The Mole

by Edison Marshall

The Mole

 

By Edison Marshall
Author of “The Last Grizzly,” Etc.

 

DOCTOR CLARK was waiting for me in his office. The twilight had come into it. He didn't like bright lights. He always did his thinking in the dusk—he said that the deep shadows and the stillness aided him to concentrate. He was like a creature of the dusk himself—always gray, always subdued. I knew he had been thinking now.

“It's the Billings case,” I thought, “or maybe that strange paralysis case out to Freemont.”

Perhaps he was going to operate that night, and I was to administer the anæsthetic. As an interne at the great seaside hospital, I did little else but administer anaesthetics. I didn't dream what he really wanted. It is a good thing human eyes cannot see into the future. If mine could have seen, I would have turned through a side door into the street, and left the famous doctor waiting vainly in the dusk.

“Sit down, Long,” the gray doctor said. “We're going to give you a week's vacation from the hospital. Miss Padgett has come back to-night. Perhaps you knew of her case in Horton.”

I knew the case very well. Miss Padgett was one of our best nurses, a magnificent creature that could lift a full-grown man in her arms and rock him like a child. She had been out to a little town at the outskirts of the city with a rather troublesome case. The great doctor sat looking at me in silence. He has the most curious quality in his eyes—a probing as sure and deep as of his own scalpels.

“Then the man is cured?” I asked. I knew perfectly well that he wasn't. Doctor Clark does not call his internes in his office to tell of cures. Old Farding, out in the village of Horton, was not the case to be cured in the week. I spoke perhaps because I thought I was expected to say something, and perhaps, because silence in a room with Doctor Clark always becomes embarrassing. A person realizes that unless the doctor is kept busy with talk he will probe and probe with those curious eyes until he finds out all about one's past, most of one's future, and the exact weight and measurements of one's soul. And this is never pleasing to the spirit.

“She says she won't spend another night in the Farding house,” the doctor told me, in the same tone that he would use to me if he were discussing the weather. “Not only that, but she's actually hysterical. Fancy it—a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound woman. Miss Padgett of all people! I didn't know she had a nerve in that heroic body. Of course I mean the kind of nerve that makes a woman fall on her face and whoop—of course she's got the other kind a-plenty. No matter what she tells. She has simply deserted—up and left—and you have to take her place.”

“I? I am not a nurse.”

“It's just for a week, Long, before Miss Dorne is free. It's good training for a young doctor. It's evidently a case a woman can't handle; and it will be interesting to you from a scientific point of view.” A rattling skeleton, stepping out for a walk from its sepulcher on a moonlit night would be interesting to Doctor Clark—from a scientific point of view. “There is nothing for you the next week; anyway, in the hospital,” he went on, “and I'm going on a vacation myself. So pack your bag and take the eight-twenty. It's only a half-hour's ride.”

He turned back to his desk, and forgot about me at once. I got up to go, but loitered about, on one foot and another, instead.

“Can't I see Miss Padgett?” I asked at last. “I'd rather like to know what to expect.”

The doctor turned with a “you-still-here?” look on his face. “She mustn't be disturbed,” he replied. “What does it matter, anyway? She's full of a cock-and-bull story to make the teeth chatter. You wouldn't be interested in it.”

“Considering I'm going to take her place, I'd think I had some slight right to be interested. Did old Farding run amuck?”

“No, he's meek as a lamb. Good Lord, I didn't know that great Padgett woman could be such a fool! I must get to work, Long—and anyway, the details don't matter. They were too vague to make anything of; so don't give them a thought.”

This was Doctor Clark all over. His words simply rubbed the wrong way. I began to wonder, very much indeed, just what Miss Padgett had to tell. A trained nurse, knowing the secrets of homes, sometimes has most disquieting opportunities to learn the secrets of life.

“It's just a lot of drivel to which no sane man will listen or give any thought,” the doctor went on, careful as always of his prepositions. “It's wasting my time to repeat it, and I don't mean to do so. You are to go out there and do what you can for Farding and his wife. Whatever scared Miss Padgett—something that lived in the cellar, and poked its head out now and then—doesn't matter to you at all. What a hectic yarn it was! Hang the girl, Long! Hang her, I say! But good night, and good luck.”

