Alan let himself in at the front door and turned on the light in the reading lamp in the library. The electric torch still was burning on the floor and he picked it up and extinguished it; he went up-stairs and brought down his shoes. He had seen a wood fire set ready for lighting in the library, and now he lighted it and sat before it drying his wet socks before he put on his shoes. He was still shaking and breathing fast from his struggle with the man and his chase after him, and by the strangeness of what had taken place.
When the shaft of light from the torch had flashed across Alan's face in the dark library, the man had not taken him for what he was—a living person; he had taken him for a specter. His terror and the things he had cried out could mean only that. The specter of whom? Not of Benjamin Corvet; for one of the things Alan had remarked when he saw Benjamin Corvet's picture was that he himself did not look at all like his father. Besides, what the man had said made it certain that he did not think the specter was "Ben"; for the specter had "got Ben." Did Alan look like some one else, then? Like whom? Evidently like the man—now dead for he had a ghost—who had "got" Ben, in the big man's opinion. Who could that be?
No answer, as yet, was possible to that. But if he did look like some one, then that some one was—or had been—dreaded not only by the big man who had entered the house, but by Benjamin Corvet as well. "You got Ben!" the man had cried out. Got him? How? "But you can't get me!" he had said. "You—with the bullet hole above your eye!" What did that mean?
Alan got up and went to look at himself in the mirror he had seen in the hall. He was white, now that the flush of the fighting was going; he probably had been pale before with excitement, and over his right eye there was a round, black mark. Alan looked down at his hands; a little skin was off one knuckle, where he had struck the man, and his fingers were smudged with a black and sooty dust. He had smudged them on the papers up-stairs or else in feeling his way about the dark house, and at some time he had touched his forehead and left the black mark. That had been the "bullet hole."
The rest that the man had said had been a reference to some name; Alan had no trouble to recollect the name and, while he did not understand it at all, it stirred him queerly—"the Miwaka." What was that? The queer excitement and questioning that the name brought, when he repeated it to himself, was not recollection; for he could not recall ever having heard the name before; but it was not completely strange to him. He could define the excitement it stirred only in that way.
He went back to the Morris chair; his socks were nearly dry, and he put on his shoes. He got up and paced about. Sherrill had believed that here in this house Benjamin Corvet had left—or might have left—a memorandum, a record, or an account of some sort which would explain to Alan, his son, the blight which had hung over his life. Sherrill had said that it could have been no mere intrigue, no vulgar personal sin; and the events of the night had made that very certain; for, plainly, whatever was hidden in that house involved some one else seriously, desperately. There was no other way to explain the intrusion of the sort of man whom Alan had surprised there an hour ago.
The fact that this other man searched also did not prove that Benjamin Corvet had left a record in the house, as Sherrill believed; but it certainly showed that another person believed—or feared—it. Whether or not guilt had sent Benjamin Corvet away four days ago, whether or not there had been guilt behind the ghost which had "got Ben," there was guilt in the big man's superstitious terror when he had seen Alan. A bold, powerful man like that one, when his conscience is clear, does not see a ghost. And the ghost which he had seen had a bullet hole above the brows!
Alan did not flatter himself that in any physical sense he had triumphed over that man; so far as it had gone, his adversary had had rather the better of the battle; he had endeavored to stun Alan, or perhaps do worse than stun; but after the first grapple, his purpose had been to get away. But he had not fled from Alan; he had fled from discovery of who he was. Sherrill had told Alan of no one whom he could identify with this man; but Alan could describe him to Sherrill.
Alan found a lavatory and washed and straightened his collar and tie and brushed his clothes. There was a bruise on the side of his head; but though it throbbed painfully, it did not leave any visible mark. He could return now to the Sherrills'. It was not quite midnight but he believed by this time Sherrill was probably home; perhaps already he had gone to bed. Alan took up his hat and looked about the house; he was going to return and sleep here, of course; he was not going to leave the house unguarded for any long time after this; but, after what had just happened, he felt he could leave it safely for half an hour, particularly if he left a light burning within.
He did this and stepped out. The wind from the west was blowing hard, and the night had become bitter cold; yet, as Alan reached the drive, he could see far out the tossing lights of a ship and, as he went toward the Sherrills', he gazed out over the roaring water. Often on nights like this, he knew, his father must have been battling such water.