About midnight, matters had so quieted down that he was able to respond to Mrs. Parlin’s message begging him to come to her and, if possible, remain in the house the balance of the night. He took with him the box, containing what he now regarded as his fortune and his reward for work done in discovering the murderer.
Mrs. Parlin was eager to hear the story, and it was some time after midnight before she left him and he was at liberty to follow his purpose. His judgment dictated waiting until morning, which would be a matter of but a few hours, but the box and its papers had become a growing burden, leaving him but one thought and that to be rid of them. From the library window he could see that a light still burned in the Hunter house. He was resolved to complete the matter before he slept.
Leaving the house cautiously, with the box under his arm, he hurried down the hill, at the foot of which lay the heavy shadows of the great Lombardy poplars. It seemed to him that he had never seen the shadows so black as they were to-night. As he entered the blackness, he quickened his pace almost to a run, and was almost in the light again when there came what seemed to him a flash of flame, then deeper darkness and oblivion.
How long he lay on the walk under the poplars he did not know, excepting that his first sensation of returning consciousness was of the soft white light that comes before the sun steals up from behind the earth. The next was of a heaviness of the head and a numbness that was giving way to pain. He put up his hand feebly, and brought it down again wet with blood.
Then came the thought of the box. He reached out his hand and, groping, it fell upon it. He had barely strength enough yet to draw it to him, but at last succeeded, though not without much pain. He lifted it feebly and the lid fell back, showing the breakage where it had been wrenched from its hinges. With a paroxysm of strength born of terror, he sat upright and looked into the box. It was empty; not even a shred of paper remaining. For one instant he gazed in uncomprehending stupidity, and then, as the truth flashed on him, he fell again to the earth, and lost in temporary unconsciousness alike the sense of pain and the power to follow his interrupted quest.
Almost at the very moment when Trafford discovered the loss of the papers, Henry Matthewson slipped through the grounds of the Hunter home, coming from the direction of the river, and entered by a side door. He went directly to the library, where his brother and the two Hunters had been in uneasy conference for some hours. As he entered, the three men started to their feet, first in surprise at his presence, and then in greater surprise at his appearance. His face was white and set, like the face of a man who has passed through some terrible struggle and has conquered or been conquered. One, looking at the inscrutable face, could not have decided which.
“You!” exclaimed Charles Matthewson. “I have been trying to reach you all night.”
“How could you reach here at this hour?” said Frank Hunter. “There’s no train.”
Charles Hunter said nothing, but his quick understanding of men, and, perhaps, a quality in him that would have dared all that man could dare in a desperate case, told him more than either of his companions saw. For a moment he hesitated and then, seeing no denial in the face of the newcomer, said: