The girls seemed engaged in some sort of argument, the red-haired one striving to interest the blond in some plan, the yellow-haired girl stubbornly refusing. At length, with a shrug betraying mingled annoyance and resignation, the blond girl gave in, and they passed toward the dancing marquee arm in arm.
“There you are,” FitzPatrick grumbled, “never knew it to fail; Josephine’s got plenty of will of her own where I’m concerned—where anyone else is, for that matter—but Dolores can twist her round her finger any time she wishes.”
We rocked, smoked and cooled ourselves with repeated orders from the club steward’s stock, played several rubbers of bridge, then returned to the porch for refreshments. By two o’clock the cars began leaving the parking-lot, and by a quarter of three the home and grounds were all but deserted.
“Confound it,” Colonel FitzPatrick grumbled, “where the deuce are those hare-brained girls? Don’t they know I’d like to be home by daylight?”
Interrogation of several homeward-bound couples failed to elicit information concerning the girls’ whereabouts, and our host had lost his temper. “Let’s go round ’em up,” he proposed. “I’m betting we’ll find ’em lallygagging with a pair of shiny-haired sheiks in one of those fool summer-houses!”
HOWEVER WELL THE COLONEL knew his women-folk, his prediction proved a least half-way wrong before we had walked a hundred yards from the clubhouse. From a shaded bower of honeysuckle, ideally adapted for the exchange of youthful vows of undying affection, the sound of a woman sobbing piteously attracted our attention; as we approached, the green gown and yellow hair of Josephine FitzPatrick told us half our quest was over.
“Why, Jo, what’s the matter?” Colonel FitzPatrick asked as he paused beside his daughter. His assumed brusqueness evaporated as he saw her abject misery, and real concern was in his voice as he continued: “Here all alone? Where’s Martin? I thought I saw him here tonight.”
“He was—he is—oh, I don’t know where he is!” the girl returned with the inconsistency of overmastering grief. “He’s somewhere with Dolores, and—oh, I wish I were dead!”
“There, daughter, there,” FitzPatrick patted the girl’s gleaming bare shoulder with awkward tenderness, “tell Dad about it. It can’t be so very bad. Why, only last week Martin asked me for you, and—”
“That’s just it” the girl interrupted with a high, half-hysterical wail. “Dolores knew he wanted me and I wanted him—she didn’t want him, really; she just wanted to take him from me to show she could do it. It’s always been so, Daddy. When we were little girls she always took the doll I loved the most, and broke it when she tired of it. She beat me for honors at school when she heard I was out for the history prize; I never had a beau she didn’t take away from me; now she’s taken Martin, and—oh, Dad, I never wanted anything in all my life as I want him. Make her give him back! She’ll take him as she took my dolls, and—and she’ll break him when she tires of him, too; she’ll never, never give him back to me. Oh, I hate her, I hate her!”
“Now, Jo—” her father began awkwardly, but:
“I know what you’re going to say!” she blazed. “You’re going to tell me she’s an orphan, hasn’t anyone to love or care for her but us, and I must give in to her—give her everything I prize most, because her father and mother are dead! She got away with everything I wanted most on those grounds when we were children; but she shan’t have Martin, I tell you; she shan’t! I love him, and I want him, and I won’t let her have him. I’ll kill her first!”
“Go get your things,” FitzPatrick interrupted authoritatively. “I’ll bring Dolores in—and Martin, too.” He turned away with a stern, set face and tramped purposefully toward the deeper shadow of the evergreen grove.
“Everything she says is true,” he confided as we marched along. “Dolores came to us, when her parents were killed in a railway accident in Virginia. She was only ten then, and was the sole survivor of the wreck. Her father was my younger brother; her mother—humph, well, none of us knew much of her. Jim met her down South somewhere while he was heading a surveying crew. Wrote us all sorts of glowing letters about her, but I never met her—Dad absolutely forbade the match, you see, and when they were married in spite of him, refused to see either of them. Jim got it in his head I was opposed to it, too; so when Father died and cut him out of his will, he’d have nothing to do with me, wouldn’t even answer my letters when I wrote and offered to share the estate half and half with him. Then he and Giatanas were killed, and I took Dolores to live with us. She’s co-legatee in my will with Josephine, and I’ve tried to be a father to her, but—well, there have been times when I thought I’d underwritten too big an issue.”
“Giatanas,” de Grandin repeated softly. “An odd name for an American woman, is it not, Monsieur? What was her surname, if you recall?”
“She didn’t have any, as far as I know,” FitzPatrick returned. “That’s where the difficulties arose. She wasn’t an American. She was a Spanish Gipsy. The seventh daughter of the queen of the tribe, who claimed to be a seeress, and all that sort of tosh. Jim met her when his crew came on their camp, and simply went blotto over her at first glance. I don’t know much about the Gipsies, but I’ve been told they’re not Christians. At any rate, Giatanas and he were married by the tribal rite, not by a clergyman, and I suppose their marriage wasn’t absolutely legal, but—”
A crashing, as of some heavy-footed animal, sounded in the undergrowth of a near-by pine copse.
“Who—what the devil’s that?” Colonel FitzPatrick demanded, striding belligerently toward the disturbance, “Come out o’ that, whoever you are, or I’ll come in after you. Now, then, come on—good God, look!”
Parting the long-needled branches with blind, groping hands, a young man in evening dress stumbled and staggered into the pool of luminance shed by a Chinese lantern. His collar and tie were undone, his shirt broken loose from its studs, his clothing in utter disarray. Blood streamed over his chin in a steady spate, staining his linen and dripping on the pine needles at his feet. At first I thought his lips parted in a drunken grin, but as he reeled nearer I gave an exclamation of horror. The grimace I had thought voluntary resulted from dreadful mutilation. Where the scarf-skin and mucous membrane joined, his lips had been cut away in two semicircular sections, like a pair of parentheses laid horizontally, revealing the white, staring teeth beneath and drenching his chin and breast with a spilth of ruby blood.
“Martin, boy, whatever is the matter—how did it happen?” FitzPatrick asked in a shrill, half-unbelieving whisper.
The young man gave a slavering unintelligible answer, waving his arms wildly toward the clearing behind as his mutilated lips refused to form the words, and goggling at us with rolling, horrified eyes. His impotence and fright, his inability to speak and the wondering horror in his dazed eyes sickened me. It was like witnessing the agony of some gentle, dumb animal, tortured where it had thought to find kindness.
“Quick, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin cried as he snatched the handkerchief from his breast pocket and deftly folded it into a pack for the boy’s maimed mouth, “help me get him to the house; we must take immediate measures, for his coronary vessels are cut—his hemorrhage is dangerous. Let Monsieur FitzPatrick seek his niece, here is work for us!”
While we clawed through the meager supplies of the club’s first-aid kit an attendant telephoned Harrisonville for an ambulance and reported that the big emergency car which Coroner Martin, in his private capacity of funeral director, kept available for service, was already on its way, for the city hospitals resolutely refused to send their cars beyond the limits of the municipality.
“Dieu de Dieu,” the Frenchman swore feverishly, “if we could but obtain a styptic, we might make progress, but this gauze, this adhesive tape, these prepared bandages—what use are they? On the field of battle, yes; in such a case as this, where we must ever consider the coming operation which is to restore the young monsieur’s countenance, non. Ah, pa
rbleu, I have it! Quick, Friend Trowbridge, rush, run, hasten, fly to the so excellent chef and obtain from him some gelatin and a pan of boiling water. Yes, that will do most nobly, I apprehend.”
Working quickly, he made a paste of the gelatin and water, then applied the transparent mixture to young Faber’s torn lips. To my surprise it acted almost as well as collodion, and in a few minutes the entire flow of blood was staunched. We had hardly finished when Martin’s ambulance drew up before the door, its powerful eight cylinder engine panting like a live thing with the strain to which it had been put in making the ten-mile run. Assisted by the genial mortician, who had dropped his other work to superintend the emergency trip, we bundled the injured man into a chair-cot and bore him to the car.
