THE NINTH LIFE

"Gordon speaking, Father. If you're not otherwise fixed, can I invite you to lunch with me at the Junior Nomads?"

"Why, certainly, Gordon—certainly! What time—it's just on one now?"

"Oh, about one-thirty."

"Suits me admirably. Very nice indeed of you, Gordon."

Gees replaced the receiver, and for a few seconds stood looking down at the instrument, Kefra's telegram still in his hand.

"I wish I'd cultivated the old boy a bit more while I had the chance," he mused.

He was in the entrance hall of the club when his father appeared. They took chairs in the lounge for a dry sherry apiece, and General Green looked with satisfaction at his son as he put his glass down after a first sip.

"Very good idea," he observed, "and a far more healthy preface to a meal than all those poisonous cocktails. And how did you find things on the estate? Is Carter keeping things in good order?"

"In my opinion, the best man you have ever had there," Gees answered. "But before we come to that, Father, there was a question I wanted to ask you about that story you told me the other day."

"Ah! About that Kefra woman's antecedents, you mean?"

Gees refrained from squirming. He said: "Yes, and the other people in the story. The man in it—the one you said was an agent provocateur. Was he ever caught, do you know?"

The general shook his head. "He vanished completely."

"Did you ever see him?"

"No. I had his description given me."

"Then I suggest," Gees said slowly, "that he was a small man, with a not very dark complexion, and remarkably young-looking blue eyes. Very striking eyes, incongruous in such a face as his, though I can't describe his face as it was thirty-eight years ago, naturally. I suggest further that his name was Saleh." He spelled the name out.

"Ah!" his father exclaimed softly.

"There was another woman in it, you told me," Gees said. "One who was killed in a particularly brutal way. You knew her name?"

"Not till after she was dead," the general answered. "In that service, we do not deal largely in names, which anyone may assume."

"Does it matter about revealing the dead woman's name now, at this length of time?" Gees inquired after a pause. "Sadie Hillman, wasn't it?—American."

"Gordon, you have got access to records in some way!" the general barked at him. "That is—there is a leakage—I must—"

"I assure you, Father, there has been no leakage. You can rely on my keeping absolutely still, Father," Gees assured him rather earnestly, "especially since the story concerns you in the way it does." He drank the rest of his sherry.

"Yes. Certainly Gordon—certainly. But—well, you have amazed me. That you should know both those names!"

In turn he put down an empty glass and rose to his feet.

"I must say, Gordon, my opinion of your activities in that office of yours has changed considerably since—er—since you dropped that infernally vulgar advertisement about mumps to murder," his father, said, over their lunch. "The cases in which your name has come to public notice, and now this present instance of unexpected knowledge, go to show that your work has a certain efficiency about it. Ah! I suppose you would not—er—disclose any of the sources from which you obtain information? Such as those names, for instance?"

"Since you were once in intelligence, you ought to know anything of that sort is quite impossible," Gees told him.

"Yes—yes, of course, and I cannot resent your discretion. No. And although it may sound a strange thing to say to one's own son, it gratifies me exceedingly that you and I get on together so much better than we did a year or two ago. In fact, at times I begin to feel almost proud of you, Gordon."

"Sentiment entirely reciprocated, Father," Gees said, and managed a smile. "Let me give you a hand with your coat."

The general adjusted the coat collar carefully, and took his gloves from its pocket. "I want you to come and dine with me one evening next week," he remarked, "and bring that Miss Brandon of yours."

The inference was altogether too plain, Gees reflected as he went on his way. Since the old boy had discovered that Eve Madeleine was well connected, niece of one of his friends of service days and daughter of another military man he had known, he had not been sparing of these hints, though he had never gone as far as this before. But, Gees told himself, that dinner would be eaten without him; on Saturday Kefra would return to London—before the definite invitation materialized, he hoped.

His yale key proved sticky in the lock of the outer door of his flat, as it often did, and he cursed it softly, volubly, fiercely, with more intense irritation than ever before. Entering, he closed the door, shied his hat viciously to the far end of the corridor, and entered Miss Brandon's room to find her looking up from her chair at the desk with a sort of questioning surprise. He said—"I'm sorry, Miss Brandon—that infernal lock annoyed me."

Refraining from reply, she noted that the hitherto inevitable cigarette case did not appear. Presently she moved some papers on the desk and observed: "I put all the worthwhile inquiries on your desk, Mr. Green, and disposed of the rest as usual. There is one—"

"You can fetch 'em all back and inform the inquirers that I am too occupied to undertake any more investigations," he interrupted.

"One," she persisted coldly, "which I felt sure would interest you, in which you are asked to try what the police have given up."

It ought to have been a matter of eager interest to him, she knew, but he shook his head and frowned—at her persistence, she felt.

"Turn it down with the rest, Miss Brandon," he said curtly, and, taking out the cigarette case, selected one for himself but failed—for the first time in their acquaintance—to offer the case to her.

"Then I will come and fetch them now," she said coldly.

When she had taken the letters away, leaving him alone at his desk, he leaned back in his chair and reflected.

"Oh, Kefra! Kefra!" he whispered.

Again he might have been out of time, for it seemed that no time at all had passed when Miss Brandon, entering, put a cup of tea down on the desk before him, and stood to say: "If you wish for a second cup, Mr. Green, you have only to ring," with an icy aloofness.

He stared at her, with a flashing thought of how, usually, he ambled into her room and sat on the desk for tea. He wanted to ask what on earth was wrong, but instead said: "Thank you, Miss Brandon, this will be enough," with just as frigid politeness as she had handed him.

A half hour later, with the tea untouched and cold on the desk, he got up, grim and angry, and went to Miss Brandon's room.

"I want—that inquiry you spoke about, Miss Brandon. If you'll let me have it I'll see if it's worth investigation." Just as well look at it, though he had no intention of doing anything about it.

"I have already declined it for you, Mr. Green."

"Already?" he snapped. "But how could you?"

"By telephone, as the inquiry requested. The—Fothergill, the name is. He states—here is the inquiry—he was most anxious to lose no time, and would you telephone as quickly as possible."

"But—yes—well, telephone where? I can telephone again if I like the look of it. Whereabouts—what's his number?"

"He was at Brown's Hotel, which is all the address there was on the notepaper. You see, Mr. Green, this inquiry came in yesterday morning, and Mr. Fothergill expected some reply by this morning at the latest—so he told me. I caught him just before he left the hotel for Paddington, he said, so we have no address. You could trace him through Brown's, I expect, if you feel like taking up the case. This is the inquiry."

He shook his head, and did not take the letter she offered. "No," he said. "I felt a bit curious, that's all, thank you."

He went back to his own room, reflecting that you could not get just such a note as was in her voice for that reply by rubbing one slab of ice against another. And even the interest he might have got out of perusing that inquiry, over a case the police had given up, was denied him! Ah, well! Only four days to wait.

CHAPTER 10. — THE CAT PURRS

THE clasp of her arms warm about him, the sweetness of her lips on his, the wonderful, unearthly fragrance that was one with her as a breath about him, and the caressing tenderness of her voice—

"I come to kiss you in the night—" Wakening, he knew it was a dream and no more, yet, it seemed to him that the fragrance lingered. Then at a sound somewhere in the flat he sat up: a steady, persistent, softish sound—in this room, was it? It went on and on, softly, ominously—Ah! Not in the room at all, of course; he must have left the water running in the bathroom.

He got out of bed and, without troubling to switch on the light in his room went to the bathroom and switched on there, to see that all four taps were closed, not even dripping, let alone running. Into his sitting room—nothing there, and still, faintly, the noise went on, a pulsing, steady sound, though fainter now than when he had first heard it. If only he could locate it!

He tried his office, and it was a little louder, but did not emanate from any point in that room, he felt sure. Then, as he came into the corridor again, he knew it must have come from the one room in which he had not yet turned on the light, his own bedroom. There was no doubt about it; the sound came from some point beyond that half-opened door.

Reaching up before he went in, he switched on the light, and as he entered the sound ceased altogether. But now he had placed it, recognized it as one thing and one only, unquestionably.

The purring of a cat. And he knew there was no cat anywhere in the place; all windows except that in the bedroom were closed and fastened, and, since there was a biting southeast wind blowing, he had allowed that one window only an inch slit of opening at the top. He went all over the flat again, with the negative result he had anticipated. There was no cat.

Again he heard the purring of unseen cats.

Again, as he entered the bedroom after that second tour, he smelled the scent that was Kefra's and hers only. Smelt it very faintly—or imagined it. What were the words he had dreamed of hearing?

"I come to kiss you in the night—"

A sentence broken off, not completed—because the intense impression of reality the dream had given had wakened him, perhaps. Yet it had been a dream and no more, could have been nothing more.

The purring had not been a dream; he had heard it.

So sure was he that he had heard it, in this room, that he got out his Webley and, placing it under his pillow, left the light on when he got back into bed. If any cat showed up, he told himself, purring or yowling, or silent, London would be a cat short in the morning. Not that he expected—

Oh, blast the thing! Some acoustic oddity, letting the purr into his room from the flat above or the one below, probably. But just let that cat show itself, long enough for him to get a line on it!

It did not.

He smoked five cigarettes, and dozed off with the first dawn. His charwoman's entrance with tea awakened him, and as he drank the tea he recollected that he had not given Kefra his address, so she could not write to him. Wait a bit, though—she knew the address, somehow, for she had sent that telegram.

Perhaps Tony had told her, at some time or other. Yet it was unlikely that Tony had recited: "Thirty-seven Little Oakfield Street, S.W. One," or that she had memorized it. Anyhow, she had the address, and with that as a certainty he got out of bed and padded barefooted in his pyjamas into Miss Brandon's office, where the charwoman had already placed the morning's sheaf of letters on the desk. The top one of all bore the postmark: Hedlington-cum-Carnworth, and, opening it, he took out a single sheet of paper, and read:

I will come to kiss you in the night—

No signature—none needed. Just the incomplete sentence, and, faintest of emanations, the scent that was one with her.

He put the telephone receiver to his ear. A woman's voice asked: "Is this Gees' Confidential Agency, please?" and he answered with a very short, "Yes, it is."

"Can I speak to Mr. Green, please?"

"Speaking."

"Mr. Green, I'm calling for Miss Brandon. She's got a slight chill, and will not be able to come to work today. She hopes to be quite recovered and back at the usual time tomorrow."

"Oh, well, tell her there's nothing to do, as usual—and what inquiries there are will take no harm by waiting, even if she takes tomorrow off as well. Give her my best wishes for a quick recovery."

It was the first time since he had engaged her that she had been absent like this, he reflected as he hung up. If she stayed away for any length of time, the place would seem cold. Altogether different, lacking her friendly presence—

Then he remembered: He was giving her notice, and closing down. Everything finished—Kefra only—so it would be, from now on.

He took an envelope from his breast pocket, extracted the single sheet of paper, and again read the nine words on it. How much had been dream, how much reality, before he had wakened in the night to hear a cat purring? As to that, how much had been dream and how much reality since he had entered Barnby Grange as daylight began to fail?

He might as well open the rest of the letters and look them over, assure himself that there was nothing requiring immediate reply. With that intent he rose from his chair, and sat down again at the summons of the telephone bell. He assured his caller that he was Mr. Green, and was asked to wait just one moment. Then a voice he knew: Inspector Tott, speaking.

"Good morning, Mr. Green. Are you busy?"

"Desperately," Gees answered. "So much to do I don't know which way to turn. What do you want?"

"Are you still interested in the Gravenor Mansions affair—the death of the Parkoot boy?"

"Nope. Not a little bit. Why—are you?"

"To some extent. There has been another case of exactly the same sort, with a girl of twelve as the victim, this time. No sign of assault or outrage, but the throat and breast torn by claws, just as in the case of that poor little Parkoot child. And no clawed beasts reported loose anywhere in the country. No tracks, either."

"Well, that sort of thing is not quite in your line, I should think. Why tell me about it?"

"For one thing," Tott said, "I don't like handing it direct to Mr. Briggs. For another, I thought it might interest you."

"What has Mr. Briggs got to do with it?" Gees growled.

"Nothing, directly. Quite possibly nothing indirectly."

"D'you want me to go and recite it all to him, then?"

"No, I don't think I'd ask you to do that," Tott answered slowly.

"Well, what made you think it might interest me?" Gees demanded.

"Because," Tott answered, very deliberately indeed, "although Mr. Briggs has naturally nothing to do with such a crime, as I see things it might possibly—I do not say it will—but it might possibly affect him. Indirectly, but then it would certainly interest you, his friend."

"Well, until it does, I'm not interested. And as nearly as I can see, there's not the slightest chance of a thing like that affecting Mr. Briggs in any way whatever. None of his friends have claws."

"This second case," Tott persisted, "is not in any of the papers yet. The body was discovered last night, and the discovery reported to an intelligent police inspector who had read about the Gravenor Mansions affair and noted the similarity of the cause of death. He got in touch with Crampton by telephone—"

"Why weigh all this out to me?" Gees interrupted harshly.

"Because—" Tott sounded quite ruffled—"and this is where Mr. Briggs may come in, indirectly—this body was found at a place called Barnby-under-Hedlington, in Gloucestershire. I'll put that no more plainly, but you see what I'm driving at, possibly."

"Don't be such a fool over a simple coincidence!" Gees shouted savagely into the receiver.

"Not coincidence, Mr. Green," Tott answered steadily. "However, since you choose to be nasty about it—"

"No—hold on—I apologize," Gees broke in desperately, "I've got a rotten head after a sleepless night, and—Crampton, you said. Is he going down there to consult about it?"

"No. He told me he's going to see if he can get Parkoot to let him have a master key to make search of—well, of a certain flat at Gravenor Mansions. Failing that, he's applying for a search warrant. But seeing how this might hit Mr. Briggs, and being able to spare the time, I'm going down to this Barnby-under-Hedlington to assure myself that the police down there don't jump too quickly at too many conclusions—for Mr. Briggs' sake."

"Stout feller—when are you starting?"

"Somewhere about twelve. I must look up a train—"

"Don't! I'll call for you at twelve and run you down by car."

"Well... yes, I could do that," Tott assented, rather dubiously. "But I thought you said you were busy."

"I am. I shall have to make holes in the atmosphere before twelve, but I'll call for you then. Must get a move on here, now. See you at twelve, and beat any train you can catch to the nearest station."

HE could not beat the Cheltenham Flyer, he knew, but, if Tott went by it, he would still be three-quarters of an hour or more distant from Barnby when he got out at Cheltenham. Half- past ten, now—he had an hour and twenty minutes before going to pick up Tott.

Of course that second case was a coincidence! It could be nothing else. But, strive as he would to convince himself of this, a second passenger arrived with him in the taxi at Gravenor Mansions, and his name was Fear.

In the entrance hall of the Mansions he faced Parkoot, just emerging from one of the lifts, and asked: "Inspector Crampton? Have you seen anything of him yet?"

"I've just taken him up, Mr. Green," the man answered.

"Then, if you will, take me up too."

They went up, and emerged to go along the spacious corridor to a door which Parkoot opened with his key. A uniformed constable faced them, in the luxuriously furnished lounge which gave access to the other rooms of the flat, and he forestalled his query.

"I understand Inspector Crampton is here. Will you tell him Mr. Green would like to see him for a moment?"

"Just hold on a minute—I'll see."

"You needn't wait, Parkoot," Gees said, and inwardly reflected that it was unusual, to say the least, for the caretaker of the place to let even a police inspector make a search of one of the tenants' apartments without witnessing his operations. But, with no demur, Parkoot retired and closed the door again, just as Crampton appeared, with yet another uniformed man looking over his shoulder.

"Ah! Good morning, Mr. Green. Got another line for us?"

Gees shook his head. "No more than to tell you this is a waste of time," he answered. "What do you expect to find here?"

Crampton's mouth closed, trapwise. Then he opened it again to ask, stiffly: "I conclude you have got wind of the second case?"

"Why should that second case bring you in here?" Gees countered.

"Because both the man and woman who were in this flat at the time Parkoot's child was abducted went to Barnby-under- Hedlington, and the second case followed on their arrival. Which may be a coincidence, and may not. I prefer not to take any chances on it."

"And as I asked before—what do you expect to find here?"

Over his shoulder Crampton spoke an answer to a question—"Yes, carry on, Sergeant." Then, with chill quietness: "I understand, Mr. Green, you spent some considerable time on the Force. That being so, your own common sense ought to tell you the answer to that question."

"Ah! Yes, I suppose it ought," Gees admitted equally coolly. "Have you any objection to my knowing—as a decidedly interested party, I may tell you—to my knowing the result of your search?"

"Interested? In what way interested?" Crampton demanded sharply.

"I must refer you to Inspector Tott for an answer to that."

