Connecticut western news., 1922-09-14
CHAPTER V
An Encounter.

The light showed the nall In front or him, reaching back into some vague, distant darkness, and great rooms with wide pOrtiered dOOrways gaping on both sides. He turned into the room upon his right, glanced to see that the shades were drawn on the windows toward the street then found the switch and turned on the electric light.
 Alan had the feeling which so often comes to one in an unfamiliar and vacant house that there was some one in the house with him. He listened and seemed to hear another sound in the upper hall, a footstep. He went out quickly to the foot of the -raIrs and looked up them.
 'Is any one here?" he caIIeu. "Is any one hereW
 His voice brought no response. ps went half way up the curve of the wiGe stairway and called again, and lis- tened then he fought down the feeling he had had; Sherrill had said there would be no one in the house, and AAoAA was NCL Idlll lliCAS WdS ouC. So he went back to the room where he had left the light.
 The center of this room, like the room next to 1t, was occupied by a library table-desk He pulled open some drawers in 1t; one or two had blueprints and technical drawings in them; the others had only the mscel- ioh Foe, t- much used. There were drawers also under the bookcases all around the room; they appeared, when Allan opened some of, them, to contain pam phlets of various societies, and the scientific correspondence of which Sherrill had told him. Alan felt that seeing these things was bringing his father closer to him; they gave him little of the feeling he had been unable to get when he looked at his fathers picture. He could realize better now the lonely, restless man, pursued by some ghost he could not kill, taking up for distraction one subject of study after another, exhausting each in turn until he could no longer make it en- gross him, and then absorbing him. self in the next.
 On the top of a chest of high draw CTS in corner near the dressing table were some papers. Alan went over to look at them they were invi- tations, notices of concerts and of plays twenty years old-the mall, probably, of the morning when Corvet's wife had gone away, left where her maid or she herself had laid them. and only picked up and put back there at the times since when the room was dusted. AS Alan touched them, he saw that his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of the chest; he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks of the same sort as he had made. The freshness of these other marks star tied him; they had been made within a day or so. They could not have been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that SherrilPs hands were slender and delicately formed; Cor vet, too, was not a large man; Alan's own hand was of good size and pow erful, but when he put his fingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the other hand must have been larger and more powerful than his own. Had 1t been Coryet's serv- ant? It might have been, though the marks seemed too fresh for that; for the servant, Sherrill had said, had left the day Corvet's disappearance was discovered.
 This proof that some one had been prying about in the house before him. self and since Corvet had gone, star tied Alan and angered him. Who had been searching in Benjamin Corvetfs in Alan's house? He pushed the drawers shut hastily and hurried across the hall to the room opposite. In this room-plainly Benjamin Cor vets bedroom-were no signs of in- trusion. He went to the door of the room connecting with it, turned on the light, and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others and contained a roll-top desk and a cabi- net. The cover of the desk was closed, Nand the drawers of the cabinet were shut and apparently undisturbed. He tried the cover of the desk, but 1t ap- peared to be locked; after looking around vainly for a key, he tried again, exerting a little more force, and this time the top went up easily, tearing away the metal plate into which the claws of the lock clasped and the two long screws which had held 1t. He examined the lock, sur prised, and saw that the screws must have been merely set into the holes; scars showed where a chisel or some metal implement had been thrust In under the top to force 1t up. The pigeonholes and little drawers in the upper part of the, desk, as he swiftly opened them, he found entirely empty. He hurried to the cabinet; the draw CTS of the cabinet too had been forced, and very recently; for the scars and the splinters of wood were clean and fresh. These drawers and the draw