One may look at pictures unchaperoned.

THE SECRET OF LONESOME COVE

BY

SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

AUTHOR OF

THE CLARION, AVERAGE JONES, ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

FRANK E. SCHOONOVER

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS : NEW YORK

Copyright 1912

The Bobbs-Merrill Company

TO ONE UNKNOWN

The only living being who possesses the secret of the

strangely clad and manacled body found beneath the

cliffs of Cornwall on April 30, 1909, this story, changed

in the setting as he will understand, is blindly inscribed.

CONTENTS

THE SECRET OF LONESOME COVE

[CHAPTER I—THE BODY ON THE BEACH]

Lonesome Cove is one of the least frequented stretches on the New England seaboard. From the land side, the sheer hundred-foot drop of Hawkill Cliffs shuts it off. Access by water is denied; denied with a show of menacing teeth, when the sea curls its lips back, amid a swirl of angry currents, from its rocks and reefs, warning boats away. There is no settlement near the cove. The somber repute suggested by its name has served to keep cottagers from building on the wildly beautiful uplands that overbrood the beach. Sheep browse between the thickets of ash and wild cherry extending almost to the brink of the height, and the straggling pathways along the edge, worn by the feet of their herders, afford the only suggestion of human traffic within half a mile of the spot. A sharp-cut ravine leads down to the sea by a rather treacherous descent.

Near the mouth of this opening, a considerable gathering of folk speckled the usually deserted beach, at noon of July sixth. They centered on a dark object, a few yards within the flood-tide limit. Some scouted about, peering at the sand. Others pointed first to the sea, then to the cliffs with the open gestures of those who argue vehemently. But always their eyes returned, drawn back by an unfailing magnetism, to the central object.

From some distance away a lone man of a markedly different type from the others observed them with an expression of displeasure. He had reached the cove by an arduous scramble, possible only to a good climber, around the jutting elbow of the cliff to the northward. It was easily to be read in his face that he was both surprised and annoyed to find people there before him. One of the group presently detached himself and ambled over to the newcomer, with an accelerated speed as he drew nearer.

“Swanny!” he ejaculated, “if it ain’t Perfessor Kent! Didn’t know you at first under them whiskers. You remember me, don’t you? I used to drive you around when you was here before.”

“How are you, Jarvis?” returned the other. “Still in the livery business, I suppose?”

“Yes. What brings you here, Perfessor?”

“Holidays. I’ve just come out of the woods. And as you have some very interesting sea currents just here, I thought I’d have a look at them. Nobody really knows anything about coast currents, you know. Now my opportunity is spoiled.” He indicated the crowd by a movement of his head.

“Spoilt? I guess not. You couldn’t have come at a better time,” said the local man eagerly.

“Ah, but you see, I had planned to swim out to the eddy, and make some personal observations.”

“You was going to swim into Dead Man’s Eddy?” asked the other, aghast. “Why, Perfessor, you must have turned foolish. They ain’t a man on this coast would take a chance like that.”

“Superstition,” retorted the other curtly. “On a still day such as this there would be no danger to an experienced swimmer. The conditions are ideal except for this crowd. What is it? Has the village gone picnicking?”

“Not sca’cely! Ain’t you heard? Another one’s come in through the eddy. Lies over yonder.”

Professor Kent’s eyebrows went up, as he glanced toward the indicated spot; then gathered in a frown.

“Not washed up there, surely?” he said.

“Thet’s what,” answered Jarvis.

“When?”

“Sometime early this morning.”

“Pshaw!” said the other, turning to look at the curving bulwark of rocks over which the soft slow swell was barely breaking. “If it were the other end of the cove, now, I could understand it.”

“Yes,” agreed Jarvis, “they mostly come in at the other end, on this tide.”

“Mostly? Always.” The professor’s tone was positive. “Unless my charts are wrong. But this—well, it spoils at least one phase of my theory.”

“Theery!” exclaimed the liveryman, his pale eyes alight. “You got a theery? But I thought you didn’t know anything about the body, till I told you, just now.”

“Oh, my ruined theory has reference to the currents,” sighed the other. “It has nothing to do with dead men, as such.”

“Neither has this,” was the prompt response, delivered with a jerk of the thumb toward the dark object.

“No? What is it then, if not a dead man?”

“A dead woman.”

“Oh! All the same, it shouldn’t have come in on this section of the beach at all.”

“Thet ain’t half the strangeness of it, the way it washed in. Lonesome Cove has had some queer folks drift home to it, but nothing as queer as this. Come and see for yourself.”

