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PAGE TWO 'yiirOTirrnirmn*!**"? I The RED I LAMP | 1 'W I I MARY ROBERTS RINEHART jj Copy right hy G*«. H. Dwm C«f«/ WKU Service I “One perceives, of course, that the livingstones had been brought into the •base. Dragged in, Is the way Halli '4|y puts it. But after the first con* rosace between the doctor and him* *eif they were In It, willy nllly. * “Who,” Hal 11 day asked Hayward, re ferring to his copy of my Uncle Hor de's letter, ‘'were likely to have ac* ’case to Horace Porter at night ?” “No one, so far as I know. The Liylngstones, possibly.” “ifhen the man who came in while he was writing this letter might have Veen Livingstone?” } %e was ill that night. 1 was with him.” “Then Livingstone’s out,” said Hal liday, and turned in a new direction. *%ome theory, some wickedness, was put up to him. And it horrified and alarmed him. A man doesn’t present such a theory without leading up to ’it Let's try this: what subject was 'jpost interesting Horace Porter during the last years, or months, of his life?” “Spiritism, I imagine. I know be was working on it.” “Alone? A man doesn’t work that Bort of thing alone, as a rule.” “I’ll ask Mrs. Livingstone, if you like. She may know.” And ask the Livingstones he did, with the result that Halliday got his first real clew, and elaborated the dar ing theory which culminated in that fatal fall from the ladder, In the se cret passage on the tragic night of the 10th of September. . . . All this time, of course, It remained only a theory. Hayward scouted it at first, but came to It later on; the Liv ingstones offered a more difficult problem. “They didn’t want to be Involved,” Halliday says. “But after Edith’s let ter came I more or less ted them. And of course after he’d tried to get Iqto the house, and left the print of Rii band on the window board, they And to come in. They’d denied any] knowledge of the passage before that But he knew ft as well as i did, or better, and that there was a chance old Bethel knew it. too, and had used it.” This letter of Edith’s, to which 1 Play, Fool, Play! She held the diamond between trembling fingers and stared at the man before her. What should she do? Should she cast it from her or—or— would it be 'better to reconsider? What would he say? What might he do? His eyes were staring into hers with stony intensity. The diamond seemed to burn her fingers. She felt weak and incompetent—incapable of decision. Bright spots danced be fore her eyes. She shuddered and drew a long breath. Yes! She must do it. There was no escape. Blindly she shut her eyes and tossed the dia mond on the table in front of her. It was done! And then she heard her partner’s deep sigh of relief as he gathered up the trick. —Colorado Dodo, i ‘ <S> Laboring under the delusion that all his cattle had been poisoned, Otto Swink, a North Dakota farmer, killed himself. •v Xy!yXvX\v\*//.*:v®>XvX‘^^a 1 11 HHh~i./.v.y.y.v.v.w^ NEVER wait to see if a headache will “wear off.” Why suffer when there’s Bayer Aspirin? The millions of men and women who use it in increasing quantities every year prove that it does relieve such pain. The medical profession pro nounces it without effect on the heart so use it as often as it can spare you any pain. Every druggist always has genuine Bayer Aspirin for the prompt relief of a headache; colds, neuralgia, lumbago, etc. Fa miliarize yourself with the proven directions in every package. 0&PIRIN have already refeired, runs as fol lows : “Dear Madam: “I have read your article with great, interest, and would like to suggest ( that a good medium might he very. useful under the circumstances. “You have one of the best in the ( country in your vicinity. She has re-j tired, and is now living under another name somewhere in the vicinity of Oakville. j “When 1 knew her she was known as Eugenia Riggs, but this was her I “They’d Denied Any Knowledge of the Passage Before That.” maiden name, which she had retained. Her husband’s name is Livingstone; I do not kuow his initials. “She has abandoned the profession in which she made so great a success, but I understand is still keenly inter ested.” The letter is not signed. . . . Halliday did not require that knowl edge; he had suspected it before. But it gave him a lever. One attempt had already been made by Bethel to gel back into the house. Time was get ting short; before long we would have to go back to the city, and although he knew by that time who and what Bethel was, he could prove nothing. To go was to abandon the case. He could not secure the arrest of a man because his lens prescription was the same as the murderer’s. Or on the. strength of an unsigned book manu script left behind the wall of the den He could not prove that Maggie Morri son had died in the process of the ex periment Gordon had puzzled over, because the mud on the truck wheels corresponded with the red Iron-clay of the lane Into the main house. He could not prove his own Interpretation of the abbreviations S. and G. T. so liberally scattered through the diary. And he could not prove that It was Bethel who, looking for the broken lens In or near the culvert, had found my fountain pen there. A fact which Gordon had noted Id the Journal as follows: “1 have them now, sure. W P. was here last night and left his fountain pen.”_ But he ssiild, through the Living stones, take a chance on proving all these things. And, against Living stone’s protests and fears, prove It he did. . ’-a*i 1 j -v.i r*t I,t-j* “As a matter of fact,” he says, “they were In a had position themselves, and they knew it. They had to come over again!” , . • 1-*,.- Things were, indeed, rather parlous for the Livingstones “As a matter of fact,” Halliday says cheerfully, “1 gave the police a very pretty case' against .them. It was all there, accord j ing Even to the hand 1 |nt he held them off. He had done wiuu he wanted, turned the police j along a false trail and was free once more to travel along the true one. j And in this he says, and 1 believe, that his purpose was not mercenary. “The situation was peculiar,” lie says. “The slightest slip, the faint est suspicion, and he was off.” And tie goes back again to the sub tiety and wariness of the criminal himself; so watchful, so wary, that throughout it had even been neces sary to keep me in ignorance. “Vou had to carry on, Skipper,” he says. “In away, the whole riling bung on you. Even then, you nearly wrecked us once.” Which was, he tells me the night of the second seance, when the crim Inal actually fell into the trap and entered the house. Livingstone was on guard upstairs that night, and everything would have ended then probably. “But' you spilled the beans!” he accuses me. From the first the seances were de vised for a purpose, and 1 gather that some of the phenomena were deli her ately faked, iD pursuit of that pur pose. On the other hand, Mrs. Liv ingstone has always been, firm in liei statement that “things happened' which she cannot explain. The sounds in the library, the lights and the ar rival of the book on the table are among rtiem. But trickery or genuine psyclih manifestations, in the end they served their purpose. I called the third seance, and the mystery was solved V • • It is not surprising that my memory of those last few moments is a clouded one; 1 was, of all those present ex cept the police, the only one in com plete Ignorance of the meaning ot what was going on about me. Edith knew, and was bravely taking her risk THE CHATHAM RECORD, PITTSBORO, N. C. with the others; even my dear Jane knew a little; no wonder she required I her smelling salts. Actually, out of the confusion, only two pictures remain in my mind: j One was of Greenough staring at j Livingstone, and then jerking aside 1 the curtains of the cabinet, where j Halliday and Hayward had opened the : panel and after turning on the red globe hanging there, were stooping j over a body at the bottom of the : ladder. The other is of that figure at the foot of the stairs. I know now that it could not have been there; that it was lying, dead of a broken neck, at the foot of the lad der. I have heard all the theories, but I cannot reconcile them with the fact How could I have Imagined it? I did not know then who was inside the wail. I am not a spiritist, but once In every man’s life comes to him the one experience which he can explain by no law of nature as he understands them. To every roan bis ghost, and to me, mine. In the dim light of the red tamp, dead though he was behind the panel, I will swear 'that I saw Cameron,.alias Simon Bethel, standing at the foot of the stairs and looking up. Chapter IV Who are we to judge him? If a man sincerely believes that there is no death, the taking of life to prove It must seem a trivial thing. He may feel, and from his book manuscript hastily hidden behind the wall of the den we gather he did feel, that the security of the Individual counted as nothing against the proof I of survival to the human race. But that he was entirely sane, in those last months, none of us can be lieve. Cruelty is a symptom of the borderland between sanity and mad ness ; so, too. is the weakening of what we call the Herd instinct. It is well known at the University that for the year previous to his death he had been distinctly anti-social. Certainly, too, he fulfilled the axiom that insanity Is the exaggeration of one particular mental activity. And that he combined this single exagger ation with a high grade of intelligence only proves the close relation be tween madness and genius: Kant, un able to work unless gazing at a ruined tower: Hawthorne, cutting up his bits of paper; Wagner’s periodical vio lences. The very audacity of Ills disguise, the consistent with which he lived the part he was playing, points to what ( believe Is called dissociation; toward the last there seems to have been n genuine duality of personality: during the day old Simon Bethel, dragging his helpless foot and without effort bolding his withered hand to Its spastic contraction; at night, the active Cameron, making his exits on his nocturnal adventures by the gun room window; wandering afoot Incred ible distances; watching the door of Gordon’s room and locking him In; learning from me of Halllday’s inter est In the case, and trying to burn him out; very early realizing the embar rassment of my own presence at the Lodge, and warning me away by that letter from Solenv Ohio. •■*<- IT seems clear that he had not ex pect< d me at the Lodge; Larkin ap parently told Gordon, but Gordon neg lected to inform him. Just what he felt, what terror and anger, when l greeted him at the house on his ar rival will never he known. I remem ber now how he watched me, peering up nt me through his disguising spec tacles, with the beef cube in his hand, and waiting. Waiting. But the.disguise hold. My own very | slight acquaintance with him, my near- I sTgTitcdnoss, my total lack of sus picion, all were in his favor. And of the perfection of the disguise, it Is enough to say that Gordon apparently ! never suspected It He did suspect the ' pajrlysis. “lie moved his arm today,” he wrote once, in the diary. “He knows I saw It, and he has watched me ever since.” “II takes very little to change an ap pearance beyond casual recognition,” Halliday tells me. “The idea is to take a few important points and sub stitute their opposites. Take a man with partial paralysis; one side of his face drops, you see. Well, he can’t imitate that, hut he can put a fig in the other cheek and raise it. Put hair on a bald-headed man. and watch the change. And there are other things; eyebrows now —” Only once did I come anywhere near the truth, and then it slipped past me, and 1 did not catch it. That was on the night he sent foi me, after he had struck Gordon down. He was fright ened that night, we know now. Gor don was suspicious; might even have gone to the police. And that night he tested his dis guise and me. . . Much of the explanation of that tragic summer becomes mere surmise, naturally. There Is no surmise, how ever. necessary as regards Cameron’s coming to the third seance, at my In vitation. So far as he knew, we still believed trial Simon Bethel was dead. That our circle, so innocent in appear » ance, so naive, was a cleverly devised trap seems not to have occurred to him. My frankness, the product of my I Ignorance, would probably have reas I sured a trinn less driven by necessity than he was. But even had he suspected some v thing, I believe he would have come. I His other attempts, to enter the house - I and secure the manuscript, had failed. t And any day some bit of mischance f a mouse behind a panel, a casual re 1 pni.r. and this hook of his, with Its c .characteristic phrasing, Its references to Ids earlier works, would be in the bands of the police. With what secret eagerness he ac cepted my invitation we can only guess. Halliday, carefully plotting, had already discounted his acceptance in advance. “I knew he would come, of course,' he says. “He wanted to get in. We of fered him not only that, but darkness to cover any move he wanted to make. It had to work out.” And here he explains the necessity of having the criminal caught fla grante delietu. ft had to he shown he says, not only that Cameron had written the manuscript, but that It was he who had hidden it where It lay. “The case against him stood or fell by that,” he says. . • • But aside from this, much of the explanation of that tragic summer be comes pure guesswork. We have, however, elaborated the following as fulfilling our requirements as to the situation: We know for instance that on old Horace Porter’s developing interest In spiritism, Mrs. Livingstone