for him, had dispatched him by aeroplane to lead Diane's gypsy cart
into the Everglades of Florida, the home-state of Norman Westfall until
his ill-fated marriage.




CHAPTER V

THE PHANTOM THAT ROSE FROM THE BOTTLE

The demon of the flute laughed and fell silent. The house grew very
quiet. A fresh log built its ragged shell of color within the library
and Carl drank again and again, watching the play of firelight upon the
amber liquor in his glass. It pleased him idly to build up a
philosophy of whiskey, an impudent, fearless reverie of fact and fancy.

"So," he finished carelessly, "every bottle is a crystal temple to the
great god Bacchus and who may know what phantom lurks within, ready to
rise and grow from the fumes of its fragrant incense into a nebulous
wraith of gigantic proportions. Many a bottle such as this has made
history and destroyed it. A sparkling essence of tears and jest, of
romance and passion and war and grotesquerie, of treachery and irony
and blood and death, whose temper no man may know until he tests it
through the alchemy of his brain and soul!"

To Starrett it gave a heavy courtesy; to Payson a mad buffoonery; to
Wherry pathos; to Carl himself--ah!--there was the rub! To Carl its
message was as capricious as the wind--a moon-mad chameleon changing
its color with the fickle light. And in the bottle to-night lay a