Charred Wood

"But how did she get out?" insisted the agent, coming back to the issue.

"Search me," offered the constable. He looked toward the top of the wall. "Clumb the fence, mebbe."

"With her dress looking as it does?"

"There's no other way. I dunno."

The agent was puzzled. "I want a closer inspection of that wall. We'll walk along this side."

Both agent and constable started off, keeping well behind the wild hedge along the wall so that they might not be seen from the bluff road.

The man lying in the grass was more puzzled than the agent. Why a book agent and a constable should be so anxious about a lady who was--well, just charming--but who had herself stepped out of nowhere to join a priest in his walk, was a problem for some study. He got up and walked to the wall. Then he laughed. Close examination showed him marks in the giant tree, the vertical cuts being cleverly covered by the bark, while the horizontal ones had creepers festooned over them. A door was well concealed. But the tree? It was large, yet there could not be room in it for more than one person, who would have to stand upright and in a most uncomfortable position. The man himself had been before it over an hour. How long had the lady been in the tree? He forgot his lost cigar in trying to figure the problem out.

Mark Griffin had never liked problems. That was one reason why he found himself now located in a stuffy New England inn just at the end of the summer season when all the "boarders" had gone except himself and the book agent.

Griffin himself, though the younger son of an Irish peer, had been born in England. The home ties were not strong and when his brother succeeded to the title and estates in Ireland Mark, who had inherited a fortune from his mother, went to live with his powerful English relatives. For a while he thought of going into the army, but he knew he was a dunce in mathematics, so he soon gave up the idea. He tried Oxford, but failed there for the same reason. Then he just drifted. Now, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, he was knocking about, sick of things, just existing, and fearfully bored. He had dropped into Sihasset through sheer curiosity--just to see a typical New England summer resort where the Yankee type had not yet entirely disappeared. Now that the season was over he simply did not care to pull out for New York and continue his trip to--nowhere. He was "seeing" America. It might take months and it might take years. He did not care. Then England again by way of Japan and Siberia--perhaps. He never wanted to lose sight of that "perhaps," which was, after all, his only guarantee of independence.