Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/288

 door to the living room downstairs was locked. I could not see you in any of the other rooms, and thought you might be upstairs. Oh, how frightened I was, all alone in that old house, with the storm pounding so! When I got upstairs above the living room I saw a body lying on the floor in the dark, and I thought it was you—that was the first thing that occurred to me.” She said this frankly, as though it were quite natural that she should think of him first. “My nerves were all unstrung, with the dark and the storm and the lightning and thunder, and being alone there, and I lost control of them completely for a minute and screamed. That’s the scream you heard. At that moment Ignace and another man seized me and dragged me out. I hardly knew what I was doing—they took me back to the cottage. The storm was making so much noise I guess you couldn’t have heard us.”

So that cleared up another mystery, Val thought. But there was still another he was thinking of—the mysterious man who had appeared to him in the flash of lightning; Val rather thought that it was that same man who had cut him loose. Who was he?

He told them about the incident, and described the man carefully.

“It could be anybody around here,” said Jessica. “Half the men down here wear that kind of hat and have goatees. I don’t know who it could have been. Why should he come in and cut you loose—if it was he?”

Val shook his head. “I give it up,” he laughed. “Do you know, for awhile he seemed to me like a ghost. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I suppose I came as close to seeing one last night as I’ll ever come.