CHAPTER XXX

THE WHISPER IN THE DARK

DARKNESS is a very strange thing. It is probably as strong and mysterious an agent when it comes to transmuting—and to deceiving—as anything on this earth. Nothing known to man is the same in the dark as at another time, and under the light.

It seemed to Jim Barrison that a series of pictures were being painted upon that cruel, that unfeeling, darkness. He had never, perhaps, been so close to himself before. The possibilities of human pain had certainly never been so apparent to the eyes of his mind. For suddenly, and with terrible clearness, he recalled his conversation with Grace Templeton, and seemed again to hear her say:

“Suppose the traveler who showed him the real gourd of water should refuse to share it, after all? What do you think would be likely to happen then?”

And once more he could hear himself reply:

“I should think the thirsty man would be quite likely to shoot him!”

And then—then—what was it she had said, with that enigmatical smile of hers?

“Yes, that’s just what might happen!”

Yes, that’s just what might happen! She had said that. How much had she meant by it, and how much had she meant it? He did not know. But, though he was not willing to apply it too closely as a key to his present position, he could not bring it to mind without a strange chill. For, if there were women of that kind, he was sure that she—lovely and idealistic as she was—was one of them.

He stood still, perfectly still, straining his ears, since it would have been utterly vain to have strained his eyes. For a time he even heard nothing. Yet he was poignantly conscious of another presence there—whose?

He was afraid to permit himself much in the way of conjecture; that sharp and taunting memory was still too fresh with him. He would rather a thousand times over that he had been tricked and trapped by some desperate criminal determined to torture him to death than that she should have thus deliberately led him here, should have thus cruelly traded upon her certain knowledge of his interest in her! The thing would not bear thinking of; it could not be!

He scarcely breathed as he stood there, motionless, waiting for that other’s first movement. He was so tensely alert that it seemed strange to him that the other could even breathe without his hearing it. He wished for a revolver, and cursed himself for the precipitancy which had carried him off without it.

And then he heard—what he had dreaded most of all to hear—the faint, almost imperceptible rustle of a woman’s dress!

It was the veriest ghost of a rustle, as though the very lightest and thinnest of fabrics had been stirred as delicately as possible.

But—it was a woman, then!

“Who is it?” he demanded, and his voice to his own ears seemed to resound like an experimental shout in one of the world’s famous echoing caverns.

And the answer came in a whisper—a woman’s whisper:

“Hush!”

Then there was a long, blank, awful silence, and then the rustle once again. And again that sibilant breath voiced:

“Can you tell where I am standing?”

“Who are you?” Barrison repeated, though dropping his own voice somewhat.

“Please don’t speak so loud!” He could barely hear the words. “I am Grace Templeton—surely you know?”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Because we may be overheard. Because there is danger, very great danger!”

“Danger—from whom?”

“Come closer, please! I am so afraid they will hear! Can’t you place me at all? If you are still at the door—are you?”

“Yes.”

“Then come forward to the right, only a few steps, and then wait.”

Now it has already been pointed out in these pages that the dark is paramountly deceptive. Barrison could not accurately locate the woman who was whispering to him; neither could he entirely identify the voice itself. If you will try the experiment of asking a number of different people to assemble in pitch darkness and each whisper the same thing, you will probably find that it is painfully easy to mistake your bitterest enemy for your very nearest and dearest friend. Jim Barrison had no soul thrill, nor any other sort of evidence, to assure him that the woman in the dark room was Grace Templeton; on the other hand, there was nothing to prove her any one else.

And yet—and yet—he had a curious, creeping feeling of dread and suspicion. He did not trust this unknown, unidentified, whispering voice in the darkness.

It came again then, like the very darkness itself made audible; insistent, soft, yet indefinitely sinister:

“Come! Come here to me! Only a few steps forward and just a little to the right.”

Barrison took one single step forward, and then stopped suddenly.

He did not know what stopped him. He only knew that he was stopped, as effectually and as imperatively as if some one in supreme authority had put out a stern, restraining hand before him.

And then, all at once, something happened—one of those tiny things that sometimes carry such huge results on their filmy wings. The whisper came again, more urgently this time:

“Aren’t you going to come to me, when I’m in danger?”

When people are born in the West, they carry certain things away from it with them, and it matters not how long they are gone nor in what far parts they choose to roam, they never get rid of those special gifts of their native soil. One is the slightly emphasized “r” of ordinary speech. No Easterner can correctly mimic it; no Westerner can ever get away from it except when painstakingly acting, and endeavoring to forget that to which he was born. The two r’s in the one brief sentence were of the nature to brand any one as a Westerner. And Barrison knew that Grace Templeton had never spoken with the ghost of such an accent in her life. Who was it whom he had heard speak recently who did accentuate her r’s like that? Marita did! And one other—though much more delicately and——

He remembered, with a throb of excited pleasure on dismissing a hideous suspicion from his mind, and on entering normally into the joys of chance and danger, that he had one weapon which might turn out to be exceedingly useful in his present predicament. He had come away without his gun, but he had with him the tiny pocket lamp, the electric torch of small dimensions but great power, which had been the joy of his life ever since it had been given him. Like all nice men, he was a child in his infatuated love of new toys!

He drew the little cylinder from his coat pocket cautiously, and, with the same exultant feeling that an aviator doubtless knows when he drops a bomb on a munitions factory, he flashed it.

The result was surprising.

Straight in front of him was a square, black hole in the floor. If he had taken that step forward and to the right which she had urged, he would have gone headlong to practically certain death. The human brain, being quicker than anything else in the universe, reminded him that there had been some unexplained disappearances in this neighborhood. But he was now chiefly concerned in finding out who the woman was. Before he could flash his light in her face she had flung herself upon him.

There was no more pretense about her. She was grimly, fiercely determined to force him toward that wicked, black hole into eternity. Not a single word did she utter; she did not even call for assistance, though, since the people in this house were her friends or tools, she might well have done so. She seemed consumed by one single, burning desire: to thrust him with her own hands into the pit.

Never had Jim struggled against such ferocity of purpose. She was like a demon rather than a woman, in the way she writhed between his hands, and forced her limited strength against his trained muscles in the bold and frantic effort to annihilate him. And, in that dense blackness, it was a toss-up as to who would win. The woman herself might easily have gone headlong into the very trap she had planned for him. But she did not seem to think or to care for that; her whole force of being was centered, it seemed, in the one sole purpose of his destruction.

At that furious, struggling moment, Barrison became convinced of an odd thing. He was perfectly certain, against all the testimony of all the world, that the woman who fought him so murderously was not only the woman who had planned his own death that night, but also the criminal for whom they were so assiduously seeking. He was sure that his hands at that very minute grasped the person who had killed Alan Mortimer.

It seemed to last forever, that silent, breathless struggle in the dark. But finally he got her hands pinioned behind her in one of his, and deliberately, though with a beating heart, raised his electric torch and flashed it full in her face.

Mutinous, defiant, almost mad with rage for the moment, the dark eyes of Kitty Legaye blazed back at him.