"Well—" Crampton glanced at his wrist watch—"you may wait here till we have finished, if you like considering—" he appeared to relent slightly from his stiffness—"the line on the case you gave to us—just a little while back."

"Then I will wait," Gees said, in turn glancing at his watch. Not quite eleven o'clock—he could afford half an hour, and still be able to pick up Tott at the appointed time.

Crampton left him in company with the uniformed man guarding the door, and as the minutes dragged he heard the voices of the searchers, but could not distinguish what they said. Finishing on one side of the entrance lounge, they crossed it to tackle the rooms opposite. The man on the door occupied himself in an inspection of prints on the walls of the lounge, and Gees noted that every one was a picture of either ruins of old Egypt or some aspect of, evidently, the Nile. Kefra herself had chosen them—or had Saleh ibn Nahor been responsible?

Now, forced against his will to question whether the two deaths were in any way connected, and sure (he told himself he was absolutely sure) that Kefra was in no way connected with either tragedy, he felt that he wanted to know more about the blue-eyed little man who was neither old nor young, and yet looked both.

He served Kefra now, it appeared, yet equally it appeared that in the time of her meeting with Gees' father she had served him, or at least been in league with him. Combining Kefra's admitted association with the man thirty-eight years ago, and her slip which revealed his name as that of the wanted man, with what his father had told him, Gees felt justified in assuming that Saleh ibn Nahor he had encountered was the Saleh of his father's story. Yet here he was with Kefra, free and unsuspected!

So far changed, in nearly four decades, of course, that he bore no likeness to the Saleh who had either killed Sadie Hillman or instigated her death.

Yet, if that death were as Kefra had said one of an appointed nine due to other than human agency, how did Saleh come into it? As agent, perhaps, but not as instigator.

Again, if the tale of nine had been completed, how account for this tenth in Gloucestershire, except by regarding its likeness to the others as entirely coincidental?

Now, reviewing Kefra's story of a covenant which called for nine sacrifices, three at least of them being dear to her, he wanted to dismiss the whole thing as utter fantasy, and could not. She had made it too vivid, too real, as he had heard her tell it in the firelight.

BUT Saleh—Saleh had had certain trunks loaded on to the car, the evening of the day the Parkoot child had been kidnapped—by Saleh? He had set out with the car for Barnby Grange, some time that evening, and should have left London by a west road, headed for either Maidenhead or Aylesbury.

But, with any modern car, he might have gone out by Putney and Kingston, thrown out the suitcase with its grim contents, and then gone over Kingston bridge and borne northwest to come to Maidenhead by Windsor and Slough.

Yes, why—what possible motive was there? Was Kefra unwittingly employing a homicidal maniac? If so, how account for the claw-marks on the murdered child? Saleh's hands were normal enough—Gees had seen them as he waited at table, and—but the cats that had frightened the three maids away from the Grange! Had Saleh got those cats concealed somewhere. Were they—

Kefra had conjured up two great tawny cats to sit by the parapets of the moat bridge—or had she? Illusions, lasting a minute or less while Gees had gazed at them, and then ceasing to be when the strain of throwing the pictures of them on his brain became too much for her.

Great cats, small lionesses—the goddess Sekhmet had been portrayed as a woman with the head of a lioness. But suppose Kefra had shaped those illusions as guards for the bridge because there were real cats like them somewhere about the Grange. Supposing the real ones had got loose and killed that girl?

Had those real ones in like fashion killed the Parkoot child, after which Saleh had packed the body in the suitcase and disposed of it on his drive to Barnby Grange? If so, how had the cats got at the child in Gravenor Mansions? Some servant or attendant would have known if any such animals had been housed there; an animal, even of the cat tribe, big enough to kill a two-year-old child could hardly exist unseen in a place like that. Alternatively, had such an animal existed unseen in Kefra's flat, it could not have got at the child down on the ground floor, or could it, in Vincent's absence?

Is my magic strong?

The half-mocking question came back to his mind as he waited there with the placid, unimaginative constable. All his life he had made a hobby rather than a study of old religions and cults, always keeping the open mind he found so useful.

Of a truth her magic had been strong. Was Saleh a partner in it, master of or servant to her, or was he the agent and human vehicle of that still stronger magic of Sekhmet?

At that point Crampton appeared in the entrance hall, followed by his sergeant, who carried a rather soggy-looking roll of carpet under his arm. Gees looked a question.

"Found it in the bathroom, hung up to dry," Crampton explained. "Somebody washed it out and hung it there, but didn't wash quite hard enough. I'm taking it to see if tests will tell us whether what's left of the stains is human blood."

"It would have been burnt, if that were so," Gees said.

Crampton shook his head. "These flats are all-electric," he pointed out. "You couldn't burn anything here without leaving traces."

"Finding a carpet in the bathroom doesn't prove it was ever laid," Gees remarked. "I don't see this getting you much farther."

"This isn't a carpet, but a rug," Crampton said, "and—well, since you seem rather dubious, come and have a look here."

Gees followed him to a large room opening directly on to the entrance lounge, one in which, except for a low divan immediately opposite the door, and three little octagonal tables of ebony, inlaid with silver and ivory, was no furniture as the western mind regards it.

On a pile carpet of delicate, greenish blue were heaped cushions of crimson, blue of a slightly deeper shade than the carpet, and silver tissue, two heaps to each of the low tables.

One picture, a distant view of the island of Philaein sunset light, hung over the divan. The almost empty simplicity of the room had an effect of sensuousness. Then, looking where Crampton's finger pointed, Gees saw an oblong, about eight feet by six, in front of the divan, within which the heave pile of the carpet was flattened down smoothly as if by continuous pressure on it.

"That's where the rug was taken from," Crampton said, with satisfaction in his tone. "It's exactly the size of that flat patch."

"Is that so?" Gees managed to keep all concern of every kind out of the comment. "Well, thank you for my look-see, Inspector, and now I must hit the trail. But I think, if there were any chance of your finding what you expect on that rug, you'd have found something of the same sort on either cushions or carpet in here."

"Did you read the account of the postmortem?" Crampton asked.

"'Fraid I didn't," said Gees, and shook his head.

"The child's body was practically bloodless—something hellish about the whole thing," Crampton told him. "Drained dry of blood. I don't know—anyhow, I'm going to get that rug tested, even though we can't find a sign of anything else in the place."

"Good luck to you. I'm off, now. Got to hurry to keep an appointment with Inspector Tott. He'll be interested to hear about this. See you later, perhaps."

He went with no further word—a glance at his wrist watch showed him that he had less than twenty minutes in which to go back to his flat and get what he needed, and go on to pick up Tott.

A promise of an extra half-crown to a taxi driver shortened his transit to Little Oakfield Street, and he saw his car awaiting him before he hurried up the stairs.

Inside his own door he halted and stood gazing along the corridor, tensed for long seconds of anticipation, half- incredulous, half-fearful.

Kefra's scent was in the place, unmistakable though faint. And again he could hear, just hear, the purring of a cat!

He went along the corridor to his bedroom and entered, for there, as before, the purring seemed loudest. As he thrust the door open the sound ceased utterly, and, search as he would, he could find nothing in the room to account for it.

For a moment or two he stood there, staring around helplessly.

He got his automatic pistol out of the wardrobe, and with a round in the chamber and the safety catch off went all over the flat, vainly as far as accounting for the purring sound was concerned. Then, knowing that Tott was waiting, he slipped the pistol into his hip pocket, stuffed into an attache-case pyjamas and what else he would need, and added two spare magazines for the pistol, loaded with eight rounds apiece, before closing the case and bearing it down the stairs to his car.

CHAPTER 11. — THE RED SEA

INSPECTOR TOTT climbed in and took the seat in the Rolls-Bentley next to Gees. "I was just giving you up!" he exclaimed, and sat paralyzed as Gees' car darted into movement, shot past a taxi, dived between a big Daimler and a truck, and came out ahead of the three miraculously—in Tott's opinion—unscathed.

"Whew," Tott breathed, after an eventless two hundred yards or so, "I haven't had any experience of your driving, till now."

"I thought you were in a hurry," Gees told him equably.

Again Tott held his breath—and the side of the car as well. He said, a little later, "There is a thirty-mile limit for all London."

"With you aboard, I can forget it," Gees told him, "and I've got to make up that fifteen minutes I kept you waiting."

Tott said: "You'd better—" and then exchanged speech for silent prayer, knowing that the truckload of iron girders bearing down on them would grind him so small that egg-spoons would be needed for scraping him off the street. When another miracle had put the truck behind them Gees said: "That's what I am doing—can't you see?"

"Bum-bub-better keep that limit!" Tott fairly shouted. "If you don't, I'll run you in and charge you myself."

Not another word was exchanged between them until, far beyond Uxbridge and its speed limits, Tott said, "Eighty-five. Suppose a car shot out of any of those crossroads we've passed?"

Gees answered: "How did you manage to get posted to this case? Did Gloucestershire ask for a Scotland Yard man to give it the once-over?"

Tott glared at him

"I'm not posted to it. I'm on leave, till next Monday."

Gees slowed for the long, long speed limit through Wycombe, and asked, casually: "What's your view of the whole business?"

"What's yours?" Tott snapped "Amateur deductions are always interesting."

"Well, I told you you'd be surprised, but I'd better go back first. A very long way back of this case. From the earliest ages, from long before the beginnings of history, man has made gods for himself," Gees said. "Gods within his comprehension, most of the time. Created them, say, out of belief and sacrifice. The belief gave them influence over the mass of their worshippers, and the sacrifices gave them a sort of semi-material strength. You get an example of this—in the tenth plague as recorded in Genesis, the slaughter of all the firstborn of Egypt."

"I would very much like to know what you think you're talking about," Tott observed, very sourly indeed.

"The beginning of one," Gees answered "Yes. It must be obvious that that slaughter of the firstborn of Egypt wasn't the work of the universal Power we are beginning today to recognize as the source and ruler of all life. The real God wouldn't go in for wholesale murder of his creatures and bring mourning into thousands of homes just to let a horde of Israelites loose to go and do more wholesale slaughter in their promised land. Oh, no!

"By belief in their Jehovah, the collective belief of many thousands of people, and by sacrifices to him, those same Israelites created an actual Jehovah and gave him tremendous power. And you'll find lots of tales in the Old Testament of how the said Jehovah got angry and ran amok, as long as their collective belief and continual sacrifices kept him strong enough for manifestations. It's the old idea."

"What about skipping all that bilge and coming to the case?" Tott interrupted. "Those lights are against you, too."

Gees stopped the car gently and smoothly, dead on the traffic line. "As I was saying—but that's all about the Hebrew Jehovah, anyhow. He's only one instance of how gods were made. Other instances—well, from Easter Island images to the distortion of belief that set the Inquisition torturing and burning. And one big crowd of gods of all sorts in Egypt."

The car moved on. "As I was saying," Gees went on, "Egypt was stacked high with gods, some of them developed and adopted from the days before Menes—if Menes ever existed, which is denied today. Some of them won enough belief to come to great power, mostly of a fairly benevolent sort, and I don't think any record of human sacrifice to any one of them has yet been discovered. But that's not to say that some of them didn't demand human sacrifices—and get them, too, especially the ones adopted from older races to fit Egyptian needs. One of them particularly I have in mind."

"You're out of my depth," Tott said, "and though I've got a glimmering idea of what you may be getting at, I don't see how you can fit it on to either of these two cases. Can you see counsel for the prosecution opening his case with a lecture of how the Hebrews got across the Red Sea and Pharaoh and his little lot struck a wet patch?"

"Leaving all that for a bit," Gees said, "I wonder whether you ever heard of secret societies among the tribes of central Africa, calling themselves leopard-men, and lion-men, and using skins of various specimens of the cat tribe to inspire terror and work a sort of magic?"

"I have," Tott admitted. "Lots of explorers and people have written about that leopard society."

"Have you also heard of Sekhmet, the lioness-headed goddess of Egypt?"

"No. She's a new one on me. There was a cat goddess, though."

"There was," Gees assented. "Bubastes, a much later creation. I have an idea Sekhmet came north from central Africa to Egypt—I mean, belief in her came to Egypt with the coming of invaders from central Africa, and the race that made Egyptian civilization seized on her and developed her. Built up a priesthood around her, sacrificed to her, shaped her to fit the Egyptian character, and gave her real power."

"You mean—the images of her had power?" Tott asked.

"No. I mean there was a live creation, made up of thoughts and prayers and sacrifices, which within certain limits had powers. The old Egyptians, were wonderful magicians, and they could create such a being to serve their own ends. And just like Jehovah and the other old gods, Sekhmet would not cease to exist as long as belief in her and sacrifices to her persisted—especially if she could get human sacrifices."

"M'lud—" Tott sounded utterly derisive—"I submit that my learned friend has utterly failed to sustain his case. Evidence for the defence, M'lud, not only shows but proves that this unfortunate child was chewed up by an Egyptian goddess, and this Crown prosecution of my unfortunate client is more than an utter farce."

"Your gibe may be very near the truth," Gees remarked coolly.

Tott digested that in silence until they had curved on the western end of the Oxford by-pass. The car did not so much gather pace, on the straight again, as leap easily into a smooth and quiet swiftness. Presently Gees slowed again.

"We ought to have hit several things, but we haven't," Tott said.

A small car had shot out of a side turning, and the powerful brakes of the Rolls-Bentley had pulled it to a stop so suddenly that the driver of the small car was just able to miss the front bumper and get going Londonward.

Gees drove on.

Tott looked around, and saw no sign of the small car along the road. He drew a rueful, tragic breath. "That absolute balderdash you were talking a little while ago. I was thinking—here are two cases of murder, almost certainly, and by the look of things both of them are the work of the same homicidal maniac. Places and times give us a pretty good idea of—well, I'll say good reason to suspect where that maniac may be found, and—"

"And what?"

"I had a pretty extensive experience of criminal work before I was posted to my present job, and I got my promotion through dealing in facts I could prove. If I'd gone all bats over lion- headed goddesses and things like that, I'd still be in uniform regulating traffic—or else in a padded cell.

"I came to you a few days ago and told you I didn't like a certain person, and I couldn't say why—which I own was not dealing in facts. Now I've got grounds for suspecting—I won't put that more definitely—grounds for suspecting that there is a reason for my dislike, and that certain person or someone connected with her is involved in this business. Grounds for suspecting it, I say, and therefore satisfying myself about it one way or the other.

"But I haven't and I know I never will have grounds for worrying myself about lion-headed goddesses. And you can't believe any of that foolery about old gods being able to commit murders, any more than I do. Why! It's utterly fantastic and absurd."

"An open mind," Gees said, "is as useful as a spare collar- stud. I always travel with both. We'll pull in at that pub on the bend, and you can pay for the drinks."

"I will, with pleasure."

"You know—" Gees stopped the car in front of the Inn—"down in the back of my mind somewhere I've got rather a liking for you."

"Which is why you try to pull my leg, I suppose," Tott rejoined in his sarcastic but good-humored way.

"Not exactly." Gees got out and went round by the radiator, while Tott descended from his side. "I was merely salting the ground, in case any of your digging turns up what I see is in it. Just don't be too surprised."

"But you don't mean to say you believe—" Tott began, and stopped. No point in pursuing the subject.

"Now haven't I just told you the value of an open mind?" Gees remonstrated. "Let's hustle after those drinks—it's about five minutes to closing time for this part of the world."

CHAPTER 12. — NOT OF THIS EARTH

THE Hedlington police sergeant was respectful, almost worshipful, in the presence of the great Inspector Tott. "Our own inspector, Mr. Perry, will be here in about half and hour, sir, if you care to wait," he said.

"Half an hour, eh?" Tott consulted his watch.

"Maybe less, sir."

"Well, sergeant, I may tell you and him too that I have no official connection with this case—my looking in on you today is a busman's holiday, if you know what that is. I'm well—rather interested in such an unusual crime."

"Unusual is right, sir—and pretty horrible, too. If it was a crime. Mr. Perry is inclined to think it was some animal, like that one in London the other day. We don't know quite what to make of it."

"Umm-m!" Reflecting, Tott decided to wait for the local inspector. "And the body—what had been done with it?" he inquired.

"Taken to the Rest and Be Thankful—that's our village inn, sir," the sergeant answered. "The parents'll take it after the inquest, tomorrow morning, but it's there till then."

"If possible, I'd like to see it, sergeant. You can wait here, Mr. Green."

"On the other hand?" Gees said gently, but persuasively.

"I'll take you along sir," the sergeant offered.

Gees said: "Thank you very much," before Tott could speak.

Leaving the car outside the sergeant's house, the three of them walked along the village street to the inn, closed at this hour. The sergeant led them to the padlocked door of a brick-and- tile barn before which a constable kept guard. He handed the key to the sergeant.

