Evidently it had, for a tree, with leaves still fresh, hung by its bared roots, head downward into the chasm.
“Pryor oughtn’t to miss this,” said Norton; “but if he is sketching it, he wouldn’t have heard us. Hello, Pryor!” he shouted, at the same time pushing a heavy stone out of the tree-roots over the brink.
Following the crash and a rattle of the stone, came a curious muffled rustling, and then, to their surprise, a flock of buzzards rose from below and flew about in circles over the pool. Norton watched the funereal birds until they had disappeared under the cliff.
“No use of looking for Pryor down there,” said he.
vii
They turned back, reached a clearly-visible branch in the path, and followed it by its windings down the hill. In the late afternoon the shadow of the bluff had fallen upon the wood. They had stopped calling, and several times halted to listen to an illusive mimicry of approaching voices.
“It’s the high tide,” said Carrington, “or the way the wind strikes the trees. But Pryor must have heard us. Why doesn’t he answer?”
Walking on, they realized that it was getting too late to sketch. Norton advised going back to wait for their friend, when, as the path led them down a steep bank, they noticed a faint smoky smell, with a peculiar disagreeable taint, which seemed to increase as they approached the base of the cliff. Turning a corner, they came suddenly upon the unmistakable signs of an abandoned quarry. Near a rusty derrick and some blocks of stone they stopped before a black, rotting shed, with partly collapsed roof, built close against the rock. The dismal ruin had lost its lower wall of boards, a pile of which lay along its open front in the high grass. Its dark interior, half concealed by weeds and poison-ivy, revealed faint outlines of rusting machinery and, contending with the glare of an opening in the rear, the flicker of a fire. The men hesitated a while in the approaching twilight, and then, stepping cautiously forward, looked into the place, to the right of which, by an open staircase, a rope hung downward, ending in an iron hook. Around the smouldering fire the ground seemed freshly swept.
“Some tramp has taken possession here,” said Norton. He stepped forward, but stopped suddenly at a slight rattle of boards overhead.
“Who’s up there?” he called, going over to the staircase.
The noise ceased; but was followed by a loud, rustling sound. Norton cautiously mounted to the top of the steps, then paused as if looking at something upstairs, and a moment later disappeared through the opening.
He had hardly gone, when, with a creaking of boards, Carrington heard his quick shout,—“Get out of there!”
Following a still louder rustling, and a few moments of silence, his friend re-appeared, and hastily descended the step-ladder.
“The place is full of buzzards!” he exclaimed. “I mean just outside, on a ledge of rock, where the wall is down. The infernal birds are feeding on something,—some sheep or cow, I take it, that has fallen over the cliff. There were two or three of them in the shed, and I drove them out.”
As he stepped back, Carrington went to the ladder.
“I wouldn’t go up there,” said Norton. “It’s a disgusting sight.”
The dramatist hesitated a moment, then, despite the warning, quickly climbed into the room above. He was gone longer than Norton, and when at last he appeared, he nearly fell in his hasty downward scramble.
“I warned you,” said Norton, catching the startled look in his friend’s eyes. “But,—what’s the matter?”
“That’s not a sheep those birds are tearing to pieces up there.”
“What is it?”
Carrington looked uneasily at his friend.
“It’s a man.”
“What!” exclaimed Norton, with an incredulous stare, as he walked to the ladder and listened. “I didn’t notice that.”
“You can’t mistake a human skull,” declared his friend. “Did you see a bundle of blankets on the floor?”
Norton remembered that one of the buzzards he had driven out had been sitting on something of that sort, at which Carrington asserted that he had seen the blankets move. “Don’t you think we ought to go up and look into it?” he urged.
“Let it alone,” said Norton, glancing nervously around him. “I should say the sooner we get out of this place the better.”
But Carrington had again started to mount the steps, when both men turned at a sound outside the building, this time unmistakably a murmur of voices, at first low and confused, then louder and clearer, as if rapidly approaching up the hill. Carrington, who had stepped toward the entrance and looked out, sprang back, pointed to the opening in the rear, and, followed by his friend, hurried through the shattered machinery, to halt at the collapsed wall, where a pool of water close against the rock completely cut off their escape. They glanced quickly around the wreckage; then, taking advantage of the brickwork of an old furnace under some wheels and shafting, stooped down behind the projecting boiler-ends.
When, a moment later, they looked through the crevices, a tall man was standing by the fire. He was dressed in black and wore a dark straw hat with curled brim pushed down upon his ears. For a while he stood in profile, and though he made no sound, his lips seemed to be moving, as if he might be whispering to himself. Then, stooping down, he built up the fire with some sticks held in his left hand, pulled a bag from his pocket, opened it, and sprinkled some of its contents on the flames. A dense smoke rose over him under the ceiling, and as this partly hid his emaciated face, he stepped across the light and out of the building.
