The Gray Phantom

Herman Landon

1921

[CHAPTER I—A TRAGIC INTERLUDE]

Hours afterward, when the tragic spell had broken and scraps and odds of the affair began to throng the memories of those present at the opening performance of “His Soul’s Master,” several persons remembered that a curious hush had preceded the fateful moment.

No one could tell why, but of a sudden all sounds had ceased. Subdued whispers, the creaking of seats, and the froufrou of garments had stopped as abruptly as if a silencing signal had gone through the little auditorium. The spectators had sat motionless, momentarily holding their breath, and even the voices of the actors had faltered for an appreciable second or two. The stillness had been charged with an uneasy tension, and it seemed as though a telepathic whisper of warning had been communicated to the gathering.

Vivian Tennant, as frivolous as she was delicately molded, declared the following day that the silence during those few moments had been so intense that she was positive she had heard a pin drop from the coiffure of the woman on her left. Alex Hammond, forty and cynical, would have ascribed the spell to a touch of necromancy had he been a believer in such childish things. Mrs. Hungerford Cather, a frail little widow with a melancholy disposition, said she felt just as though she were at a séance and a ghost was expected to appear any moment. The others described their impressions with varying degrees of vividness, but all of them agreed in having felt the creeping approach of a silent and invisible horror.

Only Helen Hardwick, whose fresh young charm and frank brown eyes made her seem strangely out of place in that motley gathering of rouged lips, sophisticated banter and gowns suggestive of the Parisian boulevards, was singularly uncommunicative in regard to what she had experienced during the weird interlude when the Thelma Theater became the scene of one of life’s grimly realistic tragedies. And her silence was all the more remarkable because she had seen, heard and felt more than any of the others.

The Thelma, with its walls of common red brick and severely plain architecture, might have suggested anything but the setting of a dark and mysterious crime. Outwardly the building, located in a section of New York largely given over to tenements, unsoaped children and garlicky odors, presented an air of solidity and matter-of-factness that left the imagination untouched and gave no hint of the interior. The inside was as colorful and fanciful as the outside was unlovely and prosaic, and it was rumored that Vincent Starr, the eccentric owner, had spent a fortune on the decorations.

Like many another rich man, Starr had his hobby. The newspapers and the critics had scoffed and railed when he opened the Thelma and dedicated it to the uplift of dramatic art. He held the Broadway productions in lofty contempt, declaring that they catered only to the vulgar tastes of the rabble. Admission to the Thelma was by invitation only, and the auditorium seated exactly ninety-nine persons, for it was Starr’s firm opinion that out of the city’s five million only an infinitesimal few were able to appreciate true histrionic art. Members of the daily press were never admitted, and the only critics present at the performances were the representatives of two or three obscure journals who shared Starr’s esthetic views.

The owner and director of the Thelma was prejudiced against music at theatrical performances, and where the orchestra pit should have been was an exquisite statue in marble representing Aphrodite springing out of a foaming sea. Along the walls were friezes picturing the nine muses, the work of a famous mural painter, and the domed ceiling showed colorful glimpses of Dionysian festivals. Scattered throughout the auditorium and in niches in the walls were superb vases containing flowers whose fragrance filled the air.

The effect of the whole was sumptuous rather than harmonious, and it was characteristic of Vincent Starr’s freakish tastes and clashing impulses. And among the audience at the première of “His Soul’s Master” there was not one but thought that the brilliant and fanciful setting lent a touch of incongruity to the tragic byplay enacted off stage.

The moment she stepped into the box reserved for her father and herself, Helen Hardwick felt she was in a strange and somewhat oppressive atmosphere. The faces in the audience were unfamiliar, and everybody stared at her in a way she could not understand until she suddenly remembered that among these people she was something of a celebrity. Vincent Starr, who sneered at the biggest dramatic successes of the year, had not only accepted her play for production at the Thelma, but was himself playing the principal rôle, and he was indulging in much self-flattery over having discovered a budding genius in the author of “His Soul’s Master.” That explained the curious glances turned in her direction.

It was both amusing and bewildering, she thought. Nothing but a whim had caused her to enter her play in the prize contest conducted by Starr to obtain suitable material for his theater, and its acceptance had been the greatest surprise of her twenty-three years. Her only other serious attempt had been a sketch produced by a dramatic society at Barnard in her junior year. “His Soul’s Master” had been a slightly more ambitious effort, and it had been inspired by vague emotions which she herself could hardly understand, but for all that it was a simple, artless thing with a theme as old as the story of the Garden of Eden. It was nothing more than an allegorical fantasy depicting the forces of evil and good struggling for possession of a man’s soul. How a play of that kind could have appealed to an eccentric and highly sophisticated genius like Vincent Starr was beyond her.

But the curtain had been up only a few minutes when she began to understand. In the part of Marius, the mortal for whose soul the spirits of light and darkness were contending, Starr had found a rôle that matched his temperament to perfection. The opening monologue, in which Marius revealed himself as tiring of a life of refined villainy and roguish adventures, had not proceeded far before she saw that the rôle had so gripped and stirred him that he was living the part rather than acting it. The lines throbbed and sparkled with life and passion, and Starr was completely submerging his own emotions in those of the hero.

It did not take Helen long to see that it was the character of Marius, rather than the flimsy fancy woven around it, that had caused Starr to accept her play. She had heard he was vain and egotistical, and no doubt he reveled in the opportunity for self-exaltation that the rôle afforded him. As the play went on from scene to scene, another impression began to take root in her mind. Here and there in the lines she noted an odd cynical twist or a bit of ambiguous phrasing that she was sure had not been in the manuscript. The tempting voices and gestures of the spirits of darkness were more appealing than she had intended, and the exhortations of the spirit of light were correspondingly feebler. She thought she understood why Starr had found excuses for not admitting her to any of the rehearsals.

She was inclined to resent the liberties he had taken with her lines, but again she was carried away by his impassioned rendition of Marius. The very lifeblood of the character seemed to pulse in Starr’s veins. Marius had seemed very real to her while she was writing the play, but not so real by far as she now saw him on the stage of the Thelma Theater. She leaned forward and watched him with growing interest and wonder. It was as if a being that had existed only in her thoughts and in her heart had suddenly materialized in flesh and blood.

It was weird. Now and then there came a touch of subtlety, an odd turn of speech, or a telling gesture that she instantly recognized, although she knew it was interpolated by the actor. She had heard and seen them all in imagination, but not clearly enough to reproduce them on paper. The gestures impressed her most. She knew and recognized them all, from the slightest to the most elaborate, although she had visualized only a few of them clearly enough to be able to put them into the play. It seemed as though the actor, in expanding and vivifying his rôle, had made use of material that had existed only in the playwright’s mind.

Impulsively she reached out her hand and placed it over her father’s. Mr. Hardwick, curator of the Cosmopolitan Museum and an authority on Assyrian relics, started as if his mind had been roving among prehistoric scenes.

“Why, child, your hand is cold!” he whispered anxiously. “Aren’t you well?”

“Yes, dad. I’m all right.” Her large brown eyes avoided his searching gaze. “How do you like my play?”

She scarcely heard his answer. For a moment she had turned her eyes from the stage and let them wander over the dimly lighted auditorium, and of a sudden a face in the last row of seats held her glance. It was a striking face, though Helen would not have called it beautiful. Somehow the curve of the haughtily tilted chin repelled her. The features were perfect in a cold, unalluring way, and the faint curl of the lips and the designing look in the eyes made her think of a Velasquez portrait. The woman sat alone, the seats to right and left of her being unoccupied, and the heavily shaded electric light on the wall at her side drew a thousand flashing tints from the jewel in her hair.

It was not the face that held Helen Hardwick, but rather the fixed, shrewdly scrutinizing look with which the woman was regarding Vincent Starr. She followed his every motion and gesture with the sly persistence of a cat watching a mouse. Now and then she bent forward, and her lips twitched in a knowing way, as if she were thinking of something that pleased and amused her even while it startled her a little. Helen, studying her with a puzzled look, found herself wondering whether it was the man or the actor that interested the woman so profoundly.

With an effort—for the woman in the rear of the house had already begun to pique her imagination—she once more turned her eyes to the stage. Again she marveled and wondered. She had an odd feeling that something was going on before her eyes which her reason told her could not be quite real. Starr’s perfect mastery of the rôle seemed almost supernatural. The slight, quick motions of the hands, the occasional backward toss of the head, the odd habit of gazing down at the finger tips when in deep thought, the set and swing of the shoulders, the minor but characteristic peculiarities of speech and gesture—all belonged to the Marius she had seen and known, and Starr’s re-creation of him struck her as uncanny.

Of a sudden she felt a little dazed. She shot a quick glance over the auditorium. No one but herself and the woman in the rear seemed to have noticed anything unusual. Again her eyes went back to the stage; and then, as if a hazy idea in the back of her mind had all at once leaped into dazzling clarity, she bent abruptly toward her father.

