Albert Payson Terhune

“ Doris, with a word of dismissal to her escort, moved on toward the house, entering by a French window and giving the queerly occupied front veranda a wide berth.
“Well?” impatiently asked Vail, vexed at the interruption and by the presence of the unrecognized couple on the porch. “Well, Vogel? What is it? And who are those people?”
For reply, the butler proffered him two cards. He presented them, on their tray, as if afraid they might turn and rend him.
“They are persons, sir,” he said, loftily. “Just persons, sir. Not people.” ”

“ Thax, do you realize you’ve been making my little girl very unhappy indeed?”
“I?” blithered Vail. “Making Doris unhappy? Why, Miss Gregg, I—!”
“Oh, don’t apologize. She enjoys it. A girl in love, without being divinely unhappy, would feel she was defrauded of Heaven’s best gift. Doris—”
“But I don’t understand!” protested the miserable Vail. “How on earth have I made—?”
“Principally by being mooncalfishly and objectionably in love with her,” said Miss Gregg, “and not taking the trouble to tell her so.”
“But how can I? In the first place, Clive loves her. He’s never loved any one else. ”

“ And I heard you tell the doctor on the phone that it was Vail’s own knife the murder was done with. There’s nothing else to it. He—”
“It’s you who are the old fool, Mosely, not only the chief!” exclaimed Clive Creede, wrathfully, as the rest sat open-mouthed with dismay at the linking of the chain of seemingly stupid questions. “If you knew Mr. Vail as we know him—as the chief ought to know him—you’d know he couldn’t do such a thing. He couldn’t! Why, what motive could he have? Absolutely none. It needs a terrific motive to make a man commit murder. ”

“ Call me ‘Mine Host.’ And in moments of reproof, call me ‘Fellow.’ If only I can acquire a bald head and a red nose and a bay window (and a white apron to drape over it) I’ll be able to play the sorry rôle with no more discomfort than if I were having my backteeth pulled. In the meantime, I’m as sore as a mashed thumb. What on earth possessed her to do such a thing?”
“Why, she looks on it as a stroke of genius!” said Doris. “Any one can go visiting. But no one ever went boarding in this way, before. It’s just like Auntie. She’s ever so wonderful. She isn’t a bit like any one else. ”

“ Clive got to his feet, wavering, his face set in a mask of illness. He turned to Thaxton Vail and held out his hand. To Doris there seemed in the action an assurance of loyalty. To Vail the proffer savored of the dramatic—as if, believing his friend guilty, Creede was none the less willing to shake his hand.
“Clive,” said Vail, coldly, ignoring the gesture, “if you think I’m a thief I don’t want to shake hands with you. If you don’t think I’m a thief there’s no need in shaking hands in that melodrama fashion. Good night. Need any help to get upstairs?” ”

“ Say! Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot as Tophet and I’m tired. But it’ll be better than meeting Vogel till I have to. Let me put that off as long as I can. Something tells me he is going to be nasty. And that means he’ll probably organize a strike. Come along, Macduff!” he bade the collie. “Stop nosing at that obese German dog in the car and come here!”
“Why can’t real-life butlers be like the dear old stage butlers?” sighed Chase, sympathetically, as he and Vail slunk, with guilty haste, down the veranda steps and across the lawn. ”

“ At sight of Thaxton on the dim-lit landing they broke into a clamor of questions. For reply Vail pressed the light switch, throwing the black spaces into brilliant illumination. Then his glance fell on Macduff.
The collie had halted his headlong run just outside a door at the head of the hall. At the oaken panels of this he was tearing madly with claws and teeth.
As Vail hurried to him, the dog ceased his [160] frantic efforts; as though aware that the man could open the door more easily than could he. ”

“ California sanitarium, Osmun Creede returned to Aura. There he resolved to begin life afresh. He had several good reasons for doing this.
No one knew better than he that he had made himself the most unpopular man in the neighborhood, and, as with most unpopular men, his greatest secret yearning was for popularity. In the guise of his popular brother this seemed not only possible but easy of accomplishment.
Too, he was doggedly and hopelessly in love with Doris Lane. He knew she did not care for him. He knew she could never care for him. ”

“ Vail had no need to follow the chief’s example. He knew the veranda roof was directly outside and that any active man could climb up or down the vine trellis which screened that end of the porch.
[170] He also knew no man could have done so without making enough noise to have attracted Thaxton’s notice in the night’s stillness before the crime. Nor could any man have walked on the tin veranda roof, even barefoot, without the crackle and bulge of the tin giving loud notice of his presence. A tin roof cannot be traversed noiselessly, even by a cat, to say nothing of a grown man. ”

“ Now, breathing hard, he got weakly to his feet and lurched through the open French window out onto the moonlit veranda.
He made his exit so unobtrusively that no one but Doris Lane chanced to note it. The girl, at sight of his haggard face and stumbling gait, followed Creede out into the moonlight. She found him leaning against one of the veranda pillars, drawing in great breaths of the cool night air.
“Are you worse?” she asked in quick anxiety. “Why don’t you go to bed? You’re not fit to be up.” ”

“ Fashion, wealth, modernity, had skirted this stretch of rolling valley to northeast of Stockbridge and to south of Lenox. The straggly one-street village of Aura drowsed beneath its giant elms; as it had drowsed since a quarter-century after the Pequot wars. The splashing invasion of this moneyed New Yorker created [13] more neighborhood excitement than would the visit of a Martian to Brooklyn.
Excitement and native hostility to outsiders narrowed down to a very keen and very personal hatred of Osmun Vail ”

“ Bracing himself, and cursing his loved great-uncle’s eccentricity, and cursing a thousand times more vehemently the mischief-act of Osmun Creede, the unhappy householder walked up the veranda steps and confronted the two newcomers.
On the way he planned to carry off the situation with a high hand and to get rid of the couple as quickly as might be. Whistling to heel Macduff, the collie, who showed strong and hostile signs of seeking closer acquaintance with the fat police dog, he advanced on the couple.
“Good afternoon,” he said, briskly, as he bore down on the big man and the small woman. ”

“ A MAN AND A MAID AND ANOTHER MAN “I ’M just as glad Doris wasn’t here to listen to this,” commented Miss Gregg, breaking the awed pause which followed Dr. Lawton’s recital. “For a perfectly innocent and kindly girl she seems to have stirred up no end of mischief. After the manner of perfectly innocent and kindly girls. She’d be the first to grieve over it, of course. But a billion Grief-Power never yet had the dynamic force to lift one ounce of any bad situation one inch in one century.” ”

“ The half-gods may as well put up the shutters when the whole gods arrive. Funny old world!... Rotten old world!”
“Just as there are only two kinds of children—bad children and sick children,” Miss Gregg was orating, “so there are only two kinds of dogs—fleasome dogs and gleesome dogs. Fleasome dogs that scratch all the time and gleesome dogs that jump up on you with muddy paws. Isn’t that true, Thax? Now admit it!”
Hearing his own name as it penetrated, shrilly, far down into his glum reverie, Vail recalled himself jerkily to his duties as host. ”

“ If I hadn’t had the rare good luck to be able to prove he was innocent—”
“Oh, it’s all right, Clive,” said Vail, pitying his friend’s utter demoralization. “You meant all right. I—”
“It’s all wrong,” denied Creede brokenly. “I’ve harmed the best friend I have in the world. The fact that I was trying to help doesn’t make any difference. If you don’t mind, I’ll follow the sweet Moselys’ example—pack up and go home.”
“Nonsense!” scoffed Vail. “No harm’s done. Stay on here. You meant all right—”
“Hell is paved with the skulls of people who ‘meant all right,’” interpolated Miss Gregg, severely. ”

“ Through the tangle of boxwood boughs he could see the car stop at the gate. In ungovernable panic he staggered back into the house. There, shutting the front door softly behind him, he sank down on a settle in the hall, fighting for self-control.
In a few minutes he had conquered the unreasoning fright which had made him shun meeting any interlopers.
He had caused the death of his brother. He had done it to save his own life. He was not ashamed. He was not sorry. He was not minded to slink behind closed doors when it was his duty as a white man to confess what he had done. ”

“ At their heels paced Vail’s dark sable collie, Macduff.
The sky was hazy, the air was hot. Weather-wise Berkshire folk would have prophesied a torrid spell, the more unbearable for the bracing cool of the region’s normal air. ”

“ One man only has refused. By an odd coincidence, that happens also to be the one man who was not robbed. Figure it out for yourself. It—”
“Oz Creede!” Miss Gregg declaimed, as the rest still sat dazed into momentary stillness at the unbelievable attack. “If you had the remotest idea how utterly vile and worthless you are, you’d bite yourself and die of hydrophobia.... I just thought I’d mention it,” she added, apologetically, to Doris.
But Doris did not hear. The girl’s glowing eyes were on Thaxton Vail, who had sprung to his feet and was advancing on his accuser. ”

“ Old Osmun Vail had sized up the lad’s character years earlier, when he had said in confidence to Thaxton:
“There’s a white man and a cur in all of us, Thax. And some psychologist sharps say twins are really one person with two bodies. Clive got all the White Man part of that ‘one person,’ and my lamentable namesake got all the Cur. At times I find myself wishing he were ‘the lamented Osmun Creede,’ instead of only ‘the lamentable Osmun Creede.’ Hester Gregg says he behaves as if Edgar Allan Poe had written him and Berlioz had set him to music.” ”

“ Tired or hungry, he will follow into rain or snow or heat the man he calls master—sacrificing rest and ease and food for the high privilege of being with his god.
Thaxton Vail was not Macduff’s god. Vail had had the collie for only a few months. Yet man and dog had become good friends. And, to his breeder, Clive Creede, the collie nowadays gave little more than civility, having apparently forgotten Creede and their early chumship during the twin’s absence in France. ”

“ Vail followed the two officers to the front door and watched them climb into their rattling car and make off down the drive. As they disappeared, he wished he had asked the chief to leave his man on guard outside the house for the night.
The mystery of the thefts and the evening’s later complications had gotten on Vail’s nerves. If the supposedly secure rooms could be plundered by a mysterious robber when a score of people were awake, in and around the building, could not the same robber return to complete his work when all the house should be sleeping and unguarded? ”

“ Unheeding, Osmun proceeded:
“Chief, you have established that some one in this house is a thief. That thief, presumably, had to do his work mighty fast and presumably he had no time to hide all his loot in a place safe enough to elude a police hunt. He had only a minute or two to do it in. Therefore, [120] the chances are that the bulkier or less easily hidden bits of plunder are still concealed on him. Perhaps all of it. Very good. It would be that man’s natural impulse to resist search. Practically every one else here has volunteered to submit to search. ”

“ But I can’t remember seeing them together once since—”
“It was Osmun, alone!” declared Miss Gregg. “He played both rôles. Though heaven alone knows why he should have done such a queer thing. And he worked it cleverly. Oh, Oz always had brains! Clive was supposed to live here at Rackrent Farm, while Oz lived at Canobie—those two who had never lived apart before! That was to make the dual rôle possible. He couldn’t have pretended they lived in the same house without the servants or some guest discovering there was only one of them. ”

“ But men don’t kill each other for puerile causes like that. Any more than for the silly dispute I overheard them having a few days ago at the Hunt Club in Stockbridge when Vail threatened he’d—”
“You idiot!” growled Thaxton. “What are you trying to get at? You’ve known Chase and me all our lives. You know we were good chums. And you know we were forever bickering, in fun, and having mock disputes and insulting each other; from the time we were kids. So—”
“That’s just what I’m saying,” urged Clive eagerly. “That’s what I’m trying to hammer into the chief’s head. ”

“ Osmun painted glowing portraits of the wealth that was to be his as soon as his new Wall Street ventures should cash in. The bulk of this wealth he pledged to Clive if the latter would go to some foreign land or to the Coast and there await its arrival. ”

“ That weasel of a Reuben Quimby had no more right to the contents of my brain than to the contents of my safe. A person who is not ashamed to lock a door with a key need not be ashamed to lock his mind with a lie.”
“Aunt Hester!” cried Doris, quite horrified.
“Not that I excuse foolish and unnecessary lies, my dear,” explained her aunt. “They are ill-bred, and they spoil one’s technique for the few really needful lies.”
Then, feeling she had averted for the moment Vail’s angry condemnation of her falsehood, she shifted the subject once more.
“Clive!” she ordained. “Go to bed. ”

“ We know they carry those. We are still in doubt about the germs. Let him in there when Mr. Creede wakes. If it were I, I’d rather have my chum-dog come to my bedside when I’m sick than any human I know—except one. And that reminds me—Dr. Lawton would like you to notify Miss Lane as soon as Mr. Creede is wide awake. The doctor says Creede has been asking for her and that it’ll do him good to see her.”
Vail moved wearily away. He felt all at once [259] tired and old, and he realized for the first time that life is immeasurably bigger than are the people who must live it. ”