The body lay on a narrow trestle table, covered by a sheet. Tott drew down the sheet as far as the waist, revealing the body of a girl who in death appeared much less than twelve years old. There were deep, terrible lacerations across the breast and the left side of the throat was fearfully torn. Forcing himself to it, Tott leaned over the body to look closely at the right arm and shoulder. He drew back again, white of face; he turned to Gees. He said: "Two of them, and one at least was human."

In turn Gees leaned over the corpse and then drew back. "Yes, two of them," he assented. "No animal made those marks That's the grip of a hand without claws on it."

Tott lifted the corner of the sheet. "I've seen enough—haven't you?" he asked. "Those wounds—quite bloodless."

"Cover it," Gees urged. "This feels like sacrilege to me. They'll have photographs and measurements, if you want them. I don't."

Tott replaced the sheet, and they emerged from the shed to face the sergeant as the constable replaced the padlock and turned the key. "The whole village has gone into a huddle over it, sir," the sergeant said, "and I reckon you've seen enough not to wonder at it."

"I don't," Tott agreed. "Anything bearing on it yet?"

The sergeant shook his head gloomily "Not a thing, sir. Not a pad mark, not a footprint. Nothing. Pretty much every man in the village that's got a gun is out beating the woods. Mr. Perry warned 'em of the danger, because if it is a leopard or a tiger as they reckon, shot guns'll be precious little use. But they reckon if they keep together they'll be all right, and I suppose they will, too."

"Woods?" Tott echoed. "Was the body found in these woods, then?"

"No, sir—it was on the open ground betwixt here and Barnby, at the top of the hill, and the woods are t'other side of Hedlington from there. But they reckon it's the only part where anything like that'd lay up after a kill. I don't see it that way myself, nor does Mr. Perry, because them animals don't just, drain away all the blood like this one did. From all I've heard of 'em, they go for flesh food."

Tott nodded in sober thoughtful agreement. "The girl was out alone, of course," he suggested after a pause.

"Children go all over the place here alone, sir," the sergeant answered. "Not now, of course—not since this happened. But they did. She went down to Barnby with some friends of hers after school. Then she set off to come back home, up here, and they were the last to see her alive."

"Found—when and how?" Tott asked.

"By me, sir. I'd walked my bicycle up the hill and the light from the lamp showed me something a good twenty yards back from the road, on the grass. So I wheeled the bike across, and found her. No tracks, no anything And next to no blood, either!"

"Do you know what time she left the other children?"

"Somewhere close on five, sir. They say it was beginning to get dark, and she ran off in a hurry because she'd be late for tea. And I found out they were all late for tea, all five of 'em."

"And the time when you found her?" Tott persisted.

"Three minutes to eight by my watch, sir. I checked it at once."

Listening, Gees reflected that at about that time, the evening of the Parkott child's disappearance, the Gravenor doorman must have been helping Saleh ibn Nahor to get his trunks out to the car in front of Gravenor Mansions.

FOR a little while Tott brooded. "Well, sergeant, I think we'll go along and wait for your Inspector Perry to turn up. I suppose he'll go back to your house?"

"Yes, sir, and I wouldn't wonder if he's got there by now."

They went back. The group in the road fell silent as they passed. They had almost reached the garden gate of the sergeant's house when Tott spoke again, to nobody in particular:

"Absolutely real and solid, whatever it was."

The sergeant said: "I beg your pardon, sir?"

"I was thinking," Tott said, "that fancies and foolishment don't fit into any case of this sort. Finding what or who did it can only be done by sticking to hard, everyday facts."

"Why, yes, sir, and that's what the inspector and me are doing."

A gravely cheerful, middle-aged man, Inspector Perry, and rather above the average of a provincial police officer, in Gees' opinion. Rather more a man of the world. "I had a long talk over the phone with Inspector Crampton," he said, "and by what he had to tell me there's a similarity about both deaths. Except—in his case there appear to be no holding marks."

Tott nodded comprehension. "I've seen the body here," he admitted. "And my first conclusion—my main conclusion, I should say—was that there were two—somethings. It doesn't look human."

"Quite so—quite so," Perry agreed. "By what Crampton had to say, claw, and fang only, there. But here—the only sort of beast that could have made those grip marks on the shoulder would be one of the ape tribe, ourang or chimpanzee or possibly baboon, and none of them hunt with members of the cat family. In the same way, no member of the cat family, as far as I know, can grip to cause a bruise. I should say bruises. That awful tear in the throat might have been caused by any sort of beast, but when you add on the claw marks, it's feline and nothing else. I make it a pretty big feline, too."

"An ordinary house cat can scratch deeply," Tott observed.

"But couldn't leave its prey as bloodless as that poor child's body was when it was found," Perry pointed out. "And that reminds me. Down under Hedlington—literally down under it, by two hundred feet or so—is Barnby, named Barnby-under- Hedlington, from its position. To get there, you wind down the side of the hill—the body was found at the top of that hill. About halfway down the hillside becomes cliff, and the road is cut in and railed for safety. If you stop at that point and stand with your back to the hillside, you can look straight over Barnby hamlet and see what is known as the Grange."

"I see. And this Grange?"

"Was let furnished at the beginning of last autumn—the owner went abroad—to a Miss Kefra. She's got a sort of chauffeur-personal-man, and he's Egyptian, and she had three servants there all the time—the man went backward and forward to London with her. Pretty well-to-do, I understand. Well, the day before yesterday, the three maids all quit, and said it was because they couldn't stand the cats."

Tott said, quite calmly: "That sounds relevant. Might be worth looking into."

"I thought the same," Perry assented. "Two of the three were engaged through a Cheltenham agency, and I've still got to trace them—if I think it worthwhile. The third is a Mrs. Bell, a widow who had been at the Grange as cook and lives here in Hedlington with her brother. She says her reason for leaving was that she wouldn't stay on in the house alone with Miss Kefra's man—Sally something-or-other, his name appears to be."

"Saleh," Gees put in, "Saleh ibn Nahor—which means son of Nahor."

"Sally—yes," Perry agreed. "Only one of the other two actually saw any cats, it seems, and she rushed into the other one's bedroom in the middle of the night, too scared to stay alone in her own room. According to her, she'd heard a noise and gone out to look for the source—mind, I get this only at third hand from Mrs. Bell—gone out wondering about it, thinking there was a stray kitten or something of the sort outside her room, and found herself face to face with two enormous cats, smooth-coated, yellowish beasts, she described them.

"She managed to shoo at them—this is the tale she told the other girl and Mrs. Bell—and one of them growled at her. It didn't miaow or spit as an ordinary cat does, but growled.

"Then both of them came at her and penned her against the wall of the corridor outside her room, one crouched as if to spring at her, and she gave herself up for lost—too paralyzed with terror even to scream, she said. And then they weren't there, either of them."

The yellow beasts penned her against the wall—one crouched as if to spring...

"Somnambulistic nightmare," Tott said.

"In the morning," Perry went on, she summoned up courage enough to go to her own room to dress, and swore to the other girl and Mrs. Bell that she saw the hindquarters and waving tail of one of those ghost cats as it went into this Miss Kefra's own room—Miss Kefra was in the room at the time.

"So she waited till the other girl was dressed, and then went along with her to get dressed herself. When all three of them got together in the kitchen, she asked Mrs. Bell whether the place was supposed to be haunted, but without saying anything about what she had just seen.

"Mrs. Bell owned that there were stories about it, and then the girl told what she'd seen and said she couldn't stop another hour in a place like that. She'd infected the other girl with her fright, and they both packed and quit. Then Mrs. Bell had a word with Miss Kefra, and she packed and quit, to some extent because of the panic of those two girls and this tale of ghost- cats, but more, she says, because of this Mr. Sally."

"It sounds like a queer business," Tott observed.

"If you ask me," Perry said, "the look of that Sally chap is enough to give any girl the jitters, and that place is too far from cinemas and the boys to pay for the tickets, and girls like those two know they can get posts anywhere, with the shortage of domestics there is nowadays, especially in villages and small towns.

"I went to the Grange this morning," Perry went on, "and this Sally let me in. He's a weird-looking specimen with a face a million years old, but he was quite respectful. I told Miss Kefra why I was there—the possibility of cats about the place. She was most sympathetic over the death of the girl, and assured me there were no cats of any sort at the Grange.

"And she as good as insisted on my satisfying myself about it, went all over it with me, from attic to cellar, in case, as she said, any strays had got in without her knowledge. We went over all the buildings, too. I'd gathered from Mrs. Bell that Miss Kefra was a bit of a terror, but I found her perfectly charming, a real lady in every way, and anxious to do everything she could to help me."

"What was that you said the girl said—that the cats suddenly weren't there when they first frightened her?"

"According to Mrs. Bell, they were her words. Not that the cats vanished, but that they weren't there, just as one of them was going to spring at her. But nobody else in that house ever saw any—and if there was a cat there, Mrs. Bell would have known about it. I see no reason to disbelieve her telling me that she never saw a cat in or near the house, all the while she was there."

"You acquit the Grange of cats?" Tott suggested.

"Absolutely. I've never seen a ghost myself, but that girl may have thought she saw something—may even have seen something, for all I know, because it seems that some people can see apparitions, if they are to be believed. But apparitions, even ghost-cats, haven't got material claws and fangs. They can't rend and kill physically."

"Have you any theory at all of the cause of this?" Gees asked.

Perry shook his head.

"We can't get away from the fact that two people, this Miss Kefra and her man Saleh, were at Gravenor Mansions or thereabouts when the Parkoot child was killed in this—well, I might almost say this unique way—and then they move down here and another death of almost exactly the same sort happens," Tott explained.

"Which was why I had my talk with Crampton over the telephone, to get all the particulars he could give me," Perry pointed out. "The cases are similar, but there is this difference of the bruises."

"A child of two wouldn't struggle long enough for the attacker to cause any bruises. A child of twelve might," Tott observed. "And you say—the place where the body was found—"

"You mean you'd like to give it a once over? Because there's absolutely nothing to be seen. There are no footprints of any sort—that grass wouldn't register any—and there's nothing but the very faint impress made by the body, and the equally faint tracks left by Sergeant Willis and his bicycle—and Willis was as careful not to obliterate anything as I should have been myself. My trouble though, is that there was nothing to obliterate."

Tott looked at his watch. "It's getting rather late, but I think I'd like to look at that spot while the light holds."

"I'll drive you there, if you like," Gees offered.

"And I'll come along too," Perry said. "If you, Mr. Tott, can make any suggestions, I shall be only too pleased to have them, because I've got to own that up to the present—unless those chaps out beating the woods find something, that is—I'm absolutely at sea."

They went to Gees' car, and Tott seated himself in the back so that Perry, beside Gees, could guide them. But Gees needed no great amount of guiding, having come up from the Grange and through Hedlington when he had left Kefra at the Grange the day before. It came to him as something of a shock that only thirty hours or so had passed since he had last seen her.

He drove past the last house of the village, which was set in a depression along the height which rose over Barnby. The road curved westward, over the highest part of the ridge; and then a gentle descent brought them to a point where the low stone wall bounding the road on their right receded to take in over an acre of tussocky grass land, on which grew a few hawthorn bushes.

As Perry called a halt, Gees saw a uniformed constable midway between two of the bushes.

Perry got out of the car as it stopped. "This is all that's left of what used to be Hedlington Common," he observed. "The rest of it has been enclosed."

"And the child came up that hill," Tott suggested, nodding at the steep descent toward which the car was heading.

"Must have come that way," Perry assented. "And—you can see the Grange chimneys over there—" he pointed as he spoke—"while Barnby itself, what there is of it, is down under us, under the side of this hill. By which I mean—anyone coming from the Grange—"

"Yes," Tott said, as the sentence remained incomplete, "but—it's not my case, and I don't intend to take any hand in it. But—no offense intended—you seem to me almost anxious to acquit the Grange people."

"I don't see it as possible to do anything else," Perry pointed out. "After that talk with Miss Kefra—my estimate of her—" Again he broke off, frowning as if resentful of Tott's insistence.

"I believe," Tott said very slowly, "in their normal moments people who suffer from a homicidal mania can be absolutely charming."

"Did you ever hear of anyone afflicted with homicidal mania who made use of cats?" Perry asked. "Or leopards or lions or tigers, or whatever this thing or these things might be? Because I'll put my life against a stick of celery that nothing human caused the wounds that brought that poor child to her death. That's impossible."

"You may remember—" Gees, still seated in the car, spoke to Tott—"I sketched a bare outline of a theory on the drive here."

"And when I attach any importance to that theory," Tott answered sourly, "it'll be time for me to apply for long leave and spend it in a lunatic asylum. Are you going to wait here for us?"

Gees shook his head. "I'm going on a bit. I wonder—Mr. Perry, if I feel like staying the night round here, do you think I could get a decent room at the Rest And Be Thankful spot?"

"Sure of it, Mr. Green. They've nobody staying there this time of year, but they've got three or four rooms.".

"I expect I'll come back, then," Gees said, as he released his hand brake to let the car forward on the slope. "If I go on to Cheltenham instead, many thanks for admitting me to your council."

"He's a clever chap," Tott observed to Perry as they advanced toward the constable who came to attention as he faced them, "but batty about ghosts and the supernatural generally. That theory he talked about was no more than leg-pulling—all about the plagues of Egypt and old gods and goddesses. Interesting, but utterly ridiculous tripe as far as this case of yours is concerned—or the one in London either."

Thus he pronounced judgment, while Gees let the car's own weight take it engineless down the slope, until where stout iron railing fenced the road on his right, he stopped and got out, to go to the railings and stand with his back to the car, looking down into the valley toward which this road tended.

A bitter wind struck on him from the northwest; already there was a shade less light in the leaden sky. He looked over the railings, downward, and saw that he stood at the brink of an almost vertical cliff, with the cottages and two or three larger houses that made up Barnby so near its foot that he could have tossed stones on to most of their roofs with very little effort.

A mile or so beyond them, slightly above the general level of the valley, showed Barnby Grange with its surrounding moat and few trees masking it not at all at this leafless season. He reflected that the castle which had preceded this present building on the site must have been a very strong place in the days before artillery could threaten it from the height above him. Now, the square, gray, building appeared somber in the failing light; he could see no smoke over any of its chimneys, nor any sign of life about it.

He remembered a part of Kefra's fantastic story of herself: When Barnby Grange was the castle under Hedlington, in the year that Poitiers was fought. SHE laid the darkness on me here in this keep for the sixth time and renewed her strength by a young girl's life.

One had either to accept that story of hers in its entirety, or reject it altogether—it was not a recital of which one could believe parts and dismiss the rest.

He might have dismissed it, as practical sanity dictated, had it not been for his father's story of her and her knowledge of the names in that story. Then he remembered his father's words: "I'm perfectly certain that girl could tempt Saint Anthony himself, if she wished." And the way she had won Inspector Perry to believe in her justified the estimate—he was a very long way from Tott's distrust of her. But then, she had had no chance to win Tott over.

Abruptly Gees found himself facing the completeness with which she had won him over.

He had come all this way for no other reason than to see her and aid her if need arose over the preposterous suspicion that she could be in any way connected with these murders.

But now, gazing toward that grim, lonely grange in the middle distance, he felt reluctant to go on. The spell she had laid on him ceased to have power; his practical self demanded resumption of normal aims. The glamor with which for a brief while she had conquered him was not of this earth: it was unreal...

The minute of resistance passed. Consciousness of all that she had asked and given, of all that she had promised—"one with time and you for ever—" submerged him like a leaping wave. He got back into the car and went on.

He told himself: "At least I must see her."

CHAPTER 13. — THE HELL-CATS PURR

FRAMED in the doorway of the Grange, waiting for Gees to enter, Kefra stood outlined against the dimness of the entrance hall. When he had stepped over the threshold she closed the door and turned to him; for a minute, perhaps, she gave herself up to his hold, clung to him with a strength he had not thought she possessed, and he felt her trembling.

"I prayed—knew you would come to me," she said, almost sobbing.

Here, he realized, was no mistress of strong magic, but a frightened woman—yet the renewed strength of her spell over him was greater for this weakness in which she told her need of him. He asked: "Where is Saleh? Are you alone here?"

"Saleh has gone to Cheltenham," she answered. "This morning a police inspector came to see me, and we thought it better that he should go to Cheltenham instead of the village for things I needed. They—these people here—think that I—Come into the drawing room." She stood back from his hold. "Your coat here. I must—"

She did not end it. He followed her into the room, and saw the heaped fire in the iron basket on the hearth—the bitter wind made it a welcome sight. Standing before it, Kefra faced him, and he heard her long, tremulous sigh—of relief?

"I know," she said. "You counted the cost, and felt you must be free of me. You could not believe—" She left it at that.

"I could not believe," he echoed. "Not being with you, it was all different. And reason rejects—"

"And now you are with me?"

"You are Kefra. There is nobody like you."

