The Valley of Silent Men Part 17

In that instant came a flare of lightning, and to Kent, looking down, was revealed a sight that tightened every muscle in his body. More vividly than if it had been day he saw a man standing below in the deluge. It was not Mooie. It was not Kedsty. It was no one that he had ever seen. Even more like a ghost than a man was that apparition of the lightning flare. A great, gaunt giant of a ghost, bare-headed, with long, dripping hair and a long, storm-twisted beard. The picture shot to his brain with the swiftness of the lightning itself. It was like the sudden throwing of a cinema picture on a screen. Then blackness shut it out. Kent stared harder. He waited.

Again came the lightning, and again he saw that tragic, ghost-like figure waiting in the storm. Three times he saw it. And he knew that the mysterious, bearded giant was an old man. The fourth time the lightning came, the figure was gone. And in that flare it was the bowed figure of Kedsty he saw hurrying up the gravel path to the door.

Quickly Kent covered the window, but he did not relight the lamp.

Before Kedsty could have reached the foot of the stair, he had unlocked the door. Cautiously he opened it three or four inches and sat down with his back against the wall, listening. He heard Kedsty pa.s.s through into the big room where Marette had waited for him a short time before.

After that there was silence except for the tumult of the storm.

For an hour Kent listened. In all that time he did not hear a sound from the lower hall or from Marette's room. He wondered if she was sleeping, and if Kedsty had gone to bed, waiting for morning before he set in action his bloodhounds of the law.

Kent had no intention of disturbing the comfortable looking bed of blankets. He was not only sleepless, but filled with a premonition of events about to happen. He felt impinging itself more and more upon him a sense of watchfulness. That Inspector Kedsty and Marette Radisson were under the same roof, and that there was some potent and mysterious reason which kept Kedsty from betraying the girl's presence, was the thought which troubled him most. He was not developing further the plans for his own escape.

He was thinking of Marette. What was her power over Kedsty? Why was it that Kedsty would like to see her dead? Why was she in his house? Again and again he asked himself the questions and found no answers to them.

And yet, even in this purgatory of mystery that environed him, he felt himself happier than he had ever been in his life. For Marette was not four or five hundred miles down the river. She was in the same house with him. And he had told her that he loved her. He was glad that he had been given courage to let her know that. He relighted the lamp, and opened his watch and placed it on the table, where frequently he could look at the time. He wanted to smoke his pipe, but the odor of tobacco, he was sure, would reach Kedsty, unless the Inspector had actually retired into his bedroom for the night.

Half a dozen times he questioned himself as to the ident.i.ty of the ghostly apparition he had seen in the lightning flare of the storm.

Perhaps it was some one of Fingers' strange friends from out of the wilderness, Mooie's partner in watching the bungalow. The picture of that giant of a man with his great beard and long hair, as his eyes had caught him in a sea of electrical fire, was indelibly burned into his brain. It was a tragic picture.

Again he put out the light and bared the blanketed window, but he saw nothing but the sodden gleam of the earth when the lightning flashed. A second time he opened the door a few inches and sat down with his back to the wall, listening.

How long it was before drowsiness stole upon him he did not know, but it came, and for a few moments at a time, as his eyes closed, it robbed him of his caution. And then, for a s.p.a.ce, he slept. A sound brought him suddenly into wide wakefulness. His first impression was that the sound had been a cry. For a moment or two, as his senses adjusted themselves, he was not sure. Then swiftly the thing grew upon him.

He rose to his feet and widened the crack of his door. A bar of light shot across the upper hall. It was from Marette's room. He had taken off his boots to deaden the sound of his feet, and he stepped outside his door. He was positive he heard a low cry, a choking, sobbing cry, only barely audible, and that it came from down the stair.

No longer hesitating, he moved quickly to Marette's room and looked in.

His first glimpse was of the bed. It had not been used. The room was empty.

Something cold and chilling gripped at his heart, and an impulse which he no longer made an effort to resist pulled him to the head of the stair. It was more than an impulse--it was a demand. Step by step he went down, his hand on the b.u.t.t of his Colt.

He reached the lower hall, which was still lighted, and a step or two brought him to a view of the door that opened into the big living-room beyond. That door was partly open, and the room itself was filled with light. Soundlessly Kent approached. He looked in.

What he saw first brought him relief together with shock. At one end of the long desk table over which hung a great bra.s.s lamp stood Marette.

She was in profile to him. He could not see her face. Her hair fell loose about her, glowing like a rich, sable cape in the light of the lamp. She was safe, alive, and yet the att.i.tude of her as she looked down was the thing that gave him shock. He was compelled to move a few inches more before he could see what she was staring at. And then his heart stopped dead still.

