His light footfall was soundless on the matting as he went.
He reached the top of the stairs just as Milo arrived at the bottom. Claire was standing in the veranda doorway shading her eyes and peering out into the darkness. But at sound of her brother"s advancing tread she turned and ran back to him, meeting him as he reached the bottom of the stair and clasping both hands anxiously about his big forearm.
She seemed about to break out in excited, even frightened speech, when chancing to raise her eyes, she saw Gavin Brice calmly descending from the hall above. At sight of him her eyes dilated. Milo had begun to speak. She put one hand warningly across her brother"s bearded mouth. At the same moment Gavin, halting midway on the stairs, said with deprecatory meekness:
"You didn"t tell me what time to be ready for breakfast. I"d hate to be late and--"
He got no further. Nor did he seek to. His ears had been straining to make certain of the ever approaching sound of footsteps across the lawn. Now an impatient tread echoed on the veranda, and a man"s figure blocked the doorway.
The newcomer was slender, graceful, with the form of an athletic boy rather than of a mature man. He was pallid and black eyed. His face had a cla.s.sic beauty which, on second glance, was marred by an almost snakelike aspect of the small black eyes and a sinister smile which seemed to hover eternally around the thin lips. His whole bearing suggested something serpentine in its grace and a smoothly half-jesting deadliness.
So much the first glimpse told Brice as he stood there on the stairs and surveyed the doorway. The second look showed him the man was clad in a strikingly ornate yachting costume.
Gavin"s mind, ever taught to dissect trifles, noted that in spite of his yachtsman-garb the stranger"s face was untanned, and that his long slender hands with their supersensitive fingers were as white and well-cared-for as a woman"s.
Yachting, in Florida waters at any time of year, means either a thick coat of tan or an exaggerated sunburn. This yachtsman had neither.
Scarce taller than a lad of fifteen, yet his slender figure was sinuous in its every line, and its grace betokened much wiry strength. His face was that of a man in the early thirties,--all but his eyes. They looked as old as the Sphinx"s.
He stood for an instant peering into the room, trying to focus his night-accustomed eyes to the light. Evidently the first objects he saw clearly were Milo and Claire standing with their backs to him as they stared upward in blank dismay at the guest they had thought safely disposed of for the night.
"Well?" queried the man at the door, and at sound of his silken, bantering voice, brother and sister spun about in surprise, to face him.
"Well?" he repeated, and now there was a touch of cold rebuke in the silken tones. "Is this the way you keep a lookout for the signals? I might very well have walked in on a convention of half of Dade County, for all the guard that was kept. I compliment--"
And now he broke off short in his sneering reproof, as his eyes chanced upon Gavin half way down the stairs.
For a second or more no one spoke or moved. Claire and her brother had an absurdly shamefaced appearance of two bad children caught in mischief by a stern and much feared teacher.
Into the black depths of the stranger"s eyes flickered a sudden glint like that of a striking rattlesnake"s. But at once his face was a slightly-smiling mask once more. And Gavin was left doubting whether or not he had really seen that momentary gleam of murder behind the smiling eyes. It was Claire who first recovered herself.
"Good evening, Rodney," she said, with a graciousness which all-but hid her evident nerve strain. "You stole in on us so suddenly you startled me. Mr. Brice, this is Mr. Rodney Hade."
As Gavin bowed civilly and as Hade returned the salutation with his eternal smile. Milo Standish came sufficiently out of his own shock of astonishment to follow his sister"s mode of greeting the new visitor. With the same forced joviality he had used in coercing Brice to go to bed, he sauntered over to the smiling Hade, exclaiming:
"Why, h.e.l.lo, old man! Where did you blow in from? You must have come across from your house on foot. I didn"t hear the car .... I want you to know Brice here. I was tackled by a holdup man outside yonder a while ago. And he"d have gotten me too, if Brice hadn"t sailed into him. In the scrimmage I made a fool of myself as usual, and slugged the wrong man with a monkey wrench. Poor Brice"s reward for saving my life was a broken head. He"s staying the night with us. He--"
The big man had spoken glibly, but with a nervousness which, more and more, cropped out through his noisy joviality. Now, under the coldly unwavering smile of Hade"s snakelike eyes, he stammered, and his booming voice trailed away to a mumble.
Again, Claire sought to mend the rickety situation. But now Gavin Brice forestalled her. Pa.s.sing one hand over his bandaged forehead, he said:
"If you"ll forgive me having b.u.t.ted in again. I"ll go up to my room. I"m pretty shaky, you see. I just wanted to know what time breakfast is to be, and if I can borrow one of your brother"s razors in the morning."
"Breakfast is at seven o"clock," answered Claire. "That"s a barbarously early hour, I suppose for a New Yorker like you.
But down here from six to ten is the glorious part of the day.
Besides, we"re farmers you know. Don"t bother to try to wake so early, please. I"ll have your breakfast sent up to you.
Good night."
"I"ll look in on you before I go to bed," called Milo after him as he started up the stairs for the second time. "And I"ll see that shaving things are left in your bathroom. Good night."
Hade said nothing, but continued to pierce the unbidden guest with those gimlet-like smiling black eyes of his. His face was expressionless. Gavin returned to the upper hall and walked with needless heaviness toward the room a.s.signed to him. Reaching its door he opened and then shut it loudly, himself remaining in the hallway. Scarce had the door slammed when he heard from below Rodney Hade"s voice raised in the sharp question:
"What does this mean? You"ve dared to--?"
