The Lake Mystery

by Marvin Dana

“Pooh, no thanks to me,” Billy declared, embarrassed by the emotion in his friend’s voice. “It was only by accident that I interfered—not by volition.”

“I know,” Saxe agreed. “But the fact remains that you were the instrument of salvation, and that is what I shall always remember.” He looked toward Margaret West as he spoke, and saw that her face was very pale. He wondered how much of that pallor—if indeed any of it—had been caused by his own peril. For a fleeting second, the girl’s limpid blue eyes met his, then they were veiled by the thick lashes. He found himself unable to read the meaning that had lain in them. He went to his chair, seated himself, and afterward twisted about to mark the precise line in which the bullet had passed. There could be no manner of doubt: its course had been such that he could have escaped only by a miracle, had he been in his place. There could have been only a slight variation in the direction of the bullet, dependent on the position of the marksman. That variation could by no means have been great enough to save him from a grave, probably a mortal, wound. Saxe shuddered, as the narrowness of his escape was again, and thus visibly, borne in on his consciousness. He looked about the cheery room and into the faces of the others with a sort of wonder in the realization that he was still of the quick, not of the dead. The wine of life took on new flavor. His gaze went again to Margaret.

All went into the music-room presently, still talking of the event that had been so close to tragedy—all except May Thurston. Without attracting any attention, she quietly slipped away from the others into the out-of-doors.

There are times when one finds it well-nigh impossible to analyze the workings of the mind, and it was so with this girl tonight. Suspicion had come to her—suspicion sudden, terrible, irresistible, and she knew not whence it came. She fought against it in an effort of reason, but she fought in vain. She could not flee its clutch, strive as she would. In the end, she made abject surrender, and fled forth into the night, to learn whether suspicion taught her truth or a lie.

May Thurston was a girl of much more than average intelligence. Native shrewdness had been sharpened by years of association with men of ability, to whom her secretarial skill had made her valuable. She had drawn from them something besides her weekly stipend: she had assimilated a faculty for logical deductions made with lightning swiftness, which is not characteristic of women, and is rare among men. Often, in fact, its possessor confuses it with intuition, because the rapidity of such automatic reasoning is so great that its method readily escapes the attention of the one using it. In the present instance, the girl in her distress was totally unconscious of the fact that she had reasoned with exactness from a group of circumstances within her knowledge. Yet, this was the case, and to such reasoning, doubtless, rather than to intuition, was the strength of her suspicion due. Intuitive perception she had to the full, and to it, it is likely, she owed some measure of the belief that now obsessed her, but its origin had been in the reasoning power alone, which she had exercised involuntarily, even unconsciously.

The first fact on which she builded had been the expression of terror on Masters’ face, when she chanced upon him in the wood at dawn. Now, she could no longer believe that fancy had played a trick on her. On the contrary, she was sure of the emotion he had shown, and, too, sure of the sinister significance of it. It meant guilt. Masters was not a timid girl, to be filled with fright at the unheralded coming of another in the forest. She believed, rather, that he possessed an abundance of physical courage, whatever his lack of the moral. Nevertheless, at her call, he had shown abject fear. The signs of it had vanished in the twinkling of an eye; but they had been present for an appreciable length of time. Since there could have been nothing else to cause him alarm in that place, this must have been the fear of discovery, which only guilt could explain. What that guilt might be, it were easy to guess, if one took thought of the event that had so recently befallen, where death had been avoided by the merest hazard of fate. May did not formulate her reasoning in such wise, but this was the nature of it. From it, she drew the conclusion that drove her forth alone into the night. As she went her way up the slope, intuition whispered that the hideous suspicion was truth.

The moon was just thrusting its bulk of gold over the wooded ranges of the eastern shore, and its radiance flooded the ascent, up which she mounted with a step that was unfaltering, though the heart was sick within her. She could see very clearly, and guided her course without hesitation toward the point at which she had encountered the engineer.

When she reached the bit of underbrush in which she had stopped short on first hearing Masters, May peered through the purple dusk, and readily made out the outline of the sapling beneath which the engineer had stood when she accosted him. She at once made her way quickly to a position immediately below its canopy of branches. It was well foliaged, yet not so thickly as to prevent her from observing freely. If, at this moment, anyone had asked her what she expected to find there aloft, she would have been utterly unable to make a coherent explanation, and indeed it must have been instinct, rather than reason, that now guided her in the search, for, without understanding in the least why she did so, she stared up into the branches with fixed intensity, her heart beating like the sound of battle-drums in her ears. Presently, then, her gaze fastened on a line of shadow, high among the branches, and on this she held her attention concentrated, though there seemed nothing in the appearance to justify an absorption so complete. It was, perhaps, instinct again that caused her to feel the importance of this variation from the green black of the foliage. Whether that, or the leaping processes of reason, she was impelled to search out the meaning of the shadow aloft among the branches. She laid hold of the lower branches, and easily swung up into the tree.

May mounted swiftly until the shadow was within reach of her hand. Yet she could not distinguish it clearly on account of a branch, which held a screen of leaves between it and the moon. Putting out her hand, she bent the bough aside, so that the light shone on the thing that had drawn her to the spot. She saw a rifle!

The weapon had been fastened to the trunk of the sapling, at a point where one of the larger branches made a fork. The stock had been secured in a position that permitted easy adjustment, by means of two ropes, which ran to other branches, so placed that tightening cords would vary the mark toward which the rifle was aimed. Masters, from his technical skill as an engineer, would have found little difficulty in making the arrangement to his satisfaction. May realized at a glance that there could be no doubt as to the actuality. Hartley Masters had deliberately attempted to murder Saxe Temple. A wave of loathing swept over her as she grasped this final confirmation of the hideous thing she had suspected. In the flood of abhorrence for the crime, the last remnants of her love were overwhelmed.