The Indian Drum

by William MacHarg; Edwin Balmer

Alan reclosed the case, and put the picture down; then he went into the room with the desk. He tried the cover of the desk, but it appeared to be locked; after looking around vainly for a key, he tried again, exerting a little more force, and this time the top went up easily, tearing away the metal plate into which the claws of the lock clasped and the two long screws which had held it. He examined the lock, surprised, and saw that the screws must have been merely set into the holes; scars showed where a chisel or some metal implement had been thrust in under the top to force it up. The pigeonholes and little drawers in the upper part of the desk, as he swiftly opened them, he found entirely empty. He hurried to the cabinet; the drawers of the cabinet too had been forced, and very recently; for the scars and the splinters of wood were clean and fresh. These drawers and the drawers in the lower part of the desk either were empty, or the papers in them had been disarranged and tumbled in confusion, as though some one had examined them hastily and tossed them back.

Sherrill had not done that, nor any one who had a business to be there. If Benjamin Corvet had emptied some of those drawers before he went away, he would not have relocked empty drawers. To Alan, the marks of violence and roughness were unmistakably the work of the man with the big hands who had left marks upon the top of the chest of drawers; and the feeling that he had been in the house very recently was stronger than ever.

Alan ran out into the hall and listened; he heard no sound; but he went back to the little room more excited than before. For what had the other man been searching? For the same things which Alan was looking for? And had the other man got them? Who might the other be, and what might be his connection with Benjamin Corvet? Alan had no doubt that everything of importance must have been taken away, but he would make sure of that. He took some of the papers from the drawers and began to examine them; after nearly an hour of this, he had found only one article which appeared connected in any way with what Sherrill had told him or with Alan himself. In one of the little drawers of the desk he found several books, much worn as though from being carried in a pocket, and one of these contained a series of entries stretching over several years. These listed an amount—$150.—opposite a series of dates with only the year and the month given, and there was an entry for every second month.

Alan felt his fingers trembling as he turned the pages of the little book and found at the end of the list a blank, and below, in the same hand but in writing which had changed slightly with the passage of years, another date and the confirming entry of $1,500. The other papers and books were only such things as might accumulate during a lifetime on the water and in business—government certificates, manifests, boat schedules of times long gone by, and similar papers. Alan looked through the little book again and put it in his pocket. It was, beyond doubt, his father's memorandum of the sums sent to Blue Rapids for Alan; it told him that here he had been in his father's thoughts; in this little room, within a few steps from those deserted apartments of his wife, Benjamin Corvet had sent "Alan's dollar"—that dollar which had been such a subject of speculation in his childhood for himself and for all the other children. He grew warm at the thought as he began putting the other things back into the drawers.

He started and straightened suddenly; then he listened attentively, and his skin, warm an instant before, turned cold and prickled. Somewhere within the house, unmistakably on the floor below him, a door had slammed. The wind, which had grown much stronger in the last hour, was battering the windows and whining round the corners of the building; but the house was tightly closed; it could not be the wind that had blown the door shut. Some one—it was beyond question now, for the realization was quite different from the feeling he had had about that before—was in the house with him. Had his father's servant come back? That was impossible; Sherrill had received a wire from the man that day, and he could not get back to Chicago before the following morning at the earliest. But the servant, Sherrill had said, was the only other one besides his father who had a key. Was it ... his father who had come back? That, though not impossible, seemed improbable.

Alan stooped quickly, unlaced and stripped off his shoes, and ran out into the hall to the head of the stairs where he looked down and listened. From here the sound of some one moving about came to him distinctly; he could see no light below, but when he ran down to the turn of the stairs, it became plain that there was a very dim and flickering light in the library. He crept on farther down the staircase. His hands were cold and moist from his excitement, and his body was hot and trembling.

Whoever it was that was moving about down-stairs, even if he was not one who had a right to be there, at least felt secure from interruption. He was going with heavy step from window to window; where he found a shade up, he pulled it down brusquely and with a violence which suggested great strength under a nervous strain; a shade, which had been pulled down, flew up, and the man damned it as though it had startled him; then, after an instant, he pulled it down again.

Alan crept still farther down and at last caught sight of him. The man was not his father; he was not a servant; it was equally sure at the same time that he was not any one who had any business to be in the house and that he was not any common house-breaker.

He was a big, young-looking man, with broad shoulders and very evident vigor; Alan guessed his age at thirty-five; he was handsome—he had a straight forehead over daring, deep-set eyes; his nose, lips, and chin were powerfully formed; and he was expensively and very carefully dressed. The light by which Alan saw these things came from a flat little pocket searchlight that the man carried in one hand, which threw a little brilliant circle of light as he directed it; and now, as the light chanced to fall on his other hand—powerful and heavily muscled—Alan recollected the look and size of the finger prints on the chest of drawers upstairs. He did not doubt that this was the same man who had gone through the desk; but since he had already rifled the desks, what did he want here now? As the man moved out of sight, Alan crept on down as far as the door to the library; the man had gone on into the rear room, and Alan went far enough into the library so he could see him.

He had pulled open one of the drawers in the big table in the rear room—the room where the organ was and where the bookshelves reached to the ceiling—and with his light held so as to show what was in it, he was tumbling over its contents and examining them. He went through one after another of the drawers of the table like this; after examining them, he rose and kicked the last one shut disgustedly; he stood looking about the room questioningly, then he started toward the front room.