Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 253, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1915 — WAS IT A SPECTER? [ARTICLE]

WAS IT A SPECTER?

ANONYMOUS.

He was waiting for her; he had been waiting an hoar and a half in a dusty suburban lane. He loved her, and he was engaged to be married to her, with the complete disapproval of every reasonable person who had' been consulted. And this half-clan-destine meeting was tonight to take the place of the grudgingly sanctioned weekly interview —because a certain rich uncle was visiting at her house, and her mother was not the woman to acknowledge to a moneyed uncle a match so deeply Ineligible as hers with him. So he waited for her, and the chill of an unusually severe evening entered into bis bones. The policeman passed him with but a surly response to his “good night.” The bicyclists went by him like gray ghosts with fog-horns; and it was nearly ten o’clock and she had not come. He shrugged his shoulders and turned toward his lodgings. His road led by her house —desirable, commodious, suburban —and he walked slowly as he neared it. She might, even., now, be coming out. But she was not. There was no sign of movement about the house, no sign of life, no lights even in the windows. And her people were not early people. He paused by the gate, wondering. Then he noticed that the front door was open—wide open—and the street-lamps shone a little way into the dark hall. He walked up the path and listened. No sign of life. He passed into the hall. There was no light anywhere. Where was everybody, and why was the front door open? Everyone was out, evidently. But the unpleasant sense that he was, perhaps, not the first casual visitor to walk through the open door impelled him to look through the house before he went away and closed it after him. So he went upstairs, and at the door of the first bedroom he came to he struck a wax match, as he had done in the sitting rooms. Even as he did so he felt that he was not alone, and he was prepared to see something; for what he saw he was not prepared. For what he saw lay on the bed, in a white, loose gown—and it was his sweetheart, and her throat was cut from ear to ear. He did not know what happened then, but the policeman found him iu a fit, under the lamp-post at the corner of the street. He could not speak when they picked him up, and he passed the night in the police cells, because the .policeman had seen plenty of drunken men before, but never one in a fit. The next morning he was better, though still white and shaky. But the tale he told the magistrate was convincing, and they sent a couple of constables with him to her house. There was no crowd about it as he had fancied there would be, and the blinds were not down. As, he stood, dazed, in front of the door, it opened and she came out. He held on to the door-post for support. “She’s all right, you see," said the policeman who had found him under the lamp; “I told you you was drunk; but- yob would know best —” When he was alone with her, he told her.

“But, my dearest," she said, “I dare say the house was dark, for we were all at the theater with my uncle, and no doubt the door was open, for the servants, will run out if they’re left. But you could not have been in that room, because I locked it when I came away, and the key was in my pocket. 1 dressed In a hurry, and I left my odds and ends lying about.” “I know,” he said; “I saw—why, I even noticed the calendar on the mantelpiece—October 21, At least, it couldn’t be that, because this is May. And yet it was. Your calendar is at October 21, Isn’t it?” "No, of course It isn’t,” she said smiling rather anxiously. “You must have had a dream, or a vision or something.” He did not believe in visions, but he never rested day or night till he got his sweetheart and her mother away from that commodious house and settled them in a quite distant suburb. In the course of the removal, he incidentally married her, and the mother went on living with them His nerves must have been a good bit shaken, because he was very queer for a long time, and was always inquiring if anyone had taken the desirable suburban house; and when an old stdek broker with a family took it, he went the length of calling on the old gentleman and imploring him, by all that he held dear, not to live in that fatal house. “Why?” said the pld stock broker, not unnaturally. And then he got so vague and confused, between trying to tell why and trying net to tell why, that the stock broker showed him out. Now the curious and quite inexplicable part of this story is that when he came down to breakfast on the morning of the twenty-second of October. she found him looking like death, with the morning paper in his hand. He caught hers —he could not speak—and pointed to the paper. And there she read that on the night of the twenty-first, a yotmg lady, the stock broker’s daughter, had been found, with her throat cut from ear to ear, on the bed in the long back bedroom facing the stairs of that desirable suburban house.—Argonaut