“Safe enough here,” said Mark. “All locked up. We’re staying, the pilot and I.”
“But I insist!” She stamped the ground impatiently.
Five minutes of chilling delay, and she had it. Nor would she relinquish its care to the most courteous traveling man. She plunged through the snow with it banging at her side.
“Queer about that bag,” Rosemary murmured to Danby Force, who marched at her side.
To her surprise he shot her a strange—perhaps, she thought, a startled look.
“As if I had discovered some secret,” she thought to herself. “Well, I haven’t—not yet.”
After floundering through the snow for some distance, they came at last to a spot where a trail wound down the mountainside. Ten minutes of following this trail brought them to a long, low, broad-roofed building that, in the gathering darkness, seemed gloomy and forbidding.
“Fine place for a murder,” Danby Force whispered to Rosemary.
“Don’t say that!” She shuddered.
Stamping their feet on the broad veranda, they pushed the door open and entered. Danby Force struck a match. Directly before him, at the opposite side of the room, was a fire all laid in a broad fireplace. The young man’s second match set a mellow glow of light from the dancing flames searching out every dark corner. For the time at least, the place lost its forbidding aspect. Indeed it might well have been the banquet hall of some ancient British hunting lodge, of long ago.