“I will go there with you,” replied Burke evenly, “and I think the two of us should accomplish something. We can probably handle two shadowy forms.”
Hayden smiled dolefully.
“They handled me last night,” he said ruefully. “I’m a pretty strong man, but something held me as helpless as a baby.”
BURKE alighted at a lonely way-station, standing on a strip of land between a wide marsh and the Hudson.
The marsh ran to the foot of the mountains, and lay sear and rippling in the September breeze. Hayden had stated that the dwelling stood back in the hills, a distance of some five miles. On Burke’s suggestion, they started to walk. Burke wanted to study the country, and, incidentally, study his companion.
The country he found to be sparsely settled. The road wound up through forest-clad rocky hills. The dwelling stood beside a wide stretch of woods, with cleared fields to the north.
Burke scanned the dwelling as he approached it, and found it to be the usual type of farm house of a century ago, buried among dead trees.
The interior of the house was in keeping with the exterior. Oval frames held old prints, horse-hair upholstered, massive dark furniture contrasted with tables and stands covered with white marble tops, the chairs squatted grimly in the quiet rooms and rested on dull rag carpets. The woman and her daughter struck Burke like beings transported from the misty past.
The mother was a tall, sparse woman, with heavy black rings about the eyes. The eyes, black and dreamy, held Burke with a steady, unwinking stare. The daughter was the opposite of her dark, sallow mother. She seemed a lifeless, colorless sprite, seemingly alive by the power and vigor of her more intense mother. She was about twenty years of age, although her chalky face, and thin, bloodless hands, together with her slight frame and indolent movements, seemed to signify an elder age, or some wasting disease. Both were of the dreaming, musing type, speaking softly and briefly, and moving silently about the quiet house, and both were garbed in dresses of white material.