第 16 页

"No man or beast," said Colin to himself, "can frighten my little sister out of her five wits, and me to take no proper heed of it! Charley Finn will forward her the letters I have sent him from Buenos Aires, and the place where I am need make no difference, just so she believes me elsewhere.

"Now we'll see if the job of that poor fool MacClellan cannot be improved on, even though the trail is so old and stale! Cliona has the seeing eye, and I know she felt sure that if any of us three should live here there would be another visitation. One O'Hara gave them the welcome of a few friendly bullets. Now let them call on the other! Maybe he'll do yet better. 'Tis my own house now, that I've paid Tony well for, though of that the lad has no notion, and here I'll receive whom I please and Cliona be none the wiser or more worried!"

CHAPTER XIV

The Second Visitation

MR. COSMO STACKFIELD, rounding a sharp curve with no warning hornblast, swerved, swore, and bringing his car to a halt, turned in his seat.

"I say," he called back, "I wasn't trying to run you down, O'Hara!"

"Oh! I thought you were."

"Are you people back at the bungalow?" inquired Stackfield. "I trust Mrs. Rhodes is recovered from the results of her fright."

"She is," retorted the other with intentional briefness. "She's not here. I came out by myself for the solitude. When a man's used to the open, he wearies of just hearing people chatter. So I'm living alone for a while. Good day to you, sir."

Colin's rudeness was too gross and too obviously intentional for Stackfield to ignore longer. A slow flush tinged his flabby cheeks, and with a muttered word that sounded less like "good day" than some term not so polite, he sped past on his road to the city.

O'Hara smiled grimly after his defeated interrogator, but the incident gave him food for thought. Had he too greatly relied on not being acquainted with people is this neighborhood? Having arrived only yesterday, Stackfield was the second man who had greeted him on his early morning stroll. Secrecy promised to be a difficult achievement.

Laying the matter aside as one that must be left to chance, O'Hara turned back toward Carpentier.

Having no particular fancy for housekeeping, he had engaged a middle-aged woman to come up by the day, cook his meals, and keep the bungalow in order. Luncheon that day proved one sad fact conclusively. Promising of all housewifely virtues as had been the neat vine-covered cottage from which Colin had wrested her to his own service, Mrs. Bollinger could not cook.

The house had been thoroughly repaired, even to the laying of new planks in the scarred living-room floor, and the furniture left undamaged was plenty for his needs.

Four days he spent, reading--an occupation of which he was always fond--and wandering about the now-neglected gardens.

Ten o'clock of the fifth evening found him going about his usual preparations for the night. They were painstaking, though of a sort which would have astonished Mrs. Bollinger. Most people expecting an undesirable caller do not leave doors and windows unlocked--certainly not invitingly ajar. Nor does the burglar-expecting householder prefer his home to be in utter darkness from ten o'clock on throughout the night.

Having little use for the police at any time, Colin had disconnected the burglar alarm. Now he sought the kitchen and returned, his arms laden with tin aluminum utensils, to be stacked in high tottery piles behind the doors opening inward upon the living-room from the veranda and from the pantry into the dining-room, placing them so, rather than at the outer doors, lest the intruder be frightened away too early for successful pursuit.

As he carried out this simple and homely expedient for providing noise when noise should be least welcome, he whistled quite cheerfully for a man expecting so very strange a visitation.

Then he lay down fully dressed, in the room that had been his sister's.

Four nights his light slumber had been unbroken, but on this fifth night he suddenly awakened, every sense alert in the black darkness.

Something, he knew, was imminent. Something had telegraphed a warning to his sleeping brain. A sound? He listened keenly, intently. From far away came the faint whistle of a locomotive. Against his window he heard a slight tapping sound--then a flutter, accompanied by a mouselike squeaking. A wind-blown vine tapping the pane--the squeak of a bat. Those sounds should not have roused him.

With stealthy noiselessness, O'Hara slid from his bed and stole across the floor. The night was moonless, with an overcast sky, and save for the dim, oblong shapes of the windows the darkness within the bungalow was absolute. But O'Hara saw the location of every piece of furniture in the light of a carefully schooled memory, and he made no blunders.

Every sense quivering with a vivid expectation, he peered into the living-room.

What had awakened him? A dream? He had not been dreaming. Sheer nervousness? He knew himself too well for that to receive consideration. He heard no sound, felt no vibration. He had fallen asleep in a house empty save for himself. It was not empty now. He knew it, felt it, yet could give himself no reason for the assurance.

As noiselessly as he had crossed the bedroom he passed through the living-room. From the porti?red arch he stared on into further silent blackness. On turning back, however, O'Hara became aware that a change had befallen the space behind him.

Vaguely he could now perceive dark masses--chairs, a table; even, though faintly, the rug on which he stood.

It was some seconds before he perceived the source of this illumination, which was, by infinitesimal degrees, growing steadily brighter. Between living-room and veranda the partition was pierced by two windows, glazed and hung with thin, ivory-yellow curtains. Three other windows, similarly draped, opened upon a lawn beyond the angle formed by the veranda's end wall.

On sunny days nearly as much light was reflected through one set of windows as the other, for the veranda was finished in yellow spruce and faced south. Now, however, the windows toward the lawn were invisible behind their curtains, while those opening upon the veranda had become faintly glowing rectangles of yellowish light.

It was not a steady light. It throbbed, first dim, then brighter, in a long, regular pulsation.

O'Hara's first impulse was to spring across the room and sweep the curtains aside. His second was better. A view through the window might gratify his curiosity, but he wanted a more practical satisfaction than that. He would take no chance of giving a premature alarm by spying between curtains.

The light, which until now had continually increased, ceased to grow, but continued to throb.

Still no sound came from the other side of the partition, nor could he see anything through the translucent window draperies. He stood there in the dim twilight of the living-room and the two windows hung like yellow, oblong Chinese lanterns, pulsing between light and shadow, but giving no other hint of the presence that must be back of them.

At last Colin moved. Crouchingly he stole toward the door, body half bent, ready at any moment to leave creeping and spring. Even to him the stillness had become somewhat ghastly. If enemies were there, why did they make no move? What could be the object of this ghostly and silent illumination? They did not, could not know that he was aware of their presence. What was there in the veranda to hold their attention for so long a time?

Then Colin committed a folly for which he never afterward quite forgave himself. In the intensity of his desire to reach the door, fling it wide and take the enemy unaware, he forgot his own precautions against its noiseless opening. As his hand closed on the knob one foot grazed the little pile of precariously balanced tinware. Over it went, clashing and clattering, a most satisfactory alarm--had he not been the one to spring it!

CHAPTER XV

The Third Visitation

THE racket so startled its originator that he leaped backward, collided with a taboret, and sent that over. The oblongs of light in the southern wall vanished abruptly. Further stealth was absurdly useless. Colin flung himself at the door, wrenched it open and, reaching upward, snapped on the general light switch of the veranda. It sprang into dazzling visibility, but no one was there.

Colin made sure of its emptiness in one swift look that included the space beneath a large table and a wicker divan, snapped off the light--he had no desire to form a mark for bullets--and was at the outer door.

It stood ajar as he had left it. Outside, the darkness was nearly as impenetrable as within the house, but for that there was a remedy. Opening a concealed steel switch-box, Colin pulled a lever and sprang down the steps. The lever completed the circuit for several powerful lamps about the grounds, and by their aid he began a search which he felt in the beginning would be fruitless.

He had only himself to blame. The unknown foe had walked into the trap, so he told himself, and his own careless foot had kicked it open.

Raging, he darted from tree-shadow to tree-shadow, cautious even in his fury, but lawns, gardens, and outbuildings were empty as the veranda itself. For any signs to the contrary, that dim irradiation of the windows might have been a product of his over-stimulated imagination.

"The cowards--the sneaking, crawling cowards!" he muttered angrily. "Afraid of the noise of a tin pot or so! 'Tis myself has a notion to give them no further attention!"

