Part 6

She stopped rather abruptly. I was looking about me for a likely spot in the shade, and when I had found it, at the base of two towering hickories, I pulled Mrs. Searle's parcel out from my pocket. The setter watched my proceedings with a keen interest, intent on the chance of the moment.

"I'm convinced," she objected, "that you ought to go home and change your boots."

"It's impertinent," I reminded her, untying the pink grocery string from the parcel, "to give medical advice to a doctor. Do you like Uneeda biscuits? Because they seem to have occupied an important place in my housekeeper's mind this morning."

We sat down on the moss beneath the hickories, and I divided the single gigantic sandwich with my pocket-knife. Luckily Mrs. Searle had over-estimated my hunger. We ate healthily, with open-air appetites, and what was left over the setter finished at one watchful snap.

"When does Doctor Lennox come home?" Mary asked presently.

"He's due in another six weeks, unless he finds Europe too fascinating. Then I shall have to go back and grind, I suppose. It won't be an attractive prospect, after this holiday."

"You have a practice in New York?"

"Not yet. I've been _interne_ up to now. I expect it'll end in the East Side. A friend of mine has a settlement there, and I'd like to join him if I can. There's always plenty to do."

"I know," she nodded. "I've seen something of it. Do you know a man named Herrick, there?"

"Herrick!" I sat upright. "If you mean Jack Herrick, that's the friend I was speaking of. Then you----"

"Then _you_," she corrected, "are the college chum he was always talking about. Why, I've known Jack Herrick ever since I used to play dolls!"

"Three and a half years..." I said pensively. "The world's a small place."

"You are rude, Doctor Haverill. It's a long enough time, anyway."

She was looking at the branches overhead, and in her upturned face I caught fleetingly a likeness that had puzzled me more than once before. I knew now. On Herrick's mantelshelf, in his shabby comfortable room at the settlement, there had stood always a photograph in a silver frame. It was the portrait of a child of perhaps thirteen, in a gingham overall, and with her hair braided in two short tails down her back. Herrick had said once: "That's an old sweetheart of mine."

Singularly enough, the recollection did not at this moment greatly please me. But I merely said:

"You wore your hair in two pig-tails."

She brought her eyes to earth swiftly. "Who told you?"

"All proper little girls do at that age," I reminded her shamelessly.

"I see. But we were talking of John Herrick."

"Go on."

"Don't you think he's splendid?" she continued, turning to me. "He's done no end of good. And he works ... I don't believe he ever takes a real holiday. Doctor Haverill, you ought to get him----"

"To come down here for a while? I will--if it would please you."

She looked at me so frankly that I was at once ashamed.

"Why, of course it would! But I don't know why I said that. I don't suppose he'd take the time."

I watched a dragon-fly that was wheeling over the stream.. She sat near me, her hands locked about her knees.

"My brother was at your house last night," she said after a moment.

"Yes."

I could feel her eyes fixed on me, and I knew what was in her mind.

"He told you something?"

"We were talking about chemistry," I said. "It's a subject your brother is very interested in."

"Chemistry!" She put out her hand with a little gesture. "Doctor Haverill, do you take me for a child? What is the matter? You can tell me; he has spoken to you. I want to know."

"What do you want to know?" I said, lamely enough.

"The whole thing--what is happening here. I know something threatens him, that he is in danger, and neither he nor you will tell me what it is."

"How can I tell you," I fenced, "what I don't even know myself?"

She was quick. "Then there is something?"

I ignored the unfinished sentence.

"Miss Lessing, why can't you get your brother to go away from here, for a time?"

"I can't. I've tried. He wouldn't leave, now. You don't know him. He's the last person in the world to give a thing up until he's proved it down to the ground, one way or another. Whatever's at the bottom of this, he won't rest till he's found it out. It's just a scientific problem to him, and nothing else."

"And you?" I said.

"I?" She moved her shoulders. "What can I think? I had hoped just now--But I only know what he has told me, what I have seen. If one began to think----"

"Listen to me," I said. "You must not think! You and I are two sane people. Look at these wood around! I ask you, is it possible to feel anything but sane and incredulous in a place like this? I want you to get into your head, right now, that there is nothing--nothing at all in this world--that a man has any reason to be afraid of. And there are very few things in the world, to my belief, that cannot be explained. Has it ever occurred to you that this whole conviction of your brother's may be nothing more than hallucination?"