“Dad—look!” she whispered tensely, tugging at his sleeve. “Don’t you see? It’s——”

She stopped, shrugged a little, and her hand dropped limply to her knee. The fall of the curtain and the flare-up of the lights seemed to have blotted out an illusion. Mr. Hardwick, gray and lean and looking rather uncomfortable in his full-dress suit, adjusted his glasses on his thin nose, and looked at her gravely.

“My goodness, child! What is the matter?” he murmured.

“Nothing, dad. I forgot that—that you wouldn’t understand.” She drew the palm of her hand across her forehead. “Isn’t the air stifling?”

“Too much excitement for you, I am afraid.” He smiled as if his practical sense had found a satisfactory answer. “Your mother was just like that. Whenever she got a bit wrought up, she always said things that I couldn’t understand. Now——”

The hangings parted and Vincent Starr stepped inside the box. Helen gave him a swiftly appraising glance. His face was flushed and he looked tired, as if his last ounce of energy had been spent in the emotional tempest of Marius, but a swift look of animation brightened his face as she introduced her father. The first thing one usually noticed about Vincent Starr was his pale, placid eyes. They seemed to give the lie to his magnetic smile, his vivacious manners, and his deep and perfectly modulated voice. As once or twice before in his presence, Helen felt fascinated and repelled.

“You are doing my daughter a great honor,” murmured Mr. Hardwick.

“Not at all.” Starr laughed softly, but Helen thought she detected a slight discord that might have been due to either nervousness or fatigue. “Miss Hardwick has placed me under a very great obligation. Her play is splendid. The last act is particularly strong, as you will see in a few minutes. You must give me your opinion of——”

Helen heard no more. She had glanced toward the rear of the house just in time to see a mysterious smile on the face of the woman seated in the last row. In vain Helen tried to read and interpret it. Presently the woman took a pencil from her bag and began to write on a page torn from her programme. Finally she summoned an usher, handed him what she had written, and nodded in the direction where Helen was sitting. The attendant glided away, and a few moments later he stood bowing before Starr.

“A lady sent you this, sir,” he announced.

Starr murmured an apology to Helen and her father and unfolded the note. His face, dark and almost effeminately smooth—the face of a dreamer rather than a man of action—showed a look of boredom hinting that he was weary of receiving notes from feminine admirers. Then, as he glanced at the writing, his expression suddenly changed. A look of fear crossed his face, but it vanished so quickly that Helen could not be sure she had read its meaning correctly. He crumpled the note in his hand and glanced at his watch.

“It’s almost time for the curtain,” he murmured, quite himself once more. “I hope to see both of you later.”

With that he was gone. Helen stole a glance at the woman in the rear. Her face bore an expression of amusement and sly triumph, but it afforded no clew to what the note had contained. Then the lights faded out and the curtain rose upon the final act. The scene depended for its full effect on almost total darkness, and the only illumination in the house was a smoldering camp fire in one corner of the stage and the small red lights over the exits. Marius stood in the center, almost totally wrapped in shadows, and in the distance were heard the strains of strange, wild singing. The spirits of evil were creeping out of the darkness to make their last sorcerous appeal.

Helen felt herself tingling with suspense. She did not know why, unless it was due to the look of fear she had seen in Starr’s face as he read the note. She glanced toward the rear, but the auditorium was now so dark that she could no longer see the mysterious woman, although she imagined her hair ornament was gleaming dully in the gloom.

Of a sudden she opened her eyes wide, straining her pupils against the darkness. She could not be quite sure, but she thought a shadow had emerged from one of the exits and was gliding silently toward the woman in the rear. She sat very still while little shivers ran up and down her back, and she was vaguely wondering at an odd change in Starr’s voice. It drooped, grew hoarse and uncertain, and there were pauses between the words. She felt he was trying to conquer a sense of unreasoning dread. A feeling of dizziness seized her, but her imagination formed a picture of a dark shape stealing softly, silently toward where the woman sat.

Acting on an irresistible impulse, she rose and hurried from the box, deaf to her father’s mild remonstrance. Without volition on her part, her feet seemed to carry her swiftly up the heavily carpeted aisle. She heard a jumble of noises in her head and felt a tightening at the throat. She rounded the last tier of seats and rushed forward, guided only by a feeble red gleam over one of the exits. A dim shape, a shade darker than the surrounding dusk, was moving a few feet ahead of her.

All at once, as if the hesitancy in Starr’s voice had cast a deadening spell over the actors and the audience, an uneasy silence fell upon the house. Helen sensed it as she sped along in the wake of the creeping shadow. A few steps more, and she could make out the woman’s figure, vaguely outlined against the gloom, and just behind it stood the shadowy shape whose furtive movements Helen had followed since she left the box.

The happenings of the next few moments were like a swift, horrible dream. Suddenly she felt limp and cold. Within reach of her arm a hand moved, and the motion seemed to strike a hideous note through the surrounding stillness. A cry rose and died in her throat. She staggered back against a post and stood there motionless while a dark shape brushed past her. She recoiled as a hand touched hers in passing, and she caught a fleeting but unforgettable glimpse of a face.

It was gone in a moment, but the swarthy features, framed by coarse black hair that reached to the shoulders, the flat, short nose, the thick and jutting lower lip, the great eyes with their lambent flames that seemed to send streaks of fire into the darkness, gave her a feeling that something evil and loathsome had passed.

[CHAPTER II—“MR. SHEI”]

For a moment longer she leaned against the pillar. Then she heard laughter—laughter that was low and sibilant and edged with the insinuating twang that sometimes characterizes the laughter of a madman. It was soft and gentle, yet she thought it was the most fearful sound she had ever heard. It gripped and shook her, and she knew instinctively that it came from the woman in the rear.

Something urged her forward, but her nerves and limbs rebelled. Others beside herself must have heard that soul-shaking laughter, for the hush that had fallen over the house ended abruptly in a jumble of loud sounds. The curtain descended with a rhythmic chugging, there were exclamations of surprise and horror, and the audience sprang from their seats as the lights went on. With startled faces they looked to left and right and rear, and several of them excitedly inquired what had happened. No one seemed to know, but as if moved by a single impulse, they scrambled in the direction whence the laughter came. Then they stopped, huddled in a half circle, and stared.

What they saw seemed all the stranger by contrast with the flowery scents in the air and the rich and brilliant hues of the surroundings. All eyes were fixed on the woman whose peculiar demeanor had aroused Helen’s interest. Her extravagant attire and her wild, gypsylike beauty seemed typical of the oddly assorted characters who made up Vincent Starr’s circle of intimates. A filmy drapery embroidered with gold-touched flowers hung like an iridescent fog over her gown of silver tissue. Her bare arm was flung out over the top of the next seat, and her head had fallen back against the elbow.

Murmurs of awe and consternation fell from the lips of the onlookers. Before their eyes the pallor of death was creeping into the woman’s face, and her cheeks and forehead were beaded with the perspiration of the death struggle. Now and then her figure writhed with a slow, snakelike motion. A film of gray was gradually dimming the luster of the eyes. Only the lips were still red.

As if to fling a taunt in the face of approaching death, the woman was laughing. It sounded wildly unreal and fantastic, and the spectators stood as if gripped by an unearthly enchantment. It seemed as though the woman’s spirit was flitting away on waves of hysterical mirth.

The sounds grew husky, then ceased. The woman’s glazing orbs looked out over the fringe of faces. A fluttering ray struggled with the blinding film before her eyes, and she seemed to be looking for someone who was not there. She stirred as if trying to gather her waning energies. Her lips trembled, a few faint sounds broke on the tense silence, and again her gaze strayed gropingly over the crowd.

“Mr.—Mr. Shei,” she whispered.

Those closest to her recoiled as from a physical blow. The name spoken by the dying woman had contributed the final touch of weirdness to the scene. The two words went from mouth to mouth in a succession of solemn whispers. Faces turned rigid and white, and men and women looked at one another with mute fear in their eyes.

Then someone with more presence of mind than the others, suggested calling a physician. A strain of drawling laughter from the dying woman mocked the proposal. It rose to a shrill pitch, then died abruptly in a low sing-song moan that was like a chant of death. The lips were still moving, but the onlookers knew, even without the sagging of the body and the broken light in the eyes, that the woman was dead. A spell seemed to have lifted and an oppressive essence appeared to have gone out of the air.

“Awful!” wailed a woman, edging away from her place in the huddled throng. “I shall hear that laugh as long as I live. And what was that she said about Mr. Shei?”

The name and the prefix were all anyone had been able to make out, but they had been enough to send a thrill of fear and astonishment through the crowd. Of the mysterious “Mr. Shei” little was known except that he was a versatile and very elusive criminal, with a penchant for deep scheming and spectacular tactics, and that so far the police had matched their wits against him in vain. He flashed in and out like a meteor, without leaving trace or clew, and his audacity and impudence were as dumfounding as the magnitude of his exploits.

