Chapter Fifteen

THE SIGN OF THE BAT

But Dale could bear it no longer. The sight of her lover, beaten, submissive, his head bowed, waiting obediently like a common criminal for the detective to lock his wrists in steel broke down her last defenses. She rushed into the center of the room, between Bailey and the detective, her eyes wild with terror, her words stumbling over each other in her eagerness to get them out.

“Oh, no! I can’t stand it! I’ll tell you everything!” she cried frenziedly. “He got to the foot of the stair-case—Richard Fleming, I mean,” she was facing the detective now, “and he had the blue-print you’ve been talking about. I had told him Jack Bailey was here as the gardener and he said if I screamed he would tell that. I was desperate. I threatened him with the revolver but he took it from me. Then when I tore the blue-print from him—he was shot—from the stairs—”

“By Bailey!” interjected Beresford angrily.

“I didn’t even know he was in the house!” Bailey’s answer was as instant as it was hot. Meanwhile, the Doctor had entered the room, hardly noticed, in the middle of Dale’s confession, and now stood watching the scene intently from a post by the door.

“What did you do with the blue-print?” The detective’s voice beat at Dale like a whip.

“I put it first in the neck of my dress—” she faltered. “Then, when I found you were watching me, I hid it somewhere else.”

Her eyes fell on the Doctor. She saw his hand steal out toward the knob of the door. Was he going to run away on some pretext before she could finish her story? She gave a sigh of relief when Billy, re-entering with the key to the front door, blocked any such attempt at escape.

Mechanically she watched Billy cross to the table, lay the key upon it, and return to the hall without so much as a glance at the tense, suspicious circle of faces focused upon herself and her lover.

“I put it—somewhere else,” she repeated, her eyes going back to the Doctor.

“Did you give it to Bailey?”

“No—I hid it—and then I told where it was—to the Doctor—” Dale swayed on her feet. All turned surprisedly toward the Doctor. Miss Cornelia rose from her chair.

The Doctor bore the battery of eyes unflinchingly. “That’s rather inaccurate,” he said, with a tight little smile. “You told me where you had placed it, but when I went to look for it, it was gone.”

“Are you quite sure of that?” queried Miss Cornelia acidly.

“Absolutely,” he said. He ignored the rest of the party, addressing himself directly to Anderson.

“She said she had hidden it inside one of the rolls that were on the tray on that table,” he continued in tones of easy explanation, approaching the table as he did so, and tapping it with the box of sleeping-powders he had brought for Miss Cornelia.

“She was in such distress that I finally went to look for it. It wasn’t there.”

“Do you realize the significance of this paper?” Anderson boomed at once.

“Nothing, beyond the fact that Miss Ogden was afraid it linked her with the crime.” The Doctor’s voice was very clear and firm.

Anderson pondered an instant. Then—

“I’d like to have a few minutes with the Doctor alone,” he said somberly.

The group about him dissolved at once. Miss Cornelia, her arm around her niece’s waist, led the latter gently to the door. As the two lovers passed each other a glance flashed between them—a glance, pathetically brief, of longing and love. Dale’s finger tips brushed Bailey’s hand gently in passing.

“Beresford,” commanded the detective, “take Bailey to the library and see that he stays there.”

Beresford tapped his pocket with a significant gesture and motioned Bailey to the door. Then they, too, left the room. The door closed. The Doctor and the detective were alone.

The detective spoke at once—and surprisingly.

“Doctor, I’ll have that blue-print!” he said sternly, his eyes the color of steel.

The Doctor gave him a wary little glance.

“But I’ve just made the statement that I didn’t find the blue-print,” he affirmed flatly.

“I heard you!” Anderson’s voice was very dry. “Now this situation is between you and me, Doctor Wells.” His forefinger sought the Doctor’s chest. “It has nothing to do with that poor fool of a cashier. He hasn’t got either those securities or the money from them and you know it. It’s in this house and you know that, too!”

“In this house?” repeated the Doctor as if stalling for time.

“In this house! Tonight, when you claimed to be making a professional call, you were in this house—and I think you were on that staircase when Richard Fleming was killed!”

“No, Anderson, I’ll swear I was not!” The Doctor might be acting, but if he was, it was incomparable acting. The terror in his voice seemed too real to be feigned.

But Anderson was remorseless.

“I’ll tell you this,” he continued. “Miss Van Gorder very cleverly got a thumbprint of yours tonight. Does that mean anything to you?”

His eyes bored into the Doctor—the eyes of a poker player bluffing on a hidden card. But the Doctor did not flinch.

“Nothing,” he said firmly. “I have not been upstairs in this house in three months.”

The accent of truth in his voice seemed so unmistakable that even Anderson’s shrewd brain was puzzled by it. But he persisted in his attempt to wring a confession from this latest suspect.

“Before Courtleigh Fleming died—did he tell you anything about a Hidden Room in this house?” he queried cannily.

The Doctor’s confident air of honesty lessened, a furtive look appeared in his eyes.

“No,” he insisted, but not as convincingly as he had made his previous denial.

The detective hammered at the point again.

“You haven’t been trying to frighten these women out of here with anonymous letters so you could get in?”

“No. Certainly not.” But again the Doctor’s air had that odd mixture of truth and falsehood in it.

The detective paused for an instant.

“Let me see your key ring!” he ordered. The Doctor passed it over silently. The detective glanced at the keys—then, suddenly, his revolver glittered in his other hand.

The Doctor watched him anxiously. A puff of wind rattled the panes of the French windows. The storm, quieted for a while, was gathering its strength for a fresh unleashing of its dogs of thunder.

The detective stepped to the terrace door, opened it, and then quietly proceeded to try the Doctor’s keys in the lock. Thus located he was out of visual range, and Wells took advantage of it at once. He moved swiftly toward the fireplace, extracting the missing piece of blue-print from an inside pocket as he did so. The secret the blue-print guarded was already graven on his mind in indelible characters—now he would destroy all evidence that it had ever been in his possession and bluff through the rest of the situation as best he might.

He threw the paper toward the flames with a nervous gesture of relief. But for once his cunning failed—the throw was too hurried to be sure and the light scrap of paper wavered and settled to the floor just outside the fireplace. The Doctor swore noiselessly and stooped to pick it up and make sure of its destruction. But he was not quick enough. Through the window the detective had seen the incident, and the next moment the Doctor heard his voice bark behind him. He turned, and stared at the leveled muzzle of Anderson’s revolver.

“Hands up and stand back!” he commanded.

As he did so Anderson picked up the paper and a sardonic smile crossed his face as his eyes took in the significance of the print. He laid his revolver down on the table where he could snatch it up again at a moment’s notice.

“Behind a fireplace, eh?” he muttered. “What fireplace? In what room?”

“I won’t tell you!” The Doctor’s voice was sullen. He inched, gingerly, cautiously, toward the other side of the table.

“All right—I’ll find it, you know.” The detective’s eyes turned swiftly back to the blue-print. Experience should have taught him never to underrate an adversary, even of the Doctor’s caliber, but long familiarity with danger can make the shrewdest careless. For a moment, as he bent over the paper again, he was off guard.

The Doctor seized the moment with a savage promptitude and sprang. There followed a silent, furious struggle between the two. Under normal circumstances Anderson would have been the stronger and quicker, but the Doctor fought with an added strength of despair and his initial leap had pinioned the detective’s arms behind him. Now the detective shook one hand free and snatched at the revolver—in vain—for the Doctor, with a groan of desperation, struck at his hand as its fingers were about to close on the smooth butt and the revolver skidded from the table to the floor. With a sudden terrible movement he pinioned both the detective’s arms behind him again and reached for the telephone. Its heavy base descended on the back of the detective’s head with stunning force. The next moment the battle was ended and the Doctor, panting with exhaustion, held the limp form of an unconscious man in his arms.

He lowered the detective to the floor and straightened up again, listening tensely. So brief and intense had been the struggle that even now he could hardly believe in its reality. It seemed impossible, too, that the struggle had not been heard. Then he realized dully, as a louder roll of thunder smote on his ears, that the elements themselves had played into his hand. The storm, with its wind and fury, had returned just in time to save him and drown out all sounds of conflict from the rest of the house with its giant clamor.

He bent swiftly over Anderson, listening to his heart. Good—the man still breathed; he had enough on his conscience without adding the murder of a detective to the black weight. Now he pocketed the revolver and the blue-print—gagged Anderson rapidly with a knotted handkerchief and proceeded to wrap his own muffler around the detective’s head as an additional silencer. Anderson gave a faint sigh.

The Doctor thought rapidly. Soon or late the detective would return to consciousness—with his hands free he could easily tear out the gag. He looked wildly about the room for a rope, a curtain—ah, he had it—the detective’s own handcuffs! He snapped the cuffs on Anderson’s wrists, then realized that, in his hurry, he had bound the detective’s hands in front of him instead of behind him. Well—it would do for the moment—he did not need much time to carry out his plans. He dragged the limp body, its head lolling, into the billiard room where he deposited it on the floor in the corner farthest from the door.

So far, so good—now to lock the door of the billiard room. Fortunately, the key was there on the inside of the door. He quickly transferred it, locked the billiard room door from the outside, and pocketed the key. For a second he stood by the center table in the living-room, recovering his breath and trying to straighten his rumpled clothing. Then he crossed cautiously into the alcove and started to pad up the alcove stairs, his face white and strained with excitement and hope.

And it was then that there happened one of the most dramatic events of the night. One which was to remain, for the next hour or so, as bewildering as the murder and which, had it come a few moments sooner or a few moments later, would have entirely changed the course of events.

It was preceded by a desperate hammering on the door of the terrace. It halted the Doctor on his way upstairs, drew Beresford on a run into the living-room, and even reached the bedrooms of the women up above.

“My God! What’s that?” Beresford panted.

The Doctor indicated the door. It was too late now. Already he could hear Miss Cornelia’s voice above; it was only a question of a short time until Anderson in the billiard room revived and would try to make his plight known. And in the brief moment of that résumé of his position the knocking came again. But feebler, as though the suppliant outside had exhausted his strength.

As Beresford drew his revolver and moved to the door, Miss Cornelia came in, followed by Lizzie.

“It’s the Bat,” Lizzie announced mournfully. “Good-by, Miss Neily. Good-by, everybody. I saw his hand, all covered with blood. He’s had a good night for sure!”

But they ignored her. And Beresford flung open the door.

Just what they had expected, what figure of horror or of fear they waited for, no one can say. But there was no horror and no fear; only unutterable amazement as an unknown man, in torn and muddied garments, with a streak of dried blood seaming his forehead like a scar, fell through the open doorway into Beresford’s arms.

“Good God!” muttered Beresford, dropping his revolver to catch the strange burden. For a moment the Unknown lay in his arms like a corpse. Then he straightened dizzily, staggered into the room, took a few steps toward the table, and fell prostrate upon his face—at the end of his strength.

“Doctor!” gasped Miss Cornelia dazedly and the Doctor, whatever guilt lay on his conscience, responded at once to the call of his profession.

He bent over the Unknown Man—the physician once more—and made a brief examination.

“He’s fainted!” he said, rising. “Struck on the head, too.”

“But who is he?” faltered Miss Cornelia.

“I never saw him before,” said the Doctor. It was obvious that he spoke the truth. “Does anyone recognize him?”

All crowded about the Unknown, trying to read the riddle of his identity. Miss Cornelia rapidly revised her first impressions of the stranger. When he had first fallen through the doorway into Beresford’s arms she had not known what to think. Now, in the brighter light of the living-room she saw that the still face, beneath its mask of dirt and dried blood, was strong and fairly youthful; if the man were a criminal, he belonged, like the Bat, to the upper fringes of the world of crime. She noted mechanically that his hands and feet had been tied, ends of frayed rope still dangled from his wrists and ankles. And that terrible injury on his head! She shuddered and closed her eyes.

“Does anyone recognize him?” repeated the Doctor but one by one the others shook their heads. Crook, casual tramp, or honest laborer unexpectedly caught in the sinister toils of the Cedarcrest affair—his identity seemed a mystery to one and all.

“Is he badly hurt?” asked Miss Cornelia, shuddering again.

“It’s hard to say,” answered the Doctor. “I think not.” The Unknown stirred feebly—made an effort to sit up. Beresford and the Doctor caught him under the arms and helped him to his feet. He stood there swaying, a blank expression on his face.

“A chair!” said the Doctor quickly. “Ah—” He helped the strange figure to sit down and bent over him again.

“You’re all right now, my friend,” he said in his best tones of professional cheeriness. “Dizzy a bit, aren’t you?”

The Unknown rubbed his wrists where his bonds had cut them. He made an effort to speak.

“Water!” he said in a low voice.

The Doctor gestured to Billy. “Get some water—or whisky—if there is any—that’d be better.”

“There’s a flask of whisky in my room, Billy,” added Miss Cornelia helpfully.

“Now, my man,” continued the Doctor to the Unknown. “You’re in the hands of friends. Brace up and tell us what happened!”

Beresford had been looking about for the detective, puzzled not to find him, as usual, in charge of affairs. Now, “Where’s Anderson? This is a police matter!” he said, making a movement as if to go in search of him.

The Doctor stopped him quickly.

“He was here a minute ago—he’ll be back presently,” he said, praying to whatever gods he served that Anderson, bound and gagged in the billiard room, had not yet returned to consciousness.

Unobserved by all except Miss Cornelia, the mention of the detective’s name had caused a strange reaction in the Unknown. His eyes had opened—he had started—the haze in his mind had seemed to clear away for a moment. Then, for some reason, his shoulders had slumped again and the look of apathy come back to his face. But, stunned or not, it now seemed possible that he was not quite as dazed as he appeared.

The Doctor gave the slumped shoulders a little shake.

“Rouse yourself, man!” he said. “What has happened to you?”

“I’m dazed!” said the Unknown thickly and slowly. “I can’t remember.” He passed a hand weakly over his forehead.

“What a night!” sighed Miss Cornelia, sinking into a chair. “Richard Fleming murdered in this house—and now—this!”

The Unknown shot her a stealthy glance from beneath lowered eyelids. But when she looked at him, his face was blank again.

“Why doesn’t somebody ask his name?” queried Dale, and, “Where the devil is that detective?” muttered Beresford, almost in the same instant.

Neither question was answered, and Beresford, increasingly uneasy at the continued absence of Anderson, turned toward the hall.

The Doctor took Dale’s suggestion.

“What’s your name?”

Silence from the Unknown—and that blank stare of stupefaction.

“Look at his papers.” It was Miss Cornelia’s voice. The Doctor and Bailey searched the torn trouser pockets, the pockets of the muddied shirt, while the Unknown submitted passively, not seeming to care what happened to him. But search him as they would—it was in vain.

“Not a paper on him,” said Jack Bailey at last, straightening up.

A crash of breaking glass from the head of the alcove stairs put a period to his sentence. All turned toward the stairs—or all except the Unknown, who, for a moment, half-rose in his chair, his eyes gleaming, his face alert, the mask of bewildered apathy gone from his face.

As they watched, a rigid little figure of horror backed slowly down the alcove stairs and into the room—Billy, the Japanese, his Oriental placidity disturbed at last, incomprehensible terror written in every line of his face.

“Billy!”

“Billy—what is it?”

The diminutive butler made a pitiful attempt at his usual grin.

“It—nothing,” he gasped. The Unknown relapsed in his chair—again the dazed stranger from nowhere.

Beresford took the Japanese by the shoulders.

“Now see here!” he said sharply. “You’ve seen something! What was it!”

Billy trembled like a leaf.

“Ghost! Ghost!” he muttered frantically, his face working.

“He’s concealing something. Look at him!” Miss Cornelia stared at her servant.

“No, no!” insisted Billy in an ague of fright. “No, no!”

But Miss Cornelia was sure of it.

“Brooks, close that door!” she said, pointing at the terrace door in the alcove which still stood ajar after the entrance of the Unknown.

Bailey moved to obey. But just as he reached the alcove the terrace door slammed shut in his face. At the same moment every light in Cedarcrest blinked and went out again.

Bailey fumbled for the doorknob in the sudden darkness.

“The door’s locked!” he said incredulously. “The key’s gone too. Where’s your revolver, Beresford?”

“I dropped it in the alcove when I caught that man,” called Beresford, cursing himself for his carelessness.

The illuminated dial of Bailey’s wrist watch flickered in the darkness as he searched for the revolver—as round, glowing spot of phosphorescence.

Lizzie screamed. “The eye! The gleaming eye I saw on the stairs!” she shrieked, pointing at it frenziedly.

“Quick—there’s a candle on the table—light it somebody. Never mind the revolver, I have one!” called Miss Cornelia.

“Righto!” called Beresford cheerily in reply. He found the candle, lit it—

The party blinked at each other for a moment, still unable quite to co-ordinate their thoughts.

Bailey rattled the knob of the door into the hall.

“This door’s locked, too!” he said with increasing puzzlement. A gasp went over the group. They were locked in the room while some devilment was going on in the rest of the house. That they knew. But what it might be, what form it might take, they had not the remotest idea. They were too distracted to notice the injured man, now alert in his chair, or the Doctor’s odd attitude of listening, above the rattle and banging of the storm.

But it was not until Miss Cornelia took the candle and proceeded toward the hall door to examine it that the full horror of the situation burst upon them.

Neatly fastened to the white panel of the door, chest high and hardly more than just dead, was the body of a bat.

Of what happened thereafter no one afterward remembered the details. To be shut in there at the mercy of one who knew no mercy was intolerable. It was left for Miss Cornelia to remember her own revolver, lying unnoticed on the table since the crime earlier in the evening, and to suggest its use in shattering the lock. Just what they had expected when the door was finally opened they did not know. But the house was quiet and in order; no new horror faced them in the hall; their candle revealed no bloody figure, their ears heard no unearthly sound.

Slowly they began to breathe normally once more. After that they began to search the house. Since no room was apparently immune from danger, the men made no protest when the women insisted on accompanying them. And as time went on and chamber after chamber was discovered empty and undisturbed, gradually the courage of the party began to rise. Lizzie, still whimpering, stuck closely to Miss Cornelia’s heels, but that spirited lady began to make small side excursions of her own.

Of the men, only Bailey, Beresford, and the Doctor could really be said to search at all. Billy had remained below, impassive of face but rolling of eye; the Unknown, after an attempt to depart with them, had sunk back weakly into his chair again, and the detective, Anderson, was still unaccountably missing.

While no one could be said to be grieving over this, still the belief that somehow, somewhere, he had met the Bat and suffered at his hands was strong in all of them except the Doctor. As each door was opened they expected to find him, probably foully murdered; as each door was closed again they breathed with relief.

And as time went on and the silence and peace remained unbroken, the conviction grew on them that the Bat had in this manner achieved his object and departed; had done his work, signed it after his usual fashion, and gone.

And thus were matters when Miss Cornelia, happening on the attic staircase with Lizzie at her heels, decided to look about her up there. And went up.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE HIDDEN ROOM

A few moments later Jack Bailey, seeing a thin glow of candlelight from the attic above and hearing Lizzie’s protesting voice, made his way up there. He found them in the trunk room, a dusty, dingy apartment lined with high closets along the walls—the floor littered with an incongruous assortment of attic objects—two battered trunks, a clothes hamper, an old sewing machine, a broken-backed kitchen chair, two dilapidated suitcases and a shabby satchel that might once have been a woman’s dressing case—in one corner a grimy fireplace in which, obviously, no fire had been lighted for years.

But he also found Miss Cornelia holding her candle to the floor and staring at something there.

“Candle grease!” she said sharply, staring at a line of white spots by the window. She stooped and touched the spots with an exploratory finger.

“Fresh candle grease! Now who do you suppose did that? Do you remember how Mr. Gillette, in Sherlock Holmes, when he—”

Her voice trailed off. She stooped and followed the trail of the candle grease away from the window, ingeniously trying to copy the shrewd, piercing gaze of Mr. Gillette as she remembered him in his most famous role.

“It leads straight to the fireplace!” she murmured in tones of Sherlockian gravity. Bailey repressed an involuntary smile. But her next words gave him genuine food for thought.

She stared at the mantel of the fireplace accusingly. “It’s been going through my mind for the last few minutes that no chimney flue runs up this side of the house!” she said.

Bailey stared. “Then why the fireplace?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out!” said the spinster grimly. She started to rap the mantel, testing it for secret springs.

“Jack! Jack!” It was Dale’s voice, low and cautious, coming from the landing of the stairs.

Bailey stepped to the door of the trunk room.

“Come in,” he called in reply. “And shut the door behind you.”

Dale entered, turning the key in the lock behind her.

“Where are the others?”

“They’re still searching the house. There’s no sign of anybody.”

“They haven’t found—Mr. Anderson?”

Dale shook her head. “Not yet.”

She turned toward her aunt. Miss Cornelia had begun to enjoy herself once more.

Rapping on the mantelpiece, poking and pressing various corners and sections of the mantel itself, she remembered all the detective stories she had ever read and thought, with a sniff of scorn, that she could better them. There were always sliding panels and hidden drawers in detective stories and the detective discovered them by rapping just as she was doing, and listening for a hollow sound in answer. She rapped on the wall above the mantel—exactly—there was the hollow echo she wanted.

“Hollow as Lizzie’s head!” she said triumphantly. The fireplace was obviously not what it seemed, there must be a space behind it unaccounted for in the building plans. Now what was the next step detectives always took? Oh, yes—they looked for panels; panels that moved. And when one shoved them away there was a button or something. She pushed and pressed and finally something did move. It was the mantelpiece itself, false grate and all, which began to swing out into the room, revealing behind a dark, hollow cubbyhole, some six feet by six—the Hidden Room at last!

“Oh, Jack, be careful!” breathed Dale as her lover took Miss Cornelia’s candle and moved toward the dark hiding-place. But her eyes had already caught the outlines of a tall iron safe in the gloom and in spite of her fears, her lips formed a wordless cry of victory.

But Jack Bailey said nothing at all. One glance had shown him that the safe was empty.

The tragic collapse of all their hopes was almost more than they could bear. Coming on top of the nerve-racking events of the night, it left them dazed and directionless. It was, of course, Miss Cornelia who recovered first.

“Even without the money,” she said; “the mere presence of this safe here, hidden away, tells the story. The fact that someone else knew and got here first cannot alter that.”

But she could not cheer them. It was Lizzie who created a diversion. Lizzie who had bolted into the hall at the first motion of the mantelpiece outward and who now, with equal precipitation, came bolting back. She rushed into the room, slamming the door behind her, and collapsed into a heap of moaning terror at her mistress’s feet. At first she was completely inarticulate, but after a time she muttered that she had seen “him” and then fell to groaning again.

The same thought was in all their minds, that in some corner of the upper floor she had come across the body of Anderson. But when Miss Cornelia finally quieted her and asked this, she shook her head.

“It was the Bat I saw,” was her astounding statement. “He dropped through the skylight out there and ran along the hall. I saw him I tell you. He went right by me!”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Cornelia briskly. “How can you say such a thing?”

But Bailey pushed forward and took Lizzie by the shoulder.

“What did he look like?”

“He hadn’t any face. He was all black where his face ought to be.”

“Do you mean he wore a mask?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

She collapsed again but when Bailey, followed by Miss Cornelia, made a move toward the door she broke into frantic wailing.

“Don’t go out there!” she shrieked. “He’s there I tell you. I’m not crazy. If you open that door, he’ll shoot.”

But the door was already open and no shot came. With the departure of Bailey and Miss Cornelia, and the resulting darkness due to their taking the candle, Lizzie and Dale were left alone. The girl was faint with disappointment and strain; she sat huddled on a trunk, saying nothing, and after a moment or so Lizzie roused to her condition.

“Not feeling sick, are you?” she asked.

“I feel a little queer.”

“Who wouldn’t in the dark here with that monster loose somewhere near by?” But she stirred herself and got up. “I’d better get the smelling salts,” she said heavily. “God knows I hate to move, but if there’s one place safer in this house than another, I’ve yet to find it.”

She went out, leaving Dale alone. The trunk room was dark, save that now and then as the candle appeared and reappeared the doorway was faintly outlined. On this outline she kept her eyes fixed, by way of comfort, and thus passed the next few moments. She felt weak and dizzy and entirely despairing.

Then—the outline was not so clear. She had heard nothing but there was something in the doorway. It stood there, formless, diabolical, and then she saw what was happening. It was closing the door. Afterward she was mercifully not to remember what came next; the figure was perhaps intent on what was going on outside, or her own movements may have been as silent as its own. That she got into the mantel-room and even partially closed it behind her is certain, and that her description of what followed is fairly accurate is borne out by the facts as known.

The Bat was working rapidly. She heard his quick, nervous movements; apparently he had come back for something and secured it, for now he moved again toward the door. But he was too late; they were returning that way. She heard him mutter something and quickly turn the key in the lock. Then he seemed to run toward the window, and for some reason to recoil from it.

The next instant she realized that he was coming toward the mantel-room, that he intended to hide in it. There was no doubt in her mind as to his identity. It was the Bat, and in a moment more he would be shut in there with her.

She tried to scream and could not, and the next instant, when the Bat leaped into concealment beside her, she was in a dead faint on the floor.

Bailey meanwhile had crawled out on the roof and was carefully searching it. But other things were happening also. A disinterested observer could have seen very soon why the Bat had abandoned the window as a means of egress.

Almost before the mantel had swung to behind the archcriminal, the top of a tall pruning ladder had appeared at the window and by its quivering showed that someone was climbing up, rung by rung. Unsuspiciously enough he came on, pausing at the top to flash a light into the room, and then cautiously swinging a leg over the sill. It was the Doctor. He gave a low whistle but there was no reply, save that, had he seen it, the mantel swung out an inch or two. Perhaps he was never so near death as at that moment but that instant of irresolution on his part saved him, for by coming into the room he had taken himself out of range.

Even then he was very close to destruction, for after a brief pause and a second rather puzzled survey of the room, he started toward the mantel itself. Only the rattle of the doorknob stopped him, and a call from outside.

“Dale!” called Bailey’s voice from the corridor. “Dale!”

“Dale! Dale! The door’s locked!” cried Miss Cornelia.

The Doctor hesitated. The call came again. “Dale! Dale!” and Bailey pounded on the door as if he meant to break it down.

The Doctor made up his mind.

“Wait a moment!” he called. He stepped to the door and unlocked it. Bailey hurled himself into the room, followed by Miss Cornelia with her candle. Lizzie stood in the doorway, timidly, ready to leap for safety at a moment’s notice.

“Why did you lock that door?” said Bailey angrily, threatening the Doctor.

“But I didn’t,” said the latter, truthfully enough. Bailey made a movement of irritation. Then a glance about the room informed him of the amazing, the incredible fact. Dale was not there! She had disappeared!

“You—you,” he stammered at the Doctor. “Where’s Miss Ogden? What have you done with her?”

The Doctor was equally baffled.

“Done with her?” he said indignantly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I haven’t seen her!”

“Then you didn’t lock that door?” Bailey menaced him.

The Doctor’s denial was firm.

“Absolutely not. I was coming through the window when I heard your voice at the door!”

Bailey’s eyes leaped to the window—yes—a ladder was there—the Doctor might be speaking the truth after all. But if so, how and why had Dale disappeared?

The Doctor’s admission of his manner of entrance did not make Lizzie any the happier.

“In at the window—just like a bat!” she muttered in shaking tones. She would not have stayed in the doorway if she had not been afraid to move anywhere else.

“I saw lights up here from outside,” continued the Doctor easily. “And I thought—”

Miss Cornelia interrupted him. She had set down her candle and laid the revolver on the top of the clothes hamper and now stood gazing at the mantel-fireplace.

“The mantel’s—closed!” she said.

The Doctor stared. So the secret of the Hidden Room was a secret no longer. He saw ruin gaping before him—a bottomless abyss. “Damnation!” he cursed impotently under his breath.

Bailey turned on him savagely.

“Did you shut that mantel?”

“No!”

“I’ll see whether you shut it or not!” Bailey leaped toward the fireplace. “Dale! Dale!” he called desperately, leaning against the mantel. His fingers groped for the knob that worked the mechanism of the hidden entrance.

The Doctor picked up the single lighted candle from the hamper, as if to throw more light on Bailey’s task. Bailey’s fingers found the knob. He turned it. The mantel began to swing out into the room.

As it did so the Doctor deliberately snuffed out the light of the candle he held, leaving the room in abrupt and obliterating darkness.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ANDERSON MAKES AN ARREST

“Doctor, why did you put out that candle?” Miss Cornelia’s voice cut the blackness like a knife.

“I didn’t—I—”

“You did—I saw you do it.”

The brief exchange of accusation and denial took but an instant of time, as the mantel swung wide open. The next instant there was a rush of feet across the floor, from the fireplace—the shock of a collision between two bodies—the sound of a heavy fall.

“What was that?” queried Bailey dazedly, with a feeling as if some great winged creature had brushed at him and passed.

Lizzie answered from the doorway.

“Oh, oh!” she groaned in stricken accents. “Somebody knocked me down and tramped on me!”

“Matches, quick!” commanded Miss Cornelia. “Where’s the candle?”

The Doctor was still trying to explain his curious action of a moment before.

“Awfully sorry, I assure you—it dropped out of the holder—ah, here it is!”

He held it up triumphantly. Bailey struck a match and lighted it. The wavering little flame showed Lizzie prostrate but vocal, in the doorway—and Dale lying on the floor of the Hidden Room, her eyes shut, and her face as drained of color as the face of a marble statue. For one horrible instant Bailey thought she must be dead.

He rushed to her wildly and picked her up in his arms. No—still breathing—thank God! He carried her tenderly to the only chair in the room.

“Doctor!”

The Doctor, once more the physician, knelt at her side and felt for her pulse. And Lizzie, picking herself up from where the collision with some violent body had thrown her, retrieved the smelling salts from the floor. It was onto this picture, the candlelight shining on strained faces, the dramatic figure of Dale, now semi-conscious, the desperate rage of Bailey, that a new actor appeared on the scene.

Anderson, the detective, stood in the doorway, holding a candle—as grim and menacing a figure as a man just arisen from the dead.

“That’s right!” said Lizzie, unappalled for once. “Come in when everything’s over!”

The Doctor glanced up and met the detective’s eyes, cold and menacing.

“You took my revolver from me downstairs,” he said. “I’ll trouble you for it.”

The Doctor got heavily to his feet. The others, their suspicions confirmed at last, looked at him with startled eyes. The detective seemed to enjoy the universal confusion his words had brought.

Slowly, with sullen reluctance, the Doctor yielded up the stolen weapon. The detective examined it casually and replaced it in his hip pocket.

“I’ve something to settle with you pretty soon,” he said through clenched teeth, addressing the Doctor. “And I’ll settle it properly. Now—what’s this?”

He indicated Dale—her face still and waxen—her breath coming so faintly she seemed hardly to breathe at all as Miss Cornelia and Bailey tried to revive her.

“She’s coming to—” said Miss Cornelia triumphantly, as a first faint flush of color reappeared in the girl’s cheeks. “We found her shut in there, Mr. Anderson,” the spinster added, pointing toward the gaping entrance of the Hidden Room.

A gleam crossed the detective’s face. He went up to examine the secret chamber. As he did so, Doctor Wells, who had been inching surreptitiously toward the door, sought the opportunity of slipping out unobserved.

But Anderson was not to be caught napping again. “Wells!” he barked. The Doctor stopped and turned.

“Where were you when she was locked in this room?”

The Doctor’s eyes sought the floor—the walls—wildly—for any possible loophole of escape.

“I didn’t shut her in if that’s what you mean!” he said defiantly. “There was someone shut in there with her!” He gestured at the Hidden Room. “Ask these people here.”

Miss Cornelia caught him up at once.

“The fact remains, Doctor,” she said, her voice cold with anger, “that we left her here alone. When we came back you were here. The corridor door was locked, and she was in that room—unconscious!”

She moved forward to throw the light of her candle on the Hidden Room as the detective passed into it, gave it a swift professional glance, and stepped out again. But she had not finished her story by any means.

“As we opened that door,” she continued to the detective, tapping the false mantel, “the Doctor deliberately extinguished our only candle!”

“Do you know who was in that room?” queried the detective fiercely, wheeling on the Doctor.

But the latter had evidently made up his mind to cling stubbornly to a policy of complete denial.

“No,” he said sullenly. “I didn’t put out the candle. It fell. And I didn’t lock that door into the hall. I found it locked!”

A sigh of relief from Bailey now centered everyone’s attention on himself and Dale. At last the girl was recovering from the shock of her terrible experience and regaining consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered, closed again, opened once more. She tried to sit up, weakly, clinging to Bailey’s shoulder. The color returned to her cheeks, the stupor left her eyes.

She gave the Hidden Room a hunted little glance and then shuddered violently.

“Please close that awful door,” she said in a tremulous voice. “I don’t want to see it again.”

The detective went silently to close the iron doors. “What happened to you? Can’t you remember?” faltered Bailey, on his knees at her side.

The shadow of an old terror lay on the girl’s face, “I was in here alone in the dark,” she began slowly—“Then, as I looked at the doorway there, I saw there was somebody there. He came in and closed the door. I didn’t know what to do, so I slipped in—there, and after a while I knew he was coming in too, for he couldn’t get out. Then I must have fainted.”

“There was nothing about the figure that you recognized?”

“No. Nothing.”

“But we know it was the Bat,” put in Miss Cornelia. The detective laughed sardonically. The old duel of opposing theories between the two seemed about to recommence.

“Still harping on the Bat!” he said, with a little sneer, Miss Cornelia stuck to her guns.

“I have every reason to believe that the Bat is in this house,” she said.

The detective gave another jarring, mirthless laugh. “And that he took the Union Bank money out of the safe, I suppose?” he jeered. “No, Miss Van Gorder.”

He wheeled on the Doctor now.

“Ask the Doctor who took the Union Bank money out of that safe!” he thundered. “Ask the Doctor who attacked me downstairs in the living-room, knocked me senseless, and locked me in the billiard room!”

There was an astounded silence. The detective added a parting shot to his indictment of the Doctor.

“The next time you put handcuffs on a man be sure to take the key out of his vest pocket,” he said, biting off the words.

Rage and consternation mingled on the Doctor’s countenance—on the faces of the others astonishment was followed by a growing certainty. Only Miss Cornelia clung stubbornly to her original theory.

“Perhaps I’m an obstinate old woman,” she said in tones which obviously showed that if so she was rather proud of it, “but the Doctor and all the rest of us were locked in the living-room not ten minutes ago!”

“By the Bat, I suppose!” mocked Anderson.

“By the Bat!” insisted Miss Cornelia inflexibly. “Who else would have fastened a dead bat to the door downstairs? Who else would have the bravado to do that? Or what you call the imagination?”

In spite of himself Anderson seemed to be impressed.

“The Bat, eh?” he muttered, then, changing his tone, “You knew about this hidden room, Wells?” he shot at the Doctor.

“Yes.” The Doctor bowed his head.

“And you knew the money was in the room?”

“Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I?” parried the Doctor. “You can look for yourself. That safe is empty.”

The detective brushed his evasive answer aside.

“You were up in this room earlier tonight,” he said in tones of apparent certainty.

“No, I couldn’t get up!” the doctor still insisted, with strange violence for a man who had already admitted such damning knowledge.

The detective’s face was a study in disbelief.

“You know where that money is, Wells, and I’m going to find it!”

This last taunt seemed to goad the Doctor beyond endurance.

“Good God!” he shouted recklessly. “Do you suppose if I knew where it is, I’d be here? I’ve had plenty of chances to get away! No, you can’t pin anything on me, Anderson! It isn’t criminal to have known that room is here.”

He paused, trembling with anger and, curiously enough, with an anger that seemed at least half sincere.

“Oh, don’t be so damned virtuous!” said the detective brutally. “Maybe you haven’t been upstairs but—unless I miss my guess, you know who was!”

The Doctor’s face changed a little.

“What about Richard Fleming?” persisted the detective scornfully.

The Doctor drew himself up.

“I never killed him!” he said so impressively that even Bailey’s faith in his guilt was shaken. “I don’t even own a revolver!”

The detective alone maintained his attitude unchanged.

“You come with me, Wells,” he ordered, with a jerk of his thumb toward the door. “This time I’ll do the locking up.”

The Doctor, head bowed, prepared to obey. The detective took up a candle to light their path. Then he turned to the others for a moment.

“Better get the young lady to bed,” he said with a gruff kindliness of manner. “I think that I can promise you a quiet night from now on.”

“I’m glad you think so, Mr. Anderson!” Miss Cornelia insisted on the last word. The detective ignored the satiric twist of her speech, motioned the Doctor out ahead of him, and followed. The faint glow of his candle flickered a moment and vanished toward the stairs.

It was Bailey who broke the silence.

“I can believe a good bit about Wells,” he said, “but not that he stood on that staircase and killed Dick Fleming.”

Miss Cornelia roused from deep thought.

“Of course not,” she said briskly. “Go down and fix Miss Dale’s bed, Lizzie. And then bring up some wine.”

“Down there, where the Bat is?” Lizzie demanded.

“The Bat has gone.”

“Don’t you believe it. He’s just got his hand in!”

But at last Lizzie went, and, closing the door behind her, Miss Cornelia proceeded more or less to think, out loud.

“Suppose,” she said, “that the Bat, or whoever it was shut in there with you, killed Richard Fleming. Say that he is the one Lizzie saw coming in by the terrace door. Then he knew where the money was for he went directly up the stairs. But that is two hours ago or more. Why didn’t he get the money, if it was here, and get away?”

“He may have had trouble with the combination.”

“Perhaps. Anyhow, he was on the small staircase when Dick Fleming started up, and of course he shot him. That’s clear enough. Then he finally got the safe open, after locking us in below, and my coming up interrupted him. How on earth did he get out on the roof?”

Bailey glanced out the window.

“It would be possible from here. Possible, but not easy.”

“But, if he could do that,” she persisted, “he could have got away, too. There are trellises and porches. Instead of that he came back here to this room.” She stared at the window. “Could a man have done that with one hand?”

“Never in the world.”

Saying nothing, but deeply thoughtful, Miss Cornelia made a fresh progress around the room.

“I know very little about bank-currency,” she said finally. “Could such a sum as was looted from the Union Bank be carried away in a man’s pocket?”

Bailey considered the question.

“Even in bills of large denomination it would make a pretty sizeable bundle,” he said.

But that Miss Cornelia’s deductions were correct, whatever they were, was in question when Lizzie returned with the elderberry wine. Apparently Miss Cornelia was to be like the man who repaired the clock: she still had certain things left over.

For Lizzie announced that the Unknown was ranging the second floor hall. From the time they had escaped from the living-room this man had not been seen or thought of, but that he was a part of the mystery there could be no doubt. It flashed over Miss Cornelia that, although he could not possibly have locked them in, in the darkness that followed he could easily have fastened the bat to the door. For the first time it occurred to her that the archcriminal might not be working alone, and that the entrance of the Unknown might have been a carefully devised ruse to draw them all together and hold them there.

Nor was Beresford’s arrival with the statement that the Unknown was moving through the house below particularly comforting.

“He may be dazed, or he may not,” he said. “Personally, this is not a time to trust anybody.”

Beresford knew nothing of what had just occurred, and now seeing Bailey he favored him with an ugly glance.

“In the absence of Anderson, Bailey,” he added, “I don’t propose to trust you too far. I’m making it my business from now on to see that you don’t try to get away. Get that?”

But Bailey heard him without particular resentment.

“All right,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this. Anderson is here and has arrested the Doctor. Keep your eye on me, if you think it’s your duty, but don’t talk to me as if I were a criminal. You don’t know that yet.”

“The Doctor!” Beresford gasped.

But Miss Cornelia’s keen ears had heard a sound outside and her eyes were focused on the door.

“That doorknob is moving,” she said in a hushed voice.

Beresford moved to the door and jerked it violently open.

The butler, Billy, almost pitched into the room.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE BAT STILL FLIES

He stepped back in the doorway, looked out, then turned to them again.

“I come in, please?” he said pathetically, his hands quivering. “I not like to stay in dark.”

Miss Cornelia took pity on him.

“Come in, Billy, of course. What is it? Anything the matter?”

Billy glanced about nervously.

“Man with sore head.”

“What about him?”

“Act very strange.” Again Billy’s slim hands trembled.

Beresford broke in. “The man who fell into the room downstairs?”

Billy nodded.

“Yes. On second floor, walking around.”

Beresford smiled, a bit smugly.

“I told you!” he said to Miss Cornelia. “I didn’t think he was as dazed as he pretended to be.”

Miss Cornelia, too, had been pondering the problem of the Unknown. She reached a swift decision. If he were what he pretended to be—a dazed wanderer, he could do them no harm. If he were not—a little strategy properly employed might unravel the whole mystery.

“Bring him up here, Billy,” she said, turning to the butler.

Billy started to obey. But the darkness of the corridor seemed to appall him anew the moment he took a step toward it.

“You give candle, please?” he asked with a pleading expression. “Don’t like dark.”

Miss Cornelia handed him one of the two precious candles. Then his present terror reminded her of that one other occasion when she had seen him lose completely his stoic Oriental calm.

“Billy,” she queried, “what did you see when you came running down the stairs before we were locked in, down below?”

The candle shook like a reed in Billy’s grasp.

“Nothing!” he gasped with obvious untruth, though it did not seem so much as if he wished to conceal what he had seen as that he was trying to convince himself he had seen nothing.

“Nothing!” said Lizzie scornfully. “It was some nothing that would make him drop a bottle of whisky!”

But Billy only backed toward the door, smiling apologetically.

“Thought I saw ghost,” he said, and went out and down the stairs, the candlelight flickering, growing fainter, and finally disappearing. Silence and eerie darkness enveloped them all as they waited. And suddenly out of the blackness came a sound.

Something was flapping and thumping around the room.

“That’s damned odd!” muttered Beresford uneasily. “There is something moving around the room.”

“It’s up near the ceiling!” cried Bailey as the sound began again.

Lizzie began a slow wail of doom and disaster.

“Oh—h—h—h—”

“Good God!” cried Beresford abruptly. “It hit me in the face!” He slapped his hands together in a vain attempt to capture the flying intruder.

Lizzie rose.

“I’m going!” she announced. “I don’t know where, but I’m going!”

She took a wild step in the direction of the door. Then the flapping noise was all about her, her nose was bumped by an invisible object and she gave a horrified shriek.

“It’s in my hair!” she screamed madly. “It’s in my hair!”

The next instant Bailey gave a triumphant cry.

“I’ve got it! It’s a bat!”

Lizzie sank to her knees, still moaning, and Bailey carried the cause of the trouble over to the window and threw it out.

But the result of the absurd incident was a further destruction of their morale. Even Beresford, so far calm with the quiet of the virtuous onlooker, was now pallid in the light of the matches they successively lighted. And onto this strained situation came at last Billy and the Unknown.

The Unknown still wore his air of dazed bewilderment, true or feigned, but at least he was now able to walk without support. They stared at him, at his tattered, muddy garments, at the threads of rope still clinging to his ankles—and wondered. He returned their stares vacantly.

“Come in,” began Miss Cornelia. “Sit down.” He obeyed both commands docilely enough.

“Are you better now?”

“Somewhat.” His words still came very slowly.

“Billy—you can go.”

“I stay, please!” said Billy wistfully, making no movement to leave. His gesture toward the darkness of the corridor spoke louder than words.

Bailey watched him, suspicion dawning in his eyes. He could not account for the butler’s inexplicable terror of being left alone.

“Anderson intimated that the Doctor had an accomplice in this house,” he said, crossing to Billy and taking him by the arm. “Why isn’t this the man?” Billy cringed away. “Please, no,” he begged pitifully.

Bailey turned him around so that he faced the Hidden Room.

“Did you know that room was there?” he questioned, his doubts still unquieted.

Billy shook his head.

“No.”

“He couldn’t have locked us in,” said Miss Cornelia. “He was with us.”

Bailey demurred, not to her remark itself, but to its implication of Billy’s entire innocence.

“He may know who did it. Do you?”

Billy still shook his head.

Bailey remained unconvinced.

“Who did you see at the head of the small staircase?” he queried imperatively. “Now we’re through with nonsense; I want the truth!”

Billy shivered.

“See face—that’s all,” he brought out at last.

“Whose face?”

Again it was evident that Billy knew or thought he knew more than he was willing to tell.

“Don’t know,” he said with obvious untruth, looking down at the floor.

“Never mind, Billy,” cut in Miss Cornelia. To her mind questioning Billy was wasting time. She looked at the Unknown.

“Solve the mystery of this man and we may get at the facts,” she said in accents of conviction.

As Bailey turned toward her questioningly, Billy attempted to steal silently out of the door, apparently preferring any fears that might lurk in the darkness of the corridor to a further grilling on the subject of whom or what he had seen on the alcove stairs. But Bailey caught the movement out of the tail of his eye.

“You stay here,” he commanded. Billy stood frozen. Beresford raised the candle so that it cast its light full in the Unknown’s face.

“This chap claims to have lost his memory,” he said dubiously. “I suppose a blow on the head might do that, I don’t know.”

“I wish somebody would knock me on the head! I’d like to forget a few things!” moaned Lizzie, but the interruption went unregarded.

“Don’t you even know your name?” queried Miss Cornelia of the Unknown.

The Unknown shook his head with a slow, laborious gesture.

“Not—yet.”

“Or where you came from?”

Once more the battered head made its movement of negation.

“Do you remember how you got in this house?” The Unknown made an effort.

“Yes—I—remember—that—all—right” he said, apparently undergoing an enormous strain in order to make himself speak at all. He put his hand to his head.

“My—head—aches—to—beat—the—band,” he continued slowly.

Miss Cornelia was at a loss. If this were acting, it was at least fine acting.

“How did you happen to come to this house?” she persisted, her voice unconsciously tuning itself to the slow, laborious speech of the Unknown.

“Saw—the—lights.”

Bailey broke in with a question.

“Where were you when you saw the lights?”

The Unknown wet his lips with his tongue, painfully.

“I—broke—out—of—the—garage,” he said at length. This was unexpected. A general movement of interest ran over the group.

“How did you get there?” Beresford took his turn as questioner.

The Unknown shook his head, so slowly and deliberately that Miss Cornelia’s fingers itched to shake him in spite of his injuries.

“I—don’t—know.”

“Have you been robbed?” queried Bailey with keen suspicion.

The Unknown mumbled something unintelligible. Then he seemed to get command of his tongue again.

“Everything gone—out of—my pockets,” he said.

“Including your watch?” pursued Bailey, remembering the watch that Beresford had found in the grounds.

The Unknown would neither affirm nor deny.

“If—I—had—a—watch—it’s gone,” he said with maddening deliberation. “All my—papers—are gone.”

Miss Cornelia pounced upon this last statement like a cat upon a mouse.

“How do you know you had papers?” she asked sharply.

For the first time the faintest flicker of a smile seemed to appear for a moment on the Unknown’s features. Then it vanished as abruptly as it had come.

“Most men—carry papers—don’t they?” he asked, staring blindly in front of him. “I’m dazed—but—my mind’s—all—right. If you—ask me—I—think—I’m—d-damned funny!”

He gave the ghost of a chuckle. Bailey and Beresford exchanged glances.

“Did you ring the house phone?” insisted Miss Cornelia.

The Unknown nodded.

“Yes.”

Miss Cornelia and Bailey gave each other a look of wonderment.

“I—leaned against—the button—in the garage—” he went on. “Then—I think—maybe I—fainted. That’s—not clear.”

His eyelids drooped. He seemed about to faint again.

Dale rose, and came over to him, with a sympathetic movement of her hand.

“You don’t remember how you were hurt?” she asked gently.

The Unknown stared ahead of him, his eyes filming, as if he were trying to puzzle it out.

“No,” he said at last. “The first thing I remember—I was in the garage—tied.” He moved his lips. “I was—gagged—too—that’s—what’s the matter—with my tongue—now—Then—I got myself—free—and—got out—of a window—”

Miss Cornelia made a movement to question him further. Beresford stopped her with his hand uplifted.

“Just a moment, Miss Van Gorder. Anderson ought to know of this.”

He started for the door without perceiving the flash of keen intelligence and alertness that had lit the Unknown’s countenance for an instant, as once before, at the mention of the detective’s name. But just as he reached the door the detective entered.

He halted for a moment, staring at the strange figure of the Unknown.

“A new element in our mystery, Mr. Anderson,” said Miss Cornelia, remembering that the detective might not have heard of the mysterious stranger before—as he had been locked in the billiard room when the latter had made his queer entrance.

The detective and the Unknown gazed at each other for a moment—the Unknown with his old expression of vacant stupidity.

“Quite dazed, poor fellow,” Miss Cornelia went on. Beresford added other words of explanation.

“He doesn’t remember what happened to him. Curious, isn’t it?”

The detective still seemed puzzled.

“How did he get into the house?”

“He came through the terrace door some time ago,” answered Miss Cornelia. “Just before we were locked in.”

Her answer seemed to solve the problem to Anderson’s satisfaction.

“Doesn’t remember anything, eh?” he said dryly. He crossed over to the mysterious stranger and put his hand under the Unknown’s chin, jerking his head up roughly.

“Look up here!” he commanded.

The Unknown stared at him for an instant with blank, vacuous eyes. Then his head dropped back upon his breast again.

“Look up, you—” muttered the detective, jerking his head again. “This losing your memory stuff doesn’t go down with me!” His eyes bored into the Unknown’s.

“It doesn’t—go down—very well—with me—either,” said the Unknown weakly, making no movement of protest against Anderson’s rough handling.

“Did you ever see me before?” demanded the latter. Beresford held the candle closer so that he might watch the Unknown’s face for any involuntary movement of betrayal.

But the Unknown made no such movement. He gazed at Anderson, apparently with the greatest bewilderment, then his eyes cleared, he seemed to be about to remember who the detective was.

“You’re—the—Doctor—I—saw—downstairs—aren’t you?” he said innocently. The detective set his jaw. He started off on a new tack.

“Does this belong to you?” he said suddenly, plucking from his pocket the battered gold watch that Beresford had found and waving it before the Unknown’s blank face.

The Unknown stared at it a moment, as a child might stare at a new toy, with no gleam of recognition. Then—

“Maybe,” he admitted. “I—don’t—know.” His voice trailed off. He fell back against Bailey’s arm.

Miss Cornelia gave a little shiver. The third degree in reality was less pleasant to watch than it had been to read about in the pages of her favorite detective stories.

“He’s evidently been attacked,” she said, turning to Anderson. “He claims to have recovered consciousness in the garage, where he was tied hand and foot!”

“He does, eh?” said the detective heavily. He glared at the Unknown. “If you’ll give me five minutes alone with him, I’ll get the truth out of him!” he promised.

A look of swift alarm swept over the Unknown’s face at the words, unperceived by any except Miss Cornelia. The others started obediently to yield to the detective’s behest and leave him alone with his prisoner. Miss Cornelia was the first to move toward the door. On her way, she turned.

“Do you believe that money is irrevocably gone?” she asked of Anderson.

The detective smiled.

“There’s no such word as ‘irrevocable’ in my vocabulary,” he answered. “But I believe it’s out of the house, if that’s what you mean.”

Miss Cornelia still hesitated, on the verge of departure.

“Suppose I tell you that there are certain facts that you have overlooked?” she said slowly.

“Still on the trail!” muttered the detective sardonically. He did not even glance at her. He seemed only anxious that the other members of the group would get out of his way for once and leave him a clear field for his work.

“I was right about the Doctor, wasn’t I?” she insisted.

“Just fifty per cent right,” said Anderson crushingly. “And the Doctor didn’t turn that trick alone. Now—” he went on with weary patience, “if you’ll all go out and close that door—”

Miss Cornelia, defeated, took a candle from Bailey and stepped into the corridor. Her figure stiffened. She gave an audible gasp of dismayed surprise.

“Quick!” she cried, turning back to the others and gesturing toward the corridor. “A man just went through that skylight and out onto the roof!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN MURDER ON MURDER

“Out on the roof!”

“Come on, Beresford!”

“Hustle—you men! He may be armed!”

“Righto—coming!”

And following Miss Cornelia’s lead, Jack Bailey, Anderson, Beresford, and Billy dashed out into the corridor, leaving Dale and the frightened Lizzie alone with the Unknown.

“And I’d run if my legs would!” Lizzie despaired.

“Hush!” said Dale, her ears strained for sounds of conflict. Lizzie, creeping closer to her for comfort, stumbled over one of the Unknown’s feet and promptly set up a new wail.

“How do we know this fellow right here isn’t the Bat?” she asked in a blood-chilling whisper, nearly stabbing the unfortunate Unknown in the eye with her thumb as she pointed at him. The Unknown was either too dazed or too crafty to make any answer. His silence confirmed Lizzie’s worst suspicions. She fairly hugged the floor and began to pray in a whisper.

Miss Cornelia re-entered cautiously with her candle, closing the door gently behind her as she came.

“What did you see?” gasped Dale.

Miss Cornelia smiled broadly.

“I didn’t see anything,” she admitted with the greatest calm. “I had to get that dratted detective out of the room before I assassinated him.”

“Nobody went through the skylight?” said Dale incredulously.

“They have now,” answered Miss Cornelia with obvious satisfaction. “The whole outfit of them.”

She stole a glance at the veiled eyes of the Unknown. He was lying limply back in his chair, as if the excitement had been too much for him—and yet she could have sworn she had seen him leap to his feet, like a man in full possession of his faculties, when she had given her false cry of alarm.

“Then why did you—” began Dale dazedly, unable to fathom her aunt’s reasons for her trick.

“Because,” interrupted Miss Cornelia decidedly, “that money’s in this room. If the man who took it out of the safe got away with it, why did he come back and hide there?”

Her forefinger jabbed at the hidden chamber wherein the masked intruder had terrified Dale with threats of instant death.

“He got it out of the safe—and that’s as far as he did get with it,” she persisted inexorably. “There’s a hat behind that safe, a man’s felt hat!”

So this was the discovery she had hinted of to Anderson before he rebuffed her proffer of assistance!

“Oh, I wish he’d take his hat and go home!” groaned Lizzie inattentive to all but her own fears.

Miss Cornelia did not even bother to rebuke her. She crossed behind the wicker clothes hamper and picked up something from the floor.

“A half-burned candle,” she mused. “Another thing the detective overlooked.”

She stepped back to the center of the room, looking knowingly from the candle to the Hidden Room and back again.

“Oh, my God—another one!” shrieked Lizzie as the dark shape of a man appeared suddenly outside the window, as if materialized from the air.

Miss Cornelia snatched up her revolver from the top of the hamper.

“Don’t shoot—it’s Jack!” came a warning cry from Dale as she recognized the figure of her lover.

Miss Cornelia laid her revolver down on the hamper again. The vacant eyes of the Unknown caught the movement.

Bailey swung in through the window, panting a little from his exertions.

“The man Lizzie saw drop from the skylight undoubtedly got to the roof from this window,” he said. “It’s quite easy.”

“But not with one hand,” said Miss Cornelia, with her gaze now directed at the row of tall closets around the walls of the room. “When that detective comes back I may have a surprise party for him,” she muttered, with a gleam of hope in her eye.

Dale explained the situation to Jack.

“Aunt Cornelia thinks the money’s still here.”

Miss Cornelia snorted.

“I know it’s here.” She started to open the closets, one after the other, beginning at the left. Bailey saw what she was doing and began to help her.

Not so Lizzie. She sat on the floor in a heap, her eyes riveted on the Unknown, who in his turn was gazing at Miss Cornelia’s revolver on the hamper with the intent stare of a baby or an idiot fascinated by a glittering piece of glass.

Dale noticed the curious tableau.

“Lizzie—what are you looking at?” she said with a nervous shake in her voice.

“What’s he looking at?” asked Lizzie sepulchrally, pointing at the Unknown. Her pointed forefinger drew his eyes away from the revolver; he sank back into his former apathy, listless, drooping.

Miss Cornelia rattled the knob of a high closet by the other wall.

“This one is locked—and the key’s gone,” she announced. A new flicker of interest grew in the eyes of the Unknown. Lizzie glanced away from him, terrified.

“If there’s anything locked up in that closet,” she whimpered, “you’d better let it stay! There’s enough running loose in this house as it is!”

Unfortunately for her, her whimper drew Miss Cornelia’s attention upon her.

“Lizzie, did you ever take that key?” the latter queried sternly.

“No’m,” said Lizzie, too scared to dissimulate if she had wished. She wagged her head violently a dozen times, like a china figure on a mantelpiece.

Miss Cornelia pondered.

“It may be locked from the inside; I’ll soon find out.” She took a wire hairpin from her hair and pushed it through the keyhole. But there was no key on the other side; the hairpin went through without obstruction. Repeated efforts to jerk the door open failed. And finally Miss Cornelia bethought herself of a key from the other closet doors.

Dale and Lizzie on one side—Bailey on the other—collected the keys of the other closets from their locks while Miss Cornelia stared at the one whose doors were closed as if she would force its secret from it with her eyes. The Unknown had been so quiet during the last few minutes, that, unconsciously, the others had ceased to pay much attention to him, except the casual attention one devotes to a piece of furniture. Even Lizzie’s eyes were now fixed on the locked closet. And the Unknown himself was the first to notice this.

At once his expression altered to one of cunning—cautiously, with infinite patience, he began to inch his chair over toward the wicker clothes hamper. The noise of the others, moving about the room, drowned out what little he made in moving his chair.

At last he was within reach of the revolver. His hand shot out in one swift sinuous thrust—clutched the weapon—withdrew. He then concealed the revolver among his tattered garments as best he could and, cautiously as before, inched his chair back again to its original position. When the others noticed him again, the mask of lifelessness was back on his face and one could have sworn he had not changed his position by the breadth of an inch.

“There—that unlocked it!” cried Miss Cornelia triumphantly at last, as the key to one of the other closet doors slid smoothly into the lock and she heard the click that meant victory.

She was about to throw open the closet door. But Bailey motioned her back.

“I’d keep back a little,” he cautioned. “You don’t know what may be inside.”

“Mercy sakes, who wants to know?” shivered Lizzie. Dale and Miss Cornelia, too, stepped aside involuntarily as Bailey took the candle and prepared, with a good deal of caution, to open the closet door.

The door swung open at last. He could look in. He did so—and stared appalled at what he saw, while goose flesh crawled on his spine and the hairs of his head stood up.

After a moment he closed the door of the closet and turned back, white-faced, to the others.

“What is it?” said Dale aghast. “What did you see?”

Bailey found himself unable to answer for a moment. Then he pulled himself together. He turned to Miss Van Gorder.

“Miss Cornelia, I think we have found the ghost the Jap butler saw,” he said slowly. “How are your nerves?”

Miss Cornelia extended a hand that did not tremble.

“Give me the candle.”

He did so. She went to the closet and opened the door.

Whatever faults Miss Cornelia may have had, lack of courage was not one of them—or the ability to withstand a stunning mental shock. Had it been otherwise she might well have crumpled to the floor, as if struck down by an invisible hammer, the moment the closet door swung open before her.

Huddled on the floor of the closet was the body of a man. So crudely had he been crammed into this hiding-place that he lay twisted and bent. And as if to add to the horror of the moment one arm, released from its confinement, now slipped and slid out into the floor of the room.

Miss Cornelia’s voice sounded strange to her own ears when finally she spoke.

“But who is it?”

“It is—or was—Courtleigh Fleming,” said Bailey dully.

“But how can it be? Mr. Fleming died two weeks ago. I—”

“He died in this house sometime tonight. The body is still warm.”

“But who killed him? The Bat?”

“Isn’t it likely that the Doctor did it? The man who has been his accomplice all along? Who probably bought a cadaver out West and buried it with honors here not long ago?”

He spoke without bitterness. Whatever resentment he might have felt died in that awful presence.

“He got into the house early tonight,” he said, “probably with the Doctor’s connivance. That wrist watch there is probably the luminous eye Lizzie thought she saw.”

But Miss Cornelia’s face was still thoughtful, and he went on:

“Isn’t it clear, Miss Van Gorder?” he queried, with a smile. “The Doctor and old Mr. Fleming formed a conspiracy—both needed money—lots of it. Fleming was to rob the bank and hide the money here. Wells’s part was to issue a false death certificate in the West, and bury a substitute body, secured God knows how. It was easy; it kept the name of the president of the Union Bank free from suspicion—and it put the blame on me.”

He paused, thinking it out.

“Only they slipped up in one place. Dick Fleming leased the house to you and they couldn’t get it back.”

“Then you are sure,” said Miss Cornelia quickly, “that tonight Courtleigh Fleming broke in, with the Doctor’s assistance—and that he killed Dick, his own nephew, from the staircase?”

“Aren’t you?” asked Bailey surprised. The more he thought of it the less clearly could he visualize it any other way.

Miss Cornelia shook her head decidedly.

“No.”

Bailey thought her merely obstinate—unwilling to give up, for pride’s sake, her own pet theory of the activities of the Bat.

“Wells tried to get out of the house tonight with that blue-print. Why? Because he knew the moment we got it, we’d come up here—and Fleming was here.”

“Perfectly true,” nodded Miss Cornelia. “And then?”

“Old Fleming killed Dick and Wells killed Fleming,” said Bailey succinctly. “You can’t get away from it!”

But Miss Cornelia still shook her head. The explanation was too mechanical. It laid too little emphasis on the characters of those most concerned.

“No,” she said. “No. The Doctor isn’t a murderer. He’s as puzzled as we are about some things. He and Courtleigh Fleming were working together—but remember this—Doctor Wells was locked in the living-room with us. He’d been trying to get up the stairs all evening and failed every time.”

But Bailey was as convinced of the truth of his theory as she of hers.

“He was here ten minutes ago—locked in this room,” he said with a glance at the ladder up which the doctor had ascended.

“I’ll grant you that,” said Miss Cornelia. “But—” She thought back swiftly. “But at the same time an Unknown Masked Man was locked in that mantel-room with Dale. The Doctor put out the candle when you opened that Hidden Room. Why? Because he thought Courtleigh Fleming was hiding there!” Now the missing pieces of her puzzle were falling into their places with a vengeance. “But at this moment,” she continued, “the Doctor believes that Fleming has made his escape! No—we haven’t solved the mystery yet. There’s another element—an unknown element,” her eyes rested for a moment upon the Unknown, “and that element is—the Bat!”

She paused, impressively. The others stared at her—no longer able to deny the sinister plausibility of her theory. But this new tangling of the mystery, just when the black threads seemed raveled out at last, was almost too much for Dale.

“Oh, call the detective!” she stammered, on the verge of hysterical tears. “Let’s get through with this thing! I can’t bear any more!”

But Miss Cornelia did not even hear her. Her mind, strung now to concert pitch, had harked back to the point it had reached some time ago, and which all the recent distractions had momentarily obliterated.

Had the money been taken out of the house or had it not? In that mad rush for escape had the man hidden with Dale in the recess back of the mantel carried his booty with him, or left it behind? It was not in the Hidden Room, that was certain.

Yet she was so hopeless by that time that her first search was purely perfunctory.

During her progress about the room the Unknown’s eyes followed her, but so still had he sat, so amazing had been the discovery of the body, that no one any longer observed him. Now and then his head drooped forward as if actual weakness was almost overpowering him, but his eyes were keen and observant, and he was no longer taking the trouble to act—if he had been acting.

It was when Bailey finally opened the lid of a clothes hamper that they stumbled on their first clue.

“Nothing here but some clothes and books,” he said, glancing inside.

“Books?” said Miss Cornelia dubiously. “I left no books in that hamper.”

Bailey picked up one of the cheap paper novels and read its title aloud, with a wry smile.

“Little Rosebud’s Lover, Or The Cruel Revenge, by Laura Jean—”

“That’s mine!” said Lizzie promptly. “Oh, Miss Neily, I tell you this house is haunted. I left that book in my satchel along with Wedded But No Wife and now—”

“Where’s your satchel?” snapped Miss Cornelia, her eyes gleaming.

“Where’s my satchel?” mumbled Lizzie, staring about as best she could. “I don’t see it. If that wretch has stolen my satchel—!”

“Where did you leave it?”

“Up here. Right in this room. It was a new satchel too. I’ll have the law on him, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Isn’t that your satchel, Lizzie?” asked Miss Cornelia, indicating a battered bag in a dark corner of shadows above the window.

“Yes’m,” she admitted. But she did not dare approach very close to the recovered bag. It might bite her!

“Put it there on the hamper,” ordered Miss Cornelia.

“I’m scared to touch it!” moaned Lizzie. “It may have a bomb in it!”

She took up the bag between finger and thumb and, holding it with the care she would have bestowed upon a bottle of nitroglycerin, carried it over to the hamper and set it down. Then she backed away from it, ready to leap for the door at a moment’s warning.

Miss Cornelia started for the satchel. Then she remembered. She turned to Bailey.

“You open it,” she said graciously. “If the money’s there—you’re the one who ought to find it.”

Bailey gave her a look of gratitude. Then, smiling at Dale encouragingly, he crossed over to the satchel, Dale at his heels. Miss Cornelia watched him fumble at the catch of the bag—even Lizzie drew closer. For a moment even the Unknown was forgotten.

Bailey gave a triumphant cry.

“The money’s here!”

“Oh, thank God!” sobbed Dale.

It was an emotional moment. It seemed to have penetrated even through the haze enveloping the injured man in his chair. Slowly he got up, like a man who has been waiting for his moment, and now that it had come was in no hurry about it. With equal deliberation he drew the revolver and took a step forward. And at that instant a red glare appeared outside the open window and overhead could be heard the feet of the searchers, running.

“Fire!” screamed Lizzie, pointing to the window, even as Beresford’s voice from the roof rang out in a shout. “The garage is burning!”

They turned toward the door to escape, but a strange and menacing figure blocked their way.

It was the Unknown—no longer the bewildered stranger who had stumbled in through the living-room door—but a man with every faculty of mind and body alert and the light of a deadly purpose in his eyes. He covered the group with Miss Cornelia’s revolver.

“This door is locked and the key is in my pocket!” he said in a savage voice as the red light at the window grew yet more vivid and muffled cries and tramplings from overhead betokened universal confusion and alarm.