CHAPTER XVIII

Grover Nealman’s body was not lying in some unoccupied part of the house, nor did we find him in the gardens. Telephone messages were sent, but Nealman had not been seen. And after six hours of patient search, under that Floridan sun, it was no longer easy to believe that he lay at the bottom of the lagoon.

The sheriff’s men dragged tirelessly, widening out their field of search until it covered most of the lagoon, but they found neither Nealman nor Florey. Some of the work was done in the flow-tide, when the waves breaking on the rocky barrier made the lagoon itself choppy and rough. They came in tired and discouraged, ready to give up.

In the meantime Van Hope had heard from Lacone—but his message was not very encouraging either. It would likely be forty hours, he said, before he could arrive at Kastle Krags. Of course Van Hope and his friends agreed that there was nothing to do but wait for him.

The sun reached high noon and then began his long, downward drift to the West. The shadows slowly lengthened almost imperceptibly at first, but with gradually increasing speed. The heat of the day climbed, reached its zenith; the diamond-back slept heavily in the shade, a deadly slumber that was evil to look upon; and the water-moccasin hung lifelessly in his thickets—and then, so slowly as to pass belief, the little winds from the West sprang up, bringing relief. It would soon be night at Kastle Krags. The afternoon was almost gone.

Not one of those northern men mentioned the fact. They were Anglo-Saxons, and that meant there were certain iron-clad restraints on their speech. Because of this inherent reserve they had to bottle up their thoughts, harbor them in silence, with the risk of a violent nerve explosion in the end. Insanity is not common among the Latin peoples. They find easy expression in words for all the thoughts that plague them, thus escaping that strain and tension that works such havoc on the nervous system. Slatterly and Weldon, native Floridans, had learned a certain sociability and ease of expression under that tropical sun, impossible to these cold, northern men; and consequently the day passed easier for them. Likely they talked over freely the mystery of Kastle Krags, relieved themselves of their secret dreads, and awaited the falling of the night with healthy, unburdened minds. They were naturally more superstitious than the Northerners. They had listened to Congo myths in the arms of colored mammies in infancy. But superstition, while a retarding force to civilization, is sometimes a mighty consolation to the spirit. The tribes of Darkest Africa, seeing many things that in their barbarism they can not understand, find it wiser to turn to superstition than to go mad. Thus they escape that bitter, nerve-wracking struggle of trying to adjust some inexplicable mystery with their every-day laws of matter and space and time. They likely find it happier to believe in witchcraft than to fight hopelessly with fear in silence.

A little freedom, a little easy expression of secret thoughts might have redeemed those long, silent hours just before nightfall. But no man told another what he was really thinking, and every man had to win his battle for himself. The result was inevitable: a growing tension and suspense in the very air.

It was a strange atmosphere that gathered over Kastle Krags in those early evening hours. Some way it gave no image of reality. It was vaguely hard to talk—the mind moved along certain channels and could not be turned aside. We couldn’t disregard the fact that the night was falling. The hours of darkness were even now upon us. And no man could keep from thinking of their possibilities.

I noticed a certain irritability on the part of all the guests. Their nerves were on edge, their tempers—almost forgotten in their years of social intercourse—excitable and uncertain. They were all pre-occupied, busy with their own thoughts—and a man started when another spoke to him.

It couldn’t be truly said that they had been conquered by fear. These were self-reliant, masterful men, trained from the ground up to be strong in the face of danger. Yet the mystery of Kastle Krags was getting to them. They couldn’t forget that for two nights running some power that dwelt on that eerie shore had claimed one of the occupants of the manor house—and that a third night was even now encroaching over the forest. Any legend however strange concerning the old house could not wake laughter now. It was true that from time to time one of the guests laughed at another’s sallies, but always the sound rang shockingly loud over the verandas and was some way disquieting to every one that heard it. Nor did we hear any happy, carefree laughter such as had filled the halls that first night. Rather these were nervous, excited sounds, conveying no image of mirth, and jarring unpleasantly on us all.

The hot spell of the previous night was fortunately broken, yet some of us chose to sit on the verandas. Through rifts in the trees we could watch the darkness creeping over the sea and the lagoon. There was no pleasure here—but it was some way better than staying in our rooms and letting the night creep upon us unawares. It seemed better to face it and watch it, staring away into it with rather bright, wide-open eyes....

The trees blurred on the lawns. The trunks faded until they seemed like the trunks of ghost-trees, haunting that ancient shore. It was no longer possible to distinguish twig from twig where the branches overlapped.

The green grass became a strange, dusky blue; the gray sand of the shore whitened; the blue-green waters turned to ink except for their silver-white caps of foam. Watching closely, our eyes gradually adjusted themselves to the fading light, conveying the impression that the twilight was of unusual length. Perhaps we didn’t quite know when the twilight ended and the night began.

