The Stone Image | Page 7

you wish."
I gave the simple homemade cough remedy I was compounding
another vigorous shake. "If you bring any sawbones into this house
tonight, Betty Haig," I threatened, "I'll surely do him bodily injury." I
added a bit more rock candy to the flask of whisky.
"You'll be in a state of beastly intoxication when I get back, I know,"
Betty said as she viewed my bottle of rock and rye dubiously, "but that
doesn't prevent your tying these ankle ribbons for me now." And she
put a slender, pink satin-shod foot on my knee.
I laced the ribbons about her trim ankles and kissed her left shoulder
blade as I dropped her evening cloak over a party frock which, like
Gungha Din's uniform, "wasn't nothing much before, and rather less
than 'arf o' that be'ind."
Betty gone, I changed my coat for a house jacket and settled myself on
the lounge before the fire to read, smoke, and treat my cold with
copious drafts of the mixture I had prepared.
Efficacious as rock and rye is in the cure of a cold, it has one great
disadvantage; it has a tendency to make a man lose count of the number
of doses he's taken. After my seventh or ninth dose--I forget which--I
ceased counting, and adhered to the simple formula of a dose to a
sneeze--and sometimes I caught myself sneezing without legitimate
excuse.
A couple of hours' course of this treatment, combined with the sizzle
and crackling of the logs burning in the fireplace, set me nodding.
"Ol' stone image doesn't like it out there in the cold. Ol' image jealous
'cause I wouldn't let Betty worship it--wants to come back to house and
get revenge on me," I mumbled, half maudlin, as I dropped my pipe
and book and thrust my head deep into a sofa pillow.
How long I slept I do not know. Certainly it must have been several

hours, for when I opened my eyes and sat up with a start the fire had
burned itself to a bed of dull ashes on the hearth, and a chill had crept
through the living room. My reading lamp, too, had burned itself out,
and save for the fitful gleam of a nearby streetlight, shining through the
window, the room was in darkness.
Lying there in that no man's land between sleep and waking, I heard the
grandfather's clock in the hall strike off the half-hour, and put my feet
to the floor sleepily. "Half past something or other," I yawned; "must
be getting late. Wonder how soon Betty will be getting home?"
The crazy little French gilt clock that Betty keeps on the parlor mantel,
and which is always half an hour slow, chimed twelve times nervously.
That meant we were in the middle of that eerie hour which belongs
neither to the day which is gone nor the day which is to come, and
which, for want of a better term, we call midnight.
The fumes of the rock and rye I had taken earlier in the evening still
hung in my brain, dulling my perceptions and clouding my vision a
little. In the uncertain light from the streetlamp it seemed to me I
detected a movement among the inanimate objects in the room.
I opened my mouth in another prodigious yawn, and flung my arms
wide in a mighty stretch, striving to shake off the remnants of my sleep.
Before either yawn or stretch were finished, however, I was sitting bolt
upright on the couch, listening to the sound which came to me from the
veranda. It was a slow, heavy, scraping, thumping sort of noise; the
kind that would be produced by the dragging of a heavy weight across
the floor, or the rolling of a ponderous chest, or the walking of some
great-footed animal.
Thump, thump, thump, the footsteps--if they were footsteps--sounded
on the planks of the porch, around the corner of the house, across the
width of the piazza, up to the very door of the vestibule. Then a silence,
ten times more ominous than the noise itself.

The breath in my lungs and throat seemed suddenly impregnated with
nitrous fumes, strangling and burning me at once, and tiny globules of
cold perspiration seeped out upon my scalp and the palms of my hands
as I sat there in the dark, resolutely closing my mind against the
thought of what waited outside the door.
"B-r-r-ring!" the shrill clamor of the doorbell cut in on my terrified
vigil. I jumped up with a relieved grin. Doorbells are comforting things
to have about at such times; there is something reassuringly modern
and human about them.
I got to my feet almost cheerfully and reached for the electric switch.
My groping fingers found it readily