RoBards had caught one or two of the nurses at the ancient game and discharged them, only to be looked upon as a meddler. He had threatened the dusky Teen with a return to slavery if she did not try to disabuse the children’s minds of savagery. But she believed too much herself to be relied upon to inculcate atheism.
Keith was a brave little knight, however, and an investigator by instinct. Instinctively he pitted his inborn skepticism against the tyrannies of imagination, and when he could not exorcise a fiend by denying it, he met it with bravery. His bedroom was a little Thermopylæ and he Leonidas fighting the swarming hosts.
Sometimes he surrendered and buried his head under the pillow. Sometimes he put them all to ignominious flight. He had an ally of mystic powers who now and then gave unconscious aid: an old crack-voiced rooster, a tenor who had seen better days, who dreamed aloud at midnight of his former glories and snored a sleepy cock-a-doodle-doo long before the young beaux started their morning fanfare.
This old rooster’s drowsy utterances always reminded Keith that dawn would come again and the sun with its long broom of light would sweep the room clear of its child-hating mobs. The blessed sun would explain the panther about to spring as an old rocking chair, the broom-straddling witch at the window as a tulip tree bough, the pirate with uplifted cutlass as a pile of clothes.
Keith loved realism. He was educating himself in the night school to disbelieve the dark, to rely upon hard facts and distrust his terrifying fancies. A dawning scientist was evolving so fast that each week covered an æon of human experience.
Besides, he had an explorer’s curiosity, a soldier’s curiosity, a willingness to bet his safety against any mystery that threatened or nagged him.
He had put to flight no end of Indians, Skinners, and bogies by simply pointing his forefinger at them, snapping his trigger-thumb and observing, “Bang! bang!”
To-night he quaked only a few minutes before he realized that whatever the menace was it was downstairs. His first theory was that Jud Lasher might be stealing back to make another attempt to carry Immy away. The why of Jud’s persistence baffled him—as well it might. His best guess was that Jud wanted to take Immy with him on the whaling ship that his father had commanded him to join.
This thought substituted anger for terror. Keith’s little heart plunged with resentment and he slipped out of bed. The first sweat of fear chilled as he stood barefoot on the creaking floor. Then, like a child ghost in his long white nightshirt, he stole from his room to the hall. He peered into Immy’s room and saw that she was asleep in safety. He padded stealthily to his father’s room and, lifting the latch as silently as he could, swung back the door. He was stunned to find the room empty, the bed unoccupied, the covers still smooth and taut.
His father might be at work in the library. He peered over the banisters, but the library door was open and no light yellowed the hall carpet as he had so often seen it when he had wakened on other occasions and made adventurous forays about the house in search of a drink or reinforcements against the armies in his room.