The Amateur Inn

_By_

Albert Payson Terhune

LOCHINVAR LUCK FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LAD BUFF: A COLLIE THE AMATEUR INN BLACK CÆSAR’S CLAN BLACK GOLD

New York: George H. Doran Company

The Amateur Inn

By Albert Payson Terhune

New York George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1923, By George H. Doran Company

[Illustration]

The Amateur Inn. II

Printed In The United States Of America

Contents

Chapter Page

I A Non-Skippable Prologue 9

II At Last The Story Begins 22

III An Involuntary Landlord 44

IV Two Or Three Intruders 56

V Robber’S Roost, Unincorporated 75

VI The Police And The Duke Of Argyle 90

VII Faith And Unfaith And Some Moonlight 103

VIII The Inquisition 112

IX A Lie Or Two 125

X A Cry In The Night 140

XI What Lay Beyond The Smashed Door 161

XII Wherein Clive Plays The Fool 175

XIII How One Oath Was Taken 192

XIV A Clueless Clue 211

XV The Impossible 220

XVI The Collie Testifies 231

XVII Untangling The Snarl 243

XVIII When He Came Home 257

XIX A Man And A Maid And Another Man 283

The Amateur Inn

The Amateur Inn

Chapter I

A Non-Skippable Prologue

Osmun Vail doesn’t come into this story at all. Yet he was responsible for everything that happened in it.

He was responsible for the whistling cry in the night, and for the Thing that huddled among the fragrant boxtrees, and for the love of a man and a maid--or rather the loves of several men and a maid--and for the amazing and amusing and jewel-tangled dilemma wherein Thaxton was shoved.

He was responsible for much; though he was actively to blame for nothing. Moreover he and his career were interesting.

So he merits a word or two, if only to explain what happened before the rise of our story’s curtain.

At this point, the boreful word, Prologue, should be writ large, with a space above and below it, by way of warning. But that would be the sign to skip. And one cannot skip this short prologue without losing completely the tangled thread of the yarn which follows--a thread worth gripping and a yarn more or less worth telling.

So let us dispose of the prologue, without calling it by its baleful name; and in a mere mouthful or two of words. Something like this:

When Osmun Vail left his father’s Berkshire farm, at twenty-one, to seek his fortune in New York, he wore his $12 “freedom suit” and had a cash capital of $18, besides his railway ticket.

Followed forty years of brow-sweat and brain-wrack and one of those careers whose semi-occasional real-life recurrence keeps the Success magazines out of the pure-fiction class.

When Osmun Vail came back, at sixty-one, to the Berkshire farm that had been his father’s until the mortgage was foreclosed, he was worth something more than five million dollars. His life-battle had been fought and won. His tired soul yearned unspeakably for the peace and loveliness of the pleasant hill country where he had been born--the homeland he had half-forgotten and which had wholly forgotten him and his.

Osmun recalled the prim village of Stockbridge, the primmer town of Pittsfield, drowsing beneath South Mountain, the provincial scatter of old houses known as Lenox; the tumbled miles of mountain wilderness and the waste of lush farmland between and around them.

At sixty-one he found Pittsfield a new city; and saw a Lenox and Stockbridge that had been discovered and renovated by beauty-lovers from the distant outside world. All that region was still in the youth of its golden development. But the wave had set in, and had set in strong.

A bit dazzled and more than a little troubled by the transformation, Osmun Vail sought the farm of his birth and the nearby village of Aura. Here at least nothing had changed; except that his father’s house--built by his grandfather’s own gnarled hands--had burned down; taking the rattle-trap red barns with it. The whole hilltop farm lay weedgrown, rank, desolate. In the abomination of desolation, a deserted New England farm can make Pompeii look like a hustling metropolis. There is something awesome in its new deadness.

Cold fingers seemed to catch Osmun by the throat and by the heartstrings; as he stared wistfully from the house’s site, to the neglected acres his grandsire had cleared and his sire had loved. From the half-memory of a schoolday poem, the returned wanderer quoted chokingly:

“_Here will I pitch my tent. Here will I end my days._”

Then on the same principle of efficient promptitude which had lifted him from store-porter to a bank presidency, Osmun Vail proceeded to realize a dream he had fostered through the bleakly busy decades of his exile.

For a ridiculously low price he bought back and demortgaged the farm and the five hundred acres that bordered it. He turned loose a horde of landscape artists upon the domain. He sent overseas for two renowned British architects, and bade them build him a house on the hilltop that should be a glorious monument to his own success and to his father’s memory. To Boston and to New York he sent, for a legion of skilled laborers. And the estate of Vailholme was under way.

Fashion, wealth, modernity, had skirted this stretch of rolling valley to northeast of Stockbridge and to south of Lenox. The straggly one-street village of Aura drowsed beneath its giant elms; as it had drowsed since a quarter-century after the Pequot wars. The splashing invasion of this moneyed New Yorker created more neighborhood excitement than would the visit of a Martian to Brooklyn.

Excitement and native hostility to outsiders narrowed down to a very keen and very personal hatred of Osmun Vail; when it was learned that all his skilled labor and all his building material had been imported from points beyond the soft green mountain walls which hedge Aura Valley.

Now there was not a soul in the Valley capable of building any edifice more imposing or imaginative than a two-story frame house. There was no finished material in the Valley worth working into the structure of such a mansion as Osmun proposed. But this made no difference. An outlander had come back to crow over his poor stay-at-home neighbors, and he was spending his money on outside help and goods, to the detriment of the natives. That was quite enough. The tide of icy New England hate swelled from end to end of the Valley; and it refused to ebb.

These Aura folk were Americans of Puritan stock--a race to whom sabotage and arson are foreign. Thus they did not seek to destroy or even to hamper the work at Vailholme. But their aloofness was made as bitter and blighting as a Bible prophet’s curse. For example:

When his great house was but half built, Osmun ran up from New York, one gray January Saturday afternoon, to inspect the job. This he did every few weeks. And, on his tours, he made headquarters at Plum’s, in Stockbridge, six miles away. This was an ancient and honorable hostelry which some newfangled folk were even then beginning to call “The Red Lion Inn,” and whose food was one of Life’s Compensations. Thence, on a livery nag, Vail was wont to ride out to his estate.

On this January trip Osmun found that Plum’s had closed, at Christmas, for the season. He drove on to Aura, only to find the village’s one inn was shut for repairs. Planning to continue his quest of lodgings as far as Lenox or, if necessary, to Pittsfield, Osmun went up, through a snowstorm, to his uncompleted hilltop mansion of Vailholme.

He had brought along a lunch, annexed from the Stockbridge bakery. So interested did he become in wandering from one unceilinged room to another, and furnishing and refurnishing them in his mind, that he did not notice the steady increase of the snowfall and of the wind which whipped it into fury.

By the time he went around to the shed, at the rear of the house, where he had stabled the livery horse, he could scarce see his hand before his face. The gale was hurling the tons of snow from end to end of the Valley, in solid masses. There was no question of holding the road or even of finding it. The horse knew that--and he snorted, and jerked back on the bit when Osmun essayed to lead him from shelter.

Every minute, the blizzard increased.

The corps of indoor laborers and their bosses had gone to their Pittsfield quarters, for Sunday. Osmun had the deserted place to himself. Swathed in his greatcoat and in a mountain of burlap, and burrowing into a bed of torn papers and paint-blotched wall-cloths, he made shift to pass a right miserable night.

By dawn the snowfall had ceased. But so had the Valley’s means of entrance and of exit. The two roads leading from it to the outer world were choked breast high with solid drifts. For at least three days there could be no ingress or egress. Aura bore this isolation, philosophically. To be snowbound and cut off from the rest of the universe was no novelty to the Valley hamlet. Osmun bore it less calmly.

By dint of much skill and more persuasion, he piloted his floundering horse down the hill and into the village. There, at the first house, he demanded food and shelter. He received neither. Neither the offer of much money nor an appeal to common humanity availed. It took him less than an hour to discover that Aura was unanimous in its mode of paying him back for his slight to its laborers. Not a house would take him in. Not a villager would sell him a meal or so much as feed his horse.

Raging impotently, Osmun rode back to his frigid and draughty hilltop mansion-shell. By the time he had been shivering there for an hour a thin little man stumped up the steps.

The newcomer introduced himself as Malcolm Creede. He had stopped for a few minutes in Aura, that morning, for provisions, and had heard the gleeful accounts of the villagers as to their treatment of the stuck-up millionaire. Wherefore, Creede had climbed the hill, in order to offer the scanty hospitality of his own farmhouse to Osmun, until such time as the roads from the Valley should be open.

Osmun greeted the offer with a delight born of chill and starvation. Leading his horse, he followed Creede across a trackless half-mile or so to a farm that nestled barrenly in a cup of the hills. During the plungingly arduous walk he learned something of his host.

Creede was a Scotchman, who had begun life as a schoolmaster; and who had come to America, with his invalid wife, to better his fortunes. A final twist of fate had stranded the couple on this Berkshire farm. Here, six months earlier, the wife had died, leaving her heart-crushed husband with twin sons a few months old. Here, ever since, the widower had eked out a pitifully bare living; and had cared, as best he might, for his helpless baby boys. His meager homestead, by the way, had gleefully been named by luckier and more witty neighbors, “Rackrent Farm.” The name had stuck.

Before the end of Osmun Vail’s enforced stay at Rackrent Farm, gratitude to his host had merged into genuine friendship. The two lonely men took to each other, as only solitaries with similar tastes can hope to. Osmun guessed, though Creede denied it, that the Good Samaritan deed of shelter must rouse neighborhood animosity against the Scotchman.

Osmun guessed, and with equal correctness, that this silent and broken Scot would be bitterly offended at any offer of money payment for his hospitality. And Vail set his own ingenuity to work for means of rewarding the kindness.

As a result, within six months Malcolm Creede was installed as manager (“factor,” Creede called it) of the huge new Berkshire estate of Vailholme and was supervising work on a big new house built for him by Osmun in a corner of the estate.

Creede was woefully ignorant of business matters. Coming into a small inheritance from a Scotch uncle, he turned the pittance over to Vail for investment. And he was merely delighted--in no way suspicious--when the investments brought him in an income of preposterous size. Osmun Vail never did things by halves.

Deeply grateful, Creede threw his energy and boundless enthusiasm into his new duties. He went further. One of his twin sons he christened “Clive” for the inheritance-leaving uncle in Scotland. But the other he named “Osmun,” in honor of his benefactor. Vail, much gratified at the compliment, insisted on taking over the education of both lads. The childless bachelor reveled in his rôle of fairy godfather to them.

But there was another result of Osmun Vail’s chilly vigil in the half-finished hilltop mansion. During the hour before Creede had come to his rescue the cold and hungry multimillionaire had taken a vow as solemn as it was fantastic.

He swore he would set aside not less than ten of his house’s forty-three rooms for the use of any possible wayfarers who might be stranded, as he had been, in that inhospitable wilderness, and who could afford to pay for decent accommodations. Not tramps or beggars, but folk who, like himself, might come that way with means for buying food and shelter, and to whom such food and shelter might elsewhere be denied.

This oath he talked over with Creede. The visionary Scot could see nothing ridiculous about it. Accordingly, ten good rooms were allotted mentally to paying guests, and a clause in Vail’s will demanded that his heirs maintain such rooms, if necessary, for the same purpose. The fact was not advertised. And during Osmun’s quarter-century occupancy of Vailholme nobody took advantage of the chance.

During that quarter-century the wilderness’s beauty attracted more and more people of means and of taste. Once-bleak hills blossomed into estates. The village of Aura became something of a resort. The face of the whole countryside changed.

When Osmun Vail died (see, we are through with him already, though not so much as launched on the queer effects of his queerer actions!) he bequeathed to his beloved crony, Malcolm Creede, the sum of $500,000, and a free gift of the house he had built for him, and one hundred acres of land around it.

Creede had named this big new home “Canobie,” in memory of his mother’s borderland birthplace. He still owned Rackrent Farm, two miles distant. He had taken pride, in off moments, in improving the sorry old farmhouse and bare acres into something of the quaint well-being which he and his dead wife had once planned for their wilderness home. Within a year after Vail’s death Creede also died, leaving his fortune and his two homes, jointly, to his twin sons, Clive and Osmun.

The bulk of Vail’s fortune--a matter of $4,000,000 and the estate of Vailholme--went to the testator’s sole living relative; his grand-nephew, young Thaxton Vail, a popular and easy-going chap who, for years, had made his home with his great-uncle.

Along with Vailholme, naturally, went the proviso that ten of its forty-three rooms should be set aside, if necessary, for hotel accommodations.

Thaxton Vail nodded reminiscently, as he read this clause in the will. Long since, Osmun had explained its origin to him. The young fellow had promised, in tolerant affection for the oldster, to respect the whim. As nobody ever yet had taken advantage of the hotel proposition and as not six people, then alive, had heard of it, he felt safe enough in accepting the odd condition along with the gift.

Chapter II

At Last The Story Begins

Among the two million Americans shoved bodily into the maelstrom of the World War were Thaxton Vail and the Creede twins.

This story opens in the spring of 1919, when all three had returned from overseas service.

Aura and the summer-colony were heartily glad to have Thaxton Vail back again. He was the sort of youth who is liked very much by nine acquaintances in ten and disliked by fewer than one in ninety. But there was no such majority opinion as to the return of the two young Creedes.

The twins, from babyhood, had been so alike in looks and in outward mannerisms that not five per cent of their neighbors could tell them apart. But there all resemblance ceased.

Clive Creed was of the same general type as young Vail, who was his lifelong chum. They were much alike in traits and in tastes. They even shared--that last year before the war cut a hole in the routine of their pleasant lives--a mutual ardor for Doris Lane, who, with her old aunt, Miss Gregg, spent her summers at Stormcrest, across the valley from Vailholme. It was the first shadow of rivalry in their chumship.

Clive and Thaxton had the same pleasantly easy-going ways, the same unforced likableness. They were as popular as any men in the hill-country’s big summer-colony. Their wartime absence had been a theme for genuine regret to Aura Valley.

Except in looks, Osmun Creede was as unlike his twin brother as any one could well have been. The man had every Scotch flaw and crotchet, without a single Scotch virtue. Old Osmun Vail had sized up the lad’s character years earlier, when he had said in confidence to Thaxton:

“There’s a white man and a cur in all of us, Thax. And some psychologist sharps say twins are really one person with two bodies. Clive got all the White Man part of that ‘one person,’ and my lamentable namesake got all the Cur. At times I find myself wishing he were ‘the lamented Osmun Creede,’ instead of only ‘the lamentable Osmun Creede.’ Hester Gregg says he behaves as if Edgar Allan Poe had written him and Berlioz had set him to music.”

From childhood, Thaxton and this Creede twin had clashed. In the honest days of boyhood they had taken no pains to mask their dislike. In the more civil years of adolescence they had been at much pains to be courteous to each other when they met, but they tried not to meet. This avoidance was not easy; in such a close corporation as the Aura set, especially after both of them began calling over-often on Doris Lane.

Back to the Berkshires, from overseas, came the two Creedes. The community prepared to welcome Clive with open arms; and to tolerate Osmun, as of old, for the sake of his brother and for the loved memory of his father. At once Aura was relieved of one of its former perplexities. For no longer were the twins impossible to tell apart.

They still bore the most amazing likeness to each other, of course. But a long siege of trench fever had left Osmun slightly bald on the forehead and had put lines and hollows in his good-looking face and had given his wide shoulders a marked stoop. Also, a fragment of shell in the leg had left him with a slight limp. The fever, too, had weakened his eyes; and had forced him to adopt spectacles with a faintly smoked tinge to their lenses. Altogether, he was plainly discernible, now, from his erect brother, and looked nine years older.

There was another change, too, in the brethren. Hitherto they had lived together at Canobie. On their return from the war they astonished Aura by separating. Osmun lived on at the big house. But Clive took his belongings to Rackrent Farm; and set up housekeeping there; attended by an old negro and his wife, who had worked for his father. He even transported thither the amateur laboratory wherewith he and Osmun had always delighted to putter; and he set it up in a vacant back room of the farmhouse.

Aura was thrilled at these signs of discord in the hitherto inseparable brethren. Clive had been the only mortal to find good in Osmun and to care for his society. Now, apparently, there had been a break.

But almost at once Aura found there had been no break. The twins were as devoted as ever, despite their decision to live two miles apart. They were back and forth, daily, at each other’s homes; and they wrought, side by side, with all their old zeal, in the laboratory.

