In the Moment living room a singing silence had succeeded the words of greeting and the early small talk of arrival. All eyes were fixed on Walter Ghost.
Rainfall, a long cigar between his teeth, was still relatively calm. Saxon, nervous and awkward, crossed and recrossed his bony knees. Miss Moment, bolt upright in her chair, was tensely impatient. The professor was almost bouncing with excitement.
For a number of intolerable seconds the amateur continued to draw placidly upon his cigarette while he arranged his thoughts. His own eyes were on a picture halfway up the wall. Then, with a gesture unconsciously dramatic, he dropped his stub into a receiver and turned his gaze upon his audience.
“A very curious case, Chandler,” he observed almost casually, and although he addressed the professor his friendly smile seemed to embrace them all. “For anything like a scientific explanation, we shall probably have to ask Rainfall. The motivation is not entirely clear to me. It goes back, all of it, as probably you are tired of hearing me say, a great many years. I ventured to think about twenty years, and I missed by a single year. Oddly enough, the origins of the case were even more fantastic and extraordinary than the murders which grew out of them.”
“You predicted that, also, I think,” said the doctor with a smile.
“I have always felt that that should be the case, anyway. Well, it all began with a hailstorm in the state of Connecticut in the year 1911.”
“A hailstorm!” cried the professor.
“You have heard legendary stories about the size of hailstones. Stories have come down to us of stones as large as paving blocks. I don’t quite believe that. Anyway, these stones that I am talking about must have been large. It was an unusual storm.
“But I am already ahead of my story. I should have said, perhaps, that it all began with the hazing of a young man in the town of Walsingham. The hailstorm came later, although, if it had not been for the hailstorm, as I read it, there would have been no murders twenty years afterward. There is a preparatory school at Walsingham, a small one, where then, as now, secret societies were, and are, forbidden. The result of such a rule can be predicted. Unauthorized fraternities sprang up among the bolder spirits, and one of these seems to have been a singularly fantastic one. It was called by its members, with youthful bravado, the ‘Terrible Ten.’ It boasted only ten members, all, apparently, daredevils.”
Ghost smiled. “I don’t suppose they were really so terrible, but no doubt they thought they were. Certainly some of them turned out badly, though. The ringleaders of this group were Nicholas Allenwood, Amos Blauvelt, Patrick Stacey, and Hubert Gaunt. You may recognize the names, as I did, when I had been over the books of that period. Allenwood is obviously Nicholas Aye; when he changed his name he simply took the first letter of Allenwood and spelled it out. This is the purest speculation on my part, I must admit, but I am confident I am right.
“Amos Blauvelt is unquestionably Amos Bluefield ; the latter name is a translation of the former—from the Dutch into English. Stacey we know to have been Lear’s family name; and Gaunt, apparently, saw no reason for making any change and so stuck to his own. Make no mistake about these changes. In my opinion they had nothing to do with the crimes that followed years afterward. They were convenient changes, that is all. Stacey became Lear for stage purposes, Blauvelt became Bluefield probably because he sensed a Jewish flavor about Blauvelt and didn’t like it; I really don’t know. Allenwood became a bootlegger and perhaps decided to spare his family. Let us hope so. Save for Gaunt’s brother, Horace, whom we have still in our midst, the families would all appear to be dead, which is just as well.
“Well,” continued the narrator more briskly, “there came to the school a freshman named Tempest—Gregory Tempest. The others—Allenwood, Blauvelt, et al.—were sophomores and juniors, except for one who was a senior. It was a mixed company, you see. This fellow Tempest was what is called, I believe, a ‘regular guy,’ and as there was soon to be a vacancy in the ‘Terrible Ten,’ he was invited to join. He agreed, nothing loath, and in time plans were drawn for his initiation—always a weird and ridiculous piece of ritual and ceremony. The other members of the group, perhaps I should say, were named Frankhouse, Dawson, Delancey, Morgan, Moore, and Ker.”
Saxon cried out in amazement. “Ker!” he said.
“Yes, it’s almost beyond belief, isn’t it? I doubt if any more remarkable coincidence ever occurred. In the group, besides those readily identifiable as the dead men, there were three other names that had figured, more or less, in the murder case. You noted the others, of course: Dawson and Moore.”
“Dawson?” asked the professor.
“He’s the young reporter who, as I understand it, sensed the body of Gaunt under the shroud of Burke’s statue. He has since been prominent in the investigation. Of course, Dawson and Moore are quite common names, but Ker is not. I was immensely puzzled. If there had been a Greene in that list I think I should have thrown up the job! But, of course, Dawson, in propria persona, was out of the picture. He was too young to have been one of the Ten. Rufus Ker, on the other hand, was too old. But I was bound to wonder whether a son of Ker’s or an uncle of Dawson’s, or something of the sort, was not involved.
