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Page 34
I went to my own room then. But I did not even undress,
refilling my pipe and seating myself at the open window.
Having looked upon the awful Chinese doctor, the memory of
his face, with its filmed green eyes, could never leave me.
The idea that he might be near at that moment was a poor narcotic.
The howling and baying of the mastiff was almost continuous.
When all else in Redmoat was still the dog's mournful note yet rose on
the night with something menacing in it. I sat looking out across the sloping
turf to where the shrubbery showed as a black island in a green sea.
The moon swam in a cloudless sky, and the air was warm and fragrant
with country scents.
It was in the shrubbery that Denby's collie had met his mysterious death--
that the thing seen by Miss Eltham had disappeared. What uncanny secret
did it hold?
Caesar became silent.
As the stopping of a clock will sometimes awaken a sleeper, the abrupt
cessation of that distant howling, to which I had grown accustomed,
now recalled me from a world of gloomy imaginings.
I glanced at my watch in the moonlight. It was twelve minutes past midnight.
As I replaced it the dog suddenly burst out afresh, but now in a tone
of sheer anger. He was alternately howling and snarling in a way
that sounded new to me. The crashes, as he leapt to the end
of his chain, shook the building in which he was confined.
It was as I stood up to lean from the window and commanded a view
of the corner of the house that he broke loose.
With a hoarse bay he took that decisive leap, and I
heard his heavy body fall against the wooden wall.
There followed a strange, guttural cry. . .and the growling
of the dog died away at the rear of the house. He was out!
But that guttural note had not come from the throat of a dog.
Of what was he in pursuit?
At which point his mysterious quarry entered the shrubbery I do not know.
I only know that I saw absolutely nothing, until Caesar's lithe shape
was streaked across the lawn, and the great creature went crashing
into the undergrowth.
Then a faint sound above and to my right told me that I was not the only
spectator of the scene. I leaned farther from the window.
"Is that you, Miss Eltham?" I asked.
"Oh, Dr. Petrie!" she said. "I am so glad you are awake.
Can we do nothing to help? Caesar will be killed."
"Did you see what he went after?"
"No," she called back, and drew her breath sharply.
For a strange figure went racing across the grass.
It was that of a man in a blue dressing-gown, who held
a lantern high before him, and a revolver in his right hand.
Coincident with my recognition of Mr. Eltham he leaped,
plunging into the shrubbery in the wake of the dog.
But the night held yet another surprise; for Nayland Smith's voice came:
"Come back! Come back, Eltham!"
I ran out into the passage and downstairs. The front door was open.
A terrible conflict waged in the shrubbery, between the mastiff and
something else. Passing round to the lawn, I met Smith fully dressed.
He just had dropped from a first-floor window.
"The man is mad!" he snapped. "Heaven knows what lurks there!
He should not have gone alone!"
Together we ran towards the dancing light of Eltham's lantern.
The sounds of conflict ceased suddenly. Stumbling over
stumps and lashed by low-sweeping branches, we struggled
forward to where the clergyman knelt amongst the bushes.
He glanced up with tears in his eyes, as was revealed by
the dim light.
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