 

There are a thousand towns in the Middle West like Horton—no better or no worse. I don't think they could be worse. The untidy station, the files of cheap, frame houses, the drabness and the dullness were just as bad as could possibly be.

An old man with amazing whiskers drove me in a ramshackle taxi to the Farding house. One couldn't find more dark or draggle-tailed streets in Tangier or Port Said. There were cobwebbed, cheerless, yellow lights at the corners; but they seemed to have no function other than to attract moths. They certainly gave no light. It was the kind of town that is lashed with rain in summer and banked with snow in winter, and things happen only behind drawn window shades. We creaked about a corner, and drove up a long, still street just a block distant from, and parallel to, the main street of the town. And then we stopped with a jerk before a tall house.

I couldn't tell much about it, except its general outline against the sky. It was of frame, and it had enough lumber in it to build three attractive bungalows. Why any architect from the beginning of the world should devise such a house is a mystery to be ranked with the distances of the stars. It was absolutely hideous. It had neither lines, nor beauty, nor comfort, nor cheer. I immediately felt a great envy for the tramps who might sleep in the barn. In fact, it wasn't a house at all in the true sense of the word. It wasn't even grotesque. It was just an enormous wooden box, with roof and windows, divided into rooms.

It seemed to be three stories high, rather narrow and severely plain. It had a sort of a little stand arrangement that was an excuse for a porch, narrow, unlighted Windows, and a neglected patch of yard or lawn. It was the kind of house that the wind dearly loves to howl around—forsaking all the other houses in the neighborhood for a chance to clatter its windows and rattle its boards and whoop in its chimneys. I began to make excuses for Miss Padgett.

“Do you think any one is home?” I asked my driver as I waited for change.

“Oh, yes. Old man Farding—he ain't just right, and he don't go out. His wife don't neither. They're settin' in the kitchen, savin' light.”

“Attractive neighborhood,” I grunted.

“Not so bad.” After much pretense at fumbling in hope of further conversation he at last found my change. “Just a block off Main Street. The back door of this house is just across the alley from the back door of the First National Bank Buildin'—biggest edifice in town.”

“Unique!” I observed. Then I left him, and knocked on the door of the Farding house.

I have never been able to put my finger on the exact sources of the impressions I had that first hour with the Fardings. I've gone over every detail of it again and again, without the slightest avail. Nothing really happened. Nothing was really different from what I had a right to expect. And I am not a man of imagination, with any false impressions as to my own shadow.

The house was bleak and bare and unattractive; but it was simply nothing more or less than an atrocity perpetrated by some fiendish local contractor—a mere pile of boards and braces. I'm afraid of neither of these things. The lights were dim and ineffective; but the darkness was the same that is eternally suspended over half the world, and to which the human race has become more or less accustomed. Old man Farding was no better or no worse than I expected. He was a familiar type among certain wards in sanitariums for the insane—seemingly a gentle, white-haired, scrawny-handed old man, with a far-away fixation about the pupils of his eyes. He shambled when he walked, and he had difficulty in shaping his words; but he was the most harmless type of lunatic. His wife, a semi-invalid, seemed nothing more than a timid, withered old woman, weighed down by the burden of her own and her husband's infirmities. All these were as usual. And yet I knew, from the first moment I entered the door, that something was very seriously wrong with this house of the Fardings.

I felt it, I knew it, and I couldn't get away from it. No one could, who came through the door. It was curious beyond words, and yet it was just as real as the enlarged photographs of the savage old ladies on the wall, or the faded carpet under my feet. I tried to look myself in the eye and call myself something considerably worse than a fool; but the name simply wouldn't come.

Even as I think it all over, step by step, I can hardly explain this impression. I know that the sound of my knock seemed to last a long time. And then I heard the woman's shuffling, limping step as she came to let me in. She seemed to come a long way, down a long, dark hall. And three times on her way to the door she stopped and waited in the shadows—as if indetermined whether or not to answer my knock.

