still recumbent, was ascertaining the damage, tenderly peeling down his stocking.
“Upon my soul,” he said finally, “I don’t know whether this moisture is blood or rain. I think I’ve broken a bone.”
“Blood is thicker than water,” I suggested. “Is it sticky? See if you can move your toes.”
There was a pause: Hotchkiss moved his toes. By that time I had found a knocker and was making the night hideous. But there was no response save the wind that blew sodden leaves derisively in our faces. Once Hotchkiss declared he heard a window-sash lifted, but renewed violence with the knocker produced no effect.
“There’s only one thing to do,” I said finally. “I’ll go back and try to bring the buggy up for you. You can’t walk, can you?”
Hotchkiss sat back in his puddle and said he didn’t think he could stir, but for me to go back to town and leave him, that he didn’t have any family dependent on him, and that if he was going to have pneumonia he had probably got it already. I left him there, and started back to get the horse.
If possible, it was worse than before. There was no lightning, and only by a miracle did I find the little gate again. I drew a long breath of relief, followed by another, equally long, of dismay. For I had found the hitching strap and there was nothing at the end of it! In a lull of the wind I seemed to hear, far off, the eager thud of stable-bound feet. So for the second time I climbed the slope to the Laurels, and on the way I thought of many things to say.
I struck the house at a new angle, for I found a veranda, destitute of chairs and furnishings, but dry and evidently roofed. It was better than the terrace, and so, by groping along the wall, I tried to make my way to Hotchkiss. That was how I found the open window. I had passed perhaps six, all closed, and to have my hand grope for the next one, and to find instead the soft drapery of an inner curtain, was startling, to say the least.
I found Hotchkiss at last around an angle of the stone wall1 and told him that the horse was gone. He was disconcerted, but not abased; maintaining that it was a new kind of knot that couldn’t slip and that the horse must have chewed the halter through! He was less enthusiastic than I had expected about the window.
“It looks uncommonly like a trap,” he said. “I tell you there was some one in the park below when we were coming up. Man has a sixth sense that scientists ignore - a sense of the nearness of things. And all the time you have been gone, some one has been watching me.”
“Couldn’t see you,” I maintained; “I can’t see you now. And your sense of contiguity didn’t tell you about that flower crock.”
In the end, of course, he consented to go with me. He was very lame, and I helped him around to the open window. He was full of moral courage, the little man: it was only the physical in him that quailed. And as we groped along, he insisted on going through the window first.
“If it is a trap,” he whispered, “I have two arms to your one, and, besides, as I said before, life holds much for you. As for me, the government would merely lose an indifferent employee.”
When he found I was going first he was rather hurt, but I did not wait for his protests. I swung my feet over the sill and dropped. I made a clutch at the window-frame with my good hand when I found no floor under my feet, but I was too late. I dropped probably ten feet and landed with a crash that seemed to split my ear-drums. I was thoroughly shaken, but in some miraculous way the bandaged arm had escaped injury.
“For Heaven’s sake,” Hotchkiss was calling from above, “have you broken your back?”
“No,” I returned, as steadily as I could, “merely driven it up through my skull. This is a staircase. I’m coming up to open another window.”
It was eerie work, but I accomplished it finally, discovering, not without mishap, a room filled with more tables than I had ever dreamed of, tables that seemed to waylay and strike at me. When I had got a window open, Hotchkiss crawled through, and we were at last under shelter.
Our first thought was for a light. The same laborious investigation that had landed us where we were, revealed that the house was lighted by electricity, and that the plant was not in operation. By accident I stumbled across a tabouret with smoking materials, and found a half dozen matches. The first one showed us the magnitude of the room we stood in, and revealed also a brass candle-stick by the open fireplace, a candle-stick almost four feet high, supporting a candle of similar colossal proportions. It was Hotchkiss who discovered that it had been recently lighted. He held the match to it and peered at it over his glasses.
“Within ten minutes,” he announced impressively, this candle has been burning. Look at the wax! And the wick! Both soft.”
“Perhaps it’s the damp weather,” I ventured, moving a little nearer to the circle of light. A gust of wind came in just then, and the flame turned over on its side and threatened demise. There was something almost ridiculous in the haste with which we put down the window and nursed the flicker to life.
The peculiarly ghost-like appearance of the room added to the uncanniness of the situation. The furniture was swathed in white covers for the winter; even the pictures wore shrouds. And in a niche between two windows a bust on a pedestal, similarly wrapped, one arm extended under its winding sheet, made a most life-like ghost, if any ghost can be life-like.
In the light of the candle we surveyed each other, and we were objects for mirth. Hotchkiss was taking off his sodden shoes and preparing to make himself comfortable, while I hung my muddy raincoat over the ghost in the corner. Thus habited, he presented a rakish but distinctly more comfortable appearance.
“When these people built,” Hotchkiss said, surveying the huge dimensions of the room, “they must have bought a mountain and built all over it. What a room!”
It seemed to be a living-room, although Hotchkiss remarked that it was much more like a dead one. It was probably fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. It was very high, too, with a domed ceiling, and a gallery ran around the entire room, about fifteen feet above the floor. The candle light did not penetrate beyond the dim outlines of the gallery rail, but I fancied the wall there hung with smaller pictures.
Hotchkiss had discovered a fire laid in the enormous fireplace, and in a few minutes we were steaming before a cheerful blaze. Within the radius of its light and heat, we were comfortable again. But the brightness merely emphasized the gloom of the ghostly corners. We talked in subdued tones, and I smoked, a box of Russian cigarettes which I found in a table drawer. We had decided to stay all night, there being nothing else to do. I suggested a game of double-dummy bridge, but did not urge it when my companion asked me if it resembled euchre. Gradually, as the ecclesiastical candle paled in the firelight, we grew drowsy. I drew a divan into the cheerful area, and stretched myself out for sleep. Hotchkiss, who aid the pain in his leg made him wakeful, sat
