The intervening weather in the city was oppressive and I did no further work on the manuscript. When August thirtieth arrived Spain did not show up. I waited for him another week and then drove my car up to his hermitage in the Catskills.
I bumped over the stones of the miserable trail and brought my car to a halt in front of where Spain's house had stood. Before me I saw a yawning circle of trees with the inner sides scorched and withered, and the great gaunt stone chimney alone now rearing from a heap of ashes.
The combustion had been complete. Not a charred stick remained. All was white ash, and well packed down, for it had rained heavily a few nights before.
The evidence of that rain sent my mind hurtling back in review of the weather since Spain had left New York. I remembered that one night a few days before Spain was due to return I had found my apartment so oppressive that I had gone to Brighton Beach. As I lay on the sands, it must have been toward midnight, a squall had driven across the sky and there had been a bit of a blow and a magnificent electrical display, but only a few heavy drops of rain had fallen.
Brighton Beach was over a hundred miles from this spot in the Catskills, and the weather in the two locations might have been wholly dissimilar. Still it was suggestive of the worst possible fears.
I looked about for something with which I could prod into the debris. The only thing available was a great twisted steel lightning rod that reared up through the ashes. The result of my effort was a discovery from which I recoiled.
For a moment I found it expedient to step away from the place. In doing so, I unconsciously dragged the piece of lightning rod along with me. Behind a screen of foliage I sat down weakly. Presently, my eyes followed along that lightning rod, and I noted that one end was freshly broken where I had bent it until it snapped in two. But the other end had been the tip that pointed skyward above the house. This I now saw was fused and melted in a way that no heat of a burning wood could have possibly accomplished.
I need write but little of the duties that followed. Suffice to say, that every paper that might have revealed more than my slight knowledge of Spain's origin or connections had been destroyed. The county records yielded nothing except the deed to his property purchased the year before I met him. There was nothing for me to do but turn matters over to the local authorities and let the law take its course.
I returned to New York and slept off the weariness the ordeal had engendered.
Then I went to my desk and produced my draft of "The Book of Gud" and turned slowly through it. It was all there, a complete manuscript, but including many things on which our differences of opinion had not been reconciled—and Dan Spain was dead!