The Blind Man's Eyes

by William MacHarg; Edwin Balmer

He gazed at the south wing of the house; it was absolutely dark and quiet; the windows of the first floor were closed and the curtains drawn; but to-night there was no light in the room. The windows of the room on the second floor were open; Basil Santoine was undoubtedly asleep. Eaton gazed again at the lower room. Then in the dark he moved to the table where he had left his overcoat, and distributed in his pockets and within his clothing the articles he had brought; and now he felt again in the overcoat and brought out a short, strong bar of steel curved and flattened at one end—a "jimmy" for forcing the windows.

Eaton slipped off his shoes and went to his room door; he opened the door and found the hall dark and quiet. He stepped out, closing his door carefully behind him, and with great caution he descended the stairs. Below, all was quiet; the red embers and glowing charcoal of wood fires which had blazed on the hearths gave the only light. Eaton crept to the doors of the blind man's study and softly tried them. They were, as he had expected, locked. He went to a window in the drawing-room which was set in a recess and so placed that it was not visible from other windows in the house. He opened this window and let himself down upon the lawn.

There he stood still for a moment, listening. There was no alarm of any sort. He crept along beside the house till he came to the first windows of the south wing. He tried these carefully and then went on. He gained the south corner of the wing, unobserved or at least without sign that he had been seen, and went on around it.

He stopped at the first high French window on the south. It was partly hidden from view from south and west by a column of the portico, and was the one he had selected for his operations; as he tried to slip his jimmy under the bottom of the sash, the window, to his amazement, opened silently upon its hinges; it had not been locked. The heavy curtains within hung just in front of him; he put out his hand and parted them. Then he started back in astonishment and crouched close to the ground; inside the room was a man moving about, flashing an electric torch before him and then exploring an instant in darkness and flashing his torch again.

The unexpectedness of this sight took for an instant Eaton's breath and power of moving; he had not been at all prepared for this; now he knew suddenly that he ought to have been prepared for it. If the man within the room was not the one who had attacked him with the motor, he was closely allied with that man, and what he was after now was the same thing Eaton was after. Eaton looked about behind him; no one apparently had been left on watch outside. He drew his pistol, and loosing the safety, he made it ready to fire; with his left hand, he clung to the short, heavy jimmy. He stepped into the great room through the curtains, taking care they did not jingle the rings from which they hung; he carefully let the curtains fall together behind him, and treading noiselessly in his stocking feet, he advanced upon the man, moving forward in each period of darkness between the flashes of the electric torch.

The man, continuing to flash his light about, plainly had heard nothing, and the curtains had prevented him from being warned by the chill of the night air that the window was open; but now, at the further side of the room, another electric torch flashed out. Another man had been in the room; he neither alarmed nor was alarmed by the man flashing the first light; each had known the other's presence before. There were at least two men in the room, working together—or rather, one was working, the other supervising; for Eaton heard now a steady, almost inaudible grinding noise as the second man worked. Eaton halted again and waited; if there were two, there might be others.

The discovery of the second man had not made Eaton afraid; his pulses were beating faster and hotter, and he felt the blood rushing to his head and his hands growing cold with his excitement; but he was conscious of no fear. He crouched and crept forward noiselessly again. No other light appeared in the room, and there was no sound elsewhere from the darkness; but the man who supervised had moved closer to the other. The grinding noise had stopped; it was followed by a sharp click; the men, side by side, were bending over something; and the light of the man who had been working, for a fraction of a second shot into the face of the other. It did not delay at all; it was a purely accidental flash and could not have been said to show the features at all—only a posture, an expression, a personality of a strong and cruel man. He muttered some short, hoarse imprecation at the other; but before Eaton heard the voice, he had stopped as if struck, and his breath had gone from him.

His instant's glimpse of that face astounded, stunned, stupefied him. He could not have seen that man! The fact was impossible! He must have been mad; his mind must have become unreliable to let him even imagine it. Then came the sound of the voice—the voice of the man whose face he had seen! It was he! And, in place of the paralysis of the first instant, now a wild, savage throe of passion seized Eaton; his pulses leaped so it seemed they must burst his veins, and he gulped and choked. He had not filled in with insane fancy the features of the man whom he had seen; the voice witnessed too that the man in the dark by the wall was he whom Eaton—if he could have dreamed such a fact as now had been disclosed—would have circled the world to catch and destroy; yet now with the destruction of that man in his power—for he had but to aim and empty his automatic pistol at five paces—such destruction at this moment could not suffice; mere shooting that man would be petty, ineffectual. Eaton's fingers tightened on the handle of his pistol, but he held it now not as a weapon to fire but as a dull weight with which to strike. The grip of his left hand clamped onto the short steel bar, and with lips parted—breathing once, it seemed, for each heartbeat and yet choking, suffocating—he leaped forward.

At the same instant—so that he could not have been alarmed by Eaton's leap—the man who had been working moved his torch, and the light fell upon Eaton.

"Look out!" the man cried in alarm to his companion; with the word the light of the torch vanished.