referred him to Cameron. But we do not know why that interest developed. Is it too much, 1 wonder, to say that the house Itself led him to tt? In Oils I know I am on dangerous ground, and it becomes still more dan gerous If one grants that Mrs. Living 4 stone’s gift of a red lamp led him to experimenting with it. We do know, however, that after he had had this lamp for three months or so, he got in touch with Cameron, and it seems probable that such experi ments as were made there at night with this lamp roused Cameron to fever heat. Mrs. Livingstone believes there was a pact between them, the usual one of the first to “pass over” to come back if possible. We do nof,know that, but it seems plausible. Neither Halliday nor I believe, however, as she does, that Cameron killed the older man, in a lit of rage over the rejection of his proposal to carry their investigations to the crilniual point. What seems more probable is that Cameron had very early recognized the advantages of 1 lie house for the psychic and scientific experiments he had in mind, and that he finally sub mined the idea to old Horace. With what growing horror and indignation they were received we know from his letter. They turned a possible ally into an angry and dangerous enemy; the re jection of the proposition, with the threat which accompanied It, left Cameron stripped before the world as an enemy to society. He went home and brooded over it. “But he couldn’t let it rest at that,* Halliday says. “He went back. And the old man was at Ids desk. There was danger in Cameron that uight, and the poor old chap was frightened We’ll say he crumpled his letter up In Ids hand, and Cameron didn’t see it. Maybe there was an argument and Cameron knocked him down. But he got up again, and he managed to drop the letter Into an open drawer; after that, his heart failed,, and he fell for good.” We acquit him of that. Os the others —” ... We are, with regard to the under lying motive, the so-called experi ments, again obliged to resort to sur mise. We know, for instance, ol Cam cron's early experiments in weighing the body before and immediately after death. He has himself recorded them. But in the manuscript of his hook lie distinctly states his belief that the vital principle, whatever that may be, is weakened by long illness, and his belief that those who pass over suddenly out of full health, are more able to manifest themselves. Ht* quotes numerous instances of murdered men, whom tradition be tieves to have returned for motives of . vengeance. But he himself believes that this ability to return is due to the strength of the unweakened vital principle. The whole spirit, he calls ft. Ami although hi. manuscript in itself does not deal with any discov cries he may have made during the slimmer, there are accompanying it certain pages of figures which seem to prove that he made more than one experiment along those lines during his occupancy of the house. What waifs and strays he picked up on those night joutne/s of his we do not know; poor wanderers, probably, vfitli no place in the world from which they could fie missed.. At the same time, Halliday feels that the experiments were not neces surily to be with life and death; he suggests that they were to lie, rather in deep narcosis, pushed to the dan ger point, and that it was under this narcosis that Maggie Morrison, foi one, succumbed. Among Camerons papers, later on we found a'curious document eniitled “The Reality of tlw Soul Through a Study of the Efforts of t’hiorofonii nud rural! on the Animal Economy,’ with the note in Cameron’s baud: “The sout and He body are sep a rated r>y the agency of anesthesia The s< ul Is not a breath, but an en rity.” Os the nature of the further tests made we have no idea. Halliday be lieves that, shown the space behind 1 tie wall by Horace Border, he latei utilized il to conceal such apparatin ns he used In his experiments. “It seemed to oe full ot stuff.” h* -says, “the night I found it.” But later on. as. the chase nnrrowen tie got rid of it . bit by bit at night ; probably throwing It Into the hay This is borne out ny the fan that. laf< that, following autumn, going, herk t. ! ( Twin l|ol|ii\ys;to <•»« R ove| ; .t|re prop 1 erty with a real estate deafer. I foam washed up of* beach the battered fragments of a camera. Only a portion of the lens remained fn the frame, but this lens had been of quartz. As nearly a. 1 can dis cover, the theory of quartz used in such a manner is to photograph the ultra-violet. In other words, I dare say, to make visible that strange