exigency.
'Don't be telling the police-yet. I've an idea where she may have gone. Had she any money, do you think?'
'How do I know?' wailed his harassed sister. 'She might have had some in her coat.'
'Cliona, do you take your mind off this business entirely. I'm the one that's responsible for her, and it's myself will find the poor lass. If any more reporters or detectives come bothering you, have Masters send them about their business. All will be well and 'twill be less than a help should you fret yourself into another sickness. Call up Tony at the office and tell him I'm leaving Carpentier and he had best return straight home when he can, so I'll know where to find him. Will you do all that for me, darling?'
'Where are you going?' Her voice hinted of indefinite alarm.
'Well, the railroad station would be a good place to seek first trace of her, don't you think?'
'Perhaps-yes, I believe you're right, Colin. And then try the police stations. She's certainly quiet and well- behaved enough one way, but you can't tell what she might do outside and alone. Then will you come home- whether you find her or not?'
'Oh, I'll come home. Goodby, Cliona, and mind all I told you.'
He hung up the receiver without waiting for a reply. Having purposely misled her in regard to the direction his search would take, he wished to answer no more questions.
There was one place to which his Dusk Lady, had she been of sound mind, would have been supremely unlikely to return. Being what she was, in O'Hara's opinion that was the first covert to draw. She had expressed to Cliona alarm for his safety and a desire to follow him.
Danger and the house at Undine must be to her synonymous terms. There she had known misery and terror, there she had barely escaped the clutches of danger carnified in the person of Genghis Khan; there, she had seen him, O'Hara, kill a man and felt vicariously his own after-horror.
There, then, if she thought of danger, would she picture him, and since she wished to follow him, it was to Reed's house that she would straightway go.
It was sketchy theorizing, perhaps, but Colin had been trained in a rough school that turns out excellent and not often mistaken psychologists.
He swung out of Bradshaw's, and almost into the arms of the white haired man, who had followed him down the hill.
'Mr. O'Hara,' he began again, but Colin brushed ruthlessly past.
'I've
He had an impression that the persistent journalist sprang after him, tried to get a foothold on the running board, and fell. But his thoughts were a rushing torrent that fairly bore him with them. The outer consciousness that repulsed the man and set the car in motion was as mechanical as the motor itself.
And so went Colin's last chance of escape from that which awaited him, swept under by the impetuous nature that no experience could lessen-that would be still impetuous to the very hour of its death.
The road to Undine was well enough known to him, when he was not led cross-country. The big car ate up those few miles at reckless speed. Of course, there was a possibility that the lost maiden might have started for home in a vague, wandering way, without the wits or the money to reach it. But O'Hara deemed otherwise. The cleverness of lunacy is notorious, and who knew how familiar she might be with ways and means of getting about the city?
Ten minutes after leaving Carpentier, he pulled up with a jerk at the iron gates upon whose intricate beauty he gazed for the fourth time in two days. It was then after five o'clock, and dusk was spreading its mantle of indistinctness and mystery. Behind those iron scrolls the gate-lodge loomed as a dim, sepulchral mass.
O'Hara was out of the car almost before it had stopped, and at the gate in two long strides. But with his hand on the bell he paused. The thought of another clandestine intrusion on these premises was distasteful. He wanted to ring the bell and make his demands boldly of whoever should answer. But would anyone answer? Why had he so taken it for granted, because of last night's havoc at the bungalow, that Reed had never gone further from home than Carpentier-that the note transmitted by Marco's hand contained a lie?
What if, up there at the house whose gray roofs so melted into the gray dusk as to be invisible behind their screen of skeleton boughs, what if no one was there save the monster ape and Marco? Marco, deaf forever to the ringing of that or any earthly bell?
Had Reed returned, from however nefarious an expedition, would his own criminal proceedings have stopped him from sending out a general alarm, that the slayer of his servant and the abductor of his daughter might be immediately traced? And it would have been so easy to trace him!
Surely, even MacClellan could have picked up that trail, followed so obvious a clue as the conductor's story. But if Reed were not at his 'farm,' if no one were there save Genghis Khan, and it had been he who caused Marco's body to vanish so disturbingly, then the girl could not be there either. Had she come, there was no one to admit her-ah, stupidity! What of that open storehouse door through which Colin himself had showed her the way? And if she had gone in-had found Khan there, alone, masterless —
Filled with an increasing horror of possibilities conjured up by his own imagination, O'Hara laid his hand on the gate, shaking it slightly-and at that light impulsion it swayed inward an inch or so. The loud complaint of its hinge smote his ears like a blow. The gate was unlocked! Anyone might have entered here-
Half reluctantly, like a man who approaches some sight too terrible for human bearing, O'Hara pushed the gate wider and set his foot on the sodden leaves of the drive.
He had left that house, left the man-ape loose there and given no warning that should save any harmless intruder from its unrestrained and cunning savagery. He knew what reward had been meted out to him, the double offender-knew it as though the torn, dismembered body of his Dusk Lady lay at his feet. Yet, since he must, he entered and turned his footsteps toward the unseen house.
Tonight there was no wind; only silence, intense, painful as an evil dream, which the soft sound of wet leaves beneath his feet only served to make more lifeless. A thin haze had risen from the sodden ground, so that about him there was neither light nor darkness, only gray neutrality from which gaunt trees lifted their skeleton tracery against a sky only a little brighter than the mist below.
Yet objects close at hand were still discernible. He passed the vine-hidden gate-lodge, and as he did so, and because of the general stillness, a sound reached his ears, a just perceptible rustling, as of wood gently rubbed upon wood.
Whirling quickly, he stared through the thin haze toward the inner wall of the lodge. From where he stood, ten feet away, its outlines were somewhat blurred, its vines a mass without detail. And yet he was almost sure that again, as on that first night, a blacker oblong had appeared in the dark wall of vines.
Then and for the first time in his life O'Hara learned the meaning of stark, horrible fear-fear that shut his throat against breath, and turned the strength of his giant limbs to water!
In the center of that vague black oblong, faintly gleaming through the mist by a pallid light of its own, appeared an oval shape that swayed slightly from side to side-the oval of the gate-keeper's barely visible countenance. And to Colin the gatekeeper was Marco. And Marco lay dead by Colin's hand!
Had the Irishman been given time to reflect, time to set the stern clamp of reason on his slipping faculties, what followed might have happened differently. But time was not granted. The oval wavered and rose a foot or so, then shot itself outward straight for O'Hara's face.
He screamed out, loud and harsh, twisting his head to one side. Something struck his neck a terrible blow, and the gray mist flared red about him, to vanish, roaring, into blank unconsciousness.
He was lying beneath the sea, lapped in the slimy ooze of its deepest profundity. He could feel the rocking of his body to some slow, dense current, and the awful pressure of the depths crushed the flesh inward upon his vital organs, squeezing out the very life. Yet struggling to breathe-why, he could breathe, though shortly. He felt the air in his nostrils. How was that? Was there air on the sea-bottom?
With that question, awakening reason dissipated the dream and roused him from unconsciousness. But the pressure it did not dissipate, nor the slow rocking motion. With an effort he forced open his eyes. It was night. He was lying on the ground somewhere in the open air, for he was looking upward through mist not dense enough to obscure the larger stars. His mind, still dazed, refused at once to resume the business of life.
Marco? Marco? What was it concerning Marco? Reluctantly, then with gathering power, memory took up its
