The Blind Man's Eyes Part 37

"Believe in you, Miss Santoine!" He crushed her fingers in his grasp.

"Oh, my G.o.d, I wish I could!"

"You wish you could?" she echoed. The tone of it struck her like a blow, and she tore her hands away. "What do you mean by that?"

He made no reply but stood staring at her through the dark. "We must go back," he said queerly. "You're cold."

She did not answer but started back up the path to the house. He seemed to have caught himself together against some impulse that stirred him strongly. "The man out there who saw us? He will report to your father, Miss Santoine?" he asked unsteadily.

"Reports for Father are first made to me."

"I see." He did not ask her what she was going to do; if he was a.s.suming that her permission to exceed his set limits bound her not to report to her father, she did not accept that a.s.sumption, though she would not report to the blind man to-night, for she knew he must now be asleep. But she felt that Eaton was no longer thinking of this. As they entered the house and he helped her lay off her cape, he suddenly faced her.

"We are in a strange relation to each other, Miss Santoine--stranger than you know," he said unevenly.

She waited for him to go on.

"We have talked sometimes of the likeness of the everyday life to war,"

he continued. "In war men and women sometimes do or countenance things they know to be evil because they believe that by means of them there is accomplished some greater good; in peace, in life, men--and women--sometimes do the same. When the time comes that you comprehend what our actual relation is, I--I want you to know that I understand that whatever you have done was done because you believed it might bring about the greater good. I--I have seen in you--in your father--only kindness, high honor, sympathy. If I did not know--"

She started, gazing at him; what he said had absolutely no meaning for her. "What is it that you know?" she demanded.

He did not reply; his hand went out to hers, seized it, crushed it, and he started away. As he went up the stair--still, in his absorption, carrying cap and overcoat--she stood staring after him in perplexity.

CHAPTER XVII

THE FIGHT IN THE STUDY

Eaton dismissed the man who had been waiting in his rooms for him; he locked the door and carefully drew down all the window-shades. Then he put his overcoat, folded as he had been carrying it under his arm, on the writing table in the center of the room, and from its folds and pockets took a "breast-drill" such as iron workers use in drilling steel, an automatic pistol with three clips of cartridges, an electric flashlight and a little bottle of nitroglycerine. He loaded the pistol and put it in his pocket; then he carefully inspected the other things.

The room he was in, the largest of his suite, resembled Santoine's study on the floor below in the arrangement of its windows, though it was smaller than the study. The writing-desk in its center occupied much the position of Santoine's large desk; he moved it slightly to make the relative positions coincide. The couch against the end wall represented the position of the study's double doors. Eaton switched out the lights, and starting at the windows, he crossed the room in the darkness, avoiding the desk, and stopping a few feet to the right of the couch; here he flashed his light upon the wall at the height of the little wall-safe to the right of the doors in the study below. A dozen times he did this, pa.s.sing from the windows to the position of the wall-safe and only momentarily flashing his light.

He a.s.sured himself thus of being able to pa.s.s in the dark from the windows of Santoine's study to the wall-safe. As the study was larger than this room, he computed that he must add two steps to what he took here in each direction. He paid no attention to the position of the safe to the left of the doors, for he had kept watch of the vase on the table in the lower hall, and the only sign he had found there had told him that what he wanted was in the safe to the right.

He raised a shade and window, then, and sat in the dark. The night was cloudy and very dark; and the lake was smooth with barely a ripple.

Near at hand a steamer pa.s.sed, blazing with lights, and further out he saw the mast-head light of some other steamer. The lake was still ice-locked at its northern end, and so the farther of these steamers, he knew, was bound to some southern Michigan port; the nearer was one of the Chicago-Milwaukee boats. For some moments after it had pa.s.sed, the waves of its wake washed in and sounded on the sh.o.r.e at the foot of the bluff. Next Eaton made out the hum of a motor-car approaching the house. It was Avery, who evidently had been out and was now returning; the chauffeur spoke the name in his reply to some question as the car swung away to the garage. Eaton still sat in the dark. By degrees all noises ceased in the house, even in the servants' quarters. Twice Eaton leaned forward looking out of the window and found all quiet; but both times he settled back in his chair and waited.