The usual twilight sounds reached us with particular vividness from the lagoon and the forest and the shore. We heard the plover, as ever; and deeper voices—doubtless those of passing sea-birds, mingled with theirs. But the sounds came intermittently, sharp and penetrating out of the darkness and the silence, and they always startled us a little. Sometimes the thickets rustled in the gardens—little, hushed noises none of us pretended to hear. A frog croaked, and the hushed little wind creaked the tree-limbs together. Once some wild creature—possibly a wildcat, but more likely a great owl—filled the night with his weird, long-drawn cry. We all turned, and Van Hope, sitting near by, smiled wanly in the gloom.

Darkness had already swept the verandas, and Van Hope’s was the only face I could see. The others were already blurred, and even their forms were mere dark blotches of shadow. A vague count showed that there was six of us here—and I was suddenly rather startled by the thought that I didn’t know just who they were. The group had changed from time to time throughout the evening, some of the men had gone and others had taken their chairs, and now the darkness concealed their identities. It shouldn’t have made any difference, yet I found myself dwelling, with a strange persistency, on the subject.

The reason got down to the simple fact that, in this house of mystery, a man instinctively wanted to keep track of all his fellows. He wanted to know where they were and what they were doing. He found himself worrying when one of them was gone. I suppose it was the instinct of protection—a feeling that a man’s absence might any moment result in a shrill scream of fear or death in the darkness. Van Hope sat to my left, a little further to the right was Weldon, the coroner. There were three chairs further to the right, but which of the five remaining guests occupied them I did not know.

Three white men—two of the guests and the sheriff—were unaccounted for. My better intelligence told me that they were either in the living-room or the library, perhaps in their own rooms, yet it was impossible to forget that these men were of the white race, largely free from the superstition that kept the blacks safely from the perilous shores of the lagoon. Any one of a dozen reasons might send them walking down through the gardens to those gray crags from which they might never return.

I found myself wondering about Edith, too. She had excused herself and had gone to her room, ostensibly to bed, but I couldn’t forget our conversation of the previous night and her resolve to fathom the mystery of her uncle’s disappearance. Would she remain in the security of her room, or must I guard her, too?

How slow the time passed! The darkness deepened over land and sea. The moon had not yet risen—indeed it would not appear until after midnight. The great, white Floridan stars, however, had pushed through the dark blue canopy of the night, and their light lay softly over the gardens. The guests talked in muffled tones, their excited laughter ringing out at ever longer intervals. The coals of their cigars glowed like fireflies in the gloom.

By ten o’clock two of the six chairs were vacant. Two of the guests had tramped away heavily to their rooms, not passing so near that I could make sure of their identity. Soon after this a very deep and curious silence fell over the veranda.

The two men to my right, Weldon the coroner and one of the guests, were smoking quietly, evidently in a lull in their conversation. I didn’t particularly notice them. Their silence was some way natural and easy, nothing to startle the heart or arrest the breath. If they had been talking, however, perhaps the moment would have never got hold of me as it did. The silence seemed to deepen with an actual sense of motion, like something growing, and a sensation as inexplicable as it was unpleasant slowly swept over me.

It was a creepy, haunting feeling that had its origin somewhere beyond the five senses. Outwardly there was nothing to startle me, unless it was that curious, deepening silence. The darkness, the shore, the starlit gardens were just the same. Nor was it a perceptible, abrupt start. It came slowly, growing, creeping through me. I had no inclination to make any perceptible motion, or to show that anything was different than it was before. I turned slowly to Van Hope, sitting to my left.

Instinctively I knew that here was the source of my alarm. It was something that my subconscious self had picked up from him. He was sitting motionless in his chair, his hand that held his cigar half raised to his lips, staring away into the distant gardens.

There is something bad for the spirit in the sight of an entirely motionless figure. The reason is simply that it is out of accord with nature—that the very soul of things, from the tree on the hill to the stars in the sky, is motion never ending. A figure suddenly changed to stone focuses the attention much more surely than any sudden sound or movement. Perhaps it has its origin in the deep-hidden instincts, harking back to those long ago times when the sudden arresting of all motion on the part of the companion indicated the presence of some great danger and an attempt to escape its gaze. Even to-day it indicates a thought so compelling that the half-unconscious physical functions are suspended: a fear or a sensation so violent that life seems to die in the body.

Van Hope couldn’t get his cigar to his lips. He held it between his fingers, a few inches in front. He was watching so intently that his face looked absolutely blank. A little shiver that was some way related to fear passed over me, and I had all the sensations of being violently startled. Then Van Hope suddenly got to his feet with a short, low exclamation.

Our nerves on edge, instantly all three of us were beside him—Weldon, myself, and Joe Nopp. All of us tried to follow his gaze into the gloom. “What is it?” Weldon asked.

