Thus it befell that not an hour later Rupert Winter was guiding the shabby and noisy runabout a second time toward the haunted house.
“Nothing doin’,” said the joyous apprentice to crime; “I called old Cary up and got a furious slating for doing it; but he said there wasn’t a watch-dog in sight; and the old man had surrendered. He was going to let him into the library on parole.”
“You need a guardian,” growled the colonel; “where did you telephone? Not in the drug store?”
“Oh, dear, no, not in such a public place; I’ve a shrinking nature that never did intrude its private, personal affairs on the curious world. I used the ’phone of that nice quiet little restaurant where they gave me a lovely meal but were so long preparing it, I used up all the literature in sight, which was the Ladies’ Home Journal and a tract on the virtues of Knox’s Gelatine. When I couldn’t think of anything else to do I routed out Cary—I’d smoked all my cigarettes and all my cigars but one which I was keeping for after dinner. And Cary rowed me good and plenty. There wasn’t a soul in the room.”
“Has any one followed you?”
“Not a man, woman or child, not even a yellow dog. I kept looking round, too.”
“It was a dreadfully risky thing to do; you don’t deserve to escape; but perhaps you did. Atkins may have come to the Palace for some other purpose and never have noticed you.”
“My own father wouldn’t have got on to me in that dinky rig.”
Winter was not so easy in his mind. But he hoped for the best, since there was nothing else for him to do. They were in sight of the house now, which loomed against the dim horizon, darker, grimmer than ever. Where the upper stories were pierced with semicircular arches, the star-sown sky shone through with an extraordinary effect of depth and mystery. All the lighter features of the architecture, carving on pediment or lintel or archivolt, delicate iron tracery of rejas, relief of arcature and colonnade—all these the dusk blurred if it did not obliterate; the great dark bulk of the house with its massive buttresses, its pyramidal copings and receding upper stories, was the more boldly silhouetted on the violet sky; yet because of the very flatness of the picture, the very lack of shadow and projection, it seemed unsubstantial, hardly more of reality than the giant shadow it cast upon the hillside. Electric lights wavered and bristled dazzling beams on either side of the street; not a gleam, red, white or yellow, leaked through the shuttered windows of the house. In its blackness, its silence, its determined isolation it renewed, but with a greater force, the first sinister thrill which the sight of it had given the man who came to rifle it of its secrets.
“Lonesome-looking old shanty, isn’t it?” said the Harvard boy; “seems almost indecorous to speak out loud. Here’s where we cache the car and make a gentle detour by aid of the shrubbery up the arroyo to the north side of the patio. See?”