“What?” demanded Lanark. “Do you realize what you’re saying, man? Explain yourself.”
“Come, sir,” Jager almost pleaded, and led the way into the kitchen. “It’s down in the cellar.”
From a little heap on a table he picked up a candle, and then opened a door full of darkness.
The stairs to the cellar were shaky to Lanark’s feet, and beneath him was solid black shadow, smelling strongly of damp earth. Jager, stamping heavily ahead, looked back and upward. That broad, bearded face, that had not lost its full-blooded flush in the hottest fighting at Pea Ridge, had grown so pallid as almost to give off sickly light. Lanark began to wonder if all this theatrical approach would not make the promised devil seem ridiculous, anticlimactic—the flutter of an owl, the scamper of a rat, or something of that sort.
“You have the candle, sergeant,” he reminded, and the echo of his voice momentarily startled him. “Strike a match, will you?”
“Yes, sir.” Jager had raised a knee to tighten his stripe-sided trousers. A snapping scrape, a burst of flame, and the candle glow illuminated them both. It revealed, too, the cellar, walled with stones but floored with clay. As they finished the descent, Lanark could feel the soft grittiness of that clay under his bootsoles. All around them lay rubbish—boxes, casks, stacks of broken pots and dishes, bundles of kindling.
“Here,” Jager was saying, “here is what I found.”
He walked around the foot of the stairs. Beneath the slope of the flight lay a long, narrow case, made of plain, heavy boards. It was unpainted and appeared ancient. As Jager lowered the light in his hand, Lanark saw that the joinings were secured with huge nails, apparently forged by hand. Such nails had been used in building the older sheds on his father’s Maryland estate. Now there was a creak of wooden protest as Jager pried up the loosened lid of the coffin-like box.
Inside lay something long and ruddy. Lanark saw a head and shoulders, and started violently. Jager spoke again:
“An image, sir. A heathen image.” The light made grotesque the sergeant’s face, one heavy half fully illumined, the other secret and lost in the black shadow. “Look at it.”
Lanark, too, stooped for a closer examination. The form was of human length, or rather more; but it was not finished, was neither divided into legs below nor extended into arms at the roughly shaped shoulders. The head, too, had been molded without features, though from either side, where the ears should have been it sprouted upcurved horns like a bison’s. Lanark felt a chill creep upon him, whence he knew not.
“It’s Satan’s own image,” Jager was mouthing deeply. “ ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image—’ ”
With one foot he turned the coffin-box upon its side. Lanark took a quick stride backward, just in time to prevent the ruddy form from dropping out upon his toes. A moment later, Jager had spurned the thing. It broke, with a crashing sound like crockery, and two more trampling kicks of the sergeant’s heavy boots smashed it to bits.
“Stop!” cried Lanark, too late. “Why did you break it? I wanted to have a good look at the thing.”
“But it is not good for men to look upon the devil’s works,” responded Jager, almost pontifically.
“Don’t advise me, sergeant,” said Lanark bleakly. “Remember that I am your officer, and that I don’t need instruction as to what I may look at.” He looked down at the fragments. “Hmm, the thing was hollow, and quite brittle. It seems to have been stuffed with straw—no, excelsior. Wood shavings, anyway.” He investigated the fluffy inner mass with a toe. “Hullo, there’s something inside of the stuff.”
“I wouldn’t touch it, sir,” warned Jager, but this time it was he who spoke too late. Lanark’s boot-toe had nudged the object into plain sight, and Lanark had put down his gauntleted left hand and picked it up.
“What is this?” he asked himself aloud. “Looks rather like some sort of strongbox—foreign, I’d say, and quite cold. Come on, Jager, we’ll go upstairs.”
In the kitchen, with a strong light from several candles, they examined the find quite closely. It was a dark oblong, like a small dispatch-case or, as Lanark had commented, a strongbox. Though as hard as iron, it was not iron, nor any metal either of them had ever known.
“How does it open?” was Lanark’s next question, turning the case over in his hands. “It doesn’t seem to have hinges on it. Is this the lid—or this?”
“I couldn’t say.” Jager peered, his eyes growing narrow with perplexity. “No hinges, as the lieutenant just said.”
“None visible, nor yet a lock.” Lanark thumped the box experimentally, and proved it hollow. Then he lifted it close to his ear and shook it. There was a faint rustle, as of papers loosely rolled or folded. “Perhaps,” the officer went on, “this separate slice isn’t a lid at all. There may be a spring to press, or something that slides back and lets another plate come loose.”
But Suggs was entering from the front of the house. “Lieutenant, sir! Something’s happened to Newton—he was watching on the rock. Will the lieutenant come? And Sergeant Jager, too.”
The suggestion of duty brought back the color and self-control that Jager had lost. “What’s happened to Newton?” he demanded at once, and hurried away with Suggs.
Lanark waited in the kitchen for only a moment. He wanted to leave the box, but did not want his troopers meddling with it. He spied, beside the heavy iron stove, a fireplace, and in its side the metal door to an old brick oven. He pulled that door open, thrust the box in, closed the door again, and followed Suggs and Jager.
They had gone out upon the front porch. There, with Corporal Gray and a blank-faced trooper on guard, lay the silent form of Newton, its face covered with a newspaper.
Almost every man of the gathered patrol knew a corpse when he saw one, and it took
