Garth pointed at the cabinet where the medicine was kept. The nightmare whimpering did not cease.
"Get him something," Garth directed. "The doctor must have left you a narcotic."
She walked with a pronounced lurch to the cabinet where Garth heard her fumbling among the bottles, but he did not turn away from Alden. The imbecile sounds stopped, but the lips worked ineffectively again. One of the hands moved slowly with an apparent sanity of purpose. Garth realized that it was motioning him back. Alden started to rise. Garth saw his veins swell and the emaciated muscles strain as he literally dragged himself out of the chair and braced his elbows against the writing-table. He grasped a pencil and wrote rapidly on a piece of paper. Garth understood, and he reached out for the sheet on which Alden had written the words—perhaps a warning, perhaps the truth—which his tongue had been unable to form.
"Don't touch that paper."
There was a new quality about the voice Garth could not deny. There was no more tinkling of glass at the cabinet. He found it difficult to credit Mrs. Alden with that clear, authoritative command. He turned warily and looked into the muzzle of his own revolver. Mrs. Alden's outstretched hand, he noticed, did not waver.
"What does this mean?" he cried.
"It means," she answered in a tired voice, "that if you read what is on that paper you'll leave me no choice. I shall have to shoot."
Alden whimpered again. The paper fluttered to the floor and rested, white and uncommunicative, beneath the table. His face set. He pointed accusingly towards the rear window.
The gesture was clear to Garth. He knew what it meant before his eyes followed its direction. Before he had seen, he appreciated almost palpably the new presence in the room. At the moment it seemed inevitable to him that the tense group should be joined by a stronger force, the inspiration, probably, of the mysteries that had posed it, and that worked ahead, he could not doubt, to a graver issue for Alden and himself.
The newcomer glided from the shadows by the window and moved to Mrs. Alden's side—huge, powerful. The cap, drawn low over his eyes, and the thick growth about the mouth, robbed his face of expression and gave to his actions a mechanical precision not lightly to be disturbed. He took the revolver from the woman.