CHAPTER FOUR: THE END OF THE TRAIL
RUTH HAMMERTON hurried into her father’s study on her return from the post-office, whither she had fared for the evening mail.
Her dark face was aglow with a colour that had been foreign to it for many a long week—a colour that softened and mellowed the new lines of leanness and of sorrow in cheek and brow. Her eyes were alight with nervous eagerness.
Mr. Hammerton looked up in surprise from a heap of papers on his desk, as his daughter burst so unceremoniously in upon him. A month earlier he had been appointed local justice of the peace. His new duties still called for much night work, in the way of study and preparation for the next day’s court duties. So it was with a slight frown that he greeted this sudden interruption of his labours.
“I’ve just come from the post-office!” began Ruth eagerly. “As I was coming out two men almost bumped into me. I looked back, as they slouched into the store and sat down by the stove. They had a huge bulldog at their heels. I heard one of the loafers there hail them by name. They were Con Hegan and Billy Gates. A boy told me they had come back to Boone Lake to-day. He said it was their first visit here since they got out of prison. He——”
“Pshaw!” fumed Hammerton. “So those two crooks are back here, are they? That means more lawlessness! Just as I was congratulating myself that it was becoming a law-abiding and decent community at last! I wish——”
“You don’t understand!” broke in the girl. “You don’t see what I mean. You don’t get the significance of it. And yet I’ve been all over it with you so often! I——”
“Over what?” demanded Hammerton, nettled by her air of excited mystery. “Please explain what you’re driving at. I’m tremendously busy to-night and——”
“Michael Trent was the means of Hegan and Gates going to prison,” she hurried on. “They swore they would get him for it. We have proof of that. The very night after they were set free Michael disappeared. And now they are back here again, after four months! Don’t you see——”
“I see you are trying to lure me into that same endless old argument again,” returned Hammerton with a glance of regret at his piled-up work. “But really, I can’t see why these two jailbirds’ appearance in town to-night should have flustered you so. There was no foul play connected with Trent’s disappearance. I’ve explained that to you, over and over. Calvin Greer called him up on the telephone that evening. Trent told Calvin he was sick of Boone Lake and that he was starting off on a long motor tour up country. He said if he liked it up there he’d settle somewhere in the north counties and never come back. Next day he and his automobile were gone. Where is the mystery?”
“Where?” she repeated miserably. “Why, everywhere! The whole thing is a mystery. In the first place, I rode over to see Calvin Greer, at his stock farm. He had never met Michael till that day, and he wasn’t at all familiar with Michael’s voice. But he told me it sounded rougher and hoarser over the phone than when he talked to him face to face. And he——”
“That’s no proof. Many people’s voices sound altogether different over the phone. Or Trent may have had a cold. There’s no mystery about it, I tell you. Most assuredly there’s nothing to connect Hegan and Gates with the affair. As to——”
“You knew Michael,” she went on. “You knew him well and you liked him. Tell me, was he the sort of man to go away like that and not have the courtesy to say good-bye to us? Was he? He stopped here—he and Buff—you remember, on his way home from the market square that evening. He sat and chatted with us for half an hour or so. He didn’t say a word about going away. Instead, he arranged to go horseback riding with me the next day. Yet less than half an hour later, apparently, he tells Calvin Greer he’s leaving Boone Lake—perhaps forever. Is that——”
“Men do queer things,” said Hammerton, turning back to his papers. “I can’t agree with you that there’s any mystery about it, daughter. Certainly no mystery that would justify the law in suspecting——”
“You know what care he took of his livestock,” pursued Ruth. “Is it likely—is it possible—that he would have left his sheep and cattle to starve, his cows unmilked and his horses with empty mangers? Would he have gone away like that, of his own accord, and let all his livestock starve to death? For they would have starved to death out there on that solitary farm if you and I hadn’t gone to get them and bring them here.”