Still frowning, Professor Kent suffered himself to be led to the spot. Two or three of the group, as it parted before him, greeted him. He found himself looking down on a corpse clad in a dark silk dress and stretched on a wooden grating, to which it was lashed with a small rope. Everything about the body indicated wealth. The dress was expensively made. The shoes were of the best type, and the stockings were silk. The head was marred by a frightful bruise which had crushed in the right side and extended around behind the ear. Blood had clotted thickly in the short close-curled hair. The left side was unmarked. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open, showing a glint of gold amid very white and regular teeth. An expression of deadly terror distorted the face. Professor Kent bent closely over it.

“That’s strange; very strange,” he murmured. “It should be peaceful.”

“But look at the hand!” cried Jarvis.

Here, indeed, was the astounding feature of the tragedy; the aspect that brought Kent to his knees, the more closely to observe. The body lay twisted slightly to the right, with the left arm extended. The left wrist was enclosed in a light rusted handcuff to which a chain was fastened. At the end of the chain was the companion cuff, shattered, evidently by a powerful blow, and half buried in the sand. As Kent leaned over the corpse, a fat, powerful, grizzled man with a metal badge on his shirt-front pushed forward.

“Them’s cast-iron cuffs,” he announced. “That kind ain’t been used these forty years.”

“What kind of a ship ’ud be carryin’ ’em nowadays?” asked some one in the crowd.

“An’ what kind of a seaman’d be putting of ’em on a lady’s wrists?” growled a formidable voice, which Kent, looking up, perceived to have come from amid a growth of heavy white whiskers, sprouting from a weather-furrowed face.

“Seafaring man, aren’t you?” inquired Kent.

“No more. Fifty year of it, man an’ boy, has put me in harbor.”

“That’s Sailor Smith,” explained Jarvis, who had assumed the duties of a self-appointed cicerone. “Not much about the sea and its ways, good or bad, that he don’t know.”

“True for you,” confirmed several voices.

“Then, Mr. Smith, will you take a look at those lashings and tell me whether in your opinion they are the work of a sailor?” asked Kent.

The old hands fumbled expertly. The old face puckered. Judgment came forth presently.

“The knots is well enough. The lashin’s a passable job. What gits me is the rope.”

“Well, what’s wrong with the rope?”

“Nothin’ in pertic’ler. Only, I don’t know what just that style of rope would be doin’ on shipboard, unless it was to hang the old man’s wash on.”

“Suppose we lift this grating,” Kent suggested.

At this the man with the badge interposed. “Say, who’s runnin’ this thing, anyhow? I’m sheriff here, an’ this body ain’t to be moved till a doctor has viewed it.”

“Of course,” said Kent mildly; “but I thought you might be interested to see, Mr. Sheriff, whether a ship’s name was stamped somewhere on this grating.”

“Well, I don’t want any amachure learning me my business,” declared the official importantly.

Nevertheless, he heaved the woodwork up on edge and held it so, while eager eyes scanned the under part. Murmurs of disappointment followed. In these Kent did not join. He had inserted a finger in a crevice of the splintered wood and had extracted some small object which he held in the palm of his hand, examining it thoughtfully.

“Wot ye got there?” demanded the sheriff.

Professor Kent stretched out his hand, disclosing a small grayish object.

“I should take it to be the cocoon of Ephestia kuchniella,” he announced.

“An’ wot does he do for a livin’?” inquired the official, waxing humorous.

“Destroys crops. It’s a species of grain-moth.”

“Oh!” grunted Schlager. “You’re a bug collector, eh?”

“Exactly,” answered the other, transferring his trove to his pocket.

Thereafter he seemed to lose interest in the center of mystery. Withdrawing to some distance, he paced up and down the shore, whistling lively tunes, not always in perfect accord, from which a deductive mind might have inferred that his soul was not in the music.

Suppose we lift this grating.

Nearer and nearer to high-water mark his pacing took him. Presently, though all the time continuing his whistling, he was scanning the tangled débris that the highest tide of the year had heaped up, almost against the cliff’s foot. His whistling became slow, lugubrious, minor. It sagged. It died away. When it rose again, it was in march time, whereto the virtuoso stepped briskly toward the crowd. By this time the group had received several additions, but had suffered the loss of one of its component parts, the sheriff. Conjecture was buzzing from mouth to mouth as to the official’s sudden defection.

“Whatever it was he got from the pocket,” Kent heard one of the men say, “it started him quick.”

“Looked to me like an envelope,” hazarded some one.

“No,” contradicted Sailor Smith; “paper would have been all pulped up by the water.”

“Marked handkerchief, maybe,” suggested another.

“Like as not,” said Jarvis. “You bet that Len Schlager figured it out there was somethin’ in it for him, anyways. I could see the money-gleam in his eye.”

