Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/593

 out and joined the rest whose voices came back to him from the avenue of pines. She had been nervous and irritable all the afternoon, so unlike herself that he had wondered more than once if she were ill, or weary of his close attendance. It occurred to him now that possibly she had taken this means to rid herself of his company. He hurried on, for it was growing cold and the fog was thickening to a rain. He had just caught up with the stragglers of the party, and they were beginning to chafe him at being alone, when the sombre stillness of the darkening day was rent by a shriek so wild and wierd that they who heard it felt the blood freeze suddenly in their veins. They shrank involuntarily closer and looked at each other with blanched cheeks and startled eyes. Before anyone found voice it came again. This time it was a cry for help, thrice repeated in quick succession.

"Muriel! Where is Muriel?" demanded Welch, his heart leaping in sudden fear.

"Why you ought to know," cried Cora May. "We left her with you."

They hurried toward the deserted house.

"She went back to get her handkerchief," explained Welch. "She told me not to wait, and I locked the door and came on."

"Locked her in that horrid place! Why did you do it?" exclaimed Cora, indignantly.

"She said she would come out by way of the kitchen," replied he.

"She could not. The door is locked, and the key is broken off in the lock," said another. "I noticed it when we were rummaging around in there."

They began to call encouragingly, "Muriel, we are coming. Don't be afraid." But they got no reply.

"Oh let us hurry," urged Cora, "perhaps she has fainted with fright."

In a very few minutes they were pouring into the house and looking and calling through the lower rooms. Then up stairs, and there, upon the floor in the upper chamber, where the grey light came in through the uncurtained windows, they found a pool of warm, red blood. There were blood drops in the hall and on the stairs that led up to the landing, and in the linen closet they picked up a blood-stained handkerchief. But there was nothing else. The iron door had been replaced, and the panel in the wainscote closed, and try as they might, they could not open it. They were confronted by an apparent tragedy, appalled by a fearful mystery, and they could do nothing, nothing. They returned to the village and gave the alarm, and re-enforced, came back and renewed the hopeless search with lanterns. They ransacked the house again and again from tower to cellar. They scoured the hills in the vain delusion that she might have escaped from the house and wandered off in the fog. But they found nothing, nor ever did, save the blood drops on the stairs and the little handkerchief.

"It will be a dreadful blow to her father," remarked the landlady of the "," "I don't want to be the one to break it to him." And she had her wish, for the sloop nor any of its crew ever again sailed into Yaquina bay. As time went by, the story was forgotten by all but those who joined in that weary search for the missing girl. But to this day it is said the blood-stains are dark upon the floor in that upper chamber. And one there was who carried the little handkerchief next to his heart till the hour of his own tragic death.