“A light in my house!” exclaimed Rivers. He rose, and the others instinctively rose also, with startled glances at each other.
“Perhaps your family has come home,” suggested Mrs. Waring.
Rivers shook his head. “No, I had a letter from Bess to-day saying she had taken the rooms for two weeks more. It might have been Parker, but I don’t think so. Are you sure you saw a light?”
“On the lower floor,” asseverated Martindale. “Was the door locked when you came out?”
“No.”
“All right,” said Atwood briskly. “Porter and I’ll go back with you, Rivers. No, we don’t need you, Nichols, you’re tired. Come upstairs and choose from Callender’s arsenal.”
“Each of those women begged me secretly not to let him get shot,” whispered Porter to his companion as they set off at a jog trot down the street, Rivers a little ahead. “I suppose they could sing our requiems with pleasure.”
“I know. They pounded it into me, too. They’ve got some kind of an idea between ’em that he’s coming to harm. Anything for an excitement. We’ll get ahead of him when we’re a little nearer to the house.”
It looked very dark and still as they reached it. The moon had set, and the patch of straggling woods stretched out weird and formless. The piano, the infant, the yelping dog had given place to an oppressive silence save for the dismal chirping of insects and the shuddering of a train of coal cars as it backed far off down the track. “There is no light now,” said Porter.
The three were drawn up in a line outside the house, and even while he spoke the gas flared up bright in the second story. The edge of a shadow wavered toward the back of the room; then it came forward and disappeared. The next moment the shade of the front window was partly drawn up and pulled down again by a round white arm, half clad in the loose sleeve of a pink kimono.