Her eyes, all darkness in the firelight, looked full into his own, and he had the sense—justifiable, for once—that all this had been before. Yet this was different, for she was wielding no magic.

"You see it is impossible," she said. "You took and controlled the strength of a thousand men to bring you to me. If you choose to turn a switch, you may hear a man talking or a woman singing on the other side of the world. You might have taken the strength of ten thousand men and come through the air to me. You might have lifted a toy and held it to your ear while you talked to me across the distance. And because I, Kefra, use no toys nor any strength but the knowledge I have gained, you say that reason rejects what I have told you."

"Cold reason," he said. "With you, I don't retain cold reason. But—I'm keeping all of it that I can talk like this, and I own it isn't much. Still—will you understand, I wonder?—I want to be free of you while I find out—it's a brutal thing to say, but I don't mean it to be brutal. Kefra, if I'm to throw aside everything else for you, as I see must be done, I've got to know more than I know now. I hate to say this, but—I can't join my life to one who depends on illusion to hold me. I'd rather end it, and seek the final reality than begin, then have it end."

SHE sat down in the old-fashioned armchair before the fire, and pointed him to its fellow—the one he had occupied when she had made magic in this room. She said: "That was very bravely spoken, and I honor your courage. If I am—if I am a little less than when you went away, still I think, enough remains to answer you."

"I think there is more of you," he answered. "Less of illusion and more of you. Then, you were a whirlwind that swept me up and made me less than myself. Now, you are a woman, worth holding."

He did not attempt to hold her, but sat down, facing her across the firelight. She said: "I let your cold reason guide you, and believe it will impel you to me more surely than if I willed your desire. Because I can give as no woman of a day ever gave—but I must give answer to all you would ask, before that may be. You do not come to me, today. You come to one who may have had part in the deaths of two children, and ask if I am that one."

"What I ask, Kefra, is for your own sake. You must see it so."

She brooded a while. As, when he had sat here with her before, he waited; the last of the daylight faded out. She asked: "Would you join your life to mine?"

He answered: "You need not will my desire, Kefra. Now I see you again, I know—will you join your life to mine?"

She said: "Woven into your life—do you remember? I asked you to keep that as my last spoken thought, when you left me. And now you come as a judge—what is it you would judge?"

Her gaze was compassionate. "You think you have learned all you know of old wisdom in the span of one life, and ask me to express my knowledge in terms of that one life. I said: 'One with time and you for ever,' and thus all that you ask of me, I give. How shall I tell you—what shall I tell you?"

"About these cats. What is this tale a servant girl is telling about two big yellowish cats? I saw those two cats myself, under your hypnotism, or whatever it may have been—and then I didn't see them. Here's a servant girl talking about seeing them, and very nearly being attacked by them. What's the truth about their existence?"

"When I made that illusion," she cried, "I wanted to show you that I have power as strong as any you could use against me. It was an illusion. But of what the girl saw, what caused her fear, I know nothing," she said. "They were not of my devising."

"Kefra—you ask me to believe that?"

She shook her head. "I ask you to believe nothing," she answered.

"But I want it reduced to normality," he persisted desperately. "What power is it, in terms of today? What knowledge is it?"

At that she smiled, just such a smile as might appear on a grown woman's face over the question of a child. "I won it in ten times the length of life you have lived," she said, "and you think I could tell it in an hour. Yet one part of it I showed you plainly."

"And that?" he asked.

"You called it tricks with time. I will try to explain it in terms of today. Let us say—" she paused to think for a while—"say that you enter on a road, bounded on each side by a wall that compels you to travel only along the road, and once you have entered on it you must travel to its end without pause. Is that clear to you?" She leaned forward.

"Quite clear," he answered. "But—"

"Wait!" she interrupted. "Keep the picture—a road from which there is no egress, and on which you may not pause until you reach a certain point, beyond which you cannot see. The point at which you enter is the beginning of your life, the point beyond which you cannot see is its end, the road itself is time. The distance you travel along time is your life, from birth to death. It is not difficult to comprehend?"

"Easy," he assented. "And you—"

"Know it possible to pass outside the walls that confine you to the road," she completed for him. "To live in a space between two moments, so completely outside time that when you put a watch to your ear it seems to have stopped, because you are in a space between the last sound of its movement and the next. I took you into that state with me, and in it you lived through a change that would have carried us through days and nights, if you had been bound in time, moving along it. When the change was completed as I planned, we stepped back within the walls, and now travel with the rest of humanity, with time."

"And that, you mean, is how this story you told me of yourself may be true," he suggested. "Outside time from age to age—"

"No." Again she interrupted him. "The covenant I made gave me no power to stand apart from time, but I gained that power myself, to use only in great need, since it drains away strength in a way you could only understand by using it. I see, now the covenant is fulfilled and no longer binds me, that my long continuing in time—not outside it—was not designed for my gain, as I thought when the covenant was offered me. She promised—remember as I remember—that I should not fail from my beauty while one is left alive to make sacrifice to her."

"That is, one priest—or priestess," he said, and with the consciousness of all that the last word implied shrank from her.

Slight though the movement was, she noted it. "One other than me," she said. "I cursed her and ceased from serving her long ago. Am I one who would have killed my own child as the child you saw today was killed? Or the man by whom I bore that child? Tell me—am I?"

He said—"No." And again, with the energy of conviction—"No!"

The clock on the mantel before and over them struck six, and momentarily his thoughts reverted to Tott, to whom all she had told him would be preposterous nonsense.

She asked wearily—"What else?"

He said: "Somewhere, then, a priest of Sekhmet is left."

She echoed it. "Somewhere, a priest of Sekhmet is left."

"And his name," he added, "is Saleh ibn Nahor."

"The goddess herself, not Saleh, claimed her sacrifices," she said.

"How can a goddess take material shape and do material harm?"

"I am no goddess, but a woman," she answered, "yet by my single will I could impose on your sight two beasts that appeared to guard the bridge—impose it for a little while. Thousands on thousands believed in Sekhmet, willed her to being, and since my single could bring those shapes to being for your sight, what must be the power and reality of one shaped by a thousand wills? A priest remains—Sekhmet is!"

"No goddess, but a fiend from hell," he said.

"And what else are more than half the old deities of human belief?" she questioned in reply.

"That may be," he said, "but this Saleh—whatever he may be. When I asked you, you told me he was neither young nor old. Which means—what?"

"When I answered that question, you faced me as an enemy," she said. "Saleh comes of a family of fellahin near Luxor, one of the very, very few families of pure Egyptian blood. They were great people once, though now they live in squalid poverty and some spark of old ambition stirred in this Saleh, Nahor's son—drew him out from his hut by the shadoof and set him on a way that crossed mine. Because he was apt I taught him—some few things."

Frank though the answer sounded, he heard in it reserve, a complete withdrawal of herself from him, that marked a vast change in her since he had entered the room with her.

This was not Kefra who had told him she was one with him and time, but Cleo Kefra as he had first seen her. He felt doubt, now, of all that she had told him, and felt, too, a little trepidant in facing this strange, amber-eyed woman. For she had grown strange.

"Yes, taught him how to evoke beasts when he wanted to frighten away anyone he didn't wish to remain in this place."

"Taught him more than was wise," she said somberly. "Say rather that I renewed in him knowledge that had been his in past lives, so that in some things the pupil outran the teacher. But—" she stood up, and he too rose to face her—"no more—I will tell you no more. You must go—leave me."

"You mean it, Kefra?"

"For your own sake—go now," she bade. "Remember—against all that holds me as you see me now I force myself to call it back to your mind—I said, no harm should come to you. Thus, you must go now."

He wanted to speak, but could not. There was that in the gaze of her amber eyes, with no more than points of darkness for pupils, that which compelled his silence.

After a long pause he turned away and went to the door, to look back for a moment and see her immobile before the fire, no more than a tall, slender, graceful outline.

Then he went out and closed the door between himself and her, to take up his coat and hat in the entrance hall and let himself out of the house. In his mind the sentence: "So that is that—" repeated itself over and over, foolishly, until he asked himself: "That was what? What was that?"

There was no answer to the question, but—were there two Kefras in the one shape? For surely this one who had bidden him go and reminded him that no harm should come to him was not the Kefra who had compelled him to believe in such a tale as no woman ever told before.

The moon, near the full, was hidden by the cloud-curtain that masked all the sky, but enough light was over the earth to silver it to gray indistinctness in place of darkness. Getting into the car, Gees switched on the ignition and pressed the starter, to hear the instant, purring response of the engine.

He gazed past the edge of his windscreen toward the stretch of moat on the south side of the house and grounds. There was—yes, it must be a reek rising from the water. Nothing but a faint mist rising, but to his sight or fancy it wreathed into shapes that went slinking, crouching, pantherwise through the dim grayness of night.

It was the purring of the engine that caused him to think that he was seeing such things.

Purring, purring... he reached out and switched off, and for nearly a minute the purring went on!

With a shudder, he started his engine again and drove away, toward the Rest And Be Thankful at Hedlington.

CHAPTER 14. — WHEN THE GODDESS DESTROYS

HE had the dining room of the inn to himself, and a deft, silent maid to wait on him. He moved to an armchair by the fire to drink his coffee, and try to reduce the muddle of incompatibilities that puzzled him to some sort of order. Miss out all the fantasy, try to regard the problem of these two deaths as Tott would regard it, and what conclusion resulted?

First, the Gravenor Mansions affair. Crampton had found and taken away a rug from which somebody, Saleh, perhaps, had tried to wash certain stains. If enough of the stains remained for Crampton to have them identified as caused by human blood and no more, then Crampton would be exactly where he had been before.

Saleh might have bumped something and made his nose bleed—the blood might have got on the rug in any one of a dozen different ways. To render those stains of any significance, Crampton had to prove that they were caused by human blood of the same group classification as that of the dead child. With that, of course, he would have grounds for a case, though even then scarcely enough for a conviction.

He might believe that Saleh was the one who had disposed of the body, but proof, not mere belief, was needed for production before a jury.

For the present, then, he might be utterly unjust to connect the Parkoot child's death with Kefra's flat or anyone who had been in it on the day of the child's disappearance. Was unjust, on the face of it, since Saleh had neither claws nor fangs.

Similarily, there was no connection between this second death and either Kefra or Saleh; all that had stirred Tott was the coincidence, which he refused to see as one, of Kefra and Saleh having been within reach of both victims when the two tragedies happened. Stranger coincidences happened every day, and passed unnoted.

A question Kefra had spoken drifted into Gees' mind then: "Nine lives—the ninth life—why do you harp on it?"

Following on that, the reflection that she had spoken of a covenant which involved nine lives, and of which she was free, now, because all the nine had been taken. If that were so, then this tragedy here was a tenth life, outside the covenant—

Abruptly he put down his coffee cup beside the chair and got to his feet. He was trying to bring ugly, material happenings into line with material cases. For that, he must put the fantastic story she had told altogether out of his mind—and, when he did so, the whole thing became inexplicable.

Tott had derided his theory, but neither he nor Perry nor Crampton had suggested a tenable alternative; they had first to find a fanged and clawed homicidal maniac, and one capable of producing bruises as well as rending.

There was a possibility that they had found something, or some fact had come to light, since he had left Tott and Perry at the top of the hill to drive down to the Grange.

With that thought he went out from the dining room and along to the bar at the other end of the inn, on the chance of finding Tott. Three men sat round a table under the saloon bar window, and three double-barreled guns leaned against the window sill. Each man had a drink before him, and each gave Gees a curious glance as he went to the bar and ordered a whiskey and soda.

Turning after he had paid for his drink, Gees gave them a cordial: "Good evening," and won three muttered, "Evenin's" in response.

They maintained silence among themselves—probably because of his presence. All three were middle-aged, solemn- looking men, and Gees ranked them as small farmers in the locality. He was about to finish his drink when the outer door opened to admit a younger man who gave the trio a cheerful: "Evenin' all" which somehow managed to exclude Gees, and, ordering himself a pint, joined them at their table, fetching a chair for himself.

"Tractor all right now?" one of the three inquired.

"Aye. An' a rare old job, drivin' it all the way from Cheltenham. But I reckon it'll do me another two seasons, now."

A pause. All four eyed Gees almost furtively, and he sensed that they resented his presence. The newcomer spoke:

"Well, did ye find anything today in them woods?"

"Aye," said one of the three, dryly, and left it at that.

"You mean—that you got what done for poor little Letty?" the younger man asked.

One of the three said: "I reckon we did," and another put far more of certainty into his somberly uttered: "Aye."

The tractor-man glanced at Gees, hesitated, and then asked: "What was it, then—a tiger broke loose?"

"No. It were a cat. Just a cat, an' not a tiger." Gees heard a definite satisfaction in that denial of the surmise.

"But a cat could never—" the younger man began, and stopped.

"It were a she," his more emphatic informant said. "Laid up in a holler tree wi' three kittens—well, near on half-grown, they was. An' the mother was the biggest I ever see. Must ha' weighed not far short of a stone—ten or twelve pound, I'd put it at. A great yeller brute, an' it come at us like a ragin' lion—wild as Hell, it were, an' savage, too.

"Fred here let it have both barrels, an' we shot the kittens too. Put the carcasses in a sack an' took 'em along to the sergint. An' if you git along to the inquest tomorrow an' see them claws, you'll see whether it could do or couldn't do—what was done."

"Then it was livin' in them woods?" his questioner asked.

"We reckoned it come there not long back, maybe before the kittens was born, an' maybe arter. Not so long back, anyhow. An' it'd be the one which Mrs. Bell said scared that gal at the Grange—"

"But she said there was two," the younger man objected.

"On what Mrs. Bell said," the one referred to as Fred observed, "the gal was so scared she'd hardly know what she did see. An' a she-cat wi' young kittens gener'ly lay up alone, like this one. There ain't no doubt i' my mind it's what got poor little Letty.

"You'd only got to see the way it come at us, like a ragin' lion. I'd pity the grown man who had to stand up against a thing like that with no gun, let alone a child her size. Them claws'd make a rare mess of him, I reckon."

"Well," the tractor-man observed, "that gal said she seen two, an' I ain't lettin' my youngster go about alone till I hear t'other one's been put paid to. It looks too risky to me."

"It'll be some while afore any kids dast run about alone i' these parts, I reckon." The one of the first three who, up to that point, had maintained silence delivered judgment with slow emphasis. "Kids may be venturesome some ways, but not after a thing like that, I reckon."

"How d'you make it hadn't been there long?" the young man asked.

"If it had," Fred said, "there'd been more tracks an' signs round the place where it'd made the nest for the kittens—some sorter reg'lar track the way it come an' go when it went huntin'. More'n that, it'd been seen or heard around here. It'd been out huntin', an' people'd missed fowls an' ducks an' things, before now."

The four of them ceased their discussion and looked toward the door as a fifth patron entered. He was a bulkily built, middle- aged, bearded man in tweed coat, breeches and gaiters, with a heavily-bandaged right hand, and he made his way to the bar and called for a double brandy, putting down a ten-shilling note clumsily with his left hand. Then he turned and nodded at the group.

"'Lo, Arthur," Fred greeted him. "Whatcher been doin' to that hand? Ketched it in somethin'?"

"Claws," said Arthur, and turned to the bar with: "Thanks."

"Claws?" Fred inquired. "You ain't come across t'other one, by no chance, did you? I mean another wild cat, like the one we shot."

"It was my own cat, gone mad, I reckon," Arthur said. "Else, I dunno what come to it. It was asleep on the hearthrug, an' my little Millie was at the table doin' of her home lessons. She got down off her chair an' come to ask me somethin', an' all at once Frosty—that's the cat—woke up an' started spittin' an' swearin' like all possessed.

"Then it sprung straight at the child, lookin' more like a davle'n a tame little cat, an' I managed to put my hand out in time to stop it landin' on her neck. An' this is what I got—my hand tore to ribbons so I had to go to the doctor to get it dressed an' bandaged. An' that cat the tamest, best- tempered little thing you ever see—you know my cat, Ted? That little orange-colored one I got."

"I know that cat," the tractor-driver admitted.

"Well, it went stark, starin' mad. Hid under the couch—I made the child go right off to bed, an' then tried to get that cat out, but not ti—till I opened the door. Then it tore off before I could do a thing, went up the tree in front o' my house an' sat up there with its eyes glarin' at me like fires. So I reckoned this ain't safe, an' went an' got my gun an' shot it outer the tree before I went along to the doctor'd to get my hand dressed. I dasn't leave it there alive."

In the following silence, Gees ordered and obtained another drink. Arthur said: "I reckon it got near that one you chaps got in the woods today, an' got infected somehow—drove him murderous like that one was. Because a gentler an' sweeter- tempered little beast'n our Frosty never lived, till tonight."

"Your Milly didn't stamp on Frosty's tail, nor anything?" Fred inquired.

"Warn't nowhere near it, any more'n I was, settin' where I was," Arthur insisted. "No, it was pure madness took the cat, all at once."