It was a rather curious thing, and it started a curious parade of thoughts through my brain. Then I saw her pass through the hall door with a smoking kerosene lamp in her hand. She halted once more; then opened the door.

“Yes?” she asked. I began to wonder, in the back part of my mind where a person does such wondering, why she seemed so out of breath. Her eyes seemed to be leaping all over me, at my clothes and into my face. “What do you want?”

“I am Doctor Long—and I've come to take Miss Padgett's place for a few days—until a capable woman nurse can be secured.”

She stood perfectly still an instant. She did not even flick an eyelash. To stand so very still is some way out of accordance with nature. It gives the effect of a terrifically violent start.

“A man?” she whispered at last. “We can't take a man. We can't ”

Then she paused, and seemed to be listening to some sound I could not hear. It was not particularly comforting. I take it that no man at night and at the door of an unknown house cares to be left out on a sound that his companion can hear. And after that, she led me into the hall.

She halted me again in the shadows, and went in to talk alone to her husband. I could just hear the murmur of their voices, and both of them seemed curiously, unexplainably startled.

“But we can't send him away,” I heard her tell him. “We've got to risk it.”

Then I heard him warn her to silence; and they whispered together a long time.

Mrs. Farding showed me my room. It was on the lower floor, exactly across the hall from Farding's room. And at the end of our talk she gave me a strong key.

She seemed somewhat nervous and distracted, and at first I could scarcely understand what she was trying to tell me. She did not lift her voice above a whisper. And she did not look me in the face at all.

“You don't want to forget—you mustn't fail to lock your door when you go to your rest,” she told me. I had to lean forward to hear her; and then, subconsciously, I followed down the line of her eyes. She was steadily, intently watching a door at the end of the corridor. It seemed to be a plain door of pine that looked as if it might lead to the cellar. And before many seconds had passed I felt that I should like to take her gray face in my two hands and turn her eyes away by force. It's such little things as this that take a man's mind off of his work.

“You don't mean that I should expect trouble from your husband?” I asked.

She leaned forward till her breath was against my cheek. “That ain't it,” she said painfully. “But this is a bad neighborhood—and we've had thieves before. We don't want no one to get in—to get in and rob you, while you're at our house. We don't want to have to make up no losses ”

“I'll stand responsible for my own losses,” I told her. “I don't need this key.”

Of course it was a silly thing to say. It was no more justifiable than refusing the key that the hotel clerk hands you over the desk. But I had a feeling, somewhere, that to accept the key meant to admit fear: an admission that I had no desire to make.

She thrust the metal object in my hand. “Please, doctor,” she urged. “Maybe I'm just nervous—but I do want you to lock your door. Don't make me talk about it any more——”

So I took the key and smiled at her. And I really tried my best to believe that stupendous lie of hers about the burglars.

I talked over his case with Farding before I went to my room. We went into his bedroom, and when my back was turned I heard him click the bolt on the door behind us. But I pretended not to notice. And there were plenty of explanations for their concern about their safety. Both of them were at the frontier of senility, full of delusion and timidity. Perhaps they had their little savings hidden in the walls of their rooms. I resolved to think no more about it.

So we sat and talked, and in between our sentences we listened to the wind that I had known would come. And a half hour later some one shuffled up the hall and knocked at our door.

I rose to open it; but the old man sprang in front. He simply leaped. There is no other word. It was the kind of thing to make a man seek relief in profanity, sudden and violent. Just for an instant his eyes swept my face.

“I'll go,” he said. “It's just my wife.”

I thought at the time that he was simply trying to hide from me the fact that he had locked the door of the room, it might be that, and it might be—any one of a dozen things. His attempts to unlock the door unseen by me were rather pathetic. It was indeed just Mrs. Farding. She had come to tell her husband good night.

There is just one reason why this little incident was an inevitable link in the drama of the Farding house. To outward appearances it was just a rather appealing excerpt from a domestic tragedy—the good night of an invalid wife to her afflicted husband. It might have been very easily one of those little scenes that cast a luster of justification over all of life. The incident that changed it all was a little motion, between them in the shadow, when they thought my eyes were turned away.

