The House Of Cain

by Arthur W. Upfield

  CHAPTER XXVI

  MABEL HOGAN

  THERE are moments in human life when Time stops or is left far in the rear by the racing mind. We read a phrase such as “an Eternity passed” perhaps without taking in its meaning, because we never have experienced that timeless, measureless period. While Monty gazed with fascinated horror at the twitching rope such a period elapsed, a period of which he was more sensible afterwards than at the precise moment.

  The unnerving, wailing howls of the three great hounds seated on their haunches beyond the compound fence galvanized him into life just when Dr. Moore burst into the hut. The lank man literally jumped to a trap-door at the far end of the chamber of horrors, and, flinging it back, almost slid down what proved to be a ladder.

  Monty did not wait for the doctor to disappear. He darted round the building and in through the door. The rope, he now saw, was limp and swaying. Lightly stepping to the trap, he dropped on hands and knees and peered into its depths.

  Directly below him was Dr. Moore kneeling beside the prostrate Earle, electric torch in one hand, stop-watch in the other.

  Earle’s face, framed in a circle of brilliant light, was not pleasant to behold. The still tableau lasted but a few seconds, when Moore laid down the torch on the earthern floor in position to light up both the prostrate man and himself. The group suggested to Monty an obscene vulture gloating over a new-found feast.

  “Ah!” he heard Moore grunt.

  At that moment Earle’s horribly staring eyes moved, and the lips, twitching, let fall the cigarette butt which had remained between them. The big man is almost certain that at the moment Earle died he said faintly:

  “My darlings…come nearer!”

  He is quite sure, however, that Dr. Moore’s subsequent statement, that Earle died some time after he, the doctor, cut him down, was correct. He watched Moore spring to his feet and press down a wall-switch that flooded the underground chamber with light. He saw him jot into a notebook the time by his watch, with some further memoranda.

  What occurred then was so sudden that his swift actions were instinctive rather than determined. The voice of Anchor was suddenly audible, shouting from the veranda to the wailing dogs. A door shut, and he guessed the disturbed millionaire had left the veranda and was coming to investigate the illuminated hut. Just then Dr. Moore began to mount the ladder.

  Even during the time it took Moore to raise a foot from one rung to the next Monty decided against dubbing him when his head came within reach and then attending to Anchor and locking them both in that dreadful pit. Had he been alone he would have grasped this as a heaven-sent opportunity; but Martin’s safety came first. Martin must be moved out of harm’s way; therefore it was not yet time to open fire.

  With the silent agility of a panther the big man reached the guillotine, behind the blade of which he flung himself into hiding. Had not Dr. Moore’s mind been so full of what had just happened he doubtless would have heard the boards creak under Monty’s rapid movements. As it was, he was almost at the top of the ladder when he thought of something he had omitted to observe, and redescended.

  A quick step announced the arrival of William J. Anchor, who, as Monty saw from around one of the solid teak uprights, was in his pyjamas and carrying an automatic. From below Moore called out: “Who’s there?” but received no reply until Anchor stood above the trap looking down.

  “Why this excitement, Moore?” he inquired softly. “Have you hanged Earle?”

  “Certainly not; he has hanged himself,” replied Moore emphatically. “I say, Anchor, come down at once!”

  “I am glad he hanged himself and was not hanged, my dear Moore. I liked Earle.”

  The latter sentence held a world of meaning. It was uttered in the millionaire’s usual bland manner, but the edge of the tones boded no good to the doctor if it had transpired that Earle had been subjected to one of Moore’s experiments.

  Anchor disappeared down the ladder, and Monty again was tempted to deal summarily with the two most formidable inmates of the House of Cain. Quietly, however, he left the hut and gained his veranda-room and his bed unobserved.

  Half an hour later the light within the chamber of horrors was extinguished. The hounds had hushed their eerie clamour. The night was quiet and dark. And Montague Sherwood slept the sleep of a tired child.

  He awoke when the moon hung above the western horizon and all but the largest stars were invisible. The outbuildings and the sand-hills beyond were coming out of the night before the rushing dawn.