"Then I reckon it was like you say—that wild thing give it some disease what drove it mad," Ted averred. "An' most likely your Frosty was the other cat that gal at the Grange got frightened at—she said the pair of 'em was yellerish, an' Frosty was yeller, an' you chaps say the wild one was yeller, an' the state that gal was in she'd reckon they was both as big as houses. That's how it was."

Arthur lifted his bandages to look at them. "Tore my hand to ribbons, it did, an' my missis ain't half wild—there's blood all over the room where I tried to get that cat out. I felt I wanted that brandy—all shook up, I feel. Sorter faintish, now it's all over."

"I felt like that, 'thout bein' clawed nor nuthin', arter we'd put that wild one up i' the woods an' shot it," Fred declared. "But there warn't no brandy anywhere about. Else, I'd had some, I would."

"An' I reckon, wi' all the blood I lost outer these here scratches, another double ain't goin' to do me no harm," Arthur remarked. "Gimme another double, Jim."

Since, probably because of the presence of a stranger among them, they exchanged the subject of mad cats for that of—apparently—equally violent and antisocial farm tractors, Gees finished his second drink and went back to the fire in the dining room. He had heard enough to get him to considering the problem of Ernest Parkoot's death from a new angle, and this bar talk threatened to prove more of an irritant than an aid to reflection.

And still, no matter how he viewed the problem, nothing fitted—nothing made sense.

CHAPTER 15. — THE SECOND BEAST

AT ten o'clock, while Gees sat brooding by the fire, Inspector Tott entered, and observed with disapproval—"So you came back here. I really didn't expect to see you."

Gees said: "No? I climbed a tree and wrapped myself around the trunk. What's up?"

"That sergeant of Perry's had a nasty sort of experience, and I stopped to give a hand with him."

"Anything special?" Gees asked, with faint interest.

"I was just saying goodnight to Perry outside the sergeant's house," Tott explained. "And the sergeant's front door opened and he came out tearing at his neck and yelling like all-possessed. It was a cat—his wife told us it was a little pet cat they'd had for a couple of years, and somehow it had gone quite mad and sprung at the sergeant. Fastened on his neck, teeth and claws, and he couldn't pry it loose. We got it off, and Perry killed it, and then we had to help Willis back indoors and get him to bed, and get the local doctor to him. And that doctor told us he'd just had a similar case, one of the farmers round here had been to him with his hand all torn to shreds by a pet cat that had gone mad. Some disease attacking the cats, by the look of things."

"It might be," Gees observed, "and again might not. Is Sergeant Willis very badly hurt?"

"Out of action for a day or two, I should say," Tott answered. "So it looks as if this case has nothing to do with the one in London. At least, that's Perry's view."

"And Perry considers his case closed?" Gees half- questioned.

"Considers it closed?" Tott echoed irritably. "It is closed! With what that ordinary little cat did to Willis—what a thing that size was able to do before we got it off him, and the size and weight of the thing they destroyed in the woods today, there's only one thing for a coroner to do at the inquest on the girl."

"And the bruises we saw?" Gees inquired thoughtfully.

"Caused while she was playing with the other children—caused by any one of a dozen means," Tott insisted. "What's in your mind?"

"You'd be surprised," Gees answered, and left it at that. "I suppose, if that wild cat hadn't turned up to provide Inspector Perry with his solution of the mystery, you'd have been calling at the Grange?"

"I might have called, but I shouldn't have stayed the night," Tott said, and took a briar pipe out of his pocket and looked at it.

"Have one of my cigarettes." Gees' case flew open as he offered it. "A village like this, of course, is hell for scandal."

"I won't smoke any more just now, thank you," Tott said, and put his pipe back in his pocket. "It's quite true—in places like this, people will talk, and it's unlikely that anyone else would have left a Rolls-Bentley standing out there all night. Same colors, too."

"I take it," Gees suggested, "your interest in the fact is what you might call academic—or is it?"

"My interest—" Tott began, and broke off to gaze toward the opening door.

Gees looked over his shoulder, and saw a small, swarthy, blue- chinned man, apparently in the late twenties or early thirties, a frail-looking being whose eyes appeared distorted behind horn- rimmed lenses of, evidently, very high corrective strength. Even with those aids to vision he peered, craning his neck in Tott's direction, after he had closed the door and faced toward the fireplace again. He said, in a deep, booming voice which ought to have emanated from a giant: "Why, Mr. Tott! Well, well!"

Tott snapped out: "Mr. Green, this is a press-hound who goes by the name of Drake."

"How-de-do, Mr. Green?" Drake said, and smiled, quite unabashed. "The inspector will have his little jokes, of course. I don't mind! But if there's any story going, Mr. Tott—well, you know me."

"You're barking up a fruitless tree. It's no more than a provincial and perfectly simple tragedy—

"And no connection with any other tragedy, huh?" Drake boomed, interrupting. "Because I covered another case before I left London."

"I'd advise you to forget that when you tackle this," Tott said.

The pressman swung a chair round from the nearest table and planted it at the edge of the hearthrug, midway between the two in their armchairs. "I've got all there is to be had in the bars, about cats going mad and all that, and still—y'see, Mr. Tott, I've got a pretty good idea of what Inspector Crampton went after—and got!—at Gravenor Mansions.

"I'd advise you not to make use of that idea," Tott said ominously.

"Oh, quite! I'm not fool enough to weigh in any story I can't stand for."

He took off his horn-rimmed spectacles, wiped his eyes with a silk handkerchief, polished the lenses of the glasses, and put them on again to gaze at Tott with an expression of smug satisfaction.

"The information," Gees observed, and Drake turned his head with a start toward the speaker, "is as welcome as it is unexpected. What did you say was the name of the man on duty in the Gravenor entrance?"

"I—I didn't say anything about him," Drake answered, rather taken aback by the query. "I didn't mention him. Why?"

"Because both Inspector Tott and myself know that Crampton is not such a fool as to talk," Gees answered. "And now, on what you've said and the way you've said it, I think it should be possible to get that man hoofed out of the place, like the one who preceded him."

"I haven't said a thing about him, Mr.—Mr. Green, isn't it?" Drake protested earnestly. "I assure you—" he broke off, and again looked toward Tott, as if he would appeal to authority against this stranger.

"Tomorrow," Tott said, "the coroner down here will record a verdict of death by misadventure, or thereabouts, and with that the case will be closed. As far as your agency is concerned, there's not enough in it to justify putting out a paragraph—it isn't worth tuppence as a sensation. If I were you, Mr. Drake, I'd go back to London."

"No hurry," Drake assured him calmly.

Neither Gees nor Tott spoke for a while, for they both knew that nothing they could say would lift Drake's nose from this trail now.

"Y'know," Drake said complacently, "I was talking to our society man yesterday about this and that, and he's just pushed out a stick or two about a recent engagement. I couldn't quite make out why one of the special branch should turn on to anything of this sort—"

"I know I'll wring your blasted neck if you don't shut up!" Tott growled fiercely. "Blast your dirty suspicions, and you too!"

Drake got to his feet. He said, "I think I'll go along to the bar and get me a drink. I don't like this atmosphere, somehow."

"I hope it poisons you," Gees said gravely. "The drink, I mean, since you seem perfectly able to survive the atmosphere."

Alone again, Tott and Gees looked at each other. Tott said—"I think that's just about torn it, Mr. Green."

"Except that he's got no story," Gees pointed out.

"I'll feel happier when I'm sure of that," Tott said moodily.

"When you can—yes, though, I see. Coming round to my theory?"

Tott gave him a withering look, and was about to reply when the door's opening stopped him. The waitress who had served dinner entered, and held out to Gees a salver on which was an addressed and unstamped envelope. As he took it, she said: "The messenger said there was no reply, sir," and went out as he opened the envelope to take out the card it contained. He read:

At the top of the hill, on the road by which you came to me today. NOW.

He thrust both card and envelope in his pocket, and yawned.

"It must be the open air makes me feel so sleepy," he remarked. "I think I'll go off to bed. Goodnight, Inspector."

"Sleep well, Mr. Green."

But, when he had left the room, Tott went to the window, which gave on to the road before the inn. Enfolding himself in one of the full-length, heavy curtains, and being thus screened from the light in the room, he drew aside just enough of the blind to assure himself that Gees had not gone to bed.

ALL the clouds of early evening had cleared away when Gees emerged from the inn to the village street. A little breeze had sprung up, bitingly cold; a few stars showed, and the moon, high in the sky now, silvered the road, while shadows of walls and trees were sharply defined.

He hurried round to the garage, slid back the door just enough for entry, and took up the coat he had left on the driving seat. As he put it on he remembered the Webley automatic in the pocket of the off-side door. He took the pistol, slipped it in the right-hand pocket of the coat, and went out to the road.

Walking quickly, he passed the last house and faced the curving rise over which he had driven with Tott and Perry in the car. When he topped the rise, he saw a lone figure by the stone wall ahead of him, just where the widening to unenclosed grass land began: in the clear moonlight he knew it as the figure of a man, taller than Kefra—tall as himself. A little nearer, and Inspector Perry moved forward from the wall with "ah, Mr. Green!"

"A constitutional before turning in," Gees observed casually as he halted. "Necessary, after the dinner they gave me."

"It's a wonderful night," Perry said, rather constrainedly.

"It is," Gees assented, "and only us out to enjoy it."

"I wasn't exactly enjoying it," Perry confessed. "I came along here to save myself trouble tomorrow, pace the distance between the road and the spot where Willis found the body. I'm still asking myself why the child went all that distance off the road, when she was obviously hurrying home for tea, by what the other children had to say."

"Running away from what attacked her, possibly," Gees surmised.

"It may have been—what was that?"

He swung abruptly to face toward the crest of the rise over which Gees had come. Both men gazed in that direction, and Gees, putting his hand in his coat pocket, got a grip on the pistol and slid the safety catch off with his thumb. Something or somebody had appeared for a fraction of a second, either on or beside the wall, and too far off for them to note it as more than an indistinct movement, since neither had been looking in that direction.

Perry relaxed after a few seconds.

"I caught it out of the corner of my eye," he said. "Something—"

"Have you seen anyone about here?" Gees asked.

"Only that little foreigner from the Grange, going down the hill a few minutes ago," Perry answered. "Coming from Hedlington."

Saleh returning, after delivering the envelope at the inn, Gees thought. And Kefra, who had meant to meet him here, and seen the police inspector as she ascended the hill—was she waiting, out of sight beyond the curve? Or had she gone back—

He shouted: "Look out, man!" and Perry, who had turned his back to the wall again, half turned his head and sprang aside as Gees' hand came out from his pocket.

On top of the wall a cat crouched to spring, its back undulating, its eyes dull red—a shot crashed and the echoes went bellowing simultaneously with the animal's leap, and it fell within a yard of Gees' feet, wriggling convulsively. A moment's pause, and he stepped forward, put the pistol to the beast's ear, and fired again. One final convulsion in which it stretched to full length, and then it lay still. Reaching down, Gees lifted the carcass by the tail.

"My God!" Perry almost whispered. "So there were two!"

"Enormous," Gees said. "Ten or twelve pounds weight."

The smooth fur was a dirty yellow, covering a gaunt, starved- looking form. Perry said—"Look at those claws!" and suddenly shivered as if stricken by intense cold. He put his hands to his face momentarily.

"Man," he muttered, "if it hadn't been for you and that revolver of yours, it'd have got me. And a brute that size—"

"A Webley automatic, not a revolver," Gees observed.

"And there were two—that girl at the Grange saw two!"

"It looks as if there were two," Gees agreed quietly.

Quietly, but within him was black rage. The card in his pocket said: "At the top of the hill, on the road by which you came to me today." If Perry had not been here at the top of the hill, and if he, Gees, had not thought to slip the Webley in his pocket before coming to meet her—if a beast like that had caught him unaware—

"I don't know how to thank you," Perry said. "It looks as if Providence sent you to save me."

Gees reflected that another agency than Providence had sent him to this spot. But, since Perry appeared rather unstrung, he put aside his own deductions, and asked, "Where are you staying?"

"Staying? Oh, Mrs. Willis is putting me up for the night. Why—yes, there's no object in stopping here. But I'll take this along." He grasped the tail of the dead beast and lifted it. "I believe it's heavier than the one they shot in the woods today! I've never seen cats this size before."

"I believe wild cats grow as big," Gees remarked, as they started to ascend the rise toward Hedlington. "But I never heard of wild cats south of the Tweed, and they're not that color, in any case."

"Well, thank heaven they're both done for," Perry observed fervently. "That clears up everything—unless more tame cats go wild."

"That, I think, is very unlikely," Gees prophesied.

They came to the crest of the rise, and along the road before them saw a little group of men advancing. Foremost among them showed Inspector Tott, and Gees recognized the man with a bandaged hand from the saloon bar. They grouped around Perry, gazing at the carcass he carried.

"Who did the shooting?" Tott asked coolly. "It sounded like a field gun back at the inn, and I thought I'd come and investigate."

He glanced at Gees.

"Mr. Green, here—" Perry began to explain, but Gees broke in, "I'll bid you all goodnight, and get along now if you don't mind."

He left them, and made long strides toward the inn, feeling in no mood for reciting his part in the adventure. And, lest Tott should see fit to ask for his story, he went straight up to his room, and shut and locked the door after switching on the light. Then for a while he stood gazing at his reflection in the wardrobe mirror.

"You damned idiot!" he told it. "You complete fool!"

Then he withdrew the card from his pocket, and looked at the fine, small writing of the message on it. Kefra—Sekhmet—one corner of the card was slightly crumpled, and he smoothed it out. Then, staring incredulously at the card, he took it across to the dressing table to get more light on it from the electric bulb directly over the table, and, putting it down, went on staring, questioning—

From his breast pocket he took the message that had reached him in London, withdrew it from its envelope, and put it down beside the card. Its scent—her scent!—was still faintly perceptible, and the writing, like that on the card, was fine and small—

But, past all question, some other hand than hers had written the message on the card. He was meant to be deceived, and had been.

CHAPTER 16. — THE EMPTY ROOM

THE cheerful greeting with which the newspaper man welcomed Gees in the inn dining room on Thursday morning proved that, as he had said, getting a pressman's goat is a difficult business. Drake was disposing of his last mouthful and grinned ironically as Gees joined Inspector Tott.

"Well, gentlemen, I expect I shall see you at the inquest."

When he had gone out, Tott shook his head solemnly. "I don't know where he put it," he said. "Porridge, and haddock and eggs and bacon—two eggs! He didn't feed—he stoked!"

"These low forms of life take a deal of sustenance," Gees observed. "I've forgotten how many times its own weight a caterpillar eats in a day. See us at the inquest, eh? He might see you, of course."

Tott shook his head. "With the whole thing cleared up—and your shooting the second of those beasts last night clinches it—no dodgers lose."

"Clinches it too much for my liking," Gees said moodily.

Tott's hand, stretched toward the marmalade pot, stayed halfway. "You're implying—what?"

"The herring is too red for my taste," Gees answered.

"Blast it, man! What do you mean?"

"Simply that four cats, two wild and two tame, have been used to make sure of the verdict that will be passed today."

"But that's ridiculous."

"Yes, I know—it's all ridiculous. But that beast springing at me last night—"

"At Perry, you mean," Tott interrupted.

"All right, at Perry," Gees said. "I only imagined it was headed straight at me when it took that leap off the wall. If I hadn't had a gun and Perry hadn't been there, you'd have stood a very good chance of another inquest in this village today—or tomorrow. I am not popular."

"I'd like to know just what you do mean."

"Ah, but it's all part of my theory—Moses and the Hebrews and all that, though I never mentioned Moses. You dragged him in. You didn't know it."

"And what in all perdition have mad cats to do with it?" Tott demanded. "Since I've nothing to do—and apparently neither have you—what is this fool theory of yours, reduced to practical terms?"

"That's just what you can't do—reduce it to practical shape," Gees told him. "What do you think would happen to a coroner, if he recorded as his verdict that the deceased met her death by means of a particularly evil sort of ancient goddess, who maintains her existence by the sacrifices of human lives at intervals, said sacrifices being procured for her when possible by her only surviving priest?"

"Said coroner would get what ought to happen to you," Tott responded. "Medical examination, and a long rest in a mental institution."

He took out his pipe, filled and lighted it, and Gees went on eating. "You're trying to tell me those mad cats were planted to fog the issue," Tott accused. "Never mind about your fool goddess."

"They appear to have fogged it pretty thoroughly."

"And who planted 'em—and how?"

"I'd have to revert to my theory to tell you," Gees answered, "and if I do, evidently you'll start walking up the wall."

"Go on, man, revert to anything you like!" Tott said savagely, "Were the two wild ones and their three kittens fetched here as a sort of smoke screen in front of this goddess of yours?"