“Did she mean,” inquired someone, “that Mr. Shei was here—that she saw him?”

“What else could she have meant?” The speaker cast an uncertain glance at the dead woman. The grayness and the rigidity of her features clashed bizarrely with the brilliant coloring of her gown. “Likely as not Mr. Shei murdered her.”

“But there is no wound. And she made no outcry. She only laughed. And such a laugh! I can hear it still!”

“Mr. Shei is diabolically clever,” observed another, “and he goes about his business in his own way. It would be quite in character for him to kill without inflicting a wound and to let his victim go to her death laughing.”

The group fell silent. Helen, who had remained in the background, trying to control her sense of horror while she pondered what she had seen, touched the arm of the woman in front.

“Who is she?” she inquired.

“Don’t you know?” The woman, busying herself with a vial of smelling salts, gave Helen a puzzled look. “Why, she is Virginia Darrow. Never attend her studio parties? That’s strange. But I forget that you are something of a stranger among us, Miss Hardwick.”

Helen smiled faintly, and the next moment her attention was attracted to her father. Mr. Hardwick had joined his daughter shortly after the lights went on, and until now he had been a silent spectator. With difficulty he elbowed his way through the crowd to the dead woman’s side, and regarded her closely. Presently he raised her right arm, which had hung limply at her side. Just above the elbow was a small, faint discoloration, not unlike the puncture made by a hypodermic syringe. He nodded thoughtfully and seemed about to speak, but just then Vincent Starr, followed by several members of his company, came up the aisle and wedged a path through the huddled spectators.

He seemed to take in everything at a single comprehensive glance. He was pale, and his fingers trembled, but Helen noticed that he had taken pains to arrange his attire before coming out to ascertain the cause of the commotion. His long and glossy hair was neatly combed, his cravat was carefully adjusted, and just the proper width of cuff showed beyond the edge of his sleeve. She watched him narrowly while he questioned those about him. Somehow she sensed that it was in keeping with Vincent Starr’s character to be squeamish about the minor details of his appearance even when face to face with a tragedy. Suddenly, as she heard him issue orders to right and left, she remembered the note Virginia Darrow had sent him, and she wondered, without knowing exactly why, whether he would say anything about it.

At the same time she was forced to admire his quickness of wits and the ease with which he mastered his feelings. In an incredibly short time the police had been notified of the occurrence and the doorkeepers had been given orders to allow no one to leave the building. Starr, in his habitually suave tones, asked his guests to be seated and expressed his regrets that such an unpleasant affair should have taken place under the roof of the Thelma. There would be an investigation and a great deal of questioning, he explained, but it would be only a formality. If the mysterious Mr. Shei—he smiled queerly as he spoke the name—had invaded the Thelma, he would undoubtedly be caught.

The crowd scattered among the seats in the auditorium and lapsed into the small talk with which one sometimes masks an inward turbulence. Helen, seated beside her father on a lounge in a corner, let her glance roam aimlessly over the scene. She supposed she would be questioned along with the others, and she wondered how much or how little she would be able to tell. Now that she tried to clarify the confusion in her mind, she saw that during the evening she had received two sets of impressions. Both had been equally strong at the time, but now they seemed to clash and quarrel with each other, and one of them had all but vanished with the drop of the curtain. Yet she felt it was the more important one of the two. The other had to do with the face she had glimpsed in the shadows. With the varicolored lights glowing on all sides, her recollection of it seemed unreal and fanciful. It appeared to be a thing of darkness and dreams. Her one remaining impression of it was a sense of malignity and horror. She felt words were inadequate to describe it.

She shrugged her shoulders slightly, as if to banish harassing thoughts, and turned to her father. His face was drawn and a trifle pale, and she remembered the family physician had once said something about an incipient heart ailment and the necessity of avoiding excitement. She tilted her face close to his.

“I’m sorry I got you into this, dad,” she said.

Mr. Hardwick drew himself up. His face brightened with affection and the pride of parenthood as he gazed at his daughter’s figure, straight and slender and strong as the trunk of a young birch. Her simple frock of white taffeta with touches of coral at the waist possessed that subtle individual charm which fashion designers can only imitate. Her dark, loosely coiled hair, with stray wisps caressing her healthily tanned cheeks, seemed in constant mutiny against the petty tyrannies of hairdressers.

“I might have known something was to happen.” Mr. Hardwick’s tones were gently playful, as if he were anxious to turn his daughter’s thoughts from the tragedy. “Something always happens where you are. You are a storm petrel, my dear.”

“I was born under Uranus, you know. That explains everything.” She smiled whimsically. There was a touch of the child in the firm oval of her face and the smooth curves of mouth and nose, but the deep-brown eyes held a surprising store of worldly wisdom. She quite baffled her father at times. The impulses of April and June seemed to be constantly clashing within her, and they filled his autumnal days with a never-ending round of surprises.

“I wonder,” he said, eyeing her curiously as a new thought came to him, “whether Uranus had anything to do with your leaving the box just before—before it happened.”

“It’s always safe to blame Uranus,” she parried. “He is such a convenient scapegoat. I don’t know what I would do if——”

She was grateful for the interruption that came just then. The law was already at work, and she sat back and watched the swift precision of its mechanism. Two policemen, one heavy and red-faced, the other lean and sharp-visaged, walked into the theater and stationed themselves beside the body with the air of zealots guarding the coffin of Mohammed. She gathered from the few words they exchanged with Starr that a cordon had been thrown around the building a minute and a half after the call reached the precinct station. They were followed shortly by a puffy little man who let it be known that he was a deputy from the office of the chief medical examiner. The latter had barely begun the usual inspection of the body when two other men entered the auditorium.

One of them, barrel-chested and somewhat pompous in his manners, seemed to be a representative of the district attorney’s office. The other, angular and as loose-jointed as a marionette, with lazy, cinnamon-colored eyes and a complexion that seemed to indicate that he drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigars, was recognized by Helen at first glance. Uranus had brought them together once before. She remembered that his name was Lieutenant Culligore, and that he was attached to the homicide squad of the detective bureau. As his glance flitted slowly over the room, his mind seemed to register each detail without slightest effort. Helen noticed that he gazed at her a trifle longer than on the others, but his face betrayed no recognition.

Then began the questioning, conducted by the stout man from the district attorney’s office, while Lieutenant Culligore made an occasional jotting in his notebook. The members of the audience were interrogated briefly and pointedly, and each one in turn was permitted to depart after leaving his or her name and address. Helen marveled at the matter-of-factness of it all. It seemed almost ruthless, this volleying of questions over a body which was scarcely cold, but she recognized the brisk efficiency with which the procedure was carried out. None of the witnesses had much to tell that was significant, and the only important points brought out were the dying woman’s strange laugh and her mention of Mr. Shei.

Culligore, as was his habit when impressed, curled up his lip under the tip of his nose when these facts were stated, and the stout man raised his brows and nodded grimly.

“Looks as though Mr. Shei had been up to another of his little tricks,” he muttered.

Culligore pursed his lips and chewed a dead cigar. There was a slow twinkle in his eyes which seemed to say that life wasn’t quite so serious as it seemed, despite the sordid and ugly affairs with which he came in daily touch.

Helen did not know how it happened, but the house was almost empty when her turn to be questioned came. Her face showed no sign of the trepidation she felt as she stepped forward. She knew, as she turned her face toward the stout man, that three pairs of eyes were watching her with more than ordinary intentness—her father’s, Lieutenant Culligore’s, and Vincent Starr’s.

The stout man gave her a listless look as he inquired her name and address. She fancied he was sniffing inwardly, and that after looking her over he had decided that she probably could give no information beside what had already been brought out. At any rate, his questions were few and perfunctory and gave her no opportunity to practice the evasions she had mentally rehearsed while the others were being questioned. As she turned away, she saw a mildly reproachful look in her father’s face and one of amused understanding in Culligore’s.

“Well, doctor?” The stout man turned on the medical examiner, whose rubicund face wore a puzzled scowl. “What do you make of it?”

The examiner wagged his head. Being a man of science, he was strongly averse to forming hasty conclusions.

“There is an abrasion on the right arm that might have been caused by a hypodermic syringe,” he announced.

“And the laugh—how do you account for that?”

“I am not accounting for it, but there are certain drugs that produce exhilaration and laughter. Most of them have to be taken into the system by inhalation, however, in order to produce such an effect.”

“I see.” The stout man looked a bit impatient. “In plain words, then, it’s a case of murder?”

“I wouldn’t say that. It might prove a far-fetched guess.”

“All quibbling aside, don’t the scratch on her arm look as though somebody had shot a dose of poison into her with a needle?”

