I felt the mental itch of curiosity as I listened. Where had I heard that voice before? He had been speaking in a very low tone, but each word had a familiar ring.
“I think I must have met you before,” I said. “You’re a poet, aren’t you? I used to know a good many poets when I lived in Washington Square.”
“I am no poet,” he said curtly.
“But you write,” I insisted. “I’m sure I’ve heard your voice before. I used to know several novelists. There was…”
“I don’t write,” he broke in rather brusquely. “My name’s Bill Pete and I’ve lived around here nearly all my life.”
“Not Bill Pete, the guide?” I cried in amazement.
“The very same. The clerk told me that you were looking for me. If you want a guide, I think you’ll find that I know my business. I’m familiar with every rookery in these parts and I’ve got a snug little cabin across the bay if you were thinking of camping out.”
“So you’re Bill Pete,” I muttered under my breath. “Well, you’ve got a most astonishing vocabulary for a backwoodsman!” Aloud, I said: “You’ve worked for Doctor Street?”
“Yes, frequently. He always engages me when he comes to the hotel.”
“Then, you’re the man I want. You may consider yourself engaged from now on. I think I’ll use your cabin to-morrow night. Is it comfortable?”
“Yes, sir,” Bill Pete murmured. “I think you’ll find it very comfortable.”
Once more I shot a quick look at that tall, shadowy figure beside me. I had heard him speak before; each moment I grew surer of it. When was it and where? I would find out in the course of the next two or three days—that was certain.
“You’ll pardon me if I ask a rather personal question, Mr. Pete?” I said. “You didn’t get your education in the woods, did you? Your choice of words seems to be rather fine, rather—”
I broke off suddenly. A moonbeam had touched the side of his face. I could see that his heavily bearded cheeks and chin were trembling as though from suppressed merriment, and yet his voice was quite steady when he answered me.
“I’m a college man, sir,” he replied, moving his head slightly so that his face was once more veiled in shadow. “I’ve had my chances and I’ve thrown them away. There are lots of us like that.” He paused for an instant and then added: “Good night, sir. I’ll paddle over for you in the morning.”
XVII
The following morning, Bill Pete paddled me across the bay to his cabin with the deft, silent strokes of an Indian. Sitting in the bow of the canoe and facing him, I studied the man, attempting to account for the impression I had had the night before. But, try as I would, my memory failed me.
Certainly there was nothing familiar in that bronzed, heavily bearded face. And yet there was something about Bill Pete which struck a long disused, discordant note in my breast. What was it? His eyes? They were hidden behind dark-blue spectacles which resembled the cavernous sockets in a skull. Perhaps the answer to the riddle was concealed by these spectacles. For one mad moment I was tempted to spring forward and jerk them off his nose.
“Why do you wear those things?” I said at length.
“What things?” he asked blankly. Although his face was half turned away from me, I felt instinctively that his eyes were boring into mine.
“Why, those spectacles,” I said testily. “They make your face look like a skull.”
“My eyes are very weak. These glasses protect them from the sun.”
“Oh, I see.”
Not another word was said till the canoe grounded on the beach. I assisted Bill Pete in moving the provisions we had brought with us into the shade; then he showed me his cabin.
It was an ordinary woodsman’s shack, built of roughhewn logs and containing two bunks. There was a crudely constructed table in the center of the single room, some pots and pans hanging on the wall, a wood stove in one corner, and a doorway without any vestige of a door. To a city bred man, no building is complete without a door. This architectural omission bothered me till I learned that no wild animal availed itself of it with the single exception of a razor-back hog that each night entered after we had gone to bed and gnawed savagely at one of the logs.
Barely a hundred yards from the cabin, which stood on a slight rise of ground, the bay stretched out like a luminous shawl of bright spangles. Encircling it, was a dark somber army of tropical trees which stood like sentinels about a treasure. On windy nights, the lapping waves on the beach and the murmuring of the branches overhead mingled in a soothing melody which soon wafted one off to the land of dreams.
Bill Pete proved to be a very silent man, speaking very rarely and then always to the point. A smile seldom brightened his somber face. But although he was a poor companion, he proved to be an excellent guide. He knew the woods like the creatures of the woods; his tread was so noiseless that he could creep up to within a few feet of a feeding deer before the animal sprang away in fright; and he knew with unfaltering intuition where the largest tarpon glided. Under his guidance, I had some excellent fishing.
This healthy, outdoor life worked wonders with my shattered nerves. The long tramps through the woods, the invigorating air, the nights of unbroken repose, were fast making a new man of me. Before the week had passed I felt an entirely different individual from the broken-down portrait painter who had left New York under the doctor’s orders. It is no telling how healthy I would have become, had it not been for that night of unparalleled horror through which I passed—that night when I saw a black soul stripped bare and writhing out its life alone.
It had been a hard day’s tramp through the forest. I felt deliciously tired as I lay before the log fire. Bill Pete sat a few feet from me. His corncob pipe was gripped between his teeth; his face, as usual, was veiled in shadow. The wind had been rising steadily for upward of an hour; now and then I could hear the rumble of thunder far off. Our fire would spring up fiercely at each eddying gust; and, as the bright curling fingers of flame grasped at the upper darkness, the encircling tree trunks would seem to take a long stride forward and then leap back again.
“It looks as though we were going to have a stormy night,” I said at length.
Bill Pete nodded and puffed silver rings of smoke skyward. His spectacles for an instant reflected the firelight as he turned his face toward me.
“Doctor Street will be here tomorrow,” I continued in a desperate attempt to make the man talk. “You’d better paddle over to the hotel in the morning.”
Again Bill Pete merely nodded his head.
“You remind me of a man I used to know a good many years ago,” I said irritably. “Like you, he had unpleasant theories about the moon and for days together would scarcely say a word.”
“Who was he?” Bill Pete asked, with a sudden note of interest in his tone.
“A man by the name of Martin—Burgess Martin.”
I heard something snap like a dry twig. Glancing at Bill Pete, I saw the red glowing bowl of his pipe lying on the ground at his feet. He had bitten through the stem.
“And what became of Burgess Martin?” he asked after a moment.
“Why, you must know!” I said in surprise. “He was that famous writer who was murdered several years ago. Surely you remember the case?”
“I believe I did read something about it,” he answered in a low voice. “He was murdered by a literary critic, wasn’t he? The murderer’s name was Huntington, I believe; and he had previously had one of Martin’s books condemned by the government.”
“That’s never been proved,” I said with some heat “Wilbur Huntington was a personal friend of mine and one of the finest fellows in the world. If he did kill Martin, it was because he was mentally deranged at the time.”