Burton pressed his electric light to look at his watch. It was two o'clock. He turned back to the window, with a feeling of irritation. Henry Underwood might be a poet and a philosopher, but he was also a fool, or he would not be wandering at two A.M. through a town that was already smouldering with suspicion of the Underwood family. It was, to say the least, imprudent. Burton wished he had not seen him. Probably his errand was entirely innocent and easily to be explained, but the human mind is a fertile field, and a seed of suspicion flourishes like the scriptural grain of mustard.
There was a red glow in the sky over the trees of the garden. Burton wondered if it could be the morning glow. It was hardly time for that. He was speculating upon it idly when his ear caught the sound of returning footsteps in the back hall,--though this time they were so soft that if he had not been alert for any sound he would hardly have noticed them. He drew aside from the window, hid himself in the shadow of the long curtain, and waited. Unless the person in the hall entered this room, he had no right to question his movements.
The door was opened with noiseless swiftness, and a man stood for an instant in the opening. His head was bent forward and he carried a light in his hand,--whether small lantern or shaded candle Burton did not have time to see, for almost at the instant of opening the door the light was quenched. Burton was certain that neither sound nor movement had betrayed his own presence, yet after that single moment of reconnoitering, the light went out and the door was shut sharply. Burton sprang toward it, stumbled over the armchair he had himself placed in the way, picked himself up, and reached the door,--only to look into the blank blackness of the back hall. There was a faint quiver of sound in the air, as though the outer house door had jarred with a sudden closing, and he ran down the hall; the door was unlocked and yielded at once to his touch. For a moment everything was still; then he heard the clatter of feet on a board walk. It was as though some one, escaping, had waited to see if he would be pursued and then had fled on. Burton ran around to the rear of the house, thankful that the moonlight now made his way plain. There was a board walk running from the kitchen door to a high wall at the end of the lot, but the sound he had heard was momentary, not continuous, so, on the theory that the man had crossed the walk, not run down the hundred feet of it to the alley, he ran on to the east side of the house. There was no one to be seen, of course. Any one familiar with the location could have hidden himself in any of a hundred shadows. The lot was filled with trees, and one large oak almost rested against the house. It reminded him of Henry's remark at dinner about getting down from the second story by the oak on the east side, and he glanced up. It looked an easy climb--and two of the house windows were lit. On the impulse of the moment, he swung himself up into the branches. As he came level with the lit windows, Henry Underwood passed one of them, still fully dressed. He was so near that Burton was certain for a moment that he himself must have been discovered, and he waited a moment in suspense. But Henry had passed the window without looking out.
What Burton had expected to discover was perhaps not clear to his own mind. If he had analyzed the intuition he followed, he would have said that he was acting on the theory that Henry had looked into his room, and then, fleeing out of doors to throw him off the scent--by that side door to which he obviously carried a key, since he had let himself in that way shortly before--had regained his room by this schoolboy stairway. The feeling had been strong upon him that he was close on the trail of some one fleeing. But if in fact it had been Henry, how could he challenge him, here in his own room? Clearly he was within his rights here,--a fact that was emphasized when, after a minute, he came to the window and pulled the curtain down.
Burton dropped to the ground and retraced his steps around the rear of the house. Here he saw that the board walk ran down to a gate,--the gate in the rear by which he had seen Mrs. Bussey talking in excited fashion to a man, earlier in the day. The gate opened at Burton's touch and he looked out into an empty alley. It was so obvious that this would have been the natural and easy way of escape that he could only blame himself for folly in chasing an uncertain sound of footsteps past the gate around to the east of the house.
He found his way back to the surgery a good deal humiliated. The mysterious intruder had been almost within reach of his arm, and had got away without leaving a trace, and all that was gained was that hereafter he would be more alert than ever, knowing himself watched. It was not a very creditable beginning. Burton threw himself down on the couch, and his annoyance did not prevent his dropping, after a time, into a sound sleep.
Therefore he did not see how that red glow on the sky above the trees deepened and made a bright hole in the night, long before the morning came to banish the darkness legitimately.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE WORK OF THE INCENDIARY
Burton awoke from his short and uneasy sleep with a sudden start and the feeling that some one had been near him. The room was, however, empty and gray in the early morning light. As full recollection of the events that had passed came back to his mind, an ugly thought pressed to the front. Was it Henry who was persecuting the doctor? Or, rather, was there a possibility that it was not Henry? It certainly was Henry who had been abroad at two in the night,--that was indisputable. Burton had seen him too clearly to be in doubt. Was it not straining incredulity to doubt that it was Henry who had tried to enter his room a few minutes later? If it had been a stranger, would Henry not have been aroused by the opening and shutting of the outside door? It was not a pleasant idea that Miss Underwood's brother was the culprit in the case, but it appeared that he had already laid himself open to suspicion in connection with the series of petty annoyances which his sister had narrated. The local police might not be expert detectives, but they must have average intelligence and experience. And that Henry was moved by a sort of dumb antagonism toward his father was quite obvious.