The examiner pondered. “It could mean that, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. An autopsy will be necessary to establish the exact cause of death. Why should a murderer use a hypodermic injection when there are so many simpler and easier ways of accomplishing the same result?”

The stout man guffawed. “Mr. Shei never picks the simple and easy way. When he wants to pull off a crime, he always dresses it up in flossy trimmings. And he always plays safe. Now, my idea is that the safest thing in the world to kill a person with is a hypodermic syringe. It makes no noise, there’s no smoke, no bullet, no powder marks, no anything, and it don’t leave any clews behind.”

The examiner smiled skeptically, as if he had his own views on the subject. “The autopsy will tell. What I fail to understand is why you seem so certain that Mr. Shei, as he calls himself, has had a hand in this affair.”

“Miss Darrow saw him, didn’t she?”

“She called out his name, if I understood the witnesses correctly, but she did not say she had seen him. It’s possible she imagined she saw him. The same drugs that produce exhilaration and laughter also produce hallucinations. However,” and he pulled a cigar from his pocket and lighted it carefully, “whether Miss Darrow did or did not see Mr. Shei is for you gentlemen to decide. Good-night.”

He strode out. The stout man made a wry face and stroked his chin. Evidently the medical man had given him something to think about. Helen, too, had found food for reflection in the doctor’s statement. She stood beside her father a few feet from the others. She had remained for no other reason than a feeling that Culligore, who had been watching her covertly from time to time, might try to detain her if she made a move to go. She believed the lieutenant had rightly guessed that she had not told all she knew.

Starr, who had unobtrusively slipped out of the building while the late colloquy was in progress, returned with the report that he had questioned the doorkeepers and the watchman, and that they had seen no suspicious looking characters about the place. They were positive no one had entered or left the building either before or after Miss Darrow’s death. Starr ended by inquiring whether it were not possible that the murderer, granting that Miss Darrow had been murdered, was still hiding in the building.

The stout man rather scouted the suggestion, but he instructed the two uniformed officers to make a thorough search.

“If this is Mr. Shei’s job, you can bet your sweet life he’s made a safe get-away,” he grumbled. “He probably sneaked out through one of the fire exits.”

The two policemen withdrew. Starr, gliding about with the softness of a panther, found a piece of drapery and covered the body. Helen’s lids contracted as she followed his movements. It struck her as odd that during the entire questioning he had made no reference to the communication Miss Darrow had sent him a few minutes before her death. She wondered whether he had forgotten it or was deliberately withholding it. In the latter case, what could be his reason?

“How about the motive?” suggested Lieutenant Culligore. It was one of the few times he had spoken since the investigation began. “Know of anybody who could have had a reason for getting Miss Darrow out of the way, Mr. Starr?”

Starr stood for a moment with head lowered, deep in thought. Then he slowly shook his finely proportioned head. “No, I don’t. I knew Miss Darrow quite well. As far as I am aware, she had no enemies. I can’t imagine why——”

He checked himself. Then he gaped, and his eyes widened, and he looked as though an important matter had just occurred to him. Finally, with a sheepish smile, he began to search his pockets.

“This dreadful affair has upset me completely,” he murmured; and then, as if in answer to the question that had flashed through Helen’s mind a few moments before, he produced a crumpled piece of paper. “If I had not been so flustered I should have shown you this at once,” he added.

He smoothed out the message and handed it to the stout man. The latter’s face clouded as he read it aloud:

Mr. Shei, like a fool, rushes in where angels might fear to tread.

V. D.

A pause followed the reading. Culligore’s upper lip brushed the tip of his nose, a sign that he had found a problem to ponder. A blank expression came into the stout man’s face. He looked bewilderedly at Starr.

“What do you suppose she meant by that?” he asked.

“That’s just what I wondered when the note was brought me,” explained Starr, a blend of sadness and self-reproach in his tones. “Miss Darrow was a strange woman, full of subtleties and queer whims. The note startled me at first; then I decided it was only a jest. At any rate, it was time for the curtain, and I dismissed the matter from my mind. Now, in the light of what has happened, I can see it was meant as a warning.”

“Warning?” echoed the stout man.

“Undoubtedly.” Starr gazed regretfully into space. “In some manner Miss Darrow must have become aware that Mr. Shei was in the house, and she chose this method of warning me of his presence. I was a fool not to see it.”

He paced back and forth, running his fingers through his thick hair and muttering self-reproaches. The stout man looked as if he were trying to untangle a mental knot. Again he read the note.

“If Miss Darrow wanted to tip you off that Mr. Shei was in the house, why didn’t she say so in plain words?”

“Facetiousness,” said Starr grimly. “Virginia Darrow was the kind of woman you would expect to be facetious at her own funeral. Why didn’t I realize that she was trying to warn me? I remember now that she behaved in a peculiar manner all evening. Whenever I happened to look in her direction, I found her gazing at me in a strange way. I didn’t understand then, but I suppose now that she was trying to send me an ocular message. When that failed, she sent me the note. Oh, why didn’t I——”

He made a gesture of distress and self-disgust. Helen, watching his every movement, remembered that it was Miss Darrow’s odd way of staring at Starr that had first attracted her attention to the woman. The recollection started a train of new thoughts, but Culligore’s voice interrupted it.

“If Miss Darrow was right and Mr. Shei was in the house,” he told the fat man, “then you and I might as well hand in our badges and look for new jobs.”

The other jerked up his head. “You don’t think that——” he began in startled tones, then broke off and grinned complacently. “Not a chance of that. Mr. Shei couldn’t have been in the audience. I gave all of them a pretty stiff quiz, and every one gave a good account of himself. Anyhow, they’re the kind that get their names and pictures into the society columns of the Sunday papers. A bunch of harmless nuts—that’s all.”

He looked at Starr, as if realizing that the epithet had been a trifle brusque, but the manager seemed amused rather than offended.

“I think you are right,” he murmured. “The audience was composed of invited guests. I am willing to vouch for every one of them. Furthermore, you have their names and addresses, and you can communicate with them whenever you wish. If Mr. Shei was really in the theater, he came here as an unbidden guest. In all likelihood he stole in while the house was dark during the first scene of the last act, and departed as soon as he had accomplished his purpose.”

It sounded plausible enough, Helen thought; yet her mind was heavy with a giddying whirl of suspicions and contradictions. She slanted a reluctant glance toward the chair containing the body. With a shiver she turned away, and a look at her father’s drawn and tired face warned her that he should be in bed. Then she glanced at the man from the district attorney’s office, and finally at Culligore. His face was a mask, but his occasional glances in her direction troubled her. The two uniformed officers had not yet returned from their search, and she wondered what they would have to report.

Once more her eyes flitted over the little group, and then, with a suddenness that choked a cry in her throat, everything was blotted from sight. In a twinkling impenetrable darkness had descended upon the house. Somewhere a door banged. She felt her father’s tightening clutch on her arm. The stout man swore. Dark shapes were darting hither and thither. She heard a fragmentary cry, followed by a crash and a succession of thuds. A thrust sent her sprawling to the floor, and her mind drifted into a state of semi-stupor during which she was conscious of nothing but the swift and silent movements of the shadowy shapes.

Voices and the return of light jolted her mind back to consciousness. She struggled to her feet and blinked her eyes at the strange scene. Her father, dazed but apparently unharmed, sat a short distance away, with his back to the wall. The stout man, seemingly unconscious, lay in a twisted heap on the floor. Culligore was staring about him groggily and muttering something about a blow on the head. A policeman, one of the pair who had been sent off to search the house, was helping Starr to his feet.

With the attention to detail that comes in moments of great bewilderment, Helen noticed that Starr made a ludicrous picture. His attire, so faultless and immaculate a few minutes ago, was now in a sorry state of disorder. A streak of crimson stained his shirt front, and he held a handkerchief to his nose. He wabbled drunkenly across the floor, but all at once his figure stiffened and a blank look came into his face. His lips formed unspoken words as he raised a finger and pointed toward a seat in the last tier.

As she followed the pointing finger, things swam in confusion before Helen’s eyes. Starr, speechless and crestfallen, was indicating the chair where the body of Virginia Darrow had been. As she stared stonily toward the empty chair, Helen felt an impulse to cry out. She came a few steps closer, then stopped with a shudder and dazedly swept her hand across her forehead.

“It’s—it’s gone!” she cried huskily.

[CHAPTER III—HELEN EQUIVOCATES]

Across the breakfast table Mr. Hardwick looked anxiously at his daughter. The wild-rose color that usually flooded her cheeks had faded a trifle since last night, and her eyes were less bright. Most of the time the curator’s mind browsed among relics of the past, but his perceptions were amazingly keen where his daughter was concerned.

“Mr. Shei gave us quite a shock last night,” he remarked.