Osmun’s cantankerous soul did not seem to have undergone any purifying process from war experience and long illness. Within a month after he came back to Aura he proceeded to celebrate his return by raising the rents of the seven cottages he and Clive owned; and by a twenty per cent cut in the pay of the Canobie laborers.

Aura is not feudal Europe. Nor had Osmun Creede any of the hereditary popularity or masterliness of a feudal baron. Wherefore the seven tenants prepared to walk out of their rent-raised homes. The Canobie laborers, to a man, went on strike. Aura applauded. Osmun sulked.

Clive came to the rescue, as ever he had done when his brother’s actions had aroused ill-feeling. He rode over to Canobie and was closeted for three hours with Osmun. Servants, passing the library, heard and reported the hum of arguing voices. Then Clive came out and rode home. Next morning Osmun lowered the rents and restored wages to their old scale. As usual, the resultant popularity descended on Clive and not upon himself.

It was a week afterward that Thaxton Vail chanced to meet Osmun at the Aura Country Club. Osmun stumped up to him, as Vail sat on the veranda rail waiting for Doris Lane to come to the tennis courts.

“I was blackballed, yesterday, by the Stockbridge Hunt Club,” announced Creede, with no other salutation.

“I’m sorry,” said Thaxton, politely.

“I hear, on good authority, that it was you who blackballed me,” continued Osmun, his spectacled eyes glaring wrathfully on his neighbor. “And I’ve come to ask why you did it. In fact, I demand to know why.”

“I’m disobedient, by nature,” said Thaxton, idly. “So if I had blackballed you, I’d probably refuse to obey your ‘demand.’ But as it happened, I didn’t blackball you. I wasn’t even at the Membership Committee’s meeting.”

“I hear, on good authority, that _you_ blackballed me,” insisted Osmun, his glare abating not at all.

“And I tell you, on better authority, that I didn’t,” returned Thaxton with a lazy calm that irked the angry man all the more.

“Then who did?” mouthed Osmun. “I’ve a right to know. I mean to get to the bottom of this. If a club, like the Stockbridge Hunt, blackballs a man of my standing, I’ll know why. I--”

“I believe the proceedings of Membership Committee meetings are supposed to be confidential,” Thaxton suggested. “Why not take your medicine?”

“I still believe it was you who blackballed me!” flamed Osmun. “I had it from--”

“You have just had it from me that I didn’t,” interposed Thaxton, a thread of ice running through his pleasant voice. “Please let it go at that.”

“You’re the only man around here who would have done such a thing,” urged Creede, his face reddening and his voice rising. “And I am going to find out why. We’ll settle this, here and now. I--”

Thaxton rose lazily from his perch on the rail.

“If you’ve got to have it, then take it,” he said, facing Osmun. “I wasn’t at the meeting. But Willis Chase was. And I’ll tell you what he told me about it, if it will ease your mind. He said, when your name was voted on, the ballot-box looked as if it were full of Concord grapes. There wasn’t a single white ball dropped into the box. I’m sorry to--”

“That’s a lie!” flamed Osmun.

Thaxton Vail’s face lost all its habitual easy-going aspect. He took a forward step, his muscles tensing. But before he could set in whizzing action the fist he had clenched, a slender little figure stepped, as though by chance, between the two men.

The interloper was a girl; wondrous graceful and dainty in her white sport suit. Her face was bronzed, beneath its crown of gold-red hair. Her brown eyes were as level and honest as a boy’s.

“Aren’t you almost ready, Thax?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting, down at the courts, ever so long while you sat up here and gossiped. Good morning, Oz. Won’t you scurry around and find some one to make it ‘doubles’? Thax and I always quarrel when we play ‘singles.’ Avert strife, won’t you, by finding Greta Swalm, or some one, and joining us? Please do, Oz. We--”

Osmun Creede made a sound such as might well be expected to emanate from a turkey whose tail feathers are pulled just as it starts to gobble. Glowering afresh at Vail, but without further effort at articulate speech, he turned and stumped away.

Doris Lane watched him until his lean form was lost to view around the corner of the veranda. Then, wheeling on Thaxton, with a striking change from her light manner, she asked:

“What was the matter? Just as I came out of the door I heard him tell you something or other was a lie. And I saw you start for him. I thought it was time to interrupt. It would be a matter for the Board of Governors, you know, here on the veranda, with every one looking on. What was the matter?”

“Oh, he thought I blackballed him, for the Hunt Club,” explained Thaxton. “When, as a matter of fact, I seem to be about the only member who didn’t. I told him so, and he said I lied. I’m--I’m mighty glad you horned in when you did. It’s always a dread of mine that some day I’ll have to thrash that chap. And you’ve saved me from doing it--this time. It’d be a hideous bore. And then there’d be good old Clive to be made blue by it, you know. And besides, Uncle Oz and his dad were--”

“I know,” she soothed. “I know. You won’t carry it any further, will you? Please don’t.”

“I suppose not,” he answered. “But, really, after a man calls another a liar and--”

“Oh, I suppose that means there’ll be one more neighborhood squabble,” she sighed, puckering her low forehead in annoyance. “And two more people who won’t see each other when they meet. Isn’t it queer? We come out to the country for a good time. And we spend half that time starting feuds or stopping them. People can live next door to each other in a big city for a lifetime, and never squabble. Then the moment they get to the country--”

“‘All Nature is strife,’” quoted Thaxton. “So I suppose when we get back to Nature we get back to strife. And speaking of strife, there was a girl who was going to let me beat her at tennis, this morning; instead of spending the day scolding me for being called a liar. Come along; before all the courts are taken. I want to forget that Oz Creede and I have got to cut each other, henceforth. Come along.”

On the following morning, appeared a little “human interest” story, in the Pittsfield _Advocate_. One of those anecdotal newspaper yarns that are foredoomed to be “picked up” and copied, from one end of the continent to the other. Osmun Creede had written the story with some skill. And the editor had sent a reporter to the courthouse to verify it, before daring to print it.

The article told, in jocose fashion, of the clause in old Osmun Vail’s will, requiring his great-nephew and heir to maintain Vailholme, at request, as a hotel. An editorial note added the information that a copy of the will had been read, at the courthouse, by an _Advocate_ reporter, as well as Thaxton Vail’s signed acceptance of its conditions.

It was Clive Creede who first called Thaxton’s notice to the newspaper yarn. While young Vail was still loitering over his morning mail, Clive rode across from Rackrent Farm, bringing a copy of the _Advocate_.

“I’m awfully sorry, old man,” he lamented, as Thaxton frowningly read and reread the brief article. “Awfully sorry and ashamed. I guessed who had done this, the minute I saw it. I phoned to Oz, and charged him with doing it. He didn’t deny it. Thought it was a grand joke. I explained to him that the story was dead and forgotten; and that now he had let you in for no end of ridicule and perhaps for a lot of bother, too. But he just chuckled. While I was still explaining, he hung up the receiver.”

“He would,” said Thaxton, curtly. “He would.”

“Say, Thax,” pleaded Clive, “don’t be too sore on him. He means all right. He just has an unlucky genius for doing or saying the wrong thing. It isn’t his fault. He’s built that way. And, honest, he’s a tremendously decent chap, at heart. Please don’t be riled by this newspaper squib. It can’t really hurt you.”

The man was very evidently stirred by the affair; and was wistfully eager, as ever, to smooth over his brother’s delinquencies. Yet, annoyed by what he had just read, Thaxton did not hasten, as usual, to reassure his chum.

“You’re right when you say he has ‘an unlucky genius for saying the wrong thing,’” he admitted. “The last ‘wrong thing’ was what he said to me yesterday. He called me a liar.”

“_No!_ Oh, Lord, man, no!”

“Before I could slug him or remember he was your brother, Doris Lane strolled in between us, and the war was off. You might warn him not to say that particular ‘wrong thing’ to me again, if you like. Because, next time, Doris might not be nearby enough to stave off the results. And I’d hate, like blazes, to punch a brother of yours. Especially when he’s just getting on his feet after a sickness. But--”

“I wish you’d punch _me_, instead!” declared Clive. “Gods, but I’m ashamed! I’ll give him the deuce for this. Won’t you--is there any use asking you to overlook it--to accept my own apology for it--and not to let it break off your acquaintance with Oz? It’d make a mighty hit with me, Thax,” he ended, unhappily. “I think a lot of him. He--”

Thaxton laughed, ruefully.

“That’s the way it’s always been,” he grumbled. “Whenever Oz does or says some unspeakably rotten thing, and just as he’s about to get in trouble for it, you always hop in and deflect the lightning. You’ve been doing it ever since you were a kid. There, stop looking as if some one was going to cut off your breathing supply! It’s all right. I’ll forget the whole thing--so far as my actions towards Oz are concerned. Only, warn him not to do anything to make me remember it again. As for this mess he’s stirred up, in the _Advocate_, I can’t see what special effect it’ll have. Uncle Oz was too well loved, hereabouts, for it to make his memory ridiculous.”

* * * * *

But, within the day, Thaxton learned of at least one “special effect” the news item was to have. At four o’clock that afternoon, he received a state visit from a little old lady whom he loved much for herself and more for her niece. The visitor was Miss Hester Gregg, Doris’s aunt and adoptive mother.

“Please say you’re glad to see me, Thax,” she greeted Vail. “And please say it, _now_. Because when you hear what I’ve come for, you’ll hate me. Not that I mind being hated, you know,” she added. “But you lack the brain to hate, intelligently. You’d make a botch of it. And I like you too well to see you bungle. Now shall I tell you what I’ve come for?”

“If you don’t,” he replied, solemnly, “I shall begin hating you for getting my curiosity all worked up, like this. Blaze away.”

“In the first place,” she began, “you know all about our agonies, with the decorators, at Stormcrest. You’ve barked your shins over their miserable pails and paper-rolls, every time you’ve tried to lure Doris into a dark corner of our veranda. Well, I figured we could stay on, while they were plying their accursèd trade. I thought we could retreat before them, from room to room; and at last slip around them and take up our abode in the rooms they had finished, while they were working on the final ones. It was a pretty thought. But we can’t. We found that out, to-day. We’re like old Baldy Tod, up at Montgomery. He set out to paint his kitchen floor, and he painted himself into a corner. We’re decorated into a corner. We’ve got to get out, Doris and I, for at least a week; while they finish the house. We’ve nowhere to live. Be it never so jumbled there’s no place at home--”

“But--”

“We drove over to Stockbridge, to-day, to see if we could get rooms in either of the hotels. (We’ll have to be near here; so I can oversee the miserable activities of the decorators, every day.) No use. Both hotels disgustingly full of tourists. The return of all you A. E. F. men and the post-war rush of cash-to-the-pocket-book have jammed every summer resort on earth. We tried at Lenox and Lee and we even went over to Pittsfield. The same everywhere. Not an inn or a hotel with a room vacant. Then--”

“Hooray!” exulted Vail. “Stop right there! I have the solution. You and Doris come over here! I’ve loads of room. And it’ll be ever so jolly to have you--both. _Please_ come!”

“My dear boy,” said the old lady, “that’s just what I’ve been leading up to for five minutes.”

“Gorgeous! But when are you going to get to the part of your visit that’s due to make me hate you? Thus far, you’ve been as welcome as double dividends on a non-taxable stock. When does the ‘hate’ part begin?”

“It’s begun,” she said. “Now let me finish it. I saw the _Advocate_ story, this morning. I’d almost forgotten that funny part of the will. But it gave me my idea. I spoke of it to Doris. She was horrified. And that confirmed my resolve. Whenever modern young people are horrified at a thing, one may know that is the only wise and right thing to do.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, crestfallen. “Doesn’t she want to come here? I hoped--”

“Not the way _I’m_ coming,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “I’m not coming to visit Vailholme as a guest. I’m coming here to board!”

She paused to let him get the full effect of her words. He got them. And he registered his understanding by a snort of disdain.

“Your great-uncle,” she resumed, defiantly, “put that clause in his will for the benefit of wayfarers up here who could pay and who couldn’t get any other accommodations. That fits my case precisely. So it’ll be great fun. Besides, I loathe visiting. And I really enjoy boarding. So I am coming here, for a week, with Doris. To board. Not as a guest. _To board._ So _that’s_ settled. We will be here about eleven o’clock, to-morrow morning.”

She gazed in placid triumph at the bewildered young man.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” he sputtered. “You’re the oldest friends I’ve got--both of you are. And it’ll be _great_ to have you stay here from now till the Tuesday after Eternity. But you’re not going to board. That’s plain idiocy.”

“Thax,” she rebuked. “You are talking loudly and foolishly. We are coming to board with you. It’s all settled. I settled it, myself. So I know. We’re coming for a week. And our time will be our own, and we won’t feel under any civil obligations or have to be a bit nicer than we want to. It’s an ideal arrangement. And if the coffee is no better than it was, the last night we dined here, I warn you I shall speak very vehemently to you about it. Coffee making is as much an art as violin playing or administering a snub. It is not just a kitchen chore. We shall stay here,” she forestalled his gurgling protest, “under an act of Legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The law demands that a landlord give us hotel accommodations, until such time as we prove to be pests or forget to pay our bills. We--”

“Bills!” stammered Thaxton. “Oh, murder!”

“That brings me to the question of terms,” she resumed. “There will be Doris and myself and Clarice, my personal maid. (Clarice has the manners of a bolshevist and the morals of a medical student. But she has become a habit with me.) We shall want a suite of two bedrooms and a sitting room and bath for Doris and myself. And we shall need some sort of room for Clarice. A cage will do, for her, at a pinch. I’ve been figuring what you ought to charge me; and I’ve decided that a fair price would be--”

“So have I,” interrupted Thaxton, a glint of hope brightening his embarrassment. “I’ve been figuring on it, too. On the price, I mean. Man and boy, I’ve been thinking it over, for the best part of ten seconds. I am the landlord. And as such I have all sorts of rights, by law; including the right to fix prices. Likewise, I’m going to fix it. If you don’t like my rates, you can’t come here. That’s legal. Well, my dear Miss Gregg, on mature thought, I have decided to make special rates for you and your niece and Clarice. I shall let you have the suite you speak of, per week, with meals (and coffee, such as it is) for the sum of fifteen cents per day--five cents for each of you--or at the cut rate of one dollar weekly. Payable in advance. Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.”

He beamed maliciously upon the old lady. To his surprise, she made instant and meek answer:

“The terms are satisfactory. We’ll take the rooms for one week, with privilege of renewal. I don’t happen to have a dollar, in change, with me, at the moment. Will you accept a written order for one dollar; in payment of a week’s board in advance?”

“As I know you so well,” he responded, deliberating, “I think I may go so far as to do that. Of course, you realize, though, that if the order is not honored at the bank, I must request either cash payment or the return of your keys. That is our invariable rule. And now, may I trouble you for that order?”

From her case Miss Gregg drew a visiting card and a chewed gold pencil. She scribbled, for a minute, on the card-back; then signed what she had written; and handed the card to Thaxton. He glanced amusedly at it; then his face went idiotically blank. Once more, his lips working, he read the lines scribbled on the back of the card:

“_Curator of Numismatic Dept., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City:--Please deliver to bearer (Mr. Thaxton Vail) upon proper identification, the silver dollar, dated 1804, which I placed on exhibition at the Museum.--Hester Gregg._”

“The 1804 dollar!” he gasped. “That’s a low-down trick to play on me!”

“Why?” she asked, innocently. “It is worth at least its face value. In fact--as you may recall--my father paid $2,700 for it. When I placed it on view at the Museum, the curator told me its present value is nearer $3,600. You see, there are only three of them, extant. So, since you really insist on $1 a week for our board, it may as well be paid with a dollar that is worth the--”

“I surrender!” groaned Thaxton.

“You’d have saved so much trouble--people _always_ would save themselves so much trouble,” she sighed, plaintively, “by just letting me have my own way in the first place. Thaxton, I am going to pay you $200 a week, board. As summer hotel rates go, now, it is a moderate price for what we’re going to get. And I’ll see we get it. We’ll be here, luggage and all, at about eleven in the morning. And now suppose you ring for Horoson. I want to talk to her about all sorts of arrangements. You’d never understand. And you’d only be in the way, while we’re talking. So, run out to the car. I left Doris there. Run along.”

