“Weldon, Nopp, you and myself—if you want to come. If not, don’t mind saying so.”
“I want to come!” We smiled at each other, in the hall. After all, no other decision could be made. The high plans I had made for an evening with Edith would have to be given over. In the first place the night might solve the mystery into which I had been drawn. In the second it was the kind of offer that most men, over the earth, find it impossible to refuse. Human beings, as a whole, are not particularly brave. They are still too close to the caves and the witch-doctors of the young world. They are inordinately, incredibly shy, also, and like little children, sometimes, in their dreads and superstitions. Yet through some blessing they have a high-born capacity to conquer the fear that emburdens them.
No white man in the manor house would have refused Slatterly’s offer. Mostly, when men see that they are up against a certain hard deal, some proposition that stirs the deep-buried, inherent instinct that is nothing more or less than a sense of duty—that deep-lying sense of obligation that makes the whole world beautiful and justifiable—they simply stand up and face it. No normal young man likes war. Yet they all go. And of course this work to-night promised excitement—and the love of excitement is a siren that has drawn many a good man to his doom.
“Good,” the sheriff told me simply, not in the least surprised. “What kind of a gun can you scare up?”
“I can get a gun, all right. I’ve got a pistol of my own.”
Nopp came up then, and he and the sheriff exchanged significant glances. And the northern man suddenly turned to me, about to speak.
Until that instant I hadn’t observed the record that the events of the past three nights had written in his face. Nopp had nerves of steel; but the house and its mystery had got to him, just the same. The sunset rays slanted in over the veranda, poured through the big windows, and showed his face in startling detail. The inroads that had been made upon it struck me with a sudden sense of shock.
The man looked older. The lines of his face seemed more deeply graven, the flesh-sacks were swollen under his eyes, he was some way shaken and haggard. Yet you didn’t get the idea of impotence. The hands at his side had a man’s grasp in them. Nopp was still able to handle most of the problems that confronted him.
Slatterly, too, had not escaped unscathed. The danger and his own failure to solve the mystery had killed some of the man’s conceit, and he was more tolerant and sympathetic. There was a peculiar, excited sparkle in his eyes, too.
Slatterly turned to Nopp. “He says he’s got a pistol.”