CHAPTER XXV
THERE was a galvanized sheet-iron mail-box near the gate of the tannery, and in it once a day a carrier passing on horseback placed the letters and papers which came for the family. Little Jack loved to take the key and open the box after the carrier had passed and bring the contents to the house and distribute it to the various recipients. Hoag sat on the veranda one afternoon waiting for Jack, who had just gone to the box, having heard the carrier's whistle. Presently the boy came in at the gate holding several letters in his hands, and he brought them to his father.
“Here's one without a stamp,” Jack smiled. “That's funny; I thought all U. S. letters had to have stamps on them.”
Hoag saw only that particular envelope in the lot which was laid on his knee.
“It must have been an accident,” he muttered. “The stamp may have dropped off.”
“More likely that somebody passed along, and put the letter into the box,” Jack's inventive mind suggested.
Hoag made no reply. He had already surmised that this might be the case. There was a title prefixed to his name which he had never seen written before, and it held his eyes like the charm of a deadly reptile.
“Captain Jimmy Hoag,” was the superscription in its entirety, and the recipient remembered having seen the scrawling script before. Automatically he singled out the letters for Paul and for Ethel and her mother, and sent Jack to deliver them.
When his son had disappeared Hoag rose and crept stealthily back to his room. Why he did so he could not have explained, but he even locked himself in, turning the key as noiselessly as a burglar might have done in the stillness of night. He laid the envelope on the bed and for a moment stood over it, staring down on it with desperate eyes. Then, with quivering, inert fingers he opened it and spread out the inclosed sheet. It bore the same skull and crossbones as the former warning, and beneath was written:
The day and the hour is close at hand. Keep your eye on the clock. We will do the rest.