"But she did manage it, and by Thursday night the party was actually assembled at 'The Breakers.' There was a sou'easter on that night, but the drift-wood burned stoutly in the wide chimney-piece, with now and then a cheerful sputter as a few stray drops sought to immolate themselves in the green and purple flames.
"'Not so bad—eh, mamma?' said Betty, as she slipped another pillow behind Mrs. catherwood's back and handed her the last volume of 'Gyp,' with the pages neatly cut. And then she actually smiled over at me. I think I am beginning to understand Betty.
"Again I pass over many uneventful days. 'Nothing doing,' as Crawfurd put it, and laisser-faire was a good enough motto for our side of the house. The two children, of course, were blissfully happy.
"Three, four, nearly six weeks, and no sign or sound from M'sieur Balencourt. Not so surprising, after all, seeing that we were living on an island surrounded on all sides by deep water and no land within a mile except that little dot called 'The Thimble.' And while we didn't make any parade of our precautions, Crawfurd and I kept watch and watch, just as we used to do in the old Alert, on the China station, twenty-odd years ago. Moreover, the gardener and my boatman were men who could keep their eyes open and their mouths shut, and, finally, there were the four dogs—two Great Danes, a collie, and 'Snap,' the fox-terrier. It would have been a bold man who sought to visit Hoodman's Ledge, uninvited, during that particular month and a half.
"It was the morning of the 1st of August, and I was lounging on the piazza, Crawfurd being on duty at the time. The warm weather had come at last. The air was so soft and delightful that the scientific review I had been reading slipped from my hand and I gave myself up to indolence, gazing lazily at the white pigeons that were trading about the lawn, between the boat-house and a rustic pavilion overlooking the tennis-court. One bird I marked in particular, admiring his strong and graceful sweeps and dips as he circled about, possessed, as it were, with the pure joy of motion. I followed him as he sank down on a long slant to the lawn, swift as a bolt from the blue; then I rubbed my eyes in amaze. It was a pigeon of snowy whiteness that an instant before had been flying free; it was a coal-black nondescript that now fluttered feebly once or twice and then lay still on the gravelled path, close to the stone sun-dial. I ran down the steps and bent over the pitiful thing. Pfui!—the bird was but a charred and blackened lump of dead flesh. There was a disagreeable odor of burned feathers in the air. Mechanically my eye fell on the sun-dial; there was a spot the size of a silver dollar on the side of the pedestal where the stone had crumbled and disintegrated, as though it had been placed at the focus of some immensely powerful burning-glass. I stepped behind the sun-dial and looked out to sea. And there, in line with the pedestal of the dial and the dead bird on the path, lay 'The Thimble.'
"Now, as I have said, 'The Thimble' was a rocky islet only a few rods in extent, but densely wooded with spruce and blue-gum. The general shape of the rock was that of a lady's thimble; hence the name. Rather a picturesque object in the seascape, but, of course, utterly valueless except for occasional picnic uses—a bit of No Man's Land whose purpose in the economy of nature had hitherto remained unfulfilled. But now?
"I went back to the piazza and caught up a pair of stereo-binoculars that were lying on the table. There, shining like a star through the close curtain of green that veiled 'The Thimble,' was the projecting end of a highly polished tube of steel. And even as I gazed a man's face peered out as though in the act of sighting—Aram Balencourt!
"Then I understood. The tube was the means of projecting some enormously powerful heat-beam whose nature must be akin to that of the so-called X-ray. The article I had been reading not ten minutes ago—what was the title?—'Radium, the Wizard Metal'—that incomprehensible substance, forever sending forth its terrible emanations, yet never diminished by even the ten-thousandth part of a grain—a natural force whose properties and functions were but imperfectly understood, even by the learned men who had succeeded in isolating it, an agent of such enormous potency that an ounce or two might serve to put a battle-ship out of commission—a couple of pounds and the universe itself were endangered. Even now from that steel tube, sighted so carefully on the pedestal of the sun-dial, billions of ions might be rushing, invisible to the eye, but certain death to whatever of animal existence they chanced to encounter. There was the pigeon lying dead on the walk.
"'Do hurry, George,' called out Betty's thin, sweet treble. She stood at the entrance to the pavilion and waved a tennis-racquet impatiently.
"'Coming,' was the cheerful response, and Estes turned the corner of the house. He took the gravelled path at full speed. In an instant or two at the farthest he would be passing between the sun-dial and the dead pigeon, in line with those deadly radiations.