II
The horse thudded ponderously up the road.
“How did Westcott shoot himself?” asked Dreeme suddenly.
The boy turned his thin face and green eyes over his small hunched shoulder, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it firmly.
“I calculate that he’ll tell you that,” he finally answered. He kicked ferociously at the horse’s ribs with his small bare feet.
A few drops of rain dashed against Dreeme’s face. It was extraordinarily dark now for the moon had disappeared, swallowed up in the soundless rain-cloud that stretched across the sky like a monstrous sable circus-tent. More by sense than anything else the young doctor knew that he had passed the old burned mill and an instant later the horse clattered across the small wooden bridge which spanned the narrow Saccarac River. He was now on the final stretch of dirt-road leading to the Westcott farm. This route was exceedingly familiar to Dreeme for he traversed it often, going either to some farm or to the larger town of Leeminster where there was a bank, a stone schoolhouse, a deserted gin-distillery crumbling to ruin, and a small courthouse. The road turned in a great slow arc and was bordered by low stone fences, dejected and wrecked by weather into wide breaches at intervals. Between the roadway and the feeble barriers grew occasional clumps of birch trees and beneath them in season bloomed the dusty black-eyed Susans and asthma-compelling goldenrod. Behind the fences stretched the ploughed fields and grass meadows of the various small farms, all of them sloping downward for the Marlborough-Leeminster road progressed along a ridge. A faint mingled smell of piled dung, rotting hay and skinny poultry permeated the air. Dreeme knew the territory well enough by day. The whitewashed houses, set well back from the road and a story more in the rear than they were in front because of the ground slope, lifted tilted smoking chimneys. Dogs, cursed with legions of perpetually active fleas, barked from sagging porches and blear-eyed cocks crowed in the wire-enclosures behind the long lurching kitchens that seemed to have been added as afterthoughts to the dispirited houses. Some of these dwellings were astonishingly old and even the whitewash failed to conceal their dejected venerability. The doors and windows, sunken by the years as though Time had leaned on the lintels and sills with a heavy elbow, leered like the features of a twisted face. All this was in the daytime. At night a profound darkness enveloped these staggering structures. There were no lights in the small opaque windows, nothing but the blank glow of the moon and stars. The farmers of Marlborough sought their beds at an early hour, and the candles and kerosene oil which still sufficed for illumination cost money. Only when the moon was at its brightest did the houses step somewhat out of their brooding night shadow and turn the incurious eyes of their windows toward the curving road. Then they seemed to squat like an unfriendly array of old crones in soiled white wrappers, watching the highway along which so many strange figures had passed since the first mysterious settlers arrived in the valley and found it a likely place wherein to raise their hewn log-houses and their solitary mill.
The horse stopped suddenly and Dreeme, surmising that he had reached his journey’s end, slipped to the ground, his feet clattering on loose pebbles as he maintained his balance. A long ominous growl immediately before him greeted his footsteps and he drew back with some trepidation. He knew all about the half-savage dogs that patrolled the farmyards at night. The boy hurried by him and there was a sound of poles being pulled out of their sockets at a gateway. A cold damp snout thrust itself against Dreeme’s hand just as the boy hissed an unintelligible phrase and an instant later there was the sound of a heavy body forcing its way through the bushes which lined the road. Dreeme knew that the dog was watching him from a distance with savage curiosity. The boy came back and grasped the rope that served for bridle on the horse. “This is the way, doctor,” he said. “Don’t be afraid of the dog.” They stumbled through what was apparently an aperture in the fence and followed a twisted and hummocky path. Dreeme tripped over unsuspected hollows and small jutting boulders until they circled the dark bulk of the house and were at a rear door. A few drops of rain pattered against his face as he looked up at the rear windows. It was curious that he could perceive no least vestige of light emanating from the blank panes. The building stood morosely in a pool of high trees and this intensified the darkness about it. At the door the boy knocked delicately, his thin knuckles playing upon the splintered woodwork, and, after a moment, while Dreeme felt very foolish and slightly startled, there were a few whispered words with some invisible personage who had shot back a series of bolts. The brief beam of a candle leaped across the doctor’s face and he felt himself urged forward and into a room where the shadows fled sluggishly before the feeble whiplash of light from the cylinder of wax. There was a rattling sound as the bolts were shot and Dreeme knew that he was locked in the Westcott farmhouse.
Clutching his black bag, he stared curiously about him but all that he could perceive was a simply furnished room, the usual “sitting room” of a farmhouse with its few stuffed chairs, its wax
