Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/160

 the meaning of it all? Where was she? What had happened?

I threw down everything and took the first train south.

Investigations were futile. Mrs. Wayne had died suddenly while I was en route to Gretna, and the daughter with whom she was making her home (Dorothy's elder sister) could tell me only that my wife had called a taxi on Tuesday night and started for the station. There was no clue to identify the driver, and a thorough probing failed to reveal anything on which to work. It was as if the earth had opened and swallowed her up and the whole world was a sphinx!

The wonder to me now is that in those first few days I did not go quite mad; yet I didn't. Perhaps it was the desperate necessity for clear thought, for action, that steadied my brain and my nerves. Hope buoyed me up in the beginning, but as the mystery became denser, blanker, and more baffling, I saw myself changing into the pitiful wreck of what I once had been.

I roved from place to place, unshaven, unkempt, with only one purpose in life: to find my wife, alive or dead. I had sacrificed my entire business interests for what cash I could recover, to keep me fed and clothed while I pursued my desperate quest. Police, detectives, had exhausted their ingenuity and dismissed the case. But every minute, every day, every year, as long as I breathed, my life would be devoted to digging out the truth—and to revenge. I was certain she had been murdered, for by no mere accident could such a complete disappearance have come to pass. And no evil or treacherous design could have lurked in the heart of the woman I loved, and who loved me: of that I was even surer.

Not once, nor twice; but hundreds and hundreds of times I went over the same ground, convinced that sooner or later some unguarded word or circumstance would betray some vague hint of a clue. Apparently the world had wondered nine days, and then forgotten the tragedy of my poor little Dorothy's strange disappearance. But as time wore on, the poignancy, the ghastliness grew more and more acute in my own heart.

At thirty-five I was an old man: my hair had turned snow-white: my shoulders sagged; my hands were palsied; my voice was hollow and cracked. But inside were blazing still those deathless, consuming fires—fires that seemed to gather fresh force with every passing day.

I began to be shunned by fastidious passers-by, regarded with suspicion by all with whom I came in contact, or pitied by the few who were perhaps kinder of heart. I was now merely a vagabond, caring nothing for snubs or slights, every conscious feeling merged into the one imperishable purpose for which I lived.

the end of the seventh summer of my wanderings, I found myself back once more on familiar Louisiana soil. I had traveled all the way from Memphis along the river banks, begging my way now, for my last hoarded funds were gone and there was little work I could find, or do. Weary and footsore from a whole day's uninterrupted trudge, with only a meal of wild grapes for sustenance, I felt my knees tremble and sink beneath my frail weight. I was in the heart of a wilderness. Following the torrid day, a lashing rain had set in. In a little while came night, impenetrable as ink.

A quarter hour's blind search brought me, drenched and shivering, to an old, abandoned, tumbledown shack close to the edge of the swirling Mississippi. I forced one of the rickety windows and, clambering inside, I dropped helpless to the floor. I must have lain unconscious for a long time, for the next thing I knew,