“Mon Dieu, my hat!” de Grandin wailed as I was about to leap into the ambulance and slam the door. “Quick, my friend, get it for me, if you please—it cost me fifty francs!”
I hustled to the check room to retrieve the missing headgear, and as I hurried out again I caught a glimpse of Josephine and Dolores FitzPatrick awaiting the colonel and his car.
Josephine, tear-scarred and tremulous, had evidently been upbraiding her cousin in no uncertain terms, but the red-haired maiden was calm beneath the reproaches.
“Martin?” I heard her exclaim in a cool, ironical voice. “Why, Jo, dear, I don’t want him; you’re welcome to him, I’m sure.”
Something like a draft of winter air piercing through the sultry summer night seemed to chill my spine as I listened. Was it just a crack-brained fancy that made me think her thin, red lips were colored with a smear less innocent than any brand of rouge obtainable at drug stores?
THE CARELESSNESS OF A local fish-dealer in failing to provide adequate refrigeration for his finny stock occasioned a young epidemic of mild ptomaine poisonings, and I was kept busy prescribing Rochelle salt and administering hypodermic doses of morphine throughout the following day. By dinnertime I was in a state bordering on collapse, but Jules de Grandin was fresh as the newly starched linen he had donned for the evening meal.
“What have you been up to?” I asked as we enjoyed our coffee on the side veranda.
“Eh bien, three stories; no less,” he answered with a chuckle.
“What?”
“Three stories, I did say,” he returned. “Upon the third floor of Mercy Hospital, with the young Monsieur Faber. Jules de Grandin is clever. The wounds upon the young monsieur’s face already make excellent progress, there is no infection, and all is prepared for me to graft flesh from his leg upon his mangled lips. When I have done, only a little, so small mustache will be needed to hide his scars from the world. Yes, it is an altogether satisfactory case.”
“How the deuce did he receive that appalling hurt?” I wondered. “It looked almost as though some ferocious beast had worried him. But that’s absurd, of course. There isn’t any game more savage than a rabbit to be found in this section of Jersey.”
“U’m,” de Grandin sipped a mouthful of coffee slowly and beat a devil’s tattoo on the arm of his chair with small, slender fingers. “One wonders.”
“This one doesn’t—not tonight, at any rate,” I answered. “I’m too tired to think. It’s been a hard day, and tomorrow looks like another; I’ll turn in, if you don’t mind.”
“Happy dreams,” he bade with a wave of his hand as I rose to go inside.
PERHAPS IT WAS THE salad I had eaten, perhaps the broiling heat of the July night which made me so thirsty; at any rate, I woke with patched tongue and paper-dry lips some time between midnight and dawn and reached sleepily for the carafe of chilled water on my bedside table. I upturned the chromium-plated bottle, but no cooling trickle of liquid reached my glass. “Hang it!” I muttered as I sought my slippers and started for the bathroom to replenish the exhausted water supply.
“Dieu, non; I shall make no treaty with such as you!” I heard de Grandin whisper as I shuffled past his door on my return trip. “Away, hell-spawn, I enter no engagements—”
I paused before his door, wondering whether it were better to waken him or let his nightmare pass, when a further sound came from beyond the panels—a queer, baffling sound, like something scratching and clawing at the stout copper screen at the window. I hesitated no longer.
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed as I entered the bedroom. Jules de Grandin lay on his bed, his limbs taut and rigid, his fingers clutching at the linen. Beyond the screen, clawing at the copper mesh with the fury of a savage beast, was the biggest owl I had ever seen. With beak and talon it fought the woven wire, and in its glowing, yellow eyes there blazed a steady glare of concentrated malignancy and hatred.
A moment I stared at the uncanny thing, completely taken aback; then, acting without conscious thought, I hurried to the window and dashed the contents of my water-bottle full in its evil face. “Be off!” I ordered sharply. The visitant’s fiery eyes disappeared as though they had been two glowing coals extinguished by the flood of water, and with a scream of mingled rage and fright it flapped away in the surrounding shadows.
