17
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a manshould catch young and have done with, for when it comes inmiddle life it is apt to be serious. Dudley Pickering had escapedboyhood at the time when his contemporaries were contracting it.It is true that for a few years after leaving the cradle he hadexhibited a certain immatureness, but as soon as he put onknickerbockers and began to go about a little he outgrew all that.He avoided altogether the chaotic period which usually liesbetween the years of ten and fourteen. At ten he was a thoughtfuland sober-minded young man, at fourteen almost an old fogy.
And now--thirty-odd years overdue--boyhood had come upon him. Ashe examined the revolver in his bedroom, wild and unfamiliaremotions seethed within him. He did not realize it, but they werethe emotions which should have come to him thirty years before anddriven him out to hunt Indians in the garden. An imagination whichmight well have become atrophied through disuse had him asthoroughly in its control as ever he had had his Pickering Giant.
He believed almost with devoutness in the plot which he haddetected for the spoliation of Lord Wetherby's summer-house, thatplot of which he held Lord Dawlish to be the mainspring. And itmust be admitted that circumstances had combined to help hisbelief. If the atmosphere in which he was moving was not sinisterthen there was no meaning in the word.
Summer homes had been burgled, there was no getting away fromthat--half a dozen at least in the past two months. He was astranger in the locality, so had no means of knowing that summerhomes were always burgled on Long Island every year, as regularlyas the coming of the mosquito and the advent of the jelly-fish. Itwas one of the local industries. People left summer homes lyingabout loose in lonely spots, and you just naturally got in throughthe cellar window. Such was the Long Islander's simple creed.
This created in Mr Pickering's mind an atmosphere of burglary, areceptiveness, as it were, toward burglars as phenomena, and theextremely peculiar behaviour of the person whom in his thoughts healways referred to as The Man crystallized it. He had seen The Manhanging about, peering in at windows. He had shouted 'Hi!' and TheMan had run. The Man had got into the house under the pretence ofbeing a friend of Claire's. At the suggestion that he should meetClaire he had dashed away in a panic. And Claire, both then andlater, had denied absolutely any knowledge of him.
As for the apparently blameless beekeeping that was going on atthe place where he lived, that was easily discounted. Mr Pickeringhad heard somewhere or read somewhere--he rather thought that itwas in those interesting but disturbing chronicles of Raffles--thatthe first thing an intelligent burglar did was to assume someopen and innocent occupation to avert possible inquiry into hisreal mode of life. Mr Pickering did not put it so to himself, forhe was rarely slangy even in thought, but what he felt was that hehad caught The Man and his confederate with the goods.
If Mr Pickering had had his boyhood at the proper time andfinished with it, he would no doubt have acted otherwise than hedid. He would have contented himself with conducting a war ofdefence. He would have notified the police, and considered thatall that remained for him personally to do was to stay in his roomat night with his revolver. But boys will be boys. The only coursethat seemed to him in any way satisfactory in this his hour ofrejuvenation was to visit the bee farm, the hotbed of crime, andkeep an eye on it. He wanted to go there and prowl.
He did not anticipate any definite outcome of his visit. In hisboyish, elemental way he just wanted to take a revolver and apocketful of cartridges, and prowl.
It was a great night for prowling. A moon so little less than fullthat the eye could barely detect its slight tendency to becomeconcave, shone serenely, creating a desirable combination of blackshadows where the prowler might hide and great stretches of lightin which the prowler might reveal his wickedness without disguise.Mr Pickering walked briskly along the road, then less briskly ashe drew nearer the farm. An opportune belt of shrubs that ran fromthe gate adjoining the road to a point not far from the house gavehim just the cover he needed. He slipped into this belt of shrubsand began to work his way through them.
Like generals, authors, artists, and others who, after planningbroad effects, have to get down to the detail work, he found thatthis was where his troubles began. He had conceived the journeythrough the shrubbery in rather an airy mood. He thought he wouldjust go through the shrubbery. He had not taken into account thebranches, the thorns, the occasional unexpected holes, and he wasboth warm and dishevelled when he reached the end of it and foundhimself out in the open within a short distance of what herecognized as beehives. It was not for some time that he was ableto give that selfless attention to exterior objects which is theprowler's chief asset. For quite a while the only thought of whichhe was conscious was that what he needed most was a cold drink anda cold bath. Then, with a return to clear-headedness, he realizedthat he was standing out in the open, visible from three sides toanyone who might be in the vicinity, and he withdrew into theshrubbery. He was not fond of the shrubbery, but it was a splendidplace to withdraw into. It swallowed you up.