Summoning his housekeeper,--who had also kept house for Osmun Vail,--Thaxton departed bewilderedly to the car where Doris was awaiting her aunt’s return.

“Are you going to let us come here, Thax?” hailed the girl, eagerly. “I do hope so! I wanted, ever so much, to go in while Auntie was making her beautifully preposterous request. But she said I mustn’t. She said there might be a terrible scene; and that you might use language. She said she is too innocent to understand the lurid things you might say, if you lost your temper; but that I’m more sophisticated; and that it’d be bad for me. _Was_ there a ‘terrible scene,’ Thax?”

“Don’t call me ‘Thax!’” he admonished, icily. “It isn’t good form to shower familiar nick-names on your hotelkeeper. It gives him a notion he can be familiar or else that _you’re_ trying to be familiar. It’s bad, either way. Call me ‘Mine Host.’ And in moments of reproof, call me ‘Fellow.’ If only I can acquire a bald head and a red nose and a bay window (and a white apron to drape over it) I’ll be able to play the sorry rôle with no more discomfort than if I were having my backteeth pulled. In the meantime, I’m as sore as a mashed thumb. What on earth possessed her to do such a thing?”

“Why, she looks on it as a stroke of genius!” said Doris. “Any one can go visiting. But no one ever went boarding in this way, before. It’s just like Auntie. She’s ever so wonderful. She isn’t a bit like any one else. Aren’t you going to be at all glad to have us here?”

Chapter III

An Involuntary Landlord

Thaxton Vail was eating a solitary breakfast, next morning, when, wholly unannounced, a long and ecstatic youth burst in upon him. The intruder was Willis Chase, who had roomed with Thaxton at Williams and who still was his fairly close and most annoyingly irresponsible friend.

“Grand!” yelled Chase, bearing down upon the breakfaster. “Grand and colossal! A taxi-bandit is dumping all my luggage on the veranda, and your poor sour-visaged butler is making awful sounds at him. I didn’t bring my man. I didn’t even bring my own car. I taxied over from the club, just as I was; the moment I read it. I knew you had plenty of cars here; and the hotel valet can look after me. I’m inured to roughing it. Isn’t it a spree?”

“If you’ll stop running around the ceiling, and light somewhere, and speak the language of the country,” suggested the puzzled Thaxton, “perhaps I can make some guess what this is all about. I take it you’re inviting yourself here for a visit. But what you mean by ‘the hotel valet’ is more than I--”

“Don’t you grasp it?” demanded Chase, in amaze. “Haven’t you even read that thing? It was in one of the New York papers, at the club, this morning. A chap, there, said it was in the _Advocate_, yesterday. Your secret has exploded. All the cruel world knows of your shame. You run a hotel. You have to; or else you’d lose Vailholme. It’s all in the paper. In nice clear print. For everybody to read. And everybody’s reading it, ever so happily. I’m going to be your first guest. It all flashed on me, like--”

“Then switch the flash off!” ordered Thaxton, impatiently. “This crazy thing seems to hit you as a grand joke. To me, it hasn’t a single redeeming feature. Clear out!”

“My worthy fellow,” reproved Chase, “you forget yourself. You run a hotel. Your hotel is not full. I demand a room here. I can pay. By law, you cannot refuse to take me in. If you do, I shall bring an attorney here to enforce my rights. And at the same time, I shall bring along ten or eleven or nineteen of the Hunt Club crowd, as fellow-guests; to liven things for the rest of the summer. Now, Landlord, do I stay; or do I not?”

Vail glowered on his ecstatically grinning friend, in sour abhorrence. Then he growled:

“If I throw you out, it’d be just like you to bring along that howling crowd of outcasts; and all of you would camp here on me for the season. If you think it’s a joke, keep the joke to yourself. If you insist on butting in here, you can stay. Not because I want you. I don’t. But you’re equal to making things fifty times worse, if I turn you out.”

“I sure am,” assented Chase, much pleased by the compliment to his powers. “Maybe even seventy-eight times worse. And then some--_et puis quelque_, as we ten-lesson boulevardiers say. So here we are. Now, what can you do for me in the way of rooms, me good man? The best is none too good. I am accustomed to rare luxury in my own palatial home, and I expect magnificent accommodations here.”

Thaxton’s grim mouth relaxed.

“Very good,” he agreed. “Miss Gregg and Doris are due here, too, in an hour or so. They have picked out my best suite. But--”

“They are? Glory be! I--”

Thaxton proceeded:

“As landlord, I have the right to put my guests in any sort of room I choose to; and to charge them what price I choose. If my guests don’t like that, they can get out. I have all manner of rooms, you know; from my own to the magenta. Do you remember the magenta room, by any chance?”

“Do I?” snorted Chase, memory of acute misery making him drop momentarily his pose. “_Do_ I? Didn’t I get that room wished on me, six years ago, when your uncle had the Christmas house party; and when I turned up at the last minute? I remember how the dear old chap apologized for sticking me in there. Every other inch of space was crowded. I swear I believe that terrible room is the only uncomfortable spot in this house of yours, Thax. I wonder you don’t have it turned into a storeroom or something. Right over the kitchen; hot as Hades and too small to swing a cat in, and no decent ventilation. Why do you ask if I ‘remember’ it? Joan of Arc would be as likely to forget the stake. If you’re leading up to telling me the room’s been walled in or--”

“I’m not,” said Vail. “I’m leading up to telling you that that’s the room I’m assigning to you. And the price, with board, will be one hundred dollars a day. Take it or leave it. As--”

A howl from Chase interrupted him.

“Take it or leave it,” placidly repeated Vail. “In reverse to the order named.”

“You miserable Shylock!” stormed Chase. “And after I worked it all out so beautifully! Say, listen! Just to spite you and to take that smug look off your ugly face, I’m going to stay! Get that? I’m going to _stay_! One day, anyhow. And I’ll take that hundred dollars out of your hide, somehow or other, while I’m here! Watch if I don’t. It-- What you got there?” he broke off.

Thaxton had pulled out an after-breakfast cigar and had felt in vain for the cigar-cutter which usually lodged in his cash pocket. Failing to find it, he had fished forth a knife to cut the cigar-end. It was the sight of this knife which had caught the mercurial Chase’s interest. Thaxton handed it across the table for his friend’s inspection.

“It’s a German officer’s army knife,” he explained. “Clive Creede brought it home with him, from overseas, for me. There aren’t any more of them made. It weighs a quarter-pound or so, but it has every tool and appliance on earth tucked away, among its big blades. It’s the greatest sort of knife in the world for an outdoor man to carry, in the country.”

Chase, with the curiosity of a monkey, was prying open blade after blade, then tool after tool, examining each in childlike admiration.

“What’s this for?” he asked, presently, after closing a pair of folding scissors and a sailor’s needle; and laboriously picking open a long triangular-edged instrument at the back of the knife. “This blade, or whatever it is. It’s got a point like a needle. But it slopes back to a thick base. And its three edges are razor-sharp. What do you use it for?”

“I don’t use it for anything,” replied Vail. “I don’t know just what it’s for. It’s some sort of punch, I suppose. To make graduated holes in girths or in puttee-straps or belts. Vicious looking blade, isn’t it? The knife’s a treasure, though. It--”

“Say! About that magenta room, now! Blast you, can’t I--?”

“Take it or get out! I hope you’ll get out. It--”

A shadow, athwart the nearest long window, made them turn around. Clive Creede was stepping across the sill, into the room. He was pale and hollow-eyed; and seemed very sick.

“Hello, old man!” Vail greeted him. “You came in, like a ghost. And you look like one, too. Was it a large night or--?”

“It was,” answered Clive, hoarsely, as he turned from shaking hands with his host and with Chase. “A very large night. In fact it came close to being a size too large for me. I got to fooling with some new monoxide gas experiments in that laboratory of Oz’s and mine. No use going into details that’d bore you. But I struck a combination by accident that put me out.”

“You look it. Why--?”

“Oz happened to drop in. He found me on the lab floor; just about gone for good. He lugged me out of doors and worked over me for a couple of hours before he got me on my feet. The whole house,--the whole of Rackrent Farm, it seems to me,--smells of the rotten chemical stuff. I got out, this morning, before it could keel me over again. The smell will hang around there for days, I suppose. It--”

“Why in blazes should a grown man waste time puttering around with silly messes of chemicals?” orated Chase, to the world at large. “At best, he can only discover a new combination of smelly drugs. And at worst, he can be croaked by them. Not that research isn’t a grand thing, in its way,” he added. “I used to do a bit of it, myself. For instance, last month, I discovered one miraculously fine combination, I remember: A hooker of any of the Seven Deadly Gins, and one-- No, that’s wrong! Two parts Jersey applejack to one part French--”

He broke off in his bibulous reminiscences, finding he was not listened to. Thaxton solicitously had helped Clive to a chair and was pouring him a cup of black coffee. The visitor appeared to be on the verge of serious collapse.

“Did Doc Lawton think it was all right for you to leave the house while you’re so done up?” asked Vail.

“I didn’t send for him. Oz pulled me through,” returned Clive, dully. “Then I piked over here. I couldn’t stay there, in that horribly smelly place, could I?”

He shuddered, in reminiscence, and gulped his coffee.

“It’ll be days before the place is fit to live in again,” he said. “The gases have permeated--”

“I’d swap the magenta room for it, any time,” put in Chase, unheeded.

Clive continued:

“Oz brought me as far as your door, in his runabout. He had an idea he wouldn’t be over-welcome here, so he went on. He wanted me to stay at Canobie, with him, till I can go back home. But-- Well, when I’m as knocked out as this, I don’t want to. Oz is all right. He’s a dandy brother, and a white pal. But he has no way with the sick. He--”

“I know,” said Thaxton, as Clive halted, embarrassed. “I know.”

“You see,” added Clive, “I don’t want you to think I’m a baby, to go to pieces like this. But the fumes seem to have caught me where I was gassed, at Montfaucon. Started up all the old pain and gasping and faintness, and heart bother and splitting headache again. I’ve heard it comes back, like that. The surgeon told me it might. And now I know it does. It’s put me pretty well onto the discard. But a few days quiet will set me on my feet.”

“So you rolled over here, first crack out of the box?” suggested Willis Chase. “By way of keeping perfectly quiet?”

“No,” denied Clive, looking up, apologetically, from his second cup of black coffee. “I came over to sponge on Thax, if he’ll let me. Thax, will it bother you a whole lot if I stay here with you for a few days? I won’t be in the way. And I know you’ve got lots of room, and nobody else is stopping with you. I don’t want to put it on the ‘hotel’ basis. But that’s what gave me the nerve to ask--”

“Rot!” exclaimed Thaxton, in forced cordiality. “What’s the use of all that preamble? You’re knocked off your feet. You can’t stay at home. Every inn is full, for ten miles around. I can understand your not wanting to stay with Oz. If you hadn’t come here, I’d have come after you. Of course, you must stay.”

As a matter of fact, all Vail’s boyhood friendship for the invalid was called upon, to make the invitation sound spontaneous. He liked Clive. He liked him better than any other friend. Ordinarily, it would have been a joy to have him for a house-guest. The two men had always been congenial, even though they had seen less of each other since their return from France and had abated some of the oldtime boyish chumship.

Yet with Doris Lane coming to Vailholme, the host had dreamed of long uninterrupted hours with her. And now the presence of this other admirer of hers would block most of his golden plans. Yet there was no way out of it. In any event Willis Chase’s undesired arrival had wrecked his hopes for sweet seclusion. So the man made the best of the annoying situation and threw into his voice and manner the cordiality he could not put into his heart.

He was ashamed of himself for his sub-resentment that this sick comrade of his should find no warmer welcome, in appealing to him for hospitality. Yet the dream of having Doris all to himself for hours a day had been so joyous! While he could not rebuff Clive as he had sought to rebuff Willis Chase, yet he could not be glad the invalid had chosen this particular time to descend upon Vailholme.

Sending for Mrs. Horoson, his elderly housekeeper, he bade her prepare the two east rooms for Clive’s reception.

“Say!” Chase broke in on the instructions. “You told me that measly magenta room was the only one you had vacant!”

“I did not,” rasped Thaxton. “I told you it was the only one _you_ could have. And it is. I hope you won’t take it. If I’d had any sense I’d have said the furnace room was the only one I’d give you. That or the coal cellar.”

“Never mind!” sighed Chase, with true Christian resignation. “What am _I_, to complain? What am _I_?”

“I’d hate to tell you,” snapped Thaxton.

“What are you charging Clive?” demanded Willis.

“A penny a year. Laundry three cents extra. He--”

“Miss Gregg, sir. Miss Lane,” announced the sour-visaged butler, from the dining room doorway.

Thaxton arose wearily and went to meet his guests. All night he had mused happily on the rare chance which was to make Doris and himself housemates for an entire rapturous week--a week, presumably, in which Miss Gregg should busy herself on long daily inspection visits to Stormcrest. And now--an invalid and a cheery pest were to shatter that lovely solitude.

Chapter IV

Two Or Three Intruders

Yet luncheon was a gay enough meal. All the guests were old friends, and all were more or less congenial. Thaxton’s duties as host were in no way onerous, except when Willis Chase undertook to guy him as to his anomalous position as hotelkeeper--which Chase proceeded to do at intervals varying from two minutes to fifteen.

In the afternoon, Miss Gregg was forced to drive across to Stormcrest, to superintend the first touches of the decorators to her remaining rooms. Clive made some excuse for retiring shakily to his own rooms for a rest. Willis Chase had to go back to Stockbridge on urgent business--having found, on unpacking, that in his haste he had brought along all his evening clothes except the trousers.

Thus, for an hour or so, Vail had Doris Lane to himself. They idled about the grounds, Vail showing the girl his new sunken garden and his trout hatcheries. Throughout the dawdling tour they talked idly and blissfully, and withal a whit shyly, as do lovers on whom the Great Moment is making ready to dawn. At their heels paced Vail’s dark sable collie, Macduff.

The sky was hazy, the air was hot. Weather-wise Berkshire folk would have prophesied a torrid spell, the more unbearable for the bracing cool of the region’s normal air. But the hot wave had merely sent this mildly tepid day as a herald.

To the lounging young folk in the garden it carried no message. Yet at whiles they fell silent as they drifted aimlessly about the grounds. There was a witchery that both found hard to ignore.

Rousing herself embarrassedly from one of these sweet silences, Doris nodded toward the big brown collie, who had come to a standstill in front of a puffy and warty old toad, fly-catching at the edge of a rock shelf.

The dog, strolling along in bored majesty in front of his human escorts, had caught the acrid scent of the toad and was crouching truculently in front of it, making little slapping gestures at the phlegmatic creature with his white forepaws and then bounding back, as if he feared it might turn and rend him.

It was quite evident that Macduff regarded his encounter with that somnolent toad as one of the High Dramatic Moments of his career. Defiantly, yet with elaborate caution, he proceeded to harry it from a safe distance.

“What on earth makes him so silly?” asked Doris as she and Vail paused to watch the scene--the dog’s furry and fast-moving body taking up the entire narrow width of the path. “He must have seen a million toads, in his time.”

“What on earth made you cry, the evening we saw Bernhardt die, in _Camille_, when we were kids?” he countered, banteringly. “You knew she wasn’t really dead. You knew she’d get into her street clothes and scrub the ghastliness off her face and go out somewhere and eat a big supper. But you wept, very happily. And I had to give you my spare handkerchief. And it had a hole in it, I remember. I was hideously mortified. Every time I went to the theater with you, after that, I carried a stock of brand-new two-dollar handkerchiefs, to impress you. But you never cried, again, at a play. So that’s all the good they did me. Of course, the one time you cried, I had to be there with the last torn handkerchief I ever carried. Remember?”

“I remember I asked you why Mac is so silly about that toad,” she reproved him, “and you mask your ignorance of natural history and of dog-psychology by changing the subject.”

“I did not!” he denied, with much fervor. “I was leading up in a persuasive yet scholarly way to my explanation. You knew Bernhardt wasn’t dying. Yet you cried. Mac knows that toad is as harmless as they make them. Yet he is fighting a spectacular duel with it. You entered into the spirit of a play. He’s entering into the spirit of a perilous jungle adventure. You cried because an elderly Frenchwoman draped herself on a sofa and played dead. He is all het up, because he’s endowing that toad with a blend of the qualities of a bear and a charging rhinoceros. That’s the collie of it. Collies are forever inventing and playing thrillingly dramatic games. Just as you and I are always eager to see thrillingly dramatic plays. It isn’t really silly. Or if it is, then what are people who pay to get thrills out of plays they know aren’t true and out of novels that they know are lies? On the level, I think Mac has a bit the best of us.”

