"Hurry, man! For God's sake let's get out of here while there's time. If you have a car, take me along to Cape Girardeau with you. It may get me in the end, anywhere, but I'll give it a run for its money. Out of here--quick!" As we reached the ground floor I became aware of a slow, curious thumping from the rear of the house, followed by the sound of a door shutting. De Russy had not heard the thumping, but the other noise caught his ear and drew from him the most terrible shriek that ever sounded in human throat. "_Oh, God--great God--that was the cellar door--she's coming_----" By this time I was desperately wrestling with the rusty latch and sagging hinges of the great front door--almost as frantic as my host, now that I heard the slow, thumping tread approaching from the unknown rear rooms of the accursed mansion. The night's rain had warped the oaken planks, and the heavy door stuck and resisted even more strongly than it had when I forced an entrance the evening before. Somewhere a plank creaked beneath the foot of whatever was walking, and the sound seemed to snap the last cord of sanity in the poor old man. With a roar like that of a maddened bull he released his grip on me and made a plunge to the right, through the open door of a room which I judged had been a parlor. A second later, just as I got the front door open and was making my own escape, I heard the tinkling clatter of broken glass and knew he had leapt through a window. And as I bounded off the sagging porch to commence my mad race down the long, weed-grown drive I thought I could catch the thud of dead, dogged footfalls which did not follow me, but which kept leadenly on through the door of the cobwebbed parlor. I looked backward only twice as I plunged heedlessly through the burrs and briars of that abandoned drive, past the dying lindens and grotesque scrub-oaks, in the gray pallor of a cloudy November dawn. The first time was when an acrid smell overtook me, and I thought of the candle de Russy had dropped in the attic studio. By then I was comfortably near the road, on the high place from which the roof of the distant house was clearly visible above its encircling trees; and just as I expected, thick clouds of smoke were billowing out of the attic dormers and curling upward into the leaden heavens. I thanked the powers of creation that an immemorial curse was about to be purged by fire and blotted from the earth.