Helen kept her eyes down while she poured his coffee and added two and a half lumps of sugar and the usual portion of cream. Then she stirred it for him, knowing he would be quite apt to forget to do so himself. Despite the half dozen titles bestowed upon him by universities and learned societies, she felt he needed looking after.

“Don’t forget that you have a lecture engagement this afternoon,” she admonished as she passed the cup across the table.

Mr. Hardwick nodded and sipped. “It is a most extraordinary case. The murder of that poor woman—assuming that it was a case of murder—seemed wholly unprovoked. I gathered from the conversation among the officers that no motive was in evidence. It looks like a wanton, despicable crime.”

Helen crumbled a piece of toast. “Professor Warburton is coming to see you at three this afternoon.”

“I have a memorandum of the appointment on my desk.” Mr. Hardwick smiled faintly. “Our minds seem to be pulling in opposite directions this morning. This Mr. Shei interests me. He appears to be a remarkable criminal. His audacity and the originality of his methods are unparalleled. I don’t know that I ever encountered anything quite so mystifying as the circumstances surrounding the murder last night. How the murderer went in and out without being seen is beyond understanding, and the subsequent removal of the body was the most amazing part of it all. There seems to be neither method nor reason in that. One thing appears certain. Mr. Shei could not have accomplished what he did unless he had been aided by accomplices. What do you think, my dear?”

Helen’s head was lowered over her coffee cup. The captive sunlight in her hair gleamed and flashed.

“Your extra pair of glasses are at the optician’s,” she reminded him. “Don’t forget to stop for it.”

Mr. Hardwick looked at her helplessly; then carefully, and from force of habit, he folded his napkin.

“I wonder whether the police will ever learn Mr. Shei’s identity,” he murmured musingly. “So far the scoundrel has contrived to mystify them completely, but some day his egotism and love of self-glorification are apt to cause his undoing. In the meantime, however, he is likely to do a great deal of mischief. The fellow’s effrontery is colossal, and his fearlessness and brains render him most dangerous. In some respects he bears a very close resemblance to that other notorious rogue, now reported to be in retirement.”

Helen drew a quick breath. She bent her head a little lower over her cup. Her right index finger traced a design on the tablecloth.

“Another cup of coffee, dad?” was her only reply.

Mr. Hardwick appeared not to have heard. “You know who I mean. The man they used to call The Gray Phantom. For several years he was regarded as one of the cleverest and most dangerous criminals the world has ever known.”

Slowly Helen raised her head. Her eyes, as they met her father’s, were steady and bright.

“That was because the world didn’t understand him,” she said with emphasis. “The Gray Phantom wasn’t really a criminal. He was only a—a sort of human dynamo whose energy happened to be turned in the wrong direction.”

“Isn’t that a distinction without a difference? A Robin Hood is an enemy of society despite the glamour with which he surrounds himself. However,” and Mr. Hardwick’s face softened quickly, “I am deeply in The Gray Phantom’s debt. He saved your life twice, and but for him I would now be a lonely and heartbroken old man.”

Helen nodded eagerly. “And the Assyrian collection, dad. You spent most of your life gathering it, and you were almost overcome with grief when it was stolen. The Gray Phantom risked his life and liberty in order to recover it and restore it to you. He wouldn’t have done that if he had been just an ordinary criminal.”

“True,” admitted Mr. Hardwick. “I shall be under obligations to The Gray Phantom as long as I live. The man has a number of excellent qualities, whatever may be said of his past. On the whole, it is not surprising that you have taken an interest in him.”

Helen’s eyes were lowered again.

There was a mingling of tenderness and worry in Mr. Hardwick’s face as he looked at her. “I know just how you feel,” he said softly. “A man who is trying to live down a dark past always exerts a strong romantic appeal on a woman of your impressionable age. I don’t know why it is, unless it pleases her to think he is doing it for her sake. It makes me think of your play, ‘The Master of His Soul.’ All last night, until the interruption came, I was wondering whether your Marius was not The Gray Phantom.”

Helen sat rigidly still for a moment. Then her lips began to twitch. She flashed her father a smile.

“Sometimes, daddy dear, you show a wonderful understanding of things that have nothing to do with Assyriology.”

“I was right, then.” His face sobered. “I hope you realize that, despite The Gray Phantom’s admirable qualities, there is a gulf between him and you. But you are just as level-headed as was your mother, and I have no fear that the impulses of your heart will get the better of your judgment. We were discussing Mr. Shei. There seems to be a striking similarity between his methods and those of The Gray Phantom, except that the latter was never known to stoop to murder.” He paused for a moment and studied her averted face. “You puzzled me last night, dear. You will admit that your conduct was—er, peculiar.”

“It’s getting late, dad,” murmured Helen, a bit confusedly glancing at her wrist watch. “You should have been at your office half an hour ago. And this is the first time I’ve known you to take an interest in a murder case.”

“Once during the evening you gripped my hand and tried to point out something to me,” pursued Mr. Hardwick, heedless of her remark. “You spoke incoherently, and I had not the faintest idea what it was about. Then, a minute or so before the tragedy, you left the box and hurried away. Still later, while the officer was questioning you, I felt you were concealing something.”

Helen, her fingers tightening about a fork handle, shook her head. “I answered every question he put to me.”

“I know, dear. Yet you withheld a secret of some kind from him.”

“Not exactly. I—I merely refrained from telling him something that—that I might have told.”

“Something you had heard or seen?”

She hesitated for an instant. “If I had told all I had seen and heard, I wouldn’t have been telling half of what I knew.”

Mr. Hardwick leaned back against the chair and pondered this cryptic statement. He seemed puzzled rather than hurt by his daughter’s evasive answers. Suddenly she looked up, saw the troubled expression in his face, and impulsively pushed back her chair and ran up behind him.

“Please don’t ask me any more questions, dad.” She put her arms around his neck and tilted her face to his. “It is true I held something back, but at the time I didn’t know why. I merely felt that it wouldn’t do to tell. This morning, after lying awake most of the night, I knew I had done the right thing.” She gave a little laugh. “Isn’t it just like a woman to act first and look into her reasons afterward?”

“I—well, I suppose so. And what were your reasons?”

“Would you be hurt if I told you I would rather not explain them just now?”

“No; I trust you. Experience has taught me that I can depend upon you in spite of your mysterious little ways and madcap pranks. There is one thing I wish you would tell me, though.” He stopped, fumbling for words. “Was your reticence last night prompted by a wish to shield someone?”

“No,” was her prompt reply, and her eyes gazed frankly into his. “What put such a thought into your head?”

“I scarcely know. You’ll think I am an old fool, but it occurred to me that perhaps you had discovered something that led you to think that Mr. Shei and The Gray Phantom are identical.”

“And you thought I was protecting The Gray Phantom? What an idea! But you were wrong, dad—absolutely wrong.”

“Then I am glad.” Mr. Hardwick rose and put his arm around her waist. “My goodness! Almost ten o’clock, and I have been sitting here gossiping like an old woman. You have taken a load off my mind, dear child. I was really worried.”

She laughed, whisked a few crumbs from his coat, straightened his tie, and kissed him.

“And I hope,” added Mr. Hardwick banteringly, “that Uranus won’t lead you into any more foolhardy adventures.”

Again she laughed, but her face sobered the moment he turned away and left the room. A wiser, maturer expression settled over the wide-set eyes and the vivid lips. It seemed as though her talk with her father had left a disquieting impression in her mind. She moved absently about the room, setting things in order here and there, but the far-away gleam in her eyes told that her mind was scarcely aware of what her hands were doing. Presently she stopped before the open window and looked out. A building was going up across the street, and the groaning of derricks and screaming of steam whistles jarred discordantly in the back of her mind. Near the curb a group of laborers were mixing concrete, and a powdery substance was drifting in the air.

She came out of her abstraction with a little start. Her eyes were on the window sill, and she spelled out the characters she had written in the thin layer of dust.

“G-r-a-y P-h-a-n-t-o-m,” she mumbled, puzzled and somewhat annoyed with herself. The faint pencilings in the dust seemed all the stranger because she had not been thinking of The Gray Phantom. Instead, her mind had been occupied by Mr. Shei and what the morning newspapers had said about the tragedy in the Thelma Theater. The accounts she had read had been largely speculation and conjecture. The dying woman’s strange laughter and her mysterious allusion to Mr. Shei had afforded material for columns of vivid and imaginative description. The medical examiner had reluctantly admitted that Miss Darrow’s death might have been caused by a poison administered hypodermically, but he had added that the symptoms were strange to him, and that he knew of no drug producing just such effects. A number of toxicologists had been interviewed, but they had declared that the few facts at hand were not sufficient to enable them to form an opinion, and the disappearance of the body rendered it doubtful whether the cause of death would ever be learned definitely.

