Miss Mertoun gave a shrill scream. A creature was looking at us through the open entrance behind Aire—a strange creature.
The thing that looked at us was using Maryvale’s face, but it was not Maryvale any longer. The countenance, blank of any jot of humanity, had become a mere bag with features. It lingered there only for a moment, staring at us with incomprehension so complete that a pang of pity thrilled through me. A woman sobbed. The face was gone.
Pell-mell the men were gone, too, in a wild chase scattering across the lawn, and I among them. Yet sorry as I was for Maryvale, he did not concern me now. I had sterner work even than trammelling a moonlight madman.
I determined to risk the notice of my absence in order to make certain that the bicycles were properly waiting where Toby had promised to conceal them. Keeping under the shadow of trees where I could, I hastened across the southern lawn toward the oaks that guard the drive below the gate-house towers. I was just in time to see someone drag one of the bicycles from its bushy covert into the full moonlight and bend over the front tyre with a gleaming blade ready to slash. I sprang upon this man, mastered him more by the surprise of my leap than by main strength. He fell face upward, groaning. His knife lay on the grass ten feet away.
“Morgan! What crazy work is this?”
He thrashed about in my inexorable grip, and blurted out his words in speech that reverted toward the primitive. “The killers, the killers! They bikes was for them. I saw the lad fetch ’em and hide ’em, aye I did. ’E’s sweet on ’er since she took notice of ’im.”
“What are you talking about?” I blustered. “What do you know about the murderers?”
He struggled to rise, but I let my weight bear down, and he relapsed with another groan, though certainly not hurt. “I know who did the killin’. I’ve known all along.”
I shook him roughly by the shoulders. “Don’t lie to me. Come, out with it, now, or I’ll throttle you.”
“Mr. Blenkinson told us. It’s the sure truth.”