"I saw a light here, I thought," answered Lockwood frankly. "But as I approached, it went out. Maybe I imagined it."
"Let us see."
Kennedy spoke a few words to the man with the dog. He slipped the leash, with a word that we did not catch, and the dog bounded off, around the house, as she was accustomed to do when out on duty with an officer in the city suburbs, circling about the backs of houses as the man on the beat walked the street. She made noise enough about it, too, tumbling over a tin pail that had been standing on the back porch steps.
"Bang!"
Some one was in the house and was armed. In the darkness he had not been able to tell whether an attack was being made or not, but had taken no chances. At any rate, now we knew that he was desperate.
I thought of all the methods Kennedy had adopted to get into houses in which the inmates were desperate. But always they had been about the city where he could call upon the seemingly exhaustless store of apparatus in his laboratory. Here we were faced by the proposition with nothing to rely on but our native wit and a couple of guns.
Besides, I did not know whether to count on Lockwood as an ally or not. My estimation of him had been rising and falling like the barometer in a summer shower. I had been convinced that he was against us. But his manner and plausibility now equally convinced me that I had been mistaken. I felt that it would take some supreme action on his part to settle the question. That crisis was coming now.
I think all of us would willingly have pushed Alfonso forward. But the relations of the de Moches with Whitney had been so close that I no more trusted him than I did Lockwood. And if I could not make out Lockwood, a man at least of our own race and education, how could I expect to fathom Alfonso?
It seemed, then, to rest with Kennedy and myself. At least so Craig appraised the situation.
"You have a gun, Walter," he directed, "Lockwood, give yours to
Jameson."