The First Casebook of Jigger Masters
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short stories; crime
Description: Anthony M Rud (1893-1942) was an American pulp writer who later became Editor of "Adventure Magazine". In 1918 he wrote eight short stories about his detective Jigger Masters, which were all published in "The Green Book Magazine". In the 1930s he revived Jigger Masters in a series of short stories and serials. A list of these stories is at the end of this book. 1: The October Blight 2: The Fiery Meteor 3: The Vengeance Of The Wah Fu Tong 4: The Red Billiard-Ball Mystery 5: The Miltonvale Nemesis 6: The Giant Footprints 7: The Specter At Macey's 8: The Affair At Steffen Shoals The text files ar

THE FIRST CASEBOOK OF

JIGGER MASTERS

His Adventures in 1918

Anthony M Rud

Contents

1: The October Blight

2: The Fiery Meteor

3: The Vengeance Of The Wah Fu Tong

4: The Red Billiard-Ball Mystery

5: The Miltonvale Nemesis

6: The Giant Footprints

7: The Specter At Macey's

8: The Affair At Steffen Shoals

_______________

Anthony M Rud

[Anthony M Rud (1893-1942) was an American pulp writer who later became Editor of Adventure Magazine. In 1918 he wrote eight short stories about his detective Jigger Masters, which were all published in The Green Book Magazine.  In the 1930s he revived Jigger Masters in a series of short stories and serials. A list of these stories is at the end of this book.]

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1: The October Blight

The Green Book Magazine, March 1918

"WILL you paint a portrait of me? I am not in a hurry. In fact, I'd much prefer, if you're not too crowded down there, to come up to town and stay with you for a short time. You can paint me whenever you have sufficient time off from your other work."

If Crosby Braithwaite had asked me to come out and whitewash his chicken coop, I would not have been more astounded. I do portraits often, while I have devoted little time to the decoration of chicken coops; but to have a blunt, masculine man like Crosby so anxious for his picture that he is willing to come to town and wait around for it—well, it took my breath away. I scarcely could believe the phone receiver.

"Why—why," I sputtered, "of course! Come right along. I have a place for you here, and I'd enjoy having you here tremendously. I haven't much work on hand, and I can finish you up in two or three sittings."

"Thanks, Bert, old man!" he answered gratefully. "Don't plan on hurrying, though. I don't care if it takes you a month."

"A month?" I echoed, scenting something back of it all. "All right, Crosby. I'll take a month to it if you wish. I know you well enough to realize that it's not the portrait you're after, though. Come right along, however, and bring your suitcases—or your trunks if you prefer!"

The cordiality of this last was unfeigned, for Crosby Braithwaite always had been one of the men whose intimate friendship I would have cultivated if I had remained in New York after college days. My training abroad, however, had cut away the bonds I had formed; and when I returned, it had been necessary for me to work every minute. As a result I had seen Crosby only twice since graduation.

The nine years had not even straightened one kink in his curly thatch of reddish brown hair. As he strode into the studio an hour later, I almost could have thought him raiding my room for dormitory hazing. His shoulders were an inch or two wider, perhaps, and the broad smile came and went again instead of hovering constantly on his lips, but otherwise he was the same big-handed, big-hearted aristocrat. Even the light Scotch suit he wore was almost identical with some of the clothes I had envied in his college wardrobe.

His greetings were a trifle sheepish. "I'm not much of a bluffer, am I, Bert?" he asked, after shaking hands.

"Sit down and tell me about it," I commanded, smiling. "You have my curiosity aroused now, and if you are really going to stay with me for a time, you might just as well start at the beginning."

He stretched his heavy frame on the couch I indicated, but thought better of it immediately and sat upright on the edge. I saw all the lightness of expression and all the bluff heartiness vanish together from his face.

"I'm not going to apologize any more, Bert," he said quietly, albeit with a deadly seriousness that I could not mistake. "If you think me a coward or a fool, just tell me so to my face, and I'll try to swallow it. I have come to you because I know you're not tactful."

"Thanks," I broke in wryly.

"Oh, don't take offense. It is the most wearisome thing in the world to be with people who smile and are polite all of the time they talk to you, and then jeer behind your back. I know your tongue and your fists, too. One is as blunt as the other; I have run into both in times past, and while I don't fear either, I respect both."

"Well, just what is wrong? If you'll tell me, perhaps we can settle the difficulty." My voice was stilted, for the one thing I cannot stand is to be complimented to my face.

Braithwaite colored a trifle, but plunged into his story. It was plain to be seen that he had learned to expect ridicule. "Tomorrow is—is the first of October," he began.

"Yes," I encouraged, unimpressed as yet. "My father died suddenly on the fourth of October, five years ago. Four years ago Tim—my eldest brother—died; that was on the eighteenth. Three years ago Jesse—you knew him—met a sudden and peculiar death on the thirteenth of October. Then for a year no one lived in Braithwaite Grange, and there were no deaths in our family. Last year the servants stayed; I packed up and came down to the McAlpin. Esther Stearns—she was an old lady who had been my mother's maid for twenty years, and we had kept her because she had become a sort of fixture—died suddenly and mysteriously on the twenty-seventh of October. Now there is not a servant left; they won't stay in the house, and I cannot say that I blame them. I have come down to you because I know that you will know what to do. Max Morton said—"

The explanation of Braithwaite's visit flashed across my mind as the big chap before me stopped suddenly and bit his lip. I felt myself growing hot about the ears and under the collar, an unfortunate habit of mine when anything displeases me mightily. "What did Max tell you?" I asked, glaring savagely at my caller.

Braithwaite shifted uncomfortably. "Not much of anything," he admitted.

"He was as mysterious as a sphinx—said that you could put me in touch with a man who could clear up my difficulties if anyone could. I suppose he meant a detective, though what good that would do is beyond me, for I have employed the very best men in this country and England already. Being at my wits' end, I thought to come down here and stay on your hospitality, and then, if you—"

"Did Max tell you who this man is?"

"No; I couldn't pry anything more out of him with a crowbar. In fact, he said that he was violating a confidence even in mentioning you."

"He was," I said tersely. "Not that I really care so very much, but this chap once did a favor for Max and myself that we are repaying poorly when we disobey that simple request of his."

"Well—" Braithwaite looked puzzled. "Do you think it would do me any good to consult this secretive friend of yours? Is it worth while to bother him?"

"He isn't what you'd call a friend," I said slowly. "He isn't a public investigator, either. He is a sort of super-detective whom a few chiefs of police and big business men call on for solving their most tangled problems. Is this trouble of yours really worth his while?"

Braithwaite regarded me soberly. "So far as I am concerned it is all-important. The servants—and I, too, I must confess—call this something which hangs over our house 'The October Blight.' I am convinced that it is going to get me sometime if I don't get it first." His voice held conviction.

"Has it occurred to you to sell Braithwaite Grange?" I queried, almost sarcastically.

The man before me straightened perceptibly. "Yes!" he snapped. "But I have had health experts of all kinds out to examine the place. They have gone over it from top to bottom and declare that everything is in superb condition; there isn't a healthier country home in New York State! If I am going to admit that there is something wrong, don't you think it my duty to find out just what that something is? If it is supernatural or of human agency, will the mere fact of moving separate it from me? Anyway, I have run away enough now. If I could find some way of fighting, I'd—I'd—"

"I must ask you to step down to the street while I phone," I interrupted. Braithwaite started to obey with alacrity.

"Wait! I must also ask your pledge that you will not try to find out anything more about J. M. than he chooses to tell you; that you never will mention your meeting with him."

Braithwaite raised his right hand. "I promise!" he said quietly.

"All right. Now if you'll go, I'll see if he'll take you on."

OVER THE wire I explained the matter just as it had been told to me, and dwelt upon the fact that my caller did not know anything of Masters' identity. "You can trust Crosby Braithwaite," I concluded. "There isn't a yellow atom in him. I've known him for years, and I am sure that you will find him satisfactory and his case worthy of your talent."

The man at the other end of the wire grumbled a little, but acquiesced. "So long as this is not a habit, Hoffman," he said, "I don't mind obliging. Has he had any others on the case?"

"Yes, so he says. I believe he has employed several, some from this country and some from England."

"Hm! Sounds like coincidence. Well, I'll be up." The receiver clacked the close of our connection. I ran to the window, threw up the sash, and signaled to Braithwaite below.

"Will he come?" inquired the latter breathlessly, bursting in. He had run up the three flights, without waiting for the elevator.

"Yes, in five or ten minutes," I replied. I did not find it necessary to explain to my caller that the short delay would be something in the nature of camouflage, since Jigger Masters occupied the third-floor apartment at the north end of the same building in which we then were sitting. "I can only repeat my previous warning," I went on seriously. "Don't be too curious about this man, because keeping his identity and personality from the public knowledge is a life-and-death matter with him!"

Crosby nodded solemnly and sat down, attempting to achieve composure. His attitude was strained, however, and I knew that doubts were beginning to assail him. I had felt just the same way the first time I ever met Masters, for Morton had been even more finicky than I in laying our case before Masters.

"Do you think—" began Braithwaite; but he did not finish. I saw his eyes widen as they gazed past me at the door, and I knew that Masters had entered.

It always had been a puzzle to me how the man had succeeded in keeping so much to himself, for no one who encountered him on serious business ever could forget him. Besides his extraordinary height and leanness, he had an air of dignity and capability most impressive. I knew just how he would appear, but I turned my head instinctively.

Masters stood in the hall just at the opening of my studio, with his long arms crossed behind him, hands clasping his elbows. He wore a plain blue serge suit, high collar and blue bow tie. His chin, broad but curiously pointed, rested over the edge of his collar in such a way as to reduce, almost to invisibility, what I knew to be a long, homely neck. He was clean-shaven, except for his upper lip. This, as I found out later, he fondly imagined to carry a mustache—his only foible—but the few scraggly black hairs only succeeded in giving the broad lip a smudged appearance.

I arose deferentially. There was nothing of pose in this, for at that time I knew him only well enough to respect him; the liberties I took later were due to steadily increasing familiarity.

"Mr. Masters, this is my old friend, Mr. Crosby Braithwaite," I began. Masters strode across the room so quickly that it startled me, and Crosby told me afterward that the handshake had so taken him off his guard that his right hand was numb for a half-hour afterward.

"Glad to meet you, indeed!" rumbled Masters, the voice seeming to start very naturally from the depths of his great chest. "Sit down!"

Braithwaite started to speak, muttered a rather confused acknowledgment, then obeyed. To my relief, Jigger Masters started in immediately with Crosby's problem, evidently crediting my estimate of my friend.

"As I understand it," he said, slapping back a lock of his thick black hair from his forehead with a sweep of his long, knotted fingers, "your father, Anson Braithwaite, and two of your brothers met similar and peculiar deaths while living at your country home?"

"Yes," answered Braithwaite quickly, "and Esther Stearns also. She was a servant—not related in any way, you understand."

Masters straightened a little at this, and I could see that this statement had collided with some forming assumption in his brain. "Not a relative, eh?" he said reflectively.

"No sir."

"Tell me all you can about the manner of death of all these people. Were the cases in any way similar?"

"No one else beside the servants and myself can see any connection." Crosby's tone was pinged with a sarcasm so unlike him that I could imagine what he must have been through with the other detectives whom he had employed to handle the case.

"Father," he continued, "was quite a strict old Puritan, so far as his personal life was concerned. I guess he wasn't as scrupulous in business, but that doesn't matter to us. The point is that he had every expectation of living to be a hundred; instead of that, he dropped off at sixty-two."

"How did he die?"

Braithwaite shrugged his shoulders. "No one knew much of anything about it. Even the inquest didn't clear up the situation. You see, Dad used to get up at five-thirty every morning, drink a cup of coffee, and then go out and play nine holes of golf. He'd return in time to have breakfast with the rest of us. On that morning, Collins—he used to make the coffee—said that Dad complained of feeling stuffy and peculiar. He had said something about the house not being well ventilated, but that was nonsense, of course, because Dad had three windows in his bedchamber, and these always were open at night."

Masters nodded slightly. "It is certain, I suppose," he remarked, "that these windows were open on that night?"

"Oh yes. Dad was something of a crank on the subject of fresh air. It would be hard to imagine anyone climbing in through them, however, for copper-wire screens still were locked in place in the morning. You see the flies get rather pesky up there about the first of October, so we always keep the screens on until snow falls."

I was watching Masters closely, and saw a blank look come into his eyes. For all the world it seemed as if he had suddenly lost all interest in the details of the case, but from what I learned of him afterward, knew that this simply was a symptom of concentration.

Crosby looked at him doubtfully, but kept on with his story. "That's about all, so far as Father was concerned. He didn't show up for breakfast, so I went out to call him. I found him beside the fifth tee, all doubled up and dead! His ball was all ready for a drive, and his driver lay beside him, so whatever it was that struck him must have come suddenly."

"Was his mouth open?" The question came from Masters like a flash off lightning from a cloud, and it took Crosby unawares.

"Why—yes—I don't know," he stammered. "Dad's face was bluish and convulsed—I rather think his mouth was open, though I couldn't swear to it now."

"Where were his hands?"

"Clutching at his chest and stomach." Crosby shuddered. "Oh, he looked terrible!"

"Who examined him?"

"Dr. Watry, our old physician, and then the coroner. Both were puzzled, but Watry seemed to think heart failure the cause, and after examining Dad's stomach the coroner gave that as his decision."

"Heart failure?" Masters' tone held a hint of sarcasm. "Everyone dies of that dread disease, I'm afraid. What made his heart fail? Did they state?"

"No. I think that they were a little loath to go into the matter as thoroughly as a city inquest would have done." Crosby smiled grimly. "You see, we lived in what is practically a rural community, and whatever a Braithwaite has done in the past has been considered au fait—even when it comes to dying mysteriously."

Masters frowned. "Well, how about the others? Did they all die playing golf?"

"No, and it's this part that—well, that makes my story seem a trifle absurd to most people. Both of my brothers seemed to have met accidents, but—"

"Yes?"

"I never will believe it!" Crosby plunged on with something like desperation. "Even the detectives I employed ended up by assuring me that there was nothing in my suspicions. You see, Tim got up on the morning of the eighteenth of October, and for no particular reason ran out the roadster, and made off hell-bent- for-election up the pike toward Mowrey. He was found about noon by a party on the road. His car had crashed into a telephone pole, and he was lying there dead; his skull was fractured. The reason I never could swallow it all was that Tim was a good and a careful driver, and besides, his face looked bluish, just the way Dad's had looked!"

"Might have been caused by the rupture of blood vessels," commented Masters.

"Yes, I suppose so." Braithwaite's voice was heavy with disappointment. "I took the doctor's say-so then."

"Dr. Watry?"

"Yes. Why, do you suspect him?" Masters shook his head indifferently.

"No," he said, "I've run across Watry before—that is, if it's Charles Watry of Phelps."

"It is."

"And I just am disappointed; I don't credit him with much intelligence. Go on."

"Well—" Braithwaite hesitated.

"Hang it, Masters," he broke out impetuously, "I hope you're not just going to tell me that my family is a victim of coincidences, because I never will believe that as long as I live!"

I shivered a little, for I feared that Masters might take offense at this, but he did not. Instead a slight smile curved his mouth. "No, Mr. Braithwaite," he answered with a slight drawl, "I shall not tell you that unless I can make you believe it too!"

"Well, then—"

"Call your car," interrupted Masters. "I presume you have one in town with you?"

"Yes, at the McAlpin garage." Crosby stepped to the phone and gave the necessary orders.

"Now, while it's coming, tell me about your other brother and the servant."

Crosby resumed his seat with alacrity; I could see that the prospect of action pleased him.

"The only striking difference in the death of Jesse that I have been able to see," he began, sobering immediately, "is that he died up at Mangan Hills in the evening instead of the morning. He had gone up to a town dance with Esther Duntley, to whom he was engaged. It was about eight-thirty in the evening—the dance had just started—when he complained of feeling sick, left Esther and went outside, and was found dying there about twenty minutes later. He was unconscious when help reached him, and he never came to at all. His case seemed a little like poisoning, for he was terribly convulsed; but after another inquest they called it apoplexy, for they could find no traces of poison. Then people began talking about a 'disease that ran in our family.'"

"Did his face get bluish?"

"Yes, just the same as Dad's and Tim's. That's what made me connect them one with another."

"I think that your car is outside, Crosby," I interrupted.

"Yes, it is," he answered, glancing down. "We'll just run out," directed Masters. "You can tell me about the servant on the way out."

Crosby led the way down and gave crisp orders to his driver. Then the three of us climbed in the tonneau and were off.

"Esther Stearns' case was really not remarkable in itself," Crosby continued, after we had wormed our way out of the heavy traffic. "She was over seventy years of age and feeble; in the ordinary course of events we would have expected her to pass on in a year or two, anyway. If she had died any time except in the month of October—" Crosby paused and shook his head.

"What were the circumstances?" The baffling dullness had crept into Masters' eyes again, but Braithwaite was too much aroused now to notice.

"Simple, very simple!" he retorted, with a tinge of sarcasm. "Like all the rest, natural causes. Everyone but those confounded superstitious servants and myself think she died of plain, unadulterated old age. I don't, though! She had the same room hat Tim occupied the night before he died."

"Hm!" Masters' eyebrows shot up. "May I ask if that was the same room which your father and brother also slept in?"

"No. Those have been unused ever since." A long silence ensued in which I gave up the case for the time being, and watched the scenery.

"Tell me about your servants," Masters finally broke in. "Have you had the same set all the time?"

"No, confound them!" answered Crosby angrily. "Servants are the dickens of a problem out in the country! We haven't had a single one, except Esther Stearns, more than eight or nine months. They all get lonesome for the city. The last I had quit in a body after Esther died; they said the house was haunted, and that some one would have to die every October! There are none out there now."

"Well, how about visitors? Do you have many regular visitors? I mean those who have been coming to see you for years."

Braithwaite considered a moment. "Yes, several," he answered. "We have a great many cousins, aunts and uncles who make it their habit to drop in on us once or twice a year. You see, it's a regular summer resort for them; we always have kept a sort of an open house, so whenever a family of our relatives decided on a week in the country, all they had to do was to bring their effects right out."

"Do they usually come any particular times?"

"Oh yes, the Caldwells usually come in July and spend their time fishing over at Lake Chatonki; Cousin Kate and Cousin Eleanor come in for Christmas and New Year's, and sometimes the Ramsgates from Ohio."

"Does anyone come regularly in August?"

"Yes. Thomas Braithwaite, Dad's brother, usually spends his vacation with his wife at Braithwaite Grange during August. He hasn't been out this year because no one has been there."

"Anyone else elect August or September?"

"Well, Cousin Hal drops around once in a while in September, but I haven't encouraged him very much because he's poor company—a soured individual."

THE CAR TURNED suddenly into the wide portals of Braithwaite Grange. I recognized the place though I had seen it but once before. The grounds, ill-kept now, still showed traces of the magnificent care the bulging Braithwaite pocketbook had been able to give them. The house, a huge, rambling, rough log bungalow, built in the form of a Greek cross, was as evidently uncared for, yet all had an open-handed look of generous hospitality.

Crosby led the way in, and after carrying in a little kindling, lighted a fire in the big hearth. Masters was not in the mood for sitting down; as soon as Crosby arose, the detective nodded to him. "Let me have a small hatchet and show me the three rooms that have been occupied by your father, brothers and Esther Stearns," he said. "While I am looking around, you and Hoffman sit in there and get warm. I'll call you if I need you."

Crosby bustled out and procured the required article, handed it over, and then led the way back, pointing out the rooms as he did so. I had not been invited, so I remained beside the fire. In a moment Crosby rejoined me. "Unsociable devil, isn't he?" whispered the latter, seating himself beside me.

For twenty minutes we listened to the tap-tap-tap of Masters' hatchet—he was using the hammer part of the head. Then came a long silence, and I felt myself getting nervous. Crosby's face was drawn and white also; neither of us had the faintest idea of what Masters expected to find, yet both of us knew the importance of the detective's investigation.

The sudden impacts of Masters' heavy strides made us sit up quickly, but it was only to see him disappear into one of the other rooms. The tapping was repeated; this time it was of short duration. Then he stepped out and repeated the performance in the third and last chamber.

This time he returned to the living-room, and Crosby and I rose anxiously to meet him.

