Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 5 (1925-05).djvu/37

228 readily admitted that quarrel, did not seek in any way to minimize the fact that it had been a violent one—and over money."

"How could he?" queries Peabody. "Two of the servants heard it."

"His disgraceful speech and conduct, however," added the doctor, "brush aside, as it were, that accusing finger."

"How is that?" I exclaimed.

"Why, the bereaved husband, almost prostrated (according to these sob-reported) keeps crying:

"'Oh, if I could only have told Clara how sorry I was!'"

"Then," demanded Peabody, a little vehemently, I thought, "why didn't he go and tell her? Instead, what does the man do? He goes to his room (so he tells us) sleeps sweetly (so he says) until awakened in the morning to learn that his wife, who (so he would have us believe) he thought was all this time in her room, is a crushed and gory corpse."

There was a brief pause.

"You see, Hudson," remarked the doctor, "the case does present some sinister features."

"Probably," I suggested, "if Guy Oxford were here—"

Peabody and the doctor smiled a little.

"Rather out of his line, don't you think?" the doctor queried.

"He solved the Bradshaw mystery," I reminded him, "and that when all those crack detectives had ignominiously failed."

"He did. But that was a coldly scientific proposition, Hudson—a mystery insoluble to any man save one with Guy Oxford's deep and peculiar scientific attainments. But this—well, this is different."

"Quite so," concurred Peabody.

"No, Hudson," he added; "for my part, I am glad that the man who lost is out there at sea. He doesn't know."

2

THINK it well to set down, while memory of it is still vivid, an account of this strange business. That something terrible happened is clear. But where? And, in heaven's name, how did Mr. Oxford, standing there on the deck of the Shadow, by the weather mizzen-shrouds—in God's name, I say, how was that sudden, awful intelligence borne to him there?

For I was present, within a few yards of the man, and I heard nothing, absolutely nothing—save, that is, the soft sighting of the wind and the eternal wash of the sea. 'Tis true, the man at the wheel thinks he heard voices in the air, as he describes it—low, indistinct, terrible, ghostly. In fact, he thinks he heard spirits. But, for my part, I dismiss that helmsman's testimony (if I may call it that) without a moment's hesitation. For I was there myself, saw ten times as much as he did, heard from Mr. Oxford's own lips what the helmsman never did; and I can swear that (save for Oxford's and my own) there were no voices—from the air or from lips, ghostly or otherwise.

That an intelligence, however, was actually borne to him, that there was nothing of delusion about it, I am convinced as fully that I am this moment aboard the Shadow. For, brief though our acquaintance, nevertheless I know Mr. Oxford is too coolly scientific, too profoundly (terribly even) materialistic to permit superstition or fantasy to enter as a possible explanation of the matter.

No, the key to this mystery is material! But what is the key?

Now for the facts of the case.

T WAS the first watch of the night—one of those still, starry nights that are so beautiful. There was a steady, gentle breeze from the direction of the land, some eighty miles distant now,