He closed the book and passed to the window. The moon had risen, bathing the narrow strip of water visible between the birches and hemlocks in a white mist. The house, which Vanardy had restored from the dilapidated condition in which he had found it, was silent save for an occasional creaking of old timbers. Clifford Wade, once his chief lieutenant and now the major-domo of his little household, had gone to the village for the mail. The Phantom stood lost in reflections, his deep gray eyes soft and luminous. On occasion they could sting and stab like points of steel, but in repose they were the eyes of a dreamer. The nostrils were full and sensitive, and the arch of the lips was partly obscured by a short-cropped beard that would have made him hard to recognize from his photograph in a revolving case at police headquarters.
He turned as a knock sounded on the door. A fat man stepped through the door, groaning and puffing as if the task of carrying his huge body through life were the bane of his existence. Wade, the ostensible owner of Sea-Glimpse—for its real master was seldom seen beyond the boundaries of the estate—placed a bundle of mail on the table, gave his master a long-suffering look, and withdrew.
With a listless air Vanardy glanced at the mail and began to unfold the newspapers. He ran his eyes over the headlines, and a caption, blacker and larger than the rest, caught his languid attention. He stared at it for moments, as if his brain were unable to absorb its meaning. Slowly and dazedly he mumbled the words:
DYING MAN ACCUSES THE GRAY PHANTOM
Presently his quickening eye was running down the column of type. It was a lurid and highly colored account of the murder of Sylvanus Gage, a crime said by the police to be one of the strangest on record. Headquarters detectives confessed themselves baffled by several of the circumstances, and especially by the fact that the murderer seemed to have accomplished the apparently impossible feat of making his escape through a door which had been found bolted on the inside when the police reached the scene.
The murder, it was stated, would probably have gone down in the annals of crime as an unsolved mystery but for the fact that the dying man had whispered the name of his assailant to Patrolman Pinto, who had been summoned to the scene by the housekeeper, Mrs. Mary Trippe, after the latter had been disturbed by a mysterious sound. The name mentioned by the victim was that of Cuthbert Vanardy, known internationally as the Gray Phantom and regarded by the police as one of the most ingenious criminals of modern times.
However, the account went on, the Gray Phantom’s guilt would have been clearly established even without his victim’s dying statement. It had been learned that for some years a feud had existed between the two men and that the Gray Phantom had threatened to take his enemy’s life. The total absence of finger prints and other tangible clews strongly suggested that the deed could have been perpetrated only by a criminal in the Phantom’s class. The perplexing features added further proof of the Phantom’s guilt. Who else could have made his escape in such an inexplicable manner? Who but the Gray Phantom, who was known to be pursuing a criminal career for pleasure and excitement rather than for the profits he derived from it, would have left behind him a small fortune in perfect stones, taking nothing but a worthless curio?
These and other details Vanardy read with interest. He smiled as he reached the concluding paragraph, stating that a countrywide search for the murderer was in progress and that the police confidently expected to make an arrest within twenty-four hours. He glanced at the accompanying likeness of himself, made from a photograph taken in the early stages of his career.
“What drivel!” he exclaimed, tossing the paper aside. Then, one by one, he glanced through the other early editions of the New York evening newspapers. All featured the Gage murder on the first page, and all the accounts agreed in regard to essential details. In The Evening Sphere’s story of the crime, however, he detected a subtle difference. It presented the same array of damning facts, pointing straight to the inevitable conclusion of the Phantom’s guilt, yet, between the lines, he sensed an elusive quality that differentiated it from the others. He read it again, more slowly this time; and here and there, in an oddly twisted sentence or an ambiguous phrase, he caught a hint that the writer of the Sphere’s article entertained a secret doubt of the Phantom’s guilt.
The suggestion was so feeble, however, that a casual reader would scarcely have noticed it, and whatever doubts the writer may have felt were smothered under a mass of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. He threw the paper down with an air of disdain. Here, in this sheltered retreat, what the world thought of him was of no account. Serene in his seclusion, he could snap his fingers at its opinions and suspicions. He sat down at the piano, and a moment later his finely tapering fingers were flashing over the keys.