Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/592

 It stood in a small enclosure bare of vegetation. The sand was piled in little wind-swept heaps against the board fence. There was a walk paved with brick, leading from the gate around to the front where two or three steps went up to a square porch with seats on either side. Harold Welch unlocked the door, and they went into the empty hall that echoed dismally to the sound of human voices. Rooms opened from this hallway on either hand and in the L at the back were the kitchen, storerooms and pantry, a door that gave egress to a narrow veranda, and another shutting off the cellar. At the rear of the hall the stairs led up to the second floor which was divided like the first into plain, square rooms. But the stairway went on, winding up to a small landing where a window looked out to northward, and from which a little room, evidently a linen closet, opened opposite the window. There was nothing extraordinary about this closet at the first glance. It was well furnished with shelves and drawers, and its only unoccupied wall space was finished with a simple wainscoting.

"Why," cried one, as they crowded the landing and overflowed into the closet, "this house seems to be falling to pieces." He pulled at a section of the wainscote and it came away in his hand. "Hello! what's this? Iron walls?"

"It's hollow," said another, tapping the smooth black surface disclosed by the removal of the panel.

"So it is," cried the first speaker. "I wonder what's behind it? Why it opens!" It was a heavy piece of sheet iron about three feet square. He moved it to one side, set it against the wall, and peered into the aperture.

"How mysterious!" exclaimed Muriel, leaning forward to look into the dark closet, whose height and depth exactly corresponded to the dimensions of the panel. It went straight back some six or eight feet and then dropped abruptly into what seemed a soundless well. One, more curious than the rest, crawled in and threw down lighted bits of paper.

"It goes to the bottom of the sea," he declared, as he backed out and brushed the dust from his clothes. "Who knows what it is, or why it was built?"

"Smugglers," suggested somebody and they all laughed, though there was nothing particularly humorous in the remark. But they were strangely nervous and excited. There was something uncanny in the atmosphere of this deserted dwelling that oppressed them with an unaccountable sense of dread. They hurried out leaving the dark closet open, and climbed up into the lantern tower where no lamp has been lighted these many years.

The afternoon, which had been flooded with sunshine, was waning in a mist that swept in from the sea and muffled the world in dull grey.

"Let us go home," cried Cora May. "If it were clear we might see almost to China from this tower, but the fog makes me lonesome."

So they clambered down the iron ladder and descending the stairs, passed out through the lower hall into the grey fog. Harold Welch stopped to lock the door, and Muriel waited for him at the foot of the steps. The lock was rusty, and he had trouble with the key. By the time he joined her, the rest of the party had disappeared around the house.

"You are kind to wait for me," said he, as they caught step on the brick pavement and moved forward. But Muriel laid her hand upon his arm.

"I must go back," she said. "I—I—dropped my handkerchief in—the—hall upstairs, I must go back and get it."

They remounted the steps, and Welch unlocked the door and let her pass in. But when he would have followed, she stopped him imperiously.

"I am going alone," she said. "You are not to wait. Lock the door and go on. I will come out through the kitchen." He objected, but she was obstinate, and. perhaps because her lightest wish was beginning to be his law of life, he reluctantly obeyed her. Again the key hung in the lock. This time it took him several minutes to release it When he reached the rear of the house Muriel was nowhere to be seen. He called her two or three times and waited, but, receiving no reply, concluded that she had hurried