Then I felt the toe of my slipper meet the recumbent elbow of the Partridge Hunter. Had I reached out to him? Or had he reached back to me? There was no time to find out, for the smooth, round conversation shattered prickingly in the hand like a blown-glass bauble, and with much nervous laughter and far-fetched joke-making, we rose, rummaged round for our candles, and climbed upstairs to bed.
Alrik's Old Mother burrowed into a corner under the eaves.
The Pretty Lady had her usual room, and mine was next to hers. For a lingering moment I dallied with her, craving some tiny, absurd bit of loving service. First, I helped her with a balky hook on her collar. Then I started to put her traveling coat and hat away in the closet. On the upper shelf something a little bit scary brushed my hands. It was the Blue Serge Man's cap, with a ragged gash across it where Growly-Dog-Gruff had worried it on a day I remembered well. With a hurried glance over my shoulder to make sure that the Pretty Lady had not also spied it, I reached up and shoved it—oh, 'way, 'way back out of sight, where no one but a detective or a lover could possibly find it.
Then I hurried off to my room with a most garish human wonder: How could a man be all gone, but his silly cap last?
My little room was just as I remembered it, bare, bleak, and gruesomely clean, with a rag rug, a worsted motto, and a pink china vase for really sensuous ornamentation. I opened the cheap pine bureau to stow away my things. A trinket jingled—a tawdry rhinestone side-comb. Caught in the setting was a tiny wisp of brown hair. I slammed the drawer with a bang, and opened another. Metal and leather slid heavily along the bottom. It might have been my beast's collar, if distinctly across the name-plate had not run the terse phrase "Alrik's Cross Dog." I did not like to have my bureau haunted! When I slammed that drawer, it cracked the looking-glass.
Then, with candle burning just as cheerfully as possible, I lay down on the bed in all my clothes and began to wake up—wider and wider and wider.
My reason lay quite dormant like some drugged thing but my memory, photographic as a lens, began to reproduce the ruddy, blond face of the Blue Serge Man beaming across a chafing-dish; the mournful, sobbing sound of a dog's dream; the crisp, starched, Monday smell of the blue gingham aprons that Alrik's Wife used to wear. The vision was altogether too vivid to be pleasant.
Then the wet wind blew in through the window like a splash of alcohol, chilling, revivifying, stinging as a whip-lash. The tormented candle flame struggled furiously for a moment, and went out, hurtling the black night down upon me like some choking avalanche of horror. In utter idiotic panic I jumped from my bed and clawed my way toward the feeble gray glow of the window-frame. The dark dooryard before me was drenched with rain. The tall linden trees waved and mourned in the wind.
"Of course, of course, there are no ghosts," I reasoned, just as one reasons that there is no mistake in the dictionary, no flaw in the multiplication table. But sometimes one's fantastically jaded nerves think they have found the blunder in language, the fault in science. Ghosts or no ghosts—if you thought you saw one, wouldn't it be just as bad? My eyes strained out into the darkness. Suppose—I—should—think—that I heard the bark of a dog? Suppose—suppose—that from that black shed door where the automobile used to live, I should think—even t-h-i-n-k that I saw the Blue Serge Man come stumbling with a lantern? The black shed door burst open with a bang-bang-bang, and I screamed, jumped, snatched a blanket, and fled for the lamp-lighted hall.
A little dazzled by the sudden glow, I shrank back in alarm from a figure on the top stair. It was the Pretty Lady. Wrapped clumsily like myself in a big blanket, she sat huddled there with the kerosene lamp close beside her, mending the Blue Serge Man's cap. On the step below her, smothered in a soggy lavender comforter, crouched Alrik's Old Mother, her dim eyes brightened uncannily with superstitious excitement. I was evidently a welcome addition to the party, and the old woman cuddled me in like a meal-sack beside her.