"Do you think we are likely to have a heavy frost tomorrow night?" he questioned affably, turning his back to the fire, and eyeing the distraught Braithwaite seriously.

"I haven't an idea! Why, what difference does it make?" cried Crosby. "Have you found out anything?"

"Enough to hang a regiment!" retorted Masters calmly.

"But how about the frost?"

He turned to me.

"We have a little every night now," I ventured.

"Well, how near is the closest observatory?"

"Down at Mangan Hills," snapped Crosby with what I deemed pardonable irritation.

"Well, gentlemen?" Masters dropped his mask and sat down on the bench before us, rubbing his long fingers together. "I am not chaffing you. If you will allow me to direct your actions for the next day or two, I think we can put a pinch of salt on the tail of this October ghost, or whatever you call it. Don't bother me to explain now; all I can tell you is that the same agency probably killed all four of the people who died here, and that there was nothing supernatural about it."

"Well, what shall we do?" Crosby's eyes were wide now, but there was a grim look of anticipation there also.

Masters turned quickly to him. "You telephone to those relatives who usually visit you in August and September. Tell them you are getting fixed up here now and that you would like to have them run down any time they found convenient. Mention the fact that the weather is getting crisp, and that if they don't mind breaking the law a little, they might rouse a few partridges."

"But I have no servants here!"

"Yes, you have—two of them!" Masters indicated himself and me with a sweep of his hand. "I'll get a third, a woman I know and can depend upon who will cook the meals."

Crosby's face lighted up with pleasure, and he made for the telephone.

"While he's doing that, you run down to Mangan Hills observatory and find out whether by any happy chance there is a cold wave coming within a day or two, and also get the temperature records hour by hour, for all the days in each October for the past five years."

I bowed my complete understanding of the orders if not of the reasons for them, and started for Crosby's car.

"Get back as quickly as possible," admonished Masters. "We're servants when anyone arrives, you understand."

I need dwell little upon my trip to Mangan Hills. Suffice it to say that I obtained the desired records and returned in time to put on a greasy old dress-suit that Crosby had unearthed from some part of the wardrobe of his old staff of servants.

"You're to be door-man, Masters says," Crosby informed me. "You can put on all the dog you wish."

"Thanks!" I said dryly. "What is Masters going to do?"

"He has elected himself gardener. I believe he is out now with an old ladder, trimming the vines. He has a Mrs. Jessup coming up here in an hour. She's going to cook our meals; I've ordered everything I could think of from the grocery."

"But how about our visitors?"

Crosby hesitated. "I don't like to cast any reflections on your friend, and I am willing to play this string out the way he says, but I can't see for the life of me why he wants Uncle Tom and Cousin Hal out here! He surely can't suspect either of them of the murders. Why, neither of them were within ten miles of this place within two weeks of the time when any one of the affairs happened."

I shrugged my shoulders. "If we knew more about what he did with that hatchet, we could tell better," I remarked. "Don't imagine, though, for one instant, that J. M. is wasting his time or ours. There'll be music in the air just about as quickly as you can say 'Jack Robinson!' after he gets the stage set to his satisfaction."

MRS. JESSUP arrived on the three-twelve train and was delivered at Braithwaite Grange by the station bus fifteen minutes later. I saw the gardener go down to meet her and knew that Masters was giving her full instructions.

They must have been simple, for the woman, a rather sharp- featured but solid woman of forty or thereabouts, went immediately to the kitchen and began preparations for dinner just as though she had been in the household a year.

When Crosby drove up with the three visitors, I must admit that I mentally accused, judged and hanged Hal Marquis and acquitted Tom Braithwaite and his wife, all while the three were removing their wraps. Marquis was a villainous, dissipated- appearing youth, with blotchy pimples on his face and a stoop to his shoulders that spoke loudly of hours spent over card and billiard tables, while Tom Braithwaite was enough like Crosby in appearance so that no one ever would suspect him of a meanness. His wife was not so attractive; she had a snippiness of manner that seemed small when compared to the easy-going generosity of the Braithwaites, but I dismissed her as not mattering much one way or the other.

Crosby, acting on instructions, took the three to their rooms. On the way he showed them the room he intended to occupy, expatiating long about a set of antlers above his bed which he had acquired since seeing them. He dropped many dark hints of what he intended to do in getting a buck deer when the weather grew crisper. "You know, they come in even this close to town to feed on the rutabaga patches," he said. "If anyone would like to come out with me tonight and take a chance with the law—"

"I would!" exclaimed Hal.

"I would too," said Tom Braithwaite regretfully, "except that Sal and I have to hurry back right after dinner. We're catching the nine-four train; you see, I have some business appointments that I must see to very early tomorrow morning."

Crosby protested, explaining volubly that he was sure there would be a heavy frost that night, and that was an excellent time to go after deer, but the Braithwaites were firm.

"No, Crosby dear, we'll be out again sometime this winter," said the snippy one. "You really aren't very well settled yet, anyway. We just came out because we are so afraid that awful October curse might get you, and then we'd never see you again."

I saw the close-set black eyes bore into Crosby with an expression that was far from either affection or sympathy. At that moment Mrs. Braithwaite's lean face seemed cast in hard lines like the profile of a vulture. I revised my mental disposal of her somewhat.

Crosby laughed heartily, not noticing. "It will never get me!" he boasted. "I'm not afraid of any ghost that walks!" With that the company dispersed to dress for dinner.

I kept an eye on Masters, not knowing what he would wish me to do; and sure enough, a moment later he came into the kitchen, wiping his hands, and dropped a slip of paper on the table beside me. "Keep out of sight but see if anyone goes into Crosby's room after he leaves," it read.

I tiptoed to the back hall and waited there patiently until Crosby, Hal and Mrs. Braithwaite had gone into the dining-room. I could hear all footsteps, and by peering around the casement I could see well, though exposing myself to detection if not particularly careful.

THERE WAS not long to wait. The moment that the three had closed the sliding doors of the dining-room behind them, I heard a stealthy step. Chancing being seen, I bobbed my head around in time to see Tom Braithwaite disappearing into the room Crosby had just left. I did not see details clearly, but he seemed to be carrying a package, part of which looked like a bottle.

Without waiting an instant, I stepped back and reported the intrusion to Masters. He nodded jerkily and motioned to me to follow.

Tiptoeing as quietly as two cats, we crept up to the half- closed door of Crosby's room. Just the second we arrived, Braithwaite emerged. I needed no tip from Masters; the man was our "meat."

Masters and I hit him together and carried him backward through the doorway, crashing to the floor.

Then ensued a kicking, scrambling fight, which was not nearly as unequal as it might appear, because of the cramped quarters.

Braithwaite writhed about on the floor and succeeded in dislodging Masters. I had a solid grip on his legs like a football tackler delights to secure, but at that moment I saw Braithwaite's revolver come out. As quickly as I could, I deserted my hold and seized his wrist. Masters jumped back and sat on his head while I wrested the weapon out of his grasp and hit him on the head with the butt. This made Braithwaite go limp, and I stood up to allow Masters to adjust the bracelets.

At that moment a screaming woman burst through the door. I scarcely realized she was Mrs. Braithwaite, however; all I could see was the nickel-plated revolver she leveled at Masters. I seized a brass smoking-stand which had fallen over in the struggle, and lunged wildly at the revolver.

As luck would have it, this impromptu weapon struck her wrist just as she pulled the trigger, and the bullet crashed into the glass mirror on Crosby's chiffonier. Before she had time to fire again, I took the revolver away, and held her wrists behind her in such a way that she could not move. Vixen-like she dug her fingernails deep into my left hand.

She changed her tactics as soon as she realized her inability to do serious harm, and screamed for help. Crosby appeared in the doorway with Hal, white-faced, and she appealed to him to kill us immediately for insulting her and her husband.

Hal moved forward as if to comply, but Crosby, pale as his cousin, interposed. "This is all cooked up, Hal," he said, "so keep out of it."

"Cooked up, eh?" shrilled Mrs. Braithwaite, approaching what I presume was a hysteria of hate and terror.

"I should say it is! Ha! Ha! Fine sort of hospitality I call it! Invite us here and then have us manhandled by the servants! Oh, we'll have satisfaction for it!"

"Shut up, Sal!" commanded Braithwaite gruffly. He had come to consciousness quickly, but had given up all idea of resistance; Masters was busy coiling a rope about his ankles. When this was finished he turned to me. I know he did not intend to tie his other prisoner the same way, for Masters always was chivalrous; but at that moment he received a vicious kick from the woman, so he had to put bonds on Mrs. Braithwaite also, despite her screaming and anathema.

"Now help me here, Bert," directed Masters, indicating our captives' feet. I seized Braithwaite's bound legs, and then helped Masters carry him over and place him on the bed. His wife was also placed beside him; this operation stilled all her cries. I saw ghastly terror replace all the pseudo anger on her unpleasant countenance.

"Come in and have chairs," invited Masters pleasantly, motioning to Hal and Crosby. He took a seat himself as did I. "Don't get near the bed; there is a real reason to keep away." We all pushed back to the opposite walls at this.

"Now I am sure that we are all ready for a very pleasant little party," he continued. "The gardener is conducting it. First on the program will be the reading of the report of the United States Weather Observatory at Mangan Hills." He drew out the report I had brought. "A severe frost may be expected this evening, with a possibility of light snow flurries toward morning. North to northwest winds."

Tom Braithwaite turned his head in our direction. "Well, what is it all about?" he queried in the tone of a man who is rapidly getting intolerant. "Explain this mummery; I am sure I have had all I want of it. I pretty nearly peppered your gardener, thinking he was a burglar. Now you have me here, and you are reading weather reports to me! At least let my wife up; you can keep me here if you want to, but she is nervous."

"I noticed that!" commented Masters dryly, glancing at the nickel-plated revolver which now lay on the table. "However, I think she had better stay with you through this little program. You can call it off any time you wish, though. I have a little paper here that deals with some very unpleasant things which happened during the past five years; if both of you wish to sign it, I won't insist upon your remaining on that bed all night."

"All night!" Both of the captives shuddered, and their eyes turned upward to the wall above. I would have pitied the woman except for her evident guilt—and my smarting left hand.

