The Bat Part 41

"I saw lights up here from outside," continued the Doctor easily. "And I thought--"

Miss Cornelia interrupted him. She had set down her candle and laid the revolver on the top of the clothes hamper and now stood gazing at the mantel-fireplace.

"The mantel's--closed!" she said.

The Doctor stared. So the secret of the Hidden Room was a secret no longer. He saw ruin gaping before him--a bottomless abyss.

"d.a.m.nation!" he cursed impotently under his breath.

Bailey turned on him savagely.

"Did you shut that mantel?"

"No!"

"I'll see whether you shut it or not!" Bailey leaped toward the fireplace. "Dale! Dale!" he called desperately, leaning against the mantel. His fingers groped for the k.n.o.b that worked the mechanism of the hidden entrance.

The Doctor picked up the single lighted candle from the hamper, as if to throw more light on Bailey's task. Bailey's fingers found the k.n.o.b.

He turned it. The mantel began to swing out into the room.

As it did so the Doctor deliberately snuffed out the light of the candle he held, leaving the room in abrupt and obliterating darkness.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ANDERSON MAKES AN ARREST

"Doctor, why did you put out that candle?" Miss Cornelia's voice cut the blackness like a knife.

"I didn't--I--"

"You did--I saw you do it."

The brief exchange of accusation and denial took but an instant of time, as the mantel swung wide open. The next instant there was a rush of feet across the floor, from the fireplace--the shock of a collision between two bodies--the sound of a heavy fall.

"What was that?" queried Bailey dazedly, with a feeling as if some great winged creature had brushed at him and pa.s.sed.

Lizzie answered from the doorway.

"Oh, oh!" she groaned in stricken accents. "Somebody knocked me down and tramped on me!"

"Matches, quick!" commanded Miss Cornelia. "Where's the candle?"

The Doctor was still trying to explain his curious action of a moment before.

"Awfully sorry, I a.s.sure you--it dropped out of the holder--ah, here it is!"

He held it up triumphantly. Bailey struck a match and lighted it. The wavering little flame showed Lizzie prostrate but vocal, in the doorway--and Dale lying on the floor of the Hidden Room, her eyes shut, and her face as drained of color as the face of a marble statue. For one horrible instant Bailey thought she must be dead.

He rushed to her wildly and picked her up in his arms. No--still breathing--thank G.o.d! He carried her tenderly to the only chair in the room.

"Doctor!"

The Doctor, once more the physician, knelt at her side and felt for her pulse. And Lizzie, picking herself up from where the collision with some violent body had thrown her, retrieved the smelling salts from the floor. It was onto this picture, the candlelight shining on strained faces, the dramatic figure of Dale, now semi-conscious, the desperate rage of Bailey, that a new actor appeared on the scene.

Anderson, the detective, stood in the doorway, holding a candle--as grim and menacing a figure as a man just arisen from the dead.

"That's right!" said Lizzie, unappalled for once. "Come in when everything's over!"

The Doctor glanced up and met the detective's eyes, cold and menacing.

"You took my revolver from me downstairs," he said. "I'll trouble you for it."

The Doctor got heavily to his feet. The others, their suspicions confirmed at last, looked at him with startled eyes. The detective seemed to enjoy the universal confusion his words had brought.

Slowly, with sullen reluctance, the Doctor yielded up the stolen weapon. The detective examined it casually and replaced it in his hip pocket.

"I've something to settle with you pretty soon," he said through clenched teeth, addressing the Doctor. "And I'll settle it properly.

Now--what's this?"

He indicated Dale--her face still and waxen--her breath coming so faintly she seemed hardly to breathe at all as Miss Cornelia and Bailey tried to revive her.

"She's coming to--" said Miss Cornelia triumphantly, as a first faint flush of color reappeared in the girl's cheeks. "We found her shut in there, Mr. Anderson," the spinster added, pointing toward the gaping entrance of the Hidden Room.

A gleam crossed the detective's face. He went up to examine the secret chamber. As he did so, Doctor Wells, who had been inching surrept.i.tiously toward the door, sought the opportunity of slipping out un.o.bserved.

But Anderson was not to be caught napping again. "Wells!" he barked.

The Doctor stopped and turned.

"Where were you when she was locked in this room?"

The Doctor's eyes sought the floor--the walls--wildly--for any possible loophole of escape.

"I didn't shut her in if that's what you mean!" he said defiantly.

"There was someone shut in there with her!" He gestured at the Hidden Room. "Ask these people here."

Miss Cornelia caught him up at once.

"The fact remains, Doctor," she said, her voice cold with anger, "that we left her here alone. When we came back you were here. The corridor door was locked, and she was in that room--unconscious!"

She moved forward to throw the light of her candle on the Hidden Room as the detective pa.s.sed into it, gave it a swift professional glance, and stepped out again. But she had not finished her story by any means.

"As we opened that door," she continued to the detective, tapping the false mantel, "the Doctor deliberately extinguished our only candle!"

"Do you know who was in that room?" queried the detective fiercely, wheeling on the Doctor.

But the latter had evidently made up his mind to cling stubbornly to a policy of complete denial.

"No," he said sullenly. "I didn't put out the candle. It fell. And I didn't lock that door into the hall. I found it locked!"