There was a curious, dream-like quality about the little session that we had together at the door of Dell’s room. It was all rather dim, obscure, the voices that we heard seemed to come from some place far off, and that ring of faces no longer looked clear-cut and sharp. I suppose the answer lay in the great preoccupation that was upon us all, a struggle for understanding that engulfed our minds.
There were no excited, frenzied voices. The men spoke rather quietly and slowly, as if measuring their words, and Van Hope was smiling, faintly. It wasn’t a mirthful smile, but rather a wan smile such as a man gives when some incredible disaster, long expected, has fallen upon him. None of us liked to see it. There was nothing to believe but that the mystery had gone home to him more fully than to any one else—and we all wished that he could be spared the tragic, vain hour of search that awaited us. Because none of us had the least hope, in our own hearts, that we would ever see Major Dell again. We had got past the point where we could deceive ourselves. The truth was all too self-evident. We would search through the grounds, as a matter of duty we would call and run back and forth. But the end was already sure.
Indeed, there was no look of surprise on any one of those white faces. Rather they had a helpless, almost fatalistic expression, as men have when at last they are crushed to earth by the inevitable. I have heard a detachment of soldiers, seemingly trapped by death, speak in the same quiet way, and have seen the same baffled, resigned expression on their faces.
I didn’t try to keep track of who was there and who was absent. It was impossible to think of such things now. But bitter, blasting fear surged through me when I thought of Edith—wondering if she was safe in her room.
There was a moment of stress, a sudden, momentary explosion of suppressed excitement, when Slatterly the sheriff joined us in the hall. We heard his running feet in the corridor, and we turned to watch him, his dressing-gown flopping about him. Evidently he had heard our words from his room in the upper corridor. Certain exclamations were on his lips—whether they were profane oaths I do not know.
“What is it?” he demanded in an irritable, rasping voice. “Why are you all gathered here?”
Silently we waited for Nopp to speak—Nopp who had become the strongest arm in the affair. “We’re not having any late evening gossip,” he answered. “Kastle Krags has its tail up again. We’re here—to find out what has become of Major Dell.”
“Major Dell! Good God, don’t tell me he’s gone too.”
Instantly the sudden, deadly surge of wrath we had all felt toward the sheriff died in our breasts. That cry he made, the hopeless, defeated way in which he spoke, made him, in an instant, one of us—subject to the same fear and despair, a crushed and impotent human being like ourselves.
“He’s gone,” Nopp told him quietly. “He’s not in his room. He doesn’t seem to be any place else.”