style="font-size:15px;"> “What do you mean?”
She seemed on the point of making some declaration, but after a moment her lovely eyes narrowed obstinately and she remained silent.
“Miss Fifi”—Doctor Gallup raised his voice sharply—“the daughter of C. T. J. Calhoun, the biscuit man, ran away with a taxi-driver. Do you know what she’s doing now?”
“No.”
“She’s working in a laundry on the East Side, trying to keep her child’s body and soul together.”
He looked at her keenly; there were signs of agitation in her face.
“Estelle Holliday ran away in 1920 with her father’s second man!” he cried. “Shall I tell you where I heard of her last? She stumbled into a charity hospital, bruised from head to foot, because her drunken husband had beaten her to within an inch of her life!”
Fifi was breathing hard. Her aunts leaned forward. Doctor Gallup sprang suddenly to his feet.
“But they were playing safe compared to you!” he shouted. “They didn’t woo an ex-convict with blood on his hands.”
And now Fifi was on her feet, too, her eyes flashing fire.
“Be careful!” she cried. “Don’t go too far!”
“I can’t go too far!” He reached in his pocket, plucked out a folded evening paper and slapped it down on the table.
“Read that, Miss Fifi!” he shouted. “It’ll tell you how four man-killers entered a bank in West Crampton three weeks ago. It’ll tell you how they shot down the cashier in cold blood, and how one of them, the most brutal, the most ferocious, the most inhuman, got away. And it will tell you that that human gorilla is now supposed to be hiding in the neighborhood of Montauk Point!”
There was a short stifled sound as Aunt Jo and Aunt Cal, who had always done everything in complete unison, fainted away together. At the same moment there was loud, violent knocking, like the knocking of a heavy club, upon the barred front door.
IV
“Who’s there?” cried Doctor Gallup, starting. “Who’s there—or I’ll shoot!”
His eyes roved quickly about the room, looking for a possible weapon.
“Who are you?” shouted a voice from the porch. “You better open up or I’ll blow a hole through the door.”
“What’ll we do?” exclaimed Doctor Gallup, perspiring freely.
Fifi, who had been sprinkling water impartially upon her aunts, turned around with a scornful smile.
“It’s just Percy, the yardman,” she explained. “He probably thinks that you’re a burglar.”
She went to the door and lifted the latch. Percy, gun in hand, peered cautiously into the room.
“It’s all right, Percy. This is just an insane specialist from New York.”
“Everything’s a little insane tonight,” announced Percy in a frightened voice. “For the last hour I’ve been hearing the sound of oars.”
The eyes of Aunt Jo and Aunt Cal fluttered open simultaneously.
“There’s a fog all over the Point,” went on Percy dazedly, “and it’s got voices in it. I couldn’t see a foot before my face, but I could swear there was boats offshore, and I heard a dozen people talkin’ and callin’ to each other, just as if a lot of ghosts was havin’ a picnic supper on the beach.”
“What was that noise?” cried Aunt Jo, sitting upright.
“The door was locked,” explained Percy, “so I knocked on it with my gun.”
“No, I mean now!”
They listened. Through the open door came a low, groaning sound, issuing out of the dark mist which covered shore and sea alike.
“We’ll go right down and find out!” cried Doctor Gallup, who had recovered his shattered equilibrium; and, as the moaning sound drifted in again, like the last agony of some monster from the deep, he added, “I think you needed more than a psychoanalyst here tonight. Is there another gun in the house?”
Aunt Cal got up and took a small pearl-mounted revolver from the desk drawer.
“You can’t leave us in this house alone,” she declared emphatically. “Wherever you go we’re going too!”
Keeping close together, the four of them, for Fifi had suddenly disappeared, made their way outdoors and down the porch steps, where they hesitated a moment, peering into the impenetrable haze, more mysterious than darkness upon their eyes.
“It’s out there,” whispered Percy, facing the sea.
“Forward we go!” muttered Doctor Gallup tensely. “I’m inclined to think this is all a question of nerves.”
They moved slowly and silently along the sand, until suddenly Percy caught hold of the doctor’s arm.
“Listen!” he whispered sharply.
They all became motionless. Out of the neighboring darkness a dim, indistinguishable figure had materialized, walking with unnatural rigidity along the shore. Pressed against his body he carried some long, dark drape that hung almost to the sand. Immediately he disappeared into the mist, to be succeeded by another phantom walking at the same military gait, this one with something white and faintly terrible dangling from his arm. A moment later, not ten yards away from them, in the direction in which the figure had gone, a faint dull glow sprang into life, proceeding apparently from behind the largest of the dunes.
Huddled together, they advanced toward the dune, hesitated, and then, following Doctor Gallup’s example, dropped to their knees and began to crawl cautiously up its shoreward side. The glow became stronger as they reached the top, and at the same moment their heads popped up over the crest. This is what they saw:
In the light of four strong pocket flashlights, borne by four sailors in spotless white, a gentleman was shaving himself, standing clad only in athletic underwear upon the sand. Before his eyes an irreproachable valet held a silver mirror which gave back the soapy reflection of his face. To right and left stood two additional men-servants, one with a dinner coat and trousers hanging from his arm and the other bearing a white stiff shirt whose studs glistened in the glow of the electric lamps. There was not a sound except the dull scrape of the razor along its wielder’s face and the intermittent groaning sound that blew in out of the sea.
But it was not the bizarre nature of the ceremony, with its dim, weird surroundings under the unsteady light, that drew from the two women a short, involuntary sigh. It was the fact that the face in the mirror, the unshaven half of it, was terribly familiar, and in a moment they knew to whom that half-face belonged—it was the countenance of their niece’s savage wooer who had lately prowled half-naked along the beach.
Even as they looked he completed one side of his face, whereupon a valet stepped forward and with a scissors sheared off the exterior growth on the other, disclosing, in its entirety now, the symmetrical