She passed something into his hands—something that he quickly slid into his pocket. The motion was unbelievably quick and furtive. It had been evidently arranged between them. Their talk went on without a break. But the light showed me what had passed. Just for an instant I saw it flash, and it left me full of thought and wonder. It was a short knife or dagger—a cruel, white-bladed thing for close work.

 

Shortly after eleven I helped Farding undress and got him into his bed. I had plenty to think about as I sat beside him. Was the blade a weapon against me, or a protection from some danger that as yet I did not understand? The man did not go to sleep at once. He seemed to be listening to the sounds in the hall, and, although I had not the least desire to do so, I found myself listening, too. The wind whisked down the corridors without reason or sense, and our lamplight shook and danced.

Then a door opened softly, somewhere on the same floor with us. I tried not to hear it; but it simply would not go unheard. It wasn't that I was afraid of opening doors. A full-grown man outgrows such things. It was just that my peace of mind was rapidly going where the wind goes—a place from which it would not speedily return.

The clock in the hall had just struck twelve. It was an hour that the penny-dreadfuls love to mention, but which to a sane man is not greatly different from the hour of nine, or tea time in the afternoon. At first I did not think that Farding had heard the sound. I glanced at him; but the lids were down over his weak eyes. Then in the pause between the gusts of wind, I became quite sure that a loitering, fumbling, unsteady some one was in the corridor, just without the door.

There didn't seem to be any possibility of a mistake. It was just a matter of opening the door and looking out and seeing him loitering in the shadows. Seeing him without delusion, plain and real in the half darkness.

I could not hear footsteps. If I heard any sound at all, other than the wind and the night noises, and the roll of my own blood in my veins, it was a faint rustling and fumbling along the wall of the corridor. I would have thought it was some rodent, crawling along the walls some four feet above the floor, if it hadn't been for the unmistakable impression that this thing covered more space, embraced greater distances between his touches, than any rodent that man ever heard of. I was rather sure that it was drawing nearer. Then, abruptly, it ceased. I turned to find old Farding leaning from the bed, and groping with his hand toward his coat.

“What is it?” I whispered as gently as I could. “I am here.”

He leaned toward me, and I know it was not fancy that made his face seem so drawn in the lamplight.

“The mole has come out,” he whispered. “Don't make a sound. The mole has come out of the cellar.”

So it was a simple matter—of a mole coming out of the cellar! I took his lean wrist, and tried to steady him with my eyes. The gaze of two steadfast eyes is usually more bracing than a drink of whisky.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What is the mole?”

I have never been able to explain why I did not at once accept his words as the raving of a lunatic. It was simply that I couldn't. Perhaps it was the expression of his face, the sincerity that spoke from his eyes.

“The mole,” he whispered again. “He always comes out soon after midnight. The mole that lives in the cellar—in the dark, dark cellar. And to-night he means killing. You are here—and to-night he means killing.”

“You say this creature lives in the cellar?” And my voice, when I questioned him, held perfectly steady.

“He digs with his claws in the cellar—so dark that you cannot even see his eyes. Hark!”

“What?”

“Man, can't you hear?” The whisper seemed to die away. “It's come, that's all. It's just outside.”

So we sat, mostly without breath, and listened. There was no longer a shadow of doubt about the reality of the sound in the corridor. It was not the wind. It was not a delusion that one brain will often instill in another. Some living creature was groping down the hallway, something real that halted and crept on and groped and fumbled and halted again. I even could mark the peculiar quality of its motion. It seemed to glide, rather than walk, rather like the motion of a great rodent. One seemed to know that if it moved faster, its gait would become a scurry.

But this was not the only impression. Its hand, or antennæ, or whatever moved along the face of the wall, seemed to progress with a series of soft, distinct taps. I could only think of one thing that could make such a sound, and the thought wasn't one that a healthy man likes to tell. It was as if the taps were made by the sharp, scratching ends of claws or nails. It was silent just a moment. And then, not because of bravery but for the eternal reason that a danger is usually more safely faced than avoided, I crept toward the door.

