"You will come again?" she whispered.
"Yes, I am coming again," he said. "Good-night."
He passed out into the drizzle. The door closed behind him, but not before there came to him once more that choking sob from the throat of Miriam Kirkstone.
IX
Keith's hand was on the butt of his revolver as he made his way through the black night. He could not see the gravel path under his feet but could only feel it. Something that was more than a guess made him feel that Shan Tung was not far away, and he wondered if it was a premonition, and what it meant. With the keen instinct of a hound he was scenting for a personal danger. He passed through the gate and began the downward slope toward town, and not until then did he begin adding things together and analyzing the situation as it had transformed itself since he had stood in the door of the Shack, welcoming the storm from the western mountains. He thought that he had definitely made up his mind then; now it was chaotic. He could not leave Prince Albert immediately, as the inspiration had moved him a few hours before. McDowell had practically given him an assignment. And Miss Kirkstone was holding him. Also Shan Tung. He felt within himself the sensation of one who was traveling on very thin ice, yet he could not tell just where or why it was thin.
"Just a fool hunch," he assured himself.
"Why the deuce should I let a confounded Chinaman and a pretty girl get on my nerves at this stage of the game? If it wasn't for McDowell—"
And there he stopped. He had fought too long at the raw edge of things to allow himself to be persuaded by delusions, and he confessed that it was John Keith who was holding him, that in some inexplicable way John Keith, though officially dead and buried, was mixed up in a mysterious affair in which Miriam Kirkstone and Shan Tung were the moving factors. And inasmuch as he was now Derwent Conniston and no longer John Keith, he took the logical point of arguing that the affair was none of his business, and that he could go on to the mountains if he pleased. Only in that direction could he see ice of a sane and perfect thickness, to carry out the metaphor in his head. He could report indifferently to McDowell, forget Miss Kirkstone, and disappear from the menace of Shan Tung's eyes. John Keith, he repeated, would be officially dead, and being dead, the law would have no further interest in him.
He prodded himself on with this thought as he fumbled his way through darkness down into town. Miriam Kirkstone in her golden way was alluring; the mystery that shadowed the big house on the hill was fascinating to his hunting instincts; he had the desire, growing fast, to come at grips with Shan Tung. But he had not foreseen these things, and neither had Conniston foreseen them. They had planned only for the salvation of John Keith's precious neck, and tonight he had almost forgotten the existence of that unpleasant reality, the hangman. Truth settled upon him with depressing effect, and an infinite loneliness turned his mind again to the mountains of his dreams.