world which may de beyond the spec trum and our normal vision. Did he obtain anything? We shall never know. But sometimes 1 wonder. Suppose a man to have done what he had done to prove the Immortality of the soul; to have taken lives and have risked his own, to give to the world the sur vival after death it so pathetically craves. And he fails; there is noth ing. His own conviction has not weakened, but hi s proofs are not there. Then, In the twinkling of an eye, he himself breaks through tbe veil. With that idea dominant, he passes over to the other side, perhaps to the long sleep, perhaps not. But in that Instant between waking and sleeping, to prove his point I To make good his contention; To justify his course 1 I wonder. And 1 wonder, too, If at that moment of realization tbe supreme Irony of the situation could have occurred to him? That tbe wounded hand, the one In jury poor Gordon bad managed to In flict on him, was the factor which had shot him, head foremost, Into eter nity? . • . Was Cameron our sheep-killer? We believe so, with certain reservations. We know he was at Bass cove, under an assumed uaiue, at tbe time, prob ably looking over the ground. At the same time, it seems onlikely that he killed the first lot of Nylle’s sheep; that we believe was an act of revenge on the part of a man Nylle had recently discharged. But that the idea seized on his imagination seems probable. He was planning that mad campaign of his, and it fell in well with what was to come. It prepared the neighborhood, in a sense, but it set them looking for a maniac with a religious mania. And it was an effective alibi for him, oc curring before his arrival at the house. Jane has always believed that he added the symbol in chalk deliberately to incriminate me. I do not He added It, after Helena Lear bad told him of It, as he added the stone altar, a madman’s conception of a madman’s act. Carroway’s murder was Incidental to that preparation of his, but fn view of all we know, we can reconstruct It fairly well. Thus we have the boy, tiring of car rying bis rifle, putting It away In the darkness and possibly dosing. We have the appearance of the killer, and Carroway unable to locate his rifle quickly, following him to the water front and reaching to too late. Underneath our float the killer should have found his knife, but as we know, Halliday bad taken tt away. They were Iwo unarmed men, then, who met that night on the quiet sur face of the bay. And one of them, although nobody knew tt, was oot sane. Unarmed only in one sense, however. 1 Cameron Had an Oar and Used tt for Cameron had an oar. And used It. When it was over, he apparently rowed back quietly to the creek be yond Robinson’s point, left his boat there, and walked to Bass cove. The proprietor of the small hotel there seems never to have known that he was out at night, “He was a very quiet gentleman,” he eays, “and always went to bed early.” . . . One thing which had puzzled us, in the Morrffeon case, was that the girl had stopped her truck, at a time when Hie nerves of the countryside were on edge. It seems probable, therefore, that on some nights, at least, it was not the square and muscular Cameron who went forth, but an old crippled man. Shown to her by the lightning flashes that night, age and Infirmity by the roadside and a storm going, whai won der that she stopped? The only mar vel ts that, this halt having proven successful, it does not appear to have been used again. ... ' Mwh that Impressed tne strongly at the time has lost lis impression now •it is a curious fact that a man mav see a ghost—and many believe that they have done so—without any last ing belief In so-called survival after death. And so it is with me. On editing my Journal, however, I find myself.confron: ing tin same ques- THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17 mo. f ins which confronted nip during that ic rrible summer. Have I a body, or Is my body a >i there is of me? In other words, n \ an Intelligence served by certain physical organs? Or ntn I certain physical organs, actuated by nn i n [ e j, ligence as temporary as they? Frankly, I do not know. But any careful analysis ol the ex tra-normal phenomena of the summer seems to show, every so often, some other-world Intelligence, struggling to get through to us. As though— We have never had, as I have said any explanation of the coming of the book during the second seance, nor of the sounds from the library. While much of the physical phenomena of the first two seances was deliberately engineered by Mrs. Livingstone, In