“That’s the only part of the whole thing that I can’t understand,” assented Hammerton. “He treated his livestock as other people treat their pets. It wasn’t like him to leave them to starve. Out there they might have gone hungry till they died before any neighbour would have been likely to happen in and find them. Even if he hadn’t been so fond of them, it doesn’t make sense for a man to leave such valuable property to die of neglect. To say nothing of the ruin of his year’s crops through his absence. Why, if you hadn’t wheedled me into having his crops looked after, the year would have been a total loss to his farm. As it is——”
“Then,” she declared triumphantly, “since you admit he wouldn’t have done such a thing of his own accord——”
“I don’t admit it. I only say I can’t understand it. But it happened. We have proof of that. He went away in his car. And he took Buff along with him. If he had left Buff there I could have seen, perhaps, where the mystery came in. For he and that collie were chums. But he took Buff with him. And he took along everything of portable value in his house, too. No, that doesn’t look like foul play. He did it deliberately, whatever his motive may have been. Took along his dog and his valuables and drove away in his own car. The car couldn’t have been stolen, either. For he told Greer over the phone——”
“If it was Michael who told——”
“We don’t know his motive,” summed up Hammerton. “But we do know he went of his own accord. There is ample proof of that. As for connecting Gates and Hegan with——”
“He did not go of his own accord!” announced the girl, deathly white, her eyes ablaze, as she towered over her wondering father. “And I have every reason to know he didn’t. I don’t want to tell why I know it. But I must, if I want you to get the truth out of those two assassins. I know Michael Trent did not leave here of his own accord. I know it because he loved me. A man doesn’t run away like that from——”
“What?” shouted Hammerton in astonishment. “He—you say he——”
“I say he loved me,” reiterated the girl, her sweet voice held steady by a great effort. “And no man will go away willingly from a woman he loves as Michael loved me. Most of all, he won’t go away and fail to send any kind of word.”
“You never told me!” accused her father indignantly. “You never——”
“Michael never told me,” she retorted.
“Then how——”
“He never told me in so many words,” she went on. “Yet I knew it. A woman always knows. He loved me. And he was waiting until he could put his farm on a better paying basis before he told me of it. Now, perhaps, you’ll believe me when I say he’d never have gone away like that unless he had been kidnapped or killed.”
Long and silently Hammerton stared at his daughter, dazed by the revelation. Then he said, hesitantly:
“If I’d known—if you had told me—but——”
“But now that you do know,” she persisted, “you’ll get the truth from Hegan and Gates? You’ll start the machinery of the law to working; and——”
“Dear,” he said gently, “there’s nothing I can do. There is no shadow of proof that either of those men was concerned in——”
“As you choose!” she exclaimed, turning to leave the room. “Since you won’t interrogate them, I am going to. I’m going back to the post-office to find them. If they aren’t there, I’m going to find where they live and go——”
“Are you crazy?” stormed Hammerton, jumping up to bar her way. “You surely can’t mean to do an insane thing like that! I won’t permit it!”
“Then interrogate them yourself, as a magistrate of this county!” she bade him. “Because if you don’t do it, I shall. If it is insane, let it be insane. In these past months I have had enough to drive a wiser woman insane. I love Michael Trent. I love him, I tell you! And if he is on earth I shall find him, now that I have a clue.”
Hammerton stared wonderingly down upon his wontedly placid daughter. Then he caught her into his arms and held her close to his heart for a moment. Releasing her, he crossed to the telephone and called up Roy Saunders, the Boone Lake chief of police.
“Saunders?” he queried. Then: “Judge Hammerton speaking. Hegan and Gates are in town again. I want a talk with them. You’ll find them at the post-office. Will you bring them up here to my study? As soon as you can, please? No, there’s no warrant out for them. But I don’t think they’ll be fools enough to refuse to come here. Thanks.”
He set down the telephone and passed his arm again round the girl. Ruth, her self-control giving way, wept convulsively on his breast.
“There! There!” Hammerton murmured. “Try to get hold of yourself, darling! They’ll be here in a few minutes. And our one chance is to keep cool. I—I haven’t much faith in our success with them. It’s only fair to tell you that, Ruth. And I’ve no legal right to question them at all. I’m doing it to save you from doing it. Try to be brave, if nothing comes of our talk with them.”
Airily, not to say jauntily, Con Hegan and Billy Gates strolled up the village street and into the highroad leading to the Hammerton place. To one side of the unconcerned pair strode Saunders, the truculent but puzzled chief of police.
The men had grinned mirthfully at Saunders’ command that they accompany him to the magistrate’s home. They had complied without a single demur. And they lightened the tedium of the walk by guying the pompous police chief in a way that reduced him to sullen homicidal yearnings.
Marshalled by Saunders, they lounged through the doorway in the wake of a servant and were ushered into Hammerton’s study at the extreme rear of the house.
