"A worthy by the name of Turk McMeekin."
Van Tuyl sat up with a heavy purpose on his honest and unimaginative face.
"We've had a nice lot of this mystery, Witter, but we've got to get to the end of it. Tell me what you know, everything, and I'll have him in here and face him with it. Now, what is there beside the Turk McMeekin item?"
"Not yet!" murmured Beatrice Van Tuyl warningly, as Wilkins and his mask-like face advanced into the room.
I had the feeling, as he served us with one of those delectable ices which make even the epicureanism of the Cyrenaics tame in retrospect, that we were deliberately conspiring against our own well-being, that we were dethroning our own peace of mind. We were sitting there scheming to undo the agency whose sole function was to minister to our delights. And I could not help wondering why, if the man was indeed what I suspected, he chose to follow the most precarious and the most ill-paid of all professions. I found it hard to persuade myself that behind that stolid blue-white mask of a face could flicker any wayward spirit of adventure—and yet without that spirit my whole case was a card house of absurdities.
I noticed that for the first time Beatrice Van Tuyl's own eyes dwelt with a quick and searching look on her servant's immobile face. Then I felt her equally searching gaze directed at me. I knew that my failure to make good would meet with scant forgiveness. She would demand knowledge, even though it led to the discovery of the volcano's imminence. And after so much smoke it was plainly my duty to show where the fire lay.
I seized the conversation by the tail, as it were, and dragged it back into the avenues of inconsequentiality. We sat there, the three of us, actually making talk for the sake of a putty-faced servant. I noticed, though, that as he rounded the table he repeatedly fell under the quickly questioning gaze of both his master and mistress. I began to feel like an Iago who had willfully polluted a dovecote of hitherto unshaken trust. It became harder and harder to keep up my pretense of artless good humor. Time was flying, and nothing had as yet been found out.
"Now," demanded Van Tuyl, when the room was once more empty, "what are you sure of?"
"I'm sure of nothing," I had to confess.
"Then what do you propose doing?" was the somewhat arctic inquiry.