“That’s right, too,” confirmed the old sailor. “He looked just like that when he brought in that half-wit pedler, thinkin’ he was the thousan’-dollar-reward thief last year.”

“Trust Len Schlager to look out for number one first, an’ be sheriff afterward,” observed some one else.

Amidst this interchange of opinion, none of which was lost upon him, Professor Kent advanced and bent over the manacled corpse.

“Have to ask you to stand back, Perfessor,” said Jarvis. “Len’s appointed me special dep’ty till he comes back, and he says nobody is to lay finger on hide ner hair of the corpse; not even the doc, if he comes.”

“Quite right,” assented the other. “Sheriff Schlager exhibits commendable zeal and discretion.”

“Wonder if he knowed the corpse?” suggested somebody in the crowd.

“Tell you who did, if he didn’t,” said another man.

“Who, then?”

“Elder Iry Dennett. Didn’t none of you hear about his meetin’ up with a strange woman yestiddy evenin’?”

“Shucks! This couldn’t be that woman,” said Jarvis. “How’d she come to be washed ashore from a wreck between last night and this morning?”

“How’d she come to be washed ashore from a wreck, anyway?” countered Sailor Smith. “The’ ain’t been no storm for a week, an’ this body ain’t been dead twenty-four hour.”

“It plumb beats me,” admitted Jarvis.

“Who is this Dennett?” asked Professor Kent.

“Iry? He’s the town gab of Martindale Center. Does a little plumbin’ an’ tinkerin’ on the side. Just now he’s up to Cadystown. Took the ten-o’clock train last night.”

“Then it was early when he met this woman?”

“Little after sundown. He was risin’ the hill beyond the Nook—that’s Sedgwick’s place, the painter feller—when she come out of the shrubbery—pop! He quizzed her. Trust the Elder for that. But he didn’t get much out of her, until he mentioned the Nook. Then she allowed she guessed she’d go there. An’ he watched her go.”

“You say a man named Sedgwick lives at the Nook. Is that Francis Sedgwick, the artist?” asked Kent.

“That’s him,” said Sailor Smith. “Paints right purty pictures. Lives there all alone with a Chinese cook.”

“Well, the lady went down the hill,” continued Jarvis, “just as Sedgwick come out to smoke a pipe on his stone wall. Iry thought he seemed su’prised when she bespoke him. They passed a few remarks, an’ then they had some words, an’ the lady laughed loud an’ kinder scornful. He seemed to be pointin’ at a necklace of queer, fiery pink stones thet she wore, and tryin’ to get somethin’ out of her. She turned away, an’ he started to follow, when all of a sudden she grabbed up a rock an’ let him have it—blip! Keeled him clean over. Then she ran away up the road toward Hawkill Cliffs. That’s the way Iry Dennett tells it. But I ain’t never heard of a story losin’ anythin’ in the tellin’ when it come through Iry’s lips.”

“Well, this corpse ain’t got no pink necklace,” suggested somebody.

“Bodies sometimes gets robbed,” said Sailor Smith.

Chester Kent stooped over the writhen face, again peering close. Then he straightened up and began pulling thoughtfully at the lobe of his ear.

He pulled and pulled, until, as if by that process, he had turned his face toward the cliff. His lips pursed. He began whistling softly, and tunelessly. His gaze was abstracted.

“Ain’t seen nothin’ to make you feel bad, have you, Perfessor?” inquired Temporary-Deputy-Sheriff Jarvis with some acerbity.

“Eh? What?” said Kent absently. “Seen anything? Nothing but what’s there for any one to see.”

Following his fixed gaze, the others studied the face of the cliff; all but Sailor Smith. He blinked near-sightedly at the corpse.

“Say,” said he presently, “what’s them queer little marks on the neck, under the ear?”

Back came Kent’s eyes. “Those?” he said smiling. “Why, those are, one might suppose, such indentations as would be made in flesh by forcing a jewel setting violently against it, by a blow or strong impact.”

“Then you think it was the wom—” began the old seaman when several voices broke in:

“There goes Len now!”

The sheriff’s heavy figure appeared on the brow of the cliff, moving toward the village.

“Who is it with him?” inquired Kent.

“Gansett Jim,” answered Jarvis.

“An Indian?”

“Gosh! You got good eyes!” said Jarvis. “He’s more Indian than anything else. Comes from down Amagansett way, and gets his name from it.”

“H-m! When did he arrive?”

“While you was trapesin’ around up yonder.”

“Did he see the body?”

“Yep. Just after the sheriff got whatever it was from the pocket, Gansett Jim hove in sight. Len went over to him quick, an’ said somethin’ to him. He come and give a look at the body. But he didn’t say nothing. Only grunted.”

“Never does say nothin’, only grunt,” put in Sailor Smith.

