Adventure Magazine Cover — page 165: what you’re looking at

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

In the Noon of the Moon “T meant to have a look in that room she slept in, anyhow,” he said. But when they came to inspect that, they found little to aid in a determination. The blood-stained pillow seemed to have been the only damning exhibit. Her clothes were gone; every scintilla of her belongings was gone, from the traveling-bag she was so particular to have had fetched, even to her hairpins. And her chauffeur seemed dis- appointed. “That foxy servant of yours has done this,’’ he growled. ‘‘He’s cleaned out the place.” His guide made no denial. He led him to a store-room, or large closet, which adjoined. But the inspection here was no more fruitful. The kitchen, likewise, produced, at first, no clew—not, indeed, until the young man, on his own initiative, approached the cellar door with the intention of descending. Then, chancing to look down, he made a discovery. On the bare boards was a san- guinary splotch as large as a quarter of a dollar. ‘*See!”’ hecried, with all the feverish turbu- lence of a hound that has found ascent. “See! It is down here she was carried!”’ And impetuously he rushed down the cellar stairs. When Peter, following, perforce more slowly, reached the stair-foot, conviction was there to meet him. The chauffeur was holding a lighted match over a long, fresh- turned pile of earth in one of the stone- arched alcoves. Besides it, earth-stained, lay the coal-shovel as added testimony to the recentness of the work. Just what quickly followed in the way of added evidence—how from one corner and another this brawny, red-haired Nemesis brought forth damning, irrefutable, dumb testimony, old Peter Hemming never specifi- cally remembered. But from a horrid com- plexity of impressions a blackened bone dragged from amid the cinders of the stone- cold furnace, and a strand of hair, gore- matted, plucked from an ash-bin, loomed grimly foremost in his brief after-memory. During the unspeakable moments of this condemnatory unfolding, while staring in dazed horror, his wits had yet been busily conjuring means to save the poor demented perpetrator whom he loved and for whose fate he trembled. For his brother’s life, of course, he had no fear. His insanity would protect that. But he dreaded for him that 7 729 incarceration, worse even, it seemed to him, than death, which exposure of the crime would unquestionably involve. And he dreaded, too, though in secondary place, the smirch on the family name. Yet how were these consequences to be evaded? Two courses alone presented them- selves. And one seemed as difficult of ac- complishment as the other. This solitary witness must be quieted, either by bribery or by death. As for Abijah, he felt no concern. In his keeping, any secret of the Hemmings was inviolate. © By the time the chauffeur had exhausted his production of evidence Peter had made up his mind. He would offer to buy the fellow’s silence. If he failed in this, then with the dread alternative he must succeed. When they reascended the stairs Abijah was in the kitchen, perfunctorily preparing reakfast. The tragedy had _ scarcely scratched the surface of his aged stolidity. And in the sitting-room to which Peter, haggard, wan, pallid as a cadaver, now led the way with dragging steps, Henry, mon- ster in miniature, slept crumpled in his chair. The elder brother, in passing, bent his eyes upon him for a full second, not in horror nor repulsion, not even in reprobation, but with an expression of all-excusing, all-forgiving love and ineffable pity. In the far corner, opposite the depleted fireproof safe, was an antique mahogany secretary, and on the straight-backed chair before it Peter sank as one wofully weary. And as the chauffeur, now rid of his heavy fur coat, which he had removed the better to prosecute his work in the cellar, took the seat he indicated opposite him, the old gentle- man listlessly, as if from sheer nervousness, drew partially open a drawer at his right hand. At the same moment his eyes roved to the open safe and, catching sight for the first time of the bolts protruding from the edge of the heavy steel door, he realized that last night in the dusk he could not have fully closed it before throwing off the combina- tion. And then there came to him a mental picture of his mad brother, his brain in- iquitously distorted by that strange influ- ence of the moon at its noon, prowling here in the night betwixt theft and murder, mur- der and theft. He even wondered, in that second, where Henry could have hidden the jewels; wondered if he could have buried them with parts of the woman’s corpse, and CORNICLO© S (©