Then to prowl and mouse, stepping cautiously, stooping warily to examine dusty scraps lying on the bare boards—a dirty newspaper, an old shoe with buckle missing, a broken pewter spoon—all the sordid trifles that accent desolation. Once or twice I thought to make out moccasin tracks in the dust, as though some furtive prowler had anticipated me here, but the light filtering through the crusted panes was meager and uncertain, and, after all, it mattered nothing to me.
The house was divided by a hallway; there were two rooms on either side, all bare and empty save for scraps here and there, and in one room the collapsed and dusty carcass of a rat. On the walls there was nothing except a nail driven into the clay, which was crumbling between the facing of whitewashed brick. From the heavy oaken timbers of the wooden ceilings hung smutty banners of ancient cobwebs, stirring above me as I moved. It was the very abomination of sinister desolation.
Some vague idea of finding something that might aid me—some scrap of evidence I might chance on to kindle hope with—some neglected trifle to damn him and proclaim this monstrous marriage void—it was this instinct that led me into a house abhorred. Nothing I found, save, on one foul window-pane, names, diamond-cut, scrawled again and again: "Lyn," and "Cherry-Maid," repeated a score of times.
And long I lingered, pondering who had written it, and what it might mean, and who was "Lyn." As for "Cherry-Maid," the name was used in the False Faces rites; and at that terrific orgy held on the Kennyetto before the battle of Oriskany, where the first split came in the walls of the Long House, and where that hag-sorceress, Catrine Montour, had failed to pledge the Oneidas to the war-post, the Cherry-Maid had taken part. Indeed, some said that she was a daughter of the Huron witch; but Jack Mount, who saw the rite, swore that the Cherry-Maid was but a beautiful child, painted from brow to ankle——
Suddenly I thought of the hag's daughter as Carolyn. Carolyn? Lyn! By heaven, the Cherry-Maid was Carolyn Montour, mistress of Walter Butler! Here in bygone days she had scrawled her name—here her title. And Walter Butler had been present at that frantic debauch where the False Faces cringed to their prophetess, Magdalen Brant. Perhaps it was there that this man had met his match in the lithe young animal whelped by the Toad-Woman—this slim, lawless, depraved child, who had led the False Faces in their gruesome rites and sacrifice!
I stared at the diamond scrawl; and before my eyes I seemed to see the three fires burning, the clattering rows of wooden masks, the white blankets of the sachems, the tawny, naked form of the Cherry-Maid, seated between samphire and hazel, her pointed fingers on her hips, her heavy hair veiling a laughing face, over which the infernal fire shadow played.
Ah, it was well! Beast linked to beast—what need of priest in the fierce mating of such creatures of the dusk? He was hers, and she his by all laws of nature, and in the eternal fitness of things vast and savage. They must live and breed in the half-light of forests; they must perish as the sun follows the falling trees, creeping ever inexorably westward.
Somberly brooding, I turned and descended into the cellar. There was little light here, and I cared not to strike flint. Groping about I touched with my foot remains of bottles of earthenware, then made my way to the door again and began to ascend.
The stairway seemed steeper and more tortuous to me. As I climbed I became uneasy at its length. Then, in a second, it flashed on me that I had blundered upon a secret stairway[1 ] leading upward from the cellar. At this same instant my head brushed the ceiling; I gave a gentle push, and a trap-door lifted, admitting me to another flight of stairs, up which I warily felt my way. This must end in another trap-door on the second floor—I understood that—and began to reach upward, feeling about blindly until my hands fell on a bolt. This I drew; it was not rusty, and did not creak, and, as I slid it back, to my astonishment my fingers grew wet and greasy. The bolt had been recently oiled!
Now all alert as a gray wolf sniffing a strange trail that cuts his own, I warily lifted the trap to a finger's breadth. The crack of light dazzled me; gradually my blurred sight grew clearer; I saw a low, oblong window under the eaves of the steep, pointed roof; and, through it, the sunlight falling on the bare floor of a room all littered with papers, torn letters, and tape-bound documents of every description. Could these be the Butler papers? I had heard that all documents had been seized by the commissioners after the father and son had fled. But the honorable commissioners of sequestration had evidently never suspected this stairway.