I have tried, in living that night over again, to record things as they impressed me.  For, after all, this is a narrative of motive rather than of incidents, of emotions as against deeds.  But at the time, the brief conversation over the telephone seemed to me both horrible and unnatural.

From a great distance a woman’s voice said, “Is anything wrong there?”

That was the first question, and I felt quite sure that it was the Bullard girl’s voice.  That is, looking back from the safety of the next day, I so decided.  At the time I had no thought whatever.

“There is nothing wrong,” I replied.  I do not know why I said it.  Surely there was enough wrong, with Willie chasing an armed intruder through the garden.

I thought the connection had been cut, for there was a buzzing on the wire.  But a second or so later there came an entirely different voice, one I had never heard before, a plaintive voice, full, I thought, of tears.

“Oh, please,” said this voice, “go out and look in your garden, or along the road.  Please—­quickly!”

“You will have to explain,” I said impatiently.  “Of course we will go and look, but who is it, and why—­”

I was cut off there, definitely, and I could not get “central’s” attention again.

Willie’s voice from the veranda boomed through the lower floor.  “This is I,” he called, “No boiling water, please.  I am coming in.”

He went into the library and lighted a lamp.  He was smiling when I entered, a reassuring smile, but rather a sheepish one, too.

“To think of letting him get by like that!” he said.  “The cheapest kind of a trick.  He had slammed the door before to make me think he had gone out, and all the time he was inside.  And you—­why didn’t you scream?”

“I thought it was you,” I told him.

The library was in chaos.  Letters were lying about, papers, books.  The drawer of the large desk-table in the center of the room had been drawn out and searched.  “The History of Bolivar County,” for instance, was lying on the floor, face down, in a most ignoble position.  In one place books had been taken from a recess by the fireplace, revealing a small wall cupboard behind.  I had never known of the hiding-place, but a glance into it revealed only a bottle of red ink and the manuscript of a sermon on missions.

Standing in the disorder of the room, I told Willie about the telephone-message.  He listened attentively, and at first skeptically.

“Probably a ruse to get us out of the house, but coming a trifle late to be useful,” was his comment.  But I had read distress in the second voice, and said so.  At last he went to the telephone.

“I’ll verify it,” he explained.  “If some one is really anxious, I’ll get the car and take a scout around.”

But he received no satisfaction from the Bullard girl, who, he reported, listened stoically and then said she was sorry, but she did not remember who had called.  On his reminding her that she must have a record, she countered with the flat statement that there had been no call for us that night.