The man in the bed behind me cried out a warning. Perhaps it was meant for me, perhaps for the visitor without. I tugged at the knob, forgetting that the door was locked. Then I fumbled at the bolt; and the three seconds that I wasted gave the intruder time to make his escape. The glide of his feet in the corridor was perfectly distinct. Then the bolt slid back, and I peered out into the hall.

It was very still and dark. And down at its end the door I had noticed before swung shut behind the form of some one who had just passed through.

I have no memory of racing down the hall toward the door. I was simply there, as if there had been no interlude of time. And at once any cherished hope that the intruder might have been merely Farding's wife, on some errand of senile curiosity, was completely and abruptly dispelled. The woman herself hobbled from the door of her room and caught my arm.

“Where are you going?” she cried. “You can't go down there? You can't, I say——”

I had opened the door, and for a long instant stood peering down into the black murk below. A little flight of stairs led down and vanished soon into the utter darkness. It was a deep, intense kind of darkness, through which the eyes simply could not peer. We all stood still and listened; but the silence was absolute.

“I'm going to chase down that thing that just tried to break into our room,” I answered. “It's the thing to do, Mrs. Farding. Let me go——”

“You can't, I say. You can't go down there. This is our house, and I tell you you can't. You are just the nurse—you have no right——”

Farding joined us then, hurrying down the hall. The knife his wife had given him glittered in his hand. I whirled to meet him, but the knife was not meant for me. And I don't remember glancing at it again. It was no more grotesque or out of accordance with things as they were than~any other detail of the past five minutes.

“You can't go, doctor,” he said gently. He even smiled a little, a queer, wan, sad smile. “I wish you could—but you can't.”

“But why—why? If there's something down there, the thing to do is go down and see. Let me call the police——”

We made a strange picture there at the landing of the stairs that led into the darkness. The only light came from the open door of the woman's room. Both of them shook their heads, as if an immutable fate forbade their assent.

“What's down there?” I demanded. “If I am here to cure you and your wife, my first work is to clear out that cellar.”

But they shook their heads again; and slowly, even a little sadly, the woman closed the door over the stairs. Slowly the rift of darkness narrowed, and the mole was left to his shadows.

There was an air of suspense over the house all the next day. I tried to forget it. I worked with my patients, and made exhaustive examinations of their symptoms. But it wasn't entirely a success. There were still sounds, hushed and suppressed, that obviously were not the noise of rats working in the floor; and when an old woman walks the length of the hall with her head turned over her shoulder all the way, it was quite enough to take a doctor's mind from his work.

The Fardings ever seemed to be talking together. They would steal a few, whispered sentences every time I left their rooms. I would run into them in corners, and they made signs to each other when my back was turned. They were not clever at it at all; and I began sincerely to deplore the fact. Any one can see how this would be. If I was not to know what kind of a thing lived in the cellar, the less I thought about him the better. They did not mention the mole again to me, and I did not mention it either.

At twilight a storm broke on the prairie—a wind that rocked the house and whipped the trees, lightning gashing through the sky; and then hushed, strange silence. I resented the whole thing. It seemed to me that fate was drawing cards from its sleeve as well as from the deck to make my stay in the Farding house as interesting as possible. There was not a whisper of wind when I went to bed. It was the kind of silence that makes a man lay with pricked-up ears, waiting for something to happen; and is highly destructive to the peace of mind. The town might have been one of those dead villages that travelers sometimes see in the Western mountains—places where miners once came in thousands, but from which all have taken their empty gold pokes and departed. The same silence hung over it; the same unwavering shadows.

I went to my room at eleven. But I had no intention of going to bed. Some time after midnight the mole would emerge from his cellar; and I did not wish to be caught unready. The hands of my watch slowly drew to midnight; and the clock gonged in the hall. And all at once I remembered that I was absolutely unarmed.

The realization did not lend to my comfort. On my table was a kit of doctor's instruments; but it was not until the sounds actually began that I even considered them. But my first movement after I heard the click of Farding's door was to draw a long-bladed surgeon's knife from the kit. The incongruity of this instrument of mercy at such an hour was worth neither a smile or a thought.

