The woods seemed to receive an ashy illumination from
the passage of the snowflakes. Katherine walked
a little faster.
“Don’t be discouraged, Bobby,” she
begged him. “Everything will come out straight.
You must keep telling yourself that. You must
fight until you believe it.”
The nearness of her dusk-clothed, slender figure filled
him with a new courage, obscured to an extent his
real situation. He burst out impulsively:
“Don’t worry. I’ll fight.
I’ll make myself believe. If necessary I’ll
tell everything I know in order to find the guilty
person.”
She placed her hand on his arm. Her voice fell
to a whisper.
“Don’t fight that way. Uncle Silas
is dead; Howells has been taken away. The police
will find nothing. By and by they will leave.
It will all be forgotten. Why should you keep
it active and dangerous by trying to find who is guilty?”
“Katherine!” he cried, surprised.
“Why do you say that?”
Her hand left his arm. She walked on without
answering. Paredes came back to him—Paredes
serenely calling attention to the fact that Katherine
had alarmed the household and had led it to the discovery
of the Cedars’s successive mysteries. He
shrank from asking her any more.
They left the thicket. In the open space about
the house the snow had spread a white mantle.
From it the heavy walls rose black and forbidding.
“I don’t want to go in,” Katherine
said.
Their feet lagged as they followed the driveway to
the entrance of the court. The curtains of the
room of death, they saw, had been raised. A dim,
unhealthy light slipped from the small-paned windows
across the court, staining the snow. Robinson
and Rawlins were probably searching again.
Suddenly Katherine stopped. She pointed.
“What’s that?” she asked sharply.
Bobby followed the direction of her glance. He
saw a black patch against the wall of the wing opposite
the lighted windows.
“It is a shadow,” he said.
She relaxed and they walked on. They entered
the court. There she turned, and Bobby stopped,
too, with a sudden fear. For the thing he had
called a shadow was moving. He stared at it with
a hypnotic belief that the Cedars was at last disclosing
its supernatural secret. He knew it could be
no illusion, since Katherine swayed, half-fainting,
against him. The moving shadow assumed the shape
of a stout figure, slightly bent at the shoulders.
A pipe protruded from the bearded mouth. One hand
waved a careless welcome.
Bobby’s first instinct was to cry out, to command
this old man they had seen buried that day to return
to his grave. For there wasn’t the slightest
doubt. The unhealthy candlelight from the room
of death shone full on the gray and wrinkled face
of Silas Blackburn.
WHAT HAPPENED AT THE GRAVE