But as he flung himself into a chair in the living-room he knew that he would sit there the balance of the night, nourishing the hope that again those two windows might slowly, uncannily illuminate themselves. They did, but it was by the matter-of-fact light of a desolate dawn.

Disgustedly Colin replaced his too-efficient burglar-alarms in the kitchen, undressed, got into bed, and slept soundly until nearly noon.

"It's busted, but I didn't do it, Mr. O'Hara. It was laying broke on the floor when I come in!"

"That? Where were you finding it?"

Colin's brows knit as he took from his housekeeper the shattered object of her protestation.

"I tell you it was laying on the veranda floor when I come in. Honest, I never even seen it before, Mr. O'Hara!"

Mrs. Bollinger's lean, corded hands twisted themselves nervously in her apron. Though no ceramic expert, there was a quaint beauty about the broken manikin that warned her of possible value.

"H-m!" ejaculated Colin. "It must have been left here with the rest of the furniture when we took Cliona away--though I can't remember seeing it about. All right, Mrs. Bollinger, I likely knocked it down myself last night."

When she had gone he stood for some minutes eyeing the image in his hands. The poor little "Lord of the Air" had certainly found bad fortune in the alien land to which Colin had brought him.

First he had lost his serpent crook, and now the round, feather-trimmed shield on the other arm had been broken off, arm and all. Yet still he smiled patient benignity.

"'Tis odd," muttered Colin, "that I never saw you standing about in the veranda, little man. It's a wonderful faculty you have for being broke in the midst of a mystery! Well, your bit of staff is gone for good, but the shield and arm here can be restored to you, and shall be for the sake of the dream you will always bring to memory. Smile away, little man! Cement will work miracles!"

With a whimsical smile he set the image and its broken part on a shelf and promptly forgot them both. That there could be any actual connection between the Lord of the Air and their troubles at the bungalow never once occurred to him. How should it? Dream or reality, that strange night of so long ago had held nothing for him that could have led him to suspect the truth--a nightmare, dreadful truth for whose discovery he was at the last to pay a heavy price.

When a full fortnight had slipped by, its monotony unrelieved, Colin's patience wore decidedly threadbare. He did not at all like this game of waiting and watching.

He dared make no new acquaintances, and rebuffed what advances were offered him. Afternoons and evenings he spent in reading, or in taking long tramps through the autumn woods, while at all times he kept a sharp lookout for any clue, small or large, that might serve to simplify his problem.

But September passed, and October struck the woods to sharp reds and gold, and still he had discovered nothing. The time began to drag intolerably. What people he met looked at him with irritating curiosity, born of his unusual appearance and solitary habits.

The last week of October crept in. The thick foliage that hid the bungalow was beginning to thin in places, and the lawns were a-rustle with bright leaves, when that occurred which led Colin to take renewed hope of his long vigil.

The sun had set, a blood-red ball behind the purple autumn haze, and Colin stepped out of his front door to take a few long breaths of the crispy cool night air. Then he would go in to the lonely and ill-cooked dinner which Mrs. Bollinger had laid out before departing for the night.

That good woman glanced back through the twilight at the dark mass of screening foliage that still concealed the bungalow, and went her way with many shakes of the head and a hastening step. It was already night beneath the trees that overhung her road.

"The poor man will have to get some one else to wait on him," she reflected as she hurried along, "or else I must leave earlier. It's all right for him to live in a house that the devil visited, if he likes that sort of thing. But goodness knows, Mr. O'Hara is big enough to thrash even Satan himself, but I'll never stay in that house again after dark, no matter how bad we need the money. And I'll tell him so tomorrow morning, first thing. There was that rustling in the trees last night as I went home, and I was a perfect fool to stay so late--oh!"

The woman suddenly picked up her skirts and fled like a rheumatic but badly frightened deer. A little distance from the road there had begun a great rustling and crackling of fallen leaves, and at the same time something whizzed through the air and struck her a painful blow on the cheek.

The missile was only a chestnut burr, but its sharp prickles more than made up for its light weight. Poor Mrs. Bollinger dashed into Carpentier at a gallop, under the firm impression that she had been shot in the face by a rifle bullet.