The sun had set with a primrose glory of reflection upon the river and the ridge. Over there in the west now there was a pale after-glow of marigold. It streamed across the dark, still waters of the backwater pool by the river and faintly edged the drowsy petals of white and yellow lilies. Already distant outline and perspective were hazy, there was purple in the forest, and birds were winging swiftly to the woods.
By the pool with a great mass of dripping lilies at his side to carry back to camp, Philip stared frowningly at the tangled float of foliage at his feet. Somehow that ugly flash of suspicion had persisted. Why had the Baron wished him to stay in the camp of Diane? … What was the portent of his peculiar interest anyway?
Philip sighed.
"Do you know, Nero," he confided suddenly, patting the dog's shaggy head, "my life is developing certain elements of intrigue and mystery exceedingly offensive to my spread-eagle tastes. There's a knife and a bullet now, Johnny's two men and the auto, and a cuff and a most mysterious link between our lady and the Baron. I'll be hanged if I like any of it. And why in thunder did Themar crib an aeroplane and bump his fool head?" He fell suddenly thoughtful.
"As for you, old top," he added presently, "you ought to go home. Dick will be fussing."
Nero waggled ambiguously. Philip nodded.
"Right, old man," he admitted with sudden gravity. "I can always depend upon you to set me right. It's nothing like so essential for you to go as it is for me. You did right to mention it. I ought to dig out—all the more because the Baron wants me to stay—but I've been thinking a bit this afternoon and unusual problems demand unusual solutions. You'll grant that?" Nero politely routed an excursive bug from his path and lay down to listen.
"Mr. Poynter!" called a voice from the darkling trees behind him.
Mr. Poynter smiled and fell deliberately to filling the bowl of his wildwood pipe. Gnarled and twisted and marvelously eccentric was this wildwood pipe and therefore an object of undoubted interest. The bowl had somehow eluded Philip's desperate effort to keep it of reasonable dimensions and required a Gargantuan supply of tobacco.
"Mr. Poynter!"
"My Lord!" murmured Philip, staring ruefully into the pipe-bowl, "the infernal thing is bottomless! Exit another can of tobacco. I'll have to ask Johnny to buy me a barrel." And Philip flung the empty can into the pool whence a frog leaped with a frightened croak.
"Philip!"
"Mademoiselle!" said Philip pleasantly.
Darkly lovely, Diane's eyes met his with a glance of indignant reproach. Somehow her lips were like a scarlet wound in the gypsy brown skin and her cheeks were hot with color.
"A wildwood elf of scarlet and brown!" thought Philip and hospitably flicked away a twig or so with his handkerchief that she might sit down.
"There's water plantain over there in the bog," he said lazily, "and swamp honeysuckle. And see," he turned out his pockets, "swamp apples. Queer, aren't they? Johnny says they're good to eat. The honeysuckle was full of them."
Diane bit daintily into the peculiar juicy pulp.
"A man of your pernicious good humor," she said greatly provoked, "is a menace to civilization. You sap all the wholesome fire of one's most cherished resentment."
"I know," admitted Philip humbly. "I'll be hanged yet."
"I can't see what in the world you find so absorbing over here," she commented with marked disapproval. "All the while I was getting supper I watched you. And you merely smoked and flipped pebbles in the pool and kept supper waiting."
"You're wrong there," said Philip. "I've been thinking, too."
"I'd like to know just why you've been thinking so deeply!"
"Honest Injun?"
"Honest Injun!"
"Well," said Philip slowly, "I've been reviewing the possible mishaps incident to a caravan trip to Florida."
"Mishaps!" Diane studied him in frank displeasure. "Are you a fussy pessimist?"
"By no means. Merely—prudent." Philip's eyes narrowed thoughtfully and he fell silent.
The iris shadows beyond the river deepened. A firefly or so flickered brightly above the fields of clover. In the soft clear twilight, fragrant with the smell of clover and water lily and rimmed now by the rising moon, Philip found his resolution of the afternoon difficult to utter. The pool at his feet was a motionless mirror of summer stars. Surely there could be nothing but peace in this tranquil world of tree and grass and murmuring river. And yet—
"Do take that ridiculous pipe out of your mouth and say something!" exclaimed Diane restlessly. "You look as if you were smoking a pumpkin! Besides, the supper's all packed up in hot stones and grass to keep it hot. Why moon so and shoot pebbles at the frogs?"
