The Man in Lower Ten

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

There was a pause: Hotchkiss moved his toes. By that time I had found a knocker and was making the night hideous. But there was no response save the wind that blew sodden leaves derisively in our faces. Once Hotchkiss declared he heard a window-sash lifted, but renewed violence with the knocker produced no effect.

“There’s only one thing to do,” I said finally. “I’ll go back and try to bring the buggy up for you. You can’t walk, can you?”

Hotchkiss sat back in his puddle and said he didn’t think he could stir, but for me to go back to town and leave him, that he didn’t have any family dependent on him, and that if he was going to have pneumonia he had probably got it already. I left him there, and started back to get the horse.

If possible, it was worse than before. There was no lightning, and only by a miracle did I find the little gate again. I drew a long breath of relief, followed by another, equally long, of dismay. For I had found the hitching strap and there was nothing at the end of it! In a lull of the wind I seemed to hear, far off, the eager thud of stable-bound feet. So for the second time I climbed the slope to the Laurels, and on the way I thought of many things to say.

I struck the house at a new angle, for I found a veranda, destitute of chairs and furnishings, but dry and evidently roofed. It was better than the terrace, and so, by groping along the wall, I tried to make my way to Hotchkiss. That was how I found the open window. I had passed perhaps six, all closed, and to have my hand grope for the next one, and to find instead the soft drapery of an inner curtain, was startling, to say the least.

I found Hotchkiss at last around an angle of the stone wall, and told him that the horse was gone. He was disconcerted, but not abased; maintaining that it was a new kind of knot that couldn’t slip and that the horse must have chewed the halter through! He was less enthusiastic than I had expected about the window.

“It looks uncommonly like a trap,” he said. “I tell you there was some one in the park below when we were coming up. Man has a sixth sense that scientists ignore—a sense of the nearness of things. And all the time you have been gone, some one has been watching me.”

“Couldn’t see you,” I maintained; “I can’t see you now. And your sense of contiguity didn’t tell you about that flower crock.”

In the end, of course, he consented to go with me. He was very lame, and I helped him around to the open window. He was full of moral courage, the little man: it was only the physical in him that quailed. And as we groped along, he insisted on going through the window first.

“If it is a trap,” he whispered, “I have two arms to your one, and, besides, as I said before, life holds much for you. As for me, the government would merely lose an indifferent employee.”