"Hade's still lying where he fell," he reported, tersely.
"They haven't even bothered to move him. You were dreaming.
If—"
"I wasn't asleep," she denied, a trace of color beginning to creep back into her blanched cheeks. "I had just lain down. I heard—or thought I heard—a sound on the veranda roof. I peeped out through the grill of the shutter. There, on the roof, not ten feet away from me, stood Rodney Hade. He was dressed in rags. But I recognized him. I saw his face, as clearly as I see yours. He—"
"One of the Caesars," suggested Brice. "They found the lower windows barred and they sent some one up, to see if there was any ingress by an upper window. The porch is easy to climb, with all those vines. So is the whole house, for that matter. He—"
"It was Rodney Hade!" she insisted, shuddering. "I saw his face with the moonlight on it—"
"And with a few unbecoming scratches on it, too, from the underbrush and from those porch vines," chimed in a suave voice from the top of the stairs. "Milo, next time you bar your house, I suggest you don't forget and leave the cupola window open. If it was easy for me to climb up there from the veranda roof, it would be just as easy for any of our friends out yonder."
Down the stairs—slowly, nonchalantly,—lounged Rodney Hade.
His classic mask of a face was marred by one or two scratches and by a smudge of dirt. But it was as calm and as eternally smiling as ever. In place of his wontedly correct, if garish, form of dress, he was clad in ragged calico shirt and soiled drill trousers whose lower portions were in ribbons. All of which formed a ludicrous contrast to his white buckskin yachting shoes and his corded white silk socks.
Claire and the two men stood staring up at him in utter incredulity. Bobby Burns broke the spell by bounding snarlingly toward the unkempt intruder.
Brice absentmindedly caught the dog's collar as Bobby streaked past him on his punitive errand.
"Hade!" croaked Standish, his throat sanded with horror.
'"'Hade! I—we—we saw you—murdered!"