"Well," said Philip abruptly, "do you mind if I say that your trip seems a most imprudent venture?"
"By no means!" replied Diane with maddening composure. "But it's only fair to warn you that my aunt's already said all there is to say on the subject. The horses may drop dead," she reviewed swiftly on her slim brown fingers, "Johnny may fall heir to an apoplectic fit and fall on a horse thereby inducing him to run away into a swamp and sink in quicksand. I may be kidnapped and held for ransom in the wilds of Connecticut and the van may burn up some night when I'm asleep in it. Then I may eat poison berries in a fit of absent-mindedness, I may fall into a river while I'm fishing, forget how to swim, and drown, Johnny may gather amanitas and kill us both, and something or other may bite me. There are one or two other little things like forest fires, floods and brigands—"
"Help!" murmured Philip.
"Can you add anything to that?" demanded Diane politely.
Philip laughed. Diane, delicately sarcastic, was irresistible.
"There is the bullet—" he reminded gravely.
"Please!" begged Diane faintly.
Philip flushed with a sense of guilt.
"Well," he owned, "I have bothered you a lot about it, that's a fact! But it sticks so in my mind. There's something else—"
"Yes?" said Diane discouragingly.
"Didn't you tell me yesterday that you'd had a feeling some one had been spying on your camp?"
"Yes," said Diane in serious disapproval. "I did. I get seizures of confidential lunacy once in a while. Are you going to fuss about that?"
"No," said Philip gently. "But the knife and the bullet and that have made me wonder—a lot. After all," he regretted sincerely, "my notions are very vague and formless, but I feel so strongly about them that—urging my friendship for Carl as my sole excuse for unasked advice to his cousin—"
"Yes?"
Philip laid aside his pipe with a sigh. The crisp music of his lady's voice was not encouraging.
"I do hope you'll forgive me," he said quietly, "but I'm going to urge you to abandon your trip to Florida!"
"Mr. Poynter!" flashed Diane indignantly. "The bump on your head has had a relapse. Better let Johnny go for the doctor again."
"I know I'm infernally presumptuous," acknowledged Philip flushing, "but I'm terribly in earnest."
Diane's eyes, wide, black, rebuking, scanned his troubled face askance.
"I ought to be exceedingly angry," she said slowly, "and if it wasn't for the bump, like as not I would be—but I'm not."
"I'm truly grateful," said Philip with a sigh of relief. And added to himself, "Philip, old top, you're in for it."
"Why," exclaimed Diane, "I've never been so happy in my life as I have been here by this beautiful river!"
"Nor I!" said Philip truthfully.
Diane did not hear.
"Every wild thing calls," she went on, impetuously. "It always has. Fish—bird—wild flower—the smell of clover—the hum of bees—I can't pretend to tell you what they all mean to me. Even as a youngster I frightened my aunt half to death by running away to sleep in the forest. I'm sorry I'll ever have to go back to civilization!"
"And yet," insisted Philip inexorably, "to me it seems that you should go back—to-morrow!"
"I do seem to feel a stir of temper!" said Diane reflectively. "Maybe I'd better go back and look at supper. You can come after you're through pelting that frog."
"There's still another reason," said Philip humbly, "which I can't tell you. Indeed, I ought not mention it. I can only beg you to take it on trust and believe that it's another forcible argument against your trip. Somehow, everything in my mind weaves into a gigantic warning. So disturbing is the notion," added Philip unquietly, "that—"
"Yes?" queried Diane politely.
"That after much thought, I have decided to stay here in camp until you abandon your nomadic scheme and break camp for home. There'll come a time, I'm sure, when you'll think as I do to get rid of me."
Diane rose with suspicious mildness.
"I'm hungry," she said, "and Johnny's yodeling."
"Well," said Philip provokingly, "I don't believe I want any supper after all. The atmosphere's too chilly."
It was insolent music, a taunt in every note. Carl laid aside his flute and inspected his prisoner with impudent interest.
"You are the most difficult person to entertain!" he accused softly. "Here Hunch has strained a sinuous spine performing our beautiful native dances, the tango and the hesitation, and I've fluted up all the wind in the room and still you glower."
