Short Fiction

were palsied.

“Father, what is it?” Elaine repeated.

Her hand on his arm, anxiously she was looking at him. With a hand that still trembled, he pointed to the letter on the floor.

Elaine bent, reached for it, took it up, looked at it, and gave one low cry. Her father was just in time to catch her. She had fainted.

III

Ar first, on leaving the house, Ixar had walked slowly enough. Presently, when out of sight of it, he began to run. He ran, too, as he entered the inn, ran up the stair and into his room, where hurriedly he began to pack, and then abruptly desisted. The chimes across the way were sobbing out the time. It was just three thirty, and there was no train, he knew, for fully two hours.

He moved to the window, thinking, as he did so, that after all he could walk. But now, along the road, at full speed, a motor was approaching. It had one occupant, who, looking up, stopped the machine before the inn, jumped out, and called to him.

“Baxter!”

Ixar wheeled like a rat surprised. In search of a hiding-place he wheeled again. If he had only a weapon, he thought! He had no time to think more. There was a sound of steps that confused him. They were on the stair, in the hall, at the door, which then opened, and Elaine’s brother appeared. Producing a pistol, Herbert Duncan said, and negligently enough:

“This is rather shabby of you⁠—don’t you think so?”

As he spoke, his eyes took in the room⁠—the bed, the chair, the table; the trunk half packed; the picture and paints on the mantel.

A second only. With an uplift of the chin, again he turned to Ixar.

“In Honolulu, when the truth was known, you broke your word, and got away before you could be taken. At the time I hardly fancied that you would turn up here, and in a double masquerade⁠—the masquerade of an assumed name, the masquerade of a painted skin⁠—presume to approach my sister!”

Ixar, his back against the wall, like an animal at bay, showed his teeth.

“Dr. Duncan, I did not know! I swear to you⁠—”

“Gammon! You knew about yourself. And now she knows. Or at least I may assume so. On learning from her that you were here, I wrote her father a letter concerning you which I have just left at his house. But, if I can prevent it, no one else shall know. If I can prevent it, she shall not be bespattered!”

With a look which the damned may have, Ixar bowed his head.

“I was going. I will go.”

Duncan nodded.

“Indeed you will. But you broke your word before. You’ll not get another chance. Instead of coming here personally, I could have notified the authorities. Because of my sister, I did not. Now there is but one way out of it, and you have got to take it!”

Ixar raised his eyes. The anguish in them was infinite.

“You have got to!” Duncan continued. Significantly, with his bulldog air, he added: “Afterward the coroner shall have the facts, but I will see to it that they are buried with you.” For a moment he paused, then threw out: “I have two pistols. One I will leave with you. With the other I will station myself outside. If you attempt to escape, I shoot. It is now a quarter to four. You have fifteen minutes. At four, if you are not⁠—” Again he paused. “If you are not⁠—”

A gesture completed the sentence.

Ixar sank on the chair. Turning his face from this man who arrogated to himself the triple functions of judge, jury, and executioner, he muttered dully:

“I will be.”

With befitting gravity, Duncan bowed.

“Then commend yourself to God.”

At once, placing the pistol on the table and fingering another in his pocket, he backed to the door and went along the hall, down the stair, and across the street, where, his eyes on Ixar’s window, he waited.

Obviously, he lacked the right to do as he had said he would. What is more notable, he had no intention of doing it. But it had been necessary to threaten, and the threat would, he felt, prove effective.

Meanwhile the minutes limped. At last, slowly, mournfully, the bells rang out.

Simultaneously, with the ridiculous noise of a punctured tire, there came, from the room opposite, the crack of a pistol.

With an intake of the breath, Duncan nodded. The man had kept his word⁠—or at least had tried. For might he not have failed? Might it not be that he was but wounded?

In this uncertainty, he reentered the inn, went up the stair and down the hall to the door. It was locked.

“Baxter!” he called.

There was no answer⁠—the sound merely of someone moving or turning or perhaps writhing there.

“Baxter!” he called again.

But now the silence was complete.

Duncan shook at the knob. The lock rattled. He put himself against the door and shoved. With a squeak, it yielded, but within there was something that resisted.

He shoved again. With a crash this time it opened, disclosing a table, overturned, that had been placed against it. It was the table that had crashed. The room itself was empty, or, more exactly, deserted. Ixar had got from the window, into the motor, and away.

In an instant, when Duncan reached the window, he could see him speeding along, headed for the engulfing city.

Immediately he told himself that he could telephone, that he could commandeer the colonel’s car.

With the double motive, he turned. On the mantel before him were the photograph and the paints and pigments. From among the latter he caught up a crayon, and, with hurried, impatient hand, scrawled across the picture:

Baxter, alias Ixar, leper.

The Plot4

“Has the Figaro come yet?”

It was at Nice, in the reading room of a cosmopolitan club. A little before, I had dined on dishes that a poet had prepared. Now, for after course, and although I had a novel under my