“Didn’t I tell you that it was rather more than a life-and-death risk?”
Something cold touched Sedgwick’s hand in the darkness. His fingers closed around a flask. “No, no Dutch courage for me. Where is this place?”
“On Sundayman’s Creek, some fourteen miles from the Nook as the motor-car flies.”
“Fourteen miles,” repeated Sedgwick musingly, following a train of thought that suddenly glowed, a beacon-light of hope. “And these Blairs have some connection with the dead woman of the cove, the woman who wore her jewels.” His fingers gripped and sank into Kent’s hard-fibered arm. “Chet, for the love of heaven, tell me! Is she one of these Blairs?”
“No nonsense, Sedgwick,” returned the other sternly. “You’re to act,—yes, and think—under orders till the night’s job is done.”
There was silence for nearly half an hour, while the car slipped, ghostlike, along the wet roadway. Presently it turned aside and stopped.
“Foot work now,” said Kent. “Take the spades and follow.”
He himself, leading the way, carried a coil of rope on his shoulders. For what Sedgwick reckoned to be half a mile they wallowed across soaked meadows, until the whisper of rain upon water came to his ears.
“Keep close,” directed his guide, and preceded him down a steep bank.
The stream was soon forded. Emerging on the farther side they scrambled up the other bank into a thicker darkness, where Sedgwick, colliding with a gnarled tree trunk, stood lost and waiting. A tiny bar of light appeared. It swept across huddled and half-obliterated mounds, marked only by the carpet of myrtle—that faithful plant whose mission it is to garland the graves of the forsaken and the forgotten—shone whitely back from the headstone of the old slave-trader, came to a rest upon a fresh garish ridge of earth, all pasty and yellow in the rain, and abruptly died.