Ruggles nodded toward me. “Dan, this is Mr. Lemuel Stevenson, whose new neighbors in the town of Deersdale, up in Westchester County, thirty five minutes from here by train, are making him a little nervous.”
“I wouldn’t call myself a nervous man,” said Lemuel Stevenson, closing the door, which I had left slightly open when I came in from the street. “I wouldn’t say I was what you’d call nervous.” He glanced quickly at our windows to see if they too were closed.
Chapter II
Two Dogs and a Gun
But, for all that, he didn’t look nervous. There was not one heroic line in his commonplace features or in his dumpy body; there was nothing distinctive in his carriage; nothing particularly purposeful in his glance — his bluish gray eyes were rather kindly.
Yet something there was about Lemuel Stevenson that made me feel that he’d gone a long way, and might go much farther, without showing or feeling the least consternation when faced by danger. I judged that he was about fifty-five years old, in comfortable circumstances.
His bones seemed rather small, but there was plenty of spread to his shoulders, and he didn’t “carry a bass drum in front” of him, and there wasn’t a pad of fat at the back of his erect neck. I pictured him as a very vigorous, active man through his thirties and forties; not a New Yorker; his eyes had the freedom of glance, the unhurried look, of one who has known, and preferred, the open places.
I wondered where he’d moved over the face of the earth, and what his dominating impulse had been. I wondered about him. He set one wondering. Of one thing I was sure: he’d never showed the white feather.
As if he realized that Ruggles and I were sizing him up, he looked collectedly from one of us to the other. Then he said, “If you’re both ready, I’ll get ahead with it.” I noted his unconscious use of the English idiom, and also the fact that his speech showed no trace of an English accent, as he went on:
“I take things pretty much as I find them, and I don’t bother myself with what my neighbors are doing — not generally. But I’ll own up I don’t like the look of things at that big, dark house next to mine in Deersdale: the folks in that house aren’t right, and you’d agree with me if you’d seen what I have.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned a little toward us. “It’s my opinion they’re in terror of their lives.”
“What makes you think that?” Ruggles asked. “And why do you keep looking at the street door and at those windows? Do you think that some one from that old, dark house may be following you?”
“I don’t know,” said Lemuel Stevenson. “I don’t really figure they are. But, on the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had. I don’t mean the young one, the son. It’s the old man, his father, that gives me the shivers every time I look at him.
“A handsome, high-bred old gentleman I took him for when I saw him the first time, walking up and down the gravel path that runs from the back of his house to his garden. I’m a quiet, regular, steady-going man myself, and when I found he’d taken that house next to mine I said to myself — ‘Here’s a neighbor that looks on life the way I do,’ and it made me feel sort of comfortable.”
“Yes, of course,” Ruggles agreed. “When did he begin to make you — shiver?”
“I’m coming to that,” said Stevenson, slowly. “It was last night, three nights after they’d moved into the house, old Hathaway and his son and the two servants. That’s their name — Hathaway. I’d sort of expected one of them, the old man or the young fellow, to speak to me over the fence — at that time there was just a low, wooden fence between the two houses.
“But they hadn’t spoken to me; so, that third night after they’d moved in, I thought I’d just take a little look in for myself; and, it being a nice, fine night and the fence easy to get over, along about half past nine I—”
“Not wishing to disturb your new neighbors,” Ruggles supplied quickly, “you climbed over the fence and took a little stroll quite near the windows of their living room, where you had noticed there were lights going as if old Mr. Hathaway and his son were sitting in there; and, when you’d got quite close to the windows, you naturally looked in, as you strolled by. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Mr. Stevenson?”
“Why, yes,” said our visitor in surprise. “Yes, that’s just what I did. You’re pretty cute, if I do say it, to know that! How—”
“Not cute at all,” Ruggles denied. “I was simply telling you what almost any one would have done, in your position.”
“In my position?” Our visitor asked the question with a cool abruptness which contrasted sharply with his manner of a moment before. “You’re using a big expression there, Mr. Ruggles. What do you know about my position?”
“Nothing,” said Ruggles, with equal self-possession. “If you’ll let me say so, Mr. Stevenson, I judge that you are a man who can keep his position very much to himself. But it’s not your personal position or situation that I’m concerned with,” Ruggles added smiling.
“Let’s go back to that third night after the Hathaways moved in: last night when you took that stroll past the windows of their lighted living room. You looked in, just as Crane or I would have done in your place. Do you mind telling us what you saw, when you looked in through that window?”
“Young Hathaway,” said Stevenson, nodding a little as he met Ruggles’s eyes, “was sitting there, in a big leather-covered chair, reading a book, at least there was an open book on the table beside him.”
“Nothing very shivery about that,” said Ruggles, himself smiling. “I’m disappointed.”
“You won’t be long,” said our singular visitor. “Young Hathaway was sitting there by the table; he’d been reading, but he’d laid the book down, keeping the place where he’d been reading by putting a revolver in the open place in the book; he kept looking around him all the time as if he thought some one might be trying to creep up behind him.
“There were two dogs on the rug at his feet, two heavy, big-boned dogs, black and savage-looking, the kind a man might see in a nightmare. They crouched there at his feet, not sleeping, for I could see their eyes shine as the light caught them.
“When I first saw them I didn’t think they were alive, they both kept so quiet. But then one of them growled, or maybe both of them did. The night was mild and the window was open a little at the top, and I heard it. I nearly let out a yell — they growled so deep and — sudden and savage.”
“What did they growl at, do you know?” Ruggles asked. He was not smiling now. “Could they have seen you? Or scented you? You know the astonishingly keen scent dogs have.”
“It wasn’t me,” said Stevenson, again clearing his throat. “It was the servant, a foreign looking sort of a little man. He came in through another room somewhere, and the two dogs must have heard him coming. Young Hathaway spoke to the dogs, then called to the servant, ‘It’s all right, Rajak,’ or some such name, I don’t know just what it was; ‘It’s all right, Rajak: the dogs won’t hurt you.’ Then the servant came in.
“He was afraid of the dogs, and I don’t blame him; but he came in and asked what young Hathaway wanted. Young Hathaway said, ‘I’ve been trying to find that suit case of books I brought out from town last night, but I can’t locate it. Maybe I left it in the car in the garage. Go out and look, will you?”
“And then,” said Ruggles, “you climbed the fence to your own yard, went into your house, locked your door, and went to bed.”