CHAPTER XXIIITHE DEMON OF THE DARK
Douglasfelt his hair lift and his skin prickle, ice-cold. But he knocked the door wide and plunged out. In the moonshine stood no horrible figure. The noise was coming from the floor: a growling sound, a slithering scrape, irregular paddings, and the scratch of claws on wood.
There, in the semi-darkness between two windows, a small huddle writhed in hideous combat. Rooted to the floor, Douglas stood watching its contortions. Gradually the writhing movements diminished. But the low growl continued, and from the spot glared the fiery eyes of a cat which had made its kill.
The man started from his paralysis. Scratching a match along the wall, he held the little flare above his head and stared until his fingers twitched back, burned.
“Well—I’ll—be——” he muttered, his voice trailing into nothing.
He had looked on the ha’nt. He had seen Dalton’s Death, murderer of men,—expiring in the jaws of a tom-cat.
Snatching the gas-lamp from its nail, he got it to burning and turned its ray on the uncanny little bunch below. In the white radiance the thing stood out inhorrid clarity. Though merged together, it comprised three separate parts. They were cat—rat—rattlesnake.
The cat’s teeth were clamped in the neck of the reptile. The venomous fangs of the reptile were hooked into the head of the rat. The head of the rat was nearly hidden within the distended jaws of the sinuous slayer.
This much of the story was plain at a glance: the snake had killed the rat, begun to swallow its prey, and in its turn been pounced upon by the lightning-leaping Spit. But how had rodent and reptile come here? Why had he never seen them before? Why had Spit allowed the snake to get the rat first? Why did that snake’s tail, still moving, give out no warning burr?
Douglas wasted no more time in puzzlement. Instead he began a close inspection—as close as seemed safe, in view of the fact that the savage cat struck viciously at him with hooked claws when he came too near. It was by no means impossible that some snake-venom might be on those claws, and the investigator was wary of them. Moving around with the light, he studied snake and rodent.
The rat was long, lank, and old. Its hoary hair, its big feet, the tip of one whitish whisker still visible at the edge of the serpent’s gaping mouth, all proved its age. It was so old that it would move clumsily. In a silent house its feet would thump on the floor. If it descended stairs it would bump.
Nothing very queer about the rat. But about thesnake was something very queer indeed. Though it was well grown—more than a yard long, in fact—and thus should have been well equipped with the warning buttons of its species, it had none. It was a rattler without a rattle.
True, its tail bore a small rounded excrescence which might be an incipient button; but not a real, well-developed one. Somehow the tail looked blunt; as if a rattle once had been there but had been cut off, accidentally or otherwise. It kept moving, so that it was rather vague in outline. There was no doubt, however, about the absence of the horny joints which should have been there.
Narrow-eyed, Douglas stood regarding that unnatural tail. For no apparent reason, he suddenly wheeled and looked at the windows. Against the panes was pressed no leering face. Outside in the moonlight stood no sinister form. Slowly he turned back. Into his mind had flashed the picture of Snake Sanders loosing from a box on Dickie Barre a copperhead. Was the appearance of the snake in this house another attempt of the same sort?
“No,” Reason told him. This thing had not been brought here to-night. It must have been in the place a long time. Two men had been killed by it. One, whose freshly carved headboard even now stood against the wall, had died several nights ago. The other had been struck down last spring. Beyond a doubt, this was what had ended the lives of Jake and Nat—striking at their bare feet, driving them in blind horror from the house, leaving on their skins only twotiny wounds which, days later, would be overlooked by the men finding their frightful corpses in the woods or the brush. This creature must have been here for months.
His deductions were interrupted by Spit. Tiring at last of worrying its broken enemy, or perhaps eager to begin eating the rat, the cat loosed its hold and, ceaselessly growling, stepped around and smelt at the gray-haired victim of the snake.
“Hey! Quit that!” Douglas snapped. “You fool cat, that rat’s poisoned! If you have the slightest scratch on your lips or in your mouth you’ll die! Let it alone!”