“Why doesn’t he bring the sterling drama to a climax by annihilating the toad so we can get past?” she demanded, adding, “Not that I’d let him. That’s why I’m waiting here, while he blocks the path, instead of going around him.”

“If that’s all you’re waiting for,” he reassured her, “your long wait has been for nothing. No rescue will be needed. Mac will never touch the toad.”

“Does Mac know he won’t, though?”

“He does,” returned Vail, with finality. “Every normal outdoors dog, in early puppyhood, undertakes to bite or pick up a toad. And no dog ever tried it a second time. A zoölogy sharp told me why. He said toads’ skins are covered with some sort of chemical that would make alum taste like sugar, by contrast. It’s horrible stuff, and it’s the toad’s only weapon. No dog ever takes a second chance of torturing his tongue with it. That’s why Mac keeps his mouth shut, every time he noses at the ugly thing. The toad is quite as safe from him as Bernhardt was from dying on the elaborate _Camille_ sofa. Mac knows it. And the toad knows it. If toads know anything. So nobody’s the worse for the drama.... One side there, Mac! You’re a pest.”

At the command, the collie gave over his harrowing assault, and wandered unconcernedly down the path ahead of them, his plumed tail gently waving, his tulip ears alert for some new adventure.

“Remember old Chubb Beasley?” asked Thaxton. “He lived down on the Lee Road.”

“I do, indeed,” she made answer. “He used to be pointed out to us by our Sunday School teacher as the one best local example of the awful effects of drink. What about him?”

“He owned Macduff’s sire,” said Vail. “A great big gold-and-white collie--a beauty. Chubb used to go down to Lee, regularly, every Saturday, to spend his pay at the speak-easy booze joint in the back of Clow’s grocery. The old chap used to say: ‘If I c’d afford it, I’d have a batting average of seven night a week. As it is, I gotta do my ’umble best of a Sat’dy night.’ And he did it. He came home late every Saturday evening, in a condition where the width of the road bothered him more than the length of it. And always, his loyal old collie was waiting at the gate to welcome him and guide his tangled footsteps up the walk to the house.”

“Good old collie!” she applauded. “But--”

“One night, Beasley got to Clow’s just as the saloon was raided by the Civic Reform Committee. He couldn’t get a drink, and he spent the evening wandering around looking for one. He had to go back home, for the first Saturday night in years, dead cold sober. The collie was waiting for him at the gate, as usual. Chubb strode up to him on steady unwavering legs and without either singing or crying. He didn’t even walk with an accent. The faithful dog sprang at the poor old cuss and bit him. Didn’t know his own master.”

Macduff’s histrionic display, and the story it had evoked, dispersed the sweet spell that had hung over the man and the maid, throughout their leisurely walk. Subconsciously, both felt and resented the glamour’s vanishing, without being able to realize their own emotions or to guess why the ramble had somehow lost its dreamy charm.

They were at the well-defined stage of heart malady when a trifle will cloud the elusive sun, and when a shattered mood cannot be reconstructed at will.

Doris became vaguely aware that the afternoon was hot and that her nose was probably shiny. Instinctively, she turned toward the house.

Vail, unable to frame an excuse for prolonging the stroll, fell into step at her side, obsessed by a dull feeling that the walk had somehow been a failure and that he was making no progress at all in his suit.

As they made their way houseward across the rolling expanse of side-lawn, they saw a huge and dusty car drawn up under the porte-cochère. On the steps was a heap of luggage. A chauffeur stood by the car, stretching his putteed legs, and smoking a furtive cigarette; the machine’s bulk between him and the porch.

In the tonneau lolled a fat and asthmatic-looking old German police dog.

On the veranda, in two wicker chairs drawn forward from their wonted places, lolled a man and a woman swathed in yellow dust-coats. The man was enormous, paunchy, pendulous, sleek. The woman was small and dark and acerb. They were chatting airily, as Vail and Doris drew near.

In front of them wavered Vogel, the butler, trying to get in a word edgewise, as they talked. Back of the doorway, in the hall, could be seen the shadowy forms of the second man and a capped maid, listening avidly.

At sight of Thaxton, the butler abandoned his vain effort to interrupt the strangers and came in ponderous haste down the stone steps and across the lawn to meet his employer.

“Excuse me, sir,” began Vogel, worriedly, “but might I speak to you a minute?”

Doris, with a word of dismissal to her escort, moved on toward the house, entering by a French window and giving the queerly occupied front veranda a wide berth.

“Well?” impatiently asked Vail, vexed at the interruption and by the presence of the unrecognized couple on the porch. “Well, Vogel? What is it? And who are those people?”

For reply, the butler proffered him two cards. He presented them, on their tray, as if afraid they might turn and rend him.

“They are persons, sir,” he said, loftily. “Just persons, sir. Not people.”

Without listening to the distinction, Thaxton Vail was scanning the cards. He read, half aloud:

“_Mr. Joshua Q. Mosely._” Then, “_Mrs. Joshua Q. Mosely, 222 River Front Terrace, ... Tuesdays until Lent._”

“Interesting, if true. I should say, offhand, it ought to count them about three, decimal five,” gravely commented Vail. “But it’s nothing in _my_ young life. I don’t know them.”

“No, sir,” agreed Vogel. “You would not be likely to, sir. Nobody would. They are persons. Most peculiar persons, too. I think they are a bit jiggled, sir, if I might say so. Unbalanced. Why, sir, they actually thought this was an hotel!”

“Huh?” interjected Vail, with much the same sound as might have been expected from him had some one dug an elbow violently into his stomach. “Huh? What’s that, Vogel? Hotel?”

“Yes, sir. That’s why I took the liberty of asking to speak to you alone. I fancied you would not wish Miss Lane to hear of such a ridiculous--”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, sir, they came here, some five minutes ago, and ordered Francis to conduct them to ‘the desk.’ He could not understand, sir, so he came to me, and I went out to see what it meant. They told me they wished rooms here; for themselves and for their chauffeur. And for that stout gray dog in the car. They were most unnecessarily unpleasant, sir, when I told them this was no hotel. They insist it is. They say they know all about it. And they demand to see the proprietor. I was arguing with them when I saw you coming. Would it be well, sir, if I should telephone the police station at Aura or--?”

“No,” groaned Vail. “I’ll see them. You needn’t wait.”

Bracing himself, and cursing his loved great-uncle’s eccentricity, and cursing a thousand times more vehemently the mischief-act of Osmun Creede, the unhappy householder walked up the veranda steps and confronted the two newcomers.

On the way he planned to carry off the situation with a high hand and to get rid of the couple as quickly as might be. Whistling to heel Macduff, the collie, who showed strong and hostile signs of seeking closer acquaintance with the fat police dog, he advanced on the couple.

“Good afternoon,” he said, briskly, as he bore down on the big man and the small woman. “I am Thaxton Vail. What can I do for you?”

“I am Joshua Q. Mosely,” answered the enormous man, making no move to rise from the easy chair from whose ample sides his fat bulk was billowing sloppily. “What are your rates?”

“Rates?” echoed Vail, dully.

“Yes,” replied Mosely. “Your rates--American plan--for an outside room and board for Mrs. M. and myself and a shakedown, somewhere, for Pee-air.... Pee-air is our chauffeur. How much?”

“Please explain,” said Vail, bluffing weakly.

“Yep,” nodded Joshua Q. Mosely. “He said you’d try to stall. Said you were queer that way. But he said if I stuck to it, I’d get in. Said he could prove you weren’t full up. So I’m sticking to it. How much for--?”

“Who are you talking about?” queried Vail. “Who’s ‘he’? And--”

“Here’s his card,” responded Joshua Q. Mosely, groping in an inner pocket. “Met him on the steps of the Red Lion--at Stockbridge, you know--this morning. They’d told us they hadn’t a room left there. Same thing at Haddon Hall. Same thing at Pittsfield. Same thing at Lenox. Same at Lee. Full everywhere. Gee, but you Berkshire hotel men must be making a big turnover, this season! Yep, here’s his card. Thought I’d lost it.”

He fished out a slightly crumpled oblong of stiff paper and handed it to Vail. Thaxton read: “_Mr. Osmun Creede, ‘Canobie,’ Aura, Massachusetts._”

“We were coming out of the Red Lion,” resumed Joshua Q. Mosely. “Figured we’d have to drive all the way to Greenfield or maybe to Springfield, before we could get rooms. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted another day in this region and then make the thirty-mile run to Williamstown and back to North Adams and over the Mohawk Trail to--”

“Quite so,” cut in Vail. “What has all this to do with--?”

“I was coming to that. We were standing there on the steps, jawing about it, the wife and me, when up comes this Mr. Creede. He’d been sitting on the porch there and he’d overheard us. He hands me his card and he says: ‘You can get into Vailholme if you’re a mind to,’ he says. ‘Most excloosive hotel in the Berkshires. Not like any other place in America. Best food. Best rooms. They never advertise. So they aren’t full up,’ he says. ‘They try to keep folks away. But give Mr. Vail this card and tell him I’ll know who to go to with information if he refuses to take in people who can’t get accommodations elsewhere; and he’ll take you in.’ I thought maybe he was jollying me.”

“I--”

“He looked kind of funny while he talked to me,” prattled Mosely, unheeding. “So I asked the day clerk at the Red Lion about it. The clerk said he knew you run a hotel, because he’d read about it in the paper. And he guessed you weren’t full up. So here I came. And your--your head waiter, I s’pose he is, he told me you didn’t have but four folks stopping here with you just now. So that means you’ve got rooms left. What rates for--”

A despairing grunt from Vail checked at last the flow of monologue. Thaxton was aware of a deep yearning to hunt up Osmun Creede and murder him. Well did he understand the inner meaning of Creede’s hint as to the lodging of information in case Vail should refuse to obey the terms of the will whereby he held tenure of Vailholme. And he knew Osmun was quite capable of keeping his word.

Vailholme was dear to Thaxton. He was not minded to lose it through any legal loophole. He was profoundly ignorant of the law. But he remembered signing an agreement to fulfill all the conditions of his great-uncle’s will before assuming ownership of the property.

“I am obliged,” he said, haltingly, “to take in any travelers who can pay my prices. Probably that is what Mr. Creede meant. But I have no adequate provision--or provisions--for guests. I don’t think you’d care for it, here; even for a single day. Why not go on to North Adams, to the--”

“No, thanks, friend,” disclaimed Joshua Q. Mosely, with a leer of infinite cunning. “This isn’t the first time the wife and I have been steered away from excloosive joints. We know the signs. And we want to stop here. So here we stop. For the night, anyhow. We know our rights. And we know the law. Now, once more, what’s your rates for us? Put a price on the--”

“Your chauffeur will have to bunk in at one of the rooms over the garage,” said Vail, morbidly aware that the butler and a maid and the second man were still listening from the hallway. “And I can’t give you and Mrs. Mosely a room with a bath. I’ll have to give you one without. And you’ll have to eat at the only table I have--the table where I and my four personal guests will dine.”

“That’s all right,” pleasantly agreed the tourist. “We’re democratic, Mrs. M. and me. We’ll put up with the best we can get. How much?”

“For all three of you,” said Thaxton, “the lump price will be--let’s see--the lump price will be two hundred dollars a day.”

Joshua Q. Mosely gobbled. His lean little wife arose and faced him.

“It’s just like all these other excloosive places, Josh!” she shrilled. “He’s trying to lose us. Don’t you let him! We’ll stay. It’ll be worth two hundred dollars just to spite the stuck-up chap. We’ll stay, young man. Get that? We’ll _stay_. If you knew anything about Golden City, you’d know two hundred dollars is no more to my husband than a plugged nickel would be worth to one of you Massachusetts snobs. We’re ‘doing’ the Berkshires. And we’re prepared to be done while we’re doing it. We can afford to. Have us shown up to that room.”

Lugubriously Vail stepped to the hall door.

“Vogel,” he said, as a vanishing swarm of servants greeted his advent, “show these people up to the violet room. Have Francis help their chauffeur up with the luggage. Then have Gavroche take the chauffeur to one of the garage rooms.”

He spoke with much authority; and forcibly withal. But he dared not meet the fishy eye of his butler. And he retreated to the veranda again, as soon as he had delivered the order.

“It’s all up,” he announced to Willis Chase, three minutes later, as this first of his unwelcome guests alighted from a Stockbridge taxi, bearing a bagful of the forgotten sections of his apparel. “Here’s where I decamp. If I can’t get some inn to put me up for the night, I’ll take a train for New York.”

“And leave us to our fate?” queried Chase, disgustedly.

“Precisely that. And I hope it’ll be a miserable fate. What do you suppose has happened?”

Briefly, bitterly, he told of the arrival of the Moselys. Willis Chase smiled in pure rapture. Then his face fell as he asked concernedly:

“And you say you’re getting out and deserting us?”

“Why not? It’ll be horrible. Fancy those two unspeakable vulgarians sitting down to dinner with one! Fancy having to meet Vogel’s righteous wrath! Fancy--”

“Fancy walking out on us!” retorted Chase. “Fancy leaving a girl like Doris Lane to the mercies of the Moselys’ society at dinner! Fancy what she’ll think of you for deserting her and her aunt, like a quitter, when your place is at the head of your own table! Fancy leaving a disorganized household that’ll probably go on strike! We’ve paid our board. Are you going to welsh on us? Poor old Clive Creede is sick and all shot to pieces. He came here to you for refuge. Going to leave him to--?”

“No,” groaned Thaxton. “I suppose not. You’re right. I can’t. I’ve got to stay and see it out. If I valued Vailholme any less than I value my right arm, though, I’d let Uncle Oz’s fool conditions go to blazes. Say! Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot as Tophet and I’m tired. But it’ll be better than meeting Vogel till I have to. Let me put that off as long as I can. Something tells me he is going to be nasty. And that means he’ll probably organize a strike. Come along, Macduff!” he bade the collie. “Stop nosing at that obese German dog in the car and come here!”

“Why can’t real-life butlers be like the dear old stage butlers?” sighed Chase, sympathetically, as he and Vail slunk, with guilty haste, down the veranda steps and across the lawn. “Now if only Vogel were on the stage, he’d come to you, with an antique ruffled shirt and with his knees wabbling, and he’d say: ‘Master, I’ve saved up a little out of my wages, this past ninety years that I’ve served your house. I know you’re in trouble. Here’s my savings, Master! Maybe they’ll help. And I’ll keep on working my poor hands to the bone for you, without any wages, God bless your bonny face!’ That’s what he’d say. And he’d snivel a bit as he said it. So would the audience.”

“Faster!” urged Vail, with a covert look over his shoulder. “He’s standing on the steps, looking after us. Hit the pace!”

Chapter V

Robber’S Roost, Unincorporated

From a roadhouse two miles away Thaxton called up Mrs. Horoson, his housekeeper. Without giving her a chance to protest he told her there would be six, besides himself, for dinner that night and that a Mr. and Mrs. Mosely were occupying the violet room.

He bade her break the news to Miss Gregg, on the latter’s imminent return from Stormcrest, and to Miss Lane. Then he hung up, precipitately, and rejoined Chase in the road.

“Let’s hustle!” he adjured. “She may find where we are from Central and follow us. I can count on Horoson not to decamp even if the servants do. But every now and then I feel toward her as I used to when I was a kid and she caught me stealing Uncle Oz’s cigarettes. Hurry!”

It was within a half hour of dinner time when Vail and Chase, by devious back ways, returned to Vailholme and let themselves in at a rear door, preparatory to creeping upstairs to their rooms to dress for the seven-o’clock meal.

The dinner ordeal was one of unrelieved hideousness. But for gallant old Miss Gregg, the situation must have fallen asunder much sooner than it did. Thaxton Vail, at the table’s head, writhed in misery. He had absolutely no idea how to handle the unhandleable situation.

It was Miss Gregg who, unasked, took control of everything. Being wholly fearless, she had no normal terror of the austere Horoson or of the ever-sourer-visaged Vogel.

During the endless wait before dinner was announced she slipped out to the dining room. Thaxton was there, flustered and curt, trying to coerce his rebellious upper servants into setting the wheels of domestic machinery into motion.

