The board fence, ten feet high and painted dull green, marked the boundary of Manning's properly. Jean, Cy remembered, had said that It loomed up with disquieting effect in the twilight, pierced by a door of ordinary size, now wide open, with a small bolt on this side.
"You two," growled H.M. to Cy and Davis, "follow me single file. Anybody got a torch?"
Nobody had. H.M., his baseball cap now discarded, grunted again and lumbered into the old graveyard.
It was in a ruinous state. The whole graveyard could not have occupied a space more than a hundred feet square, and, beyond the fence, it was bounded on its three other sides by heavy yew hedges almost eight feet high.
But the hedges were toppling and sunken inwards with trailing weight Almost obscured by the high harsh grass, many headstones-blackened or grey—leaned at angles as though peering through that yellowish-green grass. A small mausoleum, half-covered with hedge, showed its blackened door on the south side. On the north side, also encroached on by the hedge, stood a smaller cenotaph: though no burying place, it had a door and what even looked like windows.
Not a noise whispered in that crooked forest of graves. The clock had been stopped; there was not time past the later nineteenth century.
"This way!" suddenly called a nervous voice, and Cy’s skin crawled with the shock of it
Some thirty feet ahead of them, some dozen feet away from the old pillared cenotaph, a young man knelt in the grass. His uniform in the dusk had seemed merely a whiter headstone until he spoke.
H.M. led the way through the rustling grass. At one place a black headstone, wafer-thin, had fallen or been uprooted. There were many bird droppings, and at one place a black scar where someone (probably now dead) had tried to light a fire.
The young man in the uniform stood up.
"I'm Bill Wadsworth," he said, and pointed. "We—we found..."
"Yes," grunted H.M. "That's Fred Manning."
Half-sitting, half-lying with his back against a gravestone, Manning sat hunched with his silver grey head hung forward and his legs in the grass along the mound of the grave. They saw him now in a light grey summer suit, with white collar and blue tie. Bloodstains, darkening the coat a few inches under the left armpit, had soaked the shirt on his left side, and still faintly trickled.
H.M., with infinite effort, managed to kneel beside him.
"I—I tried to take his pulse," Bill Wadsworth blurted out "I think he's breathing. Couldn't we get a doctor?"
Cy Norton forebore to mention other cases, or say that the old devil's degrees included an M.B. in medicine.
"Slide him down on his back," H.M. was saying. "E-asy, now!"
He glared at them while they took Manning's weight, as gently as they could, and eased him along the mound of the grave.
A faint bloodstain ran down the headstone. The headstone, for this graveyard was comparatively new. Cy Norton found himself staring at its lettering, only a little defaced:
Sacred to the Memory of Frederick Manning.
The hedges seemed to extend their tentacles, the old gravestones bend in the grass. And then Cy wondered why he had been such an idiot. Under the lettering he saw the dates of birth and death,
1822-1886.
"Has anybody got a penknife?" growled H.M., carefuly turning back the coat.
Young Bill Wadsworth hastily produced from his hip pocket a penknife more like a small clasp knife. Its biggest blade was four inches long, the longest permitted by law. H.M. looked at it with sudden curiosity; then he began carefully to cut the silk shirt.
"Strike matches, all of you!" he ordered. "Keep on strikin' matches!"
Cy Norton and Huntington Davis, who was breathing quickly, had match boxes instead of paper books. The little spurts of flame snapped, snapped again, and followed each other until the red spark winked out. Though they bent close, they could see little except the back of H.M.'s big bald head.
"Uh-huh. That'll do!" he said, and propelled himself up. "Where's the nearest telephone?"
Young Bill pointed to the eastern hedge.
"That's Fenimore Cooper Road out there," he said eagerly. "There's a gas station and a cigar store just along it."
"Phone the nearest hospital," said H.M., shovelling out a handful of change, "and get the most available doctor. I want you to give him a message from another medical man; and for the love of Esau remember what I say! Can you do that?"
"I’ll try, sir."
"Tell him," continued H.M., "there are two stab wounds, one above the other, in the left side on a line round from the nipple. They're both lung wounds, and didn't touch the heart. Got it so far?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Tell him both wounds are 'sucking.' Sure, that's the word! All the same (tell him) the left side of the lung is probably fillin' with blood clots. If s ruddy bad place to operate here; you can explain that; but, if he wants to operate at the hospital, he'd better get an ambulance here in a hurry. Got that? Then repeat it!"
Bill did so, with surprising accuracy.
"Next, phone the police at White Plains. Get Lieutenant Trowbridge, and ask him to get here as soon as he can. That's all. Hop it!"
Bill maneuvered through the graves and patches of stinging nettles, towards a high iron-barred gate in the eastern hedge. You only noticed the gate when he tore away foliage, and climbed over like an orangutan.
"You son!" said H.M., and pointed to Davis. The Old Maestro was now so nervous that his hand shook.
Davis was not all celluloid film. Though he still stared incredulously at the motionless figure on the grave mound, he had himself well under control.
"You name it," he said. "I’ll do it" "Lieutenant Trowbridge, d'ye see, left one copper here on guard. I dunno where the copper is. But find him and bring him here. Oh, ah! And you might bring some electric torches or lanterns."
Davis nodded, and was about to turn away. But human nature could not endure it Davis clenched his fists. His black hair seemed lustrous even in twilight Yet something, perhaps the unexpectedness of seeing a man he believed had vanished forever, seemed to cloud his usual charm.
"I want to know how he got here!" Davis burst out. "I want to know how he got out of that pool and—and flew"—here the unconventional beat him—"I mean, and landed here fully dressed!"
"We all want to know that, Mr. Davis," said Cy.
Davis's own dress consisted of white flannels and a sports coat His face, modelled usually on what-the-successful-man-must be, suddenly grew human.
"I don't ask for my own sake," he added. "I know I'm not much valued here. But Jean is nearly going out of her mind."
"That's true, son," H.M. agreed sombrely. "And she's goin' to feel a whole lot worse when she learns about this. Don't tell her—yet"
"I..." Davis began clearly and stopped. "Sorry," he added. "I forgot I had an errand to do."
And, a man out of his element and now half out of his mind, he strode away through the rustling grass.
The evening air was thickened by a scent of vegetation and decay. Some distance away there was a grey stone angel, its neck so cracked that a shove would make the head fall off. And, Cy realized, Davis had sensed one thing without knowing it
This graveyard, as such, held no eeriness or unease. It all flowed from Frederick Manning. It all flowed from the sprawled figure on the grave mound, with is own name written above his head.
Manning should have been up and bowing to them, with his suave smile and his imposing airs and his adroitness at trickery, But he lay there with disordered hair and a white face, even his shoes so very new—Cy bent closer—that the yellowish polished soles bore no more than a few stains or scratches. With the mainspring gone, it was worse. Manning's re-appearance made the problem harder than his disappearance.