At the impact of his voice Spit leaped aside, spat at him, stood flame-eyed, lips writhing and claws unsheathed. So menacing was the appearance of the creature, so evident its readiness to battle for possession of that rat, that the man took a backward step. Claws and teeth both might be envenomed; even if they were not, he knew that an ordinary cat-bite sometimes results fatally. But he did not intend to let the cat commit suicide. True, the poison might not injure the animal’s stomach, but if it entered the blood——
He shoved the bare flame of his lamp straight at the snarling visage. It was the best move he could have made. Had he attempted to grasp the animal, or even to push it away with a foot, the maddened creature might have sprung at him. At that moment a mere man meant little to that wild brute. But before the fire-demon imprisoned in that lamp, before the searing blue-white tongue licking out at his face,even Spit’s savage heart quailed. Spitting furiously, he sprang back.
Inexorably the flame followed him. It pressed him back into the bedroom. Then the outer door was drawn open. The light retreated. Spit sneaked back into the main room—but the white-hot tongue was waiting for him. It slid forward once more. Suddenly it made a twisting swoop toward his mouth. That was too much. With a snarly squall of panic a tawny streak shot through the doorway into the night. Spit was gone.
The door bumped shut. The man straightened up, relaxed, chuckled shortly. Then he turned the light again on the feebly squirming reptile and the lifeless rat; studied them a moment more; looked at the clean pine monument of Nat Oaks glimmering yellowish in the background; pivoted on his heels and frowningly contemplated the bedroom where both Jake and Nat had met their doom. For some minutes he stood there, playing the light over every visible inch of the room, particularly along the floor. Suddenly he started as if a dazzling ray had darted through his mental fog.
“By thunder!” he muttered. “I’ll bet——”
In another three seconds he was flat on the bedroom floor, shooting the light along the under side of the bed. He saw a series of squares of rope, upholding the thick corn-husk mattress. Within each square the mattress bellied downward. And in one of those rounded curves of cloth, near the outer edge of the bed, opened a hole.
Douglas lay there, staring up at that hole, until his position grew cramped. It was round and smooth-edged; the edges looked worn, as if something had often passed in and out—something scaly, perhaps, whose passage would wear away loose threads. The sagging cloth hung not more than a foot above the floor. And, now that his nose was near it, he became conscious of a repellent odor—a smell suggesting snakiness.
“Ugh!” He scrambled to his feet and took a breath of clean air. His gaze fell on the rent left in the middle of the bed by Nigger Nat’s steel. Swift aversion to the whole room seized him. He spun about and stepped out of it. And as he left it he did something he never had done before—he pulled its creaky door shut behind him. He was through with that loathsome death-chamber for all time.
The dead snake now was almost motionless: only the blunt tail still quivered in reptilian tremors. Giving it only a passing glance, Douglas stopped before the open staircase and swung the light slowly from side to side, examining every step. When the all-revealing radiance was centered on the top he stood as if puzzled. Down to the bottom and up to the top he played it again.
“H’m! How come?” he queried.
The darkness gave no answer. Only the solemn crickets dirged on outside.
Up the echoing stairs he clumped, and on the groaning boards above he deliberately moved about, searching the dusty, dusky recesses of the eaves. Presentlythe moving light stopped, shining steadily into one of the front corners. Through the dingy cobwebs festooning the nook he saw something which brought a satisfied nod.
“One,” he said. With that he turned away and began descending the stairs.
Almost at the bottom, he halted short. The downward-pointing ray had revealed a thing hitherto invisible despite his careful scrutiny of the stairs; something which an up-ranging eye never would see, and which was discernible from above only because the swaying light had happened to strike on it.
“Two!” he exulted. “That’s it! I’ve got the combination now. Farewell, Mister Ha’nt! Your little mystery is busted flat.”
Yet the thing at which he was looking would hardly seem to be the key to an enigma. It was only a hole, very inconspicuous in the dirty wall, at the junction of the lowest step with the door-casing. And the thing which he had found up-stairs in the corner was merely another hole.
Resuming his downward way, he trod across the main room, leaned his gun against the wall, set his lamp on the stove, filled his pipe, sat down on his chair, puffed smoke, and chuckled.