"Yes, I have reason to believe that neither of you would care much to remain just as you are many hours—you know, it's going to freeze hard tonight!"

"He's got us, Tom! He's got us!" broke in Mrs. Braithwaite hysterically.

"Shut up, you fool!" the man interrupted savagely. "I don't know what the devil you are talking about, sir," he went on rapidly, turning to Masters, "but if you don't let us up and in a hurry—"

Masters held up his hand. "You have the choice of death by means of your own devilish contrivance or according to the usual processes of the law. Take your choice!"

A gasp escaped Crosby, but other than that and the heavy breathing of the two on the bed, no other sound broke the silence for a full minute. Then Masters arose and walked quietly to the window. "The thermometer says that it is now thirty degrees above zero."

A scream answered him. Mrs. Braithwaite had turned and was facing us. "I'll confess!" she cried, her voice quivering with terror. "Take me away quick! Move the bed!"

Masters quickly unfolded a paper he had been holding in his hand, uncapped a fountain pen, and then, releasing one of Mrs. Braithwaite's arms, held it over for her to sign. "This is a confession of the murders of three of the Braithwaite family and one servant," he said solemnly. Mrs. Braithwaite seized the pen and scratched her name rapidly on the paper.

"Curse you, Sal!" groaned the man beside her, "you are sending us to the gallows!"

"You did it! You did it!" sobbed the woman in answer.

"Will you sign it now?" queried Masters calmly, addressing Braithwaite.

"I suppose I might as well," the latter answered heavily, and complied. Masters handed the paper to Crosby Braithwaite, jerked out the bed from the outside wall, and then reaching up slightly above his head, pried out what seemed to be a solid piece of log from its place. Reaching his hand into the space made, he drew out a flask which contained a little white powder and metal scrapings, and then followed it with an ordinary teacup and a flask of yellow liquid which seemed to have been set above the flask in the teacup. "It hadn't started to freeze yet," commented Masters.

"What's that?" asked Crosby, eyeing the strange apparatus with horror.

"That's your 'October Blight,'" replied Masters grimly. "Nothing in the world but arsine!"

"What is arsine?" I asked, pardonably curious.

"The most deadly gas in the world. It's the ghastly stuff the Germans used at Armentières. Its formula is simply AsH3; one good whiff of it kills a man in from six hours to six days, depending on the size of the whiff and the man's constitution. There is no known antidote." Masters turned suddenly to his captive. "Where'd you get the idea?" he asked. "Was the Lefèvre Can Company really shipping through Sweden all of the time?"

"None of your business!" growled Braithwaite savagely through his set teeth.

"Oh, but it is my business!" retorted Masters. "I think that they'll bear investigating. When they hear that their sales- manager has been using arsine—yes, I think we can make them come through!"

He turned and stepped to the door-way of the room. "You just see that nothing happens that might aid these people to escape, Mr. Hal," he said to the young chap who had been sitting like one stupefied, gazing in wide-eyed horror at the apparatus Masters held carelessly in his hands. The detective indicated the little revolver which had belonged to Mrs. Braithwaite, and Hal seized this feverishly.

"Now you call up the station at Mangan Hills and have a wagon call for our guests, Crosby," directed Masters. Crosby hastened to comply, while Masters and I walked into the front of the house again.

"I guess I have you to thank, Bert," said Masters in a low tone. "To tell the truth I hadn't counted on Mrs. Braithwaite; I thought it was the job of her devil of a husband alone. I admire your aim with the ash-stand; if you had missed, I guess we both would be wearing wings now. Would you—" He colored a trifle, and I waited, astounded, for what might be coming. I had never seen Masters in the least embarrassed before.

"Would you care, once in a while to—to come along, when I have something extraordinary on hand? I know—if you care about compensation—"

"Compensation be damned!" I exclaimed with delight. "Nothing would suit me better!"

CROSBY BRAITHWAITE burst in just then, serious of face but with a set to his jaw that meant no mercy for his scheming relatives. "The devils!" he exclaimed in a low tone. "I'll have the wagon here in ten minutes. I hope they get the chair. Lord! That's too good for them!"

"Yes, it is," I concurred. "But tell me how you did it, Mr. Masters!" asked Crosby. "How on earth did you tumble to that hellish contrivance? I had LePape and Sensibaugh of the Pinkertons, and Jeremy Tunbull from England all on the case, and they all thought me crazy. How did you do it?"

Masters smiled slowly. "Luck—and the law of averages; that's all!" he said. "You see, about a year ago, the Government was investigating the Germans' source of supply in one peculiar type of ammunition—I guess it's no particular breach of confidence to say that the British prompted the investigation, and that the ammunition in question was a type of gas bomb which we all knew the Germans couldn't make themselves—the arsine bomb. The reason why they could not make it was because there isn't enough arsenic in all Germany to kill a regiment; it simply had to come from the mines over here. Well, we suspected a few of the shell-making companies in New York, but we never fastened it on them. I got pretty well acquainted with the heads of the concerns, however, so after I had been thinking of this case for a moment, the coincidence in names furnished me with a clue."

"But how—I don't understand how the law of averages came in," said Crosby slowly. "Well, I can't understand how LePape failed to get it," returned Masters, smiling. "If one person in a house dies peculiarly—has his face turn blue and seeks the outside air, and goes off in convulsions—natural causes might possibly get the blame; that is, of course, always supposing the natural cause is established. When two do it very similarly, it looks like more than nasty coincidence; in fact, I'd call the odds at least two to one against that probability. When four people in the same house die that way, however, I give up all ideas of coincidence. The odds against it mount into the hundreds to one.

"The only thing left to look for are the motive and the method employed. The motive was easy to find; your family possesses three or four millions, and that is enough ever to make the host of your poor relations quite comfortable.

"The method was harder. It was inconceivable that anyone could enter the house and administer any sort of poison at night; the fact that you had changed servants often eliminated them from consideration. That the deed had been done at night was fairly simple; all except Esther Stearns had sought the air, and she, being feeble, might easily have tried and failed to rise from bed, even. Your father and one brother had complained of feeling stuffy; your other brother felt the same symptoms come on later in the day.

"Now what kind of poison and what kind of apparatus could bring about such a result? The stuffy feelings pointed directly at gas. What kind of gas, then, would kill but not until some time after inhaling? There is practically only one answer—arsine. One good whiff of this horrible agent is fatal, and it does not kill until six hours, at least, after taking—that is, unless the person happens to be in a very weak condition. Sometimes it takes as long as six days. You see, that accounted for the game of golf, the automobile accident and the desire of your last brother to get out into the air when he was dancing.

"I remembered then that Tom Braithwaite, the regular August visitor you mentioned, had been one of the men in that can company case. Arsine! The connection was almost too obvious!

"Then only remained the apparatus used and the manner of its placing. Clockwork first occurred to me, but I dismissed it even before we arrived out here; clocks won't run from August to October without stopping.

"But why had it all happened in October? I could think of no reason at all unless the first frosts had something to do with it. That is why I sent for the weather reports. During each of the years of the murders, the fatal nights were the nights of the first severe frosts!"

"My God!" ejaculated Crosby. "Well, the rest was simple. I knew that the expansion of some fluid must have been the 'alarm clock' I was looking for, and so it was. The little beaker with sulphuric acid was balanced in the teacup in such a way that the contents, when the water in the cup froze, were splashed into the little flask. The flask contained just a very little pure arsenic and zinc shavings. This generated arsine gas for about five minutes—more than enough to kill fifty men. Because the gas is so heavy, it filtered out through tiny crevices and fell down to the bed below. The sleeper inhaled it without even knowing that he had been poisoned, and then the gas crept along the floor until it was diffused and gone. I knew that there must be a place for it in the outside wall above the bed; the rough log walls made that part of it very easy for your estimable uncle. There is one of those little cupboards of death in each of the three chambers.

"I had you invite these people out because I knew they would try to get rid of you—the only remaining obstacle—just as quickly as they could. Your cousin Hal is no criminal; he is just rather simple. Well, that's about all. I guess."

"And there comes the Mangan Hills Black Maria for the murderers, I believe," I said, motioning at an official wagon, swinging in on the gravel.

"May God have mercy on their souls!" said Crosby solemnly.

______________________

2: The Fiery Meteor

The Green Book Magazine, April 1918

DESPITE the unexpected promise Jigger Masters had made to me on the occasion of our visit to Braithwaite Grange, when we had made an end of the cloud of horror which hung over Crosby Braithwaite, I really never expected my tall friend actually to solicit my company on any of his adventures. Though I had been handy on that one occasion, I had no belief that as astute an individual as I knew him to be would have need of assistance often.

He had taken to dropping in once or twice a day, however, seemingly for no reason except that of company. His office was on the third floor of the same building in which I had my studio; so the visits really required no explanation.

He never talked much, but would walk in silently, nod and then stretch his gaunt frame on a wicker couch at one side of my canvas. Sometimes he smoked, holding a long, black molasses-cured stogie at such an acute angle upward that as it burned down unevenly it must have warmed the end of his long hooked nose. More often he merely crossed his hands back of his shock of black, unkempt hair and watched me as I worked.

I say that he watched me, for his eyes usually were fastened upon me, but I know that the canvas before me, the stool on which I sat and the white gown in which I painted were merely parts of an unobtrusive setting which seemed in some peculiar fashion to assist his mental processes. As time went on, I knew this to be a fact, for a baffling dullness that looked for all the world like stupidity would creep into his expression: at these times he never answered or noticed me when I spoke. I became able to tell when he would answer and when he would not; when his eyes glazed, I painted on, really as much alone as if Masters had not been in the room.

On this Thursday morning he did not sit down. "Busy, Hoffman?" he inquired tersely, stopping in the doorway.

"No, not at all!" I answered, dropping my brushes as quickly as if I had been caught doing something despicable, and whirling around toward my visitor. Truth to tell, something of the timbre of Masters' rumbling voice informed me that this was no ordinary visit. I have always loved excitement, and since my experience with the man on the arsine murder-case, Masters had stood as the gate-keeper of my only chance at adventure.

"Read the papers this morning?" he asked.

"Ye-e-s," I answered slowly, trying to think of the features.

"See about the burning of the Dorgan piers and the two munition-carriers Halifax and Johnnie Jones?"

