"But I was so frightened. My head throbs now with pain. I cannot explain, but--but I had begun to hate this mission of ours before we ever reached here, and then this awful house, and that man and woman.

I almost begged you not to leave me alone, yet I conquered that weakness, and said good night, and locked my door. You never realized how I felt."

"No, not entirely, although I did comprehend you were sorry you had consented to come."

"Not that altogether," and her eyes uplifting met mine, "I was frightened last night in the darkness. I confess I completely lost my nerve, and would have run away if I could. Perhaps I even said things which made you believe I regretted my action in coming with you. But I am more myself now, and I mean to remain, and discover what it all means. Can you guess why?"

"No; I would naturally suppose the night would have added to your terror, your desire to get away."

"Then you do not suspect even now who I am?"

"Who you are? Only as you have told me."

"And I told you only a half truth. I am the wife of Philip Henley."

Her cheeks flushed, a touch of pa.s.sion in her voice as she faced me.

"That is the truth. Do you suppose that I would ever have come here with you otherwise? No matter how desperate my condition was that would have been impossible. I should have despised myself. Even as it was I have been thoroughly shamed to have permitted you to think of me as you must. Now I tell you the truth--I consented to come because I am Philip Henley's wife."

My surprise at this swift avowal kept me silent, yet I could not conceal the admiration from revealment in my eyes. She must have read aright, for she drew back a step, grasping the k.n.o.b of the door.

"I--I wanted to tell you yesterday--all the way coming down here. I felt that I could live the deceit no longer. I do not blame you, Mr.

Craig, for you are a man, and you had every reason to believe that you were doing nothing really wrong. I wanted to learn all I could before I confessed my ident.i.ty, and--and I wanted to discover just what you were like."

"You mean whether I could be trusted?"

"Yes; I--I could not tell at first. We met so strangely, and merely because I liked you from the beginning was not enough. You understand?"

"Yes, and now?"

She looked at me frankly.

"Now I am simply going to trust you fully. I must; there is no other way. I thought it all over and over again last night, and determined to confess everything as soon as we met this morning. I am Viola Henley, Mr. Craig, and I need you."

CHAPTER XV

THE DECISION

I had had time to think, swiftly to be sure, yet clearly enough.

Surprised as I was by her statement, yet the truth as thus revealed failed to startle me seriously. Vaguely I had suspicioned the possibility before, not really believing it could be so, and yet struck by the similarity in circ.u.mstances of the two women. Consequently the shock of final discovery was somewhat deadened, and I retained the pose of thought. Moreover, to know her ident.i.ty was an actual relief.

Before, I had half doubted the righteousness of my cause, at times almost felt myself a criminal. Now that I could openly a.s.sociate myself with Philip Henley's wife, in a struggle to retain for her what was justly her own, all feeling of doubt vanished, and I became grimly confident of the final result. Perhaps the relief I felt found expression in my face, for the woman exclaimed:

"I believe you are actually glad; that it pleases you to know this."

"It certainly does," I replied swiftly, "for now I can work openly, knowing exactly what I ought to do. I have felt like a rat skulking in a hole. I believed what those men told me; they convinced me with proofs I could not ignore, but they must have lied. In some details, at least, they must have deceived. Now would it be possible for Philip Henley to be in a penitentiary convicted of crime?"

"It would not be," she returned firmly. "There was no time after I left him for an arrest and conviction. That alone is sufficient to convince me of fraud and conspiracy. More than that, Philip Henley was not one to commit a crime of that nature, and there was no reason why he should. His remittances were amply sufficient. Under the influence of liquor he might commit a.s.sault, or even murder, but never forgery."

"Then what do you think has occurred?"

"Either one of two things," she said soberly. "He is dead, or helplessly in the power of those men who sent you here. There is no other conclusion possible. They had possession of his papers--even his private memoranda. They knew more of conditions here than I had ever been told. In my judgment, he is dead. Otherwise I cannot conceive it possible they would dare attempt to carry out such a conspiracy. The very boldness of their plan convinces me they believed no one lived to expose them. They knew he was dead, and believed, if I still lived, that I knew nothing of this inheritance. The telegram announcing the Judge's death I never saw. It must have arrived while Philip was too intoxicated to grasp its meaning."

"You know nothing then of the two men, Neale and Vail?"

"No; there is a Justus C. Vail, a lawyer in the city. I found the name in the directory, and called at his office. He was away making political speeches; had been gone two weeks."

