“Great!” cried Sammy. “I’ll not only stand up with you, old boy, but I’ll let you lean on me.”
“Now?” gasped Serepta Grimes, in great agitation.
“At once,” declared Oliver, struggling to his feet. “I came near to losing her to-night. I’ll take no more chances.”
“Yes—now!” cried Jane softly, and for the first time that night the color came back to her cheeks.
CHAPTER XXV
MR. GOOCH SEES THINGS AT NIGHT
Horace Gooch was going to bed. He had had a hard day, and it was nine o’clock. He had a notion he was not likely to sleep very well. The sheriff of the county had telephoned earlier in the evening—in fact, he was at supper—that a body had been found in one of the marsh pools. The news rather took his appetite away. He had a weak and treacherous stomach to begin with, and the mere thought of going over to Rumley in the morning to see if he could identify the grewsome object caused him to suddenly realize that he had a much weaker stomach than he had ever suspected before. He had, besides, an absurd notion that he was going to be haunted all night long by the ghastly remains of his brother-in-law.
While he always had contended that Oliver Baxter did not have much of a head to speak of, the fact that it had been split wide open with an ax or something of the sort was very likely to cause him to see things even with his eyes closed and the bedroom in pitch darkness. He decided to leave the light burning in his room, and then, after further deliberation, concluded, that as long as it had to be lit anyway it would be a very sensible thing on his part if he were to put in the time reading instead of wasting electricity.
Mr. Gooch slept in a night-shirt. He didn’t believe in new-fangled things. He was a plain man. No frills for him.
The windows of his bedroom looked out on to an extensive lawn, formerly a rather pretentious and well-kept half-acre but now unkempt, weedy and in a state of dire neglect. Mr. Gooch had cunningly allowed his yard to fall into a sort of groveling, imploring decrepitude, indicative of poverty rather than parsimony. He wanted the voters to understand that he was by no means as rich as the unprincipled opposition said he was. He regarded it as a very telling piece of political strategy.