«A hideout,» I said. «When the Lodge was built, forty years ago, these hills were a good hideout.»
«One thing puzzles me,» said Neville. «The emptiness of the Lodge. If you were traveling in time, wouldn’t you bring back some artifacts? Wouldn’t you want something to put up on the mantel?»
«It might be only a stopping place. A place to spend the night every now and then.»
He reached out and took the cube and glass. «One thing bothers me,» he said. «I should have turned this over to the sheriff.»
«What in the world for?» I asked. «It would only confuse him more, and he’s confused enough already.»
«But it’s evidence.»
«Evidence, hell,» I said. «This is no murder. There’s no question what did Stefan in. There’s no mystery to it; there’s nothing to be solved.»
«You don’t blame me, Andy, for wanting to keep it? It’s not mine, I know. I have no right to it.»
«If it’s what you think it is,» I said, «you have more right to it than anyone I know. Four studies in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, all on Marathon …»
«Only three on Marathon,» he said. «One of them concerned the prehistoric Danube Thoroughfare. Some of the bronzes found there seemed to have some connection with Troy. There have been times when I have had some regrets about that paper. Since then I’ve told myself I wandered somewhat far afield.»
He dropped the cube back into his pocket. «I might as well get started,» he said. «I want to reach the university before nightfall. There are hundreds of color slides in my files, taken on the plain of Marathon, and I want to make some comparison checks. Also I want to get some greater magnification than this reading glass affords.»
He stood up, hesitating for a moment. «You want to come with me, Andy? We could be back in a few days.»
I shook my head. «I have to get down to work,» I said. «If I don’t get that damn book written this time around, I’ll never write it.»
He went into his bedroom and came out with his briefcase.
I stood in the cabin door and watched him drive off. He’d get no sleep this night, I knew. Once back in his office, he’d spend the night working with the photograph of Marathon. I was surprised to find how easy it had become to think of it as a photograph of Marathon. I had come to accept, I realized, what Neville said about it. If there was anyone who would know, I told myself, he would be the one. Neville Piper was among the half dozen men in the world who could be regarded as experts on the Persian campaign of 490 BC. If he said it was Marathon, I stood ready to believe him.
I went out on the porch and sat down in a chair, looking out over the tangled wilderness of the hills. I knew I shouldn’t be sitting there. I had an attache case and a whisky carton, both filled with notes and half-written chapters, some of them only roughed out and others only needing polishing and checking. I had a brand-new ream of paper and I’d had the typewriter cleaned and oiled—and here I sat out on the porch, staring off into nothing.
But somehow I couldn’t make myself get up and go in to work. I couldn’t get Stefan or any of the rest of it out of my mind—Stefan, the cube, Stefan’s empty pockets, and the empty Lodge, empty of everything except that incredible contraption that the sheriff had thought might be some sort of game. Thinking about it, I was fairly certain it wasn’t any game, although, for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what it was.
I sat there stupid, not moving, not wanting to move, sitting there trying to absorb and put together all the strange happenings, listening with half an ear to the sound of wind in the pines that grew just down the hill, the shrill chirring of a startled chipmunk, the squalling of a jay.
Then I became aware of another sound, a distant sound, a droning that steadily grew louder, and I knew it was the noon flight of the Galloping Goose, heading north after stopping at Pine Bend. I got out of my chair and went into the yard, waiting for the plane to come over the treetops. When it showed up it seemed to be flying lower than it usually did, and I wondered if there might be something wrong, although, except for the lower-than-usual altitude, it seemed to be all right. Then, when it was almost directly above me, something apparently did happen. Suddenly the plane, which had been flying level, perhaps actually climbing, although from the ground that would not have been immediately apparent—suddenly the plane went into a bank, dipping one wing and raising the other, and watching it, I had for an instant the distinct impression that it had shuddered. It banked and seemed to wobble, as if it might be staggering. Then, just as it disappeared above the tree-tops, it seemed to right itself and go on as before.
It all had happened so swiftly that I really had seen nothing that I could pin down. Somehow, however, I had the impression that the plane had hit something, although what might be up there to hit I could not imagine. It seemed to me I had read somewhere about planes coming to grief by running into flocks of birds. But that, I remembered, almost always happened on approach or takeoff. Despite the fact that the Galloping Goose had appeared to be flying lower than usual, I realized it probably had been flying too high for birds to be a hazard.
I had glanced down and now, for some reason I don’t remember, perhaps for no reason at all, I glanced up at the sky and saw a dark dot hanging almost directly over me. As I watched it got larger, and I could see that it was something falling. It was wobbling about as if it might be tumbling in its fall. From the distance that I viewed it, it looked remarkably like a suitcase, and the thought occurred to me that a piece of luggage may have fallen or been thrown from the plane. Then I realized the improbability of throwing anything from a plane in flight, and realized, as well, that if a cargo hatch had popped open, there’d be more than one piece of luggage falling to the ground.
The whole thing was ridiculous, of course, but it didn’t seem ridiculous while I stood there watching the flapping, tumbling whatever-it-was falling toward the ground. Afterward it did seem ridiculous, but not at that time.
For a moment it seemed to be rushing straight down upon me. I even took a couple of steps to one side so it wouldn’t hit me, before I saw that it would come to earth a short distance down the slope below the cabin.
It came crashing down, brushing through the branches of a maple tree, and when it hit the ground it made a soggy thud. In the last few seconds before it hit the tree I could see it was not a piece of luggage. It was hard to make out what it was, but it did look something like a saddle, and of all the things a man would expect to come falling from the sky a saddle would have been the last upon the list.
When I heard it hit, I went running down the slope and there, in a dry ravine below the road, I found it—and it was a saddle, although no kind of saddle I had ever seen before. But it did have stirrups and a seat and what I took to be an adaptation of a saddle horn. It was scratched up a bit, but it really wasn’t damaged much. It had fallen in a deep drift of leaves, and the leaves had cushioned its fall. There was, I saw, a rather deep dent in the saddle horn, if that was what it was.
It was heavy, but I managed to hoist it on one shoulder and went puffing and panting up the slope. Back at the cabin I dumped it on the porch floor and it lay all humped up, but when I straightened it out there was no doubt that it was a saddle. The seat was wide and ample and the stirrups were cinched up to the right length for an ordinary man. The horn rose somewhat higher than one would find in an ordinary saddle and was considerably larger and flattened on the top, with what seemed to be control buttons set into its face. The entire structure of the horn was shaped like an elongated box. The saddle was constructed of a good grade of heavy leather, and from the feel of it the frame was made of metal. But leather covered all of it and no metal could be seen. Attached to the forward saddle skirts were two closed saddlebags.