“No,” was Stevenson’s unexpected reply, “I ducked away from the window and beat it to the garage; the door was open and the car was there, and before I knew what I was doing I had that suit case in my hands — it took both my hands, it was so heavy. Then I threw it over my fence and shinned over after it, with my teeth feeling all loose in my head, and, I tell you, I was glad there wasn’t any moon light!”
“I should think so,” Ruggles ejaculated. “We can understand that!”
“You don’t understand yet,” said this surprising visitor of ours. “As I ran across my lawn to get into my back door I saw the figure of a man cross the ray of light which came through the windows of my living room.”
“You mean that a man had been looking into your living room, through your windows?” Ruggles asked, his eyes alight with eager interest.
Chapter III
From Fiend or Devil
“There was a man there, but he wasn’t looking in through my garden, and, through my windows; he was walking back and forth from them, he kept on into my flower beds. He had a flash light in his hand, and he kept it on the ground, just as if he were looking for something.”
Lemuel Stevenson stopped abruptly in his strange narrative, and leaned back in his chair as if suddenly struck nerveless. “I don’t know what possessed me, Mr. Ruggles,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I’m not what you’d call a brave man. I’m timid.
“But when I saw that man going through my flower beds like that, I set down that suit case on the grass and I went over to that man, touched him on the shoulder and asked him what he was doing there.
“And when I touched him he’d have screamed if he’d had breath enough — he just couldn’t do a thing but stand and stare at me, there in the darkness — his flash light dropped and lay just where it fell, in my flower bed. I picked up the flash light and turned it on him, right into his face; then I saw it was old Hathaway, and his eyes were the worst thing I’d ever looked at.”
“What do you mean?” Ruggles cried.
“Just what I’ve said — the worst thing I’d ever looked at — fear, horror — not of me, I don’t mean, but of something, and what it is, is what we’ve got to find out. Old Hathaway just stood there and looked at me, with that look in his eyes — the kind an animal might have, if it knew that something was hunting for it close by, something that meant to kill it.
“That was what I felt when I looked into that old man’s eyes. And, all the time, I kept my hand on his shoulder and kept asking him, over and over, ‘What are you looking for? What are you looking for?’
“And when my breath gave out, as it did, after another moment, old Hathaway said in the kind of a whisper you’d expect from a ghost:
“ ‘Garlic bulbs. Have you any garlic bulbs?’ ”
Stevenson’s head bent forward until his chin rested on his breast. “I dropped the flash light then,” he said, panting and shaking. “I dropped the flash light and ran for my life, to the back door of my house. Right near the steps up to the door I’d left the suit case, and I didn’t remember it until I tripped over it, and I lay there, just as I’d fallen, until I was sure old Hathaway had gone.
“Then I dragged the suit case up the steps and into my house — I hadn’t the strength left to lift it. I locked the door and put on the night latch and an old night chain I’d had put on that door years back and never used.
“Then I told my servant, who’d come to know what all the noise I’d made was about, to clear out and go to bed; and, when she’d gone, I hauled the suit case into a little ‘den’ I’ve got off my living room, and when I opened that suit case of books I found in it just what I’ve told you — a folding crowbar, some hammers, a jimmy, I suppose you’d call it, some nippers, reamers, drills, and a coil of hemp rope.
“And I’ve come to you, Mr. Ruggles, who the newspapers say can work out almost any puzzle that has crooked work at the bottom of it — I’ve come to you, Mr. Ruggles, to do two things for me: get that suit case back into that house for me and tell me what’s scaring the life out of that old man, old Hathaway.”
For a long moment Ruggles said nothing. His deep-set eyes remained fixed on Lemuel Stevenson. And when he spoke he said, slowly and earnestly, “I’ll help you. I’ll be glad to help you.” Then Ruggles glanced at the door, just as Lemuel Stevenson had done when he had settled himself on our couch to tell his amazing narrative. “If you haven’t any garlic bulbs, Mr. Stevenson, I suggest, as your first step, that you immediately get some.”
“Me get garlic bulbs?” Stevenson demanded. “You’re not turning joker, are you?” There was indignation in his voice.
“No, I am not joking,” said Ruggles, and I had never seen his face wear a graver expression, never seen him more eager, even impatient, to launch into action all his amazing powers. “Think I’m dreaming. Believe me, you’ve come to the wrong man for help and advice. Do anything you like, only get some garlic bulbs, man, and carry a couple of them in your pocket. I’ll tell you more about them later.”
“Tell me now!” Stevenson’s face was as grave as Ruggles’s.
“I’ll tell you when the time comes, but not now,” Ruggles said with decision. “First, as you drive on, with Crane and me, to your house, tell me what you meant when you said that when the Hathaways first came there was a low wooden fence around their house. Has the fence been altered, since then?”
“Altered? You’ll see for yourself! Before it was just as I said, and you can see where the old posts were — just the little, old kind of a fence that a man like me could climb over easily, or even vault over, if he had the mind; but it’s different now: old Hathaway’s had carpenters and men take down that fence and put up another — not a fence,” corrected Lemuel Stevenson, “but a wall, a barricade, right close down to the ground it comes at the bottom, with thick posts sunk deep down in and running six feet up, if they’re an inch — the kind of a fence it would take a good man to climb even if it weren’t for the barbed wire they were putting on top of it when I started away this morning.
“This fortification runs all the way around the big house, with just one entrance at the front, with a lock on it that I’ll warrant is a first-class one.”
“You mean, it is as if the Hathaways wanted to protect themselves from some—”
“From some fiend or devil they think wants to get in at them from the outside,” Stevenson interrupted. “I know: it’s no business of mine. But you wouldn’t feel right if, for some reason you didn’t know anything about, the man who lives next to you here suddenly had people come and bar his windows with sheet iron and you saw him sitting in his front window fingering a revolver. Fiend or devil, animal or human, there’s something hanging around that house of old Hathaway’s, or he thinks there is, that’s driving him crazy with terror.”
Ruggles said nothing for a long moment. Then he spoke again — “Do you carry a gun?”
“I used to,” said Stevenson slowly, “but not of late years.”
“Have you one at your house, a good gun in good working order?”
“Yes,” said Stevenson, enigmatically.
“Are you any sort of a shot?”
“I don’t know. I — used to me.”
Both of us waited again for him to explain, if he cared to. But he apparently did not. As Ruggles had said, Lemuel Stevenson knew how to keep his own secrets about himself.
But I was determined to draw him out in spite of himself, and for that reason I put a straight question which, under the circumstances, I thought was not an improper one: