Katherine cried out. Bobby, in spite of his knowledge that sooner or later he would be arrested for his grandfather's murder, stepped forward, nodding.
"I know what you mean, doctor."
"Anybody," the doctor said, "who's ever heard of this house knows what I mean. We needn't talk of that."
The detective, however, was insistent. Paredes in his unemotional way expressed an equal curiosity. Bobby and Katherine had been frightened as children by the stories clustering about the old wing. They nodded from time to time while the doctor held them in the desolate room with the dead man, speaking of the other deaths it had sheltered.
Silas Blackburn's great grandfather, he told the detective, had been carried to that bed from a Revolutionary skirmish with a bullet at the base of his brain. For many hours he had raved deliriously, fighting unsuccessfully against the final silence.
"It has been a legend in the family, as these young people will tell you, that Blackburns die hard, and there are those who believe that people who die hard leave something behind them—something that clings to the physical surroundings of their suffering. If it was only that one case! But it goes on and on. Silas Blackburn's father, for instance, killed himself here. He had lost his money in silly speculations. He stood where you stand, detective, and blew his brains out. He fell over and lay where his son lies, his head on that pillow. Silas Blackburn was a money grubber. He started with nothing but this property, and he made a fortune, but even he had enough imagination to lock this room up after one more death of that kind. It was this girl's father. You were too young, Katherine, to remember it, but I took care of him. I saw it. He was carried here after he had been struck at the back of the head in a polo match. He died, too, fighting hard. God! How the man suffered. He loosened his bandages toward the end. When I got here the pillow was redder than it is to-day. It strikes me as curious that the first time the room has been slept in since then it should harbour a death behind locked doors—from a wound in the head."
Paredes's fingers were restless, as if he missed his customary cigarette.
The detective strolled to the window.
"Very interesting," he said. "Extremely interesting for old women and young children. You may classify yourself, doctor."
"Thanks," the doctor rumbled. "I'll wait until you've told me how these doors were entered, how that wound was made, how this body turned on its side in an empty room."
The detective glanced at Bobby. His voice lacked confidence.