Again Colin began to move forward as silently and swiftly as he might, still listening for any significant rustle before or above him. He came to a deep ditch, just missed falling into it, leaped across and found himself on a broad, smooth road, electrically illuminated at wide intervals.
An explanation of the silence occurred to him. This road was practically bare of the telltale leaves. Was it possible that the fugitive had left the false protection of the trees and taken to the road? If so, in which direction had it gone?
To the right, far down the way, a pale, squat bulk glided into view, slinking on short-bowed legs-into the light of a lamp and out again like a fleeting white shadow.
Colin gave vent to a wild hallo and dashed in pursuit. He caught occasional glimpses of the thing ahead as it passed beneath the road-lamps, and thought that he was at last gaining ground. In a foot-race, over smooth going, the creature of the trees had the worst of it. The road curved, crossed a stream, and a high stone wall replaced the forest on the left-hand side.
Scarcely the length of a city square now separated the Irishman from his quarry. Then he saw it pause directly beneath a lamp, a semihuman shape, and shake one long, thin arm at him, as if in defiance. The other hung limp at its side.
Colin shouted again and increased his speed. His feet pounded over the hard oiled road in giant strides, but again the creature flitted from the circle of light, this time to one side.
Colin pulled up and came on more slowly, for a shrill bell was ringing somewhere behind the wall. There followed a rattle, a clang as of iron, and then the creaking of hinges. A voice spoke, mumbling indistinctly, and Colin arrived at a pair of wrought-iron gates just in time to have them shut in his face with a vicious clang.
CHAPTER XVI. Admitted
O’HARA stepped up and, grasping the elaborate iron scroll-work, shook the gate angrily.
“Here, you,” he cried, “if this is the city zoo, what do you mean by letting your ferocious baboons and gorillas roam the country at large?”
The guardian of the gate, he who had opened it for the ape’s entrance and closed it in the face of its pursuer, made no reply, unless an incoherent mutter could be so accounted.
He seemed a tall, thin man, dressed in rough corduroys, and his narrow, triangular face peered out at Colin through the floral scrolls with a curiously furtive looks. Colin could see him very well by the light of the road-lamp, and thought that his face had a whiteness, as if the man had been badly frightened, or was just risen from a sick bed.
“What’s that?” demanded Colin, his indignation growing as he recalled the difficulties and discomforts of his long run and the unpleasant combat preceding it. “You need make no excuses to me! I saw the brute come in here, though I do not see him now, and I wish to come in myself and talk with the man who has charge of this place and takes in raging gorillas like they were invited guests at a parish lawn party! Will you admit me, or will I break down this fancy gate of yours?”
He gave it so violent a shake that the man inside jumped back.
“Stop!” he cried excitedly. “Stop it instantly! You are making a noise-a big noise! Stop it!”
The man’s voice came out of his lips as if there were no teeth behind them, in a kind of hushed and mumbling shriek. But he had teeth, for as Colin loosened his grasp and the man again thrust his face against the scroll, they were bared in an animal snarl. His glaring eyes reflected the lamplight with a reddish gleam. A little shiver of cold crept down the Irishman’s spine. Almost involuntarily he retreated a step.
But Colin O’Hara was not the one to be done out of satisfaction for his wrongs by a white-faced, red-eyed, silly-mouthed booby hiding behind a gate, and so he intimated in very positive terms.
“And,” he concluded, “you will now permit me to speak with the gentleman who has the bad taste to keep you and your brother that you just let in for household pets! And if you do not, I’ll come in, whether or no. We’ll see if the O’Hara must chase wild apes over bog and ditch and win his pains for his trouble!”
At that the keeper of the gate moved sulkily away, mumbling over his shoulder:
“You must wait, then, till I go to the master.”
“I’ll wait, but don’t try my patience too far now!”
The figure vanished into the darkness that lay beyond the wall. O’Hara, peering after him, could see only a few square yards of leaf-matted gravel, on which the pattern of the gate was laid in shadow by the lamp behind him.
