A sudden caution arrested him--the sound of his approach might
precipitate a catastrophe, and he soundlessly felt his passage about
the house to the portico. The steps creaked beneath his careful tread,
but the noise was lost in the wind. At first he could see no light;
the hall door, he discovered, was closed; then he was aware of a faint
glimmer seeping through a drawn window shade on the right. From
without he could distinguish nothing. He listened, but not a sound
rose. The stillness was more ominous than cries.

John Woolfolk took the pistol from his pocket and, automatically
releasing the safety, moved to the door, opening it with his left
hand. The hall was unlighted; he could feel the pressure of the
darkness above. The dank silence flowed over him like chill water
rising above his heart. He turned, and a dim thread of light, showing
through the chink of a partly closed doorway, led him swiftly forward.
He paused a moment before entering, shrinking from what might be
revealed beyond, and then flung the door sharply open.

His pistol was directed at a low-trimmed lamp in a chamber empty of
all life. He saw a row of large black portfolios on low supports, a
sewing bag spilled its contents from a chair, a table bore a tin
tobacco jar and the empty skin of a plantain. Then his gaze rested
upon the floor, on a thin, inanimate body in crumpled alpaca trousers
and dark jacket, with a peaked, congested face upturned toward the
pale light. It was Lichfield Stope--dead.

Woolfolk bent over him, searching for a mark of violence, for the
cause of the other's death. At first he found nothing; then, as he
moved the body--its lightness came to him as a shock--he saw that one
fragile arm had been twisted and broken; the hand hung like a withered
autumn leaf from its circular cuff fastened with the mosaic button.
That was all.

He straightened up sharply, with his pistol levelled at the door. But
there had been no noise other than that of the wind plucking at the
old tin roof, rattling the shrunken frames of the windows. Lichfield
Stope had fallen back with his countenance lying on a doubled arm, as
if he were attempting to hide from his extinguished gaze the horror of
his end. The lamp was of the common glass variety, without shade; and,
in a sudden eddy of air, it flickered, threatened to go out, and a
thin ribbon of smoke swept up against the chimney and vanished.

On the wall was a wide stipple print of the early ninet