I had a chair in front of my door, and I tiptoed across the room and mounted it so that I could peer through the transom. Farding, whom I had seen safely in his bed an hour before, had risen again. His door opened, very stealthily, and he slipped through into the shadows of the hall. I saw his gray face in the dim light, and a flash light that he carried in his left. hand. And as he tiptoed past, I saw something else. He held an ugly, dark, automatic pistol in his right—pointed square in front.

He stole down the hall; out of the range of my vision. And just as quietly as I would, I opened my own door.

I saw him waiting at the threshold of the dark stairway. Then the shadows hid him as he descended.

For the space of a minute, perhaps, I stood waiting in the hushed corridor. There was nothing else to do. I had no reason for following my patient into his cellar. Under the circumstances, a man may be excused for not wanting to go back quietly to his room. And perhaps I would have never reached a decision if it had not been for the pistol shot that suddenly shattered to pieces the silence of the hall.

The response to such a violent sound as a pistol shot is never quite instantaneous. There is always a moment's partial paralysis, in which the muscles of the throat seem to contract and the heart stops beating. It was this way now. There were no overtones or echoes. The sound seemed to smash and die, leaving the silence even more profound than before.

Then there were three or four soft sounds that the reeling senses could not identify. They might have been the thrashing of a dying creature on the stone floor: I was inclined to think they were. Again, they might have been the muffled sounds of a struggle. I did not have time to interpret them until the final sound reached me—the sound that ended all indecision as to my next step.

It was a human scream, high-pitched and long and wild: all too nearly like the death scream that most men have heard sometimes in their lives. It streamed up from the cellar maw; and it seemed to me that I leaped to meet it. And then the darkness of the cellar grew round me as I darted down the stairs.

I tripped over something at the base—something that breathed and cried out. I could not see it. The darkness was too heavy. And at first I could not find a match. Then my fingers encountered the broken head of one; and the light that sprang forth as I struck it didn't seem quite real. There are no words for it; except that it was remotely like some kind of an eerie, silent explosion in a dream. The walls stood out gray. At my feet lay old Farding. His pistol was still clutched in his hand, but I could not find the flash light. But he was not dead. The only wound that I could see was a cut on his face, such as he might have received from falling against the corner of the stairs. He had been knocked unconscious.

But I did not have time to examine him further. For it was suddenly evident that the mole was stalking me in the darkness. I felt it as an instinct; and, besides, I could hear the rustle of its hand upon the stone. Farding's pistol felt good in my hand.

At such times one does not stop to conjecture as to the nature of his foe. Whether it was a rodent grown to monster size, or a human being, or any other creature that might live its days in darkness did not matter. It only mattered that it was a foe, deadly past all things, and that it was ever creeping nearer across the stone.

It came ever so stealthily. I could hardly hear footsteps. Rather it was a dry rustle, as if it were feeling its way with the skin of a hand. There was no use trying to see. So I began to fire with Farding's pistol toward the sounds in the darkness. And after the roar and flame the silence and the darkness closed down around us, seemingly deeper than ever before.

I could not even hear the creature breathe. If it was still stalking me, it came like a cloud comes in the sky, silent beyond the uttermost bounds of hearing. I began to move softly, too, in what I thought was the direction of the flight of stairs. But the darkness had bewildered me. My groping hand encountered the cellar wall.

Then I stood still. Somewhere, near or far I did not know, the mole searched for me in the darkness. It was a reality that could inflict a wound, or drag its hand on the stone. It made no sound at all. All I could hear was the natural sounds of my own body, and what might have been the shuddering breath of Farding below the stairs. Whatever it was, it seemed to be able to traverse that infinite darkness with marvelous agility. It did not stumble at all. And even as I paused, I did not let myself think what kind of a foe this might be. Such thoughts would have taken away the little of my self-control that remained. It was something that had lived long in the cellar. The two old people had known of it, and had lived in constant terror of it. It had turned against one of them at last; and I had no doubt but that old Farding had fired his pistol in a vain attempt to repel its attack. The mole, the old man called it—and a mole is a thing that works beneath the ground. Only a mole could see in such darkness as this.