They found Hammerton seated at his desk, looking very magisterial indeed. At a far end of the room, her face in the shadows, sat Ruth.
“Here they are, Your Honour!” proclaimed the chief of police, ranging his two grinning charges side by side in front of the desk.
“Yep,” cheerily assented Hegan. “Here we are, Judge. We was planning to bolt. But this vigilant chief kind of overawed us. We was afraid he might cry if we stood him on his head and lit out.”
“Or,” supplemented Gates, “he’d maybe have hit one of us a crool slap on the wrist as we run past him. Or he might go to where we live and bust one of our umbrellas, to punish us. So we stuck.”
“The judge looks pretty near as terrifyin’ as the chief,” confided Hegan to his companion in a loud whisper and shaking with simulated awe. “Most likely he keeps a ’lectric chair in his kitchen. We’d best be p’lite to him.”
Hammerton checked an angry forward movement on the part of Saunders and addressed the grinning prisoners.
“I have no legal right to enforce replies to the questions I am going to ask you,” he said quietly. “But it is only fair to tell you what rights I do possess. It is within my jurisdiction to commit you both, here and now, for vagrancy, since you have no visible means of support in this village. And before the thirty-day vagrancy term can expire there will be some new charge. So, to avoid these annoyances, I advise you to wipe those grins off your faces and to drop the attempt to insult anyone here and to answer the questions I shall put to you. Otherwise, you will leave here with handcuffs on and will proceed to the lock-up; thence to come before me in the morning on a vagrancy charge.”
The men looked at each other uncertainly. Gates seemed to be measuring the distance to the study door. Unobtrusively, Hammerton took a pistol from the drawer of his desk and laid it in his lap. Instantly the two men stiffened and lost their jauntily insolent manner.
“There’s no call to threaten us, Judge,” said Hegan, nervously. “We’re glad to answer any questions you care to spring on us. As for vagrancy—well, we’re no vags. We just got home to-day and, of course, we haven’t had time to look round us for any steady work yet. But——”
“You were let out of Logan Prison on the twenty-sixth of last July,” interposed Hammerton. “Where did you go from there? I mean as soon as you were let out.”
“We went straight to Paterson,” returned Hegan. “We got out of Logan at ten, on the morning of the twenty-sixth. We took the noon train to Paterson. We got work there and we stayed on the job till yesterday, when the works shut down for the winter. Then we come back here.”
“You hadn’t been here since you were sent to prison?”
“Not till we got here this morning from Paterson. No, Judge.”
“H’m! You were not here on the twenty-seventh of July? You are certain of that?”
“Certain sure, Judge!” declared Gates. “We wouldn’t be likely to forget if we had. This is our home town. We was kind of ashamed to come back, right off, after they turned us loose from the hoosgow. So we——”
“You have not been in or near Boone Lake since you were released from prison—until to-day?” insisted Hammerton.
“No, Your Honour, we ain’t. And we c’n prove it. We went straight to Paterson; and there we——”
“Then,” spoke up Ruth, coming forward, “how did two reputable witnesses happen to see you at Mr. Michael Trent’s farm late on the afternoon of July twenty-seventh?”
Hegan gulped. Gates, however, answered suavely:
“Flash your witnesses on us, ma’am. If they seen us here or in this county that day they sure got good eyes. They——”
“Yep!” supplemented Hegan. “Who’s your witnesses? Who are they?”
Hammerton and Saunders were looking at the troubled girl in surprise. With true feminine quibble for truth, she had put the statement in the form of a query in speaking of the witnesses whose identity she had just invented. The failure of her ruse distressed her keenly, even while the memory of Hegan’s start and his scared gulp made her doubly certain she was on the right track.
“Guess you never took a course of poker playing, at school, ma’am,” chuckled Gates, reading her face with all the trained skill of a true panhandler.
“Shut up, you!” grunted Saunders in wrath.
He glowered upon the suave Gates, who promptly turned his respectful gaze to the magistrate’s face. Hammerton, frowning perplexedly, opened his lips for further query, even while he realised the utter uselessness of trying to catch such skilled offenders by any questions he might have the wit to frame.
Before he could speak a maid rushed wildly into the room. With a manifest effort, she came to a halt inside the doorway and stood as though trying to announce some guest. But the guest himself entered the room, close at her heels.