Hardly a minute had passed when he reappeared against the daylight, with another man dressed like himself. Helped by the latter, he was carrying a large bundle into the shed, a rope-bound package, apparently very heavy, which swung between them on a flexible shoulder pole and swept the grass as they came in. On reaching the middle of the room they stopped, set down their burden, pulled out the pole, and laid it on the ground. The watchers scarcely had time to observe more than the quick agile motions and long glossy hair of the men before the pungent smoke, which was filling the place, hid them from view. When it cleared a little, the bundle was swinging in the air. Suspended on the rope they had noticed, it slowly rose, while one of the men, with arms uplifted, pushed and steadied it, until, as it disappeared through the ceiling hole, he followed it upstairs.
The intruders listened a while to the voices and rattling boards; then, hurrying to the entrance, got through the weeds and down the slope into the woods.
viii
Across a gutter that must have drained the quarry, the path brought them upon marshy ground where Carrington, who had walked into a pool of clear water without seeing it, turned about upon his friend.
“Listen!” he said; “did you hear that rattling sound?”
“No.”
They were well away from the shed, but he spoke in a low voice:
“This thing ought to be investigated. We must go back.”
Norton objected. Declaring that the affair could be reported to the police, he pointed out the obvious danger of interference, under the circumstances, with the men just seen, besides the injustice of forgetting Pryor, who must have got back to the rock by that time and would be waiting for them. After an argument, Carrington yielded, and the two men, following the base of the bluff, at length reached their starting point, where, to their surprise, after mounting to the stone summit, they found no sign of the missing man. They examined the unopened supper-satchel, walked about the bare rock-level, and called loudly in all directions.
It was getting dark. The wind had risen and was making a loud noise in the trees.
“He must have gone home,” said Carrington, looking up at the sky. “I was wrong about the weather. We are going to have a storm. But we can catch him yet.”
At a distant rumble of thunder, th
ey scrambled down the rock and had started westward along the path, when Norton suddenly stopped.
“I didn’t agree with you a while ago,” said he. “But what do you think about examining that shed?”
“Too late now,” replied Carrington, looking about him nervously in the twilight. “Come on; we had better catch Pryor.”
“We may never catch him,” said Norton. “Can you get those infernal blackbirds out of your head? You saw more of it than I did.”
“What!” exclaimed the dramatist. “Do you mean to tell me—that you believe—that Pryor could be in any way——”
“I don’t know what to believe. But the more I think of it, the more——”
“Good Heavens! Come on, then!”
They turned back along the ridge by a path they thought they remembered, but soon lost their bearings. Whether because of the failing light or because the bluff had broken into several confusing spurs, the place, found so quickly before, seemed to have changed its position or passed out of existence, while the woods that Carrington alleged to be of trifling width, defied their efforts to get out into daylight or back to the water’s edge. Judging by sky-gleams, seen through the tossing boughs as they climbed up and down the slopes, the sun might have been setting in all directions. At length, when their difficulties had doubled with the downfall of night, a gleam of light ahead suddenly brought them to an opening in the trees, beyond which they got over a fence and stepped out, not upon the water side, but a swampy meadow, with a high embankment just ahead.
“The railroad!” cried Carrington in disgust. “We have come east instead of west.”
Wading through mud and briars, they gained the slope and mounted it.
Far away on either hand the sharp lines of polished metal were lit by flashes of sheet-lightning and gleams from the rising moon. To the left, a distant watery reflection, the lake, blending with the horizon, lost itself in the darkness.
Norton proposed going back.
“No. We’ve wasted an hour,” said his friend, pulling out his watch and holding it up in the moonlight. “It’s after nine o’clock. Pryor is half-way home by this time. The thing to do is to walk into Fairfield and find him at his hotel.”
Again Norton objected; but after a discussion in which he failed to suggest anything practical, he yielded, and they started westward along the rails, but had not gone far when a distant noise and a flash from the trees ahead halted them. They stepped half-way down the bank, waited while a train rushed by, and when it had slowly slackened its speed and stopped apparently on the distant bridge, watched it for nearly five minutes, until the cause of detention, whatever it was, ceased. By that time Carrington suddenly remembered their chance of catching an incoming train at a small freight station just across the lake and, turning eastward, the two friends followed the retreating noise to the bridge and stepped onto the trestles. Ten minutes later, after a dizzy balancing of foot-steps on the open framework, and then by way of a long plank foothold and trackwalker’s shed, they got to the station.
The stormclouds had blackened. Intermittent windy gusts, with loud rumblings overhead, proved that they had reached the deserted little waiting-room just in time. As they entered it, by the light of its flickering lamps, the ticket agent, a heavily-built, sullen-looking man in a blue shirt, who had been struggling in the wind with some freight boxes, came in to close the windows.
“What right have you men got to hold up the nine-thirty on the bridge a night like this?” he asked angrily, turning upon the trespassers and scowling at Carrington. “She never stops here.”
Carrington declared that they had come over behind the train.
“Then, what did she stop for?” grumbled the man. “There have been three men killed on this bridge since I came here.” He went into the ticket office, closed the door, pushed the tickets through the window, and was about to say something more, when the noise of the expected local train and a howl of wind drowned his words.