"Not mine, fortunately," Gees answered, "but I'd say you've struck the bull's-eye. Well, not quite, because the goddess doesn't need any smoke screen. The priest does."

"And where did he get 'em?" Tott persisted satirically.

Gees shook his head. "He might be able to tell you. Do you know anything about time as a fourth dimension?"

"Ah! Now I've got you!" Tott exclaimed. "Because the Einstein theory interested me, and I read up all I could about it. If you try to tell me your priest raked those cats out of the fourth dimension, I will walk up the wall—and throw things at you!"

"I was thinking, last night. About getting into what may be a fifth dimension, a space altogether out of time, a state in which you live and act and feel between two moments, so that as far as your consciousness is concerned the whole world appears to have stopped. You're so utterly removed from time that even a watch seems to have stopped ticking. In time, of course, it's going on as usual, but you're quite outside time, not moving with it."

"I've no idea what you're getting at," Tott said seriously, "but—well, theoretically, I suppose, it might be possible. But to keep between two moments you'd have to travel back along time."

"That's just what you don't," Gees contradicted. "You're merely outside it, and it goes static while you retain the power of movement. That way, everything around you appears fixed; all sound ceases, and even a fire appears to have stopped burning. And thinking over it as I lay in bed, it suddenly occurred to me that you yourself, if you were in that state outside time, would be invisible to anyone who was in and traveling with time—carried on by it."

"Obviously," Tott's interest was fully aroused now. "Because, if you were living in that state between two moments, and the static people round you were in reality moving along time as usual, you'd be no more than a flash on their sight as your fraction of a second passed by them."

"One way of accounting for ghosts," Gees remarked. "They stand still outside time while you pass them as you travel along it, and when you've passed the point where they happen to be standing, they naturally aren't there any more. And suppose this priest got his wild cats and doctored the tame ones that way? Just moved himself out of time and out of visibility, and came back into time when he'd—"

"Oh, cut it out!" Tott interrupted, in angry disgust. "I enjoy speculating along the lines of a fourth dimension, but if you're going to bring your damned goddess into it, I quit."

"Umm-yah!" Half-yawning, Gees got on his feet and went to the hearth rug to stand before the fire. "Inspector," he went on deliberately, "you're deriding my theory, as any practical man naturally would, because it's based on things and causes that neither I nor anyone else can prove by practical means. But inside a week, two terrible and very similar tragedies have occurred—"

"Similar, but that's all," Tott interposed. "Obviously, on what we now know about these cats, they're not connected with each other."

"You mean you don't want them to be connected."

"Enough has come to light to show that the two tragedies are separate and unrelated occurrences, and not due to a single cause. Similar, yes. I said at first the similarity was not a coincidence, but now I say it is. Obviously."

"I said at first it was a coincidence, and now I say it isn't," Gees retorted imperturbably. "More than that, if a third case of the kind occurs, you may begin to think my theory isn't all fooling."

"Well, then," Tott snapped, "let's have the whole thing as you see it. However silly it sounds, I'll listen."

"Very well. On Monday night, as you remarked yesterday, I did not garage my car, but forgot about it and left it standing—"

"Half a second," Tott interrupted. "You are, as I thought, bringing that Miss Kefra into this theory of yours?"

"Merely to exonerate her," Gees answered. "But that night she told me some things quite outside your range of belief, so I won't drag them in. I already had the knowledge on which the part of them essential to this theory of mine is based, and what she told me no more than confirmed it. You remember my exposition on the way down here, about the nature and quality of old gods?"

"Some of it," Tott said. "You're not going over it again, are you?"

Gees shook his head. "I am merely telling you that it's possible the old goddess you refuse to credit survives, and demands human sacrifice at intervals. Why she demands and gets two sacrifices within so short a time of each other I don't know, and probably never will. Whether the next tragedy of the kind will happen today or tomorrow, or in twenty years' time, I don't know either. But I do know, after last night, that I am looked on as knowing too much, and that cat I killed was meant to kill me before I could make use of what I know."

"That's a bit too much to believe," Tott said.

Gees took a step forward and laid on the table the card he had received the night before. "Take a look at that. It's the note that took me out to the spot where I killed that cat last night!"

Tott gave the card a cursory inspection, and then looked up again. "Yes, I remember," he said. "From—from that Miss Kefra?"

"Exactly what I was meant to think, and I fell for it," Gees answered. "But I didn't fall for it as eagerly as I was meant to do. That Now underlined should have given me the impression that Miss Kefra was waiting and I mustn't lose a minute, instead of which I went round to my car to get a coat, and put my automatic in my pocket, fortunately. I'd seen Miss Kefra's handwriting only in one specimen, and that consisted of no more than nine or ten words. I didn't question that writing on the card, but accepted it as hers, and went. Perry's being there, and my having the gun, spoiled the game."

"What game?" Tott asked stubbornly.

"For a full answer to that," Gees said, "you'd have to go to the blue-eyed little man who poses as Miss Kefra's personal attendant, Saleh ibn Nahor. Actually, as priest and minister to Sekhmet of old Egypt, and the human link between her and material activity who provides her with sacrifices. There's my theory, in plain English, as you asked."

"You're accusing this Saleh of two murders, then?" Tott queried.

"And of an attempted third. Not that I see any possibility whatever of proving it. Further, I'm inclined to think that those cats were material manifestations of Sekhmet. That she animated them, drove them to attack human beings, and that in some way outside my knowledge this Saleh is able to prepare these animal—habitations, call them—and so give her shape in which to accomplish material acts. Murders, from our point of view. Human sacrifices, from his."

"And why should any man on earth risk his neck over any such madness?" Tott asked with the same stubbornness.

"So far," Gees answered deliberately, "Saleh's neck doesn't appear to me to be in any danger. My telling you that about him is no more nor less than criminal slander, if a third person were here to hear it. As to the why of it, he gets profit of some sort. I don't mean financial profit, but increase of vitality, perhaps—something of that sort. An old saying comes to me—the blood is the life. In that, you have the basic idea behind all sacrifice in the old religions."

"You needn't put that into any plainer English," Tott said. "It's too utterly hellish. And so's all of it, to my mind."

"In other words, you don't believe a word of it."

Tott's brows drew down and together. "You've got a gift of words," he said. "On top of that, once before I wouldn't believe you, and got badly bitten over it. Do you believe all this?"

"I'll go further, and say I know it," Gees answered emphatically.

"It's too mad—too incredible altogether," Tott said. "No!" He shook his shoulders, as if to free himself from the belief Gees had almost imposed on him for a little while. "Things like that don't happen. If the man had been anything of the sort, he'd have been locked away in a criminal lunatic asylum, long ago."

Gees, making no reply, lighted himself a cigarette and gazed toward the window, thoughtfully. Tott, standing by the table eyed him.

"If you had any evidence at all, now—" he said, and paused.

"I'm going back to London," Gees observed, "but I think I'll drive down to the Grange first. Someone may have been there with news of what happened to that second cat last night, but I'd like to watch Saleh's face when he sees me alive, in case it reveals anything."

"Have you—is there room for a passenger?"

"Come along by all means," Gees invited. "I'm going to ask to see Miss Kefra, though, and if I do see her you'll have to walk back or wait for me."

"Suits me."

"Then I'll get the car out and pick you up in front of the inn."

The pale winter sunshine gave no heat as Gees drove oft. They passed the crest of the rise, curved down the steep hill toward Barnby, and, glancing across the valley, Gees saw the Grange clear-cut in the sunlight which, striking on its eastern frontage, intensified its neglected appearance. Tott, who had not spoken since entering the car, said: "That place looks haunted."

"I thought you didn't believe in that sort of thing," Gees observed.

"I said it looks haunted, not that it is haunted," Tott retorted. "Not but what—Oh, I don't know!"

They passed through Barnby hamlet, and followed the westward- trending road to the Grange gateway, where two stone posts indicated that a barrier had once existed. Along the quarter-mile of neglected driveway, with dead and rotting boughs lying under the infrequent trees, and the rutted, pot-holed roadway plashy with puddles, with its worst indentations mended by loosely- shoveled flints, Gees drove slowly for the sake of his tires.

"What on earth made the woman pick on a place like this?" Tott demanded irritably. "It's—it's suicidal, enough to make a man drown himself to look at it. And to live here!"

"But this is a woman, not a man," Gees observed, "and I have an idea there was some sort of old association with it to influence her."

"You mean she'd been here before?" Tott asked.

"It may have been in better repair, then," Gees half- answered.

"Then she arrived in a baby carriage," Tott surmised as they crossed the bridge over the moat. "There's been nothing done, by the look of it, for the best part of my lifetime, let alone hers."

The car stopped before the entrance, and as Gees got out Tott said: "That door's ajar. Someone forgot to fasten it."

"I'll call his attention to it," Gees promised, and, entering the portico, pressed the bell-push. They heard the ringing somewhere within, but no other sound, and after a minute or so Gees pressed again and evoked a long peal, but still won no attention.

He said: "I wonder," doubtfully, and lifted the old-fashioned knocker on the door to rap sharply, raising echoes from within. Tott got out of the car and came to stand beside him.

"Peculiar," he observed. "People don't leave their front doors open when they go out. It looks as if—"

Gees gave the door a push, and it swung inward slowly, heavily. He pressed the bell-push again and the sharp, harsh tintinabulation of the bell clanged out loudly.

"They'd hear that anywhere in the house," Tott said. "There may be something wrong. More cats, or something of the sort."

"That being so—" Gees ended the sentence by stepping into the hall, and Tott followed him. For a few seconds they stood, listening, and then, seeing that the drawing room door was not closed, Gees pushed it wide. The room was untenanted; in the fire-basket on the hearth was a little mass of ash and cinders from which bluish smoke still rose. Tott said: "It's not so long since somebody was here." The clock on the mantel ticked noisily—far more noisily, to Gees' hearing, than when he had been in this room with Kefra. Then he saw that a stamped and addressed envelope was placed before the clock face, and crossed the room to take it down, for the name and address on it, as he saw when he approached, were his own.

"Why wasn't it posted?" Tott, beside him, asked.

Without replying, he tore the envelope open, and at that Tott, with innate courtesy, went to the window and stood looking out. Gees took out the letter and recognized Kefra's handwriting:

When I gave, and in giving asked, it was in the certainty that I was free. Now, I have equal certainty of being still bound, and the bonds are so terrible that I shall not see you again. They held me back from you yesterday. I would have you know that it was not I who held back, but I myself was held.

Though the little time I craved and won is all, still I am glad, for though this executrix of Typhon, whom I believed, long ago in Abydos, subject to the will of Osiris—though she bind and hold me after I have fulfilled my part, yet she cannot take from me what has been. And though Saleh—

Typhon, Gees knew, was in old Egyptian belief the very essence of evil, as Osiris was the source of all good. He stood looking at the unfinished letter—had Saleh come to her as she wrote, and given her no opportunity of finishing it?—until Tott faced about. Then Gees crumpled the sheet and thrust it into his pocket, and the envelope with it.

"It tells nothing, as far as finding anyone—goes," he said.

"It looks as if you know Miss Kefra fairly well," Tott observed.

"It's that devil Saleh I want to find," Gees said.

Tott said: "There's nothing against him—or against Miss Kefra either. I think I'll go out to the car and wait there. Rummaging over a private house while the occupants are away doesn't appeal to me. And they are away."

"What makes you so certain?" Gees asked.

"Just a feeling." Tott moved toward the door. "But just in case there should be any more cats, have you got your gun?"

Gees took it out from his overcoat pocket and pushed off the safety catch. "Yes," he said. "I'm going to make sure."

But when, ten minutes or so later, he went out to where Tott waited by the car, he shook his head.

"No sign of anyone, and no clothes nor anything left about," he remarked. "It looks as if they didn't mean to come back."

"But they left the door open," Tott pointed out.

Gees gave him no answer. It was in his mind that Saleh was the cause of her letter being unfinished, and that she had left the door ajar in case he, Gees, should come to the Grange and find the letter, which, because Saleh was with her, she would not take out to post in the ordinary way. Or perhaps she had hoped that anyone else, entering, would take and post it.

"And you're going back to London?" Tott asked, as Gees started the car and turned it toward the bridge over the moat.

"Yes. Get lunch along the road—hullo!"

A small sports car, approaching the Grange, appeared ahead of them as Gees drove over the bridge. So narrow was the drive that he felt his rear wheels drag in the soft turf as he swung the steering wheel to give the other driver room to pass. But that driver did not pass. He came to a standstill beside the Rolls- Bentley, and Gees too stopped.

"Nobody at home, Tony," Gees said calmly, and blessed the thought with which he had securely closed the front door on emerging from the house, while at the same time he cursed the luck that revealed both his presence and Tott's to the man who glared at him. "We've just called, but the house seems empty."

"And what the devil are you two doing here?" Tony Briggs demanded wrathfully.

CHAPTER 17. — BY SALEH'S HAND

GEES took out his cigarette case, unhurriedly, and selected one, while Tott sat beside him, looking straight ahead, and Tony stared at them, angrily.

"I asked you a question!" Tony said impatiently.

"Well, then, for answer—what the hell are you doing here?"

"That's my business."

"Now listen for the echo," Gees said, and lighted his cigarette.

"Stop fooling!" Tony was a wrathful man. "I asked you—"

"And I told you to listen for the echo to your answer to me," Gees interrupted. "Take it as my answer to you."

"Inspector—" Tony changed to frigid politeness—"may I ask what you are doing here?"

"You may, sir," Tott answered imperturbably. "I am on leave till next Monday, and Mr. Green was good enough to drive me this far on my way to Hereford. I'm staying here till the afternoon to see a coin collector like myself, and since Mr. Green was going for a drive before he goes back to London, I came with him to see a bit of the country."

"So this is the way to Hereford, is it?"

"What do you want him to do—go round by Skegness?" Gees asked before Tott could speak. "You heard him say he's only got till Monday."

Tony opened his mouth, but shut it again. Then he said, "I want a word with you, Gees."

"Then you can turn about on the other side of that bridge and follow me up to Hedlington," Gees answered equally coldly. "I'm getting an early lunch there, and then heading back to London."

He drove on, giving Tony no chance to reply. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he saw Tony get out by the entrance and go to the door. Then the curve of the drive prevented further sight. Tott said: "Bad luck."

"He'll draw conclusions, of course," Gees remarked. "But then, he won't be the only one to do that."

"I've as much right to my conclusions, Mr. Green, as you have to yours," Tott retorted. "And about us, he'll draw the right ones."

"Don't worry," Gees urged. "I think I see a way to put him off questioning about you. In fact, I think he's got too much else on his mind just now to brew over what you do with your leave."

"But he's already put two and two together," Tott insisted. "You could tell that by the way he spoke, and the way he looked—"

"Quite—quite," Gees interrupted. "If he should as much as buttonhole you at the end of your leave, just ask him to look up records of forty to thirty-five years back, and see what there is about an agent provocateur named Saleh, operating in Cairo and thereabouts at the time. But don't quote me on it—tell him anything you like about how you got on to it, as long as you leave me out."

"You mean—this Saleh?" Tott asked incredulously.

"I mean this identical Saleh—probably quite young, but snakes don't take long to develop poison fangs. And I have an idea Mr. Briggs will find enough in records to make him acquit you of anything he might resent, as far as your being here goes. But, as I said, don't mention me."

"What happened thirty-five to forty years ago can't be dragged up now," Tott objected. "Mr. Briggs knows I wouldn't be such a fool as to try dragging it up. Everything's changed since then—"

"Murder or accessory to it can be dragged up at any time," Gees said, as he opened out for the hill leading up to the small, rustic town of Hedlington.

"If you knew about that—" Tott began, and did not end it.

"I don't. Records are not accessible to me, and nobody told me anything about it. I dreamed it. Nightmares are a hobby of mine."

Tott said: "I wish we had you back in uniform," rather wistfully.

They were halfway up the hill, and Gees looked across at the Grange. "He's given it up and started back," he said. "It took him a long while to convince himself the house was empty, the sceptical devil!"

"What made you tell me there was nobody at the Grange, Gees?" Striding across the dining room to stand over Gees as he sat at lunch, Tony Briggs fired out the question. For long seconds Gees made no reply. Then he said, "I told you what I believed was the truth."

Tony took a long, sharp breath, checked it. He stuck both hands into his trouser pockets. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, coldly. "But your being here like this—Tott, too, with his ridiculous explanation about coin collecting and going on to Hereford—You here—and him! Why?"

Gees maintained a frosty silence, and Tony said: "Gees?" miserably.

Gees looked up, and saw between Tony's thumb and finger the ring he had last seen when Kefra removed it from her finger and laid it down.

"I don't quite get that," he said—untruthfully.

"I got it back from her—from Cleo—this morning," Tony explained. "That's why I'm here. And she wouldn't see me."