Steadily, through the gathering darkness, Buff had run, his first mad pace settling down into the choppy little mile-eating stride of the trotting wolf pack. And so he kept on, ever headed for Boone Lake, moving swervelessly and with deceptive quickness.
Stars came out. A fat moon began to butt its way up over the eastern horizon mists. Here and there, as the pad-pad-pad of the collie’s tireless feet pattered along the frozen road, a farm dog would bark challenge or dart out in pursuit. But no challenge bark checked Buff’s obsessed flight. Nor did any of the pursuing curs catch up with him.
Now and then, along the state road, motor cars would meet or pass him. The dog moved aside barely far enough to miss the whirring wheels, but did not falter in his run.
Once, as he padded through a village, some fool, catching sight of him, noted his tense pose and the arrow-like straightness of his course and raised the shout of “Mad dog!”
This asinine cry lurks ever in the back of the human throat, ready and eager to spring into life at the slightest provocation. And woe to the harmlessly running or perhaps sick dog at whom it is howled! At once the hue-and-cry is ready to start in murderous pursuit. No question is asked. Nobody stops to realise that there are probably not two actually rabid dogs in any one state in the Union in the course of any two years, and that a genuinely hydrophobic dog is no more in condition to chase and attack people than is a typhoid patient.
But in Buff’s case the shout was raised too late. The tawny-and-white shape sped on through the dim moonlight and out of sight before the hue-and-cry was fairly up. And he did not so much as glance back to note the progress of the useless pursuit.
As he turned off the state road, taking the macadam byway which led towards Trent’s farm, the collie dropped to a wavering halt, his sensitive nostrils pulsing. A scent had come to him, though it was still too elusive to register clearly in the eager brain.
Twenty doubtful steps Buff took along the byway, until he came to a point where a field path from a cross-road a mile away intersected it. At the intersection the scent struck him with a force that dizzied him. Nostrils to earth, he found that a man had left this path for the byroad not ten minutes earlier.
The knowledge did amazing things to the dog. For an instant he shivered as though with a physical convulsion. His breath came in long gasps. A whine in his throat shook itself forth in an eerie note that belonged to no normal beast.
Then, like a whirlwind, he was off, down the byway; nose to earth, body flat and flying. Half a mile farther on, the rush of his madly scampering feet came to the ears of a man who was plodding wearily toward the farm—a man thin and shabby, who walked as though completing an exhausting journey. In the middle of the road the man paused and glanced back. Adown the moonlit byway was dashing a tawny-and-white creature, flat to earth in its speed.
Fifty yards from the man Buff lifted his head as he galloped. The scent—any dog’s strongest quality—told him he might now rely on sight, which is the weakest of a dog’s senses. At what he saw, the collie gave tongue.
Not in the hideous wolf howl or in whimper did Buff speak now, but in a cry that was human and rending—a cry that tore at the listener’s heartstrings by reason of its awful intensity.
Delirious—screaming, writhing, panting—Buff flung himself on the man he had tracked. He was at the end of the trail! And what he found there drove him quite insane.
Up into Michael Trent’s dusty arms the dog sprang—a vibrant mass of mad ecstasy. Moaning, crying, sobbing like a human child, Buff sought to lick his master’s haggard face and to pat him in a hundred places at once with the whirling paws.
Almost thrown off his balance by the impact, Trent spoke to the collie in wondering delight. And the sound of the tired voice sent Buff into a new frenzy of rapture. Dropping to earth, he whizzed round and round Trent in a bewildering gyroscopic flight, stomach to ground, tongue and throat clamorous with hoarse joy.
Presently, flinging himself at his master’s feet, the dog lay there, moaning and sobbing, his swift tongue caressing the man’s dusty shoes, his furry body quivering from nose to tail in hysterical bliss. There he lay while Trent leaned over and laid both calloused hands on his head, stroking him and talking to him in the pleasant, slow tones the collie loved.
“Buff!” muttered the man, swallowing hard. “Buff! Why, I didn’t think anyone on earth cared that much about anything! Come up here, old friend! You’re shaking as if you had ague. How did you find me? Have you been waiting at home for me ever since? Or have you been living with—with her?”
Buff, his paroxysm spent, crouched at Trent’s feet, his silken head pressed against his master’s knee, his upraised eyes scanning the man’s face in adoration. From time to time he shivered and moaned.