Vogel already had given warning, proclaiming briefly but proudly the list of his former super-excellent positions, and repeating, as a sort of eternal slogan of refrain that he was a butler and not a boarding-house head waiter.

It was at this point that Hester Gregg took charge.

Grateful and sweating, Vail went back to the living room to listen gloomily to the Moselys’ recital to Chase and Doris of the various inns at which they had been either cheated or incompetently served. Though the couple did not say so in actual words, Thaxton was left to infer that Vailholme combined the worst qualities of all their tour’s other wretched stopping places.

As he listened to the tale, Miss Gregg swept into the room again with the pure exaltation in her eyes of one who has triumphed in a seemingly hopeless battle. Presently thereafter Vogel announced dinner.

As the party filed stragglingly into the dining room, Clive Creede came downstairs and joined them. He seemed a little better for his afternoon’s rest, but still looked sick and shaky.

Thaxton’s collie, as usual, accompanied Vail to the dining room, lying down majestically on the floor at the host’s left. From the shelter of Joshua Q. Mosely’s bulk appeared the obese police dog, who also had followed into the dining room. He disposed himself in a shadowy space, behind Mrs. Mosely’s chair, where every passing servant must stumble unseeingly over him.

“I hope you don’t mind our bringing Petty to dinner with us,” said Joshua Q., as they sat down. “He’s quite one of the family. The wife would as soon travel without her powder rag as without Petty. He goes everywhere with us. Nice collie you’ve got there. I notice you had to speak pretty firm to him, though, to keep him from pestering poor Petty. Collies aren’t as clever at minding as police dogs. Had him long?”

“He was bred by Mr. Creede, here,” answered Thaxton. “When Mr. Creede went overseas, he left him at Vailholme.”

“And when I got back,” put in Clive, speaking for the first time, and addressing Doris, “Macduff had clean forgotten me and had adopted Thax. So I let him stay on here. Funny, wasn’t it? I’ve heard collies never forget. I suppose that’s another nature fake. For Macduff certainly had forgotten me. At least, he was civil to me, but he’d lost all interest in me.”

Then fell a pause. Miss Gregg arose to the occasion by starting the conversation-ball to rolling again.

“I think,” she said, “there ought to be a S. P. C. A. law against naming animals till they’re grown. People call a baby pup ‘Fluffy’ or ‘Beauty.’ And then he grows up to look like Bill Sikes’ dog. For instance, there’s nothing ‘petty’ about that big police dog. Yet when he was a--”

“Oh,” spoke up Mrs. Mosely, “his name isn’t really ‘Petty.’ ‘Petty’ is short for ‘Pet.’ His real name’s ‘Pet.’ He--”

Willis Chase cleared his throat portentously. Leaning far across the table, he addressed the miserable Thaxton.

“Landlord!” he began, in awful imitation of the pompous Joshua Q. Mosely. “Landlord, me good man, I--”

“Shut up!” snarled Vail, under his breath, glaring murderously.

A smile of utter sweetness overspread Willis Chase’s long countenance.

“Tut, tut!” he chided, patronizingly. “Don’t cringe, when I address you, my honest fellow! Don’t be servile, just because I am a gentleman and your own lot is cast among the working classes. I have every respect for the dignity of labor. I don’t look down on you. In Heaven’s sight all men are equal--landlords and gentlemen and day laborers and plumbers and senators and bootleggers and authors and--”

“That sounds fine in theory, Mr.--Mr. Case, is it?” boomed Joshua Q. “But it don’t work out always in real life. Not that I look down on a man just because he’s got to run an inn or a boarding house to make a living. Nor yet I don’t really look down on day laborers. Nor yet on plumbers. Not even on authors--when they keep their place. But what’s it to profit those of us who’ve made good and won our way to the leisure classes, as you might say? What’s it to profit us if we’re to be put on a level with folks who get paid for serving us? Money’s got to count for _something_, hasn’t it? If a man’s got the brain and the genius and the push to pile up a fortune, don’t he deserve to stand a notch higher than the boob who ain’t--who _hasn’t_? Don’t he? Position means something. It--”

“And family, too!” chimed in Mrs. Mosely, with much elegance of diction. “I always tell Mr. M. that family counts every bit as much as money, or it ought to. Even in these democratic days. I believe in family. I don’t boast of it. But I believe in it. While I don’t brag about my grandfather being the first Governor of--”

“Grandfathers!” sighed Willis Chase, ecstatically. “Now you’ve touched my own hobby, Mrs.--Mrs. Mousely. I--”

“Mosely,” corrected Joshua Q., with much dignity. “And--”

“To be sure,” apologized Chase, meekly. “My mistake. But I murmur ‘Amen!’ to all you say about family and grandfathers. I even go a step beyond. I even believe in pride of _great_-grandfathers.”

“Why--why, cert’nly,” assented Mrs. Mosely, albeit with a shade less assurance. “Of course. And--”

“My own great-grandfather,” expounded Willis, unctuously, “my own great-grandfather, Colonel Weilguse Chase, was the first white man to be hanged in New Jersey. Not that I brag unduly of it. Yet it is sweet to remember, in this age of so-called equality.... Landlord, these trout are probably more or less fit to eat. But my doctor forbids me to guzzle fish. I wonder if I might trouble you to order a little fried tripe for me? I am willing to pay extra for it, of course. Nothing sets off a dinner like a side dish of fried tripe. Or, still better, a nice juicy slice of roast shoulder of tripe. But, speaking of family--”

“I’m afraid you don’t just get my point, Mr. Case,” interposed Mrs. Mosely. “I mean about family. I don’t believe in pride of ancestors--merely _as_ ancestors. But I believe in being proud of ancestors who achieved something worth while. Do you see the distinction?”

“Certainly,” agreed Chase, with much profundity. “And I feel the same way. Now, out of all the millions of white men, great and small, who from time to time have infested New Jersey, there could be but _one_ ‘first white man’ hanged there. And that startling honor was reserved for my own great-grandfather. Not that I brag of it--as I said. But people like you and myself, Mrs. Mousely, can at least be honestly proud of our ancestors. Now, I suppose our genial landlord here--”

“Luella!” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely, in sudden comprehension. “This--this person is pokin’ fun at you. I’ll thank you, young man--”

“Speaking of family,” deftly intervened Miss Gregg, while Mosely and Vail, from opposite sides of the table, looked homicide at the unruffled Chase, “speaking of family, Clive, you remember the Bacons, who used to live just beyond Canobie, don’t you? Your father asked pompous old Standish Bacon if he happened to be descended from Sir Francis Bacon. He answered: ‘Sir Francis left no descendants. But if he had, I should be one of them.’ He--”

“If Mr. Case thinks it is a gentlemanly thing to insult--” boomed Joshua Q., afresh.

“That’s just like Bacon,” cut in Clive Creede, coming to the old lady’s rescue. “My father used to say--”

Then he fell silent, as though his tired mind was not equal to further invention. He did not so much as recall the possibly mythical Bacon, and he had not the energy to improvise further.

But Miss Gregg’s mind was never tired, nor was her endurance-trained tongue acquainted with weariness. And before Mosely could boom his protest afresh, she was in her stride once more.

“You’re right,” she assured Clive. “He was just that sort. If Standish Bacon had lived in Bible times, he’d never have been content to be one of the Apostles. He’d have insisted on being all twelve of them and a couple of the High Priests thrown in. Doris, you’ll remember the time I told him that?”

“Yes,” assented the girl, breaking involuntarily into the queer little child-laugh that Vail loved. “I do, indeed. And I remember what he answered. He--”

“If Mr. Case--” blustered the undeterred Mosely.

“I’d forgotten that part of it,” purred Miss Gregg, ignoring Joshua Q. “I remember now. He said, in that stiff old-fashioned way of his: ‘Madam, you exaggerate. Yet in all modesty I may venture to believe that if I had lived in Bible times, my unworthy name might have had the honor to be mentioned in that Book of Books. Lesser folk than myself were mentioned there by name. Fishermen and tanners and coppersmiths and the like.’”

“No?” exploded Vail. “Did Bacon really say that? The old windbag! And you let him get away with it, Miss Gregg? I should have thought--”

“No,” replied the old lady, complacently. “I can’t say I really ‘let him get away with it.’ At least, not very far away. I’m afraid I even lost my gentle temper, and that for once in my life I was just a little rude. I said to him: ‘Why, Standish Bacon, you couldn’t have gotten your name in Holy Writ if you’d lived through every one of its books. You couldn’t even have gotten in by name if you’d broken up one of St. Paul’s most crowded meetings at Ephesus. The best mention you could have hoped to get for that would have been a verse, tucked away somewhere in the middle of a chapter, in the Epistle to the Ephesians. A verse like this: “_And it came to pass in those days that a Certain Man of Ephesus busted up the meeting!_”’ Bacon didn’t like it very well. But he--”

Joshua Q. Mosely and his glaringly indignant wife had been shut out of the talk as skillfully as Miss Gregg’s ingenuity could devise. But mere ingenuity cannot forever hold its own against a bull-bellow voice. Now as the old lady still rambled on, Joshua Q. burst forth again:

“Excuse me for speaking out of turn, as the feller said!” he declaimed. “But I want this Case person to know-- Hey, there!” he broke off, in dismay. “What’s happenin’?”

For again the substance of his diatribe was shattered.

This time the needed and heaven-sent interruption did not come from Miss Gregg, but from Macduff and Petty.

Thaxton, absent-mindedly, had tossed a fragment of trout to Macduff on the floor beside him. He had long since dropped into the habit of giving the collie surreptitious tidbits during the course of a meal. Macduff was wont to accept them gravely, and he never begged.

But to-night, from his post behind Mrs. Mosely’s chair, the ever-hungry police dog caught sight of the tossed morsel. He lumbered forward to grab it. Macduff daintily picked up and swallowed the food, a second before Petty could seize it.

Angry at loss of the prize and at another dog daring to get ahead of him, Petty launched himself at the unsuspecting collie, driving his teeth into Macduff’s fur-armored neck.

The collie resented this egregious attack by writhing out from under his assailant, wrenching free from the half-averted grip, and flying at the police dog’s throat.

In a flash of time an industrious and rackety dog fight was in progress all over the dining room.

One of the maids screeched. Every one jumped up. A chair was overturned bangingly. Mrs. Mosely shrieked:

“The brute is murdering poor darling Petty! _Help!_”

Excited past all caution, she dashed between the rearing and roaring combatants just as Thaxton Vail recovered enough presence of mind to shout imperatively to his collie.

At the command Macduff ceased to lay on. Turning reluctantly, he walked back to his master. Joshua Q. Mosely, meantime, had flung his incalculable weight upon the bellicose Petty, pinning the luckless police dog to the floor. The fight was over.

Mrs. Mosely’s shrill voice, raised in anguish, soared above the hubbub.

“He’s bitten me!” she cried, nursing a bony finger whose knuckle bore a faint abrasion from the glancing eyetooth of one of the warriors. “That wretched collie has bitten me!”

Then it was that Joshua Q. Mosely proved himself a master of men and of situations. Holding the fat police dog by the studded collar, he drew himself to his full height.

“Come up to the room, Luella!” he bade his hysterical wife. “I’ll wash out the cut for you and bind it up nice. If it’s bad, we’ll have a doctor for it. As for you,” he continued, glowering awesomely upon Vail, “you’re just at the first of what you’re going to get for this. You tried to keep us from stopping here. Then you egged on one of your other guests to insult Mrs. M. at the table. And now your dog attacks ours and then bites my wife. We’re going to the room. To-morrow morning we’ll have breakfast in it. You can send up the bill at the same time. Because I don’t mean to sully my eyes or Mrs. M.’s by looking on your face again. As soon as breakfast’s over we are leaving. At the first police station I shall lodge complaint against you for maintaining a vicious dog, a menace to public safety. And I’m going to write this whole affair to my counsel and instruct him to institoot action. Come, Luella.”

Out of the room they strode, Petty lugged protestingly along between them. Miss Gregg broke the instant of dread silence by saying decisively:

“I’m not surprised. I make it a rule never to be surprised at anything said or done by a man who calls his wife ‘Mrs. M.’ or ‘Mrs. Any-Other-Initial,’ or who speaks of ‘_the_ room.’ And their fat dog was the only one of them that didn’t eat fish with a knife. Just the same, Willis, you ought to be spanked! I’m ashamed of you. It was all your fault; for trying to be funny with people outside your own class. That’s as dangerous as massaging a mule’s tail, and ten times as inexcusable.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Chase, remorsefully. “Honestly, I am. The only bright side to it is the man’s promise that we’ll not see either of them again. I’m sorry, Thax. I--”

Down the stairs clattered two pairs of bumpily running feet. Into the dining room burst a flamingly red and bellowing Joshua Q. Mosely, his wife spluttering along at his heels.

“We been robbed!” squealed Mosely, too upset to remember to boom.

“_What?_” gasped Vail, as the others stared open-mouthed.

Mosely repeated his clarion announcement:

“Robbed! Mrs. M.’s jewel case pinched right out of her locked bag. Twelve thousand dollars’ worth of joolry stolen. It was there when we come down to dinner, and now it’s gone, and the bag is busted open. I--”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Thaxton. “You can’t have been robbed--_here_! What--?”

“Can’t, hey?” roared Mosely, his emotion scaling to the secondary stage. “Can’t, hey?” he reiterated as he advanced on Vail with swinging fists. “Well, we _have_! You’ve had us cleaned out! You run a robber’s roost here, you dirty thief!”

Furious past further articulate words, Joshua Q. shook a hamlike fist in Thaxton’s astonished face. Vail stepped in under the flailing arm. Then he proceeded, quietly and scientifically, to knock the giant down.

After which, everything happened at once.

Chapter VI

The Police And The Duke Of Argyle

Ten minutes later they trailed downstairs from a mournful inspection of the violet room. There could be no doubt as to the truth of what Joshua Q. Mosely had told them. The smallest of the traveling bags heaped in a corner of the room had been broken open. So had the flimsy lock of the chased silver jewel box it contained.

The thief, apparently, had made brief examination of the various bags in the jumbled heap until he had come upon the only one that was locked. Then with a sharp knife or razor he had slit the russet leather along the hinge, had thrust his hand in and had drawn forth the silver box. It had been absurdly simple to force the lock of this. Probably it had yielded to the first heave of the knifeblade in the crack under the lid.

The window screens had not been disturbed, nor were the vines outside broken or disarranged. Mosely declared he had left locked the room door when he came down to dinner; and had pocketed the key. Clive Creede’s comment on this information was to go to the door of the next room, extract its key and fit it in the door of the violet room. It turned the wards with entire ease.

“Most of the doors in private houses,” said Clive, by way of explanation, “have standard uniform locks. Any one who wanted to get in here could have borrowed the key of any door along the hallway. You say you found the door wide open when you came back?”

“Yep,” said Mosely, unconsciously nursing his fast-swelling jawpoint. “That’s what made us suspicious. So we switched on the light. And there was this bag, on top of the rest, all bust open. So we--”

He refrained from repeating, for the ninth time, his entire windy recital and mutteringly followed the others down to the living room.

“You look kind of tuckered out, young man,” he said, not unkindly, to Clive as he and Creede brought up the rear of the procession.

“I am,” replied Clive. “This shock and the scene at dinner and the dog fight and your mix-up with Vail--well, they aren’t the best things for a sick man. They’ve started my head to aching again.”

“H’m! Too bad!” commented Mosely. “But not so bad as if you’d lost $12,000 worth of good joolry.... I s’pose I spoke a little too quick when I told Mr. Vail he was a crook and said he ran a robber’s roost. But he had no call to knock me down. I didn’t carry it any further; because I don’t believe in fisticuffs before ladies. But I warn you I’m going to summons you folks as witnesses in the assault-and-battery suit I bring against him. The young ruffian!”

“If you’re wise, Mr. Mosely,” suggested Clive, his usual calm manner sharpening, “you’ll bring no suit. You’ll let that part of the matter drop as suddenly as you yourself dropped. If we have to testify that he knocked you down, we’ll also testify to what you called him and that you shook your fist at him in what looked like a menace. Such a gesture constitutes what lawyers call ‘technical assault.’ No jury will convict Vail for self-defense. As for your loss--even if this were a regular hotel--you surely must know a proprietor is not responsible for valuables left in a guest’s room. I’m sorry for you. But you seem to have no redress.”

Mosely glowered blackly. Then, without answering, he turned his back on Creede and stamped into the living room.

“Telephoned the police yet?” he demanded of Vail.