The wash of waves, as from a pa.s.sing boat, sounded again on the sh.o.r.e.

Eaton leaned nearer the window and stared out. There was no light in sight showing any boat; but the waves on the sh.o.r.e were distinct; indeed, they had been more distinct than those from the steamer. They must have been made by a large vessel or from a small ship close in and moving fast. The waves came in first on the north and swept south; Eaton strained his eyes and now saw a vague blur off to the south and within half a mile of sh.o.r.e--a boat without lights. If it had pa.s.sed at high speed, it had stopped now. He watched this for some time; but he could make out no more, and soon he could not be sure even that the blur was there.

He gazed at the south wing of the house; it was absolutely dark and quiet; the windows of the first floor were closed and the curtains drawn; but to-night there was no light in the room. The windows of the room on the second floor were open; Basil Santoine was undoubtedly asleep. Eaton gazed again at the lower room. Then in the dark he moved to the table where he had left his overcoat, and distributed in his pockets and within his clothing the articles he had brought; and now he felt again in the overcoat and brought out a short, strong bar of steel curved and flattened at one end--a "jimmy" for forcing the windows.

Eaton slipped off his shoes and went to his room door; he opened the door and found the hall dark and quiet. He stepped out, closing his door carefully behind him, and with great caution he descended the stairs. Below, all was quiet; the red embers and glowing charcoal of wood fires which had blazed on the hearths gave the only light. Eaton crept to the doors of the blind man's study and softly tried them.

They were, as he had expected, locked. He went to a window in the drawing-room which was set in a recess and so placed that it was not visible from other windows in the house. He opened this window and let himself down upon the lawn.

There he stood still for a moment, listening. There was no alarm of any sort. He crept along beside the house till he came to the first windows of the south wing. He tried these carefully and then went on.

He gained the south corner of the wing, un.o.bserved or at least without sign that he had been seen, and went on around it.

He stopped at the first high French window on the south. It was partly hidden from view from south and west by a column of the portico, and was the one he had selected for his operations; as he tried to slip his jimmy under the bottom of the sash, the window, to his amazement, opened silently upon its hinges; it had not been locked. The heavy curtains within hung just in front of him; he put out his hand and parted them. Then he started back in astonishment and crouched close to the ground; inside the room was a man moving about, flashing an electric torch before him and then exploring an instant in darkness and flashing his torch again.

The unexpectedness of this sight took for an instant Eaton's breath and power of moving; he had not been at all prepared for this; now he knew suddenly that he ought to have been prepared for it. If the man within the room was not the one who had attacked him with the motor, he was closely allied with that man, and what he was after now was the same thing Eaton was after. Eaton looked about behind him; no one apparently had been left on watch outside. He drew his pistol, and loosing the safety, he made it ready to fire; with his left hand, he clung to the short, heavy jimmy. He stepped into the great room through the curtains, taking care they did not jingle the rings from which they hung; he carefully let the curtains fall together behind him, and treading noiselessly in his stocking feet, he advanced upon the man, moving forward in each period of darkness between the flashes of the electric torch.

The man, continuing to flash his light about, plainly had heard nothing, and the curtains had prevented him from being warned by the chill of the night air that the window was open; but now, at the further side of the room, another electric torch flashed out. Another man had been in the room; he neither alarmed nor was alarmed by the man flashing the first light; each had known the other's presence before.

There were at least two men in the room, working together--or rather, one was working, the other supervising; for Eaton heard now a steady, almost inaudible grinding noise as the second man worked. Eaton halted again and waited; if there were two, there might be others.

