Broussae family's avoué, has commissioned me to discover the reason for these interrupted tenancies; he desires me to build a dam against the flood of ill fortune which makes tenants scarce at the chateau and threatens to pauperize one of the oldest and most useless families of France."
"You say the tenancies were terminated by tragedies?" I asked, more to make conversation than from interest.
"But yes," he answered. "The cases, as I have their histories, are like this:
"Monsieur Alvarez, a wealthy Argentine cattle raiser, rented the château last April. He moved in with his family, his servants and entirely too many cases of champagne. He had lived there only about six weeks when, one night, such of the guests as retained enough soberness to walk to bed missed him at the good-night round of drinks. He was also missing the following morning, and the following night. Next day a search was instituted, and a servant found his body in the chapel of the oldest part of the château. Morbleu, all the doctors in France could not reassemble him! Literally, my friend, he was strewn about the sanctuary; his limbs tom off, his head severed most untidily at the neck, every bone in his trunk smashed like crockery in a china store struck by lightning. He was like a doll pulled to pieces by a peevish child. Voilà, the Alvarez family decamped the premises and the Van Brundt family moved in.
"That Monsieur Van Brundt had amassed a fortune selling supplies to the sale Boche during the war. Eh bien, I could not wish him the end he had. Too much food, too much wine, too little care of his body he took. One night he rose from his bed and wandered in the chateau grounds. In the place where the ancient moat formerly was they found him, his thick body thin at last, and almost twice its natural length—squeezed out like a tube of creme from a lady's dressing table trodden under foot by an awkward servant. He was not a pretty sight, my friend.
"The other tenants, too, all left when some member of their families or suites met a terrifying fate. There was Simpson, the Englishman, whose crippled son fell from the battlements to the old courtyard, and Biddle, the American, whose wife now shrieks and drools in a madhouse, and Muset, the banker from Montreal, who woke one night from a doze in his study chair to see Death staring him in the eye.
"Now Monsieur Luke Bixby, from Oklahoma, resides at Broussae with his wife and daughter, and—I wait to hear of a misfortune in their midst.
"You will come with me? You will help me avert peril from a fellow countryman?"
"Oh, I suppose so," I agreed. One part of France appealed to me as strongly as another, and de Grandin was never a dull companion.
"Ah, good," he exclaimed, offering his hand in token of our compact. "Together, mon vieux, we shall prove such a team as the curse of Broussac shall find hard to contend with."
2
The sun was well down toward the horizon when our funny little train puffed officiously into Rouen the following day. The long European twilight had dissolved into darkness, and oblique shadows slanted from the trees in the nascent moonlight as our hired moteur entered the chateau park.
"Good evening, Monsieur Bixby," de Grandin greeted as we followed the servant into the great hallway. "I have taken the liberty to bring a