“No,” said Thaxton. “Call them up yourself if you like. The main phone is out there at the back of the hall. Call up the Aura police station. I suppose we come within its jurisdiction more than Lenox’s.”

Mosely departed in search of the telephone. His wife stood in the doorway, wringing her hands.

“Oh, if we’d only left Petty on guard up there!” she wailed. “We always feel so safe when Petty is on guard! Mr. Vail, I’m certain this is an inside job. It--”

“Yes,” assented Willis Chase. “That’s what the police are certain to say, anyhow. When they can’t find out anything else, they always label it an ‘inside job’ and behave as if that explained everything.”

“What is an ‘inside job’?” asked Creede. “It sounds familiar. But--”

“An inside job is a job the police can’t find a clue to,” explained Chase. “So they leave the rest of the work to the detectives. That’s the climax. When a policeman blows out his brains and survives, they make a detective of him. Why, Thax, don’t you remember when the Conant house was robbed and the--”

“Yes,” answered Vail, grinning at the memory. “I remember. That was the time Chief Quimby’s box of safety matches got afire in his hip pocket while he was on his hands and knees looking for clues. And you tried to extinguish the blaze by kicking him. I remember he wanted to jail you for ‘kicking an officer in pursuit of his duty.’ You said his hip pocket wasn’t ‘out yet but seemed to be under control.’”

While they had been talking, Miss Gregg and Doris had come quietly into the room. Both were a trifle paler than usual, but otherwise were unruffled. A moment later Mosely returned from his telephone colloquy with the police.

“The chief says he’ll be right over,” he reported. “He asked if any other rooms had been robbed. And I felt like a fool, to have to tell him we hadn’t even looked.”

“If you had waited a minute longer, before leaving the telephone,” spoke up Miss Gregg, “you could have told him that at least one more room had been ransacked. My niece and I stopped in our suite, on the way down, just now. Her little jewel case and the chamois bag I kept my rings and things in--both of them are gone.”

“Miss Gregg!” exclaimed Vail. “Not really? Oh, I’m so sorry! So--”

A babel of other sympathetic voices drowned his stammered condolences. Out of the babel emerged Willis Chase’s query.

“Were they locked up?”

“Yes, and no,” returned Miss Gregg. “We locked them in the second drawer of the dresser and hid the key. But being only normal women and not Sherlockettes, of course we quite overlooked locking the top drawer. The top drawer has been carefully taken out and laid on the bed. And the case and the chamois bag have been painlessly extracted from the second drawer. It was so simple! I quite envy the brain of that thief. It is a lesson worth the price of the things he took--if only they had belonged to some one else....

“Thax Vail!” she broke off indignantly. “Stop looking as if you’d been slapped! You’re not going to feel badly about this. I forbid you to. Here we all forced ourselves upon you, and turned your home upside down, against your will! And if we’re the losers, it’s our own fault, not yours. We--”

She stopped her efforts at consolation, catching sight of Clive Creede, who slipped unobtrusively into the room. A minute earlier she had seen him go out and had heard his step on the stairs.

“Well,” she challenged, as she peered up shrewdly into his troubled white face. “Another county heard from? How much?”

Clive laughed, in an assumption of carelessness, and glanced apologetically at Thaxton.

“Not much,” he made shift to answer the garrulous old lady. “Just a little bunch of bills I’d left on my chiffonier and--and a watch. That’s all.”

“The Argyle watch?” cried Miss Lane, in genuine concern. “Not the Argyle watch. Oh, you poor boy!”

“What might the Argyle watch be?” acidly queried Mrs. Mosely. “It must be something priceless, since it seems to stir you people up more than our $12,000 loss. But then--of course--”

“The Argyle watch,” explained Doris, forestalling a hot rejoinder from Vail, “is a big, old-fashioned, gold, hunting-case watch that the Duke of Argyle offered as a scholarship prize once at the University of Edinburgh. Mr. Creede’s father won it, as a young man. And it was his dearest possession. I don’t wonder Mr. Creede feels so about its loss. He--”

“The Duke of Argyle?” repeated Mosely, lifted momentarily from his daze of grief by sound of so magic and familiar a name. “The one who invented the scratching posts that made folks say ‘God bless the Duke of Argyle’? I read about him in a book. Was he the same one?”

“No,” said Willis Chase, “this was the one who put up sandpaper pillars on the border for Highlanders to rub the burrs off their dialect. He was the laird of Hootmon Castle, syne aboon the sonsie Lochaber.”

Once more Mosely favored the flippant youth with a scowl of utter disgust. Then, turning to the rest, he said:

“An idea has just hit me. I warn you I’m going to mention it to the police as soon as they get here. We came down to this room before dinner, and we had to wait around here for pretty near half an hour before we were called in to eat. Mr. Vail, you sneaked out of the room after we were here. And you were gone ten minutes or more. Long enough to--”

“To rob all my guests?” supplemented Vail. “Quite so. I’m sorry to spoil such a pleasant theory. But I was in the dining room trying to quell a servile insurrection--trying to stave off a domestic strike--so that you might get a decently appointed dinner instead of having to forage in the ice box after the servants quit.”

“That’s your version, hey?” grated Mosely. “Most likely you can bribe one or two of your servants to back it up, too.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mosely,” put in Miss Gregg, as Vail choked back a retort. “I’m as sorry as Mr. Vail to spoil your perfectly beautiful theory. But our sinning host happens to be telling the truth. In fact, it is a habit of his. I know he’s telling the truth because I went out there to reënforce him just as he was losing the battle against butler and housekeeper combined, with the cook as auxiliary reserve. Of course, _I_ may be bribed, too, in my testimony, for all you know. So if you care to--”

“I never doubt a lady’s word, ma’am,” said Mosely with ponderous gallantry.

“Why not?” insisted Miss Gregg. “It’s far safer than doubting Thaxton Vail’s. To save my life, I couldn’t hit as clean a blow or as hard a blow as the one that gave your chin that lovely mauve lump on it. Thax, you’re something of a fool, but you’re something more of a man. I never saw any one knocked down before. Except on the stage. I ought to have been sickened by the brutal sight. But I confess it thrilled me. I got the same reaction from it that I always get when the full _Messiah_ Chorus bursts into the ‘Hallelujah.’ It--”

“Auntie!” cried Doris, scandalized.

“So did _you_, for that matter!” accused the old lady. “Your eyes were like a pair of overgrown stars. They--”

“Suppose,” broke in Doris, reddening painfully, “suppose the rest of us see if the thief visited us. Then we can have a full report to make when the chief comes. Let’s see--Auntie and I--the Moselys--Clive-oh, yes--Willis Chase! Is--”

“I saw him start upstairs a second ago,” said Vail. “He--”

“And, by the way,” exclaimed Joshua Q., on new inspiration, “Case didn’t come into the dining room till we had all sat down. He hurried in later than--”

“Chase is always hurrying in ‘later than,’” said Miss Gregg. “It’s his one claim to distinction. He is never on time anywhere. I’m afraid your new theory won’t hold water any more than the other did, Mr. Mosely.”

“If it comes to that,” suggested Clive Creede, “_I_ got downstairs after all the rest of you did. Just as you were starting in to dinner. I was almost as late as Chase. There’s as much reason to suspect me as to suspect him, Mr. Mosely.”

“No,” denied Joshua Q., judicially, “there don’t seem to be. I can’t agree with you. The cases might be the same, if you hadn’t lost money and a watch. It isn’t likely you robbed yourself. Especially of a watch like that Argyle one you think so much of. That watch seems to be pretty well known to the other folks here. And if it’s known to them, it must be known by sight to lots of others. After saying it was stolen you couldn’t ever let it be seen again if you’d just pretended to steal it. No, that lets you out, I guess.”

“Thanks,” said Creede. “I am glad you honor me with such perfect trust.”

He spoke crossly. His face was dead white and was creased with pain-lines. Very evidently he was in acute suffering. Doris looked at him with worried sympathy. Thaxton Vail saw the look, and he was ashamed of the sharp pang of jealousy which cut into him.

Vail knew enough of women at large and of Doris Lane in particular to realize that Clive Creede, bearing sickness and pain so bravely, was by far a more dangerous rival than Clive Creede in the glow of health. He was disgusted at himself for his own involuntary jealousy toward the man who was his lifelong friend.

He moved over to where Clive stood wearily leaning against the wall.

“Sit down, old man,” he said, drawing a big chair toward him. “You’re all in. This has been too much for you. We--”

“I beg to report,” interrupted Willis Chase, airily, coming back from his tour of inspection, “I beg to report the total loss of a watch and my roll and my extra set of studs. The watch was not given to my father by the Duke of Argyle. But it was given to my father’s only son, by Mr. Tiffany, as a prize for giving the said Mr. Tiffany a check for $275. The transaction was carried on through one of his clerks, of course, but that makes it none the less hallowed. Besides--”

“This seems to put it up pretty stiffly to the servants,” said Mosely. “The police better begin with them. By the way, I suppose you’ve made sure, Mr. Vail, that none of them could sneak away, before the chief gets here.”

“No,” answered Thaxton, annoyed. “I never thought of it. But I’m certain I can trust them. They have been with me a long time, most of them. And--”

“Young man,” exhorted Mosely, from the depths of his originality, “if you had had as much business experience as I’ve had you’d know it’s the most trusted employee who does the stealing.”

“Naturally,” assented Miss Gregg. “Why not? The trusted employees are the only ones who get a chance to handle the valuables. That’s one of the truisms nobody thinks of--just as people praise Robin Hood because he always robbed the rich and never molested the poor. Why should he have molested the poor? If they’d been worth robbing, they wouldn’t have been poor. And it’s the same with--”

The chug and rattle of a motor car at the porte-cochère checked her. A minute later two men were ushered into the room by the awe-stricken Vogel. They were Reuben Quimby, the Aura police chief, and one of his constables.

Chapter VII

Faith And Unfaith And Some Moonlight

The lanky chief did not appear at all excited. Indeed, he and his assistant went about their work with a quiet routine method that verged on boredom. They made a perfunctory tour of the robbed rooms; then they convened an impromptu court of inquiry in the living room, Quimby bidding Vogel and Mrs. Horoson to collect the entire service staff of house and grounds in the dining room and to herd them there until they should be called for, one by one.

Then after listening gravely to Vail’s account of the affair and with growing impatience to Joshua Q. Mosely’s longer and more dramatic recital, Quimby announced that the interrogation would begin. Thaxton was the first witness.

“Mr. Vail,” asked the chief, “what did _you_ lose? I don’t see your list on this inventory of stolen goods you’ve made out for me.”

Vail looked blank.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “I never thought to look. I was so bothered about the others’ losses I clean forgot--”

“Suppose you go and look now,” hinted the chief. “Be as quick as you can. We’ll delay the interrogation till you come back.”

Thaxton returned to the improvised courtroom in less than three minutes.

“Not a thing missing, so far as I can see,” he reported. “And nothing disturbed. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Chief. I seem to be the only one who escaped a visit from the thief.”

Clive Creede had been slumping low in the chair which Vail had brought him. Now, breathing hard, he got weakly to his feet and lurched through the open French window out onto the moonlit veranda.

He made his exit so unobtrusively that no one but Doris Lane chanced to note it. The girl, at sight of his haggard face and stumbling gait, followed Creede out into the moonlight. She found him leaning against one of the veranda pillars, drawing in great breaths of the cool night air.

“Are you worse?” she asked in quick anxiety. “Why don’t you go to bed? You’re not fit to be up.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” he declared, pluckily, as he straightened from his crumpled posture. “Don’t worry about me. Only--the room was so close and so crowded and so noisy--and I felt dizzy--and I had to come out here for a lungful of fresh air. I’ll go back presently.”

She hesitated, as though about to return to the others. But the sick man looked so forlorn and weak she disliked to leave him alone. Yet, knowing how sensitive he was in all things regarding his health, she masked her intent under pretense of lingering for a chat.

“I wonder if it was really an ‘inside job,’” she hazarded. “If it was, of course it must have been one of the servants. And I hate to believe that. We know every one else concerned, and we know we are all honest. That is, we know every one but the Moselys. And they couldn’t very well have done it, could they?”

“They couldn’t have done it at all,” he said, emphatically. “I know. Because you said they were the first people in the living room, waiting for dinner. I came down nearly half an hour later. I had overslept. When I changed to dinner clothes, I left my watch and my cash on my chiffonier. They were stolen. The Moselys had been downstairs a long time. And they didn’t go up again till they went after that dog fight. And then they weren’t gone two minutes before they came rushing back to tell us they’d been robbed. Not long enough for them to ransack a single unfamiliar room, to say nothing of my room and Chase’s and yours. No, we must leave the Moselys out of it.”

“Then it must be one of the servants, of course,” decided Doris.

“I wish I dared hope so,” muttered Clive, almost too low for her to catch the words.

“What do you mean?” she asked in surprise.

“I mean,” he said, wretchedly, “I mean it would be better to find out that one of them had robbed us than if-- Oh, I don’t mean anything at all!” he ended, in sulky anticlimax.

She stared at him with wonder.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “We’ve just proved it couldn’t be any one but the servants, unless, of course, it was done by some professional thief who got in. And that doesn’t seem likely.”

“No,” he said, shortly. “It doesn’t. It was done from the inside. That’s proved.... Let’s talk about something else, shan’t we?”

But Doris’s curiosity was piqued by his eagerness to sheer away from the theme.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

“Tell you what?” he countered, sullenly.

“Tell me whom you suspect,” returned Doris. “You suspect some one. I know you do. Who is it?”

“I didn’t say I suspected any one,” he made troubled answer. “I’d rather not talk about it at all, if you don’t mind.”

“But I _do_ mind,” she protested. “Why, Clive, all of us have been living here in this corner of the Berkshires every summer since we were born! We’ve all known one another all our lives. It’s--it’s a terrible thing to feel that one of us may be a thief. Won’t you tell me whom you suspect?”

Clive looked glumly down into her appealingly upraised face for a moment. Then he squared his shoulders and spoke.

“You’ve asked for it,” said he, speaking between his shut teeth and with growing reluctance. “I’d give ten years’ income not to tell you--and I’d give ten years of my life not to believe it’s he.”

“Who?”

He hesitated. Then, a tinge of evasion in his unhappy voice, he replied:

“Every one of us was robbed.... Except one.”

She frowned, perplexed.

“What’s that got to do with it?” she asked. “Thax was the only one of us who wasn’t robbed. That doesn’t answer my question at all.”

He said nothing.

“Clive Creede!” she burst forth, incredulously. “Do you mean to say you are--are--_imbecile_ enough to believe such a thing of Thax? Why, I-- _Clive!_”

There was a world of amazed contempt in her young voice. The man winced. Yet he held his ground doggedly.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I know, as well as you do, that Thax didn’t do it through dishonesty or because he needed the money. He has more cash now than he can spend. But--”

“Then why--”

“Either he did it as a mammoth practical joke or else--”

“Thax is not a practical joker,” she interpolated. “No one but a fool plays practical jokes.”

“Or else,” he resumed, “he did it to get rid of his unwelcome guests. That is the most likely solution.”

“The most likely solution,” she said hotly, “the _only_ sane solution is that he didn’t do it at all. It’s absurd to think he did. He--”

“He is the only one of us who wasn’t robbed,” persisted Clive. “He is the only one of us familiar enough with every room and every piece of furniture to have gone through the house so quickly and so thoroughly, taking only the most valuable things from each of them. Nobody else would have had time to or a chance to. He is the only one of us who could have been seen going from room to room without being suspected. I thought of all that. But I wouldn’t believe it till he said himself just now that he hadn’t been robbed. That proved it to me. That’s why I came out here. It turned me sick to think--”

“Clive,” said the girl, quietly, “either the war or else those exploding chemicals in your Rackrent Farm laboratory seems to have had a distressing effect on your mentality. I’ve known you ever since I was born. In the old days you could never have made yourself believe such a thing of Thax Vail. You know you couldn’t. Oh, if--”

Her sweet voice trembled. She turned away, staring blindly out into the moonlight.

“I’m sorry,” said Clive, briefly.

He hesitated, looking in distress at her averted head. Then with a catch of the breath he turned and strode into the living room.

Doris took a step toward the French window to follow him. But there were tears in her eyes, and she felt strangely shaken and unhappy from her talk with Creede. She did not wish the others to see her until she should have had time to recover her self-control. Wherefore she remained where she was.