“Well, it was a frightful muddle. I put it out of my mind for a bit and concentrated on what had happened. You see, I was quite definitely looking for something out of the ordinary involving three men—Bluefield, Gaunt, and Lear. It was these names that turned my attention at once to the Ten. Happening across Allenwood was a bit of luck. Not that I did not have him in mind—he was so obviously a part of the murder conspiracy, in one rôle or another—but I had erred in believing him to be a minor figure. I now believe him to have been a very outstanding figure. Certainly, I have learned, he was the headliner in all the antics of the Ten.
“So much for the dramatis personæ. You must keep them all in mind.”
He lighted a cigarette, puffed twice at it, and threw it away.
“Walsingham is an interesting town,” he continued. “In earlier years—earlier even than the time I am talking about—it was, after a fashion, a racing town. Just outside the limits a few miles, and nearer to Walsingham than the next village, was an abandoned race track—a one-mile track— which once had been a flourishing resort.” He laughed suddenly. “Again, I’m getting ahead of my story. But the race track is part of it.
“To resume: Allenwood and his band of nuisances determined to give young Tempest an initiation calculated to chill his blood. They had never gone quite so far before. In preparation for the event a considerable quantity of liquor had been consumed by everybody concerned—which, also, I need not add, was against the rules of the school. Thus fortified, they all proceeded to an empty house, just on the edge of town, which was reputed to be haunted.
“What went forward in the haunted house is not certain—probably a lot of absurd rites and a lot of gibberish. I imagine that more liquor was consumed, then and there. At any rate, late that night, Allenwood, who had left the group, returned from town driving a hearse. Yes, a hearse. Empty, of course! He had rented or borrowed it from a local undertaker. They proposed to place young Mr. Tempest in the hearse and drive him around the town, as the concluding number of their program. You see the amusing sort of fellows they were!” commented Ghost dryly.
“Good gracious!” said Holly Moment, shrinking a little nearer to Saxon.
“I don’t suppose Tempest cared,” continued Ghost. “He was probably too drunk to be affected much. Anyway, he was placed in the hearse, or he climbed in, and the unholy procession started around the town. Nobody had noticed, or nobody cared, that a storm was brewing. All this was in the early spring, with winter still loitering in the neighborhood. It was still cold, and Tempest, in the hearse, was probably the most comfortable of the band. However, they had bound him, hand and foot, as part of the scheme of things, and they had put a huge placard on the side of the hearse. You can imagine what the thing said!”
“‘Dead Man Inside!’” said Holly Moment and Rainfall, at the same instant.
“Exactly. You begin to see, now, what happened; how, like a pantoum, the story begins to round on itself and make a pattern. ‘Dead Man Inside!’ And Tempest, drunk, was as good as dead. On the driver’s box were Allenwood and Gaunt, and the rest of the precious company followed on foot, singing and carrying on. The town turned out to see them, but nobody thought of interfering. The doors at the back of the hearse were left open, and one of the boys—I fancy it was Bluefield—sat just inside, with his legs dangling. All this detail comes from an old file which I dug out of a country newspaper office in Walsingham. Perhaps the man who sat inside was Lear. It’s a detail that wasn’t reported.
“And then—to make the story short—the storm broke. It broke over them on the other side of town, as the procession headed out toward the open country. ‘The rains descended and the floods came.’ And the rain came down in large cold drops that became in a little time hailstones. The old newspaper says the stones were as large as walnuts, which is quite probable. They pelted down upon the hearse, and upon the horses that drew it, and upon the procession that followed. At a loud and sudden clap of thunder the horses took fright, and in a minute there was such a runaway as probably never had occurred before in the history of the world.
“The procession disbanded at once. Those on foot hurried back to town without stopping to worry about the group that still clung to the hearse. And the horses girded up their loins and ran furiously out into the open country, assaulted at every step by the great hailstones and more and more frightened by every fresh thunderclap that burst over them. Allenwood, who had plenty of nerve, stood upright on the swaying seat, trying to get the animals under control. He had to give it up. There was only one thing to do: to keep the horses in the road—full of ruts as it was—for if they left the highway and ran into the prairie alongside there would be a spill, he knew, that would endanger the lives of everybody in or on the vehicle.
“And inside—you can imagine! Tempest, bound hand and foot, rolled and thumped from side to side, now crashing against one wall and now against the other, until his face and body were bruised and lacerated and all his drunkenness had left him. I imagine, by that time, the drunkenness had passed for all of them.
