"It has, of course, been deciphered," the blind man went on calmly.

"The fact that it was based upon your pocket English-Chinese dictionary as a word-book was early suggested; the deciphering from that was simply a trial of some score of ordinary enigma plans, until the meaning appeared."

Eaton made no comment. Santoine went on:

"And that very interesting meaning presented another possible explanation--not as to your taking the train, for as to that there can be only the four I mentioned--but as to the attack itself, which would exonerate you from partic.i.p.ation in it. It is because of this that I am treating you with the consideration I do. If that explanation were correct, you would--"

"What?"

"You would have had nothing to do with the attack, and yet you would know who made it."

At this, Eaton stared at the blind man and wet his lips.

"What do you mean?" he said.

Santoine did not reply to the question. "What have you been doing yesterday and to-day?" he asked.

"Waiting," Eaton answered.

"For what?"

"For the railroad people to turn me over to the police."

"So I understood. That is why I asked you. I don't believe in cat-and-mouse methods, Mr. Eaton; so I am willing to tell you that there is no likelihood of your being turned over to the police immediately. I have taken this matter out of the hands of the railroad people. We live in a complex world, Mr. Eaton, and I am in the most complex current of it. I certainly shall not allow the publicity of a police examination of you to publish the fact that I have been attacked so soon after the successful attack upon Mr. Warden--and in a similar manner--until I know more about both attacks and about you--why you came to see Warden that night and how, after failing to see him alive, you followed me, and whether that fact led to the attempt at my life."

Eaton started to speak, and then stopped.

"What were you going to say?" Santoine urged.

"I will not say it," Eaton refused.

"However, I think I understand your impulse. You were about to remind me that there has been nothing to implicate you in any guilty connection with the murder of Mr. Warden. I do not now charge that."

He hesitated; then, suddenly lost in thought, as some new suggestion seemed to come to him which he desired to explain alone, he motioned with a hand in dismissal. "That is all." Then, almost immediately: "No; wait! ... Harriet, has he made any sign while I have been talking?"

"Not much, if any," Harriet answered. "When you said he might not have had anything to do with the attack upon you, but in that case he must know who it was that struck you, he shut his eyes and wet his lips."

"That is all, Mr. Eaton," Santoine repeated.

Eaton started back to his compartment. As he turned, Harriet Santoine looked up at him and their eyes met; and her look confirmed to him what he had felt before--that her father, now taking control of the investigation of the attack upon himself, was not continuing it with prejudice or predisposed desire to damage Eaton, except as the evidence accused him. And her manner now told, even more plainly than Santoine's, that the blind man had viewed the evidence as far from conclusive against Eaton; and as Harriet showed that she was glad of that, Eaton realized how she must have taken his side against Avery in reporting to her father.

For Santoine must have depended entirely upon circ.u.mstances presented to him by Avery and Connery and her; and Eaton was very certain that Avery and Connery had accused him; so Harriet Santoine--it could only be she--had opposed them in his defense. The warmth of his grat.i.tude to her for this suffused him as he bowed to her; she returned a frank, friendly little nod which brought back to him their brief companionship on the first day on the train.

And as Eaton went back to his compartment through the open car, Dr.

Sinclair looked up at him, but Avery, studying his cribbage hand, pretended not to notice he was pa.s.sing. So Avery admitted too that affairs were turning toward the better, just now at least, for Eaton.

When he was again in his compartment, no one came to lock him in. The porter who brought his breakfast a few minutes later, apologized for its lateness, saying it had had to be brought from a club car on the next track, whither the others in the car, except Santoine, had gone.

Eaton had barely finished with this tardy breakfast when a b.u.mping against the car told him that it was being coupled to a train. The new train started, and now the track followed the Mississippi River.

Eaton, looking forward from his window as the train rounded curves, saw that the Santoine car was now the last one of a train--presumably bound from Minneapolis to Chicago.

South they went, through Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the weather grew warmer and the spring further advanced. The snow was quite cleared from the ground, and the willows beside the ditches in the fields were beginning to show green sprouts. At nine o'clock in the evening, some minutes after crossing the state line into Illinois, the train stopped at a station where the last car was cut off.

A motor-ambulance and other limousine motor-cars were waiting in the light from the station. Eaton, seated at the window, saw Santoine carried out on a stretcher and put into the ambulance. Harriet Santoine, after giving a direction to a man who apparently was a chauffeur, got into the ambulance with her father. The surgeon and the nurses rode with them. They drove off. Avery entered another automobile, which swiftly disappeared. Conductor Connery came for the last time to Eaton's door.

"Miss Santoine says you're to go with the man she's left here for you.

Here's the things I took from you. The money's all there. Mr.

Santoine says you've been his guest on this car."

Eaton received back his purse and bill-fold. He put them in his pocket without examining their contents. The porter appeared with his overcoat and hat. Eaton put them on and stepped out of the car. The conductor escorted him to a limousine car. "This is the gentleman,"

Connery said to the chauffeur to whom Harriet Santoine had spoken. The man opened the door of the limousine; another man, whom Eaton had not before seen, was seated in the car; Eaton stepped in. Connery extended his hand--"Good-by, sir."

"Good-by."

