The Lone Wolf Returns

by Louis Joseph Vance

XXIV

A wilder spirit now ruled the night: the freshening wind blew with zest more constant, with briefer and less frequent lulls, the trees it worried fought back in bootless fury, with thrashing limbs and lows of torment, a heavier wrack coursed the skies, the blinded stars found fewer rifts through which to wash the world with their troubled and misleading light. Lanyard, traversing an unknown terrain, with nothing but impatient memories of Morphew's rough sketch-map to guide him, threw caution to the very wind whose wanton spirit shouted down his noisy flounderings, and shouldered headlong through hedges, coppices and thickets, reckless whether or not he were heard or seen and followed. His prayer, indeed, was not so much that he might give Morphew and his crew the slip, as that chance might throw him into direct personal collision with his enemy.

From that moment, when, after dinner, Morphew had first broached his mind on this foray and Lanyard had taken the tacit implication that he might refuse to play his part appointed only by dedicating himself to an early and a wasted end, he had been determined to find some means—and the fouler the fitter—of coercing Morphew into keeping him company step by step and sharing whatever fate would be his in the outcome.

From the moment when his hand had closed upon the grip of the pistol which he had talked Morphew into trusting him with, he had felt fondly confident, not that he would escape with his life, but that Morphew shouldn't.

Now to find his plan of campaign anticipated, and with a readiness and thoroughness to warrant the belief that his most secret thoughts were not safe from Morphew's acumen, infected Lanyard with a phase of madness, with an actual mania: he was a man-killer in intention as he blundered through the dark, he had fixed in mind a solitary thought, to be in time to abort the proposed burglary by taking Morphew's life. The penalty for that would be so little to pay for vindication of himself to himself—to Eve: the tale would surely find its way to her, some day, wherever she might be; some day she would learn how and why he had died, would understand . . .

He found himself finally at check on the fringe of a black spinney, peering across a hundred yards of lawn at a pale, columned façade that loomed against the confused sky with a certain stateliness of line and mass.

The dwelling seemed to be fast asleep. In the intervening open nothing human moved: only the bystanding trees tossed their arms and lamented as they looked on, like a grouped chorus morbidly curious.

If Morphew and his lot were about, they were keeping to good cover.

The Lone Wolf in his day would have rendered such discretion tribute of slavish flattery, would have picked his way toward the house from shadow to shadow, taking profit of the shelter afforded by every bush and hole between him and his objective, like an Indian stalking his kill: the Lanyard of that night struck straight away across the lawns at the top of his speed. The worst that could reward such audacity would be an attempt to overhaul or intercept him, in which event there would be gun-play, Lanyard could promise that, a fusillade sure to give the alarm: better the hazard of that than to lose precious minutes trying to avoid being seen, thereby granting the thief in the house the time he needed, if he knew his business, to consummate his purpose and escape.

For the thief was in the house already: Lanyard's first cast across the lawns at the wing that held the library—with whose location Morphew's ground plan of the dwelling had made him acquainted—had been repaid by discovery of a lancing play of light in the dark beyond the windows, the thin, broken and restless, blue-white blade of an electric torch in hands either cynically indifferent to detection, or absurdly amateurish.