“What have you got there?” asked the doctor. Oliver passed him, on a dustpan, the fragments of an old box. The doctor pushed aside the pieces with a pencil.
“Jed really did it, eh? I always thought so. I’ve been wondering,” he said vaguely, “about that smell... It has haunted me ever since... I was coming up here myself to find out.”
“But what is it?” demanded Belden.
The doctor uncovered a dusty lump of some substance the size of an egg.
“Cyanide,” he said, peering. “Heat it — to ninety, or a hundred degrees — it gives off a deadly gas — cyanogen.”
The Half-Way House still stands. It was restored, and a road built to it, and a modern heating plant installed. The shutters have been so well repaired that no longer on stormy nights can one hear the ghost horse “stamping.”
The pink room is now a sun parlor.