Silence answered without a moment’s hesitation. “I have,” he said. “There is a curious sensation of heat in the place.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the other, with a slight start. “You _have_ noticed it. This unaccountable heat—”

“But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself—but outside,” I
was astonished to hear the doctor add. Colonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map
that hung upon the wall. I got the impression that the movement was
made with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face. “Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate,” he said after a
moment, turning round with the map in his hands. “Though, of course, I
can have no idea how you should guess—”

John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. “Merely my
impression,” he said. “If you pay attention to impressions, and do not
allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will
often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.”

Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His
face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story. “On coming into possession,” he said, looking us alternately in the
face, “I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and
impossible kind I had ever heard—stories which at first I treated with
amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only
to keep my servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my
brother’s death—and, in a way, I think so still.”

He leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence. “It’s an old plan of the estate,” he explained, “but accurate enough
for our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the
plantations marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one,”
indicating the spot with his finger, “is called the Twelve Acre
Plantation. It was just there, on the side nearest the house, that my
brother and the head keeper met their deaths.”

He spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would
have preferred to leave untouched—things he personally would rather
have treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly
dignified and impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness
as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed
as though I were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any
moment I might be summoned to play a part. “It was twenty years ago,” continued the Colonel, “but there was much
talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have
heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered
man but I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them
seem to have been frequent.”

“I do not recall the affair,” said the doctor. “May I ask what was the
cause of death?” Something in his voice made me prick up my ears for
the reply. “The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the
doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time
when found.”

“And your brother?” asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and
listening intently. “Equally mysterious,” said our host, speaking in a low voice with
effort. “But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to
mention. For those who saw the face—I did not see it myself—and though
Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged—” He stammered and
hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved between his
words. He stuck. “Yes,” said the chief listener sympathetically. “My brother’s face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched. It had been swept, as it were, by something that burned—blasted. It
was, I am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found lying side by
side, faces downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they
had been in the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from
its edge.”

Dr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map
attentively. “I did not see the face myself,” repeated the other, his manner somehow
expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, “but
my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be
entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be
brought to refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that
the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But
she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame—blasted.”

John Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the
air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel
Wragge went on with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad
shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece. “They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That
was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as Irish
peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the
foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every
week. You may imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you
that the servants dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants,
but the men who worked on the estate outside. The keepers gave notice
one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the
foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. Word flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a
place to be avoided, day or night. “There came a point,” the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, “when
I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could not
kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the stories
at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map,
comes rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches
the end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense
growth of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the
east winds that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my
brother interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one
of the best pheasant coverts on the whole estate.”

“And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?” asked Dr. Silence. “In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know—except that I
understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head
keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up
travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this
wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall
around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins
tomorrow in the daylight.”

“And the result of your investigations—these stories, I mean?” the
doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues. “Yes, I’m coming to that,” he said slowly, “but the wood first, for
this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way
peculiar about it.