Page:The Black Cat v06no11 (1901-08).djvu/29

Rh Hawksley peered into the cask of Restorative.

"Enough for a dozen small men like me," he said, "but it's getting low."

The goblet of medicine to put him to sleep he fetched from the shop, and when all was ready, and he lay in the big vat, he drank it off and almost immediately lost consciousness, as we could plainly see. Then we proceeded as he had directed, drawing the tarpaulin over the tub, for none of us cared to watch. While we silently waited in the cellar for the passing of a full half hour our hearts beat anxiously—I know mine did—and we were in such a state as to shrink unnerved when, with a loud bark and ponderous rush, the Newfoundland dog dashed among us, pursuing a rat. We leaped aside, and I tried to stop the brute, but he dodged me, and as the rat slid in between the Restorative cask and the cellar wall the great beast followed, like a stone shot from a catapult, upsetting the cask, which was but half full and therefore quite light. It was all over in a moment.

Stupefied with amazement and horror, we stood there and saw the last of the priceless liquid vanish, spilled beyond redemption—soaking into the rotting boards of the cellar floor! My father was the first to recover the power of motion. He sprang to the tub and snatched away the tarpaulin. Nothing but a milky-looking fluid met our eyes. Hawksley had disappeared.

With shaking steps and trembling voices we left that awful place, followed by the dog. We left it just as it was—never to return—but in the upper shop we swore an oath of eternal secrecy.

Here the statement of Burke Simpson stopped, but old newspapers and records show that on that very night Hawksley's shop was burned to a charred framework, and that his opposite neighbor, Henry Higham, the grocer, was supposed to have been its incendiary, in a fit of insanity from which he never recovered.