“That’s right,” agreed Jarvis. “Well, the sheriff tells me to watch the body. Then he says, ‘An’ I’ll need somebody to help me. I’ll take you, Jim.’ So he an’ the Indian goes away together.”

Professor Kent nodded. He looked seaward where the reefs were now baring their teeth more plainly through the racing currents, and he sighed. That sigh meant, in effect, “I wanted to play with my tides and eddies, and here is work thrown at my very feet!” Then he bade the group farewell, and set off up the beach.

“Seems kinder int’rested, don’t he?” remarked one of the natives.

“Who is he, anyway?” inquired another.

“Oh, he’s a sort of a harmless scientific crank,” explained Jarvis, with patronizing kindliness. “Comes from Washington. Something to do with the government work.”

“Kinder loony, I think,” conjectured a little, thin, piping man. “Musses and moves around like it.”

“Is that so!” said Sailor Smith, who still had his eyes fixed on the scarified neck. “Well, I ain’t any too dum sure thet he’s as big a fool as some folks I know thet thinks likelier of theirselves.”

Others, however, supported the little man’s diagnosis, and there was some feeling against Sailor Smith who refused to make the vote unanimous.

“No, sir,” he persisted sturdily. “That dude way of talkin’ of his has got somethin’ back of it, I’ll bet. He seen there was somethin’ queer about thet rope, an’ he ast me about the knots, right off. He knows enough not to spit to wind’ard, an’ don’t you forgit it! Wouldn’t surprise me none if he was p’intin’ pretty nigh as clus up into the wind as Len Schlager.”

Possibly the one supporter of the absent would have wavered in his loyalty had he seen the trove that Professor Chester Kent had carried unostentatiously from the beach, in his pocket, after picking it from the grating. It was the fuzzy cocoon of a small and quite unimportant insect. Perhaps the admiring Mr. Smith might even have come around to the majority opinion regarding Professor Kent’s intellectual futility, could he have observed the absorbed interest with which the Washington scientist, seated on a boulder, opened up the cocoon, pricked it until the impotent inmate wriggled in protest, and then, casting it aside to perish, threw himself on his back and whistled the whole of Chopin’s Funeral March, mostly off the key.

[CHAPTER II—PROFESSOR KENT MAKES A CALL]

Between the roadway and the broad front lawn of the Nook a four-foot, rough stone wall interposes. Looking up from his painting, Francis Sedgwick beheld, in the glare of the afternoon sun, a spare figure rise alertly upon the wall, descend to the road, and rise again. He stepped to the open window and watched a curious progress. A scrubby-bearded man, clad in serviceable khaki, was performing a stunt, with the wall as a basis. He was walking from east to west quite fast, and every third pace stepping upon the wall; stepping, Sedgwick duly noted, not jumping, the change of level being made without visible effort.

Now, Sedgwick himself was distinctly long of leg and limber, but he realized that he would be wholly incapable of duplicating the stranger’s gracefully accomplished feat without violent and clumsy exertion. Consequently, he was interested. Leaning out of the window, he called:

“Hello, there!”

“Good afternoon,” said the stranger, in a quiet cultivated voice.

“Would you mind telling me what you are doing on my wall.”

“Not in the least,” replied the bearded man, rising buoyantly into full view, and subsiding again with the rhythm of a wave.

“Well, what are you doing?”

“Taking a little exercise.”

By this time, having reached the end of the wall, he turned and came back, making the step with his right leg instead of his left. Sedgwick hurried down-stairs and out into the roadway. The stranger continued his performance silently. At closer inspection it appealed to the artist as even more mysterious both in purport and execution than it had looked at a distance.

“Do you do that often?” he asked presently.

The gymnast paused, poised like a Mercury on the high coping. “Yes,” said he. “Otherwise I shouldn’t be able to do it at all.”

“I should think not, indeed! Has it any particular utility, that form of exercise?”

“Certainly. It is in pursuance of a theory of self-defense.”

“What in the world has wall-hopping to do with self-defense?”

“I shall expound,” said the stranger in professional tones, taking a seat by the unusual method of letting himself down on one leg while holding the other at right angles to his body. “Do you know anything of jiu-jutsu?”

“Very little.”

“In common with most Americans. For that reason alone the Japanese system is highly effective here, not so effective in Japan. You perceive there the basis of my theory.”

“No, I don’t perceive it at all.”

“A system of defense is effective in proportion to its unfamiliarity. That is all.”

“Then your system consists in stepping up on a wall and diving into obscurity on the farther side, perhaps,” suggested Sedgwick ironically.

“Defense, I said; not escape. Escape is perhaps preferable to defense, but not always so practicable. No; the wall merely served as a temporary gymnasium while I was waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For you.”

“You have distinctly the advantage of me,” said Sedgwick, with a frown; for he was in no mood to welcome strange visitors.

“To return to my theory of self-defense,” said the other imperturbably. “My wall exercise serves to keep limber and active certain muscles that in the average man are half atrophied. You are familiar with the ostrich?”

“With his proverbial methods of obfuscation,” replied Sedgwick.

The other smiled. “That, again, is escape or attempted escape. My reference was to other characteristics. However, I shall demonstrate.” He rose on one foot with an ease that made the artist stare, descended, selected from the roadway a stone of ordinary cobble size, and handed it to Sedgwick.

“Let that lie on the palm of your hand,” said he, “and hold it out, waist high.”

As he spoke he was standing two feet from the other, to his right. Sedgwick did as he was requested. As his hand took position, there was a twist of the bearded man’s lithe body, a sharp click, and the stone, flying in a rising curve, swished through the leafage of a lilac fifty feet away.

“How did you do that?” cried the artist.

The other showed a slight indentation on the inside of his right boot heel, and then swung his right foot slowly and steadily up behind his left knee, and let it lapse into position again. “At shoulder height,” he explained, “I could have done the same; but it would have broken your hand.”

“I see,” said the other, adding with distaste, “but to kick an opponent! Why, even as a boy I was taught—”

“We were not speaking of child’s play,” said the visitor coolly; “nor am I concerned with the rules of the prize-ring, as applied to my theory. When one is in danger, one uses knife or gun, if at hand. I prefer a less deadly and more effective weapon. Kicking sidewise, either to the front or to the rear, I can disarm a man, break his leg, or lay him senseless. It is the special development of such muscles as the sartorius and plantaris,” he ran his long fingers down from the outside of his thigh round to the inside of his ankle, “that enables a human being, with practise, to kick like an ostrich. Since you found me exercising on your property, I owe you this explanation. I hope you won’t prosecute for trespass, Mr. Long-Lean-Leggy Sedgwick.”

“Leggy!” The artist had whirled at the name. “Nobody’s called me that for ten years.”

“Just ten years ago that you graduated, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Then I knew you in college. You must have been before my class.”

The bearded one nodded. “Senior to your freshman,” said he.

The younger man scrutinized him. “Chester Kent!” said he softly. “What on earth are you doing behind that bush?”

Kent caressed the maligned whiskers. “Utility,” he explained. “Patent, impenetrable mosquito screen. I’ve been off in the wilds, and am—or was—going back presently.”

“Not until you’ve stopped long enough to get reacquainted,” declared Sedgwick. “Just at present you’re going to stay to dinner.”

“Very good. Just now you happen to be in my immediate line of interest. It is a fortunate circumstance for me, to find you here; possibly for you, too.”

“Most assuredly,” returned the other with heartiness. “Come in on the porch and have a hammock and pipe.”

————

Old interests sprang to life and speech between them. And from the old interests blossomed the old easy familiarity that is never wholly lost to those who have been close friends in college days. Presently Francis Sedgwick was telling his friend the story of his feverish and thwarted ten years in the world. Within a year of his graduation his only surviving relative had died, willing to him a considerable fortune, the income of which he used in furtherance of a hitherto suppressed ambition to study art. Paris, his Mecca, was first a task-mistress, then a temptress, finally a vampire. Before succumbing he had gone far, in a few years, toward the development of a curious technique of his own. Followed then two years of dissipation, a year of travel to recuperate, and the return to Paris, which was to be once more the task-mistress. But, to his terror and self-loathing, he found the power of application gone. The muscles of his mind had become flabby. He quoted to Kent, with bitterness, the terrible final lines of Rossetti’s Known in Vain:

“When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze

After their life sailed by, and hold their breath,

Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze

Thenceforth their incommunicable ways

Follow the desultory feet of Death?”

“‘When Work and Will awake too late,’” repeated Kent. “But is it too late in your case? Surely not, since you’re here, and at your task.”

“But think of the waste, man! Yet, here I am, as you say, and still able to fight. All by virtue of a woman’s laugh; the laugh of a woman without virtue. It was at the Moulin de la Galette—perhaps you know the dance hall on the slope of Montmartre—and she was one of the dancers, the wreck of what had once been beauty and, one must suppose, innocence. Probably she thought me too much absinthe-soaked to hear or understand, as I sat half asleep at my table. At all events she answered, full-voiced, her companion’s question, ‘Who is the drunken foreigner?’ by saying, ‘He was an artist. The studios talked of him five years ago. Look at him now! That is what life does to us, mon ami. I’m the woman of it: that’s the man of it.’ I staggered up, made her a bow and a promise, and left her laughing. Last month I redeemed the promise; sent her the first thousand dollars I made by my own work, and declared my debt discharged.”