He had come to the end of the trail—the gloriously happy end of the horrible long trail. And he understood now why his queer sixth sense had summoned him hither, from the far-off farm where for weeks he had lived so placidly. The master-call had come to him. He had obeyed it. For it had been stronger than he.
And it had led him to his god. That was all Buff knew or cared to know.
And now, still talking to his dog, still petting him, Michael Trent took up again his homeward trudge. But there was life in his step. Fatigue seemed to have fallen away from him. The ludicrous worship of a dog had somehow made life over and had changed depression to hope.
Following his old custom—immemorial among lonely men who own dogs—Trent talked to Buff as they went along, as though to another human—knowing the collie could not get the sense of one word in ten, yet glad to have this vent for his own yearning for expression.
“The start of it all is pretty hazy to me, Buff,” he rambled on, in the soft monotone that was music to the dog. “I saw Hegan and Gates in the doorway. One minute I was fighting with them. The next minute I was in the smelly fo’cas’le of a tramp steamship. I was sick. And I was aching all over. I had been shanghaied. The next three months were unadulterated hell. We were bound for Honolulu by way of the Horn, Buff. And the crew was only one degree better than the captain and the mate. Let’s let it go at that.
“A chap named Carney and I got to be pals. We broke ship together at San Francisco on the way back. And we made most of the transcontinental trip on brake beams. Brake beams aren’t flowery beds of ease, Buff. Keep off them. Carney had got a bit of the story about me, from a man who was the mate’s pal between voyages. It seems a fellow who was in prison down at Logan with Gates and Hegan helped them engineer my shanghaiing. He told them where to take me. And they loaded me on a launch of his, down the river to the harbour and sold me to the captain. He was just weighing anchor. And he was short-handed.
“Hegan and Gates were planning to keep me out of the way and to let my stock starve and my crops go to wrack—as most likely they have, for nobody was likely to get to our out-of-the-way farm in time to prevent it. Then they were going to lay low for a few months, and after that they were coming back to Boone Lake and set fire to the house and barns. Most likely they’ve done it before now. Nice home-coming, hey, Buff? We’re dead broke, most likely, you and I. But we’ve got each other, anyhow. And that’s more than I dared hope for.”
He was turning in at the gateway of his farm as he finished the rambling tale. Buff thrust his nose into his master’s hand and whined softly. Then, in a trice the collie had stiffened to attention and darted forward through the shadows towards a patch of white that emerged from the darkness of the dooryard.
When Gates and Hegan came home to Boone Lake that day they brought with them a new possession in the shape of a mongrel bulldog of huge proportions and with a local fame for being one of the “dirtiest” fighters that ever set upon a weaker foe. Planning to carry out their amiable intent of firing Trent’s house and barns late in the night, they had stationed this dog in their victim’s dooryard that evening, to scare off any possible tramp or other intruder who might be intending to make the deserted house a resting place. They had no desire for such witnesses; the penalty for arson being somewhat drastic in their home state.
It was this guardian dog that came tearing forward now to repel the two intruders, as Trent and Buff turned into the dooryard. Buff, guessing his ferocious intent and resenting another and hostile dog’s presence in his own beloved bailiwick, flew eagerly to meet him. An instant later the two beasts came together with a clash; and a right energetic dog fight was raging at Trent’s feet.
Buff, for all his fury, fought with brain as well as brawn, against his heavier assailant.
There never yet was a bulldog that could, in the open, seize a collie that was aware of his assault and that wished to elude it.
Buff nimbly sprang aside as the bulldog rushed and let the other hurtle past him. But the bulldog did not go scatheless. As he lumbered past, a slash from Buff’s curved eyetooth ploughed a long and deep red furrow along his shoulder and back. And, as he turned, Buff’s slash laid open a similar cut at one side of the enemy’s stomach. The collie danced out of reach of the clashing jaws that sought to grab him before he could jump back.
When the jaws clamped together the collie’s throat was not there. Even as his opponent struck a second time Buff flung himself on the ground and dived for the heavy forelegs in front of him.
Buff’s teeth closed on the bulldog’s right foreleg. And, but for his own strong strain of collie blood, the fight must have ended then and there. For a bulldog would have gained this foreleg grip and would have hung onto it, heedless of the fact that his own spine and the back of his neck were within easy reach of the foe.
Wherefore, merely giving the forefoot an agonising bite as he went, he continued his diving rush. Under and between the bowed forelegs of the bulldog he slipped, eel-like, in swift elusiveness, slashing the other’s underbody again as he went, and emerged safe on the far side of the enemy.