"Monsieur," broke forth the prisoner, goaded beyond endurance by the stifling heat and the stench of Hunch's pipe, "is it not enough to imprison me here without reason, that you must taunt and gibe—" he choked indignantly and stared desperately at the boarded windows.
"Let your voice out, do!" encouraged Carl. "We dispensed with the caretaker days ago, fearing you'd feel restricted."
The other's face was livid.
"Monsieur!" he cried imperiously, his eyes flashing. "Take care!"
"I know," said Carl soothingly, "that you have deep, dark, sinister possibilities within you—dear, yes! You tried something of the sort on the Ridge Road. That's why your august head's so badly bruised. But why aggravate your blood pressure now when it's so infernally hot and you've work ahead. Hunch," he added carelessly to the admiring henchman who had once dealt away successive slices of his inheritance, "go get a pitcher of ice water and rustle up another siphon of seltzer and some whiskey. Likely His Nibs and I will play chess again to-night."
Hunch rose from a chair by the window where he had flattened his single good eye against a knot hole, and slouched heavily to the door.
The face of the prisoner slowly whitened. Every muscle of his body quivered suddenly in horrible revulsion. Nights of enforced drunkenness had left his nerves strained to the breaking point.
"Monsieur," he panted, greatly agitated, "the whiskey—the thought of it again to-night—is maddening."
Carl merely raised ironical eyebrows.
"You are not a man," choked the other, shaking. "You are a nameless demon! Such hellish originality in the conception of evil, such singular indignities as you have seen fit to inflict, they are the freaks of a madman!"
"Thank you," said Carl politely. "One likes to have one's little ingenuities appreciated."
"I—I am ill—and the room is stifling."
"If I do not mind it," said Carl in aggrieved surprise, "why should you?"
"You are a thing of steel and infernal fire. I am but human."
"There is a way to stop it all," reminded Carl, lazily relighting his cigar. "Why not give me a logical reason for your presence in America?"
"I have done so. Have I not said again and again that I am Sigimund Jokai, of Vienna, touring in America?"
"You have said so," agreed Carl imperturbably, "but you lie. There was an empty chamber in your revolver, you were perilously close to my cousin's camp. Why? Is it not better to tell me than foolishly to waste such splendid nerve and grit as you possess?"
The prisoner moistened his bloodless lips and shrugged.
"Monsieur," he accused coldly, "you tinge commonplace incidents with melodrama."
"Days ago—er—Jokai of Vienna," went on Carl thoughtfully, "I dispatched a formal communication to your country. Why has it been ignored? Why did my first inkling of its effect come in the sight of your face in suspicious territory? And why, Monsieur," purred Carl softly, "did you seek to kill me by a trick?"
"Monsieur, you delayed me. I am hot of temper—"
"And kill whoever angers you? My dear Jokai, that's absurd. As for your singular indifference to the burning car—that's easy. You'd stolen it. But why?"
He smiled slightly and picked up his flute. With infinite softness a waltz danced lightly through the quiet room. To such a fanciful, eerie piping might the ghost of a child have danced. Then without pause or warning it swung dramatically into a stirring melody of power and dignity.
The wretched man by the table buried his face in his hands and groaned.
"Ah!" said Carl softly. "So Monsieur has heard that tune before? That in itself is illuminating."
With a leer Hunch entered and deposited a tray upon the table. Carl poured himself some whiskey and pushed the decanter toward his guest with a significant glance. Jokai of Vienna poured and drank with a shudder of nausea.
"We've a new chessboard," said Carl. "It's most ingenious. Hunch spent a large part of his valuable morning shopping for it. The board and chessmen are metal and I myself have added one or two unique improvements. Help yourself to some more whiskey—do."
"Monsieur," faltered Jokai desperately, "I—I can not."
"Hunch," said Carl softly. "His Nibs won't drink."
Instantly from the wired metal points of Jokai's chair a stinging electric current swept fiendishly through his body. Last night it had goaded him unspeakably. To-night, with every tortured nerve leaping, it was unbearable. Shaking, he poured again and drank—great drops of sweat starting out upon his forehead. Where the rope bound his ankles the flesh was aching dully.
