The Amateur Inn

by Albert Payson Terhune

It was not there.

He yanked the drawer wider open and groped among its heterogeneous contents. Then impatiently he began tossing those contents to the floor. A pair of crumpled and stained riding gauntlets, an old silk cap, wadded into a corner, a dog-leash without a snapper, odds and ends of string, a muffler, a pack of dog-eared cards, a broken box of cartridges. But no pistol.

The revolver was gone, unmistakably gone—taken from its hiding place, during the past five minutes.

Thaxton went through his pockets on the bare chance he might have stuck the pistol into one of them, although he remembered with entire clearness that he had dropped it back into the drawer.

Subconsciously, the thought of weapons lingered in his mind. He felt in his hip pocket for the big army knife. It was not there.

Then he remembered the use it had been put to in drawing the cork of the vial of smelling salts. And he went back into the living room, on the chance he might have left the knife lying on floor or table. But he could not find it.

“Mac,” he confided to the collie—for, like many lonely men, he had grown to talk sometimes to his dog as if to a fellow-human—“Mac, all this doesn’t make any kind of a hit with us, does it? Up to to-day this was the dearest old house on earth. Since this afternoon it’s haunted. That gun, for instance! The front door was locked, Mac. Nobody could have come in from the kitchen quarters, for the baize door is bolted. Nobody could have gotten into the house, this past five minutes. And every one in the house except you and me has gone to bed, Mac. Yet some one has frisked my gun out of that drawer. And the big knife seems to have melted, too. What’s the answer, Mac?”

Naturally the collie, as usual, did not understand the sense of one word in twenty. Yet the frequent repetitions of his own name made him wag his plumed tail violently. And the subnote of worried unhappiness in Thaxton’s voice made him look up in quick solicitude into the man’s clouded face. For dogs read the voice as accurately as humans read print.

Thaxton petted the classic head, spoke a pleasant word to the collie and then switched off all the lights except one burner in the front of the hall and a reading lamp in his study across from the dining room. After which he bade Macduff lie down at the foot of the stairs and to remain there.

Up the steps Vail made his way. At his own room he paused. Then with a half-smile he went along the corridor to a door at the far end of an ell. He knocked lightly at this.