t the man had said made it certain that
he did not think the specter was "Ben"; for the specter had "got Ben."
Did Alan look like some one else, then? Like whom? Evidently like the
man--now dead for he had a ghost--who had "got" Ben, in the big man's
opinion. Who could that be?

No answer, as yet, was possible to that. But if he did look like some
one, then that some one was--or had been--dreaded not only by the big
man who had entered the house, but by Benjamin Corvet as well. "You
got Ben!" the man had cried out. Got him? How? "But you can't get
me!" he had said. "You--with the bullet hole above your eye!" What
did that mean?

Alan got up and went to look at himself in the mirror he had seen in
the hall. He was white, now that the flush of the fighting was going;
he probably had been pale before with excitement, and over his right
eye there was a round, black mark. Alan looked down at his hands; a
little skin was off one knuckle, where he had struck the man, and his
fingers were smudged with a black and sooty dust. He had smudged them
on the papers up-stairs or else in feeling his way about the dark
house, and at some time he had touched his forehead and left the black
mark. That had been the "bullet hole."

The rest that the man had said had been a reference to some name; Alan
had no trouble to recollect the name and, while he did not understand
it at all, it stirred him queerly--"the _Miwaka_." What was that? The
queer excitement and questioning that the name brought, when he
repeated it to himself, was not recollection; for he could not recall
ever having heard the name before; but it was not completely strange to
him. He could define the excitement it stirred only in that way.

He went back to the Morris chair; his socks were nearly dry, and he put
on his shoes. He got up and paced about. Sherrill had believed that
here in this house Benjamin Corvet had left--or might have left--a
memorandum, a record, or an account of some sort which would explain to
Alan, his son, the blight which had hung over his life. Sherrill had
said that it could have been no mere intrigue, no vulgar personal sin;
and the events of the night had made that very certain; for, plainly,
whatever was hidden in that house involved some one else seriously,
desperately. There was no other way to explain the intrusion of the
sort of man whom Alan had surprised there an hour ago.

The fact that this other man searched also