The Lone Wolf Returns

by Louis Joseph Vance

"Mine!"

"You can not know everything you confided to me after your accident; the many curious secrets you told me, such as that you remembered clearly having broken into Folly's and stolen her emeralds, beside yourself as you were that night with drink, and rebellious into the bargain against a social order that kept you poor and so forbade your marrying Madame de Montalais."

The brief sub-tropic twilight was ebbing fast, night was sweeping swiftly over the face of the waters to blot out the last lingering souvenir of the routed sun. Lanyard looked down as it were into a well of gloom in which a blur of spectral pallor swam, source of those accents which were enunciating proofs of an intimacy with his mind and heart that passed all believing.

"I told you that!"

A low unhappy laugh floated up to him: "But more!"

"Under what circumstances?"

"Let me go back to the beginning. . . . The night after that rencontre of yours with Mallison, Morphew dined me at the Abbaye, another of his establishments where the maître-d'hôtel happened to be a protégé of mine from Paris of pre-War days—but Morphew knew nothing about that. He had just finished telling how you had humiliated him before Folly, and was making my blood curdle with threats to be revenged—O but you were wrong to make an enemy of that one, Michael!—when he was called to the telephone. He came back grinning hideously, and said his agents reported having traced you and Madame de Montalais to the Inn of the Green Woods. You would never, Morphew boasted, return to New York the same man. I tried to wheedle him into disclosing his mind, but he was too wary, I learned nothing; and the best I could manage was to bribe my maître-d'hôtel, as soon as Morphew's back was turned again, to try to get a warning through to you by telephone. Then I made believe to be indisposed, got rid of Morphew, and engaged an automobile I had used before. . . . Never, my friend, shall I forget that ride! not even that night of our flight to Cherbourg from Paris was its equal for wildness . . . if you remember . . ."

A hand found Lanyard's in the mirk and clasped it tightly. He suffered it, replying simply: "I remember."

"Let me tell you, Michael, when we swung wide to clear your automobile by the roadside, and that other in which Morphew's people were pursuing you came hurtling toward us like a juggernaut gone mad, I did not hope to live another minute. As it turned out, my hired car came through with a crumpled fender for all damage. It was the other cannoned off and turned turtle in the ditch. The men in it escaped somehow with their lives, though they crawled back to the road too badly shaken to be dangerous. I left them trying to fit a tyre from their wrecked car to yours, and took you and Madame de Montalais back to New York with me. She had wrenched an ankle falling into the ditch when you threw her off the road, and was unable to walk; otherwise she had come to no harm. But you—it seemed a miracle you lived . . .

"You had your right arm and two ribs broken, and a great gash in your head—you'll find the scar under your hair. The surgeons said it meant concussion of the brain, you might survive but never could be your mental self again. It was two months before you were able to talk connectedly, more than a few words at a time. I took you to my apartment from the hospital, and myself nursed you through your convalescence. As it progressed, one saw that mentally as well as bodily your recovery would be complete—it was your spirit had been wounded beyond repair. All your old vivacity was gone, Michael, you never laughed; you seemed fond of having me near you, but fonder still of being solitary, sitting all alone with your black thoughts, brooding . . .