One of Kent’s Washington friends once criticized the scientist’s mode of motoring, as follows: “Kent’s a good driver, and a fast one, and careful; but he can never rid himself of the theory that there’s a strain of hunter in every well-bred motor-car.”
Cross-country travel was, in fact, rather a fad of Kent’s, and he had trained his light car to do everything but take a five-barred gate. After departing from the Nook, it rolled along beside Sundayman’s Creek sedately enough until it approached the wide bend, where it indulged in a bit of path-finding across the country, and eventually crept into the shade of a clump of bushes and hid. Its occupant emerged, and went forward afoot until he came in view of Hedgerow House. At the turn of the stream he leaped a fence, and made his way to a group of willows beneath which the earth was ridged with little mounds. Professor Chester Kent was trespassing. He was invading the territory of the dead.
From the seclusion of the graveyard amid the willows a fair view was afforded of Hedgerow House. Grim as was the repute given it, it presented to the intruder an aspect of homely hospitable sweetness and quaintness. Tall hollyhocks lifted their flowers to smile in at the old-fashioned windows. Here and there, on the well-kept lawn, peonies glowed, crimson and white. A great, clambering rose tree had thrown its arms around the square porch, softening the uncompromising angles into curves of leafage and bloom. Along the paths pansies laughed at the sun, and mignonette scattered its scented summons to bee and butterfly. The place was a loved place; so much Kent felt with sureness of instinct. No home blooms except by love.
But the house was dead. Its eyes were closed. Silence held it. The garden buzzed and flickered with vivid multicolored life; but there was no stir from the habitation of man. Had its occupants deserted it? Chester Kent, leaning against the headstone of Captain Hogg of damnable memory, pondered and wondered.
From the far side of the mansion came the sound of a door opening and closing again. Moving quickly along the sumac-fringed course of the creek, Kent made a détour which gave him view of a side entrance, and had barely time to efface himself in the shrubbery when a light wagon, with a spirited horse between the shafts, turned briskly out into the road. Kent, well sheltered, caught one brief sufficient glimpse of the occupant. It was Doctor Breed. The medical officer looked, as always, nerve-beset; but there was a greedy smile on his lips.
Kent’s mouth puckered. He took a deep breath of musical inspiration—and exhaled it in painful noiselessness, flattening himself amid the greenery, as he saw a man emerge from the rear of Hedgerow House. The man was Gansett Jim. He carried a pick and a spade and walked slowly. Presently he disappeared in the willow-shaded place of mounds. The sound of his toil came, muffled, to the ears of the hidden man.
Cautiously Kent worked his way, now in the stream, now through the heavy growth on the banks, until he gained the roadway. Once there he went forward to the front gate of Hedgerow House. The bricked sidewalk runs, thence, straight and true to the rose-bowered square porch which is the mansion’s main entry. Kent paused for the merest moment. His gaze rested on the heavy black door. Heavier and blacker against the woodwork a pendant waved languidly in the faint breeze.
To the normal human being, the grisly insignium of death over a portal is provocative of anything rather than mirth. But Chester Kent, viewing the crape on Hedgerow House, laughed as he turned to the open road.