eyes, when something--I don't know what--struck me and threw me to the ground. My hand was already on the lamp, and I must have managed to turn it out actually in the moment of falling. I have a recollection of struggling for a moment there in the darkness, of trying, with some sort of hazy instinct, to drag myself under cover of the table, and then I suppose I became unconscious.

"When I came to it was broad daylight. I was lying on the floor, near the table. There was broken glass near me, and I seemed to remember the crash of it before I lost consciousness. My clothes were torn, my arms and chest were badly scratched--I must have somehow defended my face without knowing it--and I was stiff all over when I moved. When I got into the open I was seized with an intense nausea, which lasted for several minutes. My wife and sister are used to my being up till all hours, so that my absence had caused no uneasiness. I went into the house, washed myself as well as I could, and went to sleep. It was then five o'clock, so that I must have been nearly four hours unconscious."

"Did you notice any other symptoms besides the nausea?" I interrupted.

"Yes; an intense fatigue. It was not sleepiness. I was tired out, as if I had been through some great exertion."

"Well?" I said, for I knew he had not finished.

"That was last October, the twenty-fourth, to be exact. Since then the thing has happened twice again. On each occasion I have had the same premonitory drowsiness. I have struggled against it, and it has mastered me at just the critical moment. The second time when I came to I was more badly hurt than before. My sister happened to be up early that morning, and there was no disguising my condition from her. She went off for Lennox. When he came he fixed me up and gave me a sleeping draught--which I didn't need--and I slept nearly the whole day. He held the opinion, which I wrested from him later, that I had had some sort of seizure, the result of overwork, and that I had inflicted the injuries on myself during unconsciousness. The rest he put down to hallucination. He was a fool, and I told him so. Whatever the thing was, it was no hallucination."

"How wide was the skylight open?"

"About eighteen inches."

"Did you find any traces in the morning?"

"Not a mark. The building is high, as you know, and the sides are of perfectly plain boarding. There is nothing that could give foothold, except to a monkey, and the nearest tree is eight feet off. Oh, I went over the whole ground carefully! Whatever it was that came, it did not reach me from the ground."

I moved impatiently. "But what other way could it have reached you?"

"That's what I ask myself," said Lessing grimly. "Do I look like a man subject to brain trouble?"

"No," I said. "I gave that theory up almost immediately."

"Then what do you make of it?" he asked quietly.

"Make of it!" I cried. "Good heavens, man, do you realize that you're asking me to believe a thing that's outside the range of all human possibility!"

"Human possibility! What is human possibility? I tell you the thing as it happened, simply." He rose and began to pace to and fro in the room. "I'm a sane man. I'm not given to imaginary things. And besides--you saw yourself----"

"Wait a moment," I said. "About this light. Have you used the same lamp right along?"

Lessing gave a quick look. I wondered if he had divined my visit to the laboratory that first morning.

"No. I altered it after the second time. There was an interval of over four months when nothing happened at all. I tried to reason it all out, and I concluded that in some way the lamp had had to do with it. From the position of the building, and the woods about it, the light I was at first using could be visible only from one certain direction. I wanted to investigate the whole thing systematically, and with that idea I raised the lamp and fitted a strong reflector that would throw the light outside the building at will, and in any direction."

His description corresponded with the light I had seen above the tree-tops, the night of Pete's adventure with the turkey-buzzard.

"You were using this the last time?"

"Yes. I had been experimenting with it, off and on, for several weeks."

"Have you any idea of the shape of the thing?" I asked him.

"So far as I could make out anything, outside the glass, I might describe it as some kind of dog. It seemed to be greyish.... But that as a theory is sheer nonsense. You know that no dog could have made the scratches you saw."

One thing still puzzled me.

"You say that you put the light out yourself the first time?"

"Yes."

"And the second?"

"There was scarcely time to get any definite impression," he answered evasively. "I was struck down almost at once."

"But you had the impression of a dog?"

"What does it matter?" he cried, with a sudden change of voice. "I tell you, Haverill, it was like nothing that I can describe!"

We sat there for some minutes in silence. I can see now the turn of Lessing's head, the restless movement of his fingers on the chair-arm. It seemed incongruous that we should be sitting here in this common-place room, amid surroundings which spoke so emphatically of the practical routine of life, discussing that which should have branded us both as madmen.

It was Lessing who broke the silence first.

"What the good?" he said, with a short laugh. "I've told you the whole business, and it's up to you to make what you choose of it. The only conclusion seems to be that we are up against something which is, as you put it, outside the range of experience. Good. But suppose I told you that it wasn't outside the range of experience--that what I saw has been seen by other people, upon independent testimony, ten, twenty, thirty years ago?"

I thought of the reporter's story. But there would be time to contribute my data presently, after Lessing had told me all that he knew.

"Did you ever hear of an apparition called the Jersey Devil?" he asked.

"I don't remember it."