tossed and rolled. My eyes wandered, and in wakeful desperation I studied the bedroom doors. Three doors, one to the bathroom, one to the living room, one to a shallow clothes closet. I examined the closet door. Jack’s necktie hung around the knob, and the shadow of knob and necktie were weirdly printed upon the floor. Gradually my fixed gaze grew hypnotic. My lids were drooping shut when suddenly I felt a wave of cold surprise. The shadow on the floor was moving. I stared. Slowly but definitely the shadow advanced across the floor and toward the bed.
For a moment I lay rigid. My heart hammered, perspiration chilled my forehead and I seemed frozen to the bed. I looked again at the shadow, then raised my eyes to the closet door. Very quietly the door was opening out into the bedroom.
I shrieked.
The door flew open. A man with a blurred, black face rushed from the closet, across the bedroom into the living room. Jack flung back the covers, sat up.
“What was it?”
“Someone in the closet—a Negro.”
The kitchen door banged. Instantly Jack was out of bed and out of the bedroom. A second time the door banged. Clad only in a thin nightgown, I, too somehow got outside and into the yard.
Two figures were running through the moonlight. The man who had hidden in the closet was far in advance, half way across the stubble field beyond the fence. He ran like an animal, crouched low, arms swinging. Hampered by a late start and bare feet. Jack was steadily losing ground. As I gained the fence, the black-faced man plunged into the woods at the edge of the field, disappeared. Jack put on a fresh burst of speed.
“Come back,” I screamed.
Jack didn’t turn or hesitate, but darted on and out of sight. This bit of foolhardiness, typical of him, can make me angry now. As I saw him vanish across that empty moonlit field I felt a terror such as I had never known before. I clambered over the fence, reversed myself, and shot back into the cottage, thus, as Jack admitted later, exhibiting a higher degree of intelligence than he had shown. I reached the telephone. I retained sufficient wit to realize that Standish was six miles away, and when a sleepy operator finally answered, I put in a call for Silas. He answered at the second ring, but he sounded sleepy and his questions were intolerably slow and stupid. Frantic, I demanded that he come at once.
“Directly I get some clothes on, Mrs. Storm.”
The Lodge was more than half a mile distant. Reminded of my own apparel, I snatched up a bathrobe and slippers, hesitated long enough to try the police station—I got no response there or at Standish’s home—then ran outside into the stubble field, loudly calling Jack and watching for Silas. I had hoped he would take the short cut through the pasture. His bobbing lantern a few minutes later approached by the road.
Hatless, coatless, muttering to himself, he was hurrying. As he scrambled through the barbed-wire fence, and as I dragged him toward the woods, I poured forth a confused, incoherent story.
“Who was in the closet?”
“I don’t know. It was a Negro.”
“There aren’t many Negroes around Crockford.”
“I don’t care who was in the closet,” I cried, maddened by his stupidity. “I don’t care how many Negroes are in Crockford. I want to find Jack. You’ve got to help, me.”
At this point it developed that Silas was unwilling to enter the woods. He proposed returning to the Lodge to get his dog. I plunged in alone, and I suppose his conscience pricked him, for he followed, though he stuck close beside me. Together we started beating the bush, calling, calling. I had a flashlight. Silas, who had prudently armed himself with a stout stick, swung his lantern to and fro. Giant circles danced eerily through the tangled underbrush. Twigs crackled, the wind sighed overhead, a rabbit fled past like a shadow. Silas and I grabbed each other’s hands in mutual terror.
Five minutes later the hired man stumbled across a pair of outthrust feet. Bleeding and senseless, Jack had been roughly shoved into a clump of briars. We drew him into the open.
I pushed Silas aside—he was near collapse—and knelt upon the ground. Blood smeared Jack’s cheek and forehead; he lay deathly white and still. He didn’t hear me when I called his name.
CHAPTER SIX
The Hell Hole
Between us, Silas and I carried Jack into the cottage and laid him upon the bed. Although he had not stirred during the journey, his pallor was less intense. As I wrapped a comforter about his feet and adjusted a pillow beneath his head, he moved a little and groaned deeply, wearily. I sent Silas to heat a kettle of water. When he brought in the steaming kettle I began to bathe Jack’s forehead.
“Well,” said Silas almost cheerfully, “we got him back all right.”
“So we did,” I said.
He was impervious to irony. He shambled to the closet, peered curiously inside and muttered that our intruder had chosen a strange hiding place—a fact which had earlier occurred to me. Just then, however, I could not appreciate the hired man’s speculations. My tone was short.
“Go and phone for Dr. Rand.”
I continued my ministrations. The savage head wound, clotted with blood, matted with blond hair, abruptly thrust from my mind a certain tentative theory. Until then I had thought that, running as he was, headlong, into the dense blackness of the woods, Jack might have crashed into a tree and knocked himself unconscious. This wound was the result not of accident, but of a singularly brutal attack.
Silas returned to report that Dr. Rand would come at once. We were to put ice on Jack’s head and a hot-water bottle at his feet. We were to do nothing else until the physician reached the cottage.
“He said quiet was the best medicine.”
Shortly afterward Jack opened his eyes. Too sick and nauseated to discuss what had happened in the woods, he was sufficiently himself to protest against a doctor.
“I’ll be o.k. in the morning.”
Following his prediction, he was again violently nauseated. Silas promptly suggested that the patient rise from bed to walk backward across the room. This remedy was culled from Mrs. Coatesnash’s store, and according to Silas, had been effective in the case of a young relative who had tumbled from a haymow.
“You can lean on me, Mr. Storm, if you feel sickish. I promise it’s a sure cure. With my own eyes I saw it work with little Willie. Mrs. Coatesnash swears it saved his life.”
Jack decided to remain where he was.
Dr. Rand had assimilated his quota of excitement for one evening. He arrived at the cottage, disposed to make light of Jack’s injuries. Silas’s telephone report had been garbled and uninformative; furthermore, Jack was shakily sitting up.
The physician jovially approached the bed. “What’s this I hear about your chasing bandits in the woods? Don’t you know enough to carry a flashlight?”
Immediately he commenced the examination his face sobered. He asked Jack many questions. He had him shake his head. “Do you feel any pain?”
“Lord, yes.”
“Is it concussion?” I asked quietly.
“I think not.” Dr. Rand looked at Jack. “You’re a lucky young man. That’s a nasty wound. You missed a bad injury by a very narrow margin.”
“I think myself I missed death by a narrow margin.”
The statement went uncontradicted. Dr. Rand turned, gave me a few instructions and ordered Jack to report the next day for an X-ray. Just to be sure. Then snapping shut his bag, he paused hesitantly.
“Exactly what did happen? I’m curious.”
“I was running in the woods, running hard. I stopped to listen. Someone hit me.”
“From behind?”
“Yes.”