Van Hope, seemingly scarcely aware of us before, instantly rallied his faculties and turned to us. In a single instant he had wrenched back complete self-control—an indication of self-mastery such as I had rarely seen surpassed. He smiled a little, in the gloom, and dropped his hand to his side.

“I suppose it was nothing,” he answered. “I guess I’m jumpy. Maybe half asleep. But I saw some one—walking through the gardens down by the lagoon.”

Van Hope spoke rather lightly, in a wholly commonplace voice. He had not been, however, half asleep. The frozen face I had seen was of complete wakefulness.

“A man, you say—down by the lagoon?” Weldon asked.

“Yes. Of course there’s always a chance for a mistake. Probably it wouldn’t be anything anyway—just one of the men getting a little air. Watch a minute—maybe you’ll see him again.”

We watched in silence, and listened to one another’s breathing. But the faint shadows, in that starlit vista, were unwavering.

“It wasn’t likely anything——” Van Hope said apologetically. “I was thinking, though, that any stranger ought to be investigated——”

“He had, too,” Weldon agreed. “Not just any stranger. Any one who goes walking down there in the darkness ought to be questioned—whether he’s one of us or not. But are you sure you saw anything?”

“Not sure at all. I thought I did, though. I thought I saw him step, distinctly, through a rift in the trees. Excuse me for bothering you.”

None of us felt any embarrassment on Van Hope’s account, or any superciliousness if he had been unnecessarily alarmed. It was wholly natural, this third night of three, to wonder and be stirred by any moving thing in the darkened gardens.

But we waited and watched in vain. There were no cries from the shore of the lagoon. The silence remained unbroken, and after awhile the thought turned to other channels.

Van Hope rose at last, hurled his cigar stub to the lawns and for a breath stood watching its glowing end pale and die. The disappearance of his old friend had gone hard with him. You could see it in the stoop of his shoulders. He looked several years older.

“Nothing to do now—but go to bed,” he commented quietly. “Maybe we can get some sleep to-night.”

“The third night’s the charm,” Nopp answered grimly. “How do we know but that before this night is over we’ll be gathered out here again.” He paused, and we tried to smile at him in the darkness. Nopp was speaking with a certain grim humor, yet whatever his intentions, none of us got the idea that he was jesting. “It’s worked two nights—why not three. I’d believe anything could happen at this goblin house——”

We listened to him with relief. It was some way good for our spirits to have one of us speak out what we had all been thinking and had strained so hard to hide. Nor did we think less of him for his frankness. We knew at first, and we knew now, that Nopp’s nerve was as good or better than any man in the gathering, and he had never showed it better than in speaking frankly now.

“Bunk, Nopp,” Van Hope answered. “You’re mixing coincidence up with atmosphere. It was a strange and a devilish thing that those two crimes should have happened two nights running, but it will work out perfectly plausible—mark my words. And coincidences don’t happen three times in a row.”

Nopp lifted his face to the starlit skies. “My boy,” he said, rather superciliously, “anything could happen at Kastle Krags.”

CHAPTER XIX

Had Nopp spoken true—could there be a recurrence of last night’s tragedy? Could any situation arise in human affairs that would result in three murders, one after another, all under practically the same and the most mysterious conditions? It was possible, by a long stretch of the imagination, to conceive of two such crimes occurring on successive nights—the murderer striking again, through some unknown movement of events, to hide his first crime—but coincidences do not happen thrice! If indeed these disappearances could be wholly attributed to human activities, human designs and human passions, there was no need of lying awake and expectant this third night. Surely no super-criminal had declared remorseless war against all of the occupants of that house. Certainly we could sleep in peace to-night!

But I couldn’t get away from the same thought that haunted me before—that these crimes lay somehow without the bourne of human event and circumstance, that they were some way native to this strange, old manor-house beside the sea. It wasn’t easy to lose one’s self in sleep. I felt no shame at my own uneasiness. It was true that the crimes had both occurred, evidently, on the shore of or near the lagoon, but could the curse that lay upon the old estate extend its baleful influence into the house itself? Anything could happen at Kastle Krags, Nopp had said, and it became increasingly difficult to disbelieve him.

Since the intrusion of two nights before I had slept with a chair blocked firmly against my door, knowing that no one could enter from the corridor, at least without waking me. My own pistol lay just under my mattress where the hand could reach it in an instant. Both these things were an immense consolation now. I would not be so helpless in case of another midnight visitor.

Yet I had no after-image of terror in thinking upon the intruder of two nights before. Strangely, that hand reaching in the flashlight was the one redeeming feature of this affair of Kastle Krags. That hand was flesh and blood, and thus the whole mystery seemed of flesh and blood too. If this incident did not confine the mystery to the realm of human affairs, at least it showed that there were human motives and human agents playing their parts in it.

