“HADN’T YOU BETTER SWITCH off your lights?” suggested Miss Withers.
“But how can I see to drive?” protested Oscar Piper. “I don’t know these roads nor this car. After all, Hildegarde …!”
“If we can’t see, we can’t be seen,” the schoolteacher told him. There was moonlight enough so that after the inspector’s eyes became accustomed to the dimness he could steer the borrowed roadster along an approximation of the middle of the winding country highway.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t do all this in the morning,” Piper was complaining.
“Nonsense, Oscar!” she said. “We’ll trap our key witness. Drag a man out of bed when he’s heavy with sleep and you’ll get the truth out of him. He won’t have his mind keyed up to lying—it’s an old dodge, but I’m staking everything on the chance that it will work.”
“Just to smash an alibi?” Piper asked.
She nodded. “The best alibi in the world,” she said softly. They rode on up the hill, with a stone wall on the right. Miss Withers knew that beyond the stone wall was a green pasture, a pasture with a Yellow Transparent apple tree in the middle of it. But there was no sign tonight of the mare and the red foal—both were undoubtedly safe within their sadly mortgaged stable.
Suddenly the inspector jammed on the brakes. “Look!” he cried. “Tinker must have left some men on guard, after all!”
He stopped the car and both of them stared up the hill toward the Gingerbread House which loomed darkly against the stars. There was a faint flicker of flame….
“The captain would have stationed policemen, not Camp Fire Girls,” she pointed out acidly. Suddenly she found it difficult to breathe. “We seem to be just in time, Oscar, there’s something very wrong going on here.”
He nodded. “You stay here in the car and I’ll go see,” he said. He fumbled in the door pocket of the car.
“O-o-oh no, you won’t,” Miss Withers retorted. “I’m staying right next to you, Oscar Piper.”
They got out of the car and went swiftly up the hill. The light still flickered, tiny yet clear.
“It’s awfully close to the rear wing of the house!” Miss Withers whispered.
So it was. Indeed, the fire flared against the very wall of the house. As they came closer they could see that now and again a dark figure moved between them and the light.
The inspector took his hand out of his pocket and there was a police automatic in his fist. “Tinker’s,” he explained in a low whisper. “I hope he keeps it well oiled.”
They crept closer, still in the shadow of the stone wall. But the dark figure which moved about the feeble fire took no note of them.
“Wait, Oscar!” Miss Withers begged with trembling voice. “Wait and see what he’s doing.”
They were within fifty yards of the house. “I know what he’s doing—he’s setting fire to the place!” Piper returned hoarsely. “It’s arson, Hildegarde.”
Miss Withers whispered that there were worse crimes than arson. “Wait—wait and watch!”
They wormed their way closer, slipping from shrub to shrub in the garden. Still the dark figure remained dim and mysterious. At times it seemed to be performing a sort of weird dance around the growing flames.
“Pouring on kerosene!” explained Piper, barely moving his lips. “Good Lord, he’s trying to burn down the place and everybody in it.”
The red light grew higher, red flames licking along the wooden siding, rising above a window frame…. The window was open and inside a flaring curtain was licked up in an instant.
“I’m going …” said the inspector. But Miss Withers gripped him with all her strength.
“No, Oscar! Not yet!”
The shadowy figure reappeared. It was a man with something in his hand.
“He’s got an ax!” gasped Piper. “Must be mad as a hoot-owl!”
But the mysterious figure was crouching beneath the window, crying out in a high-pitched, hysterical voice, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Inside the house a woman screamed horribly. The inspector rose to his feet and went forward on tiptoe, Miss Withers still close at his heels. They were out in the open now, but the man who cried “Fire!” had no eyes for them.
He stood near a side doorway which opened out into the garden by a stone step and the ax was upraised. Suddenly a woman, still screaming, burst from the house. It was Mattie Thomas, in spite of her fat body sprinting like a deer. She missed the step, landed sprawling in the grass and scuttled, still howling, into the shrubbery.
