Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

The slim little figure had slipped gracefully into a chair, facing Dayler on the opposite side of the table. She smiled curiously.

“But, at least, I will keep my promise first, and tell you about this Keats,” she said. “Buck Keats, wasn’t it, Mr. Dayler? And, as your servants may be back in another half hour or so, we won’t waste any time in getting to the story. It goes back about twenty years. At that time you were in the Yukon, and pretty well away from civilization, and you had been prospecting all summer with your partner, a man quite a little older than you were, a man named Laynton, Joe Laynton—Square Joe, they called him in that country, and you ought to know why. He was a big man—in his body and in his soul—a God’s nobleman, wasn’t he, Mr. Dayler?”

Dayler was leaning forward, staring at her in a strange, puzzled way.

“How do you know all this?” he demanded sharply.

She shook her head again.

“I may not be quite accurate in the little details,” she went on. “You will overlook that. You and Laynton delayed your return to Dawson too long that fall. You were caught in bad weather. Your provisions ran low. Laynton met with a nasty accident with an axe. In reaching up above his head to cut some branches for fuel, the axe in some way glanced off and inflicted a very serious and a very ugly wound in his shoulder and chest. Things went from bad to worse. For days Laynton could do nothing but lie in his blood-soaked bunk. Provisions ran still lower. The winter was settling down hard. You had already delayed too long, and now Laynton couldn’t go. And yet you woke up one morning to find his bunk empty.”

She paused. Billy Kane’s eyes, as he stood beside the table, passed from one to the other. Her small gloved hand, resting on the arm of her chair, had closed tightly; and into Dayler’s face, grown haggard now, had come the look of a dumb beast in hurt.

“On a sheet of paper on the table”—her voice was lower now—“Laynton had left a message for you, the kind a brave man would leave, explaining it all, and bidding you take the one chance you had and go without him. And piled on the table beside the sheet of paper was his money, quite a few hundred dollars. You went to the door of the shack, and you followed the tracks in the snow. And you found him, and you found his revolver beside him. You were already weak and half delirious yourself for lack of food, and I think this crazed you and unhinged your mind. You buried him in the snow, and picked up the revolver and put it in your pocket. You took the paper and the money and what food there was, and you ran, like the madman you then were, away from the shack. I do not know how long you wandered, nor how you existed, nor the number of miles you put between yourself and the man who had given his life for you; but eventually you were found by a trapper, and the trapper’s name was Keats, Buck Keats, a man with a very unsavory record. You spent some time with Keats. You recovered your physical health, but your mind remained affected. What had taken place was temporarily a blank to you. Keats robbed you of Laynton’s money and most of your own, and he stole that paper which later on was to mean so much to you. He preferred, if anything were ever known, that you, and not he, should be credited with having stolen Laynton’s money, and he further helped out that suggestion by getting you, after some months, out of the country, by having you, in a word, disappear. I imagine you were like a child in his hands. I am sure you do not even know how you got there, but the spring found you, quite normal in all respects save a broken memory, working at anything you could get to do in Mexico, and living there under the name of Dayler. Your proper name is Forbes, John Forbes, isn’t it?”

Dayler’s head was forward on the table, and buried in his hands. And Billy Kane, meeting her glance, read through a sudden mist in the brown eyes, a bitter condemnation of himself that he did not quite fully understand. He was not the Rat, was he? He was only playing the Rat in a fight for his life, and to win back a name of his own! How should he understand!

“I am taking too long,” she said hurriedly. “Your awakening came then. You read in a paper of the discovery of a brutal and revolting crime in the Yukon—the murder of Joe Laynton. The snow had melted, and a trooper of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police had found the body. If ever there was a prima facie case of murder it was there: The axe wound, presupposing a quarrel, the blood-soaked bunk, the final wound from a revolver shot, the absence of any weapon left in the possession of the dead man, the fact that he had apparently been stripped of his money, and, most damning of all, that you had disappeared. It all came back to you in a flash then; and, like the last straw, adding to this array of evidence already against you, you realized that you were now living under an assumed name. The letter, written and signed by Laynton, that would have saved you, was gone. You naturally did not know that it had been stolen from you; you believed that you had lost it. It would take a very brave man, and a man that was very sure of himself indeed, to judge you for what you did then. Without that paper, you, an innocent man, were already as good as hanged if you gave yourself up. You continued to live on as Dayler. Twenty years went by. You prospered. You lived in all quarters of the globe. No breath of suspicion ever associated John Dayler with John Forbes. But you knew, because you knew the record of the Royal Northwest Mounted, that the Men Who Never Sleep had not forgotten the case, nor given over the search—and that they never would. But at last, with the long lapse of years, you felt yourself secure; and finally, a few years ago, you came here and settled in New York.”