Only one thing seemed beyond dispute and that was Mr. Shei’s complicity in the affair. The elusive and highly accomplished rogue already had a score of astounding crimes to his record, and the Thelma murder was hedged with all the mystery and baffling detail with which he loved to mask his exploits. Miss Darrow’s dying words were scarcely needed to turn the finger of suspicion in Mr. Shei’s direction. The absence of clews, the uncertainty in regard to the motive, the audacity that marked the crime itself as well as the subsequent snatching away of the body, all indicated a boldness and a finesse that left little doubt of Mr. Shei’s guilt. Even if his own hand had not executed the crime, it seemed practically certain that his mind had planned and conceived it.

But who was Mr. Shei? The whole train of surmises and theories pivoted on that question. Not much was known of him save that he had a passion for tantalizing the public and keeping the nerves of the men at headquarters on edge, and that his achievements had not been equaled in scope or brilliance of execution since The Gray Phantom’s retirement. He took a diabolical delight in flaunting his name before the world while keeping his person carefully out of the reach of the law’s long arm, and even the name was a challenge to the police and a teaser for the public imagination. Someone versed in dead languages had discovered that the word “shei” was the ancient equivalent of the modern x, the symbol of the unknown quantity, and it was generally agreed that the name fitted the elusive individual who bore it.

Yet the name meant nothing. It was only an abstraction, for it afforded no clew to its owner’s identity. The night before, while she sat beside her father in the Thelma Theater, a vagrant flash of intuition had come to Helen. She had seen the solution of the mystery in a swift, dazzling glimpse. The revelation had stunned and nearly blinded her, and thoughts had crowded upon her so thickly that she would have been quite unable to clothe them in words. The idea carried to her by that intuitive flash had seemed clear and unquestionable. It still seemed so, but her talk with her father had disturbed her a little and turned her thoughts in a new direction.

Again she looked down at the tracings in the dust. A smile, faint and wistful, reflected her softened mood, and a light of wonder and gentleness flooded her eyes. She reached out a hand to obliterate the telltale pencilings, but something restrained her. Besides, a freshly forming layer of dust was already blotting them out.

The telephone rang in the adjoining room, and she hurried away to answer.

“Miss Hardwick?” inquired a drawling voice which she instantly recognized. “Lieutenant Culligore speaking. I’m at the Thelma Theater. Wish you’d come over right away. I want to ask you a few questions.”

Before she could reply, he hung up. Her face grew suddenly tense. Culligore’s brusqueness piqued her, though she knew it was characteristic of the man, and she felt he had taken undue advantage of her by giving her no chance for argument. She did not wish to see him, yet she knew she could not escape him by merely ignoring his request. Anyway, she reflected as she hastily dressed for the street, it would be interesting to learn Culligore’s theory of the murder.

A ride in the subway and a short walk brought her to the door of the Thelma. On the wall, at each side of the entrance, were posters stating that until further notice there would be no more performances of “His Soul’s Master.” Helen viewed the announcement of the withdrawal of her play without much regret. She had partly anticipated it, and last night’s occurrence had given her weightier things to think of. As she passed through the foyer, a policeman nodded stolidly and in a way that told her she was expected. She passed unhindered into the auditorium.

At first she could see nothing. Every door was closed, and the vast room was full of silence and vague shadows. Presently, as her eyes grew accustomed to the dusk, she glanced toward the chair that had been occupied by Miss Darrow. She looked quickly aside, and saw that she was standing not far from the pillar that had supported her when the creature with the loathsome face brushed past her. The scene, which had seemed dim and immaterial while she was out in the sunlight a few minutes ago, now recurred to her with disagreeable vividness. Of a sudden the air about her felt heavy and oppressive.

A figure was moving up the aisle toward where she stood. The dawdling gait and the slouchy attitude told her it was Culligore, and she braced her nerves for an ordeal. In a few moments her quickly working wits had found a way of handling the situation.

“Good-morning, lieutenant,” she said pleasantly as he came up beside her. “I suppose you are looking for clews. Any success?”

“Nope,” he replied complainingly. “That’s why I sent for you, Miss——”

“You have found no trace of the body?” she quickly cut in, anxious to maintain the rôle of questioner.

Culligore shook his head. She felt his eyes on her face, though he did not appear to be looking at her. Practicing a trick cultivated by his profession, he was studying her without seeming to do so.

“Don’t you think it strange that the murderer should go to all that risk and trouble to remove the body?” she went on.

“Murderer? There must have been three or four of them, at least. There was some mighty fast work done when the lights went out, and one man didn’t do it all. I’ve got a bump in the back of my head as big as a hen’s egg. Selfkin, the man from the district attorney’s office, is in bed with a fractured skull, and Starr looks as though somebody had hit him on the nose with a brick. One of the gang must have tampered with the switchboard back of the proscenium arch just before the others swooped down on us and carried away the body.”

“But what was the object? Wasn’t the murderer’s purpose accomplished with the killing of Miss Darrow?”

“Hard telling. One thing is sure. As long as the body is missing there can be no autopsy, and I’ll bet a pair of yellow socks that that’s exactly what they wanted. Not that I pretend to understand it all, but it seems reasonable that they didn’t care to have the exact cause of Miss Darrow’s death become known.”

Helen pondered this statement for a moment. “How about the motive for the murder?”

“We’re pretty much in the dark there, too,” admitted Culligore. “I don’t suppose, though, that it was just by accident that Miss Darrow happened to die a few minutes after she had sent Starr a note warning him that Mr. Shei was in the house.”

“Oh!” Helen gave a quick start. “You think she was killed because she had in some manner discovered Mr. Shei’s identity?”

“Maybe.” Culligore, with legs spread out and hands in trousers pockets, seemed engrossed in a study of Helen’s bright-trimmed hat. “My mind isn’t made up on that point. Mr. Shei’s schemes go pretty deep. Maybe you can tell me——”

Again Helen interrupted him. “Have you discovered how the murderers got in and out of the building?”

“They didn’t leave any tracks behind them, but there is a door in the rear of the basement that they might have used. It’s supposed to be locked, but I satisfied myself a while ago that the spring lock can be picked. That the body was carried out that way is as good a guess as any. But look here, Miss Hardwick,” and something that might have been a grin drifted across his face, “you’re pretty good at firing questions, but it’s my turn now.”

She stiffened, seeing she would have to assume defensive tactics. She sent him a quick glance, but his face, always inscrutable, was even more so in the dusk.

“I asked you to come here, hoping the surroundings would refresh your memory of what happened last night,” Culligore went on in his usual placid drawl. “You needn’t repeat what you said then. What I’m after is the things you didn’t say.”

“I don’t believe I understand.”

Culligore’s chuckle sounded like a snort, though she knew it was meant to be good-natured. “Oh, yes, you do. I didn’t do much talking last night, but I was watching you all the time. We’d met before, you know, and I could read you like an open book. I knew you were just as long on brains as on looks. Though you answered every question, you weren’t telling anything. All the while you were holding something back. Isn’t that true?”

She hesitated, having an uncomfortable feeling that Culligore was seeing through her and that any attempt at evasion would be useless.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“That’s a lot better, Miss Hardwick. You might begin by telling me where you were sitting when the disturbance began.”

“Why, I—I wasn’t sitting anywhere.”

“Standing up, then?”

“I wasn’t standing, either.”

“Oh, I see. You were lying down?”

“No, not even lying down.”

Culligore gave her a queer look. “If you weren’t sitting, standing, or lying, you must have hung suspended in the air. Was that it?”

Helen smiled engagingly. She had found time for deliberation while quibbling, and now her mind was made up. “I was so frightened I could neither stand up nor sit down. I was leaning against that pillar over there.” She pointed.

“How did you happen to leave your seat?”

Helen told him of the flitting shadow that had caused her to leave her father and run to the rear of the house.

“And what did you see while you were leaning against the pillar?” was Culligore’s next question.

Helen searched her mind for words vivid enough to recount her impressions during the terrible moments just before the drop of the curtain, but she felt her description was both hazy and fragmentary. Her picture of the face that had flashed past her in the dark was blurred and unreal, like one’s recollection of a dream.

When she had done her best, Culligore walked back and forth for a time. Standing in an attitude of strained tensity, she wondered what his next question would be. Suddenly he stopped squarely in front of her, and again she had an uncomfortable feeling that his deceptively lazy eyes were reading her thoughts.

“What else?” he demanded quietly. “What you have told me so far is pretty good, but you’re still holding back the most important thing—the thing you didn’t want to tell about last night.”

“How—how do you know that?” she asked.

He gave another snortlike chuckle. “Common horse sense tells me. The reason you didn’t tell about the things you saw while leaning against the post was because you were afraid they would lead you on to a subject you didn’t want to discuss. You were afraid that if you got started you might get tangled up and wouldn’t be able to stop.”

Helen could only stare at him. He had stated the truth far more clearly than she herself could have done.

“What was it, Miss Hardwick? I think you had better tell.”