She was dully astonished that Clive’s disbelief in Vail should have moved her so profoundly. She had not realized, until she heard him attacked, all that Thaxton was coming to mean to her. A glimpse of this new wonder-feeling had been vouchsafed her when she saw Vail knock down a man so much larger and bulkier than himself. The sight had thrilled her unaccountably. But it had been as nothing to the reaction at hearing his honesty doubted.

Long she stood there, forcing herself to look in the face this astounding situation wherein her heart had so imperceptibly floundered. At last, turning from her blind survey of the moon-flooded lawn, she moved toward the living room.

At her first step she paused. Some one was rounding the house from the front, treading heavily on the rose-bordered gravel path that skirted the veranda. Doris waited for the newcomer to draw nearer.

On came the heavy, fast-moving steps. And now they were mounting the veranda’s side stair. In the moonlight, the face and body of a man were clearly revealed.

Chapter VIII

The Inquisition

At first glance the man was Clive Creede. And Doris wondered how he chanced to have left the house and to have approached the veranda in such a roundabout way.

Then, as he stood before her, she saw he was not in dinner clothes, but in a dark lounge suit. And as he lifted his soft hat at sight of her, she saw his forehead was bald and that he wore spectacles. Also that there was a sagging stoop to his shoulders and the hint of a limp in his walk.

Clive’s twin brother was the last man she cared to meet in her present tumultuous frame of mind. At best she had never been able to bring herself to like him. Yet he had come too close now to be avoided without rudeness.

As he recognized her, Osmun Creede took an impulsively eager step forward.

“Why, Doris!” he exclaimed joyously. “This is better luck than I looked for. What on earth are you doing at Vailholme? And why are you out here all alone? Doesn’t the same moon that interests you interest Clive or Vail?”

“Oh, you’ve come to see Clive?” she asked, trying to speak civilly and not to let herself be annoyed by the man’s awkward attempts at banter.

“Yes,” said Osmun. “He’s stopping with Vail till his house gets disinfected or loses the reek of some chemicals that made him sick. Why he should choose to come here instead of to his own brother’s home,” he added bitterly, “is a mystery to me. Probably he has his own reasons. Anyhow, I came over to see if he is better and if there’s anything I can do for him. I didn’t ring because I saw through the windows that there’s a party of some kind going on. I saw a bunch of people in the living room. And I’m in tramping clothes. I came around to the side door, on the chance of finding a servant I could send upstairs to Clive to find how he is.”

“Clive was out here five minutes ago,” she replied. “He went back to the interrogation. I’ll--”

“Interrogation?” repeated Osmun, puzzled. “Is it a game? Or--?”

Briefly she outlined to the dumbfounded man the story of the evening’s events. He listened, open-mouthed, his face, in the moonlight, blank with crass incredulity. The instant she paused he began to hurl questions at her. Impatiently she answered them. But in their mid-flow she turned away and walked to the long window.

“I’m afraid I must go in,” she said, stiffly, his avid curiosity and his evident relish of the affair jarring her unaccountably. “They may want to interrogate me, too. The chief was going to examine us all, I believe. You’ll excuse me?”

“I’ll do better than that,” he assured her. “I’ll come along. I wouldn’t miss this thing for a million.”

Before she could deter him he had stepped past her and had flung wide the French window. Standing aside, he motioned her to pass through. She hesitated. Chief Quimby, catching sight of her on the threshold, beckoned her in.

“We wondered where you were, Miss Lane,” said he. “We’ve been waiting for you. Every one else has been questioned. Come in, please.”

Reluctantly she entered. Osmun Creede pressed in, at her heels, closing the window behind him. The guests were seated in various parts of the living room, one and all looking thoroughly uncomfortable. At a table sat the chief. Beside him, holding an open note book, sat the constable.

Through the doorway Doris could see in the hall a flustered group of servants, babbling in excited whispers. One woman among them was repeating snifflingly at intervals that she was a respectable working girl and that never before in her life had any one asked her such a passel of turrible questions and she was going to pack up and leave right away and she’d have the law on them that had asked was she a thief!

Quimby seemed to note the presence of this offstage chorus at the same time as did Doris. For he turned to the housekeeper who stood primly in a far corner:

“You can send them back to the kitchen quarters, Mrs. Horoson,” he said. “I’m through with them for the present. Only see none of them leave the house. Let them understand that any one who tries to sneak out will be followed and arrested. I shall take it as an indication of guilt. That is all, Mrs. Horoson. We shan’t need you or Vogel any more either. Or if we do I’ll ring for you.”

“Where is Clive?” Osmun asked Willis Chase, who had greeted the unpopular twin’s advent with the briefest of nods.

“Gone up to bed,” answered Chase. “Went up as soon as the chief had finished asking him a handful of questions. Said he felt rotten. Looked it, too. Chief excused him. He has the two East rooms, if you want to go up and see him.”

“I shall, presently,” said Osmun. “This is too interesting to leave just yet.”

He listened to the chief’s few queries of Doris as to the discovery that her jewel box had been stolen. Doris replied clearly and to the point, her testimony confirming in all details the story her aunt had just told.

The last witness being examined, the lanky chief leaned back in his chair beating a tattoo on his teeth with the pencil he carried. Then he glanced at his notes and again at the inventory on the table before him.

“I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that all you people have told me the truth. And I am inclined to believe the servants have done the same. Taking into consideration their flurry and scare, they told remarkably straight stories, and it seems clear that none of them were absent from their duties in the kitchen or in the dining room long enough to have run upstairs and robbed so many rooms and then to have gotten back unnoticed. It seems none of them had even gone up so early to arrange the bedrooms for the night. And there is positively no sign, outdoors or in, that any professional thief broke into the house. Of course, a closer search of the rooms and a search of the servants and of their quarters--and of yourselves, if you will permit--may throw new light on the case. But--”

He paused. On these summer people and on others of their clan depended ninety per cent of Aura’s livelihood and importance. Quimby had tried, therefore, to handle this delicate matter in such a way as to avoid offense. And, thus far, he had not a ghost of a clue to go on.

“Search away--as far as I’m concerned,” spoke up Willis Chase, in the short pause which followed. “Three times, on the Canadian border, I’ve had my car searched for bootleg booze. And every time I hit the New York Customs crowd, on my way back from Europe, they search my soiled collars and trunkbottoms with the most loving care. So this’ll be no novelty. Search.”

“I have a horrible feeling that all the stolen things are going to be found on _me_,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “They would be, in a nightmare, you know. And if this isn’t a nightmare I don’t know what nightmare is. But search if you like. The sooner it’s over the sooner we’ll wake up.”

“I speak for the good wife as well as for myself,” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely, “when I say we shall do all in our power to uphold the law. We are willing to be searched.”

He gazed about him with the rarefied air of one who has just consented to part with life in the holy cause of duty.

“_I_ am not going to be searched.”

It was Thaxton Vail who said it. Every one turned with something akin to a jump and stared marvelingly at him.

“I am not going to be searched,” he repeated, coming forward into the strong glare of lamplight beside the table where sat the two officials. “And I am not going to permit my guests to be searched. When I say ‘my guests,’ I do not refer to Mr. and Mrs. Mosely, but to the friends whom I have known all my life. They are under my roof. They have suffered by being under my roof. Neither they nor myself shall be humiliated any further. I’ve listened patiently to this comic opera interrogation, and I have answered all questions put to me in the course of it. But I’m not going to submit to the tom-foolery of a search. Please understand that clearly, Chief.”

He sat down again. There was a confused rustle throughout the room. Joshua Q. Mosely glared at him with fearsome suspicion. Quimby cleared his throat, frowning. But before either could speak Osmun Creede had come forward out of the shadows to the area of light by the table.

“Chief,” he said, his rasping voice cutting the room’s looser sounds like a rusty file, “I’m the only person here who can’t possibly be connected with the thefts. I didn’t get here till five minutes ago, and I can prove by a dozen people that I was dining at the Country Club at the time the things were stolen. So I can speak disinterestedly.”

“What’s the sense of your speaking at all?” grumbled Chase. “It’s no business of yours.”

Unheeding, Osmun proceeded:

“Chief, you have established that some one in this house is a thief. That thief, presumably, had to do his work mighty fast and presumably he had no time to hide all his loot in a place safe enough to elude a police hunt. He had only a minute or two to do it in. Therefore, the chances are that the bulkier or less easily hidden bits of plunder are still concealed on him. Perhaps all of it. Very good. It would be that man’s natural impulse to resist search. Practically every one else here has volunteered to submit to search. One man only has refused. By an odd coincidence, that happens also to be the one man who was not robbed. Figure it out for yourself. It--”

“Oz Creede!” Miss Gregg declaimed, as the rest still sat dazed into momentary stillness at the unbelievable attack. “If you had the remotest idea how utterly vile and worthless you are, you’d bite yourself and die of hydrophobia.... I just thought I’d mention it,” she added, apologetically, to Doris.

But Doris did not hear. The girl’s glowing eyes were on Thaxton Vail, who had sprung to his feet and was advancing on his accuser.

“Oz,” said Vail, his voice muffled and not quite firm, “I promised your brother I’d forget I had any grievance against you. May I trouble you to leave here before I forget that promise?-- As quickly as you can, please.”

“Hold on there!” blustered Joshua Q., billowing forward. “Hold on there! There seems to me to be a lot in what this young feller says. He talks sense, Mr. Vail. And I believe he’s right. This is no time to go trying to carry things highhanded. Chief, I demand--”

He broke off short in the rolling utterances, his mouth ajar, his little eyes bulging. Osmun Creede and Vail stood confronting each other. With a gesture as swift as the strike of a rattlesnake Osmun thrust out his right hand toward the left waistcoat pocket of Vail’s dinner clothes.

Now he withdrew the questing hand and was holding it open for all to gaze on. In its palm glowed dully a huge old hunting-case watch.

“I caught sight of a bulge in that pocket,” he rasped. “So I took a chance at a search on my own account. Now I’ll go. Not because you’ve ordered me out, Vail, but because I don’t care to stay under the same roof with a man who robs his guests. Good-by.”

His words went unheard in the sudden babble of voices and the pressing forward of the rest. Every one was talking at once. The chief peered, hypnotized, at the watch Osmun had laid on the table in front of him. Vail, after a moment of stark blankness, lurched furiously at Creede, mouthing something which nobody could hear in the uproar.

The constable threw himself between Vail and the sardonically smiling man. Before Thaxton could break free or recover his self-control Creede had left the room. But, in the hallway outside, during the moment’s hush which followed the clamor, all could hear his strident voice as he shouted up the stairs:

“Clive! Come down here! Come down in a rush! The thief’s found!”

Again Vail took a furious step in pursuit, but again the constable stepped officiously in front of him. And a second later the front door slammed.

“Stay where you are, everybody!” commanded the chief, a new sternness in his voice, as Willis Chase succeeded in working his way around the constable and Vail and made for the hall. “Where are you going, Mr. Chase?”

“I’m going to catch that swine!” yelled Willis, wrathfully, over his shoulder, pausing in the living room doorway as he cleared the last obstacle and sprang toward the hall. “I’m going to find him and bring him back by the scruff of the neck. And--”

The constable took a belated step to stop him. Chase turned and bolted. But as he did so, he collided violently with Clive Creede. Clive had come downstairs at his brother’s shouted summons, just in time to receive Chase’s catapult rush.

Under the impact the sick man staggered and would have fallen had not Chase caught him. At the same time Thaxton Vail called sharply:

“Willis! Come back here! Don’t make a fool of yourself! Come back. I don’t need any one to fight my battles for me. I can attend to this myself.”

Apologizing to the breathless Clive for the unintended collision and helping to steady the shaken man on his feet, Chase abandoned his plan to overtake and drag Osmun back by force. Sullenly he returned to the living room, Clive at his side. To the invalid’s puzzled questions he returned no answer.

As they came in, Quimby was on his feet. His deferential manner was gone. The glint of the man hunt shimmered beneath his shaggy gray brows.

“Sit down, everybody!” he commanded. “Mr. Vail, I said, _sit down_! This case has taken a different turn. Let nobody leave the room. Whitcomb,” to the constable, “stand at the door. Now then, we’ll tackle all this from another angle. The time for kid glove questioning is past.”

He eyed them sternly, his gaze focusing last on Thaxton Vail. Then, as silence was restored, he picked up the watch and held it toward the blinkingly wondering Clive.

Chapter IX

A Lie Or Two

“Mr. Creede,” said he, “look carefully at this watch. Do you recognize it?”

“Of course I do,” replied Clive. “It’s mine. How did--?”

“This watch, Mr. Creede,” said the chief, slowly, “has just been turned over to me by your brother.”

“My brother?” asked Clive, surprised.

As he spoke his eyes searched the room, peering into the farther shadows in quest of Osmun.

“He has gone,” said the chief, reading the glance. “But before he went he pulled this watch out of the vest pocket of--Mr. Thaxton Vail. You admit it is yours. The watch that was stolen from your room this evening. Therefore--”

“Clive!” broke in Vail. “You know me well enough to--”

“Mr. Vail,” interrupted the chief, “it is my duty to warn you that anything you say may be used against you. Now, then, Mr. Creede: You have identified this watch as the one stolen from you. It was taken from Mr. Vail’s pocket in the presence of all of us. You can swear to the identification?”

“Hold on, please!” said Clive. “You’re barking industriously, Chief. But you’re barking up the wrong tree. That isn’t the watch I lost.”

“You said it was!” accused the chief. “You said--”

“I said nothing of the sort,” denied Clive. “You asked me if I recognized the watch. And I said I did and that it was mine. I didn’t say it was the one that was stolen to-night. And it isn’t.”

The house guests--to whom the Argyle watch was a familiar object--gasped. Thaxton Vail made as though to speak in quick disclaimer. But Clive’s tired voice droned on as he met Quimby’s suspicious eyes fairly and calmly.

“This watch is mine. It belonged to my father. It was one he had made the year before he died, with the Argyle watch as a model. And a very poor bit of work it was. For it has scarcely a look of the original. Last week at my Rackrent Farm house Mr. Vail dropped his repeater-watch and broke its mainspring. He sent it to New York to be mended. And I lent him this second watch of mine to carry till his own comes back. That’s what I meant just now when I said I recognized the watch and that it is mine.”

“Clive!” sputtered Vail. “You’re--”

“If my brother snatched this watch out of Mr. Vail’s pocket,” finished Clive, heedless of the interruption and with his eyes still holding the chief’s, “then he did a mighty impertinent thing and one for which I apologize, in his name, to my host. That’s all, Chief. The Argyle watch is still missing.”

The stupidly coined lie deceived no one but the police, though Doris Lane felt a throb of admiration for the man who thus sought to shield his friend. The lie helped to blot from her memory Clive’s earlier suspicion of Vail. She gave eager credit to the way wherein he defended the chum in whose guilt he really believed.

Old Miss Gregg reached out a wrinkled hand and patted Creede on the knee much as she might have patted the head of Macduff, the collie.

“You’re a good boy, Clive,” she whispered. “You always were. And, oh, it’s so infinitely better to _do_ good than just to _be_ good! If--”

Thaxton Vail’s fierce disclaimer drowned out her murmured words of praise.

“Chief,” declared Vail, “my friend is saying all this to protect me. But I don’t need any protection. That is the Argyle watch. Though how it happened to be in my pocket is more than I can guess. That’s the stolen watch. I ought to know. I’ve seen it a thousand times ever since I was a child. And I never broke a repeater-watch at Mr. Creede’s house. I never owned a repeater. And I never borrowed any watch from him. Also, to the best of my belief, his father never had a watch made to order. He always carried the Argyle watch, and I never heard of his having any other.”

“Chief,” interposed Clive, very quietly, as Vail paused for breath, “I have just told you the true story--the story I shall stick to, if necessary, on the witness stand. Please remember that. If I say that watch is not the stolen one any jury in the world will take my word as to my knowledge of my own property. And any accusation against Mr. Vail will appear very ridiculous. It will not add to your reputation. For your own sake I advise you to accept my statement at its face value.”

“Drop that idiocy, Clive!” exhorted Vail angrily. “I tell you I don’t need any protection. And if I did I wouldn’t take it in the form of a lie. You mean well. And I’m grateful to you. But--”

“That’s my story, Chief,” calmly repeated Creede.