Back and forth over the frost-slippery, moon-lit grass raged the fight, the frantic clawing of feet and Buff’s own staccato snarls and the thud of clashing bodies alone breaking the night silences. Twice the bulldog well-nigh secured his coveted throat hold—a hold that must speedily have left Buff gasping out his life through a severed jugular.
A third time the bulldog charged for the throat. Buff reared, twisting sidewise to avoid the charge and at the same time to counter on the panting and lumbering body. But he did not take account of the slipperiness of the frosty, dead grass.
The collie’s hind legs slid from under him. Down he went, asprawl on his back, under this sudden loss of his precarious balance. As quick as a cat he had spun to his feet again. But the instant of wasted time had sufficed for the enemy.
The bulldog, lunging murderously for the exposed throat, missed his mark by reason of Buff’s swirling motion of scrambling to his feet again. Yet this time the ravening jaws did not close on air or on fur. Instead they buried themselves in Buff’s upper right foreleg, almost at the junction of leg and body.
Helpless to break free, Buff ceased to thrash about. He felt the locked jaws begin to grind, deep and deeper towards the bone. He felt his enemy’s braced pressure brought to bear upon the imperilled foreleg.
Then his wolf brain told him what to do. He struck straight for the nose and upper jaw of the bulldog. He did not slash, as does a collie. He bent down and secured his grip as would a bulldog.
The bulldog, his own hold secure in the collie’s upper foreleg, was aware of a terribly painful grip on his tender nose, a grip that waxed sterner and more tense all the time, a grip also that was shutting off his breathing power.
In the anguish of choking, the bulldog let go Buff’s foreleg and shook himself furiously to get free of that encumbering hold. As he shook he gave tone, emitting a most horrendous yell of pain and rage.
Then for the first time Trent was able in the elusive moonlight and shadow bars to see how the fight was going or to intervene without peril of injuring his own dog. But as he bent down to drag the squirming bulldog away he saw he was too late. Buff’s grinding jaws had found the jugular. The fight was over. The victor stood up, panting and weary, and looked down at the inert mass that had so lately been a mighty fighting machine.
Half an hour later, shaved and clean, Michael Trent set forth for Ruth Hammerton’s home. Buff, wholly rested from his battle, trotted happily at his master’s heels. The maid at Hammertons’ gaped wordlessly at sight of the visitor.
Buff, as politeness bade him, wagged his tail and took a step towards her. The maid, by nature, was built for endurance rather than speed. Yet, recovering from her shock, she jumped at least a foot from the veranda floor; and she made a sound better fitted to a turkey whose tail feathers have been grabbed than to a decorous household servant.
After which she bolted into the house and down the hall towards the study. Trent hesitated as to whether or not he ought to follow. But Buff took matters into his own hands. At the opening of the front door he caught the scent of Hammerton’s two convict visitors. And down the long hall he went like a thunderbolt.
Trent, in consternation, dashed after him. But he did not catch up with the collie until Buff halted, perforce, at the doorway which the maid’s ample body was just then blocking. As he strove to wriggle past into the room Trent came alongside and seized the inexplicably excited dog firmly by the collar. This precaution saved the life of Con Hegan, who chanced to be standing nearest to the door.
It was Billy Gates who broke the brief spell. Even as Ruth started forward, with a choking little cry, towards Trent, the convict’s nerve and brain suddenly collapsed. Waving a tremulous arm at the raging Buff, Gates babbled in horror:
“Take him away! For the Lord’s sake, take him away! That’s no dog! It’s a devil! A—a ghost! I—I shot him and I buried him in a—a forty-foot well with a rope and a stone on his neck! Take him away! He’s come back for me!”
At a nod from Hammerton the chief of police shoved Hegan into an adjoining room. Then, wheeling on the gibbering and helpless Gates, Trent said sternly:
“Now, talk! The whole truth, mind you, unless you want me to let this—this ghost loose at you! Talk!”
And Gates talked. Drunk with superstitious horror, he talked and continued to talk. Even the sight of Hammerton taking swift notes did not deter him.
As the chief of police strutted back to the lock-up, propelling his handcuffed prisoners before him, he tried hard not to look at a shaded corner of the moonlit veranda—a corner wherein a maid and a man were seated very close together, with a big collie curled up in drowsy contentment at their feet.