  A glance at Martin showed him still sleeping, and as a matter of habit rather than desire the big man sat on the edge of his bed and cut tobacco-chips for his pipe. In all his adventurous career he never had met with so weird an episode as had occurred within the few past hours. From it stood out boldly the utter callousness or the scientific enthusiasm of Dr. Moore. His actions could be viewed from either angle. Came next the telling demonstration of the truth of Moore’s theory that modern execution by hanging is not instantaneous. The judicial formula, “hanged by the neck until you are dead,” had now for Monty very real meaning. In the baby-shapes floating down to Earle through his cigarette smoke and in Earle’s dying words the big man was not disposed to believe. He will tell you that it was the only time in his life that he was made aware that he possessed what people call an imagination.

  William J. Anchor, presiding as usual at the breakfast table, startled the company, with the exception, of Moore and Monty, with the news of Earle’s suicide. Mrs. Jonas dropped her knife and fork and almost gaped at him. The others, excepting Lane, who preferred to go on eating, looked at the host and guardian with varying expressions of astonishment.

  “Yes, poor Earle has seen fit to end his life in a manner both unnecessary and tragic,” Anchor murmured.

  “You don’t say!” exclaimed Monty.

  “I do! I do, indeed. I don’t think I have yet told you that we have a Suicide Chamber fitted with a dozen––ah––remedies for life’s fitful fever. I conceived the idea after a guest shot himself most clumsily in the drawing-room and spoiled a priceless snow-white Persian carpet. Moore had occasion to visit the Suicide Chamber late last evening, and came upon Earle standing on a trap, a noose about his neck and the trap-release cord in his fingers. On seeing the doctor the foolish man released the trap beneath his feet. Horrified, the doctor rushed to the underground––er––receiving-room and at once cut Earle down, but Earle died precisely eighty-three seconds after launching himself through the trap.”

  “Good God!” ejaculated Martin sharply.

  Monty refrained from commenting on Dr. Moore’s evident readiness with a stop-watch and diplomatic sub-editing of detail. Anchor continued:

  “The news has quite unnerved me.” Whatever substitute for nerves he used was evidently an efficient one. “I am greatly grieved. I liked Earle. I think we all did. He was a great gentleman. In my opinion, he was the bravest man who ever lived.”

  “Was he at the war?” asked the big man calmly.

  “No. He was much too old, even had he volunteered. When I stated that he was a very courageous man, I meant really that he was braver than any soldier; more heroic, in my opinion, than any martyr. To appreciate Earle one must study his mentality, especially at the time he killed his children. The public in their ignorance said, and they were led to say it by what their newspapers printed, that Percival Earle was a monster, far worse than Deeming, or the unfortunate Frenchman, Landru, or myself. If not a monster, he was insane.

  “You have known the man, and I think will agree with me that he was neither a monster nor a lunatic. What the newspapers, the public, and what a judge and jury failed and always would have failed to understand, was Earle’s marvellous self-sacrificing love for his three children.

  “No doubt that sounds paradoxical, when we remember that he killed them with veronal. Yet the fact remains that he was passionately devoted to them. His life was unblemished. He was a successful business man. But his wife w
as dead, and there were no near relatives to whom he could entrust them when the germs of tuberculosis sapped his physical defences.

  “Earle was of Scotch descent. He was a staunch upholder of the Kirk during his youth and early manhood. His belief in heaven, full of angels playing orchestral instruments, and in hell, containing devils misusing implements of agriculture, was real and sincere. He believed, before he killed his children, that the act would condemn him to everlasting torment by the said devils. He deliberately condemned himself to hell in order that his children would never run the risk of hell when growing up without his love and guidance in the care of unsympathetic strangers. To him, sacrificing his life on the scaffold was a mere trifle to sacrificing his immortal soul. Have I made myself plain?”

  “Quite,” assented Martin. “Yet what remains obscure to me is the fact that Earle escaped to this place. Apparently he was very careful of his life till it became unbearably filled with remorse.”