"What the blazes else could I do?" bl.u.s.tered Milo--though under the bl.u.s.ter ran a thread of placating timidity. "He saved my life, didn"t he? I was tackled by--"
"For one thing," suggested Hade, "you could have hit a little harder with the wrench. If a blow is worth hitting at all it"s worth hitting to kill. You have the strength of an elephant, and the nerve of a sheep."
"Rodney!" protested Claire, indignantly. "He--"
"I"ve seen his face somewhere," went on Hade unheeding. "I could swear to that. I can"t place it yet. But I shall.
Meantime get rid of him. And now I"ll hear about this attack on you .... Come out on the veranda. This hall reeks of iodine and liniment and all such stuff. It smells like a hospital ward. Come outside."
Despite the unvarying sweet smoothness of his diction, he spoke as if giving orders to a servant. But apparently neither of the two Standishes resented his dictation. For Brice could hear them follow Hade out of the house. And from the veranda presently came the booming murmur of Standish"s voice in a recital of some kind.
Gavin reopened his bedroom door and entered. Shutting the door softly behind him, he made a brief mental inventory of the room, then undressed and got into bed. Ten minutes later Miles Standish came into the room, carrying fresh dressings and a bottle of lotion. Gavin roused himself from a half-doze and was duly grateful for the dexterous applying of the new bandages to his bruised scalp.
"You work like a surgeon," he told Milo.
"Thanks," returned Standish drily, making no other comment on the praise.
His task accomplished Standish bade his guest a curt good night and left the room. A minute later Gavin got up and stole to the door to verify a faint sound he fancied he had heard. And he found he had been correct in his guess. For the door was locked from the outside.
Brice crept to the windows. The room was in darkness, and, unseen, he could look out on the darkness of the night. As he looked a faint reddish spot of fire appeared in the gloom, just at the beginning of the lawn. Some one, cigar in mouth, was evidently keeping a watch on his room"s windows. Gavin smiled to himself, and went back to bed.
"Door locked, windows guarded," he reflected, amusedly. "I owe that to Mr. Hade"s orders. Seen me before, has he? I"ll bet my year"s income he"ll never remember where or when or how. At that he"s clever even to think he"s seen me. It looks as if I had let myself in for a wakeful time down here, doesn"t it? But I"m getting the tangled ends all in my hands,--as fast as I had any right to hope. That rap on the skull was a G.o.dsend. He can"t refuse me a job after my fight for him. No one could. I--oh, if it wasn"t for the girl this would be great! What can a girl, with eyes like hers, be doing in a crowd like this?
"I"d--I"d have been willing to swear she was--was--one of the women whom G.o.d made. And now--! Still, if a woman lets herself in for this kind of thing she can"t avoid paying the bill. Only--if I can save her without-- Oh, I"m turning into a mushy fool in my old age! ... And she sobbed when she thought I was killed! ... I"ve got to get a real night"s rest if I want to have my wits about me to-morrow."
He stretched himself out luxuriously in the cool bed, and in less than five minutes he was sleeping as sweetly and as deeply as a child. Long experience in the European trenches and elsewhere had taught him the rare gift of slumbering at will, a gift which had done much toward keeping his nerves and his faculties in perfect condition. For sleep is the keynote to more than mankind realizes.
The sun had risen when Gavin Brice awoke. Apart from stiffness and a very sore head his inured system was little the worse for the evening"s misadventures. A cold shower and a rubdown and a shave in the adjoining bathroom cleared away the last mists from his brain.
He dressed quickly, glanced at his watch and saw the hour was not quite seven. Then he faced his bedroom door and hesitated.
"If he"s a born idiot," he mused, "it"s still locked. If he isn"t it"s unlocked and the key has been taken away. I"ve made noise enough while I was dressing."
He turned the k.n.o.b. The door opened readily. The key was gone. In the hallway outside the room and staring up at him from widely shallow green eyes, sat Simon Cameron, the big Persian cat.
"That"s a Persian all over. Simon my friend," said Brice, stooping down to scratch the cat"s furry head in greeting. "A Persian will sit for hours in front of any door that"s got a stranger behind it. And he"ll show more flattering affection for a stranger than for any one he"s known all his life.
Isn"t that true. Simon?"
By way of response, the big cat rubbed himself luxuriously against the man"s shins, purring loudly. Then, at a single lithe spring he was on Gavin"s shoulder, making queer little whistling noises and rubbing his head lovingly against Brice"s cheek. Gavin made his way downstairs the cat still clinging to his shoulder, fanning his face with a swishing gray foxlike tail, digging curved claws back and forth into the cloth of his shabby coat, and purring like a distant railroad train.
Only when they reached the lower hallway did the cat jump from his shoulder and with a flying leap land on the top of a nearby bookcase. There, luxuriously, Simon Cameron stretched himself out in a shaft of sunlight, and prepared for a nap.
Brice went on to the veranda. On the lawn, scarce fifty feet away, Claire was gathering flowers for the breakfast table.
Very sweet and dainty was she in the flood of morning sunshine, her white dress and her burnished hair giving back waves of radiance from the sun"s strong beams.
At her side walked Bobby Burns. But, on first sound of Brice"s step on the porch, the collie looked up and saw him.
With a joyous bark of welcome Bobby came dashing across the lawn and up the steps. Leaping and gamboling around Gavin.