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Page 67
My father stopped and caught up the hunchback's double-barreled
pistol out of the empty drawer.
The room was now illumined; the moon had got above the tree tops
and its light slanted in through the long windows. The hunchback
saw the thing and he paused; his face worked in the fantastic
light.
"Yes," continued my father, in his deep, quiet voice, "this is
your mistake to-night - to let me get your weapon. Your mistake
that other night was to shoot before you counted the money. It
was only a few hundred dollars. The dozen wooden boxes would
hold no great sum. But the thing was done, and you must cover
it."
He paused.
"And you did cover it - with fiendish cunning. It would not do
for your brother to vanish from your house, alone and with no
motive. But if he disappeared, with the gold to take him and a
horse to ride, the explanation would have solid feet to go on. I
give you credit here for the ingenuity of Satan. You managed the
thing. You caused your brother David and the horse to vanish. I
saw, on that morning, the tracks of the horse where you led him
from the stable to the door, and his tracks where you led him,
holding the dead man in the saddle, from the door to the ancient
orchard where the grass grows over the fallen-down chimney of
your grandsire's house. And there, at your cunning, they wholly
vanished."
The mad courage in the hunchback got control, and he began to
advance on my father with no weapon and with no hope to win. His
fingers crooked, his body in a bow, his wizen, cruel face pallid
in the ghostly light.
"Dillworth," cried my father, in a great voice, like one who
would startle a creature out of mania, "you will write a deed in
your legal manner granting these lands to your brother's child.
And after that" - his words were like the blows of a hammer on an
anvil - "I will give you until daybreak to vanish out of our
sight and hearing - through the gap in the mountains into
Maryland on your horse, as you say your brother David went, or
into the abandoned cistern in the ancient orchard where he lies
under the horse that you shot and tumbled in on his murdered
body!"
The moon was now above the gable of the house. The candles were
burned down. They guttered around the sheet of foolscap wet with
the scrawls and splashes of Dillworth's quill. My father stood
at a window looking out, the girl in a flood of tears, relaxed
and helpless, in the protection of his arm.
And far down the long turnpike, white like an expanded ribbon,
the hunchback rode his great horse in a gallop, perched like a
monkey, his knees doubled, his head bobbing, his loose body
rolling in the saddle - while the black, distorted shadow that
had followed my father into this tragic house went on before him
like some infernal messenger convoying the rider to the Pit.
IX. The End of the Road
The man laughed.
It was a faint cynical murmur of a laugh. Its expression hardly
disturbed the composition of his features.
"I fear, Lady Muriel," he said, "that your profession is ruined.
Our friend - `over the water' - is no longer concerned about the
affairs of England."
The woman fingered at her gloves, turning them back about the
wrists. Her face was anxious and drawn.
"I am rather desperately in need of money," she said.
The cynicism deepened in the man's face.
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