“I have said that I do not know,” was his emphatic reply, “and I do not. How could I, when I did not see it? It was large, powerful and ferocious, but whether it was an animal of some kind, or a demon out of hell, I do not know.”
“Perhaps your ears served you better than your eyes?” said Strange. “Did you hear the Thing when it leaped upon you?”
“I did,” replied Deweese, with a shudder. “At almost the very instant that it attacked me I heard it whisper.”
“Eh, bien, Monsieur,” cried Peret, “and what did it say to you?”
“It did not say anything intelligible,” was Deweese’s disappointing reply. “It just whispered.”
Strange and Peret looked at each other in silence. The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders, and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. Strange took a hitch in his trousers, and his face became stern.
“All right,” he said curtly to Deweese. “Stick around till the coroner comes. I want to question you and this other man further, a little later on.”
He gave an order to O’Shane, who was standing a little distance away with his eyes glued on the front of Berjet’s house, then turned to Peret.
“I’m going in,” he growled, and drew his revolver.
The Frenchman threw his cigarette on the pavement, drew his own automatic, and, opening the front gate, ran across the little yard. Followed by Strange and Deweese, who asked and obtained permission to accompany them, Peret buttoned his coat around his frail body, got a firm grip on the window ledge and, with the agility of a monkey, climbed through the broken sash of the window through which Berjet had projected himself.