Beside it rose a roughly peaked cubic mound of reddening ivy, which he took to be either a much-neglected gatelodge or a monument of some sort. Probably the latter, for there was no sign of door or window. Beyond only dark tree masses loomed against the starry sky. No lights gleamed through the branches, nor did any sound come out save when the night-breeze faintly rustled the dry leaves.
“A queer place and no mistake,” muttered Colin; “and I’m thinking that once in the O’Hara may wish himself out again. I wonder has this beast I’ve chased here anything at all to do with the other matters? Could a monkey, however knowing, have done the things that were performed at the bungalow? No, likely this is an occurrence by itself, and I’ll just give the beast’s owner a piece of my mind and go home again.”
Having reached this conclusion, Colin began to weary of such long waiting. The gatekeeper had now been absent at least a quarter of an hour, and for any evidence of life the Irishman might have been the only human being within miles. Not even a car had passed on the pike behind him. He shifted from one foot to the other and swore softly.
“The white-faced fool has played me some trick!” he grumbled. “Very like ‘twas through his fault that the beast got loose, and he’s never gone near his precious master.”
Well, there was a bell connected with this gate. He had heard it sing. Searching for a moment he located a push-button and set his thumb firmly against it. The bell rang; but it rang inside the ivy-covered heap beside the gate. It was a lodge, then. The shrill clamor sounded so startlingly near and out of place in the silence that Colin hesitated a moment before ringing again.
Was that vague rustling sound from inside the lodge, or was it the wind among the leaves? It ceased after a moment. Colin waited, then as no one came he rang again. For fully five minutes he continued to ring, first steadily, then in long and short assaults on the bell-push. But the noise he made was his sole reward.
Disgusted, and at last really angry, O’Hara drew back from the gate and contemplated the wall. Fully ten feet high it extended right and left in an unbroken barrier.
“My coat to the wall,” said Colin, proceeding to take it off, “and I’ll soon be over.”
The garment with which he intended padding the sharp, wicked-looking spikes was in his hand, and he was about to fling it upward when he arrested his arm and hastily slipped the coat on again. A sound had reached his ear from beyond the gate. Either the gatekeeper was returning or the bell had at last roused someone else to action.
Again he, peered into the grounds. Out of the darkness a figure emerged, walking with a brisk, firm tread, and close behind glimmered the white face and red eyes of his first acquaintance, the gatekeeper. As the newcomer advanced, Colin could perceive, even in the dim, shadow-streaked light, that he was a bearded man, that he wore a pair of round glasses with tortoise rims, and that he was frowning angrily.
“Are you the ruffian who broke that poor brute’s arm? Marco, open the gate and have him come in!”
O’Hara was so taken aback by this forestalling of his own complaint that Marco, he of the white face, had time to unlock and swing wide the portals before he could think of any fit reply. But he had no hesitation about entering. In he stalked and confronted the newcomer, while behind him the gates shut, clanging.
“I am the man your beast would have strangled,” he began indignantly; “and for why do you let him run wild at night, the way he might have killed me had I been a small, weak man? Strangling at the throat of me when I am medita
ting in my own dooryard! Or is it that you are training the handsome creature for murder?”
At that the bearded man laughed. His tone was low, amused, with just the faintest hint of a sneer somewhere about it.
“Pray, my dear sir, don’t carry your accusation to the point of absurdity. If, as you hint, it was Khan who attacked you first, I owe you an apology. Perhaps we had best go to the house and discuss this quietly. Will you follow me, sir?”
O’Hara hesitated, but only momentarily. He was possessed of a dubious feeling, scarcely amounting to suspicion, that wisdom would carry his feet elsewhere than inward. To O’Hara, however, discretion was ever an uninteresting virtue. When the bearded man led the way into the dark shadows of the trees, after him went Colin.
He was still conscious of a sense of repulsion toward the white-faced gatekeeper, following close at his heels, and of a generally eerie and disagreeable impression. But no doubt this was folly, and no man, not even such a one as this gatekeeper, can help the looks he is born with. As for the ungainly monster he had chased here, it was most likely a valuable pet, whose ferocity might or might not be known to its master.