"Mercy!" he choked. "I—I can not bear it."
"There is a way to stop it!" reminded Carl curtly. "The ivory chessmen for me, Hunch. And whenever he refuses to drink—start the current."
With the metal chessboard before him, Carl idly arranged his ivory men. Jokai touched a metal pawn and shuddered violently. The metal board was wired. Thenceforth every move in the game he must play with the metal men would complete the circuit and send the biting needles through his frame. It was delicately gauged, a nerve-racking discomfort without definite pain, a thing to snap the dreadful tension of a man's endurance at the end.
"Ah! Monsieur!" cried Jokai wildly. "It is inconceivable—"
"Play!" said Carl briefly. White and grim his guest obeyed.
In terrible silence they played the game through to the end.
"Let me pour you some more whiskey," insisted Carl with infernal courtesy. "Let us understand each other. Whenever I drink, I expect you to do the same. As for you, Hunch, you'll kindly stay sober!"
Jokai gulped the nauseating torture to the end. He was faint and sick. By the end of the third game, every move had become convulsive. The insidious bite of the current was getting horribly on his nerves. Still with desperate will he played on. Drunk and dizzy—his veins hot and pounding, he stared in fascinated horror at the face of his merciless opponent. Through the film of smoke it loomed vividly dark, impudent, ironic, the mobile mouth edged satirically with a slight smile.
"Are you man or devil?" he whispered.
Carl laughed. His hand, for all his drinking, was calm and steady, his handsome eyes clear and cold and resolute.
"Hunch," he said curtly, "if you touch that bottle again, I'll break it over your head. You're drunk now."
To Jokai his voice trailed off into curious nothingness. Somewhere he knew in a room stifling hot and hazy with the fumes of vile tobacco there was a voice, musical, detached and very far away.
"Monsieur," it was saying, "there are still the questions."
With shaking hand Jokai touched a metal king and screamed. The heat and the hell-board hard upon his days and nights of enforced drinking were too much. With a strangled sob, Jokai of Vienna pitched forward upon the board unconscious.
Carl swept the metal men away with a shrug.
"Poor devil!" he said pityingly. "All this hell sooner than answer a question or two. By to-morrow night, with another dose of the same medicine, he'll feel differently. Likely I'll run up to Connecticut to-night, Hunch, to see my aunt. I'll be back by noon to-morrow. Tear off the window boards and give him some more air. You can move him to another room in the morning."
Hunch obeyed, and presently as the street door slammed behind his chief, Hunch's single eye roved expectantly to the forgotten whiskey on the table. Jokai lay in a motionless stupor by the window. It would be morning before the hapless drinker would be quite himself again. With brutal, powerful arms, Hunch bore his charge to an adjoining room and consigned him disrespectfully to a bed. Then with a fresh bottle of whiskey in his hand, he returned to the open window, leered pleasantly at the dizzy glare of city lights beyond and henceforth devoted himself to getting very drunk. Having gratified this bibulous ambition to the uttermost, he fell asleep. The morning sunlight flaming at last on his coarse, bloated face awoke him to resentful consciousness. Glowering at the bright, warm light with his single eye, Hunch rolled away into the shadow and went to sleep again.
Below on the porch, with an outraged caretaker's letter in her hand bag, Aunt Agatha turned her latchkey resolutely in the lock.
"I just will not have it!" reflected Aunt Agatha defiantly. "I certainly will not. And I'd have been here yesterday if Mary hadn't insisted upon my spending the night with her. Well do I remember how Carl installed himself here last year with a Japanese servant and invited that good-looking Wherry boy to come and scratch the furniture. I don't suppose Carl invited him for that purpose," added Aunt Agatha fairly, "but he did it, anyway. I can't for the life of me see why it is that young Mr. Wherry is perpetually making scratches where his feet rest. And I'm sure he left his footprint on the piano and thundered through every roll on the player, for they're all out of place, and the Williston caretaker heard him, though like as not it was Carl for that matter. He's a Westfall, and he'd do it if he felt like it, dear knows! Though I must say Carl detests bangy music."
Still rambling, Aunt Agatha, having fussed considerably over the extraction of the key, halted in the hallway, appalled by the utter loneliness of the darkened rooms. Beyond in the library a clock boomed loudly through the quiet. Somewhere upstairs a dull, choking rasp broke the soundless gloom. Aunt Agatha began to flutter nervously up the stairway.
