Part 14

"They settled in the country, where Aaron was born, and a few years after, for reasons unknown, Menning deserted her. Then, for the first time, she seems to have remembered Jakey, now growing to an age when he might begin to make himself useful about the farm. She set about claiming him. The circus people, from what I could hear, made some opposition. Jakey was being trained as an acrobat and showed some promise, though he was a difficult child to manage. Moreover, they had kept him all this time and expected some return. Times, however, were slack, they probably foresaw trouble with the school inspectors also, and in the end they let the boy go.

"He worked about the farm, off and on, for some eight or ten years, and got himself thoroughly disliked, as you know, by all the Mennings' neighbours. The criminal streak in him was already apparent, though in those days it only took the form of spitefulness and mental deficiency. He was idle and vagrant and finally, at about seventeen years old, took himself off one fine day and went back to the travelling show, which he managed to trace up through the Pottsville saloon-keeper. They took him back as an extra hand, to help with the wagons. He was not good enough for a performer, his training being interrupted, but the proprietor about that time had the idea of running one or two freak side-shows, and they tried Jakey out as the hoary old fake of 'wild man.'"

Herrick paused a moment to light a fresh cigarette, and in that instant I saw Lennox's eye turn to me with something very like relief.

"It seems," Herrick went on, "that he was quite a successful attraction and I can certainly believe it. There was naturally something apish and uncouth about him, and very little make-up would have turned the trick most naturalistically. He stayed with the show nearly two years, doing odd jobs by day and playing his wild-man stunt at the performances. And then some sort of queer thing must have happened.

"I couldn't get the whole truth of it from the Pottsville brother, who told me most of the story. Either he didn't know or he was unwilling to tell, but the gist of it is that there was some row and Jakey got suddenly fired. From what the Pottsville brother 'guessed,' Jakey played his rôle too realistically, and the proprietor refused then and there to keep him another day. He had a little money in his pockets, he turned up in Pottsville, where he hung about for two or three days, and then made his way back to the farm.

"I would give a great deal to have ten minutes with Goldstein himself, and know exactly what did happen and why Jakey was fired. I gathered that it was something pretty unpleasant. But Goldstein is somewhere out in Ohio, and try as I would, I could get nothing more from the brother than what I have told you. I think myself there was something hushed up at the time, and that he is afraid even now of its coming out. But I got enough I think to throw some interesting light on what has happened since."

"Did you get any idea," Lennox asked, "of Jakey's make-up when he was with these people?"

"No. Why?"

"Tell him your story, Lennox," I said.

He repeated briefly what he had already told me. Herrick listened, his face intent.

"So that was----" He pulled himself up short. "Well, it isn't difficult to put two and two together. The obvious explanation is that Jakey has fallen back on his old circus stunt as a means of terrorizing the neighbourhood. It wouldn't be difficult. No one here, from what I can make out--possibly not even his own family--knew how he spent those two years while he was away. There is a form of mania which takes just that expression, and it is possible that in Jakey's case it began out of sheer maliciousness, and developed later into something a great deal worse--a fixed mania which, with the rousing of the homicidal instinct, turned him actually, at moments, into the wild beast he pretended to be."

"You think it was Menning--it was--well, what I saw--that attacked Lessing?"

"I am certain of it. Go over the thing carefully, Lennox. There was no stunt outside the possibility of a man with unusual physical strength and ability, who had had acrobatic training in boyhood. And remember that a maniac can perform feats that in his sane moments might be outside his powers. We are not dealing with a normal person. That's the one thing in this whole business we've got to remember." He rose. "Austin, will you come over to the bungalow with me? I'd like to see Lessing tonight."

I looked at my watch. "Ten o'clock. I told them I'd be over. We'll take the cycle. It'll carry two of us."

He had left the motor cycle outside the porch. As we wheeled it out to the roadway I said: "You think that is the explanation of the whole thing?"

Herrick gave me a quick look.

"I said it was the obvious explanation. It is. But there's more mixed up with it than that. And it's the other side of it that we shall never get to the truth of until we get hold of Menning himself."

I thought of Lennox's description of what he had seen, in that fleeting glimpse, and in spite of myself a shudder went over me.

"Do you mean that mania can actually transform a human being to that degree?"

"Haven't you see enough, Austin, in your own experience, to answer that question?"

I was silent. Every doctor, I imagine, has had experiences which he is glad enough to put out of his mind, and though my own were limited so far, I had heard enough tales of abnormality, at second hand, to know that there was truth in Herrick's words.

