Tom Ossington's Ghost Part 8

"Something in the kitchen? If you did hear something in the kitchen, I'll shoot that something as dead as a door nail."

Madge caught up the revolver, which she had placed on the table.

"Madge, for goodness sake don't do anything ras.h.!.+"

"I will do something rash--if you call it rash to shoot at sight any scoundrel who ventures to intrude on my premises at this hour of the night!--and I'll do it quickly! Do you think I'm going to be played the fool with because I'm only a woman! I'll soon prove to you I'm not--that is, if it is to be proved by a little revolver practice."

Madge spoke at the top of her voice, her words seeming to ring through the house with singular clearness. But whether this was done for the sake of encouraging herself and Ella, or with the view of frightening a possible foe, was an open question. She strode out of the room with an air of surprising resolution. Ella clinging to her skirts and following her, simply because she dare not be left behind. As it chanced, the kitchen door was open. Madge marched bravely into the room--only to find that her display of courage was thrown away, since the room was empty.

Having made sure of this, Madge turned to Ella with a smile on her face--though her cheeks, like her friend's, were whiter than they were wont to be.

"You see, we are experiencing some of the disadvantages of two lone, lorn young women being the solitary inhabitants of a rural residence--Jack Martyn scores."

For answer Ella burst into tears. Madge took her in her arms--as well as she could, for the candle in one hand and the revolver in the other.

"Don't cry, girl; there's nothing to cry at. You'll laugh at and be ashamed of yourself in the morning. I'll tell you what--I'll make an exception!--you shall have half my bed, and for the rest of the night we'll sleep together."

CHAPTER V

A REPRESENTATIVE OF LAW AND ORDER

The next morning, information was given to a pa.s.sing policeman of the events of the night, and in the course of the day an officer came round from the local station to learn particulars. Madge received him in solitary state; she had refused Ella's offer to stop away from business to keep her company, declaring that for that day, at any rate, she would be safe from undesirable intruders.

The officer was a plain-clothes man, middle-aged, imperfectly educated, with the stolid, matter-of-fact, rather stupid-looking countenance which one is apt to find an attribute of the detective of fact, rather than fiction.

"You say you didn't see him?"

"I saw the back of him."

"Hum!" This stands for a sort of a kind of a sniff.

"Would you know him if you saw him again?"

"From the glimpse which I caught of him last night I certainly shouldn't. It was pretty dark, and he was twenty or thirty yards down the road when I first caught sight of his back."

"You didn't follow him?"

"We did not."

Madge smiled as she thought of how such a suggestion would have been received had it been made at the time.

"He came in through the back window and left through the front?"

"That's it."

"And he took nothing?"

"No--but he left something behind him--he left this."

Madge produced the half-sheet of paper which Ella had picked up from the floor.

"You're sure this was his property?"

"I'm sure it isn't ours, and I'm sure we found it in this room just after he left it."

The officer took the paper; read it, turned it over and over; looked it up and down; read it again. Then he gave his mouth a rather comical twist; then he looked at Madge with eyes which he probably intended to be pregnant with meaning.

"Hum!" He paused to cogitate. "I suppose you know there's been a burglary here before?"

"I know nothing of the kind. We have only been here six weeks, and are quite strangers to the place."

"There was. Something more than a year ago. The house was empty at the time. The man who did it was caught at the job--and our chap got pretty well knocked about for his pains. But that wasn't the only time we've had business at this house; our fellows have been here a good many times."

"Neither my friend or I had the slightest notion that the house had such a reputation."

"I daresay not. It's been empty a good long time. I expect the stories which were told about it were against its letting."

"What sort of stories?"

"All sorts--nonsense, most of them."

"Were the people who lived here named Ossington?"

"Ossington?" The officer screwed his mouth up into the comical twist which it seemed he had a trick of giving it. "I believe it was, or, at any rate, something like it. A queer lot they were--very."

"Do you see what's written as a heading on that piece of paper?"

The officer's glance returned to the writing.

"'Tom Ossington's Ghost!'--yes, I noticed it, but I don't know what it means--do you?"

"Except that if the name of the people who lived here last was Ossington, it would seem as if last night's affair had some reference to the house's former occupants."

"Yes--it would look as if it had--when you come to look at it in that way." He was studying it as if now he had made up his mind to understand it clearly. "It looks as if it was some sort of cryptogram, and yet it mightn't be--it's hard to tell." He wagged his head. "I'll take it to our chaps, and see what they can make of it. Some men are better at this sort of thing than others." Folding up the paper he placed it in his pocket-book. "Am I to understand that you can give no description of the burglar--that there's no one you suspect?"

"I don't know that it amounts to suspicion--but there was a man hanging about here in rather a singular fas.h.i.+on whom I can't help thinking might have had a finger in the pie."

"Can you describe him?"

"He was about my height--I'm five feet six and a half--thick set, and I noticed he walked in a sort of rolling way; I thought he was drunk at first, but I don't believe he was. He kept his hands in his trousers pockets, and he was very shabbily dressed, in an old black coat--I believe you call them Chesterfields--which was b.u.t.toned down the front right up to the chin--I doubt if he had a waistcoat; a pair of old patched trousers--and I'm under the impression that his boots were odd ones. He had an old black billyc.o.c.k hat, with no band on, crammed over his eyes, iron-grey hair, and a fortnight's growth of whiskers on his cheeks and chin. He had a half impudent, half hang-dog air--altogether just the sort of person to try his hand at this sort of thing."

"I'll take down that description, if you'll repeat it."

She did repeat it--and he did take it down, with irritating slowness.