"It's Carl of course!" she murmured in a panic. "I just know it is. I've never known him to even gurgle—much less snore in his sleep. Like as not his windows are still boarded up and he's suffocating. Only a Westfall would think of such a thing."
Puffing, Aunt Agatha halted at her nephew's door. That and the one adjoining were locked. There was a den beyond. Making her way to a door of which Hunch was ignorant. Aunt Agatha opened it and gasped. Fully clothed, a man whose feet and hands were securely bound, lay muttering upon the bed, his jargon incomprehensibly foreign.
"God deliver us from all Westfalls!" wept Aunt Agatha. "Carl's kidnapped an immigrant!"
With unwavering determination in her round, aggrieved eyes, she swept majestically to the bed and shook the sleeper severely.
"My good man," she demanded, "what do you mean by lying here on a lace spread with your feet tied and your head scarred?"
Jokai of Vienna stirred and moaned. Aunt Agatha fumbled for her smelling salts and administered a most heroic draft. Sputtering, Jokai awoke from his restless stupor and stared.
From the room adjoining came again the dull, choking rasp of Hunch's heavy slumber. Fluttering hurriedly to the doorway, Aunt Agatha stared in horror at the littered room and Hunch, the latter no reassuring sight at his best, and thence with fascinated gaze at Jokai of Vienna. With wild imploring eyes Jokai glanced at his hands and feet. Miraculously Aunt Agatha understood. After an interval of petrified indecision, during which she trembled violently and made inarticulate noises in her throat, she fluttered excitedly from the room and returned with a pair of scissors. Urged to noiseless activity by Jokai's fear of the sleeper in the farther room, she cut the ropes which bound him and led him stealthily to the hall below.
"You poor thing!" whispered Aunt Agatha in hysterical sympathy. "You're as pale as a ghost. I don't wonder—"
But Jokai of Vienna was already bolting wildly through the street door and down the steps. Aunt Agatha burst into aggrieved tears.
"I don't in the least know what it's all about," she sniffed, greatly frightened, "but what with the immigrant bolting out of the house in his shirt sleeves without so much as a word of thanks—such a nice distinguished fellow as he was, too, for all he smelt of liquor!—and Carl nowhere in sight—and a fat young man, with a hairy chest exposed, sleeping on a whiskey bottle and snoring like a prisoner file, it does seem most mysterious—that's a fact! And my knees have folded up and I can't budge. Mother's knees used to fold up this way, too. God bless my soul!" wept the unfortunate lady. "I do wish I were dead."
With a desperate effort Aunt Agatha unfolded her knees sufficiently to bear her weight and turning, screamed wildly. Hunch Dorrigan was stealing catlike down the stairs, his bloated vicious face leering threateningly at her over the railing.
"You old she-wolf!" roared that elegant young man. "Where's His Nibs?"
Aunt Agatha moistened her dry lips and, gurgling fearfully, fainted. When at length she became conscious again. Hunch, glowering fiercely, was returning from a futile chase. With a resentful flash of brutality he towered suddenly above her and began to curse. Aunt Agatha, bristling, sat up.
"Don't you dare speak to me like that after breathing vulgar liquor fumes all over my niece's house and tying up that nice foreign gentleman," she quavered weakly. "Don't you dare! I live in this house, young man, and Carl will see to it that I'm protected. He always has. He's very good to me."
Hunch glowered sullenly at her, fearful, in the face of her relationship to Carl, of committing still another unforgivable offense.
"I once knew a stout young man with a glass eye," she gulped with increasing courage, "and he was hanged by the neck until he was dead—quite dead—and then they cut his body down and his relatives took it away in a cart and on the way home it came to life—"
Aunt Agatha halted abruptly, vaguely conscious that this somewhat felicitous ending to the tragedy, as an object lesson to Hunch, left much to be desired.
"Leave the house!" she commanded with shrill magnificence, for all her hair and dress were awry, and her round face flushed. "Leave the house."
Hunch shrugged and obeyed. It was nearly noon and there was no single east-side acquaintance—no, not even Link Murphy, the terrible—whom he feared as he feared Carl Granberry.
