g to find
who is guilty?"

"Katherine!" he cried, surprised. "Why do you say that?"

Her hand left his arm. She walked on without answering. Paredes came back
to him--Paredes serenely calling attention to the fact that Katherine had
alarmed the household and had led it to the discovery of the Cedars's
successive mysteries. He shrank from asking her any more.

They left the thicket. In the open space about the house the snow had
spread a white mantle. From it the heavy walls rose black and forbidding.

"I don't want to go in," Katherine said.

Their feet lagged as they followed the driveway to the entrance of
the court. The curtains of the room of death, they saw, had been
raised. A dim, unhealthy light slipped from the small-paned windows
across the court, staining the snow. Robinson and Rawlins were
probably searching again.

Suddenly Katherine stopped. She pointed.

"What's that?" she asked sharply.

Bobby followed the direction of her glance. He saw a black patch against
the wall of the wing opposite the lighted windows.

"It is a shadow," he said.

She relaxed and they walked on. They entered the court. There she
turned, and Bobby stopped, too, with a sudden fear. For the thing he had
called a shadow was moving. He stared at it with a hypnotic belief that
the Cedars was at last disclosing its supernatural secret. He knew it
could be no illusion, since Katherine swayed, half-fainting, against him.
The moving shadow assumed the shape of a stout figure, slightly bent at
the shoulders. A pipe protruded from the bearded mouth. One hand waved a
careless welcome.

Bobby's first instinct was to cry out, to command this old man they had
seen buried that day to return to his grave. For there wasn't the
slightest doubt. The unhealthy candlelight from the room of death shone
full on the gray and wrinkled face of Silas Blackburn.

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE GRAVE

"Hello, Katy! Hello, Bobby! You shown your face at last? I hope you've
come sober."

The thin, quarrelsome voice of Silas Blackburn echoed in the mouldy
court. The stout, bent figure in the candlelight studied them
suspiciously. Katherine clung to Bobby, trembling, startled beyond speech
by the apparition. They both stared at the gray face, at the thick
figure, which, three days after death, they had seen buried that noon in
the overgrown cemetery. Bobby recalled how Doctor Groom had reminded him
that an activity like this might emer