I took my seat on the back of the motor cycle, and in a few minutes we had reached the rise of hill. Turning the corner, we could see the bungalow through the trees. There was still a light burning. As we approached, the deep melancholy howl of the dog broke on our ears. Evidently Lessing had not yet let him out.

We left the cycle against a tree and went up to the porch. The door stood wide open, the light streaming through it from the lamp on the table inside. Of Lessing or his sister there was no sign. Except for the steady howling of the dog in the shed, the place was absolutely silent.

We went through the empty rooms, came out again on the porch. A chair was drawn up near the doorway, with a book dropped in it face-downward, as though someone had risen in haste. That, and the lamp left flaring on the table, gave me for the first time a definite thrill of uneasiness.

Herrick went back and lowered the flame. "They can't have gone far," he said. "They wouldn't have left the light that way. Let's try the studio."

We crossed the little space of ground beside the house. The studio was dark; the door was locked and the key on the outside. As we passed the tool-shed there was a tumult within. The dog, hearing our footsteps, flung himself against the door in a frenzy of eagerness, whining, scratching, tearing at the wood with his nails. There was something in the deep, agonized, almost human anxiety in his voice, raised, not in yelps, but in steady entreaty, that sent a queer thrill down by spine. Herrick felt it too. He stopped short.

"What's _got_ that dog?"

"Lessing shut him in this evening. It was after----"

I paused. All at once there came back to my mind the dog's behaviour that afternoon, when Lessing dragged him back from the saw-mill, bristling and rebellious--Lessing's own face when he joked about the rat. It was near the identical spot where we had missed the dog before, when he broke away from us on our way down, just before we saw Menning's mother. Menning's mother ... and Menning himself had been seen in the neighbourhood the night before. In a flash I saw the whole thing clearly--Freeman's action, the ghost that haunted the milldam, Rebecca's rifled cream-pans and the old woman with her basket of chips. What a fool I had been!

In a moment I had drawn the bolt and the setter was free. He barely stopped to notice us; with a flash of his white chest and a wide-flung yelp of relief he was off across the road and into the woods.

I caught Herrick's arm. "Lessing is at the saw-mill. Come on--I'll tell you later!"

"The saw-mill?"

I saw his hand slip down to his pocket as we ran. The same thought was in both our minds. We broke through the underbrush on the far side of the road, stumbled by chance on the footpath and were racing along it, shoulder to shoulder, while the setter's barking still echoed in our ears.

For a while his voice guided us. Then, abruptly, he was silent. We paused on the edge of the clearing to take breath. All was still--that closed-in stillness of the woods at night, when all daytime life hushed. Before us loomed the old mill, its broken roof and ruined timbers black against the sky. For a moment there was no sound but the pounding of the blood in our ears, the dry rustle of a dead bush as Herrick leaned forward, listening.

Then suddenly, from somewhere in the recesses of the old building itself, there broke on that tense stillness another sound--more horrible to me than anything else--the hoarse choking breaths and muffled worrying of a dog at grips with his enemy. It came, not from the main floor of the mill, but from the basement where the water-wheel hung. There was a doorway on the near side of the mill, formerly used for carting away the sawdust, but it had been nailed up, and remembering this I called to Herrick as I ran directly for the steep slope on the side by the sluice. Here there was open space to squeeze through, and with Herrick close on my heels I trampled a way through the breast-high weeds and bushes round the corner of the building and gained an entrance.

Within all was pitch black. The water was shut off, but a little trickle still flowed through, dripping from the slimy motionless bulk of the great wheel above us. The air was warm, heavy with the smell of rotting sawdust and of something else, fetid and nauseous. The worrying had ceased; we could hear the broken rapid breathing of two bodies, there, unseen, somewhere within a few feet of us in the darkness. I made a step forward, but Herrick clutched my arm, and as he did so the fight broke out again with renewed fury, somewhere it seemed up in the far corner, among the drifted sawdust. I could recognize the setter's deep-throated snarls, the snap of teeth seeking a grip, and with it was another voice, deeper and more guttural--something wholly strange and horrible--something that snarled and panted and coughed in choking gasps. The darkness moved; there came the breath of a warm animal body, the straining of a heavy weight flung against resisting wood, and then the nailed planks gave way, the sudden square of the doorway was obscured by a tumbling, heaving mass and the next instant we were alone--alone in the darkness with silence round us and that fetid unforgettable smell on the air.

