absence of light
in the few external windows pointed to this central gathering. And he
had already conceived his plan of entrance.

Gaining the rear wall of the casa he began cautiously to skirt its
brambly base until he had reached a long, oven-like window half
obliterated by a monstrous passion vine. It was the window of what had
once been Mrs. Peyton's boudoir; the window by which he had once forced
an entrance to the house when it was in the hands of squatters, the
window from which Susy had signaled her Spanish lover, the window whose
grating had broken the neck of Judge Peyton's presumed assassin. But
these recollections no longer delayed him; the moment for action had
arrived. He knew that since the tragedy the boudoir had been dismantled
and shunned; the servants believed it to be haunted by the assassin's
ghost. With the aid of the passion vine the ingress was easy; the
interior window was open; the rustle of dead leaves on the bare floor as
he entered, and the whir of a frightened bird by his ear, told the story
of its desolation and the source of the strange noises that had been
heard there. The door leading to the corridor was lightly bolted, merely
to keep it from rattling in the wind. Slipping the bolt with the blade
of his pocket-knife he peered into the dark passage. The light streaming
under a door to the left, and the sound of voices, convinced him that
his conjecture was right, and the meeting was gathered on the broad
balconies around the patio. He knew that a narrow gallery, faced with
Venetian blinds to exclude the sun, looked down upon them. He managed to
gain it without discovery; luckily the blinds were still down; between
their slats, himself invisible, he could hear and see everything that
occurred.

Yet even at this supreme moment the first thing that struck him was the
almost ludicrous contrast between the appearance of the meeting and
its tremendous object. Whether he was influenced by any previous boyish
conception of a clouded and gloomy conspiracy he did not know, but
he was for an instant almost disconcerted by the apparent levity and
festivity of the conclave. Decanters and glasses stood on small tables
before them; nearly all were drinking and smoking. They comprised
fifteen or twenty men, some of whose faces were familiar to him
elsewhere as Southern politicians; a few, he was shocked to see, were
well-known Northern Democrats. Occupying a characteristically central
position was t