The Unspeakable Perk Part 43

"Some high-minded Caracunan patriot, I suppose."

"Why?"

"Well, I suspect that it was a mistake. From a distance and inside a window, she might easily have been taken for some one else."

Carroll's mind reverted to his companion's ready revolver.

"Yourself, for instance?" he suggested.

"Why, yes."

"Who was she?"

There was left in the Southerner's manner no trace of the cross-examiner. Suspicion had departed from him at the first sight of that old and still face, leaving only sympathy and pity.

"My patient."

"Have you been running a private hospital up here?"

"Oh, no. I took her because there was no other place fit for her to go to. And I had to keep her presence secret, because there's a law against harboring lepers here. A pretty cruel brute of a law it is, too."

"Leprosy!" exclaimed Carroll, looking at that strange silvery face with a shudder. "Isn't it fearfully contagious?"

"Not in any ordinary sense. I was trying a new serum on her, and had planned to smuggle her across to Curacao, when this ended it."

"Curacao? Then that pa.s.s for yourself and wife--By the way, that and your coat are over in the thicket, where I dropped them."

"Thank you. But it doesn't say 'wife.' It says simply 'a woman.'"

"And you were enc.u.mbering yourself with an unknown leper, at a time like this, just as an act of human kindness?" There was something almost reverential in Carroll's voice.

"Scientific interest, in part. Besides, she wasn't wholly unknown. She's a sort of cousin of Raimonda's."

Carroll's mind flew back to his fatally misinterpreted conversation with the young Caracunan.

"What did he mean by letting me think that you shouldn't a.s.sociate with Miss Polly?"

"Oh, he had the usual erroneous dread of leprosy contagion, I suppose."

"May I ask you another question, Mr. Per--I beg your pardon, Dr. Pruyn?"

said the visitor, almost timidly.

"Perkins will do." The other smiled wanly. "Ask me anything you want to."

"Why did you run away that day on the tram-car?"

"To avoid trouble, of course."

"You? Why, you go about searching for dangerous and difficult jobs. That won't do!"

"Not at all. It's only when I can't get away from them. But I couldn't risk arrest then. Some one would surely have recognized me as Luther Pruyn. You see, I've been here before."

"Then I don't see why they didn't identify you, anyway."

"Three years ago I was much heavier, and wore a full beard. Then these gla.s.ses, besides being invaluable for protection, are a pretty thorough disguise."

"So they are. But the game is up now."

"Yes." The scientist drew the sheet back over the dead woman. "I suppose the sharp-shooters who did the job will report me safely out of the way.

It's only a question of when the burial party will come for me."

"Then, why are we waiting?" cried Carroll.

"I couldn't leave her lying here," replied the other simply.

The sound of rhythmical labor came back to Carroll's memory.

"You were digging her grave?"

The other nodded. Carroll, stiffly, for his knifed arm was painful, got out of his coat.

"Where's an extra spade?" he asked.

When their labor was over, and the leper laid beneath the leveled soil, Carroll cut two branches from a near-by tree, trimmed them, bound them in the form of a cross, and fixed the symbol firmly in the earth at the dead woman's head.

"That was well thought of," said the scientist. "I'm afraid that wouldn't have occurred to me."

"You can get word to Senor Raimonda?" asked Carroll.

His host nodded. A long silence followed. Carroll broke it:--

"Then there is no further secrecy about this?"

"About what?"

"Her ident.i.ty." He pointed to the grave.

"No; I suppose not. Why?"

"Because Miss Brewster has a right to know."

"Do you propose to tell her?"

"Yes."

"Very well," agreed the scientist, after a pause for consideration. "But not until after the yacht is at sea."

Carroll did not reply directly to this.