It was the same smell that Mary had complained of that evening, wafted to us as we sat on the porch--the smell, I knew now, that I had first noticed on the day I passed the Mennings' place in the early summer.

"Phew!" said Herrick.

He struck a match, shielding the flame with his hands. The little flicker threw out shadows high on the piled sawdust and gray ruined walls. We could make out the huge mass of the wheel, the shafts that ran to the story above, the great beams supporting the broken flooring over our heads. The match spluttered and went out, but in that instant it had shown us what we sought, a dark motionless figure lying huddled in the far corner, where the sawdust sloped up in a shadowy drift under the rafters.

Herrick reached it first, his feet sinking deep at every step as he scrambled up. I heard him draw his breath in sharply as I struck another match, and by its gleam saw Lessing, one arm doubled under him and the clothes nearly torn from his body, lying unconscious in a saturated pool of blood.

Of Mary there was no sign.

XXI

THE THING IN THE WOODS

Together we managed to get Lessing back to the house and laid him on the couch, and while Herrick held the lamp I did the best I could for his injuries with the means at my disposal. It was an ugly job. One arm and shoulder were badly mangled and the collar bone broken; he had lost a great deal of blood and there was a nasty contused wound above the temple. A flicker of consciousness came back while I was working over him, but the loss of blood told, and he lapsed back again almost immediately. There were stitches to be taken; nothing much could be done except to check the bleeding with temporary bandages and as soon as I could manage single-handed Herrick rode off to Lennox for help.

In reality it was not long, though it seemed to me an eternity that I kept that nightmare vigil, my ears strained for any sound from without, bending all my will-power on my task to keep me from the one thought that I dared not face, Mary. Where had she gone--what had happened to her? I went over a thousand possibilities, trying to find some reasonable explanation to which I might cling, though as each moment went by the stillness became more and more a torture. If she had merely missed her brother and gone down the road to call for him we should have met her, or she would be back by now. If she had been with him at the mill, or had followed there ... I thought of the deep blackness of the water at the end of the dam, where we had passed that evening, the sheer drop blow the sluice-gates, and shuddered.

It was with infinite relief I caught the approaching noise of the motor cycle and saw Herrick reappear, followed only a few moments later by Lennox with the light spring-wagon. It was decided to take Lessing straightway to the doctor's house, where he could be better looked after than in the bungalow. We laid a mattress in the bottom of the wagon and lifted him on to this, and Herrick and I on the motor cycle accompanied Lennox beyond the hollow at the foot of the hill. Before we started Herrick, his face grim and set in the lamplight, pulled out the revolver I had lent him that morning and handed it to me.

"Keep that, Austin. I bought another today. Lennox has his own."

"There was an extra box of cartridges," I said, "in the table-drawer."

"Lennox gave them to me."

When we had seen the wagon well along the road we turned, and rode back to the bungalow.

"Now," said Herrick, when we stood once more in the lighted room, "the first thing is to find Mary. And then ... there has got to be an end to this. Are you ready to face it?"

He did not need to ask me. I looked round on the little room, gay and friendly with its rugs and books and the great bowls of wildflowers that Mary loved--the countless little signs of her occupation, a sweater flung across a chair, her work-basket of Indian grass on the table--the room in which I had spent so many happy hours, now suddenly sinister in its desertion. And then my eye fell on the couch where we had laid Lessing, and the hideous litter I had left in my haste--stained wads of cotton and the torn strips from his shirt with which we had striven to check the blood before we carried him up from the mill.

"For God's sake," I exclaimed impulsively, "let's get that cleared away before she gets back!"

Before Mary got back ... the words died in my throat. But I gathered up the telltale evidence all the same--every last scrap and fragment--and thrust them out of sight behind the kitchen woodbox, before I turned to Herrick.

"We'll try Sliefers' first," he said. "There's just the possibility she is there."

It was a slight chance, and as it proved, fruitless. The farmer was still up, and opened the door to us in stockinged feet. No one there had seen Mary since the afternoon. Sliefer heard our errand with a grave face.

"There's no house she'd have come to but this," he said. "There's only Scholl's and Nevill's at the Bend, and they were both asleep as you passed? They're a-bed by ten. Besides, if there was anything out of the way they'd either one of them have sent over here straight. No. Unless the young lady's missed her way, or met with some accident...."

He looked at us doubtfully. It was no time to mince matters. We told him, as briefly as we could, what had happened that evening and how we had found Lessing at the mill.

He heard us out, his jaw set grimly. When we had finished he rose without a word, a tall, still stalwart figure in his stockinged feet, and crossing the kitchen took down his gun that hung on a rack above the door.