"But the injuries----"

"I have known hysteric patients, before now, inflict as severe injuries upon themselves without consciousness or recollection. I don't say it is your brother's case; I'm only trying to form a possible rational explanation such as any doctor would put forward. I have had one or two such cases within my own experience. What I propose to do is this, but I shall do it only with your consent. I will write to Herrick and ask him down here for a fortnight. It will be a new brain to bear on the problem, and I shall ask your brother to let us join these investigations with him."

"You'll do that." She put out her hand to me impulsively.

"I'll do it to-night. Only ... I shall have to give Herrick a detailed account of everything that has happened, so far as we know it, and I can't do that without your brother's approval."

"Yes ... I see."

"You will excuse one question. Are they on good terms?"

It struck me that I had never heard Lessing mention his name.

"Yes." She paused doubtfully. "It's funny you should ask that. They had a disagreement, about two years ago. It was when my brother first took up this ... this kind of study. Having séances and that. Doctor Herrick wanted him to give it up."

I moved involuntarily. Here was a new light on Lessing's attitude of mind, which he himself had been at pains, it seemed to me, to touch on very lightly. I remembered stray references of his, the signed article I had noticed on my first evening at the house.

"Your brother used to attend séances often?"

"Didn't he tell you? I don't know that I would have mentioned it, but I don't see that it matters. It was before I came to live with them. He and some friends of his were very interested, and Doctor Herrick used to join them too sometimes. They met at a friend's studio. Doctor Herrick was rather against it from the first, but I know he used to be there. Of course I understand very little about it, but ... things did happen. I don't mean that they banged on tambourines or rapped out the alphabet or anything like that. It wasn't spiritualism. And then Doctor Herrick stopped. I think he knew more than any of them, but he said it was dangerous and it didn't lead to anything, and he wanted my brother to give it up altogether. Kate--that's my sister-in-law, you know--was their medium, and I think it was on her account. Doctor Herrick thought it was bad for her. And then one night something happened, I don't know just what, but Kate got some sort of a shock. She's very highly strung at any time, and I always supposed something frightened her, but anyway she was quite ill for a long time after that. She used to get queer sort of nervous spells, and she couldn't be left alone, and that was why I first came to live with them, on her account. Of course my brother gave the whole business up then. The physician who attended her said simply that she was in poor health, and had had a nervous breakdown, and he told her she must live in the country awhile till she got stronger, but I know Doctor Herrick thought at the time that the séances had been the cause of it. He told my brother so."

I listened attentively. It was news to me that Herrick, the essential level-headed, should have lent himself at any time to experiments of this order. He had never mentioned the subject to me in our many talks, and I had even gathered, as one gathers an impression without any very definite grounds, that he was a confirmed sceptic on all matters of occultism.

"You say they had a disagreement?"

"It was exactly that," she made haste to say, "They didn't quarrel, but I know Herrick was very much opposed to Dick's views, and they used to have arguments. But it didn't amount to more than that."

"Good!"

She had risen to her feet, and at her movement the setter himself lazily rose and came towards us.

"Then we're going to see this thing out?" I said.

"We'll see it out."

We shook hands, and I fancied that her fingers rested in mine a moment voluntarily before she drew them away.

"Are you coming up to see my brother today?" she asked.

"Presently ... I'd like to." I looked at my watch. "I thought of taking a stroll up to the dam, as I'm so close; I've never been there. You say it's only a few minutes?"

"Not more than ten, through the woods."

"Let's walk up together," I suggested, "if you aren't too tired."

She assented readily, and we struck off up a little footpath, barely traceable, that followed the course of the stream. It was, as she had said, a scant ten minutes before the sound of the sluice broke on our ears, and through a sudden clearing of the woods the dam lay before us, a black sinister sheet of water, covered with masses of floating weed and pond-lilies, and darkened by the trees and underbrush that grew closely down to its edge. An old scow, long past use and sunken low in the water, lay pad-locked to a slimy stump near the shore.

Following an old cart-track, we skirted the edge of the dam in the direction of the saw-mill, a dilapidated building with broken roof, that seemed to have stood for many years of disuse. To reach it we had to cross the sluice itself, and Mary Lessing, who was a few paces ahead of me, paused to look down over the single rough handrail that protected one from a misstep.

There is something forbidding about a mill-sluice at any time, especially when dissociated, as this was, from the companionable sound of human labour. The sheer depth, the knowledge of the vast imprisoned force behind one, the sound of water gushing here and there between the slimy weed-grown timbers, give always, to me at least, an indefinable sense of the sinister.

I leaned my rod against the railing, and we looked down side by side at the black oozing wall below.

"I like this place," Mary Lessing said. "There's something queer and creepy about it. I often come here. I suppose they haven't worked the sluice for years."