Barely able to see his way, Colin was not aware that they had approached a house until the drive curved sharply aside and they arrived at an entrance, the light of whose open door was shielded by a deep stone porch and a porte-coch?re, arching above the driveway.
From the look of these he judged the mansion to be one of considerable size and dignity, but whether a private residence or a public institute of some kind, he was not yet able to determine. The three men ascended the steps, passed through the porch, and came into a square, old-fashioned reception hall.
Within the door the master of the house turned to his guest. He was an older man than the latter had at first supposed, for the carefully trimmed Vandyke beard was thickly streaked with gray. But the dark eyes behind the great, round lenses were very bright, his expression was keenly intelligent, and these characteristics, together with his quick, alert way of moving, lent him a deceptive look of youth.
As he stood, Colin noticed that he kept his left hand in the pocket of his coat. He noticed it, because that hand had been in that pocket since the first moment of their meeting. Colin had seen other men’s left or right hands concealed in the same consistent manner, and it generally meant one thing.
He himself was unarmed.
“Will you be seated, sir?” inquired the man courteously enough. “I must ask you to excuse me while I give Marco some directions for the setting of Khan’s arm. The poor brute is suffering.”
O’Hara acquiesced. As Marco passed across the room in his master’s wake, the visitor received one quick, full view of him and of his face. The man’s singular pallor was explained, for Marco was an albino. He had removed his cap and disclosed a smooth, oval skull, sparsely covered with bristling white hairs.
By this more revealing light, his eyes, that had gleamed red in the shadow-shot gloom, were a reddish pink, and in that one clear glimpse of them O’Hara had a sickening notion that those eyes saw not out but inward. The pupils were like black pin-points.
The effect was as if the man had literally reversed his vision and contemplated not his outer surroundings but the secrets of his own stealthy soul. A childish and an unjust idea, for what had he against Marco save his unfortunate appearance?
Alone in the hall O’Hara looked about with a judging, curious eye. His first impression had been pleasant. The room was agreeably lighted by a hanging fixture, whose translucent, cream-colored globe diffused a mellow radiance. A log glowed in the depths of a fireplace of black dignity and size. The furniture, while severely plain, was good. There was certainly no hint of mystery or danger in that well-lighted, well-ordered, empty hall.
And yet as he stood there, O’Hara was again keenly conscious of the feeling he had experienced on entering the gate. It was as though the very atmosphere were charged with discomfort and some incomprehensible warning. It was indubitably charged beside with a faint but unpleasant odor. Very like it was that which troubled him. He wondered again if Reed kept other beasts than Khan on the premises, and if the bungalow mystery were not indeed near its solution.
A door opened and his host reentered.
“What? Still standing?” began the man, but Colin broke in on his hospitable protestations-which might have seemed more friendly had not that left hand remained in ambiguous concealment.
“I will not sit down. I am not fit to be seated on a decent chair, for I am mud and mold from the head to the feet of me.”
“And for that it seems that we-or rather Khan, is responsible. You must let me make amends, Mr. — “
“O’Hara,” supplied the other.
“My own name is Chester Reed. When you first came here, Mr. O’Hara, and from Marco’s account, I believed that you had met Khan on the road and broken his arm with a club or bullet in an effort to capture him. Now I am inclined to believe that an explanation is due you. Before I offer it, would you give me an outline of exactly what occurred?”
Something about the man, or the tones of his voice, struck O’Hara as faintly familiar. Disagreeably familiar, too, as if the former association, if there had really been one, was of a distinctly unpleasant nature. Yet the name was new to him and the face called up no recollections. Doubtless the familiarity was no more than a resemblance to someone he had once known.
He began his narrative, but not until Reed had insisted that he be seated, mud or no mud, and had brought out a decanter, glasses, and a humidor of strong but good cigars.