Was that intruder Pescini? The hand could easily have been his—firm, strong, aristocratic, sensitive and white. After all, there was quite a case to be made against Pescini. “Find George Florey and you’ll find the murderer,” William Noyes had written. And the whole business of proving that Pescini was George Florey was simply that of proving his handwriting and that of the “George” notes we had found in the butler’s room were the same.

“They have been bitter enemies since youth.” Rich, proud, distinguished, had this bearded man carried a life-long hatred for the humble servitor of Kastle Krags? What boyhood rivalry, what malice, what blinding, bitter jealousy had wakened such a hatred as this? Yet who can trace the slightest action from its origin to its consummation; much less such a complex human drama as this. No man can see truly into the human heart. It seemed fairly credible that this gray servant might hate, with that bitter hatred born of jealousy, his richer, more distinguished brother—yet human relations, in their fullness, are beyond the ken of the wisest men. It would be easy to prove or disprove whether or not Pescini and Florey were brothers: the “George” letters were secure in the hands of the State, and a copy of Pescini’s handwriting could be procured with ease. Besides their lives and origins would likely be easy to trace.

Florey’s letter to his sister was further proof of Pescini’s guilt. I made an entirely different interpretation of it than that of the officials. I did not think that he was referring to any physical disease. I believed, at the first hearing, and I believed still that he had written in veiled language of the persecutions of his brother:

I did not share the sheriff’s view that “G——” referred to some long-named malady that, either for the sake of abbreviation or because he could not spell it, he had neglected to write out in full. I felt sure it meant “George” and nothing else. “The Florey burden——”—what was more reasonable than that his family had been cursed by feuds within. I hadn’t forgotten my talk with Nealman. He had spoken of the hatred sometimes borne by one brother for another; and had named the Jason family, main characters in the treasure legend of the old manor house, as a case in point. But Florey had got rid of his burden at last. He had got rid of it by death.

Could I make myself believe that Pescini had lured his brother to the shore, killed him, seized an opportunity to hurl his body into the lagoon, from which, by the thousandth chance, our drag-hooks had failed to find it; and the following night, to conceal his guilt, had struck down his host? Perhaps the former was true, and that the crime, coming just previous to his own financial failure, had suggested suicide to Nealman’s mind. No one had track of Pescini the night of the crime. For that matter, unlike Van Hope, Major Dell, and several others, he was not undressed and in his room when Nealman had disappeared. And the coroner had suggested a motive for murder in the matter of Pescini’s suit for divorce.

It wasn’t easy to believe that such an obviously distinguished and cultured man could stoop to murder. There is such a thing, criminologists say, as a criminal face; but Pescini had not the least semblance of it. Criminologists admit, however, in the same breath that they are constantly amazed at the varied types that are brought before them, charged with the most heinous crimes. Pescini looked kind, self-mastered, not given to outlaw impulses. Yet who could say for sure.

I was already falling to sleep.... It was hard to keep the sequence of thought; absurd fancies swept between. Ever my hold on wakefulness was less. It was pleasant to believe that the mystery would soon be unraveled, all with a commonplace explanation.... At first I gave no heed to a rapid footfall in the corridor.

Yet in an instant I was wide awake. In the silent hall the footfall was perfectly distinct, carrying through the walls of my room, and echoing somewhere in the wall behind me. In any quiet home, in any land, it would have been impossible to disregard those footsteps. There was a distinct tone of urgency behind them that simply could not be denied. In this dark house of mystery the senses rallied, quickened, and seemed to lie waiting to contend with any emergency.

The steps were not only hurried and urgent. They were frenzied—although they were not running footsteps. At the same time they gave the image of some one trying to hurry, some one trying to conquer himself, and yet not move too loudly. It was as if he was some way fearful to waken the poignant silence of that shadowed corridor.

“He is coming to my door,” I told myself. It was wholly likely that I spoke the words aloud; at least, I believed them as unwaveringly as if the man outside had thus announced his intentions. No man can ever tell how such knowledge comes to him. Perhaps it is coincidence—that he expects such a summons on a hundred different occasions before it ever comes to him in reality. Yet many things already proven true are a thousand times harder to believe than telepathy—the transmission of messages according to no known laws of matter and space.

The tread itself was peculiar. It had an odd, shuffling quality that was hard to analyze. Then some one rapped excitedly on my door.

“What is it?” I asked.

I was already out of bed, groping for my light switch.

“It’s me—Wilkson,” was the reply. “Boss, will ye open de do’?”

I knew Nealman’s colored janitor—a middle-aged servant of an old-fashioned, almost departed glory—but for an instant I found it almost incredible that this was his voice. The tones were blurred, lifeless, spoken as if from drawn lips. There was only one thing to believe, and I fought it off as long as I could: that the man outside my door was simply stricken and almost dead with fear.

