Satan's Garden

It was long past the hour of tinkling glass, and song to the guitar, and crowded tables at the CafŽ du ThŽ‰tre. The gray-walled city of Bayonne slept in the moonlight like an odalisque overcome with wine and lying bejewelled in a garden whence the musicians had departed. It is thus that Bayonne has slept each night of the full moon for more than nineteen centuries at the junction of the Nive and the Adour, guarding the road to Spain.

There were two who sat in a room on the second floor of a house that faced the street running along the city wall. One was old and leathery, with fierce, upturned gray mustaches, and eyes that smoldered beneath shaggy brows; the other was not more than half his age, a lean, broad-shouldered man whose bronzed features were rugged as the masonry of the fortress, and seamed with a saber slash that ran from his cheek-bone almost to the chin.

The younger emerged from the depths of his chair like a panther leaving his cage. He paced the length of the room and paused at the window to stare out into the dazzling moon-brightness that slowly marched from the rolling, tree-clustered parkway and invaded the shadows cast by the city wall across the dry moat that skirted it. Then, as he retraced his steps, he glanced at his watch.

"Later than usual tonight, Pierre," he observed. His voice was weary from baffled wrath. "Do you suppose that It may skip a night?"

Pierre d'Artois shook his gray head and sighed.

"Why should It fail to torment her? We sit here like dummies, you and I. And to what purpose? Look!" He indicated the seals on the door at his left. "It could get through neither door nor window without breaking those sealsÑÑ"

"But It did, by heaven!" exclaimed the younger. And Glenn Farrell resumed his pacing the length of the Boukhara rug that carpeted the room. He made a gesture of futile rage, then resumed, "But how, PierreÑand why?"

Pierre d'Artois twisted his mustache, shook his head again, and struck light to a cigarette. Farrell sank into the depths of his chair and retrieved the cigar butt he had laid on its arm.

"We couldn't have slept on post without one of us being aware of it," resumed Farrell. His voice was monotonous from repetition of a statement so often made that he himself had begun to doubt it. "And if we hadÑÑ"

He regarded the waxen seals on the door.

"Those seals couldn't have been duplicated, with your die locked in a bank vault each night. And she couldn't have escaped."