A heavy cloud of smoke issued from Kent’s mouth, followed by this observation: “That formula about the inability to lift one’s self by one’s own boot-straps fails to apply in the spiritual world.”

“Right! You can pull yourself out of the ditch that way; but afterward comes the long hillside. Life has seemed all tilted on edge, at times, and pretty slippery, with little enough to cling to.”

“Work,” suggested Kent briefly.

“Wisdom lurks behind your screen. Work is the answer.”

“Good or bad, it’s the only thing. Which kind is yours?”

“Presently you shall sit in judgment. Meantime, suppose you account for yourself.”

Chester Kent stretched himself luxuriously. “A distinguished secretary of state has remarked that all the news worth telling on any subject can be transmitted by wire for twenty-five cents. The short and simple annals of the poor in my case can be recorded within that limit. ‘Postgraduate science. Agricultural Department job. Lectures. Invention. Judiciary Department expert. Signed, Chester Kent.’ Ten words—count them—ten.”

“Interesting, but unsatisfying,” retorted his friend. “Can’t you expand a bit? I suppose you haven’t any dark secret in your life?”

“No secret, dark or light,” sighed the other. “The newspapers won’t let me have.”

“Eh? Won’t let you? Am I to infer that you’ve become a famous person? Pardon the ignorance of expatriation. Have you discovered a new disease, or formulated a new theory of life, or become a golf champion, or a senator, or a freak aviator, or invented perpetual motion? Do you possess titles, honors, and ribboned decorations? Ought I to bat my brow against the floor in addressing you? What are you, anyway?”

“What I told you, an expert in the service of the Department of Justice.”

“On the scientific side?”

“Why—yes, generally speaking. I like to flatter myself that my pursuit is scientific.”

“Pursuit? What do you pursue?”

“Men and motives.”

Sedgwick’s intelligent eyes widened. “Wait,” he said, “something occurs to me, an article in a French journal about a wonderful new American expert in criminology, who knows all there is to know, and takes only the most abstruse cases. I recall now that the article called him ‘le Professeur Chêtre Kennat.’ That would be about as near as they would come to your name.”

“It’s a good deal nearer than that infernal French journalist whom Wiley brought to my table at the Idlers’ Club got to the facts,” stated Kent.

“Then you are the Professor Kent! But look here! The Frenchman made you out a most superior species of highfalutin detective, working along lines peculiarly your own—”

“Rot!” interjected Kent. “The only lines a detective can work along successfully are the lines laid down for him by the man he is after.”

“Sounds more reasonable than romantic,” admitted the artist. “Come now, Kent, open up and tell me something about yourself.”

“Only last month a magazine put that request in writing, and accompanied it with an offer of twenty-five hundred dollars—which I didn’t accept. However, as I may wish to ask you a number of leading questions later, I’ll answer yours now. You remember I got into trouble my senior year with the college authorities, by proving the typhoid epidemic direct against a forgotten defect in the sewer system. It nearly cost me my diploma; but it helped me too, later, for a scientist in the Department of Agriculture at Washington learned of it, and sent for me after graduation. He talked to me about the work that a man with the true investigation instinct—which he thought I had—could do, by employing his abilities along strictly scientific lines; and he mapped out for me a three-year’s postgraduate course, which I had just about enough money to take. While I specialized on botany, entomology, and bacteriology, I picked up a working knowledge of other branches; chemistry, toxicology, geology, mineralogy, physiology, and most of the natural sciences, having been blessed with an eager and catholic curiosity about the world we live in.

“Once in the Department, I found myself with a sort of roving commission. I worked under such men as Wiley, Howard, and Merriam, and learned from them something of the infinite and scrupulous patience that truly original scientific achievement demands. At first my duties were largely those of minor research. Then, by accident largely, I chanced upon the plot to bull the cotton market by introducing the boll weevil into the uninfested cotton area, and checked that. Soon afterward I was put on the ‘deodorized meat’ enterprise, and succeeded in discovering the scheme whereby it was hoped to sell spoiled meat for good. You might have heard of those cases; but you would hardly have learned of the success in which I really take a pride, the cultivation of a running wild grape to destroy Rhus Toxicodendron, the common poison ivy. What spare time I had I devoted to experimenting along mechanical lines, and patented an invention that has been profitable. Some time ago the Department of Justice borrowed me on a few cases with a scientific bearing, and more recently offered me incidental work with them on such favorable terms that I resigned my other position. The terms include liberal vacations, one of which I am now taking. And here I am! Is that sufficient?”