"Yes, some kind of a body from the heavens&—a meteor or something&—struck them, didn't it?" I inquired, trying to seem intelligent on the basis of a very scant perusal of the news.

Masters nodded, and an amused look crept into his blue eyes. "Yes, that was Basil Bennett's idea. One of the watchmen&—we'll go to see him presently&—declared that the fiery thing was a 'shootin'-star,' so Bennett, with the palpable camouflage of a tactful elephant, directed the papers not to mention the possibility of the fire being of incendiary origin. That's why all the Sunday supplement stories appear on the first page to-day.

"Of course, so long as Bennett has started it in this fashion, we shall not contradict him publicly&—yet. For the life of me I can't see, though, why there should be the slightest deception in the story, except for such browsers as yourself, who merely seize a few tufts of news at the breakfast-table to digest at leisure."

"No, the criminals won't be fooled for an instant," I replied. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to take you with me on a little trip through the sky to see if we cannot locate the orbit of our heavenly visitor." Masters' tone was jocular, but his eyes were earnest.

"Whoopee!" I cried, and my dressing-gown was off in an instant. "Shall I carry an ash-stand?"

"No." He smiled. "That was a good weapon against Mrs. Braithwaite, but it has had its day. Have you a dependable revolver?"

"Just that old single-action cannon." I pointed to the wall above the fireplace where my forty-five hung in a holster. "There's nothing fancy about it, but I can hit an orange at thirty feet with it."

"Yes, with one bullet!" Masters' tone condemned my old friend of nights on the Montmartre to the discard. "Here, pocket this!" He drew a black thirty-eight automatic from his pocket and handed it to me.

Then, as soon as I had donned my jacket, Masters led the way to the street and made for the subway. "We'll interview one of the guards, first of all," he informed me. "You know, ever since the declaration of war, patrols of armed guards have been kept on the munitions-piers. Most of them are being held at the Tombs."

A short time later we were ushered into a cell in that somber edifice. A man, bandaged about the head and neck and with one arm in a sling, reclined upon the prison cot. The jailer introduced us as Government investigators and urged the prisoner to tell us all he could tell about the catastrophe. The man sat up.

"Did this fiery thing that burned you seem like a meteor from the skies?" inquired Masters without preamble.

The chap on the bed seemed slow to answer. So much of his face was swathed that it was difficult to guess his mental processes. "Gosh, I don't know!" he said finally. "I ain't never seen shootin'-stars close up, and you believe me, I don't want to see no more!"

"Well, can you tell us really just what occurred? Some people don't seem to believe it was from the sky at all, and we just want to make sure. By the way, Murphy, what nationality are you?"

The brows between the bandages scowled. "Kidding me, ain't you?" he retorted ironically.

"Well, I suspect you are of Irish extraction, of course," Masters replied. "But were you born in the country?"

"Yeh."

"Lived all your life here?"

"In little old New York."

"Any Liberty bonds?"

"One. I ain't got it all paid for yet."

"Well, I guess you're all right, Murphy. Tell us about the shooting-star."

The other leaned forward. "There ain't so much I can tell," he began, "but what there was of it was darned hot stuff for me! You see, Doolan, Shinner and me had the job of guardin' the shore end of Number Four Pier&—that was the one that the Johnnie Jones was tied to. We had two hours on and then four hours off, right along, twenty-four hours a day. Doolan had from twelve till two in the mornin', and I followed him. It was just about time for me to wake Shinner. I was thinkin' about walkin' over to the bunk-house that minute, when all of a sudden I hears a clank and a bang, kinda far off, like. I stops and turns my head, and right that second the whole sky seemed to catch fire, and gobs of fire began splashing down all around me."

"Could you see the meteor?" interrupted Masters eagerly.

"Could I see it?" mimicked the other, with scornful emphasis. "I couldn't see nothin' else! It was just like as if somebody had torn the sun loose and it was bearin' down, losin' hunks of liquid sun all the way! It was so bright and so danged hot that you couldn't look at it straight, though."

"Did it make any noise?"

"Noise? Gosh, it whistled like fifty steam injines, all shootin' out steam at one time!"

I glanced at Masters' face in time to see the peculiar dullness creeping into his eyes. Murphy saw this also, and interpreted it as meaning that the interview was about over. He started to recline again on the cot.

"Just a minute!" Masters checked the Irishman. "You say that this thing came on with a clank and a bang?" The expression of my friend had altered as quickly as it had changed previously.

"No-o," said our informant slowly. "I heard them first. I don't think there was any noise of that kind after, though I don't rightly know, 'cause there was so much whistling."

"I see. Did you see anything about the meteor that would explain the whistling?"

"Nope—that is—well, the darned thing seemed to be spinnin' like a great big top, and you know some of these here tops that kids play with whistle."

Masters sat up straight in his chair. "Spinning!" he exclaimed.

"Well, I don't know as I'd call it that," answered Murphy uneasily. "I wouldn't like to swear to that on the stand. It kinda looked that way to me, 'cause the fire it shot out seemed to curve, kinda, like water from a hose when you sweep the end around sudden-like."

Masters nodded, and was silent an instant. I would have liked to have him probe Murphy further in regard to this interesting phenomenon, but he seemed to take the spinning quite as a matter- of-fact characteristic of meteors.

"Did the thing seem to drop straight down from the sky?" he asked.

Murphy shook his head decidedly, seeming relieved that the subject was changed. "Nope!" he returned. "It was headin' northeast, or thereabouts, and the big funny thing I seen about it was that it didn't seem to be a darn bit in a hurry to come down! All shootin'-stars I ever seen before came down and went out quick."

"Yes? How long did it seem to stay in the air?"

"About five minutes&—still, I guess it wasn't that long," Murphy corrected himself quickly. "You see, it didn't come very near to me, but I got some of it just the same. It threw fire all over everything, and some of it splashed on me, and it seemed a long time. I don't just know how long. I wouldn't like to swear."

"Cheer up. You probably won't have to do any swearing," returned Masters to the cautious Celt. "Did you notice what the fire seemed like that fell on you?"

"Like hell-fire!" returned Murphy with conviction. "It stunk like brimstone, but it wasn't solid when it hit me. It was all liquid and burning like a busted gasoline tank."

"Flammenwerfer," I muttered, unconscious of the fact that I was voicing my thought aloud.

Masters fixed me with a scowl instantly. "All right, Murphy," he said, rising, and shaking hands with the watchman. "I guess that will be all for now. Thanks!"

WHEN we were on the way out, Masters seized my arm firmly. "Your guess may have something in it," he said sternly, "but you must not talk in your sleep any more!"

"I'm sorry," I said, "but I don't think that chap understands German, anyway."

Masters twisted his wide mouth into a grim smile. "No, I don't believe he does now, either. But you can count on it, that whoever is really mixed up in this shooting-star stuff does understand German!"

Then in silence we made our way down to the water-front where the big array of Dorgan piers had stood just two days previously. Fire engines and tugs still were pumping water on the smoking ruins, and a tangle of fire-hose made us keep close watch of our footing.

All the huge piles of munitions were consumed, the piers themselves surrendering to the fire-monster also, except the two ends of each, which vainly seemed to be trying to support the wasted and charred middles.

A little group of men in rubber boots was scurrying about among the ruins on Pier Number Four which we visited. Masters walked up and accosted one who seemed to be in charge. "Any luck?" he said.

"No, not a trace!" was the disgusted answer. "Say, do you know, I don't think we'll find much," he went on, leaning toward my friend. "I don't think there's much to find!"

"No?" Masters' tone contained a perfect inflection of mild surprise.

"No!" asserted the other darkly. "Oleson&—you know, he was watching over on Pier One&—says that the thing blew up, and never came down to the ground at all!"

Masters pursed his lips in a low whistle and turned in my direction. I thought for an instant he was going to wink at me, but instead I saw that he was scanning the outlines of the big warehouses on the water-front. "Well, I don't think you'll find much left if that's the case, Leders," he said, and walked back with me to the shore.

"What the deuce kind of a machine could that have been?" I asked in what must have been an awe-struck tone.

Masters shrugged his shoulders. "In this game one can judge the future only by the future," he said. "If criminals and conspirators stuck always to the beaten paths, there would be little use for me. For that reason I look forward always; I rely on the police and the regular detective bureaus to work the rule of thumb as far as it will work. When they give up, I am morally certain that there is some new factor in the situation."

"And are you often disappointed?"

"Rarely. The police net has become so efficient in our big cities that even most intelligent criminals fall into it. But now and then comes a real genius like the man back of this."

"Then you are positive that this is a war-plot?"

"Absolutely. Meteors don't throw off naphtha, sulphur and niter; nor do they spin like tops; nor do they stay in the air for any appreciable periods. Yes, I know a German is behind this; in fact, I can almost say without investigating further that I know what German!"

"Good heavens, how?"

"Well, this machine is a marvel of mechanical ingenuity; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that I even can describe it now. However, it accomplished its purpose thoroughly; it is a high development of Flammenwerfer, a German invention, and it was used in attacking Allied shipping and munitions destined for the Allies. Therefore it doubtless is German, or at least the work of a German sympathizer who is willing to risk his all to help the German cause. So far as I know there are just three Teutons in this country who have laboratories equipped well enough to turn out a machine of this description. Well, I do not believe we shall be long in the dark!"

WITH this he turned sharply to the right. We had been walking south along the water-front, and had got approximately fifty feet beyond Pier Number One. Masters led me between the walls of two huge warehouses and back into a lateral passage behind the outside building.

This passage was narrow, ill-smelling with the accumulated filth of a generation, and the wooden walls rising on each side of us were blank and totally without windows. Masters seemed most interested in the building just to the west.

We walked slowly along the alley, scrutinizing the bare walls, I did not know for what. Suddenly Masters gave an exclamation of satisfaction. "See up there?" he queried, pointing upward at what looked like only a crack running horizontally.

"Yes."

"Well, how can we get up?"

"How about the front door?"

Masters smiled grimly. "Are you well satisfied with your life- insurance?" he asked. "I don't believe in walking into any traps I can avoid. Guess I'll try that telephone-pole."

With that he cast aside his coat, hat and gloves and mounted a wooden pole which had been left standing, bare of wires, after the latter had been run underground. From this he managed to clamber to the broad, sloping roof, and stretched himself out prone upon the rotten shingles, with his face and arms dangling over the edge.

