Ramshackle House. Footner Hulbert
by his protégé.”
Pen for the moment disregarded what followed. She had to stop and think, she would have said, but as a matter of fact she was incapable of thinking. She was conscious only of a dull horror that numbed her faculties. She had not yet taken it in. Outwardly she was quite composed. With the palm of her hand she thoughtfully polished a dull spot on the velvety surface of the table.
Pendleton fairly babbled in his excitement. “When I first read the story he was in the drawing-room with you. I didn’t know what to do! I didn’t know what to do!”
Pen was sharply recalled to the necessity for action. “Well, what are you going to do?” she asked quietly.
“My duty,” said the little man swelling a little.
“Inform against him?”
“Inform? What a word to use!” said Pendleton with asperity. “I mean to give him up to justice as he richly deserves.”
“But he didn’t do it,” said Pen with an odd, detached air. The words came out of her involuntarily.
Pendleton stared. “How do you know?”
“By instinct,” she said simply.
“Fiddlesticks!” said Pendleton. “You read the paper, didn’t you?”
Pen merely smiled the smile that women use when they decline to argue with a man. It is very exasperating to a man.
“You have seen the man once and exchanged a few pleasantries with him!” he cried. “Do you presume to decide from that whether or not he is capable of murder?”
“I suppose he could shoot a man—with sufficient provocation,” she said coolly. “Any man could I suppose…but not like that. Not in the back!”
Pendleton flung up his hands. “Isn’t that like a woman! Just because he has fine eyes I suppose, and a taking smile!”
It never reached Pen who was busy with her own thoughts. She knew in her heart without reason, without arguments that the charge was false, but she was searching for reasons that would convince a man. Her instinct led her unerringly to the weak spots of the case against Counsell.
“Why should he leave his pistol behind to convict him?” she asked. “Why should he introduce himself to us under his right name?”
Pendleton waved this impatiently aside. “Oh, they always make some slips. That’s how they’re caught. From the first I felt there was something funny about him.”
“It was you who first asked him to stay,” said Pen indignantly.
“Yes. But I didn’t expect the house to be turned upside down to entertain him,” he retorted. “Something funny about him, skulking down the Bay like that. You remember how he said he preferred to be alone.”
“There’s nothing criminal in that!”
“I don’t know. Very strange he should slink out of the house without saying good-night to me. Perhaps he saw me reading the paper.”
Pen all but wrung her hands. This was men’s boasted logic. How could an intelligent person cope with it?
The little man got up with an important air.
“Don’t act in haste, Dad,” Pen pleaded earnestly. “Something tells me you will regret it. At least sleep on it!”
“He will be gone in the morning,” Pendleton said. A look of dismay appeared in his face. “Good Heavens! If he suspects anything he will push off at once!”
“Would you be sorry?” Pen asked astonished.
Pendleton was momentarily disconcerted. “Well no…of course not. But I must do my duty just the same… This is an important case. I must act with prudence. The eyes of the world will be upon us now.”
“Oh, the newspapers!” cried Pen. “They poison our lives!”
Pendleton was already at the door of the room. “Are you going to take him single-handed?” queried Pen.
He hesitated, puffing a little bit to conceal his discomposure. “The negroes…” he hazarded.
“Ellick and Theodo’!” said Pen with curling lip.
Pendleton rubbed his bald crown. “You’re right,” he said. “Worse than useless. I’ll go to the lighthouse for Weems Locket and his assistant.”
“You’ll have to pass the tent on the beach.”
“I’ll row around in my skiff,” said Pendleton craftily.
“With muffled oars?” she asked scornfully.
“Why yes,” he said innocently. He was impervious to her scorn.
“Dad, you must listen to me!” she cried.
“This is man’s work,” he said, swelling up. “You must leave it to me.”
A sick horror overcame her, that men were so insensible to the truth. What could one do with them? It was evident from the whole tone of the story she had read that men had already made up their minds as to Counsell’s guilt. Let one of them raise the cry and all were ready to give tongue as thoughtlessly as a pack of hounds. It was not the desire for justice that moved them but a sort of blood lust. They would try him with all their solemn farcical forms of justice, but none the less he would be railroaded to a shameful death!
“Dad! You mustn’t. You don’t know what you’re doing!” she murmured, swaying.
He stared his displeasure. “Pendleton, is it possible that you…that this young man…”
She contrived some sort of a laugh. “What nonsense!”
He turned out of the door saying: “I must act at once.”
Pen gasped: “Dad!” and keeled over on a chair. The swoon was perfectly genuine, but she lost consciousness only for the space of a breath, and thereafter her wits worked with the swiftness of desperation. He was deaf to truth, to reason, to sense, very well then, she must use a woman’s weapons against him. It was Pendleton’s transports of distress that gave her her cue.
“Penny, Penny, my child!” he was crying wildly.
Pen’s mother had died a young woman of a heart attack, and the fear that Pen might have inherited her weakness was ever present in the good, absurd little man’s breast. It was Pen’s final weapon. Be it said to her credit she had never used it before. She put her hand to her breast without speaking.
“Oh, my child! Look at me! Speak to me!” he implored.
“Help me to my room!” she whispered.
He made a manful attempt to pick her up in his arms, but she was as big as he. He could not lift her.
“What shall I do!” he wailed, wringing his hands.
“I can walk,” she said. “If you will help me.”
“But the stairs!”
“Let me lie down in the drawing-room until I feel better.”
He helped her across the hall and Pen sank down on the old linen-covered sofa with the broken springs. She was still pressing her hand to her breast in that mute gesture that drove him to distraction. In truth she was pale enough, but it was not from heart disease.
He made her as comfortable as he could; he brought her a glass of water. He scampered back into the hall to call up the doctor. After agitated appeals to other subscribers to get off the line he finally got Doctor Hance on Absolom’s Island. But evidently the doctor declined to make the long drive around the head of the creeks and down the impassable Neck road. Pendleton must come for him in his boat he said. In vain the distracted father pleaded that he could not leave his child; the doctor was firm.
Finally Pendleton said: “Very