It wasn’t easy to open the door to hear what he had to tell. A scream in the night is one thing; a chattering fellow man, just on the other side of a pine door, is quite another. But I took away the chair and turned the knob.

The man’s face was almost as hard to recognize as his voice. It was Wilkson, beyond possibility of doubt, but he was no longer the tranquil, genial serving-man. His face had the strangest gray hue pen ever tried to describe. I could see the whites of his eyes, his lips were rounded, he was almost unconscious from sheer terror.

At that moment I began to strive hard to remember certain truths—one of them being that little things, laughed away by an Anglo-Saxon, have been known to instill the most unfathomable depths of fear into an unlettered southern negro. What seemed terrible to him might be only laughable to me. I thought of these things in order to brace myself for what he had to tell.

At that moment I knew the inroads that the events of the last two nights had made upon me—likely upon every man and woman in the house. I could have met that gray face much more bravely the night previous, and would have likely been largely unmoved by it two nights before. But mystery, the lack of sleep, the terrible possibilities to which both crimes had pointed, had over-stretched the nerves and taken the pith from the thews. The sight of that terrified face sent a sharp chill of fear through every avenue of my nerves. I felt its icy touch in my veins. Kastle Krags was getting to me—denial of that fact was impossible even to myself.

“Iscuse me, Boss,” he said humbly, pathetically, if I had ever known what pathos was. In his terror he wanted to propitiate the whole world, and was begging my indulgence of his intrusion. “Boss, is Majo’ Del in yo’ room?”

“No.” I didn’t reprove him for failing to notice that my light was out. “Where is he?”

“Boss, he am gone. He’s gone just like them other two am gone.” His voice died and a low moan escaped his lips. “Boss, who’ll they be takin’ nex’? Gawd, who’ll they be takin’ nex’——?”

I seized his arm, trying to steady him. “Listen, Wilkson,” I commanded. “How do you know he’s gone——”

“Telephone message come for him, Boss. Telegram, from Ochakee. And he ain’t here to get it. He’s gone—just like dem oder two men has gone befo’ him.”

CHAPTER XX

“De phone bell rung, jus’ off de su’vant’s rooms,” he explained. “It was a message fo’ Majo’ Dell. ‘Get him up to get dis telegram,’ some white gen’lman said, so I done went to get him up. He ain’t in his room. Bed not been slept in. I called and no one answered. Den I ask Mrs. Gentry—she saw him go down the hall hour ago, all dressed, and seen him turn in yo’ room——”

“He’s not here. He hasn’t been here.” I slipped on a dressing-gown and slippers, then stood a moment with Wilkson in the darkened hall. It was curious that the housekeeper should have made such an odd mistake—thinking that Dell had turned into my door. Perhaps at the distance she had observed she confused the door either to the right or left with mine.

There was no need for panic yet. Any one of a dozen things might have explained his temporary absence from his room in the dead of night. He might be in the room to my right—Fargo’s room—in some conference with his friend. Yet there was no light under the door.

I knocked loudly. Fargo called sharply from his bed.

“Have you seen Major Dell?” I asked.

“Dell? No! Good Lord, he hasn’t disappeared, too?”

“We can’t find him.” I heard Fargo spring from his bed, and I turned to the room to my left. Yet in an instant I remembered and halted on the threshold. This was Nealman’s room, dark and chill with shadows. I scratched a match and lifted it high.

But no one was here. My voice rang with a hollow sound back to me. Our shouts had aroused Nopp, and in a moment he came out in the hall to join us. I think Nopp was a steadying influence on us both. He walked, rather than ran, he was perfectly composed, wholly himself, and his voice when he spoke was low and even. Yet there was no tone or note of an attempt to belittle our alarm. He acted as I have seen strong men act in the presence of some great disaster—calmly, soberly, rather white-faced and silent, but unflinching and steadfast.

There was no amazement in Nopp’s face. Evidently he had expected just such a development.

“Another gone, eh?” he said. “I wish these devils would stay in their rooms, where they belong. What’s taking them out there, Killdare?”

“How do I know? Maybe they just can’t sleep—want to walk——”

“They wouldn’t want to walk in that part of the grounds, if they’re human, unless they’ve got business there. But no matter. We’ve got to look around for him at least. I don’t suppose it will do any good——”

He spoke with an unmistakable fatalism. “You don’t mean—that he’s gone like the rest——”

I heard our low breathing as I waited for his answer. “What’s the use of fooling ourselves any more, Killdare?” he replied quietly. “We’re up against something—God knows what. Of course he’s gone—just like the rest. Where else could he be?”