pur suance of HaUiday’s plan to get Cam eron Into the bouse, these two things remain without explanation. The same thing is true of my finding of the letter, of the lighthouse appari. tion, of tbe sitting at Evanston, and of Jane’s clairvoyant visions. Nona of which, by tbe way, she hns had since. And yet all of which had their part, large or small, in our solving and understanding of the crimes. Peter Geiss, and the figure In the fore-rigging of the sloop, my own vision of Cameron at the foot of the stairs, when be lay dead behind the panel, what am I to say of tliese? Am 1 to accept them as I do Jane’s “vision without eyes” as no more ex. traordinary than the feats of somnam bulists, who go through their curious nightly progress with closed eyelids? Am I to accept them, refute them, or evade them? • • * There are, however, certain inci dents which, puzzling as they were at the time, lend themselves to very sim ple explanation. Among these are the cough I heard more than once, and Hadly’s story of the materialization in the Oakville cemetery. Throughout Gordon’s diary, here aDd there, were the letters S. aud G. T. There was also, in one place, a sen tence which translated, became “The G. P. stuff went great last night.” Halliday believes that Gordon waa what we know as a medium, and that it was in that capacity primarily that Cameron took him to the country, The S. he therefore translates as “sit ting,” and the G. T. as “genuine trance.” After the G. T. there almost invariably follows the rather pathetic entry: “Feel rotten today,” or “ah in.” v . Hadly’s ghost, then, In all proba bility was tbe secretary, securing data for tl»e “sittings” which he so care folly differentiates from the nights when he went Into genuine trance, Being honest with himself, poor boy, and honest nowhere else. And tin same was no doubt true as to the dry cough which be practiced on me, tta night I was in tbe garage, ft waa during those “sittings,” too almost certainly, that under pretended control from beyond he began to fer ret out, with the cunning of bis kind the story underneath; to bring back Horace Porter, and watch the reac tion; to tendon the boat he had dis covered, and see the man across from him, in tbe dim red light, twitch and tremble. To play him, to fool him, and at t!i« last to threaten and blackrrmil him. And, in the end, to die. But there remain these things I can not explain. One of the mo it curious is the herbal odor; that this was not a purely subjective impression shown by the fact that both Haywart and Edith noticed it during the sec ond seance. The scent of flowers Is I believe, not unusual during certaii psychic experiments; Warren speak l of the Impression of tuberoses beins waved before him in the dark by some ghostly hand. Os this, as of the other inexplicable phenomena, 1 can only say that at tl»< time I did not doubt them; living tlien again, as I prepare this manuscript l accept them once more. But 1 fit not explain them. “You wish,” said Cicero, “to have the explanation of these things? 'cry well ... 1 might tell you that ti* magnet is a body which attracts iroi and attaches itself to it; but becaiis* I could not give yon the explanation of it, would y»»u deny it?” In closing this record, 1 cannot C.c better than copy the following ext rat ! from my Journal, made the following June: June 1, 1923. Our little Edith was married todu;- Heigh-ho. And again, beigh-ho. How we begrudge the happiness o! others when it is ai our expense! Bow I hateJ Halliday when, once in house, he pul his arms around her at*' held her close. Bow 1 resented that calm air of possession with which ia took til* place Id the line beside her and shook hands smilingly with ?h» hysterical crowd that kissed > in '- blessed them, on the way to the ing room %nd food. Aod yet—how happy they are, an how safe she Is. “My wife” he said. “Forever wh ever. Amen.” Old class and new glass; china, sti ver and linen; the l.ears’ candlestick* 5 , every corner of tbe house filled wid guests and gifts—and Jock. And f<» the two of them nothing and nobody • just a space filled with shadows wi h'.i smiled and passed; themselves only reality. And perhaps they are. Love at leas is real; the one reality perhaps. . thou art absolute; sole lord of life death.” ... So they have gone, and tonight .!» n * and I ate alone Base and quiet— 4l u alone, alas. Heigh-ho! 1 |TIIE END]
The Chatham Record (Pittsboro, N.C.)
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Oct. 17, 1929, edition 1
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