in such trash! I wonder at you.”
“I do, for I have seen them—ugh!” and he trembled as with cold, though a warm air was rippling the water at his boat’s keel.
“But what has this all to do with me or my gains?” Connel Craig asked, with a keen look into his companion’s face. “It is nothing to me what you have done with your ill-gotten money; my part of the business is to take my share of it for keeping your secret; if I don’t get my share I don’t keep the secret, that is all.”
“And you would betray me after all the payments I have made you?”
“Betray you? I would have betrayed you when your accomplice was alive to share your punishment, if you had not forked out double, so as to have him under your own thumb; and you may believe I won’t think twice about it when you begin to talk about my losing over the bargain.”
“I thought that you would help me,” Neilson said, “as it is to your own benefit I thought you would try to get the money out for me.”
“Me! Me make a robber of myself to save you? No, thank you, I have kept myself free of the law as yet, and I mean to do the same while I hold out. And now I want to talk no more about this matter, but I won’t be hard on you, for I’ll give you a week to pay up in full. If you don’t, you know what will be the consequence.”
“Yes, I know,” replied the man Neilson; and his deep-set eyes blazed with rage as he answered, “I know you for the first time Connel Craig, and I see that it is with you my money or my life, eh?”
“Any way you like to put it, mate; you know well what I mean.”
“All right, it is as well that you have spoken out at last;” and Neilson resumed the sculls and pushed his boat into the river.
“There goes my murderer, if he can manage it,” muttered Craig, as he looked after the boat; “but he’s too big a coward to try it single-handed; he’ll bolt for it I guess, and so let him for all I care.”
And meanwhile Neilson rowed on his way down the river, along whose banks the shadows of tree and verdure were darkening more and more with each passing moment; but for once the man felt not his accustomed terror as he passed a spot from whence he could lift his eyes and see the old Moat tower looming dim in its surrounding of heavy forest land. He was in too fierce a rage to shudder as he passed one awful spot on the bank, or to fancy, as he had many a time done before, that a terrible white face gleamed at him among the surging sweep of his own oar. Fearful oaths were on his lips, and threats that would have made a hearer’s blood run cold were flung on the breeze that swept his hot face without cooling it any more than if it had been the plates of a furnace within which the fires of a great force were trying to expend themselves.
If one believes at any time in the ubiquitous power of the Evil One, surely it must be when occasions such as those to which my story has reached lay to the hands of evil-doers the most suitable tools to assist them in the working of an evil deed. The heart of Richard Neilson was boiling with impotent revenge, and his grip on the oars was as on his enemy’s throat, when a soft but peculiar whistle from the left bank of the river held his hands as he let the boat drift and looked eagerly shoreward. He saw no one, but some one saw his pause, and the whistle was repeated when the suspended oars dipped again into the water and the boat was propelled toward the sound.
As he laid his boat alongside the reedy shore, and drew in his oars, an exclamation that was almost a shout escaped from his lips, and Neilson bounded ashore. A man was standing on the grass in the shelter of some undergrowth—a man stout of form and coarse of face, with worn and dusty attire and tangled hair and beard.
“By—, it is you!” Neilson had said. “The devil helps his own. If of all the world I could have had my wish this moment, I should have wished to see your face.”
“Hold your mad yells!” the man replied, as he stepped into the boat and sat down. “If you had a rope around your neck you would not make such a row. Get in and get home.”
“In trouble again?” asked Neilson, as he obeyed and seized the oars.
“Ay, and will be as long as there is money to be made by a blow. I was at your hut, but guessed you were up the river when I missed the boat. How are things working with you, Dick?”
“Badly,—badly just now, and if ever a man wanted a helping hand I do, and I know you’re game to give it to me, Dan Whelan.”
“Ay am I, ‘in for a penny in for a pound’ is my motto, mate; so spit out your trouble, Dick, for there can’t be listeners on the river. Pull out more into the stream and then go ahead.”
The speaker struck a match as he spoke and lit his pipe, in readiness to listen to Neilson’s story, which was told as the water rippled by them in silvery sparkles, where the nearly full moon crept through the trees to its bosom, and while the sweet breeze from the Bugong Hills softly touched the cheeks of the plotters in a vain attempt to whisper of a sweetness and a purity they could not comprehend. As further events will reveal the result of their plans, I need not enter into them more fully, but leave them in the hut of Neilson at Calandra until a later hour.
“We may as well go upstairs,” Cyrus said to me after we had lingered long in front of the haunted house, and when the moon was beginning to throw her pale light freely over the forest tops. “It is getting late, and I have a story to tell you.”
So I followed him in and up the stairs, after he had carefully seen to the fastenings of the door. There was no light save what struggled through the uncurtained windows on the staircase, and I confess that I did not feel at ease, even though I was no believer in ghosts, and was glad when Cyrus had struck a match and lighted the candles ready placed on the writing-table in the room he had selected to occupy.
“You would never think of living altogether alone in this place?” I said, as he placed a decanter and some refreshments on the table. “Putting spirits entirely out of the question, the loneliness and gloom of this house would set a man crazy.”
“I never meant to be here long,” he answered; “indeed I hope my business will not take many days. You see my preparations are but slight,” and he pointed to his bedding as it lay on the old-fashioned couch I have mentioned before; “but although my belief in spirits is entire, I am not afraid, for I know that those who revisit this house will not harm me.”
“No, I am sure they won’t!” I replied, as though I should say “for there are no such things;” but my new friend looked so solemn as he drew the dusty curtain far back from the window and let the moonlight through the dim panes, that I helped myself to a glass from the decanter, and sat down to hear the story he had promised me.
Cyrus took out his watch and laid it on the table. The hands marked half-past ten as he detached the albert from his vest.
“I am impressed with the belief,” he said seriously, “that whatever of a supernatural seeming occurs here this night will take place between half-past eleven and twelve o’clock, so that I have more time to relate my tale to you than its length will require. Shall I begin?”
“If you will be so obliging. I confess that my curiosity is great.”
“I want to tell you a little of the history of the brothers who both lived and both died in this house. You are already aware that the family name of these gentlemen was Malbraith; the youngest of them, George Malbraith, was a single man; the eldest was a widower, with one son, but a disowned one in consequence of an unhappy marriage to
