Between the roadway and the broad front lawn of the Nook a four-foot, rough stone wall interposes. Looking up from his painting, Francis Sedgwick beheld, in the glare of the afternoon sun, a spare figure rise alertly upon the wall, descend to the road, and rise again. He stepped to the open window and watched a curious progress. A scrubby-bearded man, clad in serviceable khaki, was performing a stunt, with the wall as a basis. He was walking from east to west quite fast, and every third pace stepping upon the wall; stepping, Sedgwick duly noted, not jumping, the change of level being made without visible effort.
Now, Sedgwick himself was distinctly long of leg and limber, but he realized that he would be wholly incapable of duplicating the stranger’s gracefully accomplished feat without violent and clumsy exertion. Consequently, he was interested. Leaning out of the window, he called:
“Hello, there!”
“Good afternoon,” said the stranger, in a quiet cultivated voice.
“Would you mind telling me what you are doing on my wall.”
“Not in the least,” replied the bearded man, rising buoyantly into full view, and subsiding again with the rhythm of a wave.
“Well, what are you doing?”
“Taking a little exercise.”
By this time, having reached the end of the wall, he turned and came back, making the step with his right leg instead of his left. Sedgwick hurried down-stairs and out into the roadway. The stranger continued his performance silently. At closer inspection it appealed to the artist as even more mysterious both in purport and execution than it had looked at a distance.
“Do you do that often?” he asked presently.
The gymnast paused, poised like a Mercury on the high coping. “Yes,” said he. “Otherwise I shouldn’t be able to do it at all.”
“I should think not, indeed! Has it any particular utility, that form of exercise?”
“Certainly. It is in pursuance of a theory of self-defense.”
“What in the world has wall-hopping to do with self-defense?”
“I shall expound,” said the stranger in professional tones, taking a seat by the unusual method of letting himself down on one leg while holding the other at right angles to his body. “Do you know anything of jiu-jutsu?”
“Very little.”
“In common with most Americans. For that reason alone the Japanese system is highly effective here, not so effective in Japan. You perceive there the basis of my theory.”
“No, I don’t perceive it at all.”
“A system of defense is effective in proportion to its unfamiliarity. That is all.”
“Then your system consists in stepping up on a wall and diving into obscurity on the farther side, perhaps,” suggested Sedgwick ironically.
“Defense, I said; not escape. Escape is perhaps preferable to defense, but not always so practicable. No; the wall merely served as a temporary gymnasium while I was waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For you.”
“You have distinctly the advantage of me,” said Sedgwick, with a frown; for he was in no mood to welcome strange visitors.
“To return to my theory of self-defense,” said the other imperturbably. “My wall exercise serves to keep limber and active certain muscles that in the average man are half atrophied. You are familiar with the ostrich?”
“With his proverbial methods of obfuscation,” replied Sedgwick.
The other smiled. “That, again, is escape or attempted escape. My reference was to other characteristics. However, I shall demonstrate.” He rose on one foot with an ease that made the artist stare, descended, selected from the roadway a stone of ordinary cobble size, and handed it to Sedgwick.
“Let that lie on the palm of your hand,” said he, “and hold it out, waist high.”
As he spoke he was standing two feet from the other, to his right. Sedgwick did as he was requested. As his hand took position, there was a twist of the bearded man’s lithe body, a sharp click, and the stone, flying in a rising curve, swished through the leafage of a lilac fifty feet away.
“How did you do that?” cried the artist.
The other showed a slight indentation on the inside of his right boot heel, and then swung his right foot slowly and steadily up behind his left knee, and let it lapse into position again. “At shoulder height,” he explained, “I could have done the same; but it would have broken your hand.”
“I see,” said the other, adding with distaste, “but to kick an opponent! Why, even as a boy I was taught—”
“We were not speaking of child’s play,” said the visitor coolly; “nor am I concerned with the rules of the prize-ring, as applied to my theory. When one is in danger, one uses knife or gun, if at hand. I prefer a less deadly and more effective weapon. Kicking sidewise, either to the front or to the rear, I can disarm a man, break his leg, or lay him senseless. It is the special development of such muscles as the sartorius and plantaris,” he ran his long fingers down from the outside of his thigh round to the inside of his ankle, “that enables a human being, with practise, to kick like an ostrich. Since you found me exercising on your property, I owe you this explanation. I hope you won’t prosecute for trespass, Mr. Long-Lean-Leggy Sedgwick.”
“Leggy!” The artist had whirled at the name. “Nobody’s called me that for ten years.”
“Just ten years ago that you graduated, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Then I knew you in college. You must have been before my class.”
The bearded one nodded. “Senior to your freshman,” said he.
The younger man scrutinized him. “Chester Kent!” said he softly. “What on earth are you doing behind that bush?”
Kent caressed the maligned whiskers. “Utility,” he explained. “Patent, impenetrable mosquito screen. I’ve been off in the wilds, and am—or was—going back presently.”
“Not until you’ve stopped long enough to get reacquainted,” declared Sedgwick. “Just at present you’re going to stay to dinner.”
“Very good. Just now you happen to be in my immediate line of interest. It is a fortunate circumstance for me, to find you here; possibly for you, too.”
“Most assuredly,” returned the other with heartiness. “Come in on the porch and have a hammock and pipe.”
Old interests sprang to life and speech between them. And from the old interests blossomed the old easy familiarity that is never wholly lost to those who have been close friends in college days. Presently Francis Sedgwick was telling his friend the story of his feverish and thwarted ten years in the world. Within a year of his graduation his only surviving relative had died, willing to him a considerable fortune, the income of which he used in furtherance of a hitherto suppressed ambition to study art. Paris, his Mecca, was first a task-mistress, then a temptress, finally a vampire. Before succumbing he had gone far, in a few years, toward the development of a curious technique of his own. Followed then two years of dissipation, a year of travel to recuperate, and the return to Paris, which was to be once more the task-mistress. But, to his terror and self-loathing, he found the power of application gone. The muscles of his mind had become flabby. He quoted to Kent, with bitterness, the terrible final lines of Rossetti’s Known in Vain:
“When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze
After their life sailed by, and hold their breath,
Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze
Thenceforth their incommunicable ways
Follow the desultory feet of Death?”
“‘When Work and Will awake too late,’” repeated Kent. “But is it too late in your case? Surely not, since you’re here, and at your task.”
“But think of the waste, man! Yet, here I am, as you say, and still able to fight. All by virtue of a woman’s laugh; the laugh of a woman without virtue. It was at the Moulin de la Galette—perhaps you know the dance hall on the slope of Montmartre—and she was one of the dancers, the wreck of what had once been beauty and, one must suppose, innocence. Probably she thought me too much absinthe-soaked to hear or understand, as I sat half asleep at my table. At all events she answered, full-voiced, her companion’s question, ‘Who is the drunken foreigner?’ by saying, ‘He was an artist. The studios talked of him five years ago. Look at him now! That is what life does to us, mon ami. I’m the woman of it: that’s the man of it.’ I staggered up, made her a bow and a promise, and left her laughing. Last month I redeemed the promise; sent her the first thousand dollars I made by my own work, and declared my debt discharged.”
A heavy cloud of smoke issued from Kent’s mouth, followed by this observation: “That formula about the inability to lift one’s self by one’s own boot-straps fails to apply in the spiritual world.”
“Right! You can pull yourself out of the ditch that way; but afterward comes the long hillside. Life has seemed all tilted on edge, at times, and pretty slippery, with little enough to cling to.”
“Work,” suggested Kent briefly.
“Wisdom lurks behind your screen. Work is the answer.”
“Good or bad, it’s the only thing. Which kind is yours?”
“Presently you shall sit in judgment. Meantime, suppose you account for yourself.”
Chester Kent stretched himself luxuriously. “A distinguished secretary of state has remarked that all the news worth telling on any subject can be transmitted by wire for twenty-five cents. The short and simple annals of the poor in my case can be recorded within that limit. ‘Postgraduate science. Agricultural Department job. Lectures. Invention. Judiciary Department expert. Signed, Chester Kent.’ Ten words—count them—ten.”
“Interesting, but unsatisfying,” retorted his friend. “Can’t you expand a bit? I suppose you haven’t any dark secret in your life?”
“No secret, dark or light,” sighed the other. “The newspapers won’t let me have.”
“Eh? Won’t let you? Am I to infer that you’ve become a famous person? Pardon the ignorance of expatriation. Have you discovered a new disease, or formulated a new theory of life, or become a golf champion, or a senator, or a freak aviator, or invented perpetual motion? Do you possess titles, honors, and ribboned decorations? Ought I to bat my brow against the floor in addressing you? What are you, anyway?”
“What I told you, an expert in the service of the Department of Justice.”
“On the scientific side?”
“Why—yes, generally speaking. I like to flatter myself that my pursuit is scientific.”
“Pursuit? What do you pursue?”
“Men and motives.”
Sedgwick’s intelligent eyes widened. “Wait,” he said, “something occurs to me, an article in a French journal about a wonderful new American expert in criminology, who knows all there is to know, and takes only the most abstruse cases. I recall now that the article called him ‘le Professeur Chêtre Kennat.’ That would be about as near as they would come to your name.”
“It’s a good deal nearer than that infernal French journalist whom Wiley brought to my table at the Idlers’ Club got to the facts,” stated Kent.
“Then you are the Professor Kent! But look here! The Frenchman made you out a most superior species of highfalutin detective, working along lines peculiarly your own—”
“Rot!” interjected Kent. “The only lines a detective can work along successfully are the lines laid down for him by the man he is after.”
“Sounds more reasonable than romantic,” admitted the artist. “Come now, Kent, open up and tell me something about yourself.”
“Only last month a magazine put that request in writing, and accompanied it with an offer of twenty-five hundred dollars—which I didn’t accept. However, as I may wish to ask you a number of leading questions later, I’ll answer yours now. You remember I got into trouble my senior year with the college authorities, by proving the typhoid epidemic direct against a forgotten defect in the sewer system. It nearly cost me my diploma; but it helped me too, later, for a scientist in the Department of Agriculture at Washington learned of it, and sent for me after graduation. He talked to me about the work that a man with the true investigation instinct—which he thought I had—could do, by employing his abilities along strictly scientific lines; and he mapped out for me a three-year’s postgraduate course, which I had just about enough money to take. While I specialized on botany, entomology, and bacteriology, I picked up a working knowledge of other branches; chemistry, toxicology, geology, mineralogy, physiology, and most of the natural sciences, having been blessed with an eager and catholic curiosity about the world we live in.
“Once in the Department, I found myself with a sort of roving commission. I worked under such men as Wiley, Howard, and Merriam, and learned from them something of the infinite and scrupulous patience that truly original scientific achievement demands. At first my duties were largely those of minor research. Then, by accident largely, I chanced upon the plot to bull the cotton market by introducing the boll weevil into the uninfested cotton area, and checked that. Soon afterward I was put on the ‘deodorized meat’ enterprise, and succeeded in discovering the scheme whereby it was hoped to sell spoiled meat for good. You might have heard of those cases; but you would hardly have learned of the success in which I really take a pride, the cultivation of a running wild grape to destroy Rhus Toxicodendron, the common poison ivy. What spare time I had I devoted to experimenting along mechanical lines, and patented an invention that has been profitable. Some time ago the Department of Justice borrowed me on a few cases with a scientific bearing, and more recently offered me incidental work with them on such favorable terms that I resigned my other position. The terms include liberal vacations, one of which I am now taking. And here I am! Is that sufficient?”
“Hardly. All this suggests the arts of peace. What about your forty-horse-power kick? You don’t practise that for drawing-room exhibitions, I take it?”
“Sometimes,” confessed the scientist, “I have found myself at close quarters with persons of dubious character. The fact is, that an ingenious plot to get rid of a very old friend, Doctor Lucius Carter the botanist, drew me into the criminal line, and since then, that phase of investigation has seemed fairly to obtrude itself on me, officially and unofficially. Even up here, where I hoped to enjoy a month’s rest—Do you know,” he said, breaking off, “that you have a most interesting inset of ocean currents hereabouts?”
“Of course. Lonesome Cove. But kindly finish that ‘even up here’. I recollect your saying that you were waiting for me. Haven’t traced any scientific crime to my door, have you?”
“Let me forget my work for a little while,” pleaded his visitor, “and look at yours.”
Sedgwick rose. “Come up-stairs,” he said, and led the way to the big, bare, bright studio.
From the threshold Chester Kent delivered an opinion, after one approving survey. “You really work, I see.”
“I really do. Where do you see it, though?”
“All over the place. No draperies or fripperies or fopperies of art here. The barer the room, the more work done in it.”
He walked over to a curious contrivance resembling a small hand-press, examined it, surveyed the empty easel, against which were leaning, face in, a number of pictures, all of a size, and turned half a dozen of them over, ranging them and stepping back for examination. Standing before them, he whistled a long passage from La Bohème, and had started to rewhistle it in another key, when the artist broke in with some impatience.
“Well?”
“Good work,” pronounced Kent quietly, and in some subtle way the commonplace words conveyed to their hearer the fact that the man who spoke them knew.
“It’s the best there is in me, at least,” said Sedgwick.
Kent went slowly around the walls, keenly examining, silently appraising. There were landscapes, genre bits, studies of the ocean in its various moods, flashes of pagan imaginings, nature studies; a wonderful picture of wild geese settling from a flight; a no less striking sketch of a mink, startled as he crept to drink among the sedges; a group of country children at hop-scotch on the sands; all the varied subjects handled with a deftness of truth and drawing, and colored with a clear softness quite individual.
“Have you found or founded a new system of coloring?” asked Kent as he moved among the little masterpieces. “No; don’t tell me.” He touched one of the surfaces delicately. “It’s not paint, and it’s not pastel. Oh, I see! They’re all of one size—of course.” He glanced at the heavy mechanism near the easel. “They’re color prints.”
Sedgwick nodded. “Monotypes,” said he. “I paint on copper, make one impress, and then—phut!—a sponge across the copper makes each one an original.”
“You certainly obtain your effects.”
“The printing seems to refine the color. For instance, moonlight on white water, a thing I’ve never been able to approach, either in straight oils or water. See here.”
From behind a cloth he drew a square, and set it on the easel. Kent whistled again, casual fragments of light and heavy opera intermingled with considerative twitches of his ear.
“It’s the first one I’ve given a name to,” said Sedgwick. “I call it The Rough Rider.”
A full moon, brilliant amid blown cloud-rack, lighted up the vast procession of billows charging in upon a near coast. In the foreground a corpse, the face bent far up and back from the spar to which it was lashed, rode with wild abandon headlong at the onlooker, on the crest of a roaring surge. The rest was infinite clarity of distance and desolation.
“The Rough Rider!” murmured Kent; then, with a change of tone, “For sale?”
“I don’t know,” hesitated the artist. “Fact is, I like that about well enough to keep.”
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”
“Five hundred! Man alive! A hundred is the most I’ve ever got for any of my prints!”
“The offer stands.”
“But, see here, Kent, can you afford it? Government salaries don’t make men rich, do they?”
“Oh, I’m rich enough,” said the other impatiently. “I told you I’d made inventions. And I can certainly afford to buy it better than you can afford to keep it here.”
“What’s that?” asked the painter, surprised.
Kent repeated his final sentence, with slow emphasis. “Do you understand what I mean?” he asked, looking flatly into Sedgwick’s eyes.
“No, not in the least. Another suggestion of mystery. Do you always deal in this sort of thing?”
“Very seldom. However, if you don’t understand so much the better. When did you finish this picture?”
“Yesterday.”
“H-m! Has any one else seen it?”
“That old fraud of a plumber, Elder Dennett, saw me working on it yesterday, when he was doing some repairing here, and remarked that it gave him the creeps.”
“Dennett? Well, then that’s all up,” said Kent, as if speaking to himself. “There’s a streak of superstition in all these New Englanders. He’d be sure to interpret it as a confession before the fact. However, Elder Dennett left this morning for a trip to Cadystown. That’s so much to the good.”
“He may have left for a trip to Hadestown for all I care,” stated Sedgwick with conviction. “What’s it all about, anyway?”
“I’ll tell you, as soon as I’ve mulled it over a little. Just let me cool my mind down with some more of your pictures.” He turned to the wall border again, and faced another picture out. “What’s this? You seem to be something of a dab in black and white, too.”
“Oh, that’s an imaginary face,” said Sedgwick carelessly.
“Imaginary face studied from various angles,” commented Kent. “It’s a very lovely face, and the most wistful I’ve ever seen. A fairy, prisoned on earth by cockcrow, might wear some such expression of startled wondering purity, I fancy.”
“Poetry as well as mystery! Kent, you grow and expand on acquaintance.”
“There is poetry in your study of that imaginary fay. Imaginary! Um-hum!” continued Kent dryly, as he stooped to the floor. “I suppose this is an imaginary hairpin, too.”
“My Chinaman—” began Sedgwick quickly, when the other caught him up.
“Don’t be uneasy. I’m not going to commit the bêtise of asking who she is.”
“If you did, I give you my word of honor I couldn’t tell you. I only wish I knew!”
There was silence between them for a moment; then the painter broke out with the air of one who takes a resolution:
“See here, Kent! You’re a sort of detective, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been called so.”
“And you like my picture of The Rough Rider?”
“Five hundred dollars’ worth.”
“You can have that and any other picture in my studio, except this one,” he indicated the canvas with the faces, “if you’ll find out for me who she is.”
“That might be done. We shall see. But frankly, Sedgwick, there’s a matter of more importance—”
“Importance? Good heavens, man! There’s nothing so important in this world!”
“Oh, is it as bad as that?”
A heavy knock sounded from below, followed by the Chinaman’s voice, intermingled with boyish accents demanding Sedgwick in the name of the Western Union Telegraph Company.
“Send him up,” ordered Sedgwick, and the boy arrived; but not before Kent had quietly removed The Rough Rider from its place of exhibit.
“Special from the village,” announced young Mercury. “Sign here.”
After the signature had been duly set down, and the signer had read his message with knit brows, the urchin lingered, big with news.
“Say, heard about the body on the beach?”
Kent turned quickly, to see Sedgwick’s face. It was interested, but unmoved as he replied:
“No. Where was it found?”
“Lonesome Cove. Woman. Dressed swell. Washed up on a grating last night or this morning.”
“It’s curious how they all come in here, isn’t it?” said the artist to Kent. “This is the third this summer.”
“And it’s a corkerino!” said the boy. “Sheriff’s on the case. Body was all chained up, they say.”
“I’m sure they need you at the office to help circulate the news, my son,” said Kent. “And I’ll bet you this quarter, payable in advance, that you can’t get back in half an hour on your wheel.”
With a grin the boy took the coin. “I got yer,” he said, and was off.
“And now, Sedgwick,” said Kent decisively, “if I’m to help you, suppose you tell me all that you know about the woman who called on you last evening?”
“Last evening? Ah, that wasn’t the girl of the picture. It’s an interminable six days since I’ve seen her.”
“No; I know it wasn’t she, having seen your picture, and since then your visitor of last night. The question is, who was it?”
“Wait! How did you know that a woman came here last night?”
“From common gossip.”
“And where have you seen her since?”
“On the beach, at Lonesome Cove.”
“Lonesome Cove,” repeated Sedgwick mechanically. Then with a startled glance: “Not the dead woman!”
Kent nodded, watching him closely. For a space of four heart-beats—one very slow, and three very quick—there was silence between them. Kent broke it.
“Do you see now the wisdom of frankness?”
“You mean that I shall be accused of having a hand in her death?”
“Strongly suspected, at least.”
“On what basis?”
“You are the last person known to have seen her alive.”
“Surely that isn’t enough?”
“Not of itself. There’s a bruise back of your right ear.”
Involuntarily Sedgwick’s hand went to the spot.
“Who gave it to you?” pursued Kent.
“You know it all without my telling you,” cried Sedgwick. “But I never saw the woman before in my life, Kent—I give you my word of honor! She came and went, but who she is or why she came or where she went I have no more idea than you have. Perhaps not nearly so much.”
“There you are wrong. I’m depending on you to tell me about her.”
“Not if my life hung on it. And how could her being found drowned on the beach be connected with me?”
“I didn’t say that she was found drowned on the beach.”
“You did! No; pardon me. It was the messenger boy. But you said that her body was found in Lonesome Cove.”
“That is quite a different matter.”
“She wasn’t drowned?”
“I should be very much surprised if the autopsy showed any water in the lungs.”
“But the boy said that the body was lashed to a grating, and that there were chains on it. Is that true?”
“It was lashed to a grating, and manacled.”
“Manacled? What a ghastly mystery!” Sedgwick dropped his chin in meditation. “If she wasn’t drowned, then she was murdered and thrown overboard from a boat. Is that it?”
Chester Kent smiled inscrutably. “Suppose you let me do the questioning a while. You can give no clue whatsoever to the identity of your yesterday’s visitor?”
There was the slightest possible hesitation before the artist replied, “None at all.”
“If I find it difficult to believe that, what will the villagers think of it when Elder Dennett returns from Cadystown and tells his story, as he is sure to do?”
“Does Dennett know the woman?”
“No; but it isn’t his fault that he doesn’t. He did his best in the interviewing line when he met her on her way to your place.”
“She wasn’t on her way to my place,” objected Sedgwick.
“Dennett got the notion that she was. Accordingly, with the true home-bred delicacy of our fine old New England stock, he hid behind a bush and watched.”
“Did he overhear our conversation?”
“He was too far away. He saw the attack on you. Now, just fit together these significant bits of fact. The body of a woman, dead by violence, is found on the beach not far from here. The last person, as far as is known, to have seen her alive is yourself. She called on you, and there was a colloquy, apparently vehement, between you, culminating in the assault upon you. She hurried away. One might well guess that later you followed her to her death.”
“I did follow her,” said Sedgwick in a low tone.
“For what purpose?”
“To find out who she was.”
“Which you didn’t succeed in doing?”
“She was too quick for me. The blow of the rock had made me giddy, and she got away among the thickets.”
“That’s a pity. One more point of suspicion. Dennett, you say, saw your picture, The Rough Rider. He will tell every one about it, you may be sure.”
“What of it?”
“The strange coincidence of the subject, and the apparent manner of the unknown’s death.”
“People will hardly suspect that I killed her and set her adrift for a model, I suppose,” said the artist bitterly; “particularly as Dennett can tell them that the picture was finished before her death.”
“Not that; but there will be plenty of witch-hangers among the Yankee populace, ready to believe that a fiend inspired both picture and murder in your mind. Why, the very fact of your being an artist would be prima facie evidence of a compact with the devil, to some people. And you must admit a certain diabolical ghastliness in that painting.”
“Evidently some devil of ill fate is mixing up in my affairs. What’s your advice in the matter?”
“Tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” suggested Chester Kent.
“Easily done. The question is whether you’ll believe it.”
“If I hadn’t felt pretty sure of your innocence, I shouldn’t have opened the case to you as I’ve done. I’ll believe the truth if you tell it, and tell it all.”
“Very well. I was sitting on my wall when the woman came down the road. I noticed her first when she stopped to look back, and her absurd elegance of dress, expensive and ill fitting, attracted my closer attention. She was carrying a bundle, wrapped in strong paper. It seemed to be heavy, for she shifted it from hand to hand. When she came near, I spoke to her—”
“You spoke to her first?”
“Well, we spoke simultaneously.”
“Why should you speak to her, if she was a stranger to you?”
“See here, Kent! You’ll have to let me tell this in my own way, if I’m to tell it at all.”
“So long as you do tell it. What did she say to you?”
“She asked me the time.”
“Casually?”
“Not as if she were making it a pretext to open a conversation, if that is what you mean.”
“It is.”
“Certainly it wasn’t that. She seemed anxious to know. In fact, I think she used the word ‘exact’; ‘the exact time,’ she said.”
“Presumably she was on her way to an appointment, then.”
“Very likely. When I told her, she seemed relieved; I might even say relaxed. As if from the strain of nervous haste, you know.”
“Good. And then?”
“She thanked me, and asked if I were Mr. Sedgwick. I answered that I was, and suggested that she make good by completing the introduction.”
“She wasn’t a woman of your own class, then?”
Sedgwick looked puzzled. “Well, no. I thought not, then, or I shouldn’t have been so free and easy with her. For one thing, she was painted badly, and the perspiration, running down her forehead, had made her a sight. Yet, I don’t know: her voice was that of a cultivated person. Her manner was awkward and her dress weird for that time of day, and, for all that, she carried herself like a person accustomed to some degree of consideration. That I felt quite plainly. I felt, too, something uncanny about her. Her eyes alone would have produced that impression. They were peculiarly restless and brilliant.”
“Insane?” questioned Kent.
“Not wholly sane, certainly; but it might have been drugs. That suggested itself to me.”
“A possibility. Proceed.”
“She asked what point of the headland gave the best view. ‘Anywhere from the first rise on is good,’ I said. ‘It depends on what you wish to see.’—‘My ship coming in.’ said she.—‘It will be a far view, then,’ I told her. ‘This is a coast of guardian reefs.’—‘What difference?’ she said, and then gave me another surprise; for she quoted:
“‘And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond—
Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.’”
“That’s interesting,” remarked Kent. “Casual female wayfarers aren’t given to quoting The House of Life.”
“Nor casual ships to visiting this part of the coast. However, there was no ship. I looked for myself, when I was trying to find the woman later. What are you smiling at?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry I interrupted.”
“She walked away from me a few paces, but turned and came back at once.
“‘I follow my star,’ she said, pointing to a planet that shone low over the sea. ‘Therein lies the only true happiness; to dare and to follow.’
“‘It’s a practise which has got many people into trouble and some into jail,’ I remarked.
“‘Do not be flippant,’ she replied in her deep tones. ‘Perhaps under that star you move on dim paths to an unknown glory.’
“‘See here,’ I broke out, ‘you’re making me uncomfortable. If you’ve got something to tell, please tell it, kindly omitting the melodrama.’
“‘Remember this meeting,’ she said in a tone of solemn command; ‘for it may mark an epoch in your life. Some day in the future I may send for you and recall to-day to your mind by what I have just said. In that day you will know the hidden things that are clear only to the chosen minds. Perhaps you will be the last person but one to see me as I now am.’”
Kent pulled nervously at the lobe of his ear. “Is it possible that she foresaw her death?” he murmured.
“It would look so, in the light of what has happened, wouldn’t it? Yet there was an uncanny air of joyousness about her, too.”
“I don’t like it,” announced Kent. “I do not like it!”
By which he meant that he did not understand it. What Chester Kent does not understand, Chester Kent resents.
“Love-affair, perhaps,” suggested the artist. “A woman in love will take any risk of death. However,” he added, rubbing his bruised head reminiscently, “she had a very practical bent, for a romantic person. After her mysterious prophecy she started on. I called to her to come back or I would follow and make her explain herself.”
“As to what?”
“Everything: her being there, her actions, her—her apparel, the jewelry, you know, and all that.”
“You’ve said nothing about jewelry.”
“Haven’t I? Well, when she turned—”
“Just a moment. Was it the jewelry that you were going to speak of when you first accosted her?”
“Yes, it was. Some of it was very valuable, I judge. Wasn’t it found on the body?”
“No.”
“Not? Robbery, then, probably. Well, she came back at a stride. Her eyes were alive with anger. There came a torrent of words from her; strong words, too. Nothing of the well-bred woman left there. I insisted on knowing who she was, and she burst out on me with laughter that was, somehow, more insulting than her speech. But when I told her that I’d find out about her if I had to follow her into the sea, she stopped laughing fast enough. Before I could guard myself she had caught up a rock from the road and let me have it. I went over like a tenpin. When I got up, she was well along toward the cliffs, and I never did find her trail in that maze of copses and thickets.”
“Show me your relative positions when she attacked you.”
The artist placed Kent, and moved off five paces. “About like that,” he said.
“Did she throw overhand or underhand?”
“It was so quick I hardly know. But I should say a short overhand snap. It came hard enough!”
“I do not like it at all,” said Kent again.
He wandered disconsolately and with half-closed eyes about the room, until he blundered into collision with a cot-lounge in the corner, spread with cushions. These he heaped up, threw his coat over them, stretched himself out with his feet propped high on the mound just erected, and closed his eyes.
“Sleepy?” inquired Sedgwick.
“Busy,” retorted his guest.
“Like some more pillows?”
“No; I’d like ten minutes of silence.” The speaker opened one eye. “At the end of that time perhaps you’ll think better of it.”
“Of what?”
“Of concealing an essentially important part of your experience, which has to do, I think, with the jewelry.”
At the end of the ten minutes, when Kent opened both eyes, his friend forestalled him with another query.
“You say that no jewels were found on the body. Was there any other mark of identification?”
“If there was, the sheriff got away with it before I saw it.”
“How can you be sure, then, that the dead woman was my visitor?”
“Dennett mentioned a necklace. On the crushed flesh of the dead woman’s neck there is the plain impress of a jewel setting. Now, come, Sedgwick! If I’m to help you in this, you must help me. Had you ever seen that necklace before?”
“Yes,” was the reply, given with obvious reluctance.
“Where?”
“On the neck of the girl of my picture.”
Kent’s fingers went to his ear, pulling at the lobe until that unoffending pendant stretched like rubber. “You’re sure?” he asked.
“There couldn’t be any mistake. The stones were matched rose-topazes; you mightn’t find another like it in the whole country.”
Kent whistled, soft and long. “I’m afraid, my boy,” he said at length, “I’m very much afraid that you’ll have to tell me the whole story of the romance of the pictured face; and this time without reservation.”
“That’s what I’ve been guarding against,” retorted the other. “It isn’t a thing that I can tell, man to man. Don’t you understand? Or,” he added savagely, “do you misunderstand?”
“No, I don’t misunderstand,” answered Kent very gently. “I know there are things that can’t be spoken, not because they are shameful, but because they are sacred. Yet I’ve got to know about her. Here! I have it. When I’m gone, sit down and write it out for me, simply and fully, and send it to my hotel as soon as it is done. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can do that,” decided Sedgwick, after some consideration.
“Good! Then give me some dinner. And let’s forget this grisly thing for a time, and talk of the old days. Whatever became of Harkness, of our class, do you know?”
Between them that evening was no further mention of the strange body in Lonesome Cove.