He beckoned me to climb the pole. When I had got to a point opposite the crack, he motioned for me to stop. "Get out your gun!" he whispered. "If there's anyone inside, get him first!"

A few curious apprehensions stirred within me; it seemed to me rather that Masters and I were the criminals, not the men we were seeking. It all seemed so much like housebreaking.

I had little time for philosophizing, though. Masters, once he saw that I was stationed, drew a jimmy from his hip pocket and began work on the crack. I noted now that the cracks were four in number. Two extended laterally, while two were perpendicular, outlining what might be a gigantic door some ten feet wide by six in height. The moment I realized this, most of my apprehensions fled, for a concealed door, thirty feet from the ground, and looking out only on the peak of the roof of the warehouse nearer to the water, could have no legitimate purpose.

THE big door swung open noiselessly. This surprised me, for I had expected a creaking or a straining of locks, or some other indication, but there was none. A black-shirted arm reached out of the semidarkness to catch the door, the owner doubtless thinking it had swung open by itself. As quickly the arm withdrew, and I saw a shadowy form within moving backward.

Almost instantly I fired, and the man dropped with a yell of pain.

Masters waited no longer. Crawling to the edge, he swung down on the door. The hinges strained under his weight, and I expected to see him pitch to the ground, but by some miracle they held. He scrambled in the wide opening, and then I could not see him.

Feeling that I could be of no more assistance to him there, I hastily descended the pole, and made my way around the warehouse to the door in front. Just as I arrived, a bareheaded man, heavy- set and with a pair of blue, popping eyes, burst through. I shot, but the bullet either missed or was deflected without damage, for he sprang straight in my direction, his arms wide for a grapple. I saw my chance; it scarcely could have been more simple. I met his rush with a straight-arm jab flush in his mouth. His head shot back like a tenpin hit by a bowling-ball, and he slipped to his knees, then slumped forward on his face, completely out.

I knew he would be there for several minutes, so I rushed in. "Masters!" I yelled. "Where are you?"

"Here!" came the deep voice from above-stairs. "Coming down!"

"You got that chap upstairs, all right! I wish it had been Lilienthal himself. It was only a helper."

"Maybe this one is the chap you are after," I said, indicating my unconscious foe. "He came running out."

"Oh!" Masters turned like a flash and made his way into the building again, this time hurrying into the big office on the ground floor. I followed, wondering what else there was to do.

The office was empty. Masters was baffled for a second; then, throwing aside a bookcase which seemed to be built in, he hurried into an inner room quite concealed.

A strong stench of burning powder smote our nostrils! The moment I stuck my head in, I saw Jigger bending down in one corner, striving frantically to extinguish a lighted fuse which had burned itself to within a fraction of an inch of a big tublike contrivance which I could not distinguish clearly in the smoky atmosphere.

HE succeeded, barely in time. In fact, he was not at all sure that the thing was not going to explode anyway, and so he hurried me out into the open air again and waited. "That was a narrower escape than I imagine you know," he said with a sigh of relief after several moments had elapsed. He bent down, clicked handcuffs on my victim and with my assistance dragged the man into the inner office. Then he sat down and phoned Basil Bennett.

The big chief of police arrived five minutes later with a squad of policemen.

"I suppose he'll get a chance to rest, at least until this war is over," I ventured, breaking the silence as the man was taken out to the wagon.

"The chair!" retorted Bennett laconically. "Two watchmen were burned to death in the fire!"

"And now, before you go, Chief, I want you to dismiss your men and come here an instant. There is a little apparatus here which will interest you&—and the chief of the ordnance board&—immensely, I think."

Bennett stepped forward, and at that moment Masters seized a wire rope at one corner of the room. Pulling on this, he made the whole room rise beneath our feet! The room was simply an elevator.

In a moment we had arrived at the floor above, and the light from the open door shone in more brightly; one wall, that on the side of the door, had been taken out entirely.

"Here it all is, Chief," said Masters, with just a touch of pride. "That's the machine that burned the piers and the two ships!"

"What on earth?" asked Bennett, puzzled. I felt like echoing his sentiments, for on a huge truck lay one of the queerest devices the mind of man ever conceived. In appearance it seemed to be a huge wheel, for it had a rim somewhat like a wagon-tire, probably of steel. In place of an ordinary hub was a metal tub from which the "spokes"—as I shall call them for want of a better descriptive term&—radiated. These spokes resembled huge thermos bottles, except that they too were of metal, and that they each possessed what appeared to be a nozzle or faucet, turned one side, and inclined down.

"Well, there's no wonder you are puzzled," said Masters, smiling. "I knew that the machine must be something like this, but I must admit that I cannot explain the mechanism satisfactorily myself as yet. In principle, of course, it is a gigantic apparatus for throwing liquid fire—the same weapon which the Germans use in assaulting trenches. But it is a great deal more than that; in fact, it is also an ingenious airplane and a bomb of terrific force!

"You see this center hub, or tub, or whatever you wish to call it? Well, I have no doubt that right this instant that hub contains forty or fifty pounds of trinitrotoluol, the deadliest and most destructive of all the explosives now in use in warfare. I'll explain what that is for in a moment.

"Each of these arms, radiating from the center, is a hollow container carrying a load of liquid fire under high pressure. On the bottom of each of these is a broad fin&—see, it is almost like the blade of an airplane propeller. The idea is that when this monster has all its tubes shooting out the burning, expanding gases and liquids from the nozzles, the high pressure exerted on the atmosphere makes the wheel revolve at enormous speed&—speed probably greater than that attained by any other human machine!

"The revolution of the wheel, which is a great deal like the pin-wheels we used to fire off on the nights of Fourth of July, exerts a tremendous lifting force on the air in which it travels, through the medium of these propellers, or fins, on the bottom of the thermos-bottle spokes. This keeps the machine from falling to the ground until all the liquid fire is exhausted."

"But what is the metal rim for?" I queried, reaching down my hand to touch it.

"Stop!" shouted Masters, just in time to prevent my hand from seizing it. "Lord! You almost gave me heart-failure!" he said, heaving a sigh of relief. "That rim is arranged with an electrical apparatus in some way so that when the whole mechanism is started whirling, centrifugal force releases it. It in turn then opens the cocks of the liquid-fire containers, and sets them alight by an electric spark in front of each of the nozzles."

"We would have been cooked in a short time!" I answered, starting back from the horrid thing.

"Yes, indeed!"

"But I don't understand just how this apparatus gets up into the air, and what that tub or bomb at the center is for," said Bennett.

"Look here!" directed Masters, turning back toward the wide door through which he had entered so unceremoniously. The floor immediately back of this door was inclined backward and down, and sides were added, making a gigantic skid. At the rear of this was a huge catapult with a number of heavy springs, and a lever for setting the latter.

"Lilienthal simply had that catapult set. Then he placed the big fire-wheel on this skid so it would be acted upon by the catapult. When all was ready, he let go the trigger. The wheel sailed out just over that roof in front of us. The moment it got over there, right above Pier One, the liquid fire caught, and from then on the wheel soared, shooting its contents over a diameter of about two hundred yards. The original impetus was sufficient to carry it across the four piers."

"And the tub-bomb?"

Masters smiled grimly. "That almost spelled Finis for Hoffman and myself. I knew that Lilienthal probably would be making another of the machines, so that when I found he was in the building—Hoffman knocked him down just as he was leaving—I knew that he would have some method of destroying his work rather than have it fall into the hands of the United States' authorities. As a matter of fact, I got here in just the nick of time! See this burned fuse?" We all nodded assent. "Well, in five seconds more it would have reached the trinitrotoluol, or whatever his explosive is, and all the buildings around here would have been blown up!

"Lilienthal was a clever one, all right! The real idea of the tub-bomb was to light this fuse just as the wheel was started. Then it would explode just about the time the liquid fire was exhausted, destroying the mechanism completely so that no one could be certain what it was like."

____________________________

3: The Vengeance Of The Wah Fu Tong

The Green Book Magazine, May 1918

SPUTTERING, choking and holding my nose, I made my way around the exhibition canvases and back to the little bay- window alcove where Jigger Masters had ensconced himself temporarily during the decorating of his own apartment.

"In the name of the great Joss!" I exclaimed, looking down contemptuously at the slimy mess he was mixing in a beaker. "This is the olfactory limit! I can stand for white mice, and the stench of your tobacco, but this odor couldn't be breathed by a physiological chemist!"

"I'll have it bottled in just a second," he replied, stirring in the last of some light greenish powder. "I must do so before the ether in the collodion evaporates." As he spoke to me, he removed the cork from a small flask, pouring in the semi-liquid mass and then recorking the bottle, to the infinite relief of my nose.

"All right!" I grumbled. "I hope no visitors arrive to look at my paintings, though. No living being could survive the atmosphere of this studio for long and still feel like purchasing. What is the horrid stuff—asafetida?"

Masters grinned evasively. "I know your studio rule," he answered. "You're not likely to have any buyers here early. The visitors who do come won't mind the smell."

It was the truth, and I knew it, but a certain something in his tone made me glance sharply at him. He leaned back in his swivel-chair, extending his thin, corded arms in a luxurious stretch.

"I think you're going to insult my visitors," I began, ready to stand upon my dignity. The twinkle in his eye made me stop, however. I had found by bitter experience that pretense never went far with Masters.

"Why, it seems to me," he said in a tone just light enough so that I felt sure he was leading up to something further and more serious, "that the only visitors of note we have had here during the past three days have been laundrymen! Either the Orientals must suddenly have taken up art, or—"

"Do you know," I interrupted, "that I have been thinking of painting King Chow Lee one of these days? He is one of the most picturesque Chinamen I ever have seen. He comes around often enough, too."

"Wasn't he here this morning?" inquired Jigger with interest. His black eyes caught mine sharply, in spite of the smile.

"Yes, and yesterday, and the day before—as you said when you started to insult me."

"It wasn't insult." Masters suddenly became serious. He arose from the chair, threw up the window-shade and beckoned to me. "Look out there on the curb in front of the Meadow Terrace apartments. What do you see?"

I obeyed, but the only human being in sight was a beggar, seated on the curb in utter dejection, with his crutches leaning on his shoulder. "That beggar is all I see," I answered slowly. Because I was well aware that Masters rarely called anything commonplace to my attention, I was reluctant to seem uninterested, but the beggar looked to me just like any one of a thousand to be seen on the streets of the city.

