XII. The Woman at the Quinta - Page 2

was burning. In the middle of the floor was spread a sheet, beneath which a form was outlined in grisly significance. Carroll's host lifted the cover.

The woman was white-haired, frail, and wrinkled. One side of her face shone in the lamplight with a strange hue, like tarnished silver. In her throat was a small bluish wound; opposite it a gaping hole.

"Shot!" exclaimed Carroll. "Who did it?"

"Some high-minded Caracunan patriot, I suppose."

"Why?"

"Well, I suspect that it was a mistake. From a distance and inside a window, she might easily have been taken for some one else."

Carroll's mind reverted to his companion's ready revolver.

"Yourself, for instance?" he suggested.

"Why, yes."

"Who was she?"

There was left in the Southerner's manner no trace of the cross- examiner. Suspicion had departed from him at the first sight of that old and still face, leaving only sympathy and pity.

"My patient."

"Have you been running a private hospital up here?"

"Oh, no. I took her because there was no other place fit for her to go to. And I had to keep her presence secret, because there's a law against harboring lepers here. A pretty cruel brute of a law it is, too."

"Leprosy!" exclaimed Carroll, looking at that strange silvery face with a shudder. "Isn't it fearfully contagious?"

"Not in any ordinary sense. I was trying a new serum on her, and had planned to smuggle her across to Curacao, when this ended it."

"Curacao? Then that pass for yourself and wife--By the way, that and your coat are over in the thicket, where I dropped them."

"Thank you. But it doesn't say 'wife.' It says simply 'a woman.'"

"And you were encumbering yourself with an unknown leper, at a time like this, just as an act of human kindness?" There was something almost reverential in Carroll's voice.

"Scientific interest, in part. Besides, she wasn't wholly unknown. She's a sort of cousin of Raimonda's."

Carroll's mind flew back to his fatally misinterpreted conversation with the young Caracunan.

"What did he mean by letting me think that you shouldn't associate with Miss Polly?"

"Oh, he had the usual erroneous dread of leprosy contagion, I suppose."

"May I ask you another question, Mr. Per--I beg your pardon, Dr. Pruyn?" said the visitor, almost timidly.

"Perkins will do." The other smiled wanly. "Ask me anything you want to."

"Why did you run away that day on the tram-car?"

"To avoid trouble, of course."

"You? Why, you go about searching for