  “Like Miss Thorpe, Earle had no option in the matter.”

  “Ah! the fog clears,” said the blind man thoughtfully. “In that case––and I have never heard of anything like it––Earle was indeed a courageous man.”

  At that point the doctor rose, intimating that he must be off to the hangar erected on the edge of Lake Moonba, whose dry bed made a perfect landing ground.

  “Is there anything I can bring you from Marree?” he asked, looking at Monty.

  “There is,” replied the big man. “It would be a real good turn if you brought me a hundred rounds of thirty-two Winchesters. And your cigarette supply is getting low, isn’t it, Martin?”

  “Yes. If you would be so kind, do you think you would have room for five hundred ‘Three Circle’ cigarettes?”

  “I will bring the tubes of comfort and the messengers of death with pleasure,” Moore agreed gravely. “With luck, I will be back about nine. Don’t let them forget to have the flares going, Anchor.”

  “They shall be lit. Bon voyage! ” farewelled the millionaire gaily.

  “The Cat” had a horse harnessed to a gig awaiting the airman, who drove off immediately afterwards. Monty learned from their host that Marree lay some hundred and sixty miles southwest of the Home. Later in the day he mounted to the roof of the house with Anchor, who showed him the encircling box timber of the lake about two miles north, with the faint dark line of the trees marking the course of the Strzelecki Creek on the horizon beyond.

  Breakfast over, the big man made Martin comfortable on the veranda and sought out the cheerful Mallowing, whom he found in the office, or the tiny room that served as one.

  “Say, my dear old Friar Tuck!” he said cheerfully, “can you put me on to a soldering outfit? I want to mend the water-drums that your bright young friend so expertly holed.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Sherwood,” came the hearty assent. “Come with me, and I will show you the tool-house.”

  They were walking across the compound when, espying the hounds chained to their kennels beyond the fence, the big man remarked:

  “I wondered last night why those poodle-dogs were howling. It seems strange that dogs know of a human death, or are you a disbeliever in the theory?”

  “By no means. I, too, heard them, and they must have started their commotion just when Earle died. Come and see them closer. They are always chained between sunrise and sunset.”

  “Mr. Anchor, I think, said there used to be a pack?”

  “That is so,” Mallowing stated expansively. “Mr. Anchor imported them from, I think, Bokhara. The number then was eleven. In spite of natural increase, these three are all that remain. Five were poisoned at various times. A visiting dogger shot two, since when the rule of chaining them in daytime was made. One died in a fight and the other had to be shot whilst you accounted for Carlo, Gilling’s favourite.”

  “Um! They’re massive brutes.”

  Through the netted fence the big man regarded the dogs with admiration; they glared at him with snarling malevolence. Their shaggy grey coats added to their apparent size. They stood not less than four feet high.

  “It seems strange that Gilling, who was low and vicious, passionately loved those dogs,” the little man said. “They were the only things he did love. They seemed to understand that, for they would fawn and play about him like pups. They were his especial care.”

  “Ah! And whose especial care are they now?”

  “You would never guess. I wouldn’t dare approach them.

  Nor would Lane or ‘The Cat.’ The keeper of the dogs is Madeline Fox.”

  “The fair girl?”

  “Yes, she. She can do what she likes with those three brutes. >Whatever you do, never venture outside the compound when they are loose. They would kill a man in three seconds.”

  “If the man didn’t kill ’em in less,” Monty murmured.

  “Precisely. This is our tool shop. Within you will find anything, from a lathe to a tin-tack.”

  The happy man who had regained his freedom left Monty and returned to his office, and, while the big man selected irons and started a blow-lamp, he thought of those three huge dogs and wondered how he would best them when he attempted to get his camels and Martin clear. Shooting would then be prohibited. Also he was without strychnine, generally included in his bush kit. He thought of the assorted poisons on the small table in the Suicide Chamber, and wondered if they included anything as reliable as strychnine, if not that identical drug.