“Hardly. All this suggests the arts of peace. What about your forty-horse-power kick? You don’t practise that for drawing-room exhibitions, I take it?”

“Sometimes,” confessed the scientist, “I have found myself at close quarters with persons of dubious character. The fact is, that an ingenious plot to get rid of a very old friend, Doctor Lucius Carter the botanist, drew me into the criminal line, and since then, that phase of investigation has seemed fairly to obtrude itself on me, officially and unofficially. Even up here, where I hoped to enjoy a month’s rest—Do you know,” he said, breaking off, “that you have a most interesting inset of ocean currents hereabouts?”

“Of course. Lonesome Cove. But kindly finish that ‘even up here’. I recollect your saying that you were waiting for me. Haven’t traced any scientific crime to my door, have you?”

“Let me forget my work for a little while,” pleaded his visitor, “and look at yours.”

Sedgwick rose. “Come up-stairs,” he said, and led the way to the big, bare, bright studio.

From the threshold Chester Kent delivered an opinion, after one approving survey. “You really work, I see.”

“I really do. Where do you see it, though?”

“All over the place. No draperies or fripperies or fopperies of art here. The barer the room, the more work done in it.”

He walked over to a curious contrivance resembling a small hand-press, examined it, surveyed the empty easel, against which were leaning, face in, a number of pictures, all of a size, and turned half a dozen of them over, ranging them and stepping back for examination. Standing before them, he whistled a long passage from La Bohème, and had started to rewhistle it in another key, when the artist broke in with some impatience.

“Well?”

“Good work,” pronounced Kent quietly, and in some subtle way the commonplace words conveyed to their hearer the fact that the man who spoke them knew.

“It’s the best there is in me, at least,” said Sedgwick.

Kent went slowly around the walls, keenly examining, silently appraising. There were landscapes, genre bits, studies of the ocean in its various moods, flashes of pagan imaginings, nature studies; a wonderful picture of wild geese settling from a flight; a no less striking sketch of a mink, startled as he crept to drink among the sedges; a group of country children at hop-scotch on the sands; all the varied subjects handled with a deftness of truth and drawing, and colored with a clear softness quite individual.

“Have you found or founded a new system of coloring?” asked Kent as he moved among the little masterpieces. “No; don’t tell me.” He touched one of the surfaces delicately. “It’s not paint, and it’s not pastel. Oh, I see! They’re all of one size—of course.” He glanced at the heavy mechanism near the easel. “They’re color prints.”

Sedgwick nodded. “Monotypes,” said he. “I paint on copper, make one impress, and then—phut!—a sponge across the copper makes each one an original.”

“You certainly obtain your effects.”

“The printing seems to refine the color. For instance, moonlight on white water, a thing I’ve never been able to approach, either in straight oils or water. See here.”

From behind a cloth he drew a square, and set it on the easel. Kent whistled again, casual fragments of light and heavy opera intermingled with considerative twitches of his ear.

“It’s the first one I’ve given a name to,” said Sedgwick. “I call it The Rough Rider.”

A full moon, brilliant amid blown cloud-rack, lighted up the vast procession of billows charging in upon a near coast. In the foreground a corpse, the face bent far up and back from the spar to which it was lashed, rode with wild abandon headlong at the onlooker, on the crest of a roaring surge. The rest was infinite clarity of distance and desolation.

“The Rough Rider!” murmured Kent; then, with a change of tone, “For sale?”

“I don’t know,” hesitated the artist. “Fact is, I like that about well enough to keep.”

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”

“Five hundred! Man alive! A hundred is the most I’ve ever got for any of my prints!”

“The offer stands.”

“But, see here, Kent, can you afford it? Government salaries don’t make men rich, do they?”

“Oh, I’m rich enough,” said the other impatiently. “I told you I’d made inventions. And I can certainly afford to buy it better than you can afford to keep it here.”

“What’s that?” asked the painter, surprised.

Kent repeated his final sentence, with slow emphasis. “Do you understand what I mean?” he asked, looking flatly into Sedgwick’s eyes.

“No, not in the least. Another suggestion of mystery. Do you always deal in this sort of thing?”

“Very seldom. However, if you don’t understand so much the better. When did you finish this picture?”

“Yesterday.”

“H-m! Has any one else seen it?”

“That old fraud of a plumber, Elder Dennett, saw me working on it yesterday, when he was doing some repairing here, and remarked that it gave him the creeps.”

“Dennett? Well, then that’s all up,” said Kent, as if speaking to himself. “There’s a streak of superstition in all these New Englanders. He’d be sure to interpret it as a confession before the fact. However, Elder Dennett left this morning for a trip to Cadystown. That’s so much to the good.”

“He may have left for a trip to Hadestown for all I care,” stated Sedgwick with conviction. “What’s it all about, anyway?”

