My half-formed suspicion was confirmed. The eavesdropper’s footprints were quite distinct. He had crouched directly under the chairs which the adventuress and I had occupied.
I did not retire until an hour later. An indescribable feeling of dread had, though for no adequate reason, begun to weigh upon my spirits and to nag my nerves.
The first faint glimmer of dawn was in the east when something touched me softly on the shoulder. I remembered that I had left my porch window open, and sprang up in a sudden flurry of alarm, but my nerves slackened quickly when the intruder, a black Jamaican, showed me his watchman’s badge.
The old negro was afraid something had happened. He had heard stealthy footfalls upstairs, and somebody’s bedroom door was wide open. On looking into the room he had seen—!
But at this point in his story he choked, overcome. He was an excitable and superstitious old black at best, but now he was fairly beside himself with a terror for which he had no explanation. The occupant of the room, I surmised, had gone out on the porch, properly enough, to smoke an early morning cigar. But the old watchman would not be reassured until I consented to accompany him up to the second floor.
I noted, as we advanced along the corridor, that a door stood ajar. I tapped tentatively. No answer. I repeated the summons, louder. Still no answer. I walked in.
The moonlight that flooded the porch outside filtered in, subdued, through the lace-curtained windows. It revealed a bed. In the center of the bed was the figure of a woman—all in snow white save a single dark-hued covering of some sort which sprawled across the full bosom.
A nameless something made me fumble rather hurriedly for the electric switch. The bright light showed what I had dreaded, almost expected. The dark-colored garment was not a garment at all. It was blood.
It dyed the white bosom repellently and, still welling from its fountain, was fast forming a ragged little pool on the bedcovering. Fair over the victim’s heart, the ornamented stag-horn handle of a heavy hunting-knife, none of the blade visible, stood up like a sinister monument, somehow increasingly familiar to my gaze; and after an instant’s reflection I could have sworn—so plainly did my eyes visualize the motive for this horror—that I beheld a single word scrawled in crimson along the mottled staghorn handle:
“VENGEANCE!”