We turned once more into his room. Wilkson had reported rightly—his bed had not been slept in, and there was not the slightest sign of disorder. His coat—a well-made garment of some gray, cotton cloth hung on the back of his chair, and the butts of two cigars lay on his smoking stand. He was not in his bathroom, nor did we hear his voice from some adjoining room.

And now all the other guests, all of whom slept on this same floor, were gathering about us, wakened by the sound of our voices. Marten came, swearing under his breath, and Van Hope’s brow was beaded with perspiration that glistened in the dim light. But none of them knew where Major Dell was. Indeed none of them had seen him since he had gone to his room.

There was a curious, dream-like quality about the little session that we had together at the door of Dell’s room. It was all rather dim, obscure, the voices that we heard seemed to come from some place far off, and that ring of faces no longer looked clear-cut and sharp. I suppose the answer lay in the great preoccupation that was upon us all, a struggle for understanding that engulfed our minds.

There were no excited, frenzied voices. The men spoke rather quietly and slowly, as if measuring their words, and Van Hope was smiling, faintly. It wasn’t a mirthful smile, but rather a wan smile such as a man gives when some incredible disaster, long expected, has fallen upon him. None of us liked to see it. There was nothing to believe but that the mystery had gone home to him more fully than to any one else—and we all wished that he could be spared the tragic, vain hour of search that awaited us. Because none of us had the least hope, in our own hearts, that we would ever see Major Dell again. We had got past the point where we could deceive ourselves. The truth was all too self-evident. We would search through the grounds, as a matter of duty we would call and run back and forth. But the end was already sure.

Indeed, there was no look of surprise on any one of those white faces. Rather they had a helpless, almost fatalistic expression, as men have when at last they are crushed to earth by the inevitable. I have heard a detachment of soldiers, seemingly trapped by death, speak in the same quiet way, and have seen the same baffled, resigned expression on their faces.

I didn’t try to keep track of who was there and who was absent. It was impossible to think of such things now. But bitter, blasting fear surged through me when I thought of Edith—wondering if she was safe in her room.

There was a moment of stress, a sudden, momentary explosion of suppressed excitement, when Slatterly the sheriff joined us in the hall. We heard his running feet in the corridor, and we turned to watch him, his dressing-gown flopping about him. Evidently he had heard our words from his room in the upper corridor. Certain exclamations were on his lips—whether they were profane oaths I do not know.

“What is it?” he demanded in an irritable, rasping voice. “Why are you all gathered here?”

Silently we waited for Nopp to speak—Nopp who had become the strongest arm in the affair. “We’re not having any late evening gossip,” he answered. “Kastle Krags has its tail up again. We’re here—to find out what has become of Major Dell.”

“Major Dell! Good God, don’t tell me he’s gone too.”

Instantly the sudden, deadly surge of wrath we had all felt toward the sheriff died in our breasts. That cry he made, the hopeless, defeated way in which he spoke, made him, in an instant, one of us—subject to the same fear and despair, a crushed and impotent human being like ourselves.

“He’s gone,” Nopp told him quietly. “He’s not in his room. He doesn’t seem to be any place else.”

“Have you searched? I don’t suppose there’s any use of it, but we’ve got to search. Oh, why didn’t I guard him—why did I ever take such a criminal risk!”

None of us could forget his rugged, brown face in the wan electric light. Whether it was regret or fear that swept it we didn’t know. It was ashen, almost expressionless, and his eyes were lifeless under his heavy brows. His hands hung, fingers slightly apart, at his side.

“Wait just a minute before we begin an indiscriminate search,” Nopp said. “Slatterly, we’ve got to face facts. Do you think—there’s any place in these grounds that none of us ought to go?”

We knew what he meant. He wanted to guard against further loss of life.

“The thing seems to run according to rule,” the sheriff replied, rather grimly. “Just one gone—every night. But keep together when you’re down near the lagoon.”

There was not the least good in searching further through the house. Most of the household had gathered around us, by now, and no one had seen Major Dell. We walked the length of the corridor and down the stairs, and then we went out into the still darkness. The hour was evidently shortly after midnight—the tide was almost at its flood.

Just a moment more we stood just below the great veranda, and no man knew the other’s thoughts. The moon was rising—we could see its argent gleam through nebulous clouds to the East. Far away the gray shore stretched to the darkened sea, and the natural rock wall showed a faint, gray line. Then we headed out into the grounds.

But there was no answer to the calls we made, and only such little people as moles and gophers, burrowers in the ground, stirred in the thickets as we crushed through. We hunted aimlessly, more to satisfy our own sense of duty than through any expectation of finding the missing man. The moon came out more vividly, but its light did not bring success. At last we collected, a silent, rather breathless group, in front of the house.

“What now, Slatterly?” Nopp asked. “Is there anything more we can do?”

“Nothing more.” His old confidence was gone from his voice. “I wish I’d done something long ago, instead of being so sure. But this thing can’t happen to-morrow night.”