"I doubt if the machinery would move now," I said. "Of course this is never opened. There should be a smaller sluice for the millstream further on."

I glanced as I spoke at the clumsy wooden levers near me that controlled the sluice. They looked to be rotting in their place, but as I pushed one, idly, a sudden change in the sound of escaping water below warned me that the machinery was not in such ill repair as it would seem. I exerted my strength to pull the lever back, and my attention was momentarily distracted from the girl beside me. She was leaning out over the hand-rail, and when I turned it was with a sudden cry of warning.

"Look out!" I said. "That may not be safe!"

I caught her arm instinctively as I spoke, and on the instant the rail bent outward with a slight sound of cracking. In another moment she would have been over the edge. We looked at one another, and Mary laughed, a little nervously on the stillness. Her face had flushed.

"I thought that rail was all right," she said rather awkwardly.

"Dick walked over here with me not a week ago, and we tested it then to see."

"It isn't all right now," I returned sharply.

I put my two hands on the rail, giving it a slight wrench outward. It gave easily to my touch, and looking closer, I saw that the surface towards the water had been half cut through. Someone had tampered with it deliberately and within the last few days.

"What is it?" Mary Lessing asked.

"Merely rotten, as I thought!"

I turned away, and walked thoughtfully on towards the saw-mill. The thing puzzled me, but it had an ugly look. It was no idle mischief that had prompted the act. Whoever had done it, had done it maliciously, and the purpose was not very far to seek. Hitherto I had not attached much importance to the Lessings' occasional laughing references to their unpopularity in the village. Now it assumed suddenly a significance.

I turned to Mary Lessing, walking beside me.

"I want you to promise me something," I said, "whether it seems to you irrelevant or not. I want you not to come here again by yourself, at any time. It's a lonely place and it isn't particularly safe. If you come at all, bring your brother with you."

The smile that was on her lips at first faded abruptly, leaving her face serious.

"The rail was cut," she said quietly. "Is that what you mean? It must have been, because it was perfectly solid a few days ago."

"Someone has been up to mischief. If there are characters of that kind in the neighbourhood, it's best to run no risks, that's all."

We walked on a few paces, silently. The mill was on our right, a desolate-looking building enough, with its surrounding litter of sodden chips and piles of cut logs lying here and there In the open. A heavy smell of decaying wood was in the air, added to the stagnant odour of the dam itself.

The setter was in front of us, sniffing to and fro on the trail of the rats that infested the wood piles. Suddenly he stood still, his ears laid back, growling ominously. A short, thick-set figure slipped from the angle of the mill wall and vanished in the woods on the farther side of the cart-track.

"Aaron Menning," Miss Lessing said. She put her hand and called the dog back. I was staring up the track where the chicken-huckster had so adroitly disappeared.

"Does he live near here?"

"Not very far off. I suppose he comes here to fish. There are a good many in the dam."

"Very probable," I said.

"I dislike that man," Mary said after a moment. "I guess it's mutual, too. The other one, Jake, you know, had a quarrel with my brother one time. He was always loitering round the house, and Dick turned him away. Aaron's always very civil when we meet, but I don't believe he likes us any more than Jakey did."

We took a turning past the mill that led us, without further event, to the Lessings' bungalow. Within sight of the house I parted from her. I wanted to see Lessing again, but there were a few points that needed readjustment in my own mind first. As I walked slowly home down the familiar slope of Dutchman's Hill I was thinking that the industrious and chapel-going Aaron might very well bear a little watching.

IX

PROBLEMS

I wrote to Herrick that same evening and his answer came a couple of days later, saying that he hoped to get away towards the end of the month. I had said nothing in my letter about the events of the summer, but merely mentioned that the Lessings were my neighbours for the time being.

Herrick wrote: "I shall be glad to meet Lessing again. He seems to have buried himself in obscurity for the last twelve months. Is he still as enthusiastic a theorist as ever, or has the country sobered his ideas? In any case you are to be congratulated on having for neighbours three of the most charming people it has ever been my luck to meet."

I smiled at the "three." In my own mind I could have substituted another numeral which would explain much of Herrick's promptitude in accepting my invitation. He was very much mistaken if he thought that any such artless device would put me off the track. In imagination I already saw myself playing the rôle of a reluctant gooseberry during his visit.

Lessing, when I mentioned my expected guest, made a comment almost identical with Herrick's own.

"Herrick?" he said. "Good! We shall have some arguments, Haverill, that will eclipse even your own. If Herrick gets to the bottom of this by any of his cut-and-dried theories and deductions I'll give him best once and for all!"

