Detective and mystery stories; Murder -- Investigation -- Fiction
Halliday was shaken, but did not become unconscious. Clearing his feet
and arms from the tangle of ropes and canvas, he emerged from the
confused heap, and dragged out the woman by her dress, which fluttered
out from the wreckage. To tear off her veil and light a match took a
single minute.
"Miss Armour!" cried Dan, greatly amazed. And Miss Armour it was,
quite senseless.
CHAPTER XIX
TREACHERY
In the chill gray gloom of the fields, damp, depressing and misty,
with the wreckage of the airship piled up around him, and the
insensible woman lying at his feet, Dan stood bewildered, his nerves
jangling like ill-tuned bells. The twenty feet fall had not harmed him
in limb or body; but the violent contact with the earth, broken in
some measure by the fact that his enemy's aeroplane had been
underneath, resulted in a displacement of his normal powers. He felt
battered and bruised, deadly sick and wished to lie on the wet grass,
indifferent to everything and everyone. But with a dangerous creature
at his elbow, this was not to be thought of, even though that same
creature was unable to exercise her wicked will. Moreover, The Grange
was only a stone's throw distant, and doubtless Mrs. Jarsell had been
watching for the coming of her friend. If this were the case, she
would come out with help--for Queen Beelzebub, that is. How Halliday
would be treated he was much too muddled in his brain to consider.
Finally, he dropped on his knees, longing for brandy to pull him
together, and began to think with difficulty.
This woman was not Mrs. Jarsell, but Miss Armour. Seeing that he knew
her to be old, feeble, and paralyzed, this was most remarkable.
Curberry had called her Queen Beelzebub, so Miss Armour, and not Mrs.
Jarsell, was the head of the Society of Flies, and the cause of all
the trouble. In a weak way, Dan considered that she evidently was not
so old as she had made herself out to be, and certainly she was not
paralyzed. No woman without the use of her limbs could have escaped so
swiftly, or have worked the aeroplane so dexterously. Miss Armour, the
delicate, kind-hearted old lady, was the infernal Queen Beelzebub who
had spoken behind the mask when in the darkness the scarlet light had
made an accursed halo round her head. And now she was dead--stone
dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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