"He can't understand a word we say," said Putnam Jones loudly. "You better get out of here yourself, young woman. This is a job for men, not—"
"I think he's going now," she whispered in an awe-struck voice. "Keep still, all of you. Is he breathing, Mr. Barnes? That awful cough just now seemed to—"
"Come away, please," said Barnes, taking her gently by the arm. "I—I believe that was the end. Don't stay here, Miss Thackeray. Dillingford, will you be good enough to escort Miss—"
"I've never seen any one die before," she said in a low, tense voice. Her eyes were fixed on the still face. "Why—why, how tightly he holds my hand! I can't get it away—he must be alive, Mr. Barnes. Where is that silly doctor?"
Barnes unclasped the rigid fingers of the man called Andrew Paul, and, shaking his head sadly, drew her away from the improvised bier. He and the shivering Mr. Dillingford conducted her to the dining-room, where a single kerosene lamp gave out a feeble, rather ghastly light. The tall Bacon followed, the upper part of his person enveloped in the blanket Putnam Jones had hastily snatched from the mattress before it was slipped under the dying man. Several of the women of the house, including the wife of the landlord, clogged the little entrance hall, chattering in hushed undertones.
"Would you like a little brandy?" inquired Barnes, as she sat down limply in the chair he pulled out for her. "I have a flask upstairs in my—"
"I never touch it," she said. "I'm all right. My legs wabble a little but—Sit down, Mr. Barnes. I've got something to say to you and I'd better say it now, because it may come in pretty handy for you later on. Don't let those women come in here, Dilly."
Barnes drew a chair close beside her. Bacon, with scant regard for elegance, seated himself on the edge of the table and bent an ear.
"It's all rot about that man Roon being here to look for a place for his daughter." She spoke rapidly and cautiously. "I don't know whether Jones knows, but that certainly wasn't what he was here for. The young fellow in there was a sort of secretary. Roon had a room at the other end of the hall from yours, on the corner, facing the road and also looking toward the cross-roads. Young Paul had the next room, with a door between. I was supposed to make up their rooms after they'd gone out in the forenoon for a horseback ride. I kept out of their sight, because I knew they were the kind of men who would laugh at me. They couldn't understand, and, of course, I couldn't explain. Yesterday morning I found a sort of map on the floor under young Paul's washstand. The wind had blown it off the table by the window and he hadn't missed it. It was in lead pencil and looked like a map of the roads around here. I couldn't read the notations, but it required only a glance to convince me that this place was the central point. All of the little mountain roads were there, and the cross-roads. There wasn't anything queer about it, so I laid it on his table and put a book on it.
"This afternoon I walked up in the woods back of the Tavern to go over some lines in a new piece we are to do later on,—God knows when! I could see the house from where I was sitting. Roon's windows were plainly visible. I wasn't very far away, you see, the climb being too steep for me. I saw Roon standing at a window looking toward the cross-roads with a pair of field-glasses. Every once in awhile he would turn to Paul, who stood beside him with a notebook, and say something to him. Paul wrote it down. Then he would look again, turning the glasses this way and that. I wouldn't have thought much about it if they hadn't spent so much time there. I believe I watched them for an hour. Suddenly my eyes almost popped out of my head. Paul had gone away from the window. He came back and he had a couple of revolvers in his hands. They stood there for a few minutes carefully examining the weapons and reloading them with fresh cartridges. The storm was coming up, but I love it so that I waited almost until dark, watching the clouds and listening to the roar of the wind in the trees. I'm a queer girl in that way. I like turmoil. I could sit out in the most dreadful thunder storm and just revel in the crashes. Just as I was about to start down to the house—it was a little after six o'clock, and getting awfully dark and overcast,—Roon took up the glasses again. He seemed to be excited and called his companion. Paul grabbed the glasses and looked down the road. They both became very much excited, pointing and gesticulating, and taking turn about with the glasses."