Quimby was looking from one to the other of the two men in worried uncertainty. Both were rich and influential members of the Aura community. Both were lifelong dwellers in the region. The word of either, presumably, would carry heavy weight in court. Yet each flatly contradicted the other. The chief’s brain began to buzz. Holding up the watch and facing the onlookers he asked:

“Can any of you identify this watch?”

No one spoke. Vail glanced from face to face. Every visage was either unwontedly pale or else unwontedly red. But nobody spoke. Clive Creede’s eyes followed Vail’s to the countenances of the spectators. In his sunken gaze was a world of appeal.

“Miss Gregg!” cried Thaxton at random. “You knew Clive’s father for years. You’ve seen the Argyle watch ever so often. I call on you to identify it.”

“My dear Thax,” cooed the old lady, placidly, “nothing on earth would give me greater joy than to identify it--except to identify the scoundrel who stole it.”

“There!” exclaimed Vail, turning in grim triumph to the chief.

“But,” prattled on the serene old lady, “I’m sorry to say I can’t identify it. Because I don’t see it. I’m perfectly familiar with the Argyle watch. But the Argyle watch is most decidedly _not_ the turnip-like timepiece our friend Quimby is dangling so seductively before me.”

Thaxton groaned aloud and sank into his chair, his mind awhirl. The chief smiled.

“That seems to settle it,” he said, briskly. “Mr. Vail, you must be mistaken. This cannot be the Argyle watch. Two more-than-reputable witnesses have just testified most definitely to that fact.”

“I don’t know what conspiracy you people are in to save me,” mumbled Vail, glowering from the haggard Clive to the smugly smiling old lady. “But you wouldn’t do it if you didn’t think I am guilty. And that hurts like raw vitriol. I--”

“Don’t be absurd!” chided Miss Gregg. “Don’t lose all the little intelligence the Lord saw fit to sprinkle into that fatuous brain of yours. I’ve known you all your life. I know all about you. You’d never receive a Nobel prize for anything except cleanness and squareness and sportsmanship and kindness. But you’re no thief. And every one knows it. So stop trying to be pathetic.”

“But--”

“Besides,” she continued, in the same reproving tone, “nobody but a kleptomaniac ever steals without a practical motive. What motive have you? Why--!”

“Motive?” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely. “Motive, hey? Well, I can’t speak for you people’s losses, but Mrs. M.’s stolen joolry was worth $12,000, at a low appraisal. That seems to be motive enough for a poor dub of a country hotelkeeper to--”

“My good, if loud-mouthed, man,” replied Miss Gregg, “Mr. Vail’s annual income is something in the neighborhood of $200,000, to my certain knowledge. If he wanted such jewelry as was stolen to-night, he could have bought and paid for a three-ton truckload of it. He could even have paid present-day prices for enough gasoline to run the three-ton truck. What object would he have had in sneaking into our rooms and purloining little handfuls of gew-gaws? That is one argument which may appeal even to your mighty intellect. He--”

“But,” gurgled Joshua Q. “But--but hold on, ma’am! Is this a funny joke you’re springing? What would a man with a $200,000 income be doing, running a backwoods tavern like this? Tell me that. There’s a catch in this. Are the lot of you in the plot to--?”

“Miss Gregg is right, sir,” said the chief, who, like the rest of the community, stood in chronic fear of the eccentrically powerful old dame. “And there’s no need to use ugly words like ‘plot,’ when you’re speaking to a lady like her. Mr. Vail’s income is estimated at not less than $200,000, just as she’s told you. As for his running a tavern or a hotel, he doesn’t. This is his estate, inherited from the late Mr. Osmun Vail. I read in the paper, yesterday, that a clause of the will of Mr. Osmun Vail makes him keep a part of the house open, if necessary, as an inn. Whether or not that’s true, or just a newspaper yarn, I don’t know. But I do know that Mr. Vail could have no financial reason for stealing jewelry or small rolls of bills or cheap watches.”

He spoke with the pride of locality, in impressing an outlander with a neighbor’s importance. Thaxton Vail, thoroughly uncomfortable, had tried in vain, once or twice, to stem the tide of the chief’s eloquence and that of the old lady. Now he sat, silent, eyes down, face red.

Joshua Q. Mosely arose and came closer, staring at the embarrassed youth as if at some new-discovered specimen. His wife fluttered and wiggled, eyeing Vail as she might have eyed a stage hero.

“Well, I’m sure,” she said, mincingly, “that puts a new turn on everything. Quite a romantic--”

“Luella,” decreed her husband, breathing hard through his nose, “I guess we’ve made fools of ourselves, horning in here, to-day. Just the same,” he went on, scourged by memory of his loss, “that don’t clear up who stole our joolry. Nor yet it don’t give our joolry back to us. And those two things are more important just now than whether Mr. Vail is a multimillionaire or not.”

“Quite so,” agreed the chief. “We don’t seem to be getting much further in the case. Since Mr. Vail objects to being searched and objects to his guests being searched--well, I have no warrant to search them. But I take it there’s no objection to my searching the house, once more--especially the servants’ quarters and all that?”

“None at all,” said Vail. “Ring for Horoson. She’ll show you around.”

“I guess I and Mrs. M. will turn in,” said Mosely, “if we’re not needed any longer. We’re pretty tired, the both of us. Came all the way through from Manchester since sunrise, you know. And we’ve got to be off first thing in the morning. Chief, I’ll stop in at the police station on my way to-morrow and leave our _ad_dress and post a reward. G’night, all.”

He and his wife departed to the upper regions, gabbling together in low, excited tones as they went. The housekeeper appeared, in answer to Vail’s ring. The chief and the constable strode off in her indignant wake to make their tour of inspection.

“I wish,” said Willis Chase, vindictively, “I wish those Mosely persons and that road-company police chief could be made to take turns occupying the magenta room. That’s the worst I can wish any one. I--”

“Clive, old chap!” exclaimed Vail, wheeling on Creede as soon as the policemen’s footsteps died away. “Why in blazes did you tell such a thundering lie? And, as for you, Miss Gregg--!”

“Young man,” interrupted the spinster, with great severity, “I knew you when you were in funny kilt skirts and when you wore your hair roached on top and in silly little ringlets at the back, and when you couldn’t spell ‘cat.’ If you think I’m going to tolerate a scolding from you or going to let you call me to account for anything at all you’re greatly mistaken.”

“But--”

“Besides,” she went on, relaxing, “suppose I did tell a lie? For heaven’s sake, what is a lie? That weasel of a Reuben Quimby had no more right to the contents of my brain than to the contents of my safe. A person who is not ashamed to lock a door with a key need not be ashamed to lock his mind with a lie.”

“Aunt Hester!” cried Doris, quite horrified.

“Not that I excuse foolish and unnecessary lies, my dear,” explained her aunt. “They are ill-bred, and they spoil one’s technique for the few really needful lies.”

Then, feeling she had averted for the moment Vail’s angry condemnation of her falsehood, she shifted the subject once more.

“Clive!” she ordained. “Go to bed. You look like the hero of a Russian problem novel. One of those ghastly faced introspectives with influenza names, who needn’t bother to spend money in getting their hair cut; because they are going to commit suicide in another chapter or so anyhow. You look positively dead. This has been too much for you. Go to bed, my dear boy. And thank you for restoring my faith in boykind a few minutes ago by lying so truthfully.”

Clive got to his feet, wavering, his face set in a mask of illness. He turned to Thaxton Vail and held out his hand. To Doris there seemed in the action an assurance of loyalty. To Vail the proffer savored of the dramatic--as if, believing his friend guilty, Creede was none the less willing to shake his hand.

“Clive,” said Vail, coldly, ignoring the gesture, “if you think I’m a thief I don’t want to shake hands with you. If you don’t think I’m a thief there’s no need in shaking hands in that melodrama fashion. Good night. Need any help to get upstairs?”

“No, thanks,” returned Creede, wincing at the rebuff. “I--”

He finished the sentence by toppling over in a dead faint at his host’s feet.

Instantly Vail and Chase were working over him, loosening his collar and belt, and lifting his arms on high so that the blood might flow back into the heart. Miss Gregg dived into the recesses of the black bead handbag she always carried on her wrist. From it she exhumed an ounce vial of smelling salts.

“Here!” she said. “Let me put this under his nostrils. It’s as strong as the Moral Law and almost as rank. The poor boy! He-- Drat this cork! It’s jammed in. Got a corkscrew?”

Thaxton paused long enough in his work of resuscitation to take from his hip pocket the big German army knife which Clive had brought him from overseas.

“Here!” he said, opening the corkscrew and handing the knife to her.

“What a barbarous contraption!” commented Miss Gregg, as she strove to extract the cork from her smelling-bottle. “How do you happen to be carrying it in your dinner clothes?”

“I stuck it into my pocket, along with my cash, when I changed, I suppose,” said Vail, as he worked. “I was in a rush, and I--”

“That’s a murderous-looking thing on the back of it,” she went on, as she finished drawing the cork and laid the knife on the table. “It looks like the business-half of a medieval poniard.”

“That’s a punch, of some sort,” he answered absently. “Got the smelling salts ready yet?”

“He’s coming around!” announced Chase, as Miss Gregg knelt beside the unconscious man to apply the bottle to his pinched nostrils. “See, his eyes are opening.”

Clive Creede blinked, shivered, then stared foolishly about. At sight of the faces bending above him he frowned and essayed weakly to sit up.

“I--surely I wasn’t such a baby as to keel over, was--was I?” he panted, thickly.

“Don’t try to talk!” begged Doris. “You’re all right now. It’s been too much for you. Let Thax and Willis help you up to bed. Auntie, don’t you think we ought to telephone for Dr. Lawton?”

“No,” begged Clive, his voice somewhat less wobbly. “Please don’t. A good night’s rest will set me up. I’m ashamed to have--”

“Don’t waste breath in talking, old man!” put in Vail. “I’m a rotten host, to have let you have all this strain when you were sick. Don’t go struggling to get up. Lie still. So!”

Deftly he passed his arms under the prostrate man’s knees and shoulders. Then, with a bracing of his muscles, he lifted Clive from the floor.

“Go ahead, and open the door of his bedroom,” he bade Chase. “I’ll carry him up.”

“No!” protested Clive, struggling. “I--”

“Quiet, please,” said Vail. “It’ll be easy to carry you, but not if you squirm. Gangway!”

Chapter X

A Cry In The Night

Doris Lane followed him with her admiring gaze, noting how lightly he bore the invalid and with what tenderness he overrode Creede’s petulant remonstrances.

“Yes,” said Miss Gregg, as though answering a question voiced by her niece. “Yes, he is splendidly strong. And he’s gentle, too. A splendid combination--for a husband. I mean, for one’s own husband. It is thrown away, in another woman’s.”

“I don’t understand you at all,” rebuffed Doris.

“No? Well, who am I, to scold you for denying it, just after my longwinded lecture on the virtues of lying?”

“Auntie,” said the girl, speaking in feverish haste in her eagerness to shift the subject, “have you any idea at all who committed the robberies? Have you?”

“Yes,” returned the old lady, with no hesitation at all. “I know perfectly well who did it.”

“You do!”

“I haven’t an atom of doubt. It was Osmun Creede.”

“Why, Auntie, it couldn’t have been! It _couldn’t_!”

“I know that. I know it as well as you. Just the same, I believe he did.”

“But he wasn’t even here!” urged the girl. “You heard what he said about having dined at the Country Club, and that a dozen people there could prove it.”

“Yes,” assented Miss Gregg. “I heard him.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“Yes. I believe him implicitly. For nobody would want to testify in Osmun Creede’s behalf who didn’t have to. He knows that as well as we do. So if he says a dozen people can prove he was there, he’s telling the truth. He’d like nothing better than to bother those people into admitting they saw him there. Especially if they could send him to jail by denying it. Oh, he was there, fast enough, at the Country Club while the rooms here were being looted. I believe that.”

“Then how could he have done the robbing?” insisted the girl, sore perplexed.

“I don’t know,” admitted her aunt. “In fact, I suppose he couldn’t. But I’m equally certain he did.”

“But what makes you think so?”

“What makes me _know_ so?” amended Miss Gregg. “You’re a woman. And yet you ask that! Are you too young to have the womanly vice of intuition--the freak faculty that tells you a thing is true, even when you know it can’t be? Osmun Creede stole our jewelry. I know it, for a number of reasons. The first and greatest reason is because I don’t like Osmun Creede. The second and next greatest reason is that Osmun Creede doesn’t like _me_. A third reason is that there’s positively nothing too contemptible for Osmun Creede to do. He cumbers the earth! I do wish some one would put him out of our way. Take my word, he stole--”

“Isn’t that rather ridiculous?” gravely asked Doris, from the lofty wisdom of twenty-two years.

“Of course it is. Most real things are. Is it half as ridiculous as for Thaxton Vail to have the stolen Argyle watch in his pocket when it couldn’t possibly be there? Is it?”

“I--I can’t understand that, myself,” confessed Doris. “But--”

“But you know it’s somehow all right? Because you trust Thax. Precisely. Well, I can’t understand how Oz Creede could have committed the robberies when he wasn’t here. But I know he did. Because I distrust him. If it comes down to logic, mine is as good as yours.”

“But,” urged Doris, giving up the unequal struggle, “why should he do such a thing? He is well off. He doesn’t need the things that were stolen. That was your argument to prove Thax didn’t steal them. Besides, with all the horrid things about him, nobody’s ever had reason to doubt that Osmun is as honest as the day.”

“Honest as the _day_!” scoffed Miss Gregg. “You’re like every one else. You get your similes from books written by people who don’t know any more than you do. ‘Honest as the day?’ Do you know that only four days, out of three hundred and sixty-five, are honest? On the four solstices the time of day agrees absolutely with the sun. And on not one other day of them all. Then a day promises to be lovely and fair, and it lures one out into it in clothes that will run and with no umbrella. Up comes a rain, as soon as one is far enough from home to get nicely caught in it. ‘Honest as the day!’ The average day is an unmitigated swindler! Why--”

The return of Vail and Chase from their task of getting Clive to bed interrupted the homily.

“He seems all right now,” reported Willis. “He’s terribly broken up, though, at having fainted. And he’s as ashamed as if he’d been caught stealing pennies from a blind beggar.”

“He needn’t be,” snapped Miss Gregg. “If I’d had to be Oz Creede’s twin brother as long a time as Clive has, I’d be too inured to feel shame for anything short of burning an orphanage. Just the same, he’s a dear boy, Clive is. I like the way he came to the front, this evening, when--”

“We’ve been clear through the house, from cellar to garret,” announced the chief, from the doorway. “And we’ve been all around it from the outside with flashlights. Not a clue.”

“Behold an honest cop!” approved Chase. “One who’ll admit he hasn’t a dozen mysterious clues up his sleeve! It’s a record!”

“I’m going back to the station now,” resumed Quimby, ignoring him, “to write my report. There’s nothing more I can do to-night. I’ll be around, of course, the first thing in the morning. I’ve thrown the fear of the Lord into the whole staff of servants. They won’t dare budge till I get back. No danger of one of them confusing things by leaving on the sly.”

Vail followed the two officers to the front door and watched them climb into their rattling car and make off down the drive. As they disappeared, he wished he had asked the chief to leave his man on guard outside the house for the night.

The mystery of the thefts and the evening’s later complications had gotten on Vail’s nerves. If the supposedly secure rooms could be plundered by a mysterious robber when a score of people were awake, in and around the building, could not the same robber return to complete his work when all the house should be sleeping and unguarded?

Thaxton’s worries found themselves centering about Doris Lane. If the intruder should alarm her at dead of night--!

“Mac,” he said under his breath to the collie standing at his side on the veranda. “You’re going to do real guard duty to-night. I’m going to post you at the foot of the stairs, and there I want you to stay. No comfy snoring on the front door mat this time. You’ll lie at the foot of the stairs where you can catch every sound and where you can block any one who may try to go up or down. Understand that, old boy?”

Macduff did not understand. All he knew was that Vail was talking to him and that some sort of response was in order. Wherefore the collie wagged his plumed tail very emphatically indeed and thrust his cold nose affectionately into Thaxton’s cupped hand.

Vail turned back into the house, Macduff at his heels. He locked the front door, preparatory to making a personal inspection of every ground floor door and window. As he entered the front hall he encountered Doris Lane.

The girl had left her aunt in the living room, listening with scant patience to a ramblingly told theory of Chase’s as to how best the stolen goods might be traced. Doris had slipped away to bed, leaving them there. She was very tired a