"Why should I be? Some crank, most likely. Must be, or he wouldn't set out in such a storm as this is." "Great Pluvius, is he coming through this deluge?" "He is. Unless I'm mighty badly mistaken, he is on his way over right now." "Must be something mighty important." "Oh, it's important all right, important to _him_," said Milton Rhodes. "But will it interest _me_?" "I'll tell you that before the day is done. But who is this queer gentleman?" "Name's Scranton, Mr. James W. Scranton. That's all that I know about him, save that he is bringing us a mystery. He called it a terrible, horrible _scientific_ mystery." "That," I exclaimed, "sounds interesting!" It was patent, however, that Milton Rhodes was not looking forward to the meeting with any particular enthusiasm. "It may sound interesting," he said; "but will it prove so? That is the question, Bill. To some people, you know, some very funny things constitute a mystery. Mr. James W. Scranton's mystery may prove to belong to that species. We must wait and see. Said that he had heard of me, that, as I have a gift (that is what he called it, Bill, a gift) of solving puzzles and mysteries, whether scientific, psychic, spooky or otherwise--well, he had a story to tell me that would eclipse any I ever had heard, a mystery that would drive Sherlock Holmes himself to suicide. Yes, that's what he really said, Bill--the great Sherlock himself to suicide." "That's coming big!" I said. Milton Rhodes smiled wanly. "We haven't heard his yarn yet. We can't come to a judgment on such uncertain data." "Scranton," said I. "Scranton. Hold on a minute." "What is it now?" "Wonder if he belongs to the old Scranton family." "Never heard of it, Bill." "Pioneers," I said. "Came out here before ever Seattle was founded. Homesteaded down at Puyallup or somewhere, about the same time as Ezra Meeker. It seems to me--" "Well?" queried Milton Rhodes after some moments, during which I tried my level best to recollect the particulars of a certain wild, gloomy story of mystery and death and horror that I had heard long years before--in my boyhood days, in fact. "I can not recollect it," I told him. "I didn't understand it even when I heard the man, an old acquaintance of the Scrantons, tell the story--a story of some black fate, some curse that had fallen upon the family." "So that's the kind of mystery it is! From what the man said, though that was vague, shadowy, I thought that it was something very different. I thought that it was _scientific_." "Maybe it is. We are speculating, you know, if one may call it that, on pretty flimsy data. One thing: I distinctly remember that Rainier had something to do with it." "What Rainier?" "Why, Mount Rainier."