"
But Themar had not heard. He was shaking again in the clutch of a
heavy chill. Presently, his sentences having trailed off once or twice
into peculiar incoherency, he fell to talking wildly of a hut in the
Sherrill woods in which he had lived for days in the early autumn, of a
cuff in a box buried in the ground beneath the planking. For weeks, he
said, he had vainly tried to solve its cipher, stealing away from the
farm by night to pore over it by the light of a candle. It was
fearfully intricate--
"But you--you that know all," he gasped painfully, "you will get it and
read and tell me--"
Moaning he fell back in his chair.
Carl rang for Mrs. Carmody. It was young Mary, however, who answered,
her round blue eyes lingering in mystification upon the fire Carl had
built in the deserted wing.
"Mary," said Carl carelessly, "you'd better phone for a doctor and a
nurse. Kronberg has returned and I fear he's in for a spell of
pneumonia."
Later in the Sherrill hut, Carl ripped a board from the floor and found
in the dirt beneath, a box containing a soiled cuff covered with an
intricate cipher.
"Odd!" said he with a curious smile as he dropped the cuff into his
pocket; "it's very odd about that paper."
CHAPTER XXVII
THE SONG OF THE PINE-WOOD SPARROW
With the dawn a laggard breeze came winging drowsily in from the
southern sea, the first thing astir in the spectral world of palm and
villa.
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