Huddled down in his chair, with his head flung back so that the terrible ghastliness of his face fronted Kent, was Kedsty. And Kent, in an instant, knew. Only a dead man could look like that.

With a cry he entered the room. Marette did not start, but an answering cry came into her throat as she turned her eyes from Kedsty to him. To Kent it was like looking upon the dead in two ways. Marette Radisson, living and breathing, was whiter than Kedsty, who was white with the unbreathing pallor of the actually dead. She did not speak. She made no sound after that answering cry in her throat. She simply looked. And Kent spoke her name gently as he saw her great, wide eyes blazing dully their agony and despair. Then, like one stunned and fascinated, she stared down upon Kedsty again.

Every instinct of the man-hunter became alive in Kent's brain as he, too, turned toward the Inspector of Police. Kedsty's arms hung limp over the side of his chair. On the floor under his right hand was his Colt automatic. His head was strained so far over the back of the chair that it looked as though his neck had been broken. On his forehead, close up against his short-cropped, iron-gray hair, was a red stain.

Kent approached and bent over him. He had seen death too many times not to recognize it now, but seldom had he seen a face twisted and distorted as Kedsty's was. His eyes were open and bulging in a gla.s.sy stare. His jaws hung loose. His--

It was then Kent's blood froze in his veins. Kedsty had received a blow, but it was not the blow that had killed him. Afterward he had been choked to death. And the thing that had choked him was _a tress of woman's hair_.

In the seconds that followed that discovery Kent could not have moved if his own life had paid the penalty of inaction. For the story was told--there about Kedsty's throat and on his chest. The tress of hair was long and soft and shining and black. It was twisted twice around Kedsty's neck, and the loose end rippled down over his shoulder, _glowing like a bit of rich sable in the lamplight_. It was that thought of velvety sable that had come to him at the doorway, looking at Marette. It was the thought that came to him now. He touched it; he took it in his fingers; he unwound it from about Kedsty's neck, where it had made two deep rings in the flesh. From his fingers it rippled out full length. And he turned slowly and faced Marette Radisson.

Never had human eyes looked at him as she was looking at him now. She reached out a hand, her lips mute, and Kent gave her the tress of hair.

And the next instant she turned, with a hand clasped at her own throat, and pa.s.sed through the door.

After that he heard her going unsteadily up the stairs.

CHAPTER XVIII

Kent did not move. His senses for a s.p.a.ce were stunned. He was almost physically insensible to all emotions but that one of shock and horror.

He was staring at Kedsty's gray-white, twisted face when he heard Marette's door close. A cry came from his lips, but he did not hear it--was unconscious that he had made a sound. His body shook with a sudden tremor. He could not disbelieve, for the evidence was there.

From behind, as he had sat in his chair Marette Radisson had struck the Inspector of Police with some blunt object. The blow had stunned him.

And after that--

He drew a hand across his eyes, as if to clear his vision. What he had seen was impossible. The evidence was impossible. a.s.saulted, in deadly peril, defending either honor or love, Marette Radisson was of the blood to kill. But to creep up behind her victim--it was inconceivable!

Yet there had been no struggle. Even the automatic on the floor gave no evidence of that. Kent picked it up. He looked at it closely, and again the unconscious cry of despair came in a half groan from his lips. For on the b.u.t.t of the Colt was a stain of blood and a few gray hairs.

Kedsty had been stunned by a blow from his own gun!

As Kent placed it on the table, his eyes caught suddenly a gleam of steel under the edge of a newspaper, and he drew out from their hiding-place the long-bladed clipping scissors which Kedsty had used in the preparation of his sc.r.a.p-books and official reports. It was the last link in the deadly evidence--the automatic with its telltale stain, the scissors, the tress of hair, and Marette Radisson. He felt a sensation of sudden dizziness. Every nerve-center in his body had received its shock, and when the shock had pa.s.sed it left him sweating.

Swiftly the reaction came. It was a lie, he told himself. The evidence was false. Marette could not have committed that crime, as the crime had visualized itself before his eyes. There was something which he had not seen, something which he could not see, something that was hiding itself from him. He became, in an instant, the old James Kent. The instinctive processes of the man-hunter leaped to their stations like trained soldiers. He saw Marette again, as she had looked at him when he entered the room. It was not murder he had caught in her wide-open eyes. It was not hatred. It was not madness. It was a quivering, bleeding soul crying out to him in an agony that no other human eyes had ever revealed to him before. And suddenly a great voice cried out in his brain, drowning all other things, telling him how contemptible a thing was love unless in that love was faith.