The man with the ax never moved. There was light enough from the burning house so that Miss Withers could see a man inside the bedroom, a man who struggled into his trousers and clutched frantically at household treasures on bureau and wall. It was Abe Thomas.
“Now!” cried the schoolteacher and let go the inspector. He made one magnificent plunge and caught the shadowy figure in a flying tackle. The two men went down in a heap together, the ax flying harmlessly to one side.
To Miss Withers’s relief she saw that only the inspector got up. He was holding his antagonist helpless with a neat arm-lock.
Miss Withers was not too surprised to see that it was young Don Gregg who writhed beneath the inspector’s grasp.
It was at this moment that Abe Thomas, his arms full of miscellaneous objects, burst out of the doorway. He stopped short, dropping boxes and clothes. “What—what—” That was all he could say. His mouth opened and stayed open.
Don Gregg was sobbing, great dry gasping sobs. “Let me up!” he begged. “Let me go!” His face was horrible in the red glare.
“Get the bracelets out of my hip pocket, will you, Hildegarde?” said the inspector. “I’ve got my hands full.”
She came closer but she did not follow out her instructions to the letter. She looked down at Don Gregg sympathetically. “You wanted to kill him, didn’t you?”
Gregg nodded wildly. “I was going to kill him and then throw the body inside the house and let it burn….”
Miss Withers found the handcuffs. “On his wrists, Hildegarde!” cried the inspector.
But she still hesitated. Abe Thomas was making ineffectual efforts at beating down the flames, but she called him. “Help me, will you?” she said.
Thomas came toward her, still too dazed by sleep and terror to speak articulately. “Wha—” he began. “Wha—”
“Hold his wrists so I can slip these handcuffs on,” suggested Miss Withers. Thomas grasped Don Gregg’s hands, held them up….
Then Thomas squealed shrilly as the schoolteacher quietly snapped the cuffs across his own wrists and stepped back.
“You can let your prisoner up, Oscar,” she said calmly. “Relax,” she told the young man. “He murdered your father, but the law will take care of him for you in due time.”
Abe Thomas chose that moment to strike down at the inspector’s head with the heavy manacles, but it was a dodge that Oscar Piper had met too many times during the course of his twenty-six years on the force. He dropped the surprised Don Gregg, ducked neatly to one side and drove his knee into his assailant’s groin with disastrous results for the old family retainer. Abe Thomas lay down on the grass and moaned. It was all over.
Young Gregg looked wistfully toward the ax. “Ah-ah!” said Miss Withers. “Let him stay there—it’s more important to put out the fire.”
As a matter of fact, the blaze was subdued more easily than the schoolteacher had feared—far more easily than Mattie Thomas, as it happened. The fat cook came out of the bushes to fling herself upon her manacled and helpless husband with moist protestations of eternal devotion. When the writhing captive succeeded in kicking her off she attempted valiantly to assail the inspector. But finally she too was put under control.
A very chastened Don Gregg knelt on the grass. “I must have gone crazy,” he said slowly. “But it seemed the only way. I didn’t dare come to you—I was afraid I’d go back behind the bars if I admitted what I’d have to admit.”
“So you thought of this gentle method of righting the scales of justice?” Miss Withers asked.
He nodded. “I only had the kerosene from a couple of old lamps,” he admitted. “It wasn’t much of a bonfire.”
The inspector rubbed his burnt and blackened palms. “It was enough!” he decided. Then he turned upon Miss Withers, who looked in the pale moonlight more like a scarecrow than the figure of avenging righteousness that she felt. “Hildegarde, don’t you think that the time has come when you could safely take an old friend into your confidence and tell him what in the merry hell all this is about?”
The schoolteacher pointed down toward Abe Thomas, whose face was a pale mask of reptilian hatred. “You’ve got your murderer in handcuffs,” she said calmly. “What more do you want?”
“Sometime—at your convenience—I’d like to know just how we solved this mystery,” the inspector said wistfully.