"I guess I'm coming with you," he said.

I glanced at Herrick. He nodded.

"Three are better than two, Austin. We may be glad of an extra hand before the night's out." He turned to Sliefer, who had laid his gun on the table, and was pulling on a pair of heavy boots. "Have you got a good dog? I don't mean the collie."

"Aye. There's old Spot, back in the barn. He'd pick up a trail anywheres. Nor he ain't none too friendly to Menning, either, that's one reason we've kep' him tied up, most of the time. Now I guess I'll step up an' leave word with Mother."

He opened the stairway door and tip-toed up, curiously noiseless on his heavy feet. We heard whispering, a smothered exclamation; then he came down, gently closing the door behind him.

"I ain't told her nothing, only that you'd missed Miss Lessing and we was going out to hunt her up. There's no need she should know about the rest of it. This ain't no woman's job, nor it ain't no sheriff's job either. If they'd come to me first off I know every track in these woods back an' forth, and it won't be easy for anyone to get away from me, not once we pick his trail up. Menning can run these woods like a fox, but he won't run far, not when I got a gun in my hand. Not that I'd be scared to meet him anywheres, gun or no gun, and I bet he knows it."

A strange expression flitted across Herrick's face as he measured the farmer's sturdy figure with his eye. But he only said gravely: "You're a good neighbour, Mr. Sliefer. As you say, this is no sheriff's job now; it's up to us. And we're going to see it through."

We closed the door behind us.

"I told Mother to bolt that, once we're gone," Sliefer said. "Reckon we don't need no lantern."

"Better not," Herrick said.

The old man crossed to the barn and came back a few minutes later with the dog on a chain, a cross-bred hound by the look of him, heavily built and brindled white and brown.

"That's what they used to call a bear-dog," the farmer said, "when I was a boy. The breed's pretty well died out now. I've had old Spot here eleven years, and I had his mother an' grandmother before him. You don't see 'em nowadays, any more. They raise these light-built hounds now, but they ain't the fighters these dogs were."

The farmer was a brisk walker. He picked his way through the woods, turning here, pausing there, at what seemed to us invisible signs and landmarks, making his way unerringly through the trees and undergrowth, the hound close to his heels, till presently we stood once more on the open road a little below the bungalow. I looked eagerly towards the house, only to see the turned down light burning just as we had left it.

"We'll try here first," Sliefer said.

He took two or three turns about the road and clearing, but the dog took no interest. We recrossed the road to the farther side, and here, among the underbrush near the path Herrick and I had taken, he showed the first signs of keenness, sniffing to and fro, his nose laid close to the ground. In a few moments he was off at a leisurely trot along the path.

"Picked up the other dog's scent, most like," said Sliefer, watching him. "Come on. We'll find him at the mill."

He took us by a short cut through the bushes, across a cleared space of stumps and blackberry vines, and turning into the woods at the left again, brought us in a few minutes on the sawmill road. The hound was there before us, moving shadow-like about the clearing. When we came up to him he was clearly puzzled and uneasy. He moved warily, his forefeet stiffly braced, his ears laid back, the hair along his spine bristling as he snuffed to and fro.

I touched Herrick's shoulder. "Do you see that? It's the same way Leo was acting this afternoon."

"Give him time," said Sliefer. "I know Spot. He ain't made his mind up yet."

Shifting the gun under his arm, he pulled out a can of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette. Somehow that natural matter-of-fact action did much to relax my tense nerves. With Herrick I watched the hound closely. He approached the broken doorway, sniffed, peered, circled off a couple of times and then, as though suddenly making up his mind to it, plunged inside, only to reappear an instant after and set off, head down, with a queer muffled whine, through the underbrush. I made a move to follow but Sliefer checked me.

"Wait a bit. He ain't sure yet. He'll give us the holler when he's sure started."

He was right. After a little while Spot came back, breaking cover near the back of the mill, and returned to us, uneasiness and perplexity in every line of his taut body. With his eyes fixed on his master's face he waited, eager and yet strangely reluctant, and again with a thrill I noticed that involuntary bristling of his spine, the trembling of his lower jaw, as though at some unfamiliar and disturbing proximity. Twice the farmer spoke to him encouragingly, and twice the dog circled off, checked abruptly and came back. Sliefer grew impatient.

"I don't know what's got into the dog. He ain't never acted that way before. Hey there, Spot! Get to it! Fetch em' boy!"