CHAPTER VIII
THE HA’NT
Sunset stretched its long shadows again across the Traps.
Up on the heights, the light of day still was bright and clear. But down in the bluff-bulwarked valley of the Coxing Kill, a thousand feet lower than the Minnewaska table-land behind which the sun was rolling down in the southwest, the dusk was slowly shading into dark. Already the air vibrated with the swelling chorus of the katydids, scraping out their insistent warning of frost which had not yet come; and from every grassy space cheeped the lonesome dirge of the crickets. Night was drawing on.
Down on the diminutive stoop of a little house beside the Clove road, a man stirred and glanced around him with a frown. The steadily increasing clack of the big green bush-bugs and the growing chill of eventide had routed the thoughts which he had been drawing through the stem of a blackened but empty pipe—thoughts which, to judge from his absent gaze and the half-smile on his lips, were more pleasant than those now obtruding themselves. He shook his shoulders as if to dislodge the night chill settling there. Abruptly he stood up.
His swift survey swept the little fallow field at his right, where the black choristers of the grass were chirping away among the unseen roots; the narrow sand-track of road, empty of all but thickening shadows; the darkling mass of trees and brush at his left. Then he pivoted and peered into the darkness lying beyond a door which had been standing open at his back.
Nothing showed in the room beyond—nothing, that is, which should hold the fixed attention of a man; nothing alive. Vaguely, in the wan light still entering through the cracked panes of a curtainless side window, he could see a rickety table with one leg broken, a chair minus a back, a little rusty stove, and, in one corner, a jumble of small things recently dumped from his pack. Along a wall which started beside the open doorway showed the faint outlines of three more doors, all in a row. And that was all.
Nothing, surely, in such a scene need make this man listen keenly and half lift the shotgun in one fist. Yet he stood there for a long minute, searching the room repeatedly, then centering his gaze on the first of those three doors in the wall. That door stood open. And the queer chill between his shoulder-blades was not all due to the coolness following the sinking of the sun: it was that clammy feeling inherited by mankind through countless generations—the subconscious warning that a hidden menace lurks behind the back. And his ears subtly corroborated the caution of his nerves. Despite the clamor of the insects, he could have sworn that in the first room there at the right he had heard a slight rustle.
That room was the bedroom. It was a mere cubby-hole, not more than seven feet square, containing only a crude bed and a lamp-shelf, both fixed. The bedstead, which the new tenant had inspected and decided to use, apparently had been built in the room by the former owner; a solid contrivance of boards and hardwood posts, with interlaced ropes serving as a spring, and a noisy mattress of corn-husks. Head, foot, and one side were snug against three of the walls, leaving only a yard-wide space between bed and door. At the foot was the one tiny window of the room.
To enter that sleeping-closet, anything must go through the door or the window. The window now stood open, for Douglas had forced up its cobwebby frame after sweeping the floor as best he could with a stubby old broom found in the grass; but that opening was within ten feet of his left hand as he sat on the steps, and nothing could possibly have gone in there without his knowledge. Still less could anything have gone past him through the door. Yet he felt in his marrow that something was there.
With slow, careful shifting of his balance he stole across the meagre stoop. Not a board creaked, not a sound did his descending soles make. With the same stealth he leaned against the door-jamb and inched his head inside. At length, braced by hands against the wall, he was leaning far in and peering through that right-hand door. In the dimness beyond stood no living thing.