Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 3 (1923-03).djvu/77

Unlike the case of Miss Claire, however, he had heard no cries, nor had he seen any strangers in the vicinity either that day, or the day before. His wife had been dead a considerable time when he discovered her, and she had been killed too far away from the house for him to have heard the noise of the struggle from the field in which he was at work.

Clearly, the husband did not possess sufficient imagination to commit a clewless murder. Hence I did not advise holding him, but turned my attention to searching in other directions.

My efforts were fruitless. At every angle I ran up against a blank wall. There was nothing from which to make a start.

Turning the body over to the coroner and the sheriff, who arrived shortly after us, Mayor Brayton and I returned to Como. The darkness of the dense forest had put a stop to any more investigations for the night.

The following morning I took up my work in earnest. Visiting the local undertaking establishment, I attended the inquest over the body of the first victim of the murderer, then announced to Brayton and several others my intention of going back into the forest to look the ground over in daylight immediately after lunch.

But the night had brought upon the citizens a sort of terror of the unknown. The constable, with downeast eyes and crimsoned cheeks, apologized for not being able to accompany me, asserting that his wife had passed a bad night and could not be left alone. The sheriff was but little braver, having found, he said, that sudden business called him into another part of the country. Brayton alone offered to go with me. His offer was made, however, with such reluctance that I gravely informed him that I would go alone, adding that I could think better when by myself—greatly, I believe, to his relief.

I allowed him, however, to take me to the edge of the woods in his machine, where he dropped me after giving me precise directions how to find the spot where Miss Claire had met her death.

Striking out at a brisk walk, I reached the place within half an hour and made a thorough examination, failing, however, to find anything that would add to my store of knowledge. But this I felt, was due to the fact that the ground had been so thoroughly tramped over the day of the murder that even had there been anything out of the ordinary it would have been eliminated by the over-zealous country officials,

Yet there was something that gave me cause for speculation. I climbed into the lower branches of the tree under which the body had been found. On one of them were several peculiar marks as if someone wearing hobnailed shoes had been hidden among the leaves, I had no way of ascertaining whether the amateur sleuths had scarched the branches or not, but inasmuch as Brayton had said nothing about it, nor had it been mentioned at the inquest, I was safe in presuming that I was the first to make the discovery. It was a step in the right direction at any rate, I felt.

With this as a starting point, I sat down under a great oak a short distance away and tried to reason the thing out from every angle.

How long I sat absorbed in my own thoughts I do not know. Possibly hours. At any rate, I was suddenly aroused from my reverie by the fact that darkness had commenced to settle down. I looked at my watch. It was past six o'clock. In the blackness of the forest it grew dark early and, to make matters worse, a storm was impending. Already the skies were overcast and checked here and there by nasty forked streaks of lightning.

I leaped to my feet and started out to retrace my steps. I had gone possibly half a mile when night settled down in earnest and, a few minutes later, the storm burst in all its fury. The rain fell in sheets accompanied by a wind that bent even the monarchs of the forest. Heavy branches fell about me. My haste to get out of the accursed place may have had something to do with the matter, but, at any rate, I suddenly awoke to the realization that I was hopelessly lost.

I quickened my steps and hurried on. But the further I progressed the more certain I was that I was getting deeper into the forest. Finally, in desperation, I turned and struck out in a new direction,

I had probably been walking two hours when, suddenly, a little clearing appeared before me in the midst of which was set, as best I could observe by the lightning flashes, a tumbledown house. In one of the windows a light gleamed through the rain and storm. Never in all my eventful career have I welcomed anything as joyfully as I did that spot of light. With my heart beating happily I hurried on toward its source.

The place appeared, as best I could make out, to be of two stories and a lean-to, with a flat roof and high, crumbling chimneys. Many of the windows were covered by weatherbeaten boards. On others the shutters hung from broken hinges. The yard was filled with weeds and clumps of high, coarse grass, with here and there a mournful evergreen tree to add to the general dismal aspect of the place.

I approached the door by means of an ancient brick walk, nearly getting a bad fall as a result of a loose board in the porch floor, before I gained it. I pounded lustily several times before I could elicit a response.

Finally the stumping of feet reached my ear. The key turned and the door swung slowly back with many a protesting squeak of its rusty hinges the space of a few inches, and a tall, unkempt man with long gray beard and hair, holding aloft an ancient lamp which smoked and spluttered in the draught, gazed out at me with a sour expression.

"What d'ye want?" he demanded ungraciously.

I explained my predicament as best I could and asked for supper and a night's lodging. When I had finished he looked me over with evident disapproval.

"I'm not running a hotel," he growled. "The road's only half a mile away."

He was about to close the door in my face when I managed to stick my foot in the crack and hold it open for the minute.

"But, my dear sir," I exclaimed in as wheedling a tone as I could assume, "I have been out in this entire storm. I am wet, chilled to the bone and hungry. Surely you can find some place to put me up. Anywhere will do."

He was about to refuse again when a woman's voice, thin and trembling, piped up:

"Let the poor stranger in, Hank. I can get him a snack to eat and he can sleep in the spare room."

Still grumbling, he opened the door trifle wider and I slid in. Banging the door behind me and locking it with painstaking eare, he led me down a mildewed hall to an antiquated kitchen located in the lean-to. He put the lamp down on the table while I underwent the squinting inspection of an old woman, half-blind, wrinkled and bent, evidently his wife.

Despite her seeming infirmities, she soon placed a cold lunch out on the table, chattering and clucking to herself as she did so, while her husband, saying nothing, eyed me with ill concealed malevolence as I disposed of my meagre supper.