Adventure Magazine Cover — page 160: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

724 more. ‘This time he added: “And it’s cold; dead cold.” Peter agreed with him. His own fingers were numb. The room was very chill. He pulled an old-fashioned bell-cord, and pres- ently, just as he had seated himself in the leathern chair opposite his brother’s, turned up the lamp, adjusted his spectacles and spread out the newspaper that had come in the evening mail—yjust, too, as the antique hall clock in the passage, in solemn tone, tolled the hour of nine, a hunchbacked servitor, old like his masters, appeared in the doorway. “The house is a tomb, Abijah,” said Peter, a little querulously. ‘“‘ Put more coal in the furnace, and open the drafts. The night is bitter.”’ Then, for a half-hour and more, the long, somber room was silent, save for the cease- less whirl of the snow against the window- panes, the intermittent protest of the wind- lashed sashes, and the occasional rustle of the newspaper as Peter Hemming turned its pages. Henry, meanwhile, his faded eyes dim as the dying coals on which they rested, sat crouching, dumb and motionless, like a carven gnome. it was the habit of the brothers to rise as the clock struck ten, and mount the wind- ing, low-treaded colonial stairway to their second-floor bedchambers. Night after night the practise was invariable. Until the signal was given, Peter read his paper with- out comment, and Henry never moved, never spoke. But to-night, to the astonish- ment of the elder of the two men, the crouch- ing figure across the hearth stirred before the clock-stroke; stirred, indeed, fully twenty minutes in advance of the accus- tomed hour for stirring; and stirred in a quite unusual and alarming manner. It was the sharpness of the sound made by his withered hands dropping with sudden clutch upon his chair-arms that drew Peter’s eyes from the printed column he had been engrossed in and caused him, precipi- tately, to drop his paper into hislap. Henry was sitting up, very straight; straighter of back, indeed, than Peter remembered ever to have seen him; yet with his naked, yellow- ish head perkingly slanted and listeningly alert. His eyes, wontedly expressionless, seemed, strangely enough, to have taken on an undreamed-of luster; and as the startled brother stared, the cup of his amaze- ment was brimmed to overfiowing by a Adventure sharply penetrating, hissing sort of whisper. “Lastent”’ “Tt’s the wind,” said Peter soothingly. though his heart fluttered, ‘‘it’s the wind.’ He had heard nothing else. But Henry irritably shook his head. ‘“Tisten!”’ he hissed again. And Peter, holding his breath, strained his ears. To him the stillness now seemed abysmal; the wind had passed; the snow no longer smote the panes. ‘“They’re at the door!’ Henry cried, sud- denly springing from his chair. ‘‘Keep ’em out! Keep ’em out!”’ And he shuffled into the shadows of the room’s end. To Peter it was but another distressing, racking and unlooked for turn of the life- old infirmity. The moon, as he had been reminded, was at the full. He rose, sadly, and started to follow. It must be his mis- sion now to pacify. All his years, it seemed to him, had been given up to ministering to this feeble-minded one. He moved totteringly, nervously un- braced, only to stumble the next instant to a halt; checked by the sudden clangor of the door-bell, echoing brazenly through the silent house. In panic he laid a shaking hand on the back of Henry’s vacated chair, and paused there, white and apprehensive, while Abijah’s old feet scraped across the hall—while the chain-bolt rattled and the great lock clicked to the turning key. The invading rush of icy air seemed to freeze his thin blood. A shiver ran through him, as vainly he strove to gather the sense of the ensuing dialogue which penetrated to him in a vague jumble. At length, still disturbed, still perplexed, he heard the door slammed against the blast; and then—approaching footsteps. Instinct- ively he peered once more with apprehension into the gloom of the room’s end. Henry, dumbly cowering there beside the safe, was half lost amid the shadows; and Peter, tense though he was with questioning suspense, sighed his scant measure of relief. At the same instant, Abijah, with some apology of manner, reluctantly admitted two fur-wrapped, snow-encrusted figures— amananda woman who clung dependently to hisarm. The man had removed his cap, revealing sandy hair and a florid, tempest- whipped face. The woman was thickly veiled, and to the veil there still clung splotches of snow or the frost of her frozen breath. COMMCOOCKS. GO