“I went out to kill MacLachan next day. I was having pretty good luck at it too, when Terry the Cop came in. They brought me back here and called the doctor, and MacLachan cried out of one eye, for the other was closed.”
I recalled the tailor's black eye. Further I recalled that when some other-world business had taken me to Fifth Avenue I had there encountered Mac (of all persons) in (of all places) a millinery store. The fragments of his conversation which I caught related to ostriches. To my inquiry he replied that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp, and that it was a lawful occupation. The suspicion now lodged in my mind that Mac had been searching for a lost trail. Of this I said nothing to Leon.
“Sometimes at night,” the sick man went on, “when I am not longing to smash up all the world because I can't get out and find her, she comes and sits in the wicker chair, and I hear the pressure of her dear body against the withes, and I feel her breath in the silence, but she never speaks. Is she dead, do you think?”
I most emphatically declined to entertain any such hypothesis. As for the Gnome, it seemed that he soon might be. The Little Red Doctor's visits grew more frequent, and his brow more corrugated, and his eyes more perplexed. Once he went so far as to observe in my hearing that nature could go just about so far without sleep and then it cracked.
“Through that crack,” he remarked, “enters sometimes my old friend, Death, sometimes madness. Let's pray that it won't be madness in the Gnome's case.”
Indications seemed to point in that direction, however. Leon's association with the spirit of the chair became closer and more constant. Night after night I heard him murmuring in the darkness, and the soft creak and rustle and whisper of the chair in reply, until the hairs of my neck quivered.
There came a night when the heat broke under a pressure of wild wind and rain from the northwest that swept Our Square like an aerial charge. It whirled me, breathless, into No. 7, and pursued me up the stairs, puffing out the light at the top. The Gnome was working. Beside him on a stand rustled a little pile of checks, weighted down.
“I'm going to leave a legacy,” he said gayly. “Will you be my executor? You'll have to find Her, you know.”
“Ask me ten years from now, if I'm alive,” I answered. “What's to-night? Reading?”
“Sleep, for you. You look done up. Take the couch and a blanket.”