“Slatterly, you’re a brave man to say that anything can’t happen to-morrow night. I thought you’d learned your lesson——”

“I have. Never fear for that. To-morrow night I’m going to watch beside that lagoon with a loaded gun—and I am going to see this thing through.”

CHAPTER XXI

To work out that cryptogram, to read its hidden meaning was the first and the best thing I could do in the way to solve the mystery of Kastle Krags. Written originally on parchment, sixty or seventy years before, it doubtless referred and was in explanation of the secret of the old manor house—the legend of the treasure, supposedly hidden by Godfrey Jason in the long ago. I had just toyed with it before. Perhaps I had had little faith that it was of any real importance. But now, other avenues had failed, and I was resolved to know the truth if it was humanly possible to do so. I copied the script again, with great care:

Then I began to make a systematic analysis. I noticed first that the second and the sixth words were identical, indicating—considering the brevity of the entire message—that it must represent a word of most frequent use. Of course the articles “a” and “the” occur most often in any English writing, yet I found it hard to believe that “dqbo” represented either. In the first place, in a message of that length it is reasonable to assume that all articles and words not absolutely necessary to the meaning had been omitted.

Weeks that seemed years before Nealman had told me that, after careful study, he had been convinced that there was some truth in the legend of buried treasure. Was it not within the bounds of reason to assume that this cryptic message revealed the hiding place of the treasure? Working on this assumption, I made up an imaginary description of some hiding place, just to see what words occurred with the greatest frequency. I found at once that the word that would be most likely to be used twice in a description of that kind would be some measurement—either feet, yards, meters, rods, or something of the kind. If I could convince myself that “dqbo” represented some English measurement I might find the key and system of the code.

Either “feet,” “yard” or “rods” were words of four letters—either one of which might be represented by “dqbo.” Then I tested each one to see if I could establish a pattern.

I tried first the old code-system of having each letter in the word represent some other letter a certain number of spaces backward or forward in the alphabet. Suppose a man wanted to disguise the word “cab.” He might do so, very easily, by spelling it “dbc”—using, instead of the right letter, the letter immediately following it in the alphabet, “d” for “c,” “b” for “a,” etc. Testing for “feet” as a possible interpretation of “dqbo” I saw that “f” was the second letter in the alphabet beyond the letter “d”—first letter in the script-word—but I found that such a relation could not possibly hold with “e” and “q” respectively, the second letters. “Yard” or “rods” failed the same test. Nor by any juggling of this simple code, counting so many spaces backwards or forwards, could I make it come out true.

Some time before I had decided that it was unlikely to the verge of impossibility that any message could be made up completely of four letter words. It seemed likely, at first, that letters had been cut from each word in order to make them of four letters. Working on this hypothesis I tested for “meters” but the word “dqbo” could not be made to conform.

At that point it was necessary to begin on another tack. I smoked a while in silence, hoping that some idea, some little inspiration that so often furnished the key for such a mystery as this, would come to me. I had a dim thought that, since the words were all of four letters and could not be made intelligible by any shifting of the alphabet, that perhaps it had undergone some double transformation—changed first from words into some other symbol form, and then back into words. But I couldn’t seem to get hold.

If I could only see the key! Possibly it was extremely simple, just before my eyes if I could only grasp it. It wasn’t reasonable, I thought, for a lone man to leave a hidden message without giving some key, however adroit, for the reader to translate it. Jason hadn’t written that message for his own amusement. He had inscribed it to be read by some one who came after—perhaps by himself when old age had dulled his memory.

Working from this point of view I set myself to remember what had been written on the parchment beside the column of figures. Perhaps the key had been there also; I had simply failed to observe it. At the bottom of the message had appeared the words “At F. T.” And at first this seemed to offer the most interesting possibilities.

Certainly the word and letters had some meaning. In the first place this, and the sentence above the script, indicated that the writer did his thinking in English—not in Spanish or Portuguese or any other language. But “F. T.” did not convey any meaning to my mind. I simply couldn’t catch it.

I tried to make the letters “F” and “T” a starting point in the alphabet for rearranging the letters in the column of words, on the same theory that I had worked at first, but nothing came of it. And at that point my hopes and confidence, falling steadily for the past hour, was at its lowest ebb. I didn’t see but that I would have to give up the venture after all.

My mind slipped easily to the message in English above the column—“Sworn by the Book,” or something after that nature. Taking these words simply as they seemed, an oath on the part of the writer that the ensuing message was true, I hadn’t taken the trouble to copy them from the original parchment. Fortunately I remembered them, approximately at least. And I felt a little quickening of hope as I contemplated them.