"Then the fellow a.s.sumed that name, thinking I might be familiar with it, and thus be impressed with the legality of the transaction. As to Neale, I will go to the courthouse in this county, and find out about him. Only first of all we must understand and trust each other. We have got some shrewd villains to fight, men capable of resorting to desperate measures. You have told me the whole truth about yourself now?"

"Absolutely, yes. I told you the truth before, except only my real name. I was married to Philip Henley. Wait, here is my marriage certificate; I have always kept it with me, for I have been afraid of him almost from the first. I gave you the name Bernard unthinkingly, as that was the name he insisted upon living under. He explained his father required this, or else would stop his remittances. I had to humor him, although I thought it most strange. Is that all you wish to know?"

"All now, yes. I must have time to think, and plan what is best for us to do. I can already see my duty sufficiently clear, but not how to go at it. The fact is, Mrs. Henley--"

"Would it not be better for you to call me Viola?" she interrupted.

"Someone might overhear, and we must continue to carry out the deception, I suppose."

"It will be safer, if you do not object."

"I? Oh, no; I shall not care in the least. You were saying?"

"This, Viola," and her eyes suddenly flashed into mine, "the conditions I have already discovered here--in this house--are no less strange, and dangerous than the mission which brought us here. Everything looks bad. You ought to know it, and you are strong enough to be told. I do not know who tried your door last night, and later escaped down the trellis. If I did I could determine what action to take. But one thing I do know--there was murder committed in this house."

"Murder!" her face went white, her fingers clasping my sleeve, "Who was killed? Coombs? That woman?"

"Neither. A man I never saw before. I heard the same shot which frightened you; took my lamp and investigated. I found him lying dead on the floor of the rear room. He had been shot in the back of the head through an open window."

"Merciful G.o.d! and the body still there."

"No, but its disappearance only adds to the mystery. I dared not create an alarm at once, as we were in a strange house, and I had no means of knowing where to find either Coombs or the housekeeper. Nor did I venture to leave you alone unguarded. As soon as daylight came I went in there again to convince myself the murder was not a dream. The man's body lay there undisturbed. I turned him over, and examined the wound. Then I went out and found Coombs, who sleeps in one of the negro cabins. He sneered at my discovery, but finally accompanied me back to the house. I could not have been absent to exceed thirty minutes, and yet, when we opened the door of that rear room, the body had disappeared--vanished completely. Not a thing remained to tell of any tragedy."

"It had been dragged into some other room; hidden away in some closet.

The woman did it."

"That was my thought at first. As soon as I got free from Coombs I searched this floor, every inch of it, and found nothing, not even so much as a stain of blood. The dead man was heavily built, and Sallie could never have lifted him alone. There were others--men--concerned in the affair."

"And you saw none?"

"Only a Creole who came down the bayou by boat just as I reached the bank. He had some message for Coombs--a snaky-eyed little devil--but he had nothing to do with the removal of the body, for he was not out of my sight after he landed."

Bewildered consternation was clearly manifested in the girl's white face, and yet there was a firmness to the lips that promised anything but surrender. I was sufficiently a fighting man to comprehend the symptoms, and my own heart throbbed in quick response to her antic.i.p.ated decision. For an instant she seemed to struggle to regain her breath.

"Oh, how terrible! I can scarcely realize that all you have told me can be fact. It sounds incredible, monstrous. Why, it is as if we lived in a wild land, and another century. No novelist could conceive of such a horrible condition. There were pirates along this coast once--I have read of them--but now, in our age of the world, to even dream of such a state of affairs would be madness. What can it mean?

Have you any theory?"

"Absolutely none; I am groping in the dark, without a single clew. All I know is that Coombs is a big ruffian, but too cowardly to commit murder. The Creole might, and I would n't trust Sallie with a knife on a dark night, but, in my judgment, there are others involved about whom we know nothing."

"You mean there is a band? that we have stumbled into a rendezvous of outlaws?"

"I suspicion so. This plantation has been practically abandoned for years. Even when the Judge was alive he lived in town, and could get no negroes to work out here because they believed the place was haunted. A bayou comes within a hundred yards of the rear of the house, so concealed by trees and weeds as to be almost invisible until you stand on the banks. We are only a little over twenty miles from the Gulf. Altogether this would make an ideal hiding place for Mobile or New Orleans thieves. I don't say this is the solution, but it may be. More likely they will prove to be a local gang, smugglers, or moonshiners with a touch of modern piracy on the side."