“I’ll tell you, as soon as I’ve mulled it over a little. Just let me cool my mind down with some more of your pictures.” He turned to the wall border again, and faced another picture out. “What’s this? You seem to be something of a dab in black and white, too.”

“Oh, that’s an imaginary face,” said Sedgwick carelessly.

“Imaginary face studied from various angles,” commented Kent. “It’s a very lovely face, and the most wistful I’ve ever seen. A fairy, prisoned on earth by cockcrow, might wear some such expression of startled wondering purity, I fancy.”

“Poetry as well as mystery! Kent, you grow and expand on acquaintance.”

“There is poetry in your study of that imaginary fay. Imaginary! Um-hum!” continued Kent dryly, as he stooped to the floor. “I suppose this is an imaginary hairpin, too.”

“My Chinaman—” began Sedgwick quickly, when the other caught him up.

“Don’t be uneasy. I’m not going to commit the bêtise of asking who she is.”

“If you did, I give you my word of honor I couldn’t tell you. I only wish I knew!”

There was silence between them for a moment; then the painter broke out with the air of one who takes a resolution:

“See here, Kent! You’re a sort of detective, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been called so.”

“And you like my picture of The Rough Rider?”

“Five hundred dollars’ worth.”

“You can have that and any other picture in my studio, except this one,” he indicated the canvas with the faces, “if you’ll find out for me who she is.”

“That might be done. We shall see. But frankly, Sedgwick, there’s a matter of more importance—”

“Importance? Good heavens, man! There’s nothing so important in this world!”

“Oh, is it as bad as that?”

A heavy knock sounded from below, followed by the Chinaman’s voice, intermingled with boyish accents demanding Sedgwick in the name of the Western Union Telegraph Company.

“Send him up,” ordered Sedgwick, and the boy arrived; but not before Kent had quietly removed The Rough Rider from its place of exhibit.

“Special from the village,” announced young Mercury. “Sign here.”

After the signature had been duly set down, and the signer had read his message with knit brows, the urchin lingered, big with news.

“Say, heard about the body on the beach?”

Kent turned quickly, to see Sedgwick’s face. It was interested, but unmoved as he replied:

“No. Where was it found?”

“Lonesome Cove. Woman. Dressed swell. Washed up on a grating last night or this morning.”

“It’s curious how they all come in here, isn’t it?” said the artist to Kent. “This is the third this summer.”

“And it’s a corkerino!” said the boy. “Sheriff’s on the case. Body was all chained up, they say.”

“I’m sure they need you at the office to help circulate the news, my son,” said Kent. “And I’ll bet you this quarter, payable in advance, that you can’t get back in half an hour on your wheel.”

With a grin the boy took the coin. “I got yer,” he said, and was off.

“And now, Sedgwick,” said Kent decisively, “if I’m to help you, suppose you tell me all that you know about the woman who called on you last evening?”

“Last evening? Ah, that wasn’t the girl of the picture. It’s an interminable six days since I’ve seen her.”

“No; I know it wasn’t she, having seen your picture, and since then your visitor of last night. The question is, who was it?”

“Wait! How did you know that a woman came here last night?”

“From common gossip.”

“And where have you seen her since?”

“On the beach, at Lonesome Cove.”

“Lonesome Cove,” repeated Sedgwick mechanically. Then with a startled glance: “Not the dead woman!”

Kent nodded, watching him closely. For a space of four heart-beats—one very slow, and three very quick—there was silence between them. Kent broke it.

“Do you see now the wisdom of frankness?”

“You mean that I shall be accused of having a hand in her death?”

“Strongly suspected, at least.”

“On what basis?”

“You are the last person known to have seen her alive.”

“Surely that isn’t enough?”

“Not of itself. There’s a bruise back of your right ear.”

Involuntarily Sedgwick’s hand went to the spot.

“Who gave it to you?” pursued Kent.

“You know it all without my telling you,” cried Sedgwick. “But I never saw the woman before in my life, Kent—I give you my word of honor! She came and went, but who she is or why she came or where she went I have no more idea than you have. Perhaps not nearly so much.”

“There you are wrong. I’m depending on you to tell me about her.”

“Not if my life hung on it. And how could her being found drowned on the beach be connected with me?”

“I didn’t say that she was found drowned on the beach.”

“You did! No; pardon me. It was the messenger boy. But you said that her body was found in Lonesome Cove.”

“That is quite a different matter.”

“She wasn’t drowned?”

“I should be very much surprised if the autopsy showed any water in the lungs.”

“But the boy said that the body was lashed to a grating, and that there were chains on it. Is that true?”

“It was lashed to a grating, and manacled.”