“Yes, sir, Mister Rat, you’re caught with the goods at last,” he informed the lank old rodent on the floor. “You’re the noisy half of the ha’nt. You’re old and stiff, and your feet used to bump down like a ghost’s heels. You lived around here somewhere—out in the shed, maybe, or up under the attic floor—and youused to come out of that hole in the corner and ramble around, looking for anything to eat. Poor old Bumpety-Bump, I’ll bet you’re so ancient that you’ve lost all your teeth; you certainly look nearly starved. Anyhow, you’d find nothing up there, so you’d bump yourself down-stairs. Probably you smelt my cheese; I had some when I first came here, and Uncle Eb brought me up a huge slab of it later on.
“But when you hit the bottom you were stuck. That door was always shut. So you’d have to give it up. And with that other hole right handy, why go back up-stairs? You’d just ooze into that hole and let it go at that. So would any other sensible man.
“And that first night, when I came at you with a cannon, you heard me before I could open the door. So you just dived into the handy hole, and when I yanked the door almost off its hinges you were tee-totally gone. And while I was standing there growing goose-flesh you were probably sitting up in the wall and thumbing your old nose at me.”
He laughed again in quiet self-derision.
“It must have been tough, though, to come down here every night, just drooling for that cheese, and find yourself always blocked. All the same, that’s all that saved your life. This other gent here, Mister Side-Winder, must have been rat-hunting every night; that’s why I’ve never heard rats around here; he got ’em all. And to-night when I left that door open and you came out—well, you know as much about that as I do.
“Mister Spit, our little guest of the evening, must have followed my noble example and gone to sleep in there. Or maybe he had a hard time pulling the door open; it does stick when it’s almost shut. Anyhow, by the time he catapulted himself into the plot of this piece you were on your way down Mister Rattler’s gullet—which was just as well for friend Spit, maybe. He could maul Mister Side-Winder then without a come-back. Glad of it, too. Spit’s manners have been neglected, but he’s a regular fellow, and I’m glad he didn’t have to go out by the same route as Jake and Nat.”
He puffed again, and his smile died. When he spoke again his voice was cold.
“And you, Yard-of-Poison—how did you get here? You’ve been here since spring. Maybe you came out too early, got caught in a cold snap, found Jake’s door open, came in to get warm. Maybe. Anyway, you’ve been here since then. You found a hole in the under side of the mattress and crawled in among the husks for warmth and concealment. At night you got the warmth of Jake’s body, too. And you paid for your lodging as a snake would. Some night when Jake got up in the dark for something you struck his foot. And while he died alone in the black woods behind here you crawled back into your hole, well satisfied with yourself.
“Some other fellows came, and you missed them. They didn’t happen to come near you in the night, or you had caught a rat and were sleeping it off in your hole. And then I came. And you’re the thing thatrustled the mattress beside me that night, and made the rickety old bed tremble—you’re the thing Ifeltin the air, there in the room beside me. When I looked under the bed you weren’t in sight: you had stopped when you felt me move. But you came out later, all right, and you’d have killed me if I’d stepped near you without my boots. And every night since then you’ve been sneaking around ready to get me. Lucky I changed beds, and never came out here barefoot for a drink in the night, and kept my door shut. Maybe Uncle Eb’s right, and there’s a good angel watching over me. Looks like it.
“And then Nigger Nat came, and you got him. I owe you one for that, perhaps. But he was only a tool. If you’d nailed Snake Sanders, now, I’d be right obliged to you. But you’d never touch him, of course, even if he stepped on you. He’s your brother.”
For awhile he smoked in thoughtful silence. The buttonless tail now lay inert. Within the house the only movement was that of his own puffing, the only sound the stutter of his wet-stemmed pipe.
“I wonder,” he resumed at length, “I wonder whether your brother Snake knows anything about how you lost your rattle. I wonder if he had a grudge against Jake Dalton. If I ever get him in a corner I’ll ask him about that. Yes, sir, I will.”
His pipe stuttered more loudly and went out. A long yawn stretched his face. Reaching to the lamp, he shut off the gas-flow and stood up.
“Yes, sir,” he repeated, “I’ll give Snake a third-degree on that point sometime. And until then I’lljust keep my mouth shut about your demise. I’ll throw you two folks back into the woods to-morrow, and I’ll let folks think the ha’nt is still ha’nting. And now, with your kind permission, I’m going back to bed. Good-night, Mister Ha’nt—good-night forever.”