The Rest Hollow Mystery

by Rebecca N. Porter

And then, standing there at that half-open door, Kenwick suddenly lost his headlong impatience. For the realization came to him at last that his experiences of the last twenty-four hours were no casual adventure. This was a game, perhaps even a trap. He had inadvertently stepped into a carefully laid plot. That it had been obviously prepared for somebody else did not alter the seriousness of his present position. Whoever was engineering the thing had assumed that he would do and say certain things. And now, he reminded himself angrily, he had probably done and said them all. Certainly his every move had been direct, impetuous, glaringly obvious. He would have to change his course unless he wanted to die in this accursed house. This game, whatever it was, couldn't be won by throwing all the cards face up on the table and demanding a reckoning. The other players wore masks. If he was to have any chance against them he must adopt their tactics.

He assured himself of all this while he limped down the shallow porch steps. He hadn't the faintest notion of what he was going to do next, but decided to trust to impulse. He had reached the lowest step when all at once he recoiled. Almost with his hand upon the beetle-black limousine he discovered that it was not a limousine at all. It was a hearse.

At that same moment, he heard, coming from the near distance, the voice of some one speaking with unaccustomed restraint. It was a raucous voice talking in a harsh whisper. And then there was a sound of footsteps approaching.

Without an instant's hesitation Kenwick opened the door of the hearse, pulled himself inside, and drew it shut, unlatched behind him. There was no definite plan in his mind except to escape. And the woman had apparently fled so he felt no further responsibility for her.

The steps came nearer. In another minute some one might jerk open the door and discover him. And he remembered uneasily that now he was not armed. He had left the revolver on the table in the den. The footsteps stopped close to his head and a man's voice called to somebody at a distance.

"My orders was to come out here. That's all I know about it. But I'm not goin' to get myself tied up in any mess like this. It's up to the coroner first. It just means that I'll have to make another trip out here to-morrow."

Kenwick heard him clamber to the high seat, and heard him jam his foot against the starter, heard its throbbing response. And then he started away on his long weird drive through the black night.

He had expected his conveyance to be almost as close and stifling as a tomb, but was relieved to find that sufficient air came in through the crack of the door to make the trip endurable. The only provident thing that he had done during the whole adventure, he decided, was to put on his overcoat and hat before leaving the den. One journey bareheaded into the November night had been sufficient to warn him against a repetition of such rashness. He was dressed now as he had been when he first took stock of himself outside the tall iron gate.

The road was smooth asphalt all of the way, and the passenger, stretched at full length on the hard floor of the hearse, felt more comfortable than he had all that ghastly day. During the ride he tried to formulate some definite course of action. For now that the solitary desolation of the last twenty-four hours was ended, he was able to detach himself from its events and to view the whole experience as a spectator.

His vivid imagination pictured the somber house in a dozen different lights. But he discarded them one by one, and his interest centered about the identity of the woman upstairs and the single shot which had pierced the stillness of a few hours before. Of only one thing he was certain—that he was going to get out of Mont-Mer as speedily as possible. It was all very well to conjecture that the house might be the disreputable retreat of some Eastern capitalist, or a rendezvous for radicals, but he preferred to solve the riddle from a distance. He had no intention of being called as a witness in an ugly exposé. It would be easy enough to write to Old Man Raeburn and explain that it hadn't been possible for him to stop off on his way to San Francisco. He fervently hoped that he would never see Mont-Mer again. Without ever having really seen it he had come to loathe it.