One thing at least pleased me. I gathered from both their remarks that whatever difference had occurred between them had been purely a battle of opinion, and had no influence on their fundamental regard for one another. Meantime my meeting with Mary Lessing, and the subsequent incident of the broken hand-rail, had settled my mind on one point at least. There was some malicious influence at work in the neighborhood which was distinctly and obviously human, whether it bore any relation to the laboratory experiences or not, and at any cost, even if necessary in the face of Lessing's opposition, she must be kept clear of it.

Three-fourths of the neighbouring population were Pennsylvania Dutch, and I had learned enough, in my own infrequent dealings with them, to recognize their sullen aloofness, amounting almost to a hostility, towards any stranger settled in their midst. The Lessings were for some reason disliked in the village, and I fancied that much of the distrust towards them was due to their having chosen for their dwelling a spot which already had a sufficiently bad reputation in the eyes of the country people about. Lessing was by no means the sort of man to make himself popular here, or even friendly. He was more or less of a recluse; he had erected a mysterious building in which, engaged upon equally mysterious pursuits, he chose to isolate himself until all hours of the night, and he displayed an open indifference towards all the current gossip and superstition of the neighbourhood. Following the primitive psychology of these people, narrow-minded to a degree and distrustful of anything unfamiliar, his habits alone were sufficient to brand him as an ungodly character. According to his sister, he had already fallen foul of Jake Menning soon after his arrival, and I had no doubt whatever that Aaron, out of revenge, had since done his best to foster the already antagonistic feeling towards him. The huckster's trade lends itself to all the back-door gossip of the countryside, and it seemed to me that I could trace easily enough the fruit of Aaron's house-to-house visits. Aaron himself was civil-spoken, industrious, religious to all accounts, and a highly respected member of the community; but all this did not weigh very far against the man's face. Whatever ill blood ran in the Menning family, it was certainly not confined to the deceased Jakey.

I mentioned my suspicions to Lessing a day or two later, when I was at the bungalow.

"Oh, the man's right enough," he returned. "I don't like his kind, that's all. I had a row with Jakey because I didn't want him hanging round the place and I told him so. Aaron has never annoyed us in any way; on the contrary, he takes pains to be particularly civil. I think he's like all the rest around, glad enough to keep clear of Dutchman's Hill and all its inhabitants, dead or living!"

Mary Lessing had asked me, on our homeward walk, not to mention the cut railing to her brother, and I had not done so. It was sufficient for the moment that she had agreed to keep away from the mill-dam and its immediate neighbourhood. She was a sensible girl and I had no fear that she would break her promise out of any spirit of bravado or curiosity.

We were in the sitting-room. Mary had gone down to the village on an errand, and Mrs. Lessing was as usual invisible. For the time being we were free from interruption, and it struck me as a good moment to tell Lessing what I had heard from the reporter concerning the two mysterious cycling 'fatalities.

He took it even more seriously than I had expected. It was even with scant patience that he heard me out.

"But good heavens, man," he cried, "why didn't you tell me all this sooner? Don't you see that it's what I've been expecting, what I've been watching the papers for month after month? It puts my experience clear of all doubt. I have felt certain--as certain as I am standing here--that sooner or later some accident of this sort would turn up."

"It was a good fifteen miles from here," I said. "Besides----"

"What's fifteen miles? I don't care if it was fifty! Have you got the cutting with you?"

I had. I had torn off the corner with the paragraph, unobserved of my reporter friend, and I took the fragment now from my pocketbook and gave it to Lessing. He read it through eagerly.

"The facts correspond. The man was killed in the open; he had no chance of shelter. The thing hit him as he was riding."

"It's not proved."

"There's the damage to the bicycle."

"There's exactly that," I said, "which to my mind puts a different light on the whole thing. If the impact of the blow was sufficient to damage the bicycle to that extent, how was it that the rider escaped all injury except a single scratch on the face? It's out of all reason. There were no marks on the body. That is testified to. If a man is knocked off his bicycle while riding at even an average speed, he'll have some marks to show for it. He died from heart failure, probably resultant upon fright and the shock of the wound. Very good. But that doesn't account for the bicycle. It seems to me that whatever attacked him wreaked its spite on the machine afterwards."

"He had time to dismount?"

"Possibly. It doesn't say how near to the bicycle he was lying. If he fell at all he must have fallen clear of it. The lamp was picked up several yards away."

"The lamp..." said Lessing.

The same thought was in both our minds.

"What date did this happen?" he asked.