Page:Bat Wing 1921.djvu/335

 Harley nodded dumbly, and suddenly I found Val Beverley’s little fingers twined about mine.

“I agreed,” continued the deep voice. “It was a boon which I, too, would have asked from one who loved me. But to die, knowing another cherished the woman who had been torn from him, was an impossibility for Juan Menendez. What he had schemed to do at first I never knew. But presently, because of our situation here, and because of that which he had asked of me, it came, the great plan.

“On the night he told me, a night I shall never forget, I drew back in horror from him—I, Marie de Stämer, who thought I knew the blackest that was in him. I shrank. And because of that scene it came to him again in the early morning—the moment of agony, the needle pain, here, low down in his left breast.

“He pleaded with me to do the wicked thing that he had planned, and because I dared not refuse, knowing he might die at my feet, I consented. But, my friends, I had my own plan, too, of which he knew nothing. On the next day he went to Paris, and was told he had two months to live, with great, such great care, but perhaps only a week, a day, if he should permit his hot passions to inflame that threatened heart. Very well.

“I said yes, yes, to all that he suggested, and he began to lay the trail—the trail to lead to his enemy. It was his hobby, this vengeance. He was like a big, cruel boy. It was he, himself, Juan Menendez, who broke into Cray’s Folly. It was he who nailed the bat wing to the door. It was he who bought two rifles of a kind of which so many millions were made during the war that anybody might possess one. And it was he who concealed the first of these, one cartridge discharged, under the floor of the hut in the garden of the Guest