"At any rate it will be a shelter," he thought; "and when the storm clears off I can get home. Only three o'clock," he added, looking at his watch. "I'll rest a bit."
He broke his way through the drifts which were piled up before the door, and stumbled in. The moment his foot touched the threshold a vague feeling of fear seized upon him; the place was quite empty, thick with dust and festooned with cobwebs. There was not a stick of furniture; yet it seemed to him that there should have been a bare deal table, two deal chairs, and a fire in the grate. "Had he ever been here before?" he asked himself. But he could find no answer to the question. Finally, shaking off the feeling of depression which the influence of this house had brought upon him, he lay down on the bare boards and tried to sleep away the time. In this way, by the degree of some mysterious Power, the man was brought back to the room where his father had been murdered twelve or thirteen years before. And he was ignorant of the terrible truth.
The snow continued to fall steadily, but there was no wind. The absolute quiet was soothing to the tired man, and after a time his eyes closed. For a while he slept peacefully as a child then his face grew dark, his teeth and hands clenched themselves, and he groaned in agony. He dreamt--and this was the manner of his dream:
He was still in the bare room, but a fire burnt in the grate. A table and two chairs furnished the apartment, and made apparent the frightful poverty. The dreamer was no longer a man, but a child playing with a toy horse by the fire. Near the table sat a woman sewing. Then a man entered--the man whose face he had seen in the photograph. A quarrel ensued between him and the woman; the child--the dreamer himself--became suddenly possessed of a blind rage against the man. Then all faded in darkness. He was in bed still a child--again in darkness. Then once more he was in the room. The window was open; near it lay the dead body of the man, the blood welling from his heart. At the door stood the woman, a knife in her hand, a look of terror on her face. Then came rain, and mist, and cold, and the dreamer felt that he was falling into a gulf of darkness, never again to emerge into the light of day. But the woman's face, with blue eyes looking from under a crown of fair hair, still shone like a star in the gloom. It smiled on the dreamer, then it vanished as he awoke with a cry.
Neil Webster sprang to his feet with the perspiration beading his forehead and shaking in every limb. The dream had been so vivid! Was it but a dream? Here was the room, here the open window, and here, where he had seen the dead body of the man, black stains of blood marked the floor. He started back with a cry as he saw it all, and flung himself out into the snow which still kept falling in thick flakes. Away from that house he ran, feeling that he had recovered the memory of his childhood. His father had been murdered. By whom? That was the question he asked himself as he sped onwards through the snow.
"Oh Heavens!" he kept murmuring. "What does it all mean? Why was I sent to that house to learn this terrible truth? Why? Why?"
But the snow fell ever more thickly, and the young man fled along the road. In the same way had his mother fled with him in her arms, fled through the mists to escape the horror of the Turnpike House.
[CHAPTER VI.]
MR. CASS SPEAKS.
Jennie Brawn sat in her bedroom with an agonised took on her face, with inky fingers and tumbled hair. Miss Brawn was courting the Muse.