“Then the runaway reached the abandoned race track, and in the mind of Allenwood was born a tremendous idea. In its way it was almost epic. Since the horses must run until they fell exhausted, he determined to swing them through the gate and onto the track, where they might at least run on a smooth surface.”
Ghost shook his head. “What a picture!” he said. “Can’t you see it? By a miracle he negotiated the gate safely and got the hearse onto the track; and then those horses, under the scourging lash of the hail, circled that mile track three times—the cumbersome hearse swinging and swaying at their heels! Allenwood’s face was cut by the icy rain and stones as if it had been lashed by knotted strings. And the horses ran and ran, mad with terror, until they were nearly dropping with exhaustion. An incredible picture! There is all the quality of a nightmare in that flying hearse, with its waving black plumes and plunging horses, circling a deserted race track under a sky torn by lightning and made hideous by thunder. The episode is almost monstrous, and I suspect it is without precedent.
“However, I am getting rhetorical. What happened was this: Completely out of hand, at length, the horses left the track and plunged toward an iron fence that bounded the course. A shocking accident impended, and Allenwood and Gaunt, on the box, abandoned the hearse. They both jumped, rolled over a few times, and came up, miraculously, with only minor bruises. The man who had ridden inside with Tempest had long since jumped for safety and was far behind upon the road, with a twisted ankle, limping back toward town. Then there were a grinding crash and showers of flying glass, a sickening moment for the man inside, and in the end—for Tempest—complete blackness.”
“Dead?” asked the professor after a long moment of silence.
“They thought so,” answered Ghost. “Allenwood and Gaunt had a look at him, and they believed him to be dead. So they left him there, left the horses there, still kicking at the traces, and fled back to town as hard as their legs could take them. On the road they met the man who had jumped first, I suppose, and later they met all the other members of the Ten. I assume this, and I assume they all took an oath of silence, for when the performance was investigated—as of course it was—nobody knew a thing about it.
“But the townspeople had seen some of the band, and so it was brought home to the Ten. Allenwood, Blauvelt, Gaunt, Stacey, and a couple of others were expelled.”
“And Tempest?” asked the doctor.
“Was picked up, next morning, half dead. He had a broken leg, and many less serious injuries. Exposure, too, had all but murdered him, and for some time he lay at the point of death. In the end he recovered and left the school—naturally enough, perhaps.”
There was another silence, broken this time by Saxon.
“And you believe that this Tempest had held a grudge all these years and that it was he who killed Bluefield and the others?”
Ghost nodded. “I throw out that suggestion,” he answered. “Is it plausible?”
“It’s plausible enough, I suppose,” growled the professor. “As you tell that amazing story, Walter, it’s very plausible, too; and assuredly, since you say so, it did happen. The thing to do, then, is to run down Tempest and accuse him?”
“Possibly—and if you think we have the right. After all, he had considerable provocation.”
“But did he?” asked Holly Moment. “It was all frantic, of course; insane, for that matter; but, of course, no actual harm had been intended.”
“Well,” said Ghost, smiling, “I said I wanted advice in the matter.”
Rainfall removed his long cigar from his lips. “You suggested that I might find a scientific explanation of the case,” he observed tentatively. “You mean, of course, that some explanation is necessary to make plausible and understandable so long and well nursed a grudge. I suppose it is. I should imagine that only this man Tempest could justify it, and then only by his later experiences. The question is bound to arise: What was the effect, later on in life, of all that Tempest went through?”
“So I think,” agreed Ghost. “I don’t mean that I think it drove him insane—although long brooding, I believe, often has that effect. There would perhaps be other consequences.”
“But have you a line on this Tempest?”
“I think so. I’ve been over the whole case a number of times, and I believe my conclusions to be sound. I believe Tempest committed the murders, and I believe Tempest can be found. The question, as I see it, is: Do we want to find him?”
Saxon sat up quickly in his chair. “Listen!” he said. “There’s an extra edition. Do you hear?”
For a moment they all listened to the powerful accents of a newsboy some distance up the street.
“Bluefield!” said Saxon. “It’s our case. He certainly said ‘Bluefield.’ Didn’t he, Mr. Ghost? There wouldn’t be an extra edition unless it were important. Wait a minute and I’ll get a paper.”
He dashed out of the house and went in search of the shouting boy, who was slowly approaching on the other side of the street. In a few minutes he was back, his eyes sparkling, his tongue thick with excitement—bursting with information.
“Done!” he cried. “We’re all of us sold, Mr. Ghost! Can you beat it? A crazy old shoemaker named Johnson has confessed to all the murders!”