She stood silent, twisting her figure this way and that, and all the while wishing that he would take his eyes from her. Jumbled thoughts thronged her mind, and she felt her power of resistance slipping from her. Finally Culligore swung round on his heels, and a sigh of relief escaped her.

“The thing about you that puzzles me more than anything else is that your hair isn’t red,” he told her. “The rest I can savvy easily enough. I can even tell what it was you were holding back last night. Want me to?”

His tones were soft and teasing. She squirmed, torn between anxiety and despair. His face was expressionless, but she felt he was inwardly laughing at her.

“All right, then,” he said, taking her silence for assent. “You couldn’t have had more than one reason for keeping mum last night, and that reason was that you wanted to shield somebody. There is only one man on earth you could have wanted to shield, and that man is The Gray Phantom.”

“No!” she cried. “You’re mistaken! I wasn’t——”

“Easy now.” All at once his tone changed. “There’s such a thing as protesting too much, you know. I don’t take much stock in what I read in the Sunday papers, but there’s a lot of talk going the rounds about a romance between you and The Gray Phantom. Most of it is pipe dreams, I guess. Anyhow, it’s nobody’s business, and it makes no difference. All I’ll say is that if I was The Gray Phantom and had a girl like you fighting for me, I’d be willing to go through hell-fire for her every day in the week. You’re loyal clean through and——”

“But you’re wrong!” she interrupted emphatically. His words filled her with a great fear, but there was a kind of rough tenderness in his voice that warmed her.

“I knew you’d say that, but you have to hear me through. I take off my hat to The Gray Phantom. He always played the game according to the code, even when he cut those fancy didos that put gray hairs in almost every head on the force. I shouldn’t say it, but it goes just the same. The Phantom’s been lying low now for some time. Nobody seems to know where he is. He’s shown himself only twice, and each time he came out in a good cause. They say he’s going it straight, and it’s rumored that a certain young lady has had a lot to do with his turning over a new leaf.”

He paused, and for a moment his eyes rested on her averted face.

“It’s hard work for a leopard to change his spots. Some people say it can’t be done. The Phantom’s human, like the rest of us. Maybe he’s got tired of the straight and narrow path and gone back to his old tricks under a new name. Just for the sake of argument we’ll say he has. And I’ve got a hunch that last night you saw or heard something that made you think that Mr. Shei is The Gray Phantom.”

The assertion staggered her, though she had known all the time that he was leading up to it. Using almost the same words, her father had expressed the same idea at the breakfast table, and it was the similarity of the phrasing that startled her.

“No—no!” was all she could say.

“Then will you please tell me,” said Culligore, his tones both gentle and insistent, “why didn’t you come out with what you knew last night?”

She fell back a step, feeling suddenly weak as she realized that his question was unanswerable. A confusion of ideas churned and simmered in her mind. Her lips moved, but no words came.

“You’ve answered me,” declared Culligore. “You think Mr. Shei is The Phantom. Maybe you’re right, and maybe you’re wrong. What I wanted to know was what you thought. And let me tell you something.” A foolish grin, one of Lieutenant Culligore’s infrequent ones, wrinkled his face. “I hate my job less whenever I meet up with one of your kind.”

Helen did not hear what he said. She felt as if the swirl of thoughts and emotions within her had suddenly turned into a leaden lump. She glanced involuntarily at the chair in which Virginia Darrow had sat, and of a sudden she fancied she heard laughter—slow, tinkling laughter that sounded like a taunt flung in the face of an approaching specter. She knew the sounds existed only in her imagination, but with a low, long drawn-out cry she turned abruptly and fled toward the door, conscious only of a fierce desire for sunlight and air.

No one detained her. She ran across the street. An idea was slowly working its way out of the turmoil in her mind. She opened her bag and counted her scant supply of bills. Then she looked about her. Half a block down the street she saw the sign of a district messenger office. In a few moments she was inside, hastily scrawling a note which she had addressed to her father. A taxicab was passing as she stepped out on the street. She hailed the driver, and he drew in at the curb.

“Erie station—West Twenty-third Street,” she directed breathlessly.

As the cab started she slumped back against the cushions and gazed rigidly out the window. Despite the bright sunlight, things blurred before her eyes, and there was only one clear thought in her mind.

She was on her way to The Gray Phantom, for she alone knew where to find him.

[CHAPTER IV—AZURECREST]

It was growing dark when she reached the end of her journey, and the dusk made it easy for her to elude the little knot of idlers on the station platform. With frequent backward glances she hurried down a path that skirted the edge of a village nestling at the foot of a hill which was outlined against the horizon like a great funnel-shaped cloud. On its apex was Azurecrest, the hermitage of The Gray Phantom.

Helen found the motor driveway that circled its way upward in spiral fashion, for the hill was too steep to permit cars to reach the top by direct route. She had visited the place once before, in the course of one of the perilous adventures she and The Phantom had shared together. The residence, a sprawling structure of stone, tile and stucco, had been built by The Phantom shortly after his retirement, and she had marveled at the precautions he had taken to protect his privacy. The inhabitants of the village understood that the place was occupied by a wealthy and leisurely gentleman who was spending the remainder of his life in ease and solitude on the desolate hilltop. Though consumed with curiosity, they never ventured near Azurecrest, guessing accurately that they would not be welcomed. Occasionally they saw one of the servants, but the owner never permitted himself to be seen except by his most intimate associates.

The tang of late autumn was in the air, and Helen’s head cleared as she walked briskly up the zigzagging driveway. The railway journey had been long and tedious and punctuated by innumerable stops, and she had been too distracted to think clearly. Now she began to search her mind for a plan, but she soon saw that planning was impossible. Her trip to Azurecrest had been prompted by one of those sudden impulses that usually dictated her conduct, and she had been conscious of no other motive than to put an end to her fears and doubts. She had thought that a talk with The Gray Phantom would quickly end the suspense.

Reaching the gate in the picket fence that encircled the apex of the hill, she touched an electric button. While waiting she looked about her. The Susquehanna, like a cocoon thread, wound in and out among the hills and valleys in the distance. The moon, shining through a vapory gauze, splashed a misty sheen over bowlders and trees.

She heard a dog’s shrill bark, and a masculine figure came down the graveled walk toward the gate. As he drew nearer and the pale moonlight fell on him, she saw he was stocky and coarse-featured, and she guessed he was one of the sentinels that were always stationed about the place.

“What do you want?” he asked ungraciously as he reached the gate.

“I wish to see Mr. Vanardy,” she announced, using the name by which the occupant of Azurecrest had been known before he became The Gray Phantom.

She thought the man repressed a start, but she reflected that his evident surprise was natural enough, since visitors seldom came to Azurecrest.

“Mr. Vanardy, eh?” He drew an instrument from his pocket and flashed an electric gleam in her face. For a long moment he studied her in silence. “You mean The Gray Phantom?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated, still searching her face in the light of the electric flash. It was plain that the appearance of a feminine visitor at the gate of Azurecrest had aroused his suspicion.

“What do you want to see him about?” he demanded gruffly.

“Tell him Miss Hardwick wishes to see him. I think that will be sufficient.”

She drew herself up as she spoke and regarded him steadily. As if decided by her cool and level tones, the man lowered the light and turned away, and in a few moments he had been swallowed by the shadows cast by the tall trees. Helen controlled her impatience. She understood that The Gray Phantom was obliged to exercise care every moment of his life. Despite his new mode of existence, he was still an outlaw in the eyes of the police, and a number of outstanding charges made it necessary for him to observe every precaution.

Again the man emerged out of the shadows. This time he said nothing, but peered at her furtively as he opened the gate and motioned her to step through. He closed and locked the gate carefully, then walked ahead of her up the graveled walk. A great shaggy dog slouched at his heels and wagged its tail energetically, as if disturbed by the arrival of a visitor. Helen’s guide stopped under a portico and opened a door. A dim light shone on his face as he turned and told her to enter, and his expression gave her a twinge of misgiving. She tried in vain to analyze it, and the next moment the disturbing impression was gone.

“Wait,” he said, indicating a chair.

Helen felt relieved as soon as the door closed behind him. The room was large and pleasant, and the oak-paneled, cream-colored walls made an attractive background for the furniture and decorations. Each little detail suggested The Gray Phantom’s instinctive taste for beauty and proportion, and it suddenly occurred to her that this was the same room in which he had received her on her previous visit to Azurecrest.

Footfalls sounded in the hall, and all at once she grew confused. She wondered how she was to broach the subject that had been in her thoughts constantly since last night. She started to rise as the door opened, but in the next instant she sat back and swallowed an exclamation of surprise. She had expected to see The Gray Phantom, but the person who entered was a short, slightly humpbacked man of about fifty. He jerked his head toward her by way of a bow, and as he smiled she noticed that his mouth was crooked.

