Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 22).djvu/523

Rh appeared, then his shoulders; then he stepped through the aperture and, treading softly on list slippers and carrying a stable-lantern in his hand, came out into the room. Following him, equally soft-footed, came his sinister-looking wife.

The two went over and stood together by the bed, and the woman, taking the lantern from her husband's hand, held it so that its light streamed down upon the sleeper, and the man, drawing a knife from his belt, leaned over the unconscious victim and drove it into his heart.

"THE TWO WENT OVER AND STOOD TOGETHER BY THE BED."

Now the man and woman, taking up the corpse by the head and feet, prepared to carry it down the way they had come up; but because they needed light, yet neither had a hand free, the man took the slender ring of the lantern between his teeth, and thus the two murderers lighted themselves down the ladder.

Next, Raymond heard the sound of a pick, pick, pick, picking on the stones in the stable below preparatory to digging the victim's grave, and he awoke in cold sweats of terror to find the sun streaming in through the curtainless window, and the innkeeper's wife at the door with his morning coffee. And he had no doubt that it was the sunlight upon his eyelids which had caused him to dream of the lantern, while the woman's preliminary rap upon the door had been the stimulating cause of the entire dream.

However, she was as repulsive-looking in the gay light of morning as she had been the night before. The coffee was vile and the appointments dirty.

Raymond hurried through his dressing, paid his bill without comment on its extortionate items, and gave a prolonged whistle of relief when he got away into the road.

Turning back to give a last look at the horrible inn, he now read its name, which he had not been able to do in the obscurity of the previous evening. And this name, painted in great brown letters from end to end of the whitewashed front, was "The Friends' Trysting-Place."

"But monsieur is not listening to me?" complained old Dupont, somewhat piqued.

"On the contrary," Raymond replied, courteously, "I have listened with the deepest attention, since I have reason to be extremely interested in what you have told me. But there comes Maitre Puivert from the house. You would do me a service in introducing me to him."

It was not difficult to get the young barrister to talk of the case which was engrossing his whole attention and that of the entire countryside, and Raymond listened so intelligently, and showed so much genuine