"Who did see you, then?" Gees asked, after a pause for thought.

"Her man—Saleh. He left me at the door while he went to ask her, and came back to tell me she had nothing to say to me. When I tried to insist, he shut the door on me before I could get my foot inside."

"I'm sorry to hear this." He realized he had been mistaken about Kefra's letter on the mantel. His approach to the house, not an interruption by Saleh, had caused her to leave the letter unfinished, and place it for him to find leaving the door ajar in the certainty that he would enter and see his own name on the envelope. But where had she and Saleh hidden?

"And then—you here," Tony said. "Gees, I don't want to bark, or—or ask too much, but did she tell you—?" he broke off doubtfully.

"When could she tell me—anything about you?" Gees asked in reply.

"You were calling on Monday—your wire to me said so. Did you see her then?"

"I called. You'd gone. She told me you'd already explained how Miss Brandon happened to be at Gravenor Mansions. Miss Kefra very kindly invited me to tea with her, and I think that's all," Gees said, jesuitically meaning that it was all he meant to reveal.

"Have you—have you seen her since?" Tony asked.

"I drove down there yesterday afternoon—being in the neighborhood. I'd have felt it rather rude of me not to make a call."

"And—and she said nothing about me, or about sending this ring back?" Tony pursued.

"Now look here, Tony," Gees remonstrated. "Would any girl talk about a thing like that to a third party? I just called, being as I say in the neighborhood, and she didn't so much as mention you or anything about you, to the best of my recollection. Neither did I."

"No, I suppose she wouldn't," Tony admitted dubiously. "But I can't understand it. We parted as—as I hoped to meet her again, as we'd arranged. And then this—with no explanation. Why?"

"Miss Kefra is the only person who can tell you," Gees said.

"But still—now don't be offended at my asking, Gees. Why are you here—why this place? Is it—not because of her, is it?"

"Strictly for your ear, Tony," Gees said with an air of imparting a solemn secret, "I'm here because there has been another death almost exactly like that of the child at Gravenor Mansions, and if there's going to be an epidemic of things of that sort all over the country—well! As for its being in the neighborhood of Barnby Grange, it might have happened anywhere. It just happened to happen here. As far as Tott is concerned, you ought to know that he's no longer associated with the work of the ordinary criminal branch."

Tony thought it over, and put his ring back into his pocket. "I suppose I have rather jumped to conclusions about you," he confessed.

"Naturally," Gees admitted in the pause, "but I'd have thought you—"

He broke off abruptly, remembering Drake. The reporter had drawn quite enough conclusions already; if he saw Tony here, in addition to Gees and Tott, there would be no holding him.

"I'd go back to town, if I were you," Gees said. "You'll be more likely to learn something that way—when Miss Kefra gets back to London, I mean—than by hanging around here. Yes, in your place I'd go back."

"Are you going back too?"

"Since you've got your own car, I needn't offer to drive you," Gees said. He avoided direct reply because of a doubt as to whether he would go back, knowing as he did from Tony that Saleh was still at the Grange. He wanted a word with Saleh, in Kefra's presence, if possible, about the message on the card he had received the night before.

"Yes, I'll start back after lunch," Tony decided.

"If Tott should happen back for lunch," Gees observed, "both he and you might feel a bit awkward." All he wanted was to get Tony out of sight before Drake appeared.

"I don't see—" Tony began—and left it incomplete.

"Considering how early it is, you could make Witney in time for lunch," Gees said.

"I hate going back without seeing her," Tony said irresolutely.

"You'd hate it still more if the door is slammed in your face a second time," Gees pointed out.

He left the room and made for the staircase. Pausing on the landing, he saw Tony go along toward the entrance, and a minute or so later heard the grinding of a self-starter. Then he went downstairs again, and Tott over-took him on the way.

"Gone, thank heaven! Mr. Green, supposing that Drake had spotted him, too. Steam cranes wouldn't have pried him loose from this place."

"The reason he stayed so long down at the Grange," Gees said, taking no notice of the remark, "was that he saw Saleh there."

"You mean—Saleh must have been there when you went over the house?" Tott paused grasping the dining room door handle to ask.

"Somewhere—or hiding out at the back. Mr. Briggs saw him and asked for Miss Kefra. Whether or not she was there too we have no means of knowing. But I'm going looking for Saleh again."

"With all respect for your brains, Mr. Green—" Tott opened the door, and stood back for Gees to precede him into the dining room—"I can't subscribe to this theory of yours. I've thought it over, and I just can't."

"Then why did Saleh bring that card to get me out last night?" Gees interrupted him. "Why was that devilish animal just where the card asked me to wait? Why was a rug taken up in that room at Gravenor Mansions and scrubbed to get rid of stains? Why was a man named Saleh just outside Cairo? Oh, I know that last is a new one on you, but it's gospel."

"If you're definitely accusing Saleh of murder, you've got to produce evidence," Tott insisted. "And evidence is what that card isn't."

Gees turned toward the door and said: "Evidence or no evidence—" Then he had passed the doorway, and Tott failed to catch the end of the sentence, but the tone of those first four words gave him a good idea of what the rest would be.

Tott saw the Rolls-Bentley pass the window, headed for Barnby, and saw, too, grim determination on Gees' face.

"It's a pity," he said to himself. "Fine intellect, too. But if you let yourself get tangled up believing in things of that sort you lose all sense of proportion—which is what he's done."

Outside Hedlington Village Hall Drake waited, realizing that he had come up from Barnby a quarter of an hour too soon. Others waited with him until the door of the hall, opening, revealed Inspector Perry already inside. Then Drake moved forward, and exhibited a card.

"Ah!" Perry sounded unimpressed.

"Well, I'd never have thought a London agency would send a man down, but"—he gave the undersized, goggle-eyed man a disapproving look—"I suppose they felt they could spare you."

"You think—today finishes it, Inspector?"

"I've nothing whatever to tell you," Perry answered stiffly.

"Well, if you feel like that, that's how you feel," Drake observed quite cheerfully. He began polishing his glasses. "I dunno why," he added, "but my specs will fog, down here. Something in the air."

Perry glanced at the bulging lenses. "Your sight must be in a pretty bad way, to need things like those," he said less coldly.

"It's in a bad way," Drake said. "I'm utterly helpless without these. Now I haven't got 'em on—" he turned directly toward the inspector—"you're no more than a fuzzy line to me. That is, I can see you're a man, but not where your neck leaves off and your head begins."

He replaced them on his nose. "This show won't last long, will it?"

"I have no idea how long," Perry answered, stiffening.

"Well, it seems you've everything all set, cause of death absolutely plain, and no complications—especially since that Mr. Green bagged the second of the two wild cats last night."

"Since you know all about it, you don't need information from me," Perry remarked.

"And the tie-up with the Gravenor Mansions affair falls to the ground," Drake observed, carefully watching the inspector's face.

"What affair was that?" Perry asked casually. "There's the coroner, though—excuse me." He hurried across the hall, glad to get away, and Drake nodded to himself before taking off those troublesome spectacles to give them another rub. As he rubbed, a voice beside him said: "Blessed if it ain't young George Drake!" and he hastily replaced the glasses to recognize a boyhood acquaintance.

"Bill!" he exclaimed, and offered his hand. "How are you?"

"Oh, able to take nourishment, y'know," Bill admitted. "What's fetched you down here, George? I thought you were in London? But it sure is nice to catch a glimpse of you again."

"I represent the press. Sent down to cover this inquest. D'you still live around this way?"

"Yes, I got a little place—maybe you'll remember it. The farm Taylor used to have, down in Barnby. Mostly dairy pasture."

"Oh, yes, I remember it all right. And the Grange—I heard from somebody it was let, a little while back. All done up, I suppose?"

"No—look like fallin' down any minute, like it allus did. Damp old place—any place'd be damp with five-and- twenty foot of water all around it. If it was mine, I'd drain that old moat, right off."

"Ah!" Drake made the monosyllable sound appreciative. "What sort of people were they who hired it, do you know anything about them?"

"It were a woman," Bill told him, "an' not people at all. Except she got an odd sorter man to drive her big car. Foreigner, he is. We don't see much of her or him—they're in London, mostly. An' the three maids she had there all run off an' left, because them big cats which was the cause o' this inquest turned up there an' scared 'em. Didn't do 'em no harm, but scared one gal most outer her wits."

Which was no news to Drake, but, having led the talk in the way he wanted, he hoped for better things. "You mean," he suggested, "the cats belonged there—they belonged to this woman?"

"Nobody'll go so far as to say that," Bill hinted darkly. "This gal reckoned she see 'em upstairs i' the middle o' the night, though. Reckoned they was ghosts, she did, an' cleared off next mornin'."

"They might not have been the same cats," Drake conjectured.

"A pair, big an' yellerish, she said—an' the two which was killed like that—big an' yellerish. There wouldn't be two pair like that round here."

"Well, I'd like a talk with you later on, Bill, for the sake of old times," Drake said. "I'd find you down at your place round about six, would I?"

"Yes, I'll be there—"

"Silence, please!"

Drake took out his notebook—to be ready to write.

CHAPTER 18. — THE NET IS CLOSING

AS Gees left the car and stepped toward the portico he saw Kefra in the doorway. He realized that she had admitted him each time he had come here, and momentarily wondered if Saleh wanted to avoid him? It was no more than a second's reflection, driven out by the sound of Kefra's voice.

"Why?" she asked, with no word of greeting for preface. "After what I wrote."

He answered: "Saleh—where is he?"

He saw the moonstone on her breast rise and fall with her breath. "He will come back soon."

"I want to see him—I came back here to find him."

"Then will you come in?" she asked. "He will not be long."

He followed her into the drawing room. The fire had been replenished; it was now a red mass, radiating heat that he felt halfway across the room, and crowned by little bluish flames. Kefra reached up to lay her hand on the mantel, and faced him.

"What is it?"

"This." He took from his pocket the card he had received.

She took it from him, read its brief message, and then, still holding it, shook her head. "No, it is not from me," she said.

"As I knew when I got back from where it asked me to go," he told her. "Saleh delivered it—only Saleh could have written it, since you did not. And going there was meant to kill me, horribly."

She bent her head to gaze down at the fire, and laid her arm on the mantel, with the card pendant in her hand. Then her foot on the guard slipped, and as she started to recover her balance the card fluttered from her fingers. Gees started forward to clutch at it, but merely knocked it away, down into the flames; the paper flared up, crumpled, and was gone. Gazing down at it, he laughed—not a pleasant laugh.

She said, very quietly and evenly: "It makes no difference, and you need not even see him. Very soon, he will be called to account for far more than this. Far, far more than this!"

"Without it, seeing him would be useless," he answered. "But—called to account?"

She pointed at the armchair behind him. "Will you sit there for a little while?" she asked. "In my letter I told you I should not see you again, but now—I wish it."

Half reluctantly he seated himself, and she took her place on the rug at his feet, leaned against his knees with her face turned from him and toward the fire. "So—like any woman of a day, for this last time of all," she said. "As for some few hours out of all my hours. I dreamed I might rest at day's end. Before I knew."

For a moment she looked up at him, and he read in her eyes that she was no longer remote, but desiring his nearness. "You knew—?"

"That I am no less bound from you than I was before the ninth life was taken," she answered somberly. "Freedom was an illusion, given for the little time I knew with you to make the bonds more cruel—a vengeance designed by Typhon's own minister, Sekhmet the accursed."

In the stillness that followed he listened, still and tensed; and heard a faint, purring sound—so faint that he could not determine its source. It might have been in the room, outside the house, or even close here beside him. Then Kefra said: "Yes, I too hear it. She is content, but nothing can take from me the time we two knew." She looked up at him again. The sound had ceased. "No power can take it away. Nor this—this interval of peace."

Again she turned toward the fire, and leaned her head down on her knee. The red coals rustled, shrinking down behind their bars. He laid his hand on her hair. "All this is illusion, Kefra," he said. "Surely it is all illusion. Forget it—come back to London with me—"

"I have seen," she interrupted him. "Since I wrote the letter you took away, I have seen. Else, I would not be here with you again, as now. And Saleh—you asked of him. He will not see another day."

He tried to frame a question, but could find no words. She answered the question as if he had spoken it.

"No, not through me. Nor do I know in what way. But I have seen, and know that even now the assessors wait to judge him in Amenti. There is no escaping."

"The last priest of Sekhmet," he said. "Then—you will be free."

"I shall be free," she assented quietly.

"Then—" he began, and did not end it.

She reached up, grasped the hand he had withdrawn, and again laid it on her head. "For every day that you remember, I have known ten times a thousand days," she said. "I have stored knowledge grain by grain, as a man might store corn against a time of need. And I know—from the day when I stood before Nitocris the beautiful to this hour, through all the ages I have known, the spirit that is man has lifted itself no higher above the beasts than it was when I first saw altars in Abydos."

"A hard saying," Gees said. "But what of it?"

"A thought, no more. That when I was a child kings went out to conquer and bring back slaves, and today the whole world stores arms for no other purpose. In all the ages between they have learned nothing. A thought, no more. And though I have stored knowledge, though I am old in all the ways of life, and have experienced all things, I have found no greater good than this I know now."

"This—?"

"Peace, and a hand laid on my head."

They sat in silence, while thoughts came and passed in his mind: if Saleh, who, she had said, would not see tomorrow; of Tony Briggs, driving back to London perplexed and with a sense of the uselessness of his effort; of Tott, determined and practical; of this woman who, twice during this long silence, nestled more closely to him and once reached up to lay her hand over his on her head.

She rose to her feet with effortless grace, and turned to face him. Abruptly leaned, laid both hands on his shoulders, and drew him toward her to kiss him on the forehead.

"For the last time," she said. "The last time of all."

"But—I want to ask you—"

She shook her head. "Nothing—no more. I shall see you no more. Time—a very little time—will tell all you ask."

She drew back from him and motioned with her head toward the door. He wanted to question, to protest, but found that he could not even speak. Her eyes were all darkness, all tenderness, yet they compelled him to turn away from her and go out...

BEYOND the bridge across the moat he choked the car, realizing that he had not seen Saleh, that Kefra had told him nothing of all he would have learned. But then he drove on. Some force, perhaps emanating from her, compelled him to. And her words—"I shall see you no more," went with him, unquestionable and final.

People were coming out from Hedlington Village Hall as he passed on his way toward the inn. He felt unaccountably tired; there would be time for tea before the fire at the Rest And Be Thankful, and then he could set out for London.

WAITING outside the village hall, Inspector Tott saw Perry emerge, and moved forward to fall into step with him, going toward the inn.

"I wouldn't come inside, because of that worm Drake," he said. "He's got it in his mind that I'm in this case with you, and I want to discourage him."

"He can forget it," Perry said. "There isn't any more case, after that verdict. Though he bustled off as if he thought there might be, directly he'd got the verdict. Gone to see where the body was found, by the look of him."

"How do you get back home?" Tott inquired.

"There's a bus every half hour—it stops outside the Rest And Be Thankful," Perry answered. "One's just gone, but if we catch the next it'll get us to my home before dark. I can put you up for the night, if you like, or you can come back here or go on to Cheltenham."

"Cheltenham, I think—many thanks for the offer, all the same."

"That's a fine car your Mr. Green runs." They were abreast of the car, outside the inn, as Perry made the comment.

"Yes," Tott admitted reflectively, "but he's not my Mr. Green. If he were, I might larn him a few things."

He paused in the doorway of the inn to look back at the car.

"We've got plenty of time," Perry remarked. "More than two hours of daylight, yet, and half an hour for the bus."

"Then I think a cup of tea wouldn't damage either of us," Tott suggested. "You order it, and tell 'em to put it on my bill, while I go for that telephone call before I forget it."

Tott found the apparatus, and called his number. Minutes of waiting, and then he asked to be put through to Inspector Crampton, only to be informed that he was not in.

"Well, who is in, then?" Tott demanded.

"Who wants Inspector Crampton?"

"Inspector Tott."

"Oh, that's different, of course. Carroll speaking, Mr. Tott—Detective-sergeant Carroll."

"Where is Crampton?" Tott rasped out.

"Well, sir, I understood him to say he was going to a place called Gees Confidential Agency, to get some particular information he wanted."

"What particular information—can you tell me that?"

"No, Mr. Tott, I'm afraid I can't. But you might get him there."

"Can you give me the number?"

"Just a moment, sir."

Tott penciled the number on the pad before him, depressed the receiver hook, and dialed again.

"Miss Brandon?"

"Who is speaking, please?"

"Inspector Tott, Miss Brandon. I wonder if you could tell me—"

"Just one moment, Inspector, and perhaps you could help me first," she interrupted him. "I have somebody here asking for Mr. Green—can you tell me where to find him? I was away yesterday, and came back this morning to find him gone, leaving no address."

