"I--I dislike him intensely," I said angrily, "but you would not dare to
say that to his face. He could strangle you with one hand."
Max laughed disagreeably.
"Well, I only hope he is gone," he threw at me over his shoulder, "I
wouldn't want to be responsible to your father if he had stayed." I was
speechless with wrath.
They went away then, and I could hear them going over the house. At
one o'clock Jim went up to bed, the last, and Mr. Harbison had not been
found. I did not see how they could go to bed at all. If he had escaped,
then Max was right and the whole thing was heart-breaking. And if he had
not, then he might be lying-I got up and dressed.
The early part of the night had been cloudy, but when I got to the roof
it was clear starlight. The wind blew through the electric wires
strung across and set them singing. The occasional bleat of a belated
automobile on the drive below came up to me raucously. The tent gleamed,
a starlit ghost of itself, and the boxwoods bent in the breeze. I went
over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it. I had done the
same thing so often before; I had carried all my times of stress so
infallibly to that particular place, that instinctively my feet turned
there.
And there in the starlight, I went over the whole serio-comedy, and I
loathed my part in it. He had been perfectly right to be angry with me
and with all of us. And I had been a hypocrite and a Pharisee, and had
thanked God that I was not as other people, when the fact was that I was
worse than the worst. And although it wasn't dignified to think of him
going down the drain pipe, still--no one could blame him for wanting to
get away from us, and he was quite muscular enough to do it.
I was in the depths of self-abasement when I heard a sound behind me. It
was a long breath, quite audible, that ended in a groan. I gripped the
parapet and listened, while my heart pounded, and in a minute it came
again.
I was terribly frightened. Then--I don't know how I did it, but I was
across the roof, kneeling beside the tent, where it stood against
the chimney. And there, lying prone among the flower pots, and almost
entirely hidden, lay the man we had been looking for.
His head was toward me, and I reached out shakingly and touched his
face. It was cold, and my hand, when I drew it back, was covered with
blood.