The village of Windomville lay below, hugging the river, a relic of the days when steamboats plied up and down the stream and railways were remote, a sleepy, insignificant, intensely rural hamlet of less than six hundred inhabitants. Its one claim to distinction was the venerable but still active ferry that laboured back and forth across the river. Of secondary importance was the ancient dock, once upon a time the stopping place of steamboats, but now a rotten, rickety obstruction upon which the downstream drift lodged in an unsightly mass.
In the solid red-brick house among the oaks Alix the Third had spent her childhood days. She was taken to England when she was eight by her haunted grandfather, not only to receive the bringing-up of an English child, but because David Windom's courage was breaking down. As she grew older, the resemblance to Edward Crown became more and more startling. She had his dark, smiling eyes; his wavy brown hair; her very manner of speech was like his. To David Windom, she was the re-incarnation of the youth he had slain. Out of her eyes seemed to look the soul of Edward Crown. He could not stand it. She became an obsession, a curious source of fascination. He could not bear her out of his sight, and yet when she was with him, smiling up into his eyes,—he was deathly afraid of her. There were times when he was almost overcome by the impulse to drop to his knees and plead for forgiveness as he looked into the clear, friendly, questioning eyes of Edward Crown.
And her voice, her speech,—therein lay the true cause of his taking her to England. When she came home to him, after four years, there was no trace of Edward Crown in her voice or manner of speaking. She was almost as English as Alix the First. But her eyes had not changed; he was still a haunted man.
In the little graveyard on the outskirts of the village more than a score of Windoms lie. With them lies all that was mortal of fair Alix the First, and beside her is David Windom, the murderer.
CHAPTER III — COURTNEY THANE
"And what has become of Alix the Third?" inquired the young man, squinting at his wristwatch and making out in the semi-darkness that it was nearly half-past nine.
He had listened somewhat indulgently to the story of the three Alixes. The old man, prompted and sometimes disputed by other members of the family, had narrated in his own simple way the foregoing tale, arriving at the end in a far more expeditious and certainly in a less studied manner than the present chronicler employs in putting the facts before his readers. The night was hot. He was occasionally interrupted by various members of the little group on the front porch of the big old farmhouse, the interruption invariably taking the form of a conjecture concerning the significance of certain signs ordinarily infallible in denoting the approach of rain. Heat lightning had been playing for an hour or more in the gloomy west; a tree-toad in a nearby elm was prophesying thunder in unmelodious song: night-birds fluttered restlessly among the lofty branches; widely separated whiffs of a freshening wind came around the corner of the house. All of these had a barometric meaning to the wistful group. There was a thunderstorm on the way. It was sure to come before morning. The prayers inaugurated a month ago were at last to be answered.
As old man Brown drily remarked: "There's one satisfaction about prayin' for rain. If you keep at it long enough, you're bound to get what you're askin' for. Works the same way when you're prayin' for it to stop rainin'. My grandfather once prayed for a solid two months before he got rain, and then, by gosh, he had to pray for nearly three weeks to get it to quit."