The more I looked at them the more they seemed to be “dragged in by the heels.” I didn’t think that one with knowledge of hidden treasure, conveying its hiding place to some one else, would have taken the trouble to declare the truth of his statement by oath. Nor was such a pious beginning, on the part of that iniquitous murderer and cut-throat, Jason, quite in character. He would have been more likely to have begun with a sentence of piratical profanity. He had some reason for bringing in the “Book”—and when I knew what it was, I believed I would know the key to the cryptogram.

The “Book” was the Bible of course—a name still in wide use. And the whole volume of my blood seemed to spurt through the veins when I remembered what an important place the Bible had taken in the events of the past few days!

Nealman had had a Bible, wide open, in his room. Edith had been seen to carry it to him through the corridor—and this business with it had been of such a character that he had ordered Edith’s silence in regard to the errand. Whether or not Florey had possessed a copy I wasn’t able to remember for certain.

It must have been a grim old joke to Jason—to use the Holy Word to transmit the record of his iniquity! In an instant I was burrowing, not a little excited, into the bottom of my bag for a small copy of the Bible that I carried with me on every journey.

Apart from religious reasons, there is no better traveling companion for a knowledge-loving man than King James’ Bible. The font of all literature, the mighty well of inspiration, the record of the ages—it was beloved not only of the scientist and historian, but the literati and the esthete. Hardly a week had passed that I hadn’t referred to it, in one capacity or another. And now I felt that I was on the right track at last.

There is no book in such common usage, published with such fidelity as to the position of every word, so easily procured in any place or time, as the Holy Bible. It would be the perfect code-book. Certainly it could be used to the greatest advantage as the key to a cryptogram.

But what had been the method of its use? In what way could these four-letter words, none of which were intelligible, be made through the agency of the Bible to present an intelligent meaning? Again I found myself relying on inductive reasoning. I worked backward, just as I had done before, trying to see some way to convey a secret meaning through the agency of this universally read book.

All at once I saw the way. The Bible contained almost every word in the present English vocabulary. In all probability each one of the words in the column represented some English word to be found somewhere in the Bible, and the column of them, written out, would be the message in full.

How to find that word was the only problem that remained. True, it looked formidable enough at first. Yet I saw in a moment that the four-letter words could not represent the words of the message themselves, but only their position in the Bible.

My mind was working clearly now, leaping from one conclusion to another; and reasoning deductively I tried to work out some method of secret writing whereby I could reveal to another person the position of a certain word I wanted him to know. Suppose, for instance, that Jason wished to use the word “feet” in his message. Looking through the Bible he found the word—say on page 86, third line, fourth word. It was conceivable that he might send the numbers “86-3-4” to some other person; and the latter, aware that the Bible acted as the key, looked up the place in the Book and learned what the word was.

The number of pages vary, however, in Bibles of different size. It was natural that the location must be a constant in order that the recipient of the note could always find it. So I began again:

Suppose Jason, looking through his Bible, found the word “feet” in the book of Genesis, the first chapter, the third verse, and the fourth word of the verse. If he should send the symbols “Gen. 1, 3, 4” to his friend, the man could easily look up the place and see what he meant. And in this case he wouldn’t have to have any certain edition of the Bible. The fourth word of the third verse of the first chapter of Genesis is the same in all copies of King James’ Bible over all the world.

Now I was working on sure ground. I had no doubt but that “dqbo” represented a certain point in the Bible—the letter “d” probably representing the book, “q” the chapter, “b” the verse and “o” the word. Once more my attention was called, with particular vividness, to the fact that all the words in the column were of four letters, proving in my mind that this last contention was true.

My heart was racing as I moved to the next step in working out the cryptogram. It was simply that of finding what method had been used to transform such a symbol as “Gen. 1, 3, 4” into such a sign as “dqbo.” If instead of four-letter words I was working with sequences of numbers such as “1, 1, 3, 4” I would have felt that the problem was solved. “1, 1, 3, 4” would have plainly meant the first book, the first chapter, the third verse, and the fourth word.

To transform letters into numbers—that was all that remained. Again I went back to “dqbo” and took the simplest method of transformation. “D” was the fourth letter in the alphabet. “Q” was the seventeenth letter in the alphabet. “B” was the second letter in the alphabet. “O” was the fifteenth letter in the alphabet. I wrote down the numbers:

4-17-2-15

And I felt sure that they meant the fourth book, the seventeenth chapter, the second verse and the fifteenth word in the Holy Bible.

Shaken, so nervous I could hardly hold my hands still, I stopped a moment to rest. This was the crisis. I was either at the verge of absolute success or hopeless failure. If when I looked up the place I found some word that couldn’t possibly be used in such a message I wouldn’t have the spirit to seek further. And it would be a real blow to all my hopes.

I opened the Bible. The fourth book proved to be “Numbers.” I turned to the seventeenth chapter, the second verse. And there I read as follows: