by Rufus King
“Stop him! Stopp-whe-eee—” shrilled the voice of Thyrus as it shrieked out of tune and into silence.
Shaken with rage, with unbelievable surprise, Ramier confronted Billy.
“I will ask you,” he said, “to get out. Take your things from here and go. Get out and do not come back.”
“I will do nothing of the sort,” said Billy, equally pale and almost as angry. “And I ask you to check up on the last piece of data that the voice gave you. Figure out with a pencil and paper just what would have happened if you had followed his instructions to increase your power input by one eighth of one thousandth of a milliampere. It may be all right, and I never could prove myself that it wasn’t, but you can. Do it, old man, for the sake of Drusilla. No matter how much you trust that Greek, you owe it to Drusilla to check every syllable of his orders before you put them into effect!”
A faintly perplexed look settled in Ramier’s eyes.
“Very well,” he said shortly, and crossed to his desk.
At half-past two Ramier, pale, and trembling, a sheet of paper covered with intricate calculations held in his shaking hand, asked Billy’s pardon.
“You have saved the lives of all of us,” he said. “I cannot understand it—cannot understand Thyrus’s motive. But if I had done as he suggested—and as you prevented me just in time from doing—this laboratory and the countryside for miles around would be a vast pit of smouldering ruin.”
“Himmel!” cried Anna, entering into the conversation with Lithuanic verve, and beating all previous time records by promptly fainting on the spot.
“What is our next move?” asked Billy of Ramier, as he mechanically placed a pitcher of water beside Anna to do with as she deemed fit.
“There is nothing left us but to tune-in the voice of Drusilla,” said Ramier. “She is the only one whom we can now trust.”
And then began once more the tense strain of the test.
With the headphones pressed against his ears, Ramier absorbed himself in an adjustment of the dials. He first set them approximately in what had been the position for catching Thyrus’s tune, as it was reasonable to suppose that Drusilla’s would be somewhere near it.
The blazing sun scorched in a molten stream its slow decline along the western sky. Three o’clock struck before Ramier gave a triumphant shout.
“I have it!” he said to Billy. “Drusilla speaks!”
“What does she say?”
“Still too weak—the voice is too weak…”
One one hundredth of a millimeter by one one hundredth of a millimeter, Ramier moved first one, then the other of the dials.
“It is growing stronger,” he muttered. “I can almost determine what she is saying—a word every now and then—not connected enough for sense. Ha!—coming—it is coming—now!”
It was more of an act of repentance on his part than anything else—an act that asked Billy’s forgiveness for his recent sharp treatment—that made Ramier remove the plug of the headphones the instant that Drusilla’s voice was clearly tuned-in, and to insert instead the plug of the loud speaker. He did so in order that together they might hear her dear voice talking for the first time since her terrible disappearance.
For a brief second, after the loud speaker had been plugged in, there was an absolute silence. They waited, scarcely breathing, for her first word.
Then came her voice.
“Ramier,” said the voice of Drusilla, weakly at first but then with growing strength, “Ramier—Billy—save me!” The voice rose to a frenzy. “Save me—help—help!”
Silence.
And then a piercing, terror-stricken screech.
CHAPTER XVII
THE AUTHORITIES ACT
Now Oscar, in spite of the number of years he had used up in perfecting himself as a butler, was not nearly as dumb as he looked. It is true that his face was swathed with the discreet mask of absolute vacuity so prized in the polished servant—it has always been a constant source of wonderment to me why good butlers don’t make their fortune at poker—but behind this mask there undoubtedly operated a fairly fertile brain.
That Duveen should have suddenly dashed off in his car and not reappeared for the rest of the day or its attendant night did not puzzle Oscar in the slightest. Duveen was both an impulsive and an erratic man and was frequently given to doing ever so much more curious things than that. As Drusilla, in such respects, took strongly after her father, her sudden departure likewise caused him no alarm.
In plain truth, instead of worrying him, the sudden skipping off of the two of them filled Oscar with a sense of peaceful relief.
He spent the day in puttering placidly through various little odds and ends he wanted to clear up. One was a letter to a very dear little woman in Sweden, or rather, to be quite accurate, a dear very big woman in Sweden, whom he planned, eventually, to marry. Another odd, or end, was a rare book that dealt with certain infrequently reported doings in Arabian night life which he wished to peruse at leisure in the library.
He placed a decanter, cracked ice, and soda on a table near at hand and attended to the book during the hot, still hours of the long afternoon. He must positively take a little trip some time, he decided as he finished it, to Arabia.
When evening came, he bathed, dressed, and spent the unnaturally warm hours that persisted in still lingering even after dinner in strolling through the estate’s lovely garden with one of the estate’s pretty chambermaids. The conversation, among other matters, hinged largely on Bagdad.
The following morning had brought no sign of any return on the part of either Duveen or Drusilla, and Oscar was prepared to spend a similar pleasing day to the last.
The brief visit of Mr. Wilkins, with his questions for finding the road to that curious shack in the valley, and his request for a glass of water, was the first break in the placid monotony of the stifling hot morning.
The second break, although not vitally alarming in itself, proved very much more dramatic in its outcome.
It materialized in the form of Harris—Duveen’s personal chauffeur—who came upon Oscar quietly browsing through a silver fizz and a collection of Browning on the sun porch.
“Ah, Harris,” said Oscar, slightly annoyed at the interruption.
“Ah yourself,” said Harris, who suffered from a chronic dyspepsia and was never very pleasant about it. “Where the hell is old Bug-eyes?”
“I am totally unaware,” said Oscar, taking a sip from his glass and looking reprovingly up at Harris over its rim, “of the present whereabouts of Mr. Duveen.”
“Gracious,” said Harris, in the most dyspeptic of his voices, “oh my goodness gracious me!”
“I shall ask you,” said Oscar, emerging from the depths of his steamer chair and eying Harris sternly, “to be good enough to explain the nature of this ribbledry.”
“This what?”
“Ribbledry,” said Oscar severely, setting down the finished silver fizz. “This highly unseasoned ribbledry.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Flatterer!” Oscar waved a waggish finger in the general direction of Harris’s two noses. “It’s only a little after eleven-ortwelvethirty.”
“Well, if you ain’t drunk, sober up for a minute and lissen to me. That prize horseshoe pitcher down to the filling station at the corners just brung back the old man’s spare wheel. He put a new inner tube into it.”
“Very commendable, I am sure,” said Oscar, vaguely wondering why he hadn’t cracked more ice in the first place, and whether Harris would go and get him some if he sent him for it.
“Say lissen, cube, snap out of it for a minute and let this bore in—the old man turned back.”
“Whither?” inquired Oscar politely, and deciding that he’d probably have to go get the ice himself after all.
“Turned back—turned back here!”
“Absurd,” said Oscar. “If Mr. Duveen turned back here he’d be here.”
“And with guys like you being born every min
ute, they’re still worrying about the conversation of the forests!” said Harris. “Of course he ain’t here. He went past here.”
“Oh, now, why would he want to do that?”
“The guy said he was chasin’ his daughter out the old loggin’ road.”
“Just so. The old logging road.” Memory stirred sluggishly in Oscar’s head. “A gentleman was inquiring only a itty-bitty hour ago an—”
“And that there loggin’ road ends after four-five miles or so. I tell you, there’s been a accident, or else some kind of dirty work has been done.”
“Oh, dear,” said Oscar, “this is all most distressing. Is there no peace? Do get the car out like a good fellow and run down the road a bit and see.”
“There ain’t a damn bus left in the place. Anna beat it off with that straight-four swan song of hers last night, and she, either, ain’t been heard from since.”
“This,” said Oscar impressively, “is amounting to a major disaster. We must summon outside aid. The telephone—at once—oh, by the way, Harris, while I’m engaged in consulting with the authorities just run along and crack a bowl of ice.”
“What for? Me—me crack ice?”
“Don’t argue! In an emergency of this dire caliber, just keep your head and do as you’re told. Dreadful—dreadful—!”
Oscar finally succeeded in escaping from the impenetrable forest caused by a curtain that veiled a casement window which led inside from the sun porch and reached a telephone.
“Give me,” he said to the operator, “the state trooper post at Hiram’s Corners at once.” He drummed an impressive tattoo on the table while waiting for the connection. “Murder,” he announced, as soon as he had gotten it, “has been done.”
“Who is talking?” demanded a crisp voice at the other end of the line.
“Mr. Judson Duveen’s butler is talking, sir. Mr. Duveen, Miss Duveen, and a Miss Anna Piezinsjki have disappeared down the old logging trail, and murder has been done.”
“You refer to the road that runs past Mr. Duveen’s estate and terminates in the section formerly operated for timber?”
“Absolutely.”
“You have identified the bodies?”
“Bodies?—Put the ice right on the table here, Harris. There are no bodies.”
“You state it’s a case of murder?”
“But must there be bodies for murder?”
“Are you drunk, or is this a joke? If it is, it’s a damn bad one.”
Oscar pulled himself sharply together. He reached out and selected a small piece of ice to cool the heat raging inside of his mouth.
“I’llave you noonderstan,” he said, rolling the bit of ice to the other, and hotter, side of his jaw, “that thisisaserious affair.”
“I am going to trace this call,” said the voice from Hiram’s Corners severely. “And when I have, I’ll decide just what to do about it.”
A slammed receiver broke the connection.
“Well,” said Harris, “is it all fixed?”
“Ice,” said Oscar, poking a finger distastefully about in the bowl’s assortment, “should be uniform in size and cut in accordance with the use to which it is to be put. Now this looks as though you’d used an ax.”
“You go to hell,” said Harris.
“Oh, don’t be so impulsive,” said Oscar, finally finding a size of ice to his liking and plopping it into a freshly filled glass of whisky and soda.
“You’ll catch it good and proper when Bug-eyes gets home, all right.”
“Mr. Bug-eyes isn’t coining home. He’s dead.”
“Dead!”
“Murdered.”
“Since when?”
“Since you told me about it.”
“See here, granite, I never told you no such thing.”
“It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether you did or did not, because Miss Drusilla is murdered, too.”
“Say, lissen—”
“They’re all murdered, and there isn’t another decent piece of ice in this whole damn lot.”
Oscar picked up the bowl and dumped its contents into the fireplace. Then he sat down in a chair and began to cry.
It would be much too indelicate to report the next few words indulged in by Harris. They formed, in fact, a running commentary while he grabbed Oscar by the coat collar and dragged him into the pantry, where he held Oscar’s head under the cold tap for about ten minutes.
“There is little so refreshing,” said Oscar, as he ultimately emerged from his inverted porcelain surroundings, “as a good cold plunge. I’ll just thank you, Harris, to turn off the tap and mop up that puddle or two while I skip upstairs and change my clothes for lunch.”
Harris, in a daze, stood watching Oscar as he glided in sprightly fashion toward the pantry door.
“Where is everybody around here?” asked a state trooper, as Oscar reached the door and pushed it open.
“Whom did you wish to see, sir?” said Oscar, diverting with his tongue one particular rivulet that was running down his neck.
“Who are you?”
“The butler, sir.”
“And you?”
“Harris—chauffeur.”
“What’s been going on here—outside of a booze fight?”
“Murder,” said Oscar with considerable dignity. “And there has been no booze fight. All that’s been indulged in has been in the nature of harmless and innocent brivileges.”
“Yeh?”
“There hasn’t even been a boozeless fight.”
“You the man that just called up the sergeant?”
“I am, sir.”
“Well, there’s only one thing that prevents me from running you into the jug, and that’s the fact that Williams, down at the corners’ filling station, reports Mr. Duveen had a tire changed there yesterday morning and seemed very excited. Williams gathered that Mr. Duveen was chasing his daughter. Why was he chasing his daughter?”
“He wanted to catch her.”
The veins on the trooper’s already extraordinary neck became more prominent still. “Just so,” he said quietly. “And where is Mr. Duveen now?”
“Slaughtered.”
“Duveen,” said Harris, breaking in, “has not been seen since he left here yesterday morning. His daughter had gone away about twenty minutes earlier. His daughter’s maid, Anna, left in her car last night at half-past eight. None of the three have been heard from since, and they all headed to the left—for that logging road which ends no place.”
“Except,” said Oscar doggedly, “in death.”
“Shut up. Harris, you seem to be the soberer of you two, what time did Mr. Duveen leave here?”
“I ain’t had a drink today—smell my breath.”
The trooper obliged. “Onions,” he said.
“Duveen left about eight.”
“Did you see him get into his car?”
“I did.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Did he! Say, feller, he was swearin’ like a trooper.”
“Like a what?”
“Like—like a chauffeur.”
“Well, it is obvious that Miss Duveen went down the logging road, as her car was not seen to pass the corners. Why should she go down that logging road?”
“Search me.”
“And I,” said Oscar, “refuse to be searched without a warrant. I shall stand upon my constitution’s privileges.”
“One more wisecrack out of you, and you’ll be standing on your head! There is nothing for us to do but to investigate immediately. Why wasn’t this matter reported sooner?”
“Them two is always beatin’ it off some place or other. Williams put me wise there might be somethin’ up when he brung back the tire.”
“My car is outside. You two come along with me.”
“I can’t,” said Oscar. “I’m wet.”
“You’re all wet,” said the trooper. “And you’ll either come with me or I’ll arrest you for disorderly conduct.”
> “Then let us proceed, sir,” said Oscar, heading for the door and flitting lightly out to the car. “And perhaps you will be good enough to tell me just what has been the cause for all this delay?”
They had traveled about four miles and a half before they discovered it was impossible to go on any farther, and the sight that met them as they crested a knoll at a turn in the road blanched the trooper’s bronzed cheeks to a sickly white.
“God help the poor devils,” he said, as he turned the car and shot back at breakneck speed for the nearest telephone that he could reach, “for if that valley is the same as I remember it, they’re dead indeed!”
CHAPTER XVIII
WHEREIN FLAMING YOUTH MEETS FLAMING WIND
I have been severely censured by Billy, upon his perusal of my account to the present point, for a suspicion or two of levity in my handling of what he considers to be some of the grimmest and most gruesome episodes in the adventure.
I have begged his pardon, and have asked him to be tolerant with me because of my age—trying to make him grasp a little the truth that as one gets on in years there is nothing really terrible or grim in life but dullness; that the line drawn between a smile and a teardrop is so tenuous that it is often a puzzling question as to on which side of it one is taking one’s stand.
I have meant, I assured him, no belittlement of the torment that must have been his, and Ramier’s, and Drusilla’s—to say nothing of the mixed emotions enjoyed, or not, by Duveen, Mr. Wilkins, and the peculiarly debonair Greek—but explained that my eyes are spectacled for the pleasant mask of Comedy that nature wears for a man’s declining years, rather than for the harsh grotesque of Tragedy which, to the eyes of youth, distorts her kindly features.
“If you so much as dare to put the tip of your tongue near the side of your cheek during your account of the climax of this business,” Billy threatened, “I will give you what’s what.”
Getting a “what’s what” is something that I have fortunately escaped to date. I don’t know what it is, but presume from the tone of Billy’s voice that it cannot be especially pleasant or desirable. So I shall skip back a decade or two, and change the lenses of my spectacles to those of a more serious intent.
