"I'll wager my head against a turnip that that impudent vixen put the watch there herself. I'm not sure that she isn't responsible for the laces and handkerchiefs too. Doesn't it strike you as rather odd that her father should ferret out the stolen goods on this particular evening?"
"Oh, come, now, Tayloe, that is carrying your detective genius too far! Grigsby is an honest man if ever there was one. It is more odd that this nest of thieves was not unearthed before. Grigsby only needed to be put upon the scent. A canny Scot has a nose like a pointer-dog's if once you wake him up."
The canny Scot was wide awake at this present moment, rolling his horse up in a part of the road where the banks shut him away from possible observation, he struck a match and examined more closely a piece of paper he had picked up, unnoticed by the Major, in the hut. It had lain open, the written side up, in the middle of the floor. At the first glance he had read nothing but his daughter's name, yet had recognized instantly the lost report, and instinctively secreted it. The match burned long enough for him to verify his first impression.
"October 31, 184-.
"Felicia Jean Grigsby: Lessons, usually fair. Conduct—room for improvement! James Tayloe."
The date was the day before yesterday, when her mother had scolded the girl for loitering on the way home. He recalled the haste and heat with which Flea had answered, while confessing that she had lost the report—she could not say where.
How came she to be inside of that locked door? He had vowed to get at the bottom of this matter. Was he there now?
Flea was worse when her father got home. Her cheeks were purple and glazed with fever, her eyes wild and sightless. Her head rolled restlessly on the pillow; her fingers picked tufts of wool from the blanket while she crooned over and over what her mother described as "outlandish stuff." Her aunt, who had established herself as head nurse, had learned the lines by heart already:
"It stands beside the weedy way;
Shingles are mossy, walls are gray:
Gnarled apple-branches shade the door,
Wild vines have bound it o'er and o'er.
The sumac whispers, with its tongues of flame,
'Here once was done a deed without a name.'"
At the fourth repetition, in her father's hearing, the girl laughed aloud—the hollow, mirthless peal of madness.