“Cordieu!” de Grandin woke with a start and sat bolt-upright. “I have had a most exceedingly evil dream, Friend Trowbridge. I dreamed a mighty owl, well-nigh as great as Uncle Sam’s so glorious eagle, came clawing at the window, and bade me keep darkly secret a fact I discovered today. I refused its order, and it made at me with beak and claws, as if it were a devil-bird from hell’s own subcellar!”
“H’m, the devil part of it was probably a dream,” I answered, “but the owl was certainly real enough. The biggest one I ever saw was scratching at the screen like a thing possessed when I came down the hall a moment ago. I thought—”
“Ha, do you tell me? And where is it now?” he interrupted.
“Drying itself, I imagine.”
“You mean—”
“I didn’t know what else to do to discourage it, so I flung a quart or so of water on it.”
“Oh, Trowbridge, my good, my incomparable Trowbridge!” he applauded. “You know not what you do; but always you do the right thing. Did you also address it?”
“Yes,” I grinned sheepishly. “I said, ‘Be off!’”
“Mort d’un rat mort!” he cried, leaping from the bed and flinging both arms about me. “You are priceless, my old one. You are perfection’s own self, no less!”
“What the deuce—”
“You did perfectly. If it were a physical, natural bird, which I greatly doubt, the dousing you gave it was enough to discourage its ardor, beyond dispute; if it were what I damnation suspect, the baptism and your unequivocal command to take itself elsewhere were precisely what was required to rid us of its presence. Oh, my inestimable one, if I could be as sure of myself in my wisdom as you are in your ignorance, I should esteem Jules de Grandin more highly.”
“Thank heaven you aren’t, then,” I countered with a laugh. “You’re bad enough as it is; if you admired yourself any more there’d be no living with you!”
“Bête!” he cried. “I have killed for less than that; the least I should do is challenge you to mortal combat and—”
“Confound it!” I interrupted. “And at this unholy hour, too!” My bedroom telephone had commenced ringing with all the infernal insistence of which those instruments of torture are capable when we are blissfully asleep.
“Hullo, Dr. Trowbridge,” came the challenge over the wire; “FitzPatrick speaking. Can you come over at once? It’s Dolores—she’s gone!”
“Gone?” I echoed. “Why, how do you mean? Have you notified the police—”
“Hell’s fire, no! This is a case for a physician. She had some sort of seizure this afternoon and—”
“All right,” I broke in, “we’ll be right out.”
Ten minutes later de Grandin and I were speeding toward Seven Pines, FitzPatrick’s palatial country seat. [#]
The place was in a turmoil when we reached it. Lights blazed in the windows from top to bottom; the colonel, his daughter and the servants trod on ea
ch others’ heels in aimless circling quests for the missing girl; everywhere was bustle, confusion and futility.
“Hanged if I know what it was,” the colonel confessed as we shook hands. “Dolores had been acting queerly ever since last night when young Faber was injured. By the way, how is he, Doctor de Grandin?”
“Excellent, all things considered,” the Frenchman replied. “But it is of Mademoiselle Dolores we were speaking. What of her?”
“Well, after we found Martin Faber last night I beat my way through the pines to look for her, and found her stretched out on the ground unconscious. It gave me a shock—I thought she might he dead or injured, but just as I scooped to pick her up she came round, rose without assistance, and walked to the house with me as coolly as though falling in a faint was an every-night occurrence with her.”
“Tiens, and was it?” de Grandin asked.
“Not that I know,” FitzPatrick answered shortly. “I asked her if she’d seen Martin, and she said she had.
“‘Was he all right?’ I wanted to know, and:
“‘As right as usual—he’s always something of an ass, isn’t he, Uncle Pat?’ she answered.
“‘Perhaps you’d be interested if I told you he’s been terribly hurt, had both lips almost torn off,’ I snapped.
“‘Perhaps I should, but I’m not,’ she replied as cool as you please, and that’s all I got from her.
“‘You’re inhuman!’ I accused.
“‘So I’ve been told,’ she admitted.
“After that we didn’t speak till we reached the clubhouse.
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