Weeping, Aunt Agatha watched him go.
Diane was to learn that the infernal persistence of the Old Man of the Sea of Arabian origin could find its match in youth. A week slipped by. Philip wove an unsatisfactory mat of sedge upon a loom of cord and stakes, whittled himself a knife and fork and spoon which he initialed gorgeously with the dye of a boiled alder, invented a camp rake of forked branches, made a broom of twigs, and sunk a candle in the floor of his tent which he covered with a bottomless milk bottle. All in all, he told Nero, he was evoluting rapidly into an excellent woodsman, despite the peculiar appearance of the sedge mat.
When Diane was honestly indignant, Philip was quiet and industrious, and accomplished a great deal with his knife and bits of wood. When, finding his cheerful good humor irresistible, she was forced to fly the flag of truce, he was profoundly grateful.
"When do you think you'll go?" demanded Diane pointedly one morning as she deftly swung her line into the river. "Unless you contrive to get stabbed again," she added doubtfully, "I really don't see what's keeping you."
"When I may help you break camp and escort you back to your aunt," replied Philip pleasantly, "I'll pack up my two shirts and my wildwood pipe and depart, exceedingly grateful for my stay in Arcadia."
Diane bit her lip and frowned.
"Suppose," she flashed, with angry scarlet in her cheeks, "suppose I break camp and leave you behind!"
"I'll go with you," shrugged Philip. "Don't you remember? I told you so before. And I'll sit on the rear steps of the van all the way to Florida and play a tin whistle."
Appalled by the thought of the spectacular vagaries which this Young Man of the Sea might develop if she took to the road, Diane said nothing.
"No matter how I view you," she indignantly exclaimed a little later, "you're a problem."
"Settle the problem," advised Philip. "It's simple enough."
"He'll go presently," she told herself resentfully. "He'll have to."
"How it amuses these fish to watch me murder worms!" exclaimed Philip in deep disgust. "Look at the audience over there! I attract 'em and you get 'em! Miss Westfall, are you a slave driver?"
"What do you mean?" asked Diane cautiously.
Philip's most innocent beginnings frequently led into argumentative morasses for his opponent.
"Does Johnny have complete freedom in your camp?"
"Certainly!" exclaimed Diane warmly. "Johnny is old and faithful. He may do as he pleases."
Philip changed an angemic worm of considerable transparency for one of more interest to his river audience and smiled.
"Johnny," said he cheerfully, "has been good enough to invite me to stay in camp with him indefinitely. I'm his guest, in fact, until you go home. I imagine that as Johnny's guest I ought to enjoy immunity from sarcastic shafts, but I may be mistaken. I've washed and drained most of these worms. Will you lend me an inch or so of that stout invertebrate climbing out of the can by you?"
Thoroughly out of patience, Diane reeled in her line and returned to camp, whence she presently heard Philip blithely whistling a fisherman's hornpipe and urging Nero to retrieve certain sticks he had thrown into the river. A little later he caught a sunfish and swung into camp with such a smile of irresistible pride and good humor on his sun-browned face, that Diane laughed in spite of herself.
"How ridiculous it is!" she mused uncomfortably. "Here I may not depart for fear a happy-go-lucky young man will play a tin whistle on the steps of the van, and I will not go home. What in the world am I to do with him? Are you an orphan?" she asked with guileful curiosity.
"No," said Philip.
"I'm sorry," said Diane maliciously. "For then I could take out papers of adoption—"
"I'll stay without them," promised Philip. And Diane added wood to the fire with cheeks like the scarlet sunset.
"I'm going to send for my aunt," she announced a few days later.
"Yes?" said Philip.
"Unconventionality of any sort shocks her dreadfully. Like as not she'll faint dead away at the sight of you domiciled in my camp as if you own it. She'll see that you go."
"Better not," advised Philip.
"Why?"
"I'll produce credentials proving I'm a reputable victim of circumstances. I'll suggest that in complete concurrence with her I deem it unsafe for a young and attractive girl to tour about the country—and that I do not feel that I can conscientiously depart. Between the two of us you'll likely have a most uncomfortable hour or so."
Aunt Agatha was impressionable. It needed but a spark of concurrence to arouse her dreadfully. Diane dismissed the project.