The discovery of the second man had not made Eaton afraid; his pulses were beating faster and hotter, and he felt the blood rushing to his head and his hands growing cold with his excitement; but he was conscious of no fear. He crouched and crept forward noiselessly again.

No other light appeared in the room, and there was no sound elsewhere from the darkness; but the man who supervised had moved closer to the other. The grinding noise had stopped; it was followed by a sharp click; the men, side by side, were bending over something; and the light of the man who had been working, for a fraction of a second shot into the face of the other. It did not delay at all; it was a purely accidental flash and could not have been said to show the features at all--only a posture, an expression, a personality of a strong and cruel man. He muttered some short, hoa.r.s.e imprecation at the other; but before Eaton heard the voice, he had stopped as if struck, and his breath had gone from him.

His instant's glimpse of that face astounded, stunned, stupefied him.

He could not have seen that man! The fact was impossible! He must have been mad; his mind must have become unreliable to let him even imagine it. Then came the sound of the voice--the voice of the man whose face he had seen! It was he! And, in place of the paralysis of the first instant, now a wild, savage throe of pa.s.sion seized Eaton; his pulses leaped so it seemed they must burst his veins, and he gulped and choked. He had not filled in with insane fancy the features of the man whom he had seen; the voice witnessed too that the man in the dark by the wall was he whom Eaton--if he could have dreamed such a fact as now had been disclosed--would have circled the world to catch and destroy; yet now with the destruction of that man in his power--for he had but to aim and empty his automatic pistol at five paces--such destruction at this moment could not suffice; mere shooting that man would be petty, ineffectual. Eaton's fingers tightened on the handle of his pistol, but he held it now not as a weapon to fire but as a dull weight with which to strike. The grip of his left hand clamped onto the short steel bar, and with lips parted--breathing once, it seemed, for each heartbeat and yet choking, suffocating--he leaped forward.

At the same instant--so that he could not have been alarmed by Eaton's leap--the man who had been working moved his torch, and the light fell upon Eaton.

"Look out!" the man cried in alarm to his companion; with the word the light of the torch vanished.

The man toward whom Eaton rushed did not have time to switch off his light; he dropped it instead; and as Eaton sprang for him, he crouched.

Eaton, as he struck forward, found nothing; but below his knees, Eaton felt a man's powerful arms tackling him; as he struggled to free himself, a swift, savage lunge lifted him from his feet; he was thrown and hurled backwards.

Eaton ducked his head forward and struggled to turn, as he went down, so that a shoulder and not his head or back would strike the floor first. He succeeded in this, though in his effort he dropped the jimmy. He clung with his right hand to the pistol, and as he struck the floor, the pistol shot off; the flash of flame spurted toward the ceiling. Instantly the grip below his knees was loosed; the man who had tackled him and hurled him back had recoiled in the darkness.

Eaton got to his feet but crouched and crept about behind a table, aiming his pistol over it in the direction in which he supposed the other men must be. The sound of the shot had ceased to roar through the room; the gases from the powder only made the air heavier. The other two men in the room also waited, invisible and silent. The only light, in the great curtained room, came from the single electric torch lying on the floor. This lighted the legs of a chair, a corner of a desk and a circle of books in the cases on the wall. As Eaton's eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, he could see vague shapes of furniture. If a man moved, he might be made out; but if he stayed still, probably he would remain indistinguishable.

The other men seemed also to have recognized this; no one moved in the room, and there was complete silence.

Eaton knelt on one knee behind his table; now he was wildly, exultantly excited; his blood leaped hotly to his hand pointing his pistol; he panted, almost audibly, for breath, but though his pulse throbbed through his head too, his mind was clear and cool as he reckoned his situation and his chances. He had crossed the Pacific, the Continent, he had schemed and risked everything with the mere hope of getting into this room to discover evidence with which to demand from the world righting of the wrong which had driven him as a fugitive for five years; and here he found the man who was the cause of it all, before him in the same room a few paces away in the dark!

