Adventure, August 3, 1919 — page 66: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

/ —— Z — “i s CA as Nan, & 1 ROGUES’ END ‘ J Ph) A 4, s Beers be hy Author of “ Square," “ Forty-Nine,” de. O, I understand, it is now called. Then it was Land’s End—that pretty little precipice behind Cragcastle, where the rock falls sheer a hundred feet to the usually turbulent inlet. It lay at the narrow end of Break- neck Gorge, the upper end of which em- braced the isolated freak of a house known as Cragcastle. Lawyer Osborne had told me his recently deceased client, John Maxon, had built the house. And, in truth, its remoteness matched well with that eccentric provision in his will which had caused me, a stranger to everybody concerned, to take up a soli- tary residence in Crageastle. And which, as a consequence, gave me the novel expe- rience, on the first night of my stay there, of sitting across the table from a visitor whom I had just admitted and of whom I knew absolutely nothing—except that he intended to kill me, “As soon as I read of your father’s will,” said this stranger, “I knew I had you.” He was and was not a man of pre- possessing appearance. Superficially, he was handsome—well-formed, well-dressed, in the late forties, with quite regular fea- tures. A closer look, however, showed that he had a coldly sensual mouth and a brutal jaw and that his eyes were bloodshot. Crookdom and the underworld know such faces well; they are the natural result of years of vice and vicious profiteering working upon unusual intelligence as a basis. In my own person I should probably never have known this man well enough to have had him for an enemy. “Your father probably figured,” he went on, “that, if you were a coward, you wouldn’t come back, and, if you changed into a man of passable courage, fit to be his son, you would. That was where he made a mistake. You came back, and still you’re a coward. In fact, you came back because you're a coward, The money you stole was all gone, of course. And you figured I was probably dead or gone or broken mentally—which last I might well be—and you'd rather take a chance on facing me than a certainty of beach- combing it the rest of your life. A hundred thousand is worth taking a chance for— and even worth living in this mansion a year for, Though mainly—” his eyes flitted around the bare room—“‘it isn’t fit to house ghosts in, and I hope yours will be—un- comfortable.” Herein his animosity caused* him to exaggerate. True, the room in which we sat contained little else than our two chairs and the old oak table on which he had ordered me—somewhat to my amuse- ment—to keep my hands. But that was because I’d carefully denuded it of every- thing else—sofas, chairs and the like— before he came in. Even while he urged the masquerade on me, Osborne had very earnestly warned me against personal danger, and I wanted to make quite sure ~ that, if I had a caller, we should sit where we did. Really, Cragcastle was a fine rambling— or rather climbing—old country house, quite comfortably supplied, even to a tele- phone and electric light and heat. a 56 ~__ comicbooks.com —