"I think," she said hopefully, "that you'll most likely go to-night."
"In any circumstances," said Philip easily, "I fear that would be impossible. Johnny's behind with the laundry and I haven't a collarable shirt." Whereupon he whistled for Nero and set off amiably through the woods to gather an inaccessible flower he knew his lady would prize.
By nine that night Diane was asleep in the van. Philip, with whom she had indignantly crossed swords a little earlier, lay thoughtfully by the fire watching the snowy curtains of the van windows billowing lazily in the warm night wind. He felt restless and perturbed and presently sought his tent, where he lit the bottled candle to look for the predecessor of his insatiable wildwood pipe, but halted suddenly with a peculiar whistle.
The silk shirt he had worn from Sherrill's lay conspicuously upon the bed, washed and ironed and beautifully mended up the slashed sleeve and along the shoulder. As a laundress of parts, Johnny was a jewel, but he could not mend!
Now oddly enough as Mr. Poynter stared at the shirt upon the bed, his appearance was that of a young man decidedly out of sorts. Presently with an ominous glint of temper in his fine eyes, he noiselessly rearranged his tent, viciously donned the offending shirt, whistled for Nero and leaving the camp of his lady as unexpectedly as he had entered it, set out for Sherrill's.
Even the most equable of tempers, it would seem, may now and then prove crotchety.
And who may say? Mr. Poynter was a young man of infinite resource. And there were other ways.
"Excellency," said Philip politely, "I have returned."
"Ah!" said the Baron cordially, marveling somewhat at the forbidding glint in the young man's eyes. He was to learn presently its portent.
Within doors, a few men chatted in the billiard room. A girl was singing. The Baron, however, was the only occupant of the comfortable porch-room with the green-shaded lamp, to which Philip had come, passing Themar, who had left a tray of ice and crème de menthe upon the table.
With his customary deliberation the Baron selected a glass, filled it with shaved ice, which he as carefully covered with green crème de menthe, and pushed the delectable result across the table to his secretary.
Philip accepted with a formal expression of thanks.
"I am delighted," rumbled the Baron, sipping his iced mint with keen appreciation, "to see that you are fully recovered."
"And Themar?" inquired Philip coldly.
"He was not injured so badly as I feared," admitted Tregar slowly. "His accident," commented Philip quietly, "was to say the least coincidental—and convenient."
"Just what do you mean?"
"Just why," begged Philip icily, "did you wish me to intrude further upon the hospitality of Miss Westfall?"
"There was an errand," reminded the Baron blandly. "Having discharged it myself, Poynter, I might—er—trust to you to report its consequences. There are possibilities of confidences over a camp fire—"
"You expected me to—spy upon Miss Westfall?"
"Even so.
"Pray believe," said Philip stiffly, "that any confidence of Miss Westfall's would have been to me—as your own."
"I am to understand then," commented His Excellency suavely, "that you made absolutely no effort—"
"You are to understand just that," said Philip quietly. "Moreover," he manfully met his chief's level glance with one of inexorable decision, "I sincerely regret that hereafter I shall be unable to discharge my duties as your secretary."
The Baron stirred.
"I may be honored by your reasons, Poynter?" he inquired quietly.
"The duties of a spy," flashed Philip, "are peculiarly offensive to me. So is Themar."
"Themar!"
"Excellency," said Philip curtly, "to-night as I entered, the lamplight fell full upon the face and throat of your valet."
"Yes?"
"Themar's throat, Excellency, bears peculiar scars."
"My dear Poynter! Themar's fall injured him severely about the face and hands."
"I have not forgotten," insisted Philip grimly, "that Miss Westfall's servant sunk his terrible fingers into the throat of the man whose knife scar I bear. Whether or not his knife was meant for me, I can not say. Nor have I sufficient proof openly to accuse him, but of this much I am convinced. Themar's presence near the camp of Miss Westfall is, in the face of your peculiar and secretive errand, ominously significant."
The Baron sighed. There was frank hostility in Philip's eyes.
"Miss Westfall," added Philip hotly, "is the unsuspecting victim of a peculiar network of mystery of which I feel you hold the key. Her camp is constantly spied upon. Upon the night of the storm there were two men lurking mysteriously in the forest near her camp fire. The knife of one I was unfortunate enough to receive. The other," Philip's eyes glinted oddly, "the other, Excellency," he finished slowly, "tried, I firmly believe—to kill Miss Westfall."