For this service he used his right hand only. The left was still in his pocket. Colin began to believe his suspicions unjustified. Perhaps the man’s hand was in some way deformed, and thus a mere personal habit, because he scowled over the inconvenience of his one-handed hospitality, and two or three times very obviously overcame an impulse to bring the left hand to the aid of its mate.
The tale ended, Reed shook his head with a frown of annoyance.
“This is the result of Marco’s carelessness. He is an excellent trainer, but he will persist in regarding Genghis Khan as a human being rather than a monkey. I myself had no idea that Khan had a trace of viciousness. He is as gentle and tractable as a child, eats his meals at table, dresses himself in the morning, helps Marco with the other animals-in fact does everything human except read, write and talk. I suppose that in the woods Khan cast aside his clothes and his gentility together. I must congratulate you, Mr. O’Hara. I should not myself care to try a fall with Genghis Khan.”
“Have we met before, Mr. Reed?”
The irrelevant question took his host by surprise. For just an instant Colin thought that the lids behind the round lenses flickered curiously. Then he replied with a quietness tinged by natural surprise. “I am sure we have not, Mr. O’Hara. You are not the sort of person whom one forgets.”
Colin met his quizzical smile and glanced down at himself ruefully.
“You may say so-but I’m not always the wild barbarian I do look just now. Your pet led me a wild dance and that’s the truth. You spoke of other animals. Will you tell me this-what kind of beasts do you keep, and did one other of them break loose early in the summer?”
“Never!” Reed put a strong emphasis on the word which he seemed to regret, for he qualified it instantly. “Never, that is, that I am aware of. I have a rather queer assortment, I’ll admit. By methods of my own I breed and raise animals which I intend later to dispose of to menageries, museums, and the like. That is my business.
“But all precautions are taken, and there is no more danger than there might be in connection with any ordinary menagerie or breeding farm. That is what this place really is-a stock farm. Only, instead of cows and sheep we handle-more peculiar beasts. But there are none of them large enough or savage enough to do any particular harm if they did break loose-and they are all shut behind bars and strong fences.”
“Genghis Khan?” suggested O’Hara, with a lift of his red b
rows.
“I have explained that. Hereafter Khan will not be given so much liberty. Some time, if you care to come around by daylight, I shall be glad to show you over my place. It is a privilege I extend to few, but — “
Breaking off in the midst of speech, Reed grasped the arm of his chair with his free hand and half rose with an indistinct ejaculation.
Somewhere-though it was hard to say from what direction-there had begun a peculiar groaning sound. The very floor quivered to its vibration, and Colin was momentarily conscious of a strange feeling of nausea. The sound persisted for perhaps ten seconds, then ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
There followed a sudden patter of feet across the floor of the room over their heads, a faint scream-that was a woman’s voice. Colin sprang to his feet, bewildered, but with an innate conviction that something had gone very much wrong somewhere. Reed, however, laid a staying hand on his arm.
“Do not disturb yourself, I beg. That voice-I may as well tell you, as you will hear of it perhaps from other sources. I live here alone with Marco and-my daughter. She is-deranged. There! It is a painful subject, and the great sorrow of my life, but such things are given us to endure by God, or Providence, or whatever arbitrary force rules the universe. She cannot bear my poor animals, and will often scream like that at a noise from the cages or yards.”
As he spoke, the expression of almost savage impatience which twisted Reed’s features had faded and smoothed into one of deep and painful sadness.
Colin stared.
“Was that first noise made by one of your beasts, then? ‘Twould be a queer animal with a voice like that. I’d like to see the creature.”
“That noise?” Reed looked oddly uneasy. “I really couldn’t say, Mr. O’Hara. It might have been Marco dragging around one of the small cages-or a box. Yes,” he continued with more assurance, “he probably dragged some heavy box across the floor. But my poor daughter takes alarm at the most innocent sounds.”
It was on O’Hara’s tongue to ask why, if the proximity of the beasts so distressed his daughter, Reed did not send her away to a sanatorium or asylum. But he repressed the question. After all, it was no affair of his. Instead, he said gravely:
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