"Yes," answered Masters impatiently, "but have you ever seen a Chinese beggar before?"

"Thousands of them, in the Shantung Province of China," I returned. "They all look like that."

"Yes, but in New York?"

I reflected. "It seems that I can't remember any Chinese mendicants in this city," I answered at last, looking again from the window at the beggar. Just at that moment I saw the wretch raise his head and gaze steadfastly in our direction. "He seems to find something of interest here!" I exclaimed with a qualm of uneasiness.

"Precisely! There are no Chinese beggars in New York. I know that." Masters drew me from the window. "Therefore when one turns up, and acts as though he cared more about this alcove window than any coins he might pick up. I start wondering myself—particularly, when we suddenly are besieged by King Chow Lee. Let me see, didn't he use to come only once a week?"

I started. "Of course! And I told him just this morning that we wouldn't have anything for him until next Friday, but he only bowed and smiled. I didn't think he understood!"

Masters suddenly gripped my arm. "Exhibit C!" he whispered. "Watch the entrance of this building!" As I started to comply, leaning my head out of the front window, I saw Jigger remove one of the slippers he was wearing, then turn and hurl it with all his might at the outside door of the studio.

I heard a slight sound in the hallway, and then, as I craned my neck outward, a tall, slim Chinaman in a black silk coat and trousers burst out the door and made his way swiftly southward. Without a word, although every nerve was thrilling. I turned, strode to my chiffonier, removed my two automatics and laid them on the table before Masters. "Well, what's the program?" I queried.

He shook his head. "Nothing for you—yet."

"Don't you intend to do something?" I asked excitedly. "Why, they're after you!"

"Surely!" Masters retorted with a smile. "I have known it for twenty-four hours, and nothing could suit me better! It's a result of that unfortunate smuggling-case Bennett wished on me last month."

"But you succeeded in catching the smugglers, didn't you?"

Masters smiled wryly. "Yes, but Chief Bennett and I knew at the time that the opium-smuggling was only a symptom. As chief of police he is utterly unable to get at the real trouble, and he looks to me for aid in cleaning up one of the most dangerous organizations in the world!"

"What is that?" I gasped. "A Chinese crime-ring?"

"Worse than that! It is an international organization—the Wah Fu Tong, as it is called. Every one of those smugglers was a member. That is why I am receiving these little favors now."

"What is the purpose of this tong?"

Masters shrugged his shoulders expressively. "If I tried to catalogue the activities of those Chinese criminals, my enumeration would take an hour. A few of the most ordinary are murder, rape, kidnaping, arson, blackmail and thievery. The tong has been in existence for centuries. It has branches in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, besides an organization in China itself. Probably one fifth of all the Chinese in our large cities, however, are connected in some way with it, although it has never been proved that the tong exists for any lawbreaking purpose outside of the branch here in New York."

He walked to the door and opened it, intending to glance down the hallway. As he did so, a small sheet of yellow paper fell at his feet. It had been wedged in the crack above the doorknob.

Masters picked it up, scanned it hastily and then handed it to me, closing the door again. "That's their signature," he said gravely, indicating a scrawl on the paper which looked like nothing more to me than an inverted washbowl with many splashes of water trickling from its sides, done in black ink with one of their long, silky-haired writing-brushes. "During the past year over thirty white men in this city have received a slip like this. Usually it has been a threat in connection with some blackmailing scheme. However, except for two who wisely allowed themselves to be victimized, and one other who fled the State, every one of this thirty disappeared within a week of the time he received this notice!"

When actual physical danger presents itself, I am able to take care of myself at least as well as the next man, but this unintelligible threat made me shiver. "What does the character stand for?" I asked.

"That is what I propose to find out! I have just a suspicion now. But Hoffman, I am going to ask you to cooperate with me again in this matter, if you will."

"Anything in the world that lies in my power, Jigger!" I exclaimed impulsively. "I haven't had a subject worthy of the name since I painted Mrs. Voorhees—Mrs. Yaryan, I mean. The portrait of her and that picture of the drugged barkeeper sold the best of any of my work for the past three years. Whether you believe it or not, I get real inspiration as well as material and excitement out of my little escapades with you!"

Masters smiled deprecatingly. "Well, if it will make you known, in time, as the Franz Hals of the American underworld, it will be no more than your due. But I know you too thoroughly to imagine that."

"Let me in on our course of action," I interrupted uncomfortably. "Are you taking any measures of precaution?"

"None at all—that is, unless talking over the matter with you and Chief Bennett is a precaution; and of course it is, of a certain kind. I am taking none of the kind you mean, though."

"But aren't you afraid they'll shoot you or knock you on the head?"

"No indeed!" Masters shook his head decidedly. "Chinks don't work that way. They are probably the most finished criminals in the world when it comes to doing away with a man they hate. I simply shall disappear, just as did Kendall, Swanson and the rest of the twenty-seven of whom I spoke to you."

"You're going to put yourself in their power?" I asked, almost unable to believe my own ears.

Masters nodded gravely. "Frankly, it is a chance I do not like to take," he admitted, "but I can see no other way. Charley Sing has baffled all the cleverest men in the country; he can do it, for his subordinates are all Chinese. Every one is loyal to him, for every Chinaman knows the long arm of the tong."

"Who is Charley Sing?"

"The king of Chinatown, they call him. Really he is a moving force in the Wah Fu Tong, but no one ever has been able to prove it. I knew last month that I was dealing with him indirectly when I ran down those smugglers. Sing runs a big wholesale grocery down in Chinatown, supplying the chop-suey houses all over the city, but that is not his main business."

"Well, I can't see where I come in!" I broke in with a degree of impatience. "What do you expect me to do—sit around and twiddle my thumbs?"

"No." Masters appeared to consider. Then he sat down at the writing-table in the corner, jerked out a sheet of note-paper, scribbled a few words upon it and thrust it into an envelope. Sealing this, he thrust it into my hand. "If you want something to do right this moment, take this note to Basil Bennett. It is important!"

"Why don't you phone it to him?" I asked suspiciously.

"If you didn't have a party line in this studio, I should do so. Also I should go myself, if I did not trust you so fully."

I had no answer to this; so I hurried out, ran my little automobile from the garage and hastened to police headquarters.

BENNETT received me immediately, tore open the note, read it and then handed it over to me without comment.

"Bennett," it read, "I am sending Hoffman to you because the Chinks are around the house, and I don't want him killed uselessly. If your men are watching, it will be O.K. In case anything extraordinary turns up, I shall try to communicate with Hoffman. Let him read this, and tell him to scan any note from me carefully. —J.M."

The last word was underscored.

"That's what I call the double cross!" I exclaimed disgustedly. "Masters tells me that he is going to need me, and then he sends me away like a naughty boy!"

Bennett regarded me thoughtfully. "I wouldn't get angry, if I were you," he suggested. "You know J.M. well enough to realize that he never overlooks a bet. He didn't send you here because he didn't want you with him, but because he did! I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the minute you left, a dozen Chinamen invaded your studio. That was the way Masters had it figured. He knew that if you stayed, you would put up too realistic a fight, and probably get knocked on the head. As it is, he is planning to use you—just how, I don't know; but if I were in your shoes, I'd go back to the studio and paint, or read a book or something, until I heard from him."

I turned on my heel, thoroughly disgruntled, but he detained me. "Before you go back, let me find out how matters stand there. It might be the worst sort of anticlimax for you to start now," he said, reaching for his desk-phone. I waited while he called a number, and saw his heavy face light up with serious satisfaction.

"Snappy work!" he exclaimed, hanging up the receiver. "Less than ten minutes after you left, an ambulance drove up before your studio and a patient was carried down on a stretcher and taken away."

"Was—was he badly hurt?" I stammered, a great fear gripping me that I might never see Masters alive again.

"No, of course not," retorted Bennett quietly. "You don't know much about Chinese methods, do you?"

"No. I have traveled in China, but I never met any worse criminal types than the hold-up coolies of Shantung."

"These are the same. It isn't generally known, but of the two hundred thousand Chinese now in the United States, it is doubtful if there are as many as twenty from the other provinces. Only the Shantung natives have the initiative required to venture into foreign lands—or to become criminals.

"The method of these men with whom we are dealing is a strange mixture of Oriental cunning and tradition with Occidental aggressiveness. If a Chink here has it in for you, he doesn't knife or shoot you from a dark alley like a Black Hander; he captures you alive, takes you to some underground cavern under the streets and drowns you slowly in a vat, or boils you in oil, or—"

"And you allowed Masters, the most valuable man you have, to be taken by these fiends?" I asked hotly.

"Cool down, friend!" Bennett left his chair and placed one of his big hands on my shoulders. "Masters is taking a desperate chance, I'll admit. There is not another detective, either in this city or in any other, that I would ask to do what he is doing, although I am giving him every protection in my power. The game is worth the candle, however. That tong has been responsible for half a hundred murders, and the Lord only knows how many thousands of other crimes, during the eight years I have been in charge. It is just possible that we may never see Masters again, but I would be willing to wager odds upon him even against Charley Sing!"

"Well, so be it!" I answered, but my heart was in my boots. "I wish only I could be in it too."

"You will!" declared Bennett. "I have told two plain-clothes men to watch your studio. If you want them for anything, just run the front shade up and down a couple of times."

WITH that assurance I had to be content. I left the office, took my car and drove slowly back to the studio. Because I thought there might be a chance to use it later, I left it in the street instead of putting it back in the garage.

As I mounted the stairs, a pungent odor struck my nostrils. The nearer I got to my studio, the stronger it became, and I recognized it as the stench of the mixture Masters had been preparing earlier in the day. Inside the studio itself it was unbearable. I gasped for breath and had a hard time to control a feeling of nausea until I could fling the windows wide open.

There naturally occurred to me an explanation of this—that Masters had been in a struggle, and the flask, which I had seen him drop in his coat pocket, had been smashed. This theory went to pieces shortly, for in tidying up the few traces of conflict—a rumpled rug, an overturned chair and a broken rose-vase were all—I came upon the flask. It was lying under the edge of Masters' bed, empty but whole!