"Impossible!" exclaimed the Baron, greatly shocked.
"If I might know the nature of your peculiar interest in Miss Westfall," urged Philip bluntly, "I would have greater faith in your apparent surprise."
The Baron reddened.
"That is quite impossible," he regretted formally. "Pray believe that you have magnified its importance into exceedingly ludicrous proportions. I fear I am obliged to dispense with your faith in my integrity on the conditions you mention. Your resolution to leave me—that is final?"
"Entirely so."
"I am sorry," said the Baron simply. And, meeting his chief's eyes, Philip felt somewhat ashamed of one or two of his highly colored suspicions and reddened uncomfortably.
"It is at least—comforting," observed the Baron quietly, "to feel that whatever I may have said in confidence to you will be honorably forgotten."
"Excellency," said Philip with spirit, "though I may not speak to Miss Westfall of your interest or my suspicions, for reasons which need no naming among gentlemen, it is but fair to warn you that henceforth I shall regard myself as personally responsible for her safety."
"Gallantly spoken!" declared the older man, and watched his secretary, as he bowed and withdrew, with more regret than he had seen fit to express. Then, lying back in his chair he listened with unsmiling attention as Philip entered the billiard room with a laughing shot of abuse for Dick Sherrill which aroused an immediate uproar of welcome.
Watching the Baron's narrowed eyes, one might have wondered greatly. For Baron Tregar looked very tired and grim. At length, having smoked his cigar quite to the end, he went up to his room and summoned Themar.
"Ah, Themar!" said he softly, and laughed with peculiar relish.
Themar shifted restlessly.
"Excellency," he began, uncomfortably aware of unpleasant mockery in his chief's keen eyes.
The Baron matched the tips of his powerful fingers and studied them intently.
"Themar," said he acidly, "within a fortnight I have lost a car whose burned remains were found several miles from here, and a secretary whose friendship and invaluable service I prize more highly than your life. I feel that you can to some extent explain both of these disasters."
"Excellency knows," reminded Themar glibly, "that the car was stolen from the Sherrill garage."
"I have merely supposed so," corrected the Baron coldly. And rising he inspected the curious scars upon his valet's throat with interest. "Odd!" he purred, "that an aeroplane may simulate the marks of tearing fingers." Swept by a sudden gust of terrible anger, he gripped Themar's shoulders and shook him until the valet's face was dark with fear.
"Why," hissed the Baron, "did you lie? Why did you go to the Westfall camp and attack Poynter? Why did you swear these scars came from a disastrous flight in a stolen aeroplane? Why have you been spying upon Miss Westfall when I expressly forbade it?"
"Excellency," choked Themar, horrified by the Baron's unprecedented display of passion, "there was a blunder—I dared not tell."
"Who blundered?" thundered his chief.
"I. Granberry, I thought, was to go to his cousin's camp," panted Themar quaking. "I heard Sherrill telephone—later he told some men—"
"You took the car—" prompted the Baron icily.
"I—I did not know it was Poynter until he fell," urged Themar trembling. "Granberry and he are similar in build."
"Who attempted to kill Miss Westfall?" blazed the Baron, shaking his valet into chattering subjection.
"Excellency, I know not!" protested Themar swallowing painfully. "There was still another man—he dashed ahead and stole the car."
After all, reflected the Baron wryly, in this damnable muddle he must still use Themar. To antagonize him now would be foolhardy. Wherefore, with a civil expression of regret at his loss of temper and certain curt instructions, he dismissed Themar, sullen and chastened, and betook himself to an open window, where he sat smoking thoughtfully until the house grew quiet and one by one the lights in the valley faded out. In the web which had engulfed one by one, himself, Themar, Granberry, Miss Westfall and Poynter, a murderous stranger was floundering. Who and what he was, it behooved His Excellency to discover.
"It would seem," reflected the Baron with grim humor as he thought of his car and his secretary, "that I am paying heavily for my part in a task not greatly to my liking."
In the adjoining room behind locked doors, Themar worked feverishly upon a cipher inscribed upon a soiled linen cuff.