There was really nothing to say. The facts were indisputable.
Colonel Wragge was the first to utter.
“My sister,” he said briefly, and moved off. In the yard I heard him sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently matter-of-fact voice, scolding someone roundly for making such a big fire and letting the flues get overheated, and paying no heed to the stammering reply that no fire had been lit there for several days. Then he dispatched a groom on horseback for the local doctor.
Then Dr. Silence turned and looked at me. The absolute control he possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture, change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well knew, over its very birth in his heart, the masklike face of the dead he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. But now, when he turned and looked at me, there was no sphinx-expression there, but rather the keen triumphant face of a man who had solved a dangerous and complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory.
“Now do you guess?” he asked quietly, as though it were the simplest matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible.
I could only stare stupidly and remain silent. He glanced down at the charred cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger. But I was too excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps, to see what it was he outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. I could only go on staring and shaking my puzzled head.
“A fire elemental,” he cried, “a fire elemental of the most powerful and malignant kind—”
“A what?” thundered the voice of Colonel Wragge behind us, having returned suddenly and overheard.
“It’s a fire elemental,” repeated Dr. Silence more calmly, but with a note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, “and a fire elemental enraged.”
The light began to dawn in my mind at last. But the Colonel—who had never heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably worked up for a plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to grapple with—the Colonel stood, with the most dumbfounded look ever seen on a human countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and stare.
“And why,” he began, savage with the desire to find something visible he could fight—“why, in the name of all the blazes—?” and then stopped as John Silence moved up and took his arm.
“There, my dear Colonel Wragge,” he said gently, “you touch the heart of the whole thing. You ask ‘Why.’ That is precisely our problem.” He held the soldier’s eyes firmly with his own. “And that, too, I think, we shall soon know. Come and let us talk over a plan of action—that room with the double doors, perhaps.”
The word “action” calmed him a little, and he led the way, without further speech, back into the house, and down the long stone passage to the room where we had heard his stories on the night of our arrival. I understood from the doctor’s glance that my presence would not make the interview easier for our host, and I went upstairs to my own room—shaking.
But in the solitude of my room the vivid memories of the last hour revived so mercilessly that I began to feel I should never in my whole life lose the dreadful picture of Miss Wragge running—that dreadful human climax after all the nonhuman mystery in the wood—and I was not sorry when a servant knocked at my door and said that Colonel Wragge would be glad if I would join them in the little smoking-room.
“I think it is better you should be present,” was all Colonel Wragge said as I entered the room. I took the chair with my back to the window. There was still an hour before lunch, though I imagine that the usual divisions of the day hardly found a place in the thoughts of anyone of us.
The atmosphere of the room was what I might call electric. The Colonel was positively bristling; he stood with his back to the fire, fingering an unlit black cigar, his face flushed, his being obviously roused and ready for action. He hated this mystery. It was poisonous to his nature, and he longed to meet something face-to-face—something he could gauge and fight. Dr. Silence, I noticed at once, was sitting before the map of the estate which was spread upon a table. I knew by his expression the state of his mind. He was in the thick of it all, knew it, delighted in it, and was working at high pressure. He recognised my presence with a lifted eyelid, and the flash of the eye, contrasted with his stillness and composure, told me volumes.
“I was about to explain to our host briefly what seems to me afoot in all this business,” he said without looking up, “when he asked that you should join us so that we can all work together.” And, while signifying my assent, I caught myself wondering what quality it was in the calm speech of this undemonstrative man that was so full of power, so charged with the strange, virile personality behind it and that seemed to inspire us with his own confidence as by a process of radiation.
“Mr. Hubbard,” he went on gravely, turning to the soldier, “knows something of my methods, and in more than one—er—interesting situation has proved of assistance. What we want now”—and here he suddenly got up and took his place on the mat beside the Colonel, and looked hard at him—“is men who have self-control, who are sure of themselves, whose
