tarted the
perspiration that streamed down his wrinkled face.

"It would be a tough job to lift it out," Rawlins said.

"No need," Robinson answered. "Get the soil away from the edges."

He bent over, passing a screw driver to the detective.

"Take off the top plate. That will let us see all we want."

Jenkins climbed out.

"I shan't look. I don't dare look."

Silas Blackburn touched Bobby's arm timidly.

"I've been a hard man, Bobby--"

He broke off, his bearded lips twitching.

The grating of the screws tore through the silence. Rawlins glanced up.

"Lend a hand, somebody."

Groom spoke hoarsely:

"It isn't too late to let the dead rest."

Robinson gestured him away. Graham, Paredes, and he knelt in the snow
and helped the detective raise the heavy lid. They placed it at the side
of the grave.

They all forced themselves to glance downward.

Katherine screamed. Silas Blackburn leaned on Bobby's arm, shaking with
gross, impossible sobs. Paredes shrugged his shoulders. The light
wavered in Robinson's hand. They continued to stare. There was nothing
else to do.

The coffin was empty.

CHAPTER IX

BOBBY'S VIGIL IN THE ABANDONED ROOM

For a long time the little group gathered in the snow-swept cemetery
remained silent. The lamp, shaking in the district attorney's hand,
illuminated each detail of the casket's interior linings. Bobby tried to
realize that, except for these meaningless embellishments, the box was
empty. That was what held them all--the void, the unoccupied silken couch
in which they had seen Silas Blackburn's body imprisoned. Yet the screws
which the detective had removed, and the mass of earth, packed down and
covered with snow, must have made escape a dreadful impossibility even if
the spark of life had reanimated its occupant. And that occupant stood
there, trembling and haggard, sobbing from time to time in an utter
abandonment to the terror of what he saw.

To Bobby in that moment the supernatural legend of the Cedars seemed more
triumphantly fulfilled than it would have been through the immaterial
return of his grandfather. For Silas Blackburn was a reincarnation more
difficult to accept than any ghost. Had Paredes, who all along had
offered them a spectacle of veiled activity and thought, grasped the
truth? At first glance, indeed his gossip of oriental theories concerning
the disintegration of matter, its passage through solid substances, its
reassembly in far place