With his heart choking him, he turned again to Kedsty. The futility of the thing which he had told himself was faith gripped at him sickeningly, yet he fought for that faith, even as his eyes looked again upon the ghastly torture that was in Kedsty's face.

He was becoming calmer. He touched the dead man's cheek and found that it was no longer warm. The tragedy must have occurred an hour before.

He examined more closely the abrasion on Kedsty's forehead. It was not a deep wound, and the blow that had made it must have stunned the Inspector of Police for only a short time. In that s.p.a.ce the other thing had happened. In spite of his almost superhuman effort to keep the picture away from him, Kent saw it vividly--the swift turning to the table, the inspiration of the scissors, the clipping of the long tress of hair, the choking to death of Kedsty as he regained consciousness. Over and over again he whispered to himself the impossibility of it, the absurdity of it, the utter incongruity of it.

Only a brain gone mad would have conceived that monstrous way of killing Kedsty. And Marette was not mad. She was sane.

Like the eyes of a hunting ferret his own eyes swept quickly about the room. At the four windows there were long curtain cords. On the walls, hung there as trophies, were a number of weapons. On one end of Kedsty's desk, used as a paperweight, was a stone tomahawk. Still nearer to the dead man's hands, unhidden by papers, was a boot-lace.

Under his limp right hand was the automatic. With these possible instruments of death close at hand, ready to be s.n.a.t.c.hed up without trouble or waste of time, why had the murderer used a tress of woman's hair?

The boot-lace drew Kent's eyes. It was impossible not to see it, forty-eight inches long and quarter-inch-wide buckskin. He began seeking for its mate, and found it on the floor where Marette Radisson had been standing. And again the unanswerable question pounded in Kent's brain--why had Kedsty's murderer used a tress of hair instead of a buckskin lace or one of the curtain cords hanging conspicuously at the windows?

He went to each of these windows and found them locked. Then, a last time, he bent over Kedsty. He knew that in the final moments of his life Kedsty had suffered a slow and torturing agony. His twisted face left the story. And the Inspector of Police was a powerful man. He had struggled, still partly dazed by the blow. But it had taken strength to overcome him even then, to hold his head back, to choke life out of him slowly with the noose of hair. And Kent, now that the significance of what he saw began to grow upon him more clearly, felt triumphing over all other things in his soul a slow and mighty joy. It was inconceivable that with the strength of her own hands and body Marette Radisson had killed Kedsty. A greater strength than hers had held him in the death-chair, and a greater strength than hers had choked life from the Inspector of Police!

He drew slowly out of the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him. He found that the front door was as Kedsty had left it, unlocked.

Close to that door he stood for a s.p.a.ce, scarcely allowing himself to breathe. He listened, but no sound came down the dimly illumined stairway.

A new thing was pressing upon him now. It rode over the shock of tragedy, over the first-roused instincts of the man-hunter, overwhelming him with the realization of a horror such as had never confronted him before. It gripped him more fiercely than the mere killing of Kedsty. His thought was of Marette, of the fate which dawn and discovery would bring for her. His hands clenched and his jaws tightened. The world was against him, and tomorrow it would be against her. Only he, in the face of all that condemning evidence in the room beyond, would disbelieve her guilty of Kedsty's death. And he, Jim Kent, was already a murderer in the eyes of the law.

He felt within him the slow-growing inspiration of a new spirit, the gathering might of a new force. A few hours ago he was an outcast. He was condemned. Life, for him, had been robbed of its last hope. And in that hour of his grimmest despair Marette Radisson had come to him.

Through storm that had rocked the earth under her feet and set ablaze the chaotic blackness of the sky over her head she had struggled--for him. She had counted no cost. She had measured no chances. She had simply come--_because she believed in him_. And now, upstairs, she was the victim of the terrible price that was the first cost of his freedom. For he believed, now that the thought came to him like a dagger stroke, that this was so. Her act in freeing him had brought about the final climax, and as a result of it, Kedsty was dead.

He went to the foot of the stair. Quietly, in his shoeless feet, he began to climb them. He wanted to cry out Marette's name even before he came to the top. He wanted to reach up to her with his arms outstretched. But he came silently to her door and looked in.

She lay in a crumpled, huddled heap on her bed. Her face was hidden, and all about her lay her smothering hair. For a moment he was frightened. He could not see that she was breathing. So still was she that she was like one dead.

His footsteps were unheard as he moved across the room. He knelt down beside her, reached out his arms, and gathered her into them.

"Marette!" he cried in a low voice.