“All right, Mr. Stevenson,” the boy said, sitting down on the trunk and fanning himself with his cap. “She’s inside. She’ll tell you.”
We followed Stevenson into his house.
“Suppose you let Crane and me look at that suit case while you are talking with your servants,” Ruggles said, to remove us from the scene of impending domestic disturbance.
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” Stevenson said, gratefully. “The suit case is in there.” He pointed to a small room which adjoined the living room. “It’s over behind the couch where I left it this morning, I mean last night — this business has got me so fussed up I don’t half know what I’m saying. Anyway, the suit case is in there.”
“No, it’s not there, sir” a woman’s voice said shakily.
“Not there? Then where is it, Mrs. Hollifield?” Stevenson demanded, his voice suddenly taking a harsh tone and his eyes glinting almost savagely.
“It’s gone, and I’m going,” said the housekeeper. She was a capable-looking, honest-faced, middle-aged woman with thick, untidy, iron-gray hair. “I’ve looked after this house for you for near a year and I never thought the day ’d come when I’d leave you; but after you went away this morning he came again, and this time Mary and I saw him.”
Stevenson’s flushed face lost its color. He started back, then recovered himself with an effort. “It’s time you went,” he said coldly to the housekeeper. “I can forgive anything in the world almost but dishonesty. I’ve said this before to you, and I meant it when, a week ago, I warned you that another offense would terminate your employment.” Then, seeing the tears rise in the eyes of the housekeeper, Stevenson’s face changed. “I spoke hastily, Mrs. Hollifield, and I’m sorry.”
He put his hand gently on her trembling shoulder. “Don’t be alarmed. You’ve nothing to fear, with we three men here. Tell us about it, of course. But don’t do it now.”
“No,” she said, “I’d rather tell you now and get it over with. You left the house this morning at a quarter past eight. I remember I was out on the back piazza watching the carpenters Mr. Hathaway had got down from White Plains. They were putting up all that netting and barbed wire all around their place.
“I was out there and heard your car, and you drove out of the garage and down the drive. I heard your car, and so did he, whoever an’ whatever he is, for you hadn’t been gone three minutes when he come in, right into the kitchen, and I looked up and if he wasn’t standing right there, clear as you are now!”
Chapter V
A Saucer of Milk
The housekeeper drew a long, choking breath, then went on: “I must have called out or done something — like as not I did, the way he looked — and his coming into my kitchen without knocking or anything. You know, sir, how it would be, even with some one that looked honest and safe, if you just happened to look up and find him standing there close to you, looking at you without speaking.
“I must have called out, or something, for Mary come running in, and she screamed — I never heard such a scream — then both of us stood just where we was, looking down at him.”
“Down?” Ruggles asked. “I beg your pardon. Please go on, Mrs. Hollifield. You said you and Mary stood looking down at him.”
“Just as we was. And I was just going to tell him to get out and be off about his business, the way I do peddlers and such folks, when he said to both of us, throwing his hand in our faces:
“ ‘You can’t speak! You can’t move!’ He had a bamboo stick in his hand, about three feet or four long, with something bright, that I don’t know what it was, in the end of it; and he moved that rod back and forth across in front of our eyes, with that bright-eyed thing in it and it was all we could see.
“Then he said, or I think he did — I think I heard it and Mary does — ‘You will stand here, just as you are, until—’ We couldn’t hear the rest.
“We couldn’t see very well, and I can’t remember just what was the rest; but it seemed to me he went to the pantry and got a saucer, then poured some milk, just a little, into it, and warmed the saucer over the stove, then, with the bamboo stick in one hand and the saucer of milk in the other, he went out through the pantry toward the dining room, and—”
“Yes, yes,” Stevenson interrupted, “what happened then? Tell me!”
“I don’t — know,” said the housekeeper, “for it was near ten, when I came out of the faint I’d fell into; and Mary was lying there, like I was, on the kitchen floor, and the suit case you spoke of is gone, and Mary’s gone, and I’m going, sir.”
She put her rough hands to her forehead, then passed them nervously over her dilated eyes, then she looked down at the floor. “There’s the tracks he made with the marsh mud on his feet. He came here from the marsh. I’m going—”
She spoke the truth; she collapsed and fell down on the floor, across the muddy tracks to which she had just pointed. It was Ruggles’s strong arms which lifted her to the couch in the little den, and it was he who sent Stevenson running upstairs to the medicine-chest in the bathroom for the ammonia which brought her back to consciousness.
She was made of good, stout material and she recovered herself quickly; but she was determined to get away as quickly as possible from the house which, to her, represented only danger. In another five minutes, she and her battered little trunk and her package of hats and odds and ends were stowed on the grocer’s truck and on their way to the railroad station at Deersdale.
“Well, anyway,” Stevenson said, getting down on his hands and knees and examining the mud stains carefully, “she was right on one point, anyway; that’s mud from the marsh, all right! The rest of what she said was just nonsense, crazy stuff that couldn’t possibly have been true.
“She was — I don’t know what possessed her to act that way; but I mean to be fair to her; she told the truth on one point — this is marsh mud, all right!” He scratched his head. “How do you figure the stuff got here?”
“The suit case is gone,” Ruggles reminded. “How do you suppose it got out of the house? That’s a simple, practical question for you to wrestle with, while Crane and I take your car, if you’ll let us, and follow Mrs. Hollifield to the station and talk with her there until her train comes. There are some questions I must ask her, before we lose sight of her. She was too excited and hysterical to talk just now; and everywhere she looked, in these rooms, reminded her of what she’d just been through. But she’ll be quieter after the fairly long drive to the station and reassured by being away from here, and ready for the questions I must put to her.
“Crane and I’ll be back inside of two hours at most. I’ve an errand at White Plains and Crane and I shall lunch there. Good idea; pasting that time-table on the wall, there, by the telephone. Crane, it’s just noon, and she can’t get a train to New York before one thirty-four. That’ll give us plenty of time—”
“Plenty of time,” Stevenson interrupted, “to talk with a woman who sees and hears things that ain’t there! I wouldn’t waste time on her, Mr. Ruggles, though you’re more than welcome to take the car. Wouldn’t it be better to have Mr. Crane stay here with me, just in case” — he looked out of the window toward the house on the edge of the marsh — “just in case some one came from over there and asked for the suit case? It would be better to have a witness, wouldn’t it?”
“No one will ask you for the suit case,” Ruggles said. “We can eliminate the suit case, for the time being. What is much more to the point is for you to measure these tracks on your kitchen floor, hall runner, and here on this den rug, and see—” Ruggles was measuring the footprints as he spoke, then jotted down the measurements and gave the figures to Stevenson. “There you are!”