“My name is Hawkes,” he announced in soft, lisping accents. “I am the secretary. I understand you wish to see Mr. Vanardy. Have you an appointment with him?”

A faint touch of uneasiness mingled with Helen’s impatience. The Gray Phantom had never mentioned that he had a secretary, and she doubted whether he was in the habit of making appointments.

“I have no appointment,” she said, mastering her vexation and disquietude, “but I think Mr. Vanardy will see me if you mention my name.”

“Ah! Then you are a friend of his?”

“I have met him several times.”

“To be sure,” said the little man. He rubbed his hands, which seemed abnormally large for one of his sparse stature. “But, if you know anything at all about Mr. Vanardy, you must realize that he has to exercise caution, particularly in regard to the people he meets.”

Helen rose, a faint flush of indignation in her cheeks. The next moment she sat down again, for she realized that Hawkes’ argument was reasonable. The Gray Phantom’s existence was precarious enough to warrant every conceivable precaution.

“I know Mr. Vanardy will see me if you tell him who I am,” she declared, looking straight into the little man’s eyes.

“Quite likely. But I have orders, and I dare not disregard them. Be good enough to answer one or two questions. To begin with, what is the nature of your business with Mr. Vanardy?”

Helen’s patience was almost exhausted, but her sense of humor came to her rescue. Her lips began to twitch.

“Tell Mr. Vanardy,” she said, “that the subject I wish to discuss with him has to do with a certain Mr. Shei.”

The little man’s eyes opened wide. She fancied his hand shook a trifle as he made an annotation on the pad he carried.

“Quite so,” he murmured, quickly controlling himself. “You have come here on business connected with a certain Mr. Shei. Just one more question. Very few people know there is such a place as Azurecrest. How did you happen to find it?”

“Mr. Vanardy once gave me the directions. But you are exerting yourself needlessly, Hawkes. I am sure all that is necessary is to mention my name to Mr. Vanardy.”

“Perhaps so.” The humpback made another annotation on the pad, after which he put it in his pocket. “I’ll repeat to Mr. Vanardy what you have just told me.” He walked out of the room.

Helen could not tell why, but the silence that fell upon the room as the door closed impressed her uncomfortably. She did her best to muffle a faint inward whisper of warning, a premonition that something was wrong. Hawkes’ questions had left a train of disturbing thoughts in her mind.

She waited a few minutes, then got up and began to pace the floor in an effort to quell a rising nervousness. She glanced at the pictures on the walls, but they did not seem to be the same as those that had hung there on her last visit, and they failed to interest her.

Presently she stepped to the window and looked out. The trees were nodding drowsily in the gentle night wind. The mist rising from the lowlands on all sides of the hill gave her a curious sense of remoteness from the world.

Then she drew back a step suddenly. Someone was passing the window, and she caught a momentary glimpse of a face. For a second or two a pair of large and oddly piercing eyes were fixed on her. Then the figure vanished, but the vision left her white and shaken. A hoarse cry rose to her lips. Unless her imagination had deceived her, the face that had just passed the window was the same swarthy, loathsome face she had seen in the Thelma Theater scarcely twenty-four hours ago.

Seized with a great fear, she ran across the floor and opened the door. The face, with its squatty features and long black hair fluttering in the breeze, had crystallized all the vague misgivings she had felt since she entered the house. For the moment she was unable to think, but an unreasoning impulse to flee drove her swiftly down the long hall. She felt she must escape from Azurecrest at once.

She had nearly reached the end of the hall when she came to a dead stop. She stood rigid, listening. Somewhere a laugh sounded. The staccato accents seemed to fill the house with volumes of hideous sound. Each vibrant note conjured up a fearful picture before her eyes. She staggered back against the wall, stopping her ears to shut out a repetition of the sound, but the echoes of it lingered in her imagination. She knew the laugh well. It was the same kind of laugh that Virginia Darrow had taken with her into eternity.

[CHAPTER V—PERPLEXITIES]

Minutes passed, each dragging a train of monstrous fancies before Helen’s mental vision. The tips of her fingers shut out all sounds from her ears, but the laughter still dinned and echoed in her imagination. It reminded her of the haunting strains of glee that had come from Virginia Darrow’s dying lips. Somehow this laughter was different, but the difference was so subtle that she could but vaguely sense it. It was loud and delirious, in contrast to the gentle, dirgelike notes that had characterized the other.

She could stand the suspense no longer. Sped on by fear, she ran in the direction where she thought the door was. She brought up against a stairway instead. A noise caused her to lift her head. Down the stairs, lurching and sliding, came a woman. Her hair was wildly tousled and her clothing in disorder, and peal after peal of harsh laughter cut through the silence as she scurried down the steps.

Then she saw Helen, and she stopped as abruptly as if she had dashed against a material barrier. Clutching the railing with one hand, she wagged drunkenly from side to side. Her face was ashen, but her skin was clear and smooth as a young girl’s. The eyes, unnaturally wide and bright, stared down at Helen with fierce intensity. She had ceased laughing, but the lips were still agape, as if suddenly frozen into rigidity.

Helen forgot her fears as she saw the strange look in the woman’s face. She wondered whether it meant madness, terror, or intoxication. It seemed to be neither, but rather a blending of all three. Slowly, with the outspread fingers of one hand pressing against her breast, the woman came down the remaining steps. Her great eyes were still fixed on Helen, but the mad flame in their depths was gradually yielding to a look of sanity.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Her voice was dry, and she spoke with little hissing sounds, as if each word were exhausting her breath.

Helen winced as the woman clutched her arm. Streaks of gray in the tumbled masses of her black hair clashed sharply with her youthfully rounded face, and Helen guessed that the contrast had been brought about by some terrifying experience.

“Do you know where you are?” the woman went on, tightening her grip on Helen’s arm.

“This is Azurecrest, isn’t it?” Helen’s words voiced an indefinite doubt that had been stirring faintly in the back of her mind since she saw the face at the window. “I came here to see the Gray—to see Mr. Vanardy.”

“Azurecrest?” The woman’s mind seemed to be slowly struggling out of a daze. “Yes—that’s what they call the place. But there is no Mr. Vanardy here. You have been deceived, just as I was. Those monsters! Do you know what will happen to you if you remain here?”

Helen shrugged as if to fight off a stupor that seemed to be gradually infolding body and mind.

“They’ll inject the fever into your veins,” the woman told her, without waiting for an answer. “The fever that always kills. Sometimes it kills quickly, but most the time very slowly, just as it is killing me. You will not feel much pain. You will laugh and sing and dream strange dreams. Those are always the symptoms. At first, before the fever reaches the last stage, you will laugh loud and hilariously—like this.” She threw back her head, and then came an outburst of screaming laughter that made Helen shudder. “That’s how it sounds at first. But later, when the fever has burned out your strength and destroyed your reason, the laughter will be low and soft and lilting. Then it sounds like this.” She gave a series of low, tinkling sounds that were like a requiem set to laughter.

Helen shivered. Just so had Virginia Darrow gone laughing to her death. The coincidence seemed rather weird. The stark realism of the imitation gripped her, and yet she wondered whether she were dreaming or whether the woman beside her were reveling in the fancies of a maniac.

The other stiffened suddenly. She seemed to recall something which her encounter with Helen had temporarily blotted from her mind. Placing two fingers across her lips, she cast a swift glance up the stairs. For a brief space she stood tense, listening.

“The woman who watches me went to sleep and I stole away from her,” she whispered. “We must try to get out before they begin looking for me. You must come, too. It won’t do for you to remain a moment longer. S-sh!”

Silent as a wraith she stole down the hall. Helen, scarcely knowing what she was doing, followed dazedly. She did not know what to think, but there was an undertow of vague dread in her jumbled thoughts and emotions. What she had just heard sounded wildly fantastical, like the raving of a deranged mind. Yet she had a feeling that something was dreadfully wrong. The strange laughter and the face at the window appeared to give a background of reality to what the woman had said. They seemed to suggest, too, that there was a connecting link between Azurecrest and the tragedy in the Thelma Theater. It was this circumstance, bewildering and almost unbelievable, that clogged the functioning of Helen’s mind and rendered her willing to be led along by her guide.

The door was unlocked and they passed unhindered into the open. In a dull and indifferent fashion Helen thought it strange that the woman’s loud laughter had not already betrayed them, but then it occurred to her that perhaps such outbursts were common at Azurecrest. After what she had already seen and heard, nothing would have surprised her greatly. She wondered how her companion meant to overcome the obstacles of the locked gate and the high picket fence. Perhaps, in her beclouded state of mind and eagerness to escape, she was not even giving them a thought. Or perhaps——

Her guide stopped so abruptly that Helen, who had been following close behind, nearly ran into her. Out of the mist and shadows came a low, rumbling growl. A huge, black shape bounded toward them.

“The dog!” exclaimed the other. “I forgot—oh!”