The motor-car drove down a wide, winding road with tall, spreading trees on both sides. Lights shone, at intervals, from windows of what must be large and handsome homes. The man in the car with Eaton, whose duty plainly was only that of a guard, did not speak to Eaton nor Eaton to him. The motor pa.s.sed other limousines occasionally; then, though the road was still wide and smooth and still bounded by great trees, it was lonelier; no houses appeared for half a mile; then lights glowed directly ahead; the car ran under the porte-cochere of a great stone country mansion; a servant sprang to the door of the limousine and opened it; another man seized Eaton's hand-baggage from beside the chauffeur. Eaton entered a large, beamed and paneled hallway with an immense fireplace with logs burning in it; there was a wide stairway which the servant, who had appointed himself Eaton's guide, ascended.

Eaton followed him and found another great hall upstairs. The servant led him to one of the doors opening off this and into a large room, fitted for a man's occupancy, with dark furniture, cases containing books on hunting, sports and adventure, and smoking things; off this was a dressing room with the bath next; beyond was a bedroom.

"These are to be your rooms, sir," the servant said. A valet appeared and unpacked Eaton's traveling bag.

"Anything else, sir?" The man, who had finished unpacking his clothes and laying them out, approached respectfully. "I've drawn your bath tepid, sir; is that correct?"

"Quite," Eaton said. "There's nothing else."

"Very good. Good night, sir. If there's anything else, the second b.u.t.ton beside the bed will bring me, sir."

When the man had withdrawn noiselessly and closed the door, Eaton stood staring about the rooms dazedly; then he went over and tried the door.

It opened; it was not locked. He turned about and went into the dressing room and began taking off his clothes; he stepped into the bathroom and felt the tepid bath. In a moment he was in the bath; fifteen minutes later he was in bed with the window open beside him, letting in the crisp, cool breeze. But he had not the slightest idea of sleep; he had undressed, bathed, and gone to bed to convince himself that what he was doing was real, that he was not acting in a dream.

He got up and went to the window and looked out, but the night was cloudy and dark, and he could see nothing except some lighted windows.

As he watched, the light was switched out. Eaton went back to bed, but amazement would not let him sleep.

He was in Santoine's house; he knew it could be no other than Santoine's house. It was to get into Santoine's house that he had come from Asia; he had thought and planned and schemed all through the long voyage on the steamer how it was to be done. He would have been willing to cross the Continent on foot to accomplish it; no labor that he could imagine would have seemed too great to him if this had been its end; and here it had been done without effort on his part, naturally, inevitably! Chance and circ.u.mstance had done it! And as he realized this, his mind was full of what he had to do in Santoine's house. For many days he had not thought about that; it had seemed impossible that he could have any opportunity to act for himself. And the return to his thoughts of possibility of carrying out his original plan brought before him thoughts of his friends--those friends who, through his exile, had been faithful to him but whose ident.i.ty or existence he had been obliged to deny, when questioned, to protect them as well as himself.

As he lay on his bed in the dark, he stared upward to the ceiling, wide awake, thinking of those friends whose devotion to him might be justified at last; and he went over again and tested and reviewed the plan he had formed. But it never had presumed a position for him--even if it was the position of a semi-prisoner--inside Santoine's house.

And he required more information of the structure of the house than he as yet had, to correct his plan further. But he could not, without too great risk of losing everything, discover more that night; he turned over and set himself to go to sleep.

CHAPTER XII

THE ALLY IN THE HOUSE

The first gray of dawn roused Eaton, and drawing on trousers and coat over his pajamas, he seated himself by the open window to see the house by daylight. The glow, growing in the east, showed him first that the house stood on the sh.o.r.e of the lake; the light came to him across water, and from the lake had come the crisp, fresh-smelling breeze that had blown into his windows through the night. As it grew lighter, he could see the house; it was an immense structure of smooth gray stone.

Eaton was in its central part, his windows looking to the south. To the north of him was a wing he could not see--the wing which had contained the porte-cochere under which the motor-car had stopped the night before; and the upper part of this wing, he had been able to tell, contained the servants' quarters. To the south, in front of him, was another wing composed, apparently in part at least, of family bedrooms.

Between the house and the lake was a terrace, part flagged, part gravel, part lawn not yet green but with green shoots showing among the last year's gra.s.s. A stone parapet walled in this terrace along the top of the bluff which pitched precipitously down to the lake fifty feet below, and the narrow beach of sand and shingle. As Eaton watched, one of the two nurses who had been on the train came to a window of the farthest room on the second floor of the south wing and stood looking out; that, then, must be Santoine's room; and Eaton drew back from his window as he noted this.

The sun had risen, and its beams, reflected up from the lake, danced on his ceiling. Eaton, chilled by the sharp air off the water--and knowing now the locality where he must be--pulled off his coat and trousers and jumped back into bed. The motor driveway which stretches north from Chicago far into Wisconsin leaves between it and the lake a broad wooded strip for s.p.a.cious grounds and dwellings; Santoine's house was one of these.

Eaton felt that its location was well suited for his plans; and he realized, too, that circ.u.mstances had given him time for anything he might wish to do; for the night's stop at Minneapolis and Santoine's unexpected taking him into his own charge must have made Eaton's disappearance complete; for the present he was lost to "them" who had been "following" him, and to his friends alike. His task, then, was to let his friends know where he was without letting "them" learn it; and thinking of how this was to be done, he fell asleep again.