pped, his face suddenly white. "You--too?"

The words were hardly audible. Their glances met--clashed like
dueling-swords.

For ten seconds neither of them said a word or moved a muscle: Arthur,
from the stairs, looking down; his father below, gazing up at him. In
Henry Duryea the blood drained slowly from his face and left a purple
etching across the bridge of his nose and above his eyes. He looked like
a death's-head.

Arthur winced at the sight and twisted his eyes away. He turned to go up
the remaining stairs.

"Son!"

He stopped again; his hand tightened on the banister.

"Yes, Dad?"

Duryea put his foot on the first stair, "I want you to lock your door
tonight. The wind would keep it banging!"

"Yes," breathed Arthur, and pushed up the stairs to his room.

* * * * *

Doctor Duryea's hollow footsteps sounded in steady, unhesitant beats
across the floor of Timber Lake Lodge. Sometimes they stopped, and the
crackling hiss of a sulfur match took their place, then perhaps a
distended sigh, and, again, footsteps....

Arthur crouched at the open door of his room. His head was cocked for
those noises from below. In his hands was a double-barrel shotgun of
violent gage.

... thud ... thud ... thud....

Then a pause, the clinking of a glass and the gurgling of liquid. The
sigh, the tread of his feet over the floor....

"He's thirsty," Arthur thought--_Thirsty!_

Outside, the storm had grown into fury. Lightning zigzagged between the
mountains, filling the valley with weird phosphorescence. Thunder, like
drums, rolled incessantly.

Within the lodge the heat of the fireplace piled the atmosphere thick
with stagnation. All the doors and windows were locked shut, the
oil-lamps glowed weakly--a pale, anemic light.

Henry Duryea walked to the foot of the stairs and stood looking up.

Arthur sensed his movements and ducked back into his room, the gun
gripped in his shaking fingers.

Then Henry Duryea's footstep sounded on the first stair.

Arthur slumped to one knee. He buckled a fist against his teeth as a
prayer tumbled through them.

Duryea climbed a second step ... and another ... and still one more. On
the fourth stair he stopped.

"Arthur!" His voice cut into the silence like the crack of a whip.
"Arthur! Will you come down here?"

"Yes, Dad." Bedraggled, his body hanging like cloth, young Duryea took
five steps to the landing.

"We can't be zanies!" cried Henry