Chapter XXXVII: Evidence

Artie realized in a flash the seriousness of Westy’s intention, and without any further comment gave him a boost up the pillar and onto the shed.

Westy pulled himself up gradually until he was sure that he could stand on his feet with safety. He went around to the side-windows first, trying each only to find they were all barred. With only one more to attempt, he approached it half-fearfully lest it should prove inaccessible too. With trembling fingers he tugged at it and, to his great joy, it yielded.

Artie and Uncle Jeb watched him from below with anxious eyes, beseeching him to be careful and to hurry.

The window was tight shut; locked! But Westy was not to be deterred from his purpose at this time. Raising his knee with determination he struck the glass with a force that sent it crashing into fragments inside. Still there came no sound whatever from within that silent interior.

Stepping through the broken pane into the room he called, but all he could hear was the roar of the flames. The heat in the room was unbearable and he couldn’t see very well in the darkness.

He stumbled over one chair and then another. With hands outstretched, he felt something cold. He laughed at the start it gave him for, on examining it closer, he found it to be one of those old-fashioned marble-topped bureaus. It was one of those huge affairs, ample enough to hold the wardrobe of one’s entire lifetime. Reaching out into the space around him again, his hand now came in contact with something else; a bed. He could feel the soft covers and knew by its very smoothness that it had been unoccupied that night. Where, he thought, was the door? What room did Ol’ Pop use? These and a hundred other thoughts were flashing constantly in his active brain, while he was groping there in the darkness.

If it hadn’t been that he knocked the ancient water pitcher and its attendant wash-basin over in his roaming, he probably would have been another half hour trying to find the door. For just after the two articles reached the floor in various pieces Westy shoved his foot ahead of him to kick them aside and in doing so he put his foot on one of the slippery pieces. He landed plunk on the floor, sitting neatly in a pool of water that the pitcher had so recently held. As he sat there so, his eye was just on the level with a little fleck of light, to his right. He put his head over further toward it and his hand out. He felt a door knob revolving under his grasp and knew instantly that the light he had seen was through the keyhole. What joy, what rapture, he thought, as the door swung open under his pressure.

But his ecstasy was of very short duration, for, stepping out into the hall, he saw to his horror the light that he had so joyously perceived through the keyhole wasn’t any beacon of safety. It came from the back bedrooms. They were afire! The heat struck his face as he stood there and made it feel blistered.

He stood in the doorway and the light from the burning rooms reflected into the bedroom brightly. Glancing back of him, he saw some towels hanging on a rack above the washstand, whose receptacles he had just demolished. Rushing in, he grabbed a couple of them and stooped, sopping them in the water that had formed a miniature pool on the floor. Taking these, he entered the hall, calling loudly again and ran wildly to the back, one of the towels protecting his face.

He opened one door after the other, but it was unnecessary for him to touch the last door at all. The flames had already destroyed the upper half of it and one could see inside perfectly. They were all practically gone now but yet, it looked to Westy that they had been devoid of any occupants that night, even in the present state of chaos and havoc that this terrible menace had created.

Running to the front again, he opened another one of the bedroom doors. A sickening odor reached him and his heart stood still. Lying on the bed was a form, apparently asleep, outlined against the darkness from the red glare in the back. Westy went over to the bed and bent close. It was Ol’ Pop!

The old scout seemed to be hardly breathing at all. In point of fact, it was so faintly and he was lying so rigid and still that Westy realized with a shock he must be unconscious.

Then the flames bursting out into the back of the hall shone through, tingeing the room a scarlet hue. It provided a sort of arc light and Westy could see Ol’ Pop very plain now.

A handkerchief was covering the lower part of his face and Westy gently removed it. As he did so, that nauseating odor permeated the whole room again, and his own nostrils seemed to be filled with it. He raised the piece of muslin to his face.

It had been saturated with chloroform!