I had hoped that my eyes might become accustomed to the darkness, to make the conflict more even; but this hope was dispelled at once. The darkness was of too heavy a nature to ever fade except by the actual admission of light. Then I heard again the dry sound of its touch against stone, and I began to feel my way along the cellar wall.

All at once I went forward, flat on my face. The wall had suddenly ended, and I had encountered a deep cavern or tunnel that had been dug in the stone. I am not quite sure what happened after that. I do not know in just what succession the events came. I was remotely aware that the tunnel narrowed to a passage just large enough for a man to crawl on hands and knees, and that I had fallen over a heavy bag or suit case that clanked and rang. The knife was knocked from my hand. And it was these sounds that gave away my presence. The next instant the mole and I were in furious conflict in the tunnel mouth.

It sprang upon my back; and even then I did not know who or what this enemy was. It had hard muscles, and seemed of my own weight. I could not aim my pistol at first. Some power had locked my arms under me. Then I heard its roar in the darkness, and its flame leaped out twice. I do not know which of us pulled the trigger. I have no memory of it. And all of it seemed like something that couldn't possibly be true, something that I was dreaming and from which I would presently awake. The arms that held me seemed so strong, the darkness so impenetrable, the strength with which I struggled so beyond that of my own muscles. I had summoned all that great store of reserve strength that the human race has acquired in long centuries of crises—the strength that most men, sometimes in their lives, find that they possess. It was no longer a question of terror. There was no longer any space left in my mind for such an emotion as terror. It was just a fight to the death.

My own world, the world where the sun shines in the day and the stars at night, the world of hospitals and surgery and homes and laughter began to seem very far away. I was simply fighting the age-old fight in the darkness. It was as if I were drawn back into a world known only in dreams—wherein life was only just one long war in the darkness, with terror ever spread above like dark wings. It seemed to go on interminably. It was just a matter of seconds; but it seemed already that endless lifetimes had come and died away, And then I felt its cold hands at my throat.

It was a mole, after all. Only a mole could have such claws as these. They seemed so sharp, buried so deep in my throat. They pressed ever harder. The strength began to flow out of my muscles, a little at a time. And curiously, the darkness seemed to grow less. It wasn't that I could see. Perhaps it was simply flashes of strange, colored lights that passed with endless variance before my eyes. For an instant all my sense seemed abnormally acute.

Yes—the darkness was lessening; but it was too late now. The cellar walls leaped out of the gloom.

Then all at once the hands fell from my throat. And as I lay, sobbing the air back into my tortured lungs, I knew that help had come down to me, even in that pit of darkness. There were men with lanterns and guns—and the mole was caught at last.

 

It was all amazingly simple, once we learned the identity of the mole. The face that we saw in the lantern light turned out the unquestioned original of a certain photograph that hung above the desk of the little city's chief of police—that of one of the most desperate and savage criminals on the Atlantic seaboard. He was blind, and in the fraternity of crime he was known as “the Mole.”

He was a nephew of old Farding and his wife, and the nets of the police had been slowly closing around him when he had taken refuge in their house. Darkness meant nothing to his blind eyes, and he had hidden in their cellar. And because he needed ample funds to escape the hangman, he had burrowed, day after day like the mole for which he was named, out of the cellar and under the vault of the bank across the alley. Only at midnight he came to the lower floor of the house for food. Although the simple old couple had lived in deadly fear of him, the old man had descended to the cellar to make a last attempt to prevent the bank robbery—on the very night of the crime. The rest is, of course, self-evident.

“I suppose you had a quiet night,” old Doctor Clark greeted me when I came to report the next day. “Great guns, man! What are those marks on your throat?”

“I caught a mole,” I told him, “and here is the bounty.” And then I showed him the check that represented the reward for the capture of a famous criminal—the check that meant my days as an interne were over forever. For it was large enough to pay for the visit to the famous clinics in Europe; and after that, the rent of physician's offices for a year thereafter.