This was the last move of the first part of Mr Pickering's activecampaign. He stayed where he was, in the middle of a bush, andwaited for the enemy to do something. What he expected him to dohe did not know. The subconscious thought that animated him wasthat on a night like this something was bound to happen sooner orlater. Just such a thought on similarly stimulating nights hadanimated men of his acquaintance thirty years ago, men who wereas elderly and stolid and unadventurous now as Mr Pickering hadbeen then. He would have resented the suggestion profoundly, butthe truth of the matter was that Dudley Pickering, after a latestart, had begun to play Indians.
Nothing had happened for a long time--for such a long time that,in spite of the ferment within him, Mr Pickering almost began tobelieve that nothing would happen. The moon shone with unutterablecalm. The crickets and the tree frogs performed their interminableduet, apparently unconscious that they were attacking it indifferent keys--a fact that, after a while, began to infuriateMr Pickering. Mosquitoes added their reedy tenor to the concert.A twig on which he was standing snapped with a report like a pistol.The moon went on shining.
Away in the distance a dog began to howl. An automobile passed inthe road. For a few moments Mr Pickering was able to occupyhimself pleasantly with speculations as to its make; and then hebecame aware that something was walking down the back of his neckjust beyond the point where his fingers could reach it. Discomfortenveloped Mr Pickering. At various times by day he had seenlong-winged black creatures with slim waists and unpleasant faces.Could it be one of these? Or a caterpillar? Or--and the maddeningthing was that he did not dare to slap at it, for who knew whatdesperate characters the sound might not attract?
Well, it wasn't stinging him; that was something.
A second howling dog joined the first one. A wave of sadness wasapparently afflicting the canine population of the district to-night.
Mr Pickering's vitality began to ebb. He was ageing, andimagination slackened its grip. And then, just as he had begun tocontemplate the possibility of abandoning the whole adventure andreturning home, he was jerked back to boyhood again by the soundof voices.
He shrank farther back into the bushes. A man--The Man--wasapproaching, accompanied by his female associate. They passed soclose to him that he could have stretched out a hand and touchedthem.
The female associate was speaking, and her first words set all MrPickering's suspicions dancing a dance of triumph. The girl gaveherself away with her opening sentence.
'You can't think how nervous I was this afternoon,' he heard hersay. She had a soft pleasant voice; but soft, pleasant voices maybe the vehicles for conveying criminal thoughts. 'I thought everymoment one of those newspaper men would look in here.'
Where was here? Ah, that outhouse! Mr Pickering had had hissuspicions of that outhouse already. It was one of thosestructures that look at you furtively as if something were hidingin them.
'James! James! I thought I h
eard James in those bushes.'
The girl was looking straight at the spot occupied by MrPickering, and it had been the start caused by her first words andthe resultant rustle of branches that had directed her attentionto him. He froze. The danger passed. She went on speaking. MrPickering pondered on James. Who was James? Another of the gang,of course. How many of them were there?
'Once I thought it was all up. One of them was about a yard fromthe window, just going to look in.'
Mr Pickering thrilled. There was something hidden in the outhouse,then! Swag?
'Thank goodness, a bee stung him at the psychological moment,and--oh!'
She stopped, and The Man spoke:
'What's the matter?'
It interested Mr Pickering that The Man retained his Englishaccent even when talking privately with his associates. Forpractice, no doubt.
'Come and get a banana,' said the girl. And they went off togetherin the direction of the house, leaving Mr Pickering bewildered.Why a banana? Was it a slang term of the underworld for a pistol?It must be that.
But he had no time for speculation. Now was his chance, the onlychance he would ever get of looking into that outhouse and findingout its mysterious contents. He had seen the girl unlock the door.A few steps would take him there. All it needed was nerve. With astrong effort Mr Pickering succeeded in obtaining the nerve. Heburst from his bush and trotted to the outhouse door, opened it,and looked in. And at that moment something touched his leg.
At the right time and in the right frame of mind man is capable ofstoic endurances that excite wonder and admiration. Mr Pickeringwas no weakling. He had once upset his automobile in a ditch, andhad waited for twenty minutes until help came to relieve a brokenarm, and he had done it without a murmur. But on the presentoccasion there was a difference. His mind was not adjusted for theoccurrence. There are times when it is unseasonable to touch a manon the leg. This was a moment when it was unseasonable in the caseof Mr Pickering. He bounded silently into the air, his whole beingrent asunder as by a cataclysm.
He had been holding his revolver in his hand as a protectionagainst nameless terrors, and as he leaped he pulled the trigger.Then with the automatic instinct for self-preservation, he sprangback into the bushes, and began to push his way through them untilhe had reached a safe distance from the danger zone.
James, the cat, meanwhile, hurt at the manner in which hisfriendly move had been received, had taken refuge on the outhouseroof. He mewed complainingly, a puzzled note in his voice. MrPickering's behaviour had been one of those things that no fellowcan understand. The whole thing seemed inexplicable to James.