For it was impossible that this was not that man; and Eaton knew now that this was he who must have been behind and arranging and directing the attacks upon him, Eaton had not only seen him and heard his voice, but he had felt his grasp; that sudden, instinctive crouch before a charge, and the savage lunge and tackle were the instant, natural acts of an old linesman on a championship team in the game of football as it was played twenty years before. That lift of the opponent off his feet and the heavy lunge hurling him back to fall on his head was what one man--in the rougher, more cruel days of the college game--had been famous for. On the football field that throw sufficed to knock a helmeted opponent unconscious; here it was meant, beyond doubt, to do more.

Upon so much, at least, Eaton's mind at once was clear; here was his enemy whom he must destroy if he himself were not first destroyed.

Other thoughts, recasting of other relations altered or overturned in their bearing by the discovery of this man here--everything else could and must wait upon the mighty demand of that moment upon Eaton to destroy this enemy now or be himself destroyed.

Eaton shook in his pa.s.sion; yet coolly he now realized that his left shoulder, which had taken the shock of his fall, was numb. He shifted his pistol to cover a vague form which had seemed to move; but, if it had stirred, it was still again now. Eaton strained to listen.

It seemed certain that the noise of the shot, if not the sound of the struggle which preceded it, must have raised an alarm, though the room was in a wing and shut off by double doors from the main part of the house; it was possible that the noise had not gone far; but it must have been heard in the room directly above and connected with the study by a staircase at the head of which was a door. Basil Santoine, as Eaton knew, slept above; a nurse must be waiting on duty somewhere near. Eaton had seen the row of b.u.t.tons which the blind man had within arm's-length with which he must be able to summon every servant in the house. So it could not last much longer now--this deadlock in the dark--the two facing one, and none of them daring to move. And one of the two, at least, seemed to have recognized that.

Eaton had moved, warily and carefully, but he had moved; a revolver flashed before him. Instantly and without consciousness that his finger pulled the trigger, Eaton's pistol flashed back. In front of him, the flame flashed again, and another spurt of fire spat at one side.

Eaton fired back at this--he was prostrate on the floor now, and whether he had been hit or not he did not yet know, or whether the blood flowing down his face was only from a splinter sprayed from the table behind which he had hid. He fired again, holding his pistol far out to one side to confuse the aim of the others; he thought that they too were doing the same and allowed for it in his aim. He pulled his trigger a ninth time--he had not counted his shots, but he knew he had had seven cartridges in the magazine and one in the barrel--and the pistol clicked without discharging. He rolled over further away from the spot where he had last fired and pulled an extra clip of cartridges from his pocket.

The blood was flowing hot over his face. He made no effort to staunch it or even to feel with his fingers to find exactly where or how badly he had been hit. He jerked the empty cartridge clip from his pistol b.u.t.t and snapped in the other. He swept his sleeve over his face to clear the blood from his brows and eyes and stared through the dark with pistol at arm's-length loaded and ready. Blood spurted over his face again; another sweep of his sleeve cleared it; and he moved his pistol-point back and forth in the dark. The flash of the firing from the other two revolvers had stopped; the roar of the shots had ceased to deafen. Eaton had not counted the shots at him any better than he had kept track of his own firing; but he knew now that the other two must have emptied their magazines as well as he. It was possible, of course, that he had killed one of them or wounded one mortally; but he had no way to know that. He could hear the click as one of the men snapped his revolver shut again after reloading; then another click came. Both the others had reloaded.

"All right?" the voice which Eaton knew questioned the other.

"All right," came the reply.

But, if they were all right, they made no offer to fire first again.

Nor yet did they dare to move. Eaton knew they lay on the floor like himself. They lay with fingers on trigger, as he also lay, waiting again for him to move so they could shoot at him. But surely now the sound of the firing in that room must have reached the man in the room above; surely he must be summoning his servants!