As he stepped below the brow of the hill he heard the first click of the workman’s hammer on the chisel with which he proposed to eliminate the word Anitra from the list of the Hazen dead.

CHAPTER IX

HUNTER’S INN

When Mr. Ransom re-entered the hotel, which he did under a swoop of wind which turned his umbrella inside out and drenched him through in an instant, it was to find the house in renewed turmoil, happily explained by the landlady, whom he ran across on the stairs.

“Oh, Mr. Johnston!” she cried as she edged by him with a pile of bed-linen on her arm.  “Please excuse all this fuss.  Another guest is coming—­I have just got a telegram.  A famous lawyer from New York.  Our house will be full to-night.”

“Where will you put him?” inquired Mr. Ransom with a good-natured air.  “There seem to be no unoccupied rooms on this hall.”

“More’s the pity,” she sighed, with a half-inquiring, half deprecatory look at this fortunate first comer.  “I shall have to put him below, poor man.  I’m afraid he won’t like it, but—­” Mr. Ransom remained silent.  “But,” she went on with sudden cheerfulness, “I will make it up in the supper.  That shall be as good a one as our kitchen will provide.  Four city guests all in one day!  That’s a good many for this quiet hotel.”

“Four!” retorted Mr. Ransom as he turned towards his own door.  “The number has grown by two since I went out.”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you.  The lady—­her name’s Mrs. Ransom—­brings her sister with her.  The little girl who—­yes, I am coming.”  This latter to some perplexed domestic down the hall, who had already called her twice.  “I mustn’t stand talking here,” she apologized as she hurried away.  “But do take care of yourself.  You are dreadful wet.  How I wish the weather would clear up!”

Mr. Ransom wished the same.  To say nothing of his own inconvenience, it was a source of anxiety to him that she should have to ride these inevitable ten miles in such a chilling downpour.  Besides, a storm of this kind complicated matters; gave him less sense of freedom, shut him in, as it were, with the mystery he was there to unravel, but which for some reason, hardly explainable to himself, filled him with such a sense of foreboding that he had moments in which he thought only of escape.  But his part must be played and he prepared himself to play it well.  Having changed his clothes and warmed himself with a draft of whisky, he sat down at his table and was busy writing when the maid came in to ask if he would wait for his supper till the coach came, or have it earlier and served in his own room.

With an air of petulance, he looked up, rapped on the table, and replied: 

“Here! here!  I’m too busy to meet strangers.  An early supper and an early bed.  That’s the way I get through my work.”

The girl stared and went softly out.  Work!—­that?  Sitting at a table and just putting words on paper.  If it was beds he had to drag around now, or a dozen hungry, clamoring men to feed all at once, and all with the best cuts, or stairs to run up fifty times a day, or—­but I need not fill out her thought.  It made her voluble in the kitchen and secured him the privacy which his incognito demanded.