In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 Read Online Free PDF Page B

illegible, if anyone had cared to read them. Sumach and thornapples and blackberry brambles discouraged investigation. Old yews and native cypress shadowed the dismal spot. There was a vault of stone that was still intact, though it had tilted as the soil had shifted with the centuries on the slope which the vault crowned. The vault had a gate of wrought iron secured by a rusty chain and padlock, and a door that seemed to await the Resurrection morning.
    Behind the slope, across neglected pastures, stood a house of brick and stone that had been nobly designed but had suffered the wear of the elements for fifty years without human occupation or reinforcement. Once there had been a garden and still a few roses bloomed, stunted, and hedges once trimmed grew wild.
    The land was part of a great grant by King George to one of his overseas subjects. Most of it had been sold. This had been a portion bequeathed to a minor heir. At the back of the house were great, gaunt lilacs guarding an alley where once George Washington had walked in his unsuccessful wooing of Marion Philipse, visiting there.
    There was a cloud about the title. The old, proud family had gone into oblivion. But someone had recently risked buying the forty ragged acres. The house was almost a ruin, with its rotting sills and leaking roof, its sagging shutters and mouldering paint, within and without.
    To-night, dim through the driving, persistent rain, a light gleamed downstairs. Some thought the newcomers were merely caretakers for the purchasers. They made no attempt to farm, little to offset the impending ruin of house and land. They were a tall, taciturn Yankee and his equally lean and silent wife; they attended strictly to their own affairs, paid their bills in cash.
    The place had long been dismal, desolate and deserted. The light in the window did little now to dispel its dreariness. Rain dripped from the dark trees, beat upon the sunken mounds in the pale gleam of a sun that fought and failed against the gloomy, swiftly gathering night.
    The new owner was recorded as a Mr. Silbi. A foreign sounding name, surely not New England, like that of Cyrus Allen, now living in the house. None locally had ever seen Mr. Silbi.
    Surrounding this forty acres was more deserted land, also with clouded title. Two big tracts of it, wooded and hilly. On one of them was a weedy mere that had once been a lake. No one ever fished there. Once a girl had drowned herself in it. These wild acres had been considered by real estate developers with an eye to summer bungalows and country homes, but the uncertain titles checked them and the land lay slowly reverting to wilderness.
    They said the ghost of the suicide haunted the mere, that weird blue and green lights flickered above the graves—corpse-candles lighting the phantoms back to their beds of clay. Some swore that a party, taking the back road by mistake, had seen the vault open, with an unearthly glare revealing broken coffins and scattered bones, and a fearful goblin, capering, hairy and legless, its head neckless and tiny; walking on its hands, in the midst of the charnel place.
    An owl hooted its melancholy note. A nightjar swooped with a screeching whistle. A few bullfrogs croaked in sheer defiance of the rain. Thunder muttered and lightning flickered incessantly as the smouldering sunset died.
    The state road was two miles away. The dirt lanes were little better than quagmires, rutted by those who stole the timber from the old Luddington Grant. Few passed after nightfall.
    A mighty, closed car came surging through the slush, driven by an expert who used the power of twelve tremendous cylinders with consummate judgment, whose steel wrists and fingers controlled their force with ease as the big black sedan threatened to skid and swerve.
    Behind drawn blinds a man sat who was dressed—as his chauffeur was—in black. Sable, from wide-rimmed slouch hat, turned down, to his shoes. He was wrapped in a black cloak like a condor