his heavy gantlet gloves as though to prepare for action. "Take it slower," he advised. "I don't get you." And then he noticed that the man on the other side of the gate was hatless and without an overcoat. "My Lord!" he cried anxiously. "You'll freeze out here, man!"

"Then for God's sake come in here and help me!" Kenwick entreated. "I don't know whose place this is but it ought to be investigated. There's a woman in here who's ill, and somebody has locked her into her room. I'm not able to do a thing for her or for myself. Do you know what house this is?"

The stranger shook his head. "No, I'm just out here on a visit." Kenwick groaned. There flashed into his mind the stories of some of his friends who had toured California and who were unanimous in their conclusion that everybody in the southern part of the state was merely a visitor. "But whom do they visit?" Everett Kenwick had once inquired and nobody could supply him with an answer.

"Then you don't know where the Raeburn house is?" the man inside the gate asked hopelessly.

The motorist shook his head again. "I'll tell you what though," he suggested. "You get back into the house out of this cold and I'll send somebody back here. I'm having engine trouble and I've got to get into town."

Kenwick was fumbling with numb fingers in the pocket of his coat. He stretched an oblong of white paper through the bars of the gate. "If you're going in town, take this," he pleaded. "It's a message I want to send to my brother in New York. Kenwick is the name and the address is on the outside."

The stranger stopped on his way to the gate and a curious expression crossed his face. And just at that moment Kenwick caught the sound of another voice speaking from inside the car. He couldn't catch the words, for the coughing of the engine beat against his ears. The man in the goggles climbed to the seat and the next minute the machine was moving jerkily away.

Cold desolation seized Kenwick. But he felt certain that the stranger would return. There was nothing mysterious nor uncanny about him. But how long would he have to wait there on the drenched gravel before help could get back to him? It wouldn't do to catch cold in that leg and add a fever to his other troubles. He must get back into the house. Out there on the bleak road he thought longingly of its warm comfort. Everything that he had done since he came into it seemed now to have been the wrong thing. A horrible sense of 

 Prev. P 22/140 next