A few typewritten lines jumped to his eye, and he nodded as if that were as he had expected. Before reading the text, however, he leaned back in his chair and strove to recall the exact circumstances under which he had discovered the missive. He had been hurrying—no, blast it, he had been scuttling like a scared rabbit!—along the trail and had run into the stick, which had been jabbed into the ground where he could not fail to notice it—and at the very spot where the figure in black had been standing! Apparition—pooh! If there was one thing certain about the whole silly business it was that the note had been put there by that—that creature. Simon did not profess to be versed in the lore of spooks, but he could not vision an ambassador from another world leaving behind him a tangible message composed on an earthly typewriter—! Pooh, and again, pooh!
He paused at this stage of his reflections to grin at the thought of Ocky, denied the knowledge of this consolatory bit of evidence. He hadn't mentioned it to her, and he wouldn't. Let her go on believing in ghosts! He was hugely pleased to think that there really existed one thing that could get under the skin of that hard-boiled human!
He was still smiling grimly as he finally began to read the message—but the smile had faded away before he finished.
"Woe unto thee, stiff-necked son of Belial! Woe unto thee, oppresor of the defensless! Woe unto thee, who hast ground the faces of the poor, who hast turned the hopes of thy neighbers to ashes! Woe! Woe! Woe! Take heed to thy ways and mend them, lest thou be destroyed by the thunderbolts of wrath!"
A hand-written signature in a sprawling fist concluded the communication; heavy, labored characters, inscribed in a crimson fluid by a blunt pen, formed two words: "The Monk."
Simon Varr read the thing through twice. He laid it on the desk before him and stared at it as though it had some power to hypnotize him. A pulse of anger beat in his temple, but it was a more subdued anger than his quick temper usually produced. His mental processes had ceased to function normally as they sank beneath a wave of bewilderment such as had submerged them in the woods. Feebly, they came again to the surface.
This message was an event entirely outside the range of his previous experience. He had heard of anonymous letters, naturally, and he knew that the correct and courageous thing to do was to ignore them as if they did not exist. But anonymous letters, as he understood them, were brought by the postman and placed on the breakfast table with the morning mail; they weren't planted in the middle of a lonely copse by gentlemen attired as Spanish Inquisitioners!
The letter on his desk seemed to leer at its recipient and challenge him to ignore it.
What did it mean? Who had sent it? Was it a genuine warning and threat, or was it merely an elaborate hoax? He pondered the latter possibility quite at length—and thanked his stars that he had not told Ocky about it. Simon Varr was not the man to relish a jest against himself, and if Ocky ever heard about it and it subsequently proved to be the work of a practical joker—well, she would never let him forget that he hadn't gone after the pound of coffee!
But the theory that it might be a hoax grew more and more implausible as he contemplated it. He was positive he knew no one capable of such a prank, and to suppose that any stranger had gone to so much trouble to play a trick on him was absurd.