  Above the roar of the blow-lamp came now and then the sharp creak of the iron roof expanding in the sun’s rays. The wind was blowing from the north, and was hot. It had cleared the air of sand, but foreboded another storm within a few days. Not far away, sounds of a hammer smiting iron on an anvil made the big man wonder if Lane was at work, and a picture of the huge accumulation of flesh and fat working in that heat made him chuckle softly.

  “Ooo-h!”

  For a moment he was startled, when the tot he had found on his bed the previous afternoon jumped through the doorway. Realistically, Monty dropped a sheet of tin and the cutters, falling back on a sawing-bench with pretended fright. The child let loose a whoop of joy, and, dashing towards him, clung to his knees and looked up at him with dancing eyes and a laughter-lit face of astonishing purity.

  “I flighten you,” announced the mite with a gurgle.

  “You did that,” Monty gasped. “Where did you spring from?”

  “I runned away from mummy,” the youngster confided. Looking round at this place forbidden him, he saw the tin-cutters on the floor, for which the big man raced him, only just winning. The child stood looking up at the bushman with a suddenly drooping mouth, which sight made Monty feel an out-size in beasts. As a sop, he offered two shining sticks of solder, and was happy to see the threatened tears vanish and the sun come out once more.

  “What’s your name, Bubbles?” he inquired, whilst busy with the lamp. “Me Fleddie,” came the solemnly-spoken reply; and, seeing Monty’s big leather pack-bags––for he had brought them there to repair when he had finished the drums––“Fleddie” went on a voyage of discovery.

  “So you’re Freddie, are you, Master Bubbles? Well, well! You go easy with those tucker-bags.”

  Monty went on with his work, whilst the curious child produced from the leather bags several small calico bags containing tea, sugar, salt, and a butt of flour, which he dragged out only by exerting all his strength. The first bag to be opened and emptied on the floor was that containing tea; and, this not suiting his taste, he examined next the salt which, proving of little interest, joined the tea. Of the sugar, however, he did manage to save a handful before it was added to the pile. The flour came last, and proved the star attraction. When a woman’s voice called “Freddie!” from one of the veranda doors at the house, the big man, turning from his work, gasped at the sight. Bubbles was wildly happy, absorbed in scooping up from the floor a glorious mixture of the contents of the tucker-bags and throwing it up over his golden crowned head. Flour whitened the deli
cate pink of his cheeks and filled the air with whirling particles, while the salt and tea gave his hair a piebald appearance.

  “Jumping nannygoats!” Monty breathed, adding with raised voice: “Look out! Here comes your mother.”

  Bubbles regarded him with rapturous eyes. He had not heard his mother’s first call. He did when she called again. Dropping handfuls of his wonderful mixture, he darted to Monty’s side, crying:

  “Mummy come! Mummy come! Me hide! Me hide from mummy!”

  When the child slipped round his great figure, Monty saw Mabel Hogan crossing to the hut. Bubbles was clutching at his trousers and stamping his sandal-shod feet with excitement; and, with a smile of joy, the bushman picked up the mite and set him down behind the sawing bench, on which he seated himself.

  “Hush! Mummy come!” he whispered tensely.

  “Mummy come!” whispered back the thrilled child. “Look out!”

  A shadow fell across the threshold, and, glancing up, Monty encountered the dark eyes of Mabel Hogan regarding him curiously.

  “Good morning!” he said.

  “Good morning!” she replied pleasantly. “Have you seen my baby? I cannot find him anywhere.”

  Monty did not speak at once, but studied with interest the woman who had murdered her betrayer. Hers was a likable face, possessing a rare beauty seldom found among Saxon women, but more often seen in Western Ireland and Northern Spain. It was a beauty enhanced by the expression of sorrow and tragedy which marked it with vivid lines. He was wondering where Bubbles had obtained his Saxon eyes and hair when her slightly almond-shaped eyes lit suddenly with understanding on noticing the indescribable mess of foodstuffs covering the floor.

  “I think that Freddie cannot be far away. He must be hiding somewhere,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Monty agreed. “Probably a habit of his.”