"Carl," choked Wherry at last, meeting the other's eyes with a glance of wild imploring, "so help me God, I'll run straight. You know that?"
"Yes," said Carl truthfully, "I know it."
An interval of desperate silence, then: "I—I can't thank you, old man, I—I'd like to but—"
"No," said Carl. "I wish you wouldn't."
And Wherry, wildly wringing his hand for the last time, was off to the sleigh waiting in the lane, a lean, quivering lad with blazing eyes of gratitude and a great choke in his throat as he waved at Carl, who smiled back at him with lazy reassurance through the smoke of a cigarette.
Carl's day was restless and very lonely. By midnight he was drinking heavily, having accepted the tray this time and dismissed Kronberg for the night. Though the snow had abated some the night before, and ceased in the morning, it was again whirling outside in the lane with the wild abandon of a Bacchante. The wind too was rising and filling the house with ghostly creaks.
It was one of those curious nights when John Barleycorn chose to be kind—when mind and body stayed alert and keen. Carl lazily poured some whiskey in the fire and watched the flame burn blue. He could not rid his mind of the doctor's farm and the girl in Vermont.
Again the wind shook the farmhouse and danced and howled to its crazy castanetting. There was a creak in the hallway beyond. Last night, too, when he had been talking to Wherry, there had been such a creak and for the moment, he recalled vividly, there had been no wind. Then, disturbed by Dick's utter collapse, he had carelessly dismissed it. Now with his brain dangerously edged by the whiskey and his mind brooding intently over a series of mysterious and sinister adventures which had enlivened his summer, he rose and stealing catlike to the door, flung it suddenly back.
Kronberg, his dark, thin-lipped face ashen, fell headlong into the room with a revolver in his hand.
With the tigerish agility which had served him many a time before Carl leaped for the revolver and smiling with satanic interest leveled it at the man at his feet.