Carrington and Norton got on board barely in time to escape a whirling downpour of heavy drops, followed by a tremendous roar of wind and thunder, while the train crept cautiously across the bridge. For several minutes the car trembled and rocked, until successive flashes of lightning ended in a deafening rattle of hailstones on the roof just as a sharp curve in the track saved the window glass.
ix
The storm was over by the time the friends stepped off the cars at Fairfield in the cool night air, to look in vain about the platform and adjoining pavements for a belated cab. The fact that they had forgotten, or never learned, the name of Pryor’s hotel caused a delay, during which, after several inquiries at the ticket office, they hurried about the hail-strewn streets from one possible destination to another.
Tired, discouraged, hungry, still hoping to make up for their spoiled picnic with a festive dinner, they at last found the deserted chair-littered porch and overlit lobby of the suburban tavern sought for, where the clerk, a stout sleepy-looking young man, had been winding up a cuckoo clock. He got down from a chair behind the counter and, after listening to their questions, led them along a dingy corridor into the cloak-room.
“There’s his valise,” said he, “just as he left it. We haven’t seen him since.”
“But he got a room,” said Pryor.
“No. We offered him number thirteen, but he wouldn’t take it. Said he would wait. Some people don’t like that number,” he added, with a compassionate smile.
Norton pulled out the fresh-looking, well-kept valise, examined it nervously, and looked up at his friend.
“I thought you were wrong,” said he solemnly. “What are we to do?”
Carrington hesitated. “He has been caught in the rain,” he answered at last; “or he may have gone back to Eastport. We can go on to the ferry, if you say so, or order supper and spend the night here.”
They had walked again to the desk, and while they stood there deliberating, the clerk had dipped his pen in the ink for the usual ledger endorsement, when Carrington felt a hand laid on his shoulder, and turned quickly upon two policemen whom he thought he had noticed at the station.
“You’re wanted, you men,” said one of them, a tall red-haired giant, with a strong Irish accent, as he seized the dramatist’s wrist. The latter drew back. But a violent wrench of the arm failed to free him.
“You’ve made a mistake. We’ve got something to tell you,” he cried indignantly.
“You’ve got a good deal to tell us,” the big man muttered, tightening his grip, while the astonished captive, seeing that resistance was useless, submitted to the quick onthrust of a pair of handcuffs.
The thing was over in a minute; and when Norton was treated in the same way, the officer turned to the clerk:
“They won’t need supper here tonight,” said he. And while the clerk looked on with an amused smirk, the helpless prisoners, more astonished than angry, followed their captors out into the street.
A half-hour later, in separate cells at the end of a long gaslit gallery, at the station house, they were left to reflect as they chose upon what had happened: a police blunder, a possible newspaper sensation. Bad enough. But it was not that, nor the prison blanket, nor the evil atmosphere of the dirty cell, dimly lit through its door grating, that robbed the supperless Carrington of his rest that night. Wild waking fancies, ghastly suspicions, ended in an oft-recurring nightmare, when, projected against the illusive background of Deadlock Meadow, he would see the figure of a man pursued by nothing visible, yet running in frantic haste,—now as if upon the clouds, now plunging through muddy grass or the waves of a rising tide,—till exhaustion and daylight at last brought the half-hour of rest that prepared him for what followed.
x
The sun was shining bright in one of the upper offices of the station house, where the two dejected friends, who had got throu
gh their prison breakfast, were anxiously waiting, when the door opened and an active, well-dressed, dark-bearded man, whom Carrington recognized as an old acquaintance, stepped into the room, halted suddenly, and stared at the captives.
“What, Mr. Carrington!” he exclaimed. “You arrested?”
“Yes. For crossing a railroad bridge. Is there a fine?”
“It’s not that. It’s what happened to the train near Greenmarsh. A man they found lying on the track. You must know that the express stopped for him just before you went over the bridge.”
“Good God! It’s Pryor.”
“Yes, William Pryor, the artist. I know him.”
“Is he dead?”
“No, but it’s a case of attempted murder. He has been assaulted and drugged. Professor Blackmore, who found him at the station and took him home, has wired us about him.”
A rapid explanation by the two prisoners of what happened to them before their capture soon threw a new light upon the situation, without diminishing its mystery.
“This thing must be looked into,” said the chief, after listening with grave attention to Carrington’s narrative and asking a number of questions. “There is a ten-thirty for Greenmarsh. We had better take it.”
Quickly following a telegram to the professor, and a second breakfast at the hotel, the released friends, in company with the officer and two policemen, were looking out of a car window at the altered scene of their last night’s adventure.
The lake of yesterday had disappeared with the ebb-tide, leaving in its place a wide sunny outlook of waving meadow grass. Fading northward into mist and steeples, it still confronted them at Greenmarsh, and there a walk of ten minutes, in sight of several quarry escarpments, brought them to a shady lawn and a little flat-roofed, vine-clad villa, where the distinguished ethnologist was waiting for them. But there was an anxious look on the kindly aquiline features as, waving his Panama hat, he came down the porch steps and out upon the gravel walk to grasp his friend Carrington’s outstretched hand.
November Night Tales Page 7