346
WEIRD TALES
man’s love I Come, we shall go right away, at once, immediately.”
We went. Half an hour later we were seated across a flat-topped ma¬ hogany desk, staring at a thin, tinder- sized little man with an oversized bald head and small, sharp, birdlike black eyes.
“This seems incredibly good, gen¬ tlemen,” the little lawyer assured ns when he had finished examining the credentials de Grandin showed. “I had hoped to get some ex-service man —some youngster who hadn’t gotten his fill of adventure in the great war, perhaps—or possibly some student of psychic phenomena—but—iny dear sir!”—he beamed on my friend—“to secure a man of your standing is more than I had dared hope. Indeed, I did not suBpect such characters existed outside book covers.”
“ Parbleu, Monsier V Avoue,” de Grandin replied with one of his imp¬ ish smiles, “I have been in what you Americans call some tight places, but never have I been shut up in a book. Now, if you will be so good as to tell us something of this so remarkable
mission you wish undertaken-”
He paused, voice and eyebrows raised interrogatively.
“To be sure”—the attorney passed a box of cigars across the desk— “you’ll probably consider this a silly sort of case for a man of your talents, but—well, to get down to brass tacks, I’ve a client who wants to sell a house.”
“Ah?” de Grandin murmured noncommittally. “And we are to be¬ come indomitably fearless real estate brokers, perhaps?”
“Not quite,” the lawyer laughed, “nothing quite as simple as that. You see, Redgables is one of the finest properties in the entire lake region. It lies in the very heart of the moun¬ tains, with a commanding view, eon- tains nearly three thousand acres of good land, and, in fact, possesses
nearly every requisite of an ideal country estate or a summer hotel or sanitarium. Normally, it’s worth be¬ tween three and four hundred thou¬ sand dollars; but, unfortunately, it possesses one drawback—a drawback which makes its market value prac¬ tically nil. It’s haunted.”
“ Eh, do you say so ? ” De Grandin sat up very straight in his chair and fixed his unwinking stare on the attor¬ ney. “Parbleu, it will be a redoubt¬ able ghost whom Jules de Grandin can not eject for a fee of two hundred thousand francs! Say on, my friend; I bum with curiosity.”
“ The house was built some seventy- five years ago when that part of New York State was little better than a wilderness,” the attorney resumed. “John Aglinberry, sou of Sir Rufus Aglinberry, and the great-uncle of my client, was the builder. He came to this country under something of a cloud—pretty well estranged from his family—and built that English manor house in the midst of our hills as a refuge from all mankind, it
“As a young man he’d served with the British army in India, and got mixed up in rather a nasty scandal. Went ghazi —fell in love with a na¬ tive girl and threatened to marry her. There was a devil of a row. His folks used influence to have him dismissed from the service and cut off his al¬ lowance to force him back to England. After that they must have made life pretty uncomfortable for him, for when he inherited a pile of money from a spinster aunt, he packed up and came to America, building that beautiful house out there in the woods and living like a hermit the rest of his life.
“The girl’s family didn’t take mat¬ ters much easier than Aglinberry’s, it seems. Something mysterious hap¬ pened to her before he left India—I imagine he’d have stayed there in