"I rather think your caller's name is Crampton. If so, Mr. Green is here, tell him. It's Hedlington-cum-Carnworth, Gloucestershire, but Mr. Green's starting back to London almost at once, I understand. Now can you let me speak to Inspector Crampton, please, Miss Brandon?"

"Just a moment."

A few seconds of silence, and then Crampton's voice. "Hullo, Mr. Tott. They told me you were on leave, and couldn't say where, so I came along here on the chance of getting what I wanted. But now I've found you, I wonder if you can tell me. Have you any idea what's become of that Miss Kefra and her man Saleh? I don't know where you're speaking from, but if you can't tell me I've got to make it a routine inquiry about that place of hers in Gloucestershire."

"That's exactly where they are. At least—" he remembered what Gees had told him—"Saleh was here up to three or four hours ago, and probably still is. About Miss Kefra, I'm not so sure, but probably she's at Barnby Grange."

"The man is our bird, I think—all right, Miss Brandon, you need not go. I want both of them held for questioning. The man in charge of the case down there—Perry, I think his name is—could you get a message through to him for me? It's important."

"Easily," Tott answered. "What have you got, Crampton—not some concrete evidence?"

"A rug I took out of her flat—a stained rug. I've had it tested, with the idea that blood might have caused the stains—somebody had tried to wash 'em out. But there was enough left to declare that they are bloodstains, and enough, too, to prove them the same group classification as the slides stained from the body of the child Ernest Parkoot. Which body Saleh jammed into a suitcase and threw out of Miss Kefra's car on Wimbledon Common, the same night the child was killed. It's enough to justify holding both Miss Kefra and the man, and I'll get a car turned out and come right down."

"You have no more than the evidence of the rug, I take it?"

"I only got that half an hour ago—the report of the analysis," Crampton answered. "Now, I've got a squad of searchers going over that flat with fine-tooth combs and microscopes."

"What you have is enough to justify questioning," Tott said. "I'll tell Perry at once—I'm not on the case, as you know, but there's nothing to prevent my giving you and him a hand. You can leave that part of it to me, and probably I'll see you when you arrive here. You don't want to speak to Mr. Green now, I take it, Inspector Crampton?"

"No—Oh, no! I know I can leave it to you—see you soon, probably."

Tott replaced his receiver and hurried down the stairs.

CHAPTER 19. — THE MASK THAT VANISHED

ENTERING the dining room, Tott saw Gees sitting by the fire with a cigarette, gazing at Inspector Perry. Tott said: "We shall not wait for tea, waitress," and Perry turned toward him. "And you, Mr. Green—Oh, well, you've been in it all along." The waitress went out with the tray.

"I've just been talking to Crampton, and he's tied up the Ernest Parkoot murder with Miss Kefra's flat. He wants her and the man Saleh held for questioning—I told him I'd give you the message, Perry."

"Not arrest?"

"Questioning first. I expect arrest will follow."

"Crampton's coming here, then?" Gees put in.

"At once—he'll arrive in about three hours' time, I expect. Meanwhile it's up to you, Perry, to see that those two don't move elsewhere."

"I'd better get going," said Perry. "It's a good three miles—"

"I'll drive you," Gees offered. He remembered Kefra's prophecy regarding Saleh, and felt that he must see if it won to fulfillment. "Your inquest verdict goes west, now," and, dropping his cigarette butt in the fire, lighted another, while Perry shook his head emphatically.

"Oh, no!" he said. "You think it was Saleh both times?"

"No," Gees answered, unenlighteningly.

"Miss Kefra?"

"No," Gees said again.

"Then if it was that cat, the verdict was correct."

"No," Gees told him for the third time.

"Then what on earth are you talking about?" Perry demanded.

"Offering to drive you to Barnby Grange."

Perry looked at his watch. "Very good of you," he said. "You'll come along, Mr. Tott? Crampton can take over when he gets here."

Gees led the way toward the door. "Half a minute—my coat is up in my room. I'll run up and get it."

"Just as well to let him drive us," Perry observed to Tott as they went out to the Rolls-Bentley. "Miss Kefra's got a big black sedan that looks as if it could move, and if that Saleh got going in it he might take some finding. The sooner I pin him down for Crampton, the better—and I've done enough today without walking to the Grange."

The still, sunlit afternoon was nearing its end as Gees drove off; not more than an hour of daylight remained. They passed out from the village and went up over the rise, to begin the long descent to Barnby.

"I hope that worm Drake doesn't spot us," Tott murmured; and Perry, beside Gees, suddenly pointed ahead.

"Her car!" he exclaimed. "Ahead there."

It was drawn up beside the road, nearly opposite the place on the grassy open land where the dead girl's body had been found. From that place, a man walked toward the black limousine, and beside him was someone in a black fur coat who held him by the shoulder.

Gees peered intently through the windshield as he neared them, and saw that the man walked stumblingly: it seemed that his companion almost held him up, and impelled him toward the car.

They were fifty yards or so away from the limousine when suddenly a flock of sheep began surging into the road by way of an opening in the high brick wall, and beyond the wall they could hear a dog barking as he rounded up his charges, and the voice of a shepherd urging both him and the sheep.

With the road completely blocked by the crowding animals, Gees pulled to a standstill some thirty yards from the stationary car before him. And now he could see, with the light from the setting sun striking on that black fur coat, five-grouped markings on its—black panther skin, that he had seen once before. He could see, too, the head that rose above the coat collar, tawny, furred—it turned toward him, and he saw the great, bared and pointed teeth, its very fierce, yellow eyes.

The tawny, furred head turned its great, bared and pointed teeth, its fierce yellow eyes...

Tott stood up in the back of the car with a shout that was almost a shriek. The thing in the panther fur coat was hurrying the stumbling man toward the car, whose side door swung open. Sheep crowded, surging past the Rolls-Bentley, while more sheep poured out from behind the high wall. They clanked against the wings, scraped past, baa-ing in fright, and Tott yelled:

"Get on! Drake—she's got Drake—get on!"

It was impossible to move the car with the mass of sheep driving at it. Short of leaping out, he could do nothing. Perry tried to get the door on his side open, but the pressure of the crowding sheep prevented it, and if he got over it on to the running-board the animals would have swept him off his feet with their rush, driven on as they were by the pressure of others following them.

And Gees saw that Drake, his spectacles missing, stumbled toward the sedan in the grip of whatever it was, like a man senseless, already half dead. His black-furred captor urged him on, almost lifting him from his feet.

Gees reached down to the pocket beside him and got out his automatic. Reaching over the side he fired, and the bullet starred the oblong glass in the back of the limousine. He tried for a second shot, but the pistol had jammed, and he drew it back to tug desperately and vainly at the recoil casing.

But, with the report, the black-furred figure released its hold on Drake, who fell in a crumpled heap, while it leaped to disappear within—and the sedan began to move down the hill.

"Oh, blast these sheep!" Perry shouted.

The last of them surged past the car as the shepherd and his dog appeared in the opening by which they had emerged to the road. Perry got out, over the side of the car, and ran to the man, who stood staring, and lifted a hand to scratch his head. Perry shook a fist at him, and then pointed to Drake's still, crumpled figure.

"See to that man, you!" he commanded fiercely.

Without waiting for reply, he ran back to the car and climbed in again. "Get on, Mr. Green—get on!" he ordered. "We've got to catch that car."

"Before they can get inside the Grange, too," Tott said sharply. "Remember how you looked for 'em there this morning, Mr. Green? They've got secret hiding places in that old house. My God, I'd never have believed—it was a mask, though. A lioness-head mask."

"Yes," Perry said, as the Rolls-Bentley shot at the descent, "it must have been a mask; but why?"

Gees spared one glance at Drake as he passed, and saw that he lay crumpled and ominously inert.

The tires ground, half-skidding, on the curve of the hill, and the car swung out so menacingly that Gees had to slow down for an instant. Coming to straight road again, Gees saw the car ahead take the right-hand turn at the foot of the hill on two wheels. He almost held his breath for the crash seemed inevitable, but the black car straightened out and disappeared, hurtling toward the Grange.

"You'll lose them—you'll lose them!" Tott moaned.

Slow, a little slower—that turn at the foot of the hill was dangerous. Open out—now brake strongly with the steering wheel hard over. Tott emitted a long, "Aah-h-h!" as the back wheels swung in a dry skid, and with the brake released the car shot swiftly forward in its new direction.

Past the last cottage of the hamlet, and on. Turning in with another dry skid between the posts where once a gate had marked the entrance to the drive, and now no more than fifty yards divided the two cars.

Tott leaned forward. "You've got 'em. Pull up sharp, and we'll have 'em before they can get inside and hide that mask. We'll jump out after them as he stops, Perry."

The car ahead was almost leaping on the rutted, flinty way. Almost on to the moat-bridge, it lurched and swerved as the report of a bursting front tire, cut by the flints on the drive, reached their hearing. Lurched, swerved—crashed on the crumbling parapet, and, for a moment that lasted interminably, hung, toppling, dropping, to plunge thunderously. Only the ripples remained when Gees braked the Rolls-Bentley to a standstill.

Perry, out on the bridge, laid a hand on the cracked and partly shattered parapet to look over. Great bubbles came to the surface, and more ripples rayed out from them on the ominously black water.

"Twenty-five feet deep," he said. "We've got to help to get it up. No hope—no chance for them."

"The mask will be inside the car," Tott said. "Evidence."

Again, seated at his steering wheel, Gees remembered Kefra's prophecy as he gazed on its fulfillment.

CHAPTER 20. — WHEN GODS MUST DIE

THE shepherd bent over Drake's limp figure on the grass. Then he knelt and heard Drake's breathing. He tried to rouse him by saying louder and louder, "Heer! Heer, mister! Wake up!"

But, since Drake showed no sign of wakening, the shepherd took him under the armpits and lifted him to a sitting posture, while the old dog that had rounded the sheep out to the road stood by with hanging tongue. Then Drake, leaning against the shepherd's hold, stirred and put his hand to his face, slowly and uncertainly.

"My—my glasses," he said. "I want my glasses."

"Where are they, mister?" the shepherd asked. "What glasses?"

"I was wiping 'em. They—they fogged. Somebody grabbed my shoulder—I couldn't see. And then—my God! I know what a mouse must feel like when a cat gets it! The glasses—who are you? Where are they?"

"If I let go, mister, kin you set up?" the shepherd asked.

Drake put his two hands on the ground and got to his feet, clumsily. "Wait—I remember," said he, more coherently. "I've got my spare pair." He felt in his pocket and, producing a case, opened it and put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. He looked at the shepherd.

"Who was it?" he asked. "Did you see who caught me?"

The shepherd shook his head. "Didn't see nobody, mister," he answered. "I were herdin' my sheep inter the road. That there p'leece inspector what been nosin' round here about that gal gittin' killed—he said I gotter look arter you. You all right now? You're sort of shaken up."

"I—I suppose so." Drake put a hand to his shoulder. "Cut, somehow—all sticky and painful." He pushed back the coat lapel, and blood showed on the shoulder of his shirt. "Wait a bit—don't go for a minute." He slipped the coat off, dropped it on the grass, and opened the front of his shirt and undervest "Look—what do you make of it?" he asked. "I can't see, myself, but I can feel it."

"Looks like you been clawed, mister, like they say the gal were clawed," the shepherd decided. "The shirt's all tore too—look! It mean there's another o' them great cats about somewhere. I gotter go an' see it don't git at my sheep, I reckon." He gazed along the road toward the crest of the rise, where the sheep, with nobody to urge them, had taken to the grass. Drake looked round too.

"That's my handkerchief over there—the glasses'll be there too," he announced. "The pair I dropped. Look here—Don't go! If there's another of those beasts about I'm not safe alone—nor are you. It's less likely to go for two of us, and there's your dog."

"Well, mister, you git them glasses, an' then come along o' me, so be you kin walk alone all right now. I got to look arter my sheep, and since I got to drive 'em through Hedlin'gon, you kin come along."

Drake went to retrieve the glasses and handkerchief. When he returned to where the shepherd waited, he said: "Whoever grabbed me must have had some sort of knife or something—it wasn't a cat or any animal made those cuts in my shoulder. It was the hand that held on to me and dragged me along—somebody—I think there was a car, but I could see nothing without my glasses. Something in the hand holding me that sunk in, tore—not an animal of any sort."

"It looks like claws done it, to me," the shepherd insisted.

"If you want to get along, I'll go with you to Hedlington," Drake said. "Find somewhere to get the cuts dressed—they may be septic. But I know how a mouse must feel, helpless, awful!"

"It were a cat done it," the shepherd said with decision. "A great big cat, like that one they shot. I gotter go after my sheep, mister. Can't leave them alone."

They set off, and the old dog followed.

The Grange frontage was no mare than a dark oblong against the night sky when the gang of men whom Perry had fetched, together with tackle from a builder's yard, finally got the large car out from the moat and righted it, little damaged except for its driven-in radiator. They dragged it toward the portico, into the ray of Gees' headlamps, and the light, too, of the two lorries on which the tackle had been fetched under Perry's direction. Tott, who had remained on guard all the time, reached out to open the door, but then stood back and turned to Crampton, who by that time had arrived to take part.

"It's your case," Tott said. "Not that there's much of a case left for you, except for the mask I told you about."

"It'll be in there," Crampton decided. "All windows up and unbroken—it'll be in there. Somebody give a hand here!"

He turned the handle and tugged at the car door. It yielded stiffly; in the fall, the body of the car had been strained, probably. As the door came open, water gushed out. Men reached in and took out the body of Cleo Kefra, and Gees standing back, held his breath as the light of a big electric torch that Tott held fell on the still figure, and on her face. Her face, he saw, and with that turned away, for a drowned face is not pretty.

"Now some of you get that body out from the driver's seat," Crampton ordered. "Let me have that light, Mr. Tott. The glass between her and the driver was closed, she was all shut in. The mask will be in the back, I expect, where she was."

He directed the strong light into the back of the car, rayed it slowly from floor to roof. Then, getting inside, he threw out the sodden rug, the seat, and even a movable floor-board, while men carried the two bodies into the Grange. Crampton got out again.

"You're sure about that mask, Mr. Tott?" he asked.

"It'll be somewhere in front," Tott answered. "We should have seen if they'd thrown it out while we were chasing them—at least, they were in sight a good part of the way. A mask like a lion's head—like a lioness' head, I mean. I saw it quite plainly while she had hold of that man Drake. Covering all her head and neck as far down as the collar of the fur coat. Look in front."

They stripped the driving compartment as Crampton had already stripped the back, but with no more result. Tott, standing beside Gees, observed—"That's funny. They must have thrown it out."

Gees said, "They didn't throw it out."

"It's not there!' Tott protested.

"No," Gees agreed tonelessly, "it's not there."

Sentences from Kefra's story were back in his mind. "When she had need, she took—so much of my life that I was as one dead until she had her will...and thus renewed her accursed self."

And now at last he knew. There was no mask—for none had been worn. Gees realized that at the end, Kefra had known too. That was what she had meant this afternoon. Her own body, during those moments of blackness, those "renderings-up of myself to the goddess," had been the instrument of Sekhmet's hideous, bloody- hungry cruelty. And as once long ago, Sekhmet had killed the man whom Kefra had loved—so last night in jealousy she had tried to kill him, Gees.

But who would believe these tales—an ancient goddess of wrath and murder, coming to earth to destroy; making of her priestess a changeling—a clawing, snarling lion-woman; giving that priestess timeless and destructive life, using her to procure the blood of mortals—the blood so necessary to sacrifice and belief—No, these things would not be believed.

But no matter. Sekhmet was dead now. For Saleh, her only living worshipper, lay lifeless in the car. There was no one to believe in her any more; and without belief she perished, as must all the gods whose cult has passed from the minds and hearts, the fear and worship, of men. And with Sekhmet dead, then Kefra—her priestess, her instrument, and her victim—was at last released from the long bondage—"the closer bond," she had called it.

So they were dead—all three. Goddess, priestess, devotee. Gone from the earth. And none would remember. Time had claimed them at last.

Gees knew though, with a pang of misery, that time would never take from him the memory of Kefra's burning amber eyes, nor that moment of utter peace they had known this afternoon... Was it only this afternoon? It seemed centuries...

"They must have thrown it out!" Tott insisted. He was still fuming about the mask.

"Very well, then, they threw it out. In that case, you'll find it somewhere on the way here—but you won't," Gees told him. "Further, you won't want me any more—Crampton has got his car here—"

"Hold on a minute," Tott interrupted. "What do you know?"

"Nothing that you would believe—nothing that would be the slightest use to you. I'm going back to London."

He turned to go to his car. Tott called—"Here—Mr. Green?" and he faced about again.

"Well?" he asked, coolly.

"Oh, nothing!" Tott said, in a tone of weary irritation.

Gees turned again, got into his car and, backing to turn, drove away.

THE END