My speculations on this point were cut short, however, by the telephone. I wasted no time in answering, for my nerves were jumpy. The voice was Bennett's, but evidently it was a far different Bennett than the cool, self-confident man I had left only twenty minutes previously.

"It's up to you!" he yelled. "Those damn' Chinks gave my men the slip! I had Chinatown flooded with my men,—three hundred of them,—but that ambulance didn't go there!"

"Well, what can I do?" I asked, resentment welling up in me. "Wasn't something like this what you expected?"

Bennett disregarded my question. "He'll let you know, somehow, if it's humanly possible," he went on excitedly. "He promised that. When he does, you take every plain-clothes man in town and get Masters! Raid every joint in town if necessary!"

"But how will I get hold of them?" I queried, the blood starting anew through my veins at the prospect of real action.

"They'll get hold of you! I have a hundred on the way up there now. You just go ahead as if you were alone, if he sends a message."

I put up the receiver. A light knock had sounded upon the studio door.

Hastily cramming two loaded automatics into my coat pockets, I threw open the door. King Chow Lee stood there, bowing, scraping and smiling as usual.

"Laundree to-day?" he inquired.

"No, nothing," I answered, bitterly disappointed. I had hoped to see a different messenger. I started to close the door, but Lee, after glancing up and down the hall, slid inside the studio.

"Let' from big man!" he announced, fishing in his blouse with his fingers. Bowing and grinning, he handed over to me a folded sheet of the same paper on which the sinister threat to Masters had come. I unfolded the note.

It was from Masters undoubtedly, for it was written in his painful long-hand. The style, however, sounded alarmingly like King Chow Lee himself.

"Most Illustrious Hoffman," it said. "You must go most immediately with much honored messenger. I have fifty blessings, fancy, plain. Any old clothes good enough. Must decide to follow right now though. —Yours Inscrutably, J.M."

I read through the note rapidly, and had to smile at its queer phraseology. "Scan it carefully!" had been Masters' admonition. I did so, for I knew that something more than blessings awaited me at the other end of the road.

Hastily I read it backward, but that made no sense. Then I tried every other word, but that was even less satisfactory. Then I read every third word, and something like a message resulted. "Go with messenger. Fifty plainclothes must follow, though. —J.M." was what I got out of it. Masters evidently wanted to be sure that ample strength was in that rescue party!

"Allee right! I go with you," I said to the expectant Lee. He bowed and grinned more widely than ever. Then, adjusting the sack of laundry over his shoulder, he led the way down the hall and to the back stairs of the building. "Me got wagon out there!" he explained, pointing at the alley.

I FELT certain qualms at leaving so suddenly, and especially by the back entrance. What if those men of Bennett's had not yet arrived? "Darn it!" I exclaimed on the spur of the moment, "it's going to rain, and I left the windows open!" Without finding out whether King Chow Lee approved of my course of action or not, I ran back into the studio, slammed down the windows and then raised and lowered one of the shades furiously. Across the street a banana peddler suddenly left his fruit and came toward the building, to my infinite relief.

As I joined Lee again in the rear, I saw that the sun had come out again from under the clouds, and that his smile was a trifle less joyful than it had been; but what did I care? As I climbed into his rickety cart. I felt so confident that I deliberately threw Masters' crumpled note into an ash-can, just as a bent-over relic was about to empty that receptacle. If Lee saw, he made no sign, but as we turned the corner, I saw the ash-man staring after us.

King Chow Lee drove quickly, turned many corners and soon had me completely fuddled in regard to directions. Although I questioned him several times lightly in regard to our destination, he seemed to become very dense suddenly. To all my queries he returned the same answer, "Yes, we go!" accompanied by many noddings and grins.

THROUGH the crowded tenement district at the edge of Chinatown our dilapidated vehicle threaded its way. I kept my eyes open for signs of Bennett's men but saw none. I comforted myself with the thought that if I had been able to distinguish them from the motley of faces that pressed in on us from every side, the Chinese themselves would have had as little difficulty.

Suddenly Lee pulled up before a wooden shack that seemed to be the dirtiest of all. "Him here!" he said shortly, jumping out and beckoning with his crooked forefinger.

It looked villainous enough to me, but I scarcely could back out. Thrusting my hands deep into my pockets, where the automatics rested, I followed my guide. Throwing open the door, he disclosed two flights of stairs, one going up and one descending into pitch darkness. To my dismay he chose the lower flight.

I knew that if I followed him blindly I should not be my own master five seconds longer; so I jumped backward, threw open the door once more, and whistled shrilly between my fingers in the manner that Jigger had taught me.

At that moment a heavy body hit me in the back, and strong hands seized my throat. I wriggled free and shot twice, just as a rush of men burst through the open doorway. Italian peddlers, Greek peanut-vendors and street riff-raff they seemed, but I knew that under the tattered garments each of them wore a police badge, and I rejoiced.

"This way!" I shouted, running toward the dark stairway. As I did so, I stumbled over a body, which proved to be that of King Chow Lee. My bullets evidently had taken effect.

The crowd that streamed in seemed unending, and I was pressed down the flight of stairs by sheer weight of numbers. Lighting matches, I proceeded. It was nothing more nor less than a damp and dingy cellar, with a roof less than five feet from the earth beneath. Not a scrap of furniture was in the place, and the walls rose blankly on all sides.

"Where are we going?" asked a hoarse voice beside me.

"Hanged if I know!" I replied. "Light a torch or a lantern, and we'll try to find out!"

Several of the men produced electric flashlights, and with one of these I set to examining the walls. I felt sure that some means of entrance into a further room must exist, else Lee never would have led me here—unless, of course, he meant to murder me himself. This last possibility I dismissed, however, for Masters must have had a different idea in mind in asking me to bring fifty plain-clothes men.

"Step back a minute, and I'll find it for you if there's any door to be found!" It was the hoarse-voiced peddler again, but we all gladly gave over the assignment to him. Crouching on the soft earth floor, he went over it on his hands and knees. In a moment he veered at right angles, and then like a bloodhound on a scent, he made straight for one of the barest spots of all.

"Bring up an ax and chop here!" he commanded; but no sooner had the words left his lips than a shot blazed in the darkness, and he crumbled. Every revolver in the crowd came out at the same moment, and a volley went through the wall that would have dismayed a regiment.

I picked up our hoarse-voiced guide, but life was ebbing fast. "It's right there," he groaned, waving his hand feebly at the wall which now our axes were attacking. "The door to Chinatown. I saw the ground was worn down hard." He gulped, and my arms held a corpse.

I laid him down reverently and then ran to the wall, where a panel already had been broken in. One idea obsessed me: somewhere back in that smelly place that lay beyond, Masters was a captive.

"Come on, boys!" I cried. "Let's hit it together. It's only wood, and we can break through!"

A dozen or more drew back at my command, and then, like one of the old tandem football-formations, we smashed through the wall with our shoulders, falling heels-over-head as we did so, down a short flight of eight or ten stairs. Two wounded Chinamen lay there, but we wasted no time on them.

FIFTY feet farther on, in a tunnel-like passageway, three more of the Orientals stood. As we sprawled heels-over-head down the stairs, they opened fire. I saw one of my companions jump as a bullet struck him, and then the onrush of the others began. Seizing the small lantern that lighted the passage, they made for the little group of defenders. There was a cracking of revolvers.

I hurried up, but the three were down on the ground now, begging for mercy. The detectives knocked them over the head, and we went on. Just beyond, the tunnel widened into a room where two score mats lay on the floor. From this council-chamber, or whatever it was, the tunnel forked.

Several of our pigtailed foes came running in, just in time to meet the leaden hail from our revolvers. My companions charged up the left branch, from which these had come; but I, knowing that I could be of no more use to the others, chose the right fork. This was darker and more smelly than any of the passages so far. I drew my automatics, and holding them before me, I crept stealthily forward.

The rattle of revolver-fire grew fainter as I progressed, until it ceased entirely. I knew that this was because the intervening curves of the tunnels had a tendency to silence all sounds. I was alone!

This knowledge raised the gooseflesh on my forearms. Alone in the heart of underground Chinatown! It was more of a sensation than I had bargained for. I stopped and listened, pressing myself against one of the soft walls.

A faint wailing, like nothing so much as a baby crying, came to my ears. I tiptoed down the passage a little farther and listened again. The sound was nearer! I could distinguish now that there was something gruesome about that wailing. It was not that of an infant; it was the cry of a man in death-agony!

I pressed on. The pitch-dark passage jogged. Just as I came to the turn, a Chinaman bearing a lantern approached at a shuffling trot. I hid myself in a protecting niche in the earth, and when he got opposite, I sprang.

Throttling him so he could not cry out, I bore him to the ground. When I had him in my power fully, I picked up one of my revolvers and the lantern he had dropped. Covering him with the muzzle, I bade him rise. "Now lead me to that room where that man is crying!" I commanded.

The customary blank look was my reward. "I'll count three!" I gritted. "If you can't understand English, that's your own loss!" I crooked my finger about the trigger. "One—two—"

"Come on!" He spoke without a trace of an accent, and nodded his head down the passage in the direction he had come. I followed, holding my automatic within a foot of his back, but feeling, nevertheless, that I was enjoying my last five minutes of life here on earth.

My guide came to a stop before a blank wall. "He's in there!" he said unemotionally.

"He?" I echoed aghast, for the cries within were horrible beyond all imagination. "Who do you mean—J.M.?"

"Yes, J.M!" he retorted, grinning, and made a lunge under my weapon at my legs.

I had been waiting for just some such tactics, however, and when he jumped forward, I met his bowed head with a powerful kick from my heavy shoes. The Chinaman dropped over, completely out. Not wishing to take any chances, however, I rapped him once more with the butt of my revolver.

The cries from within froze my blood, but when I came to try the wall that lay between me and Masters, I wished that I had not been so precipitate in making sure of my guide. I was faced by a panel of wood just like that one which the plain-clothes men had smashed when we entered, but I had no ax or implement of any kind.

Luck favored me, however, for just as I was considering running back to the entrance, the whole panel started to swing ponderously outward, and a wizened Chinee shuffled out. I greeted him with a shot which sent him tumbling; and then, as the door- spring started to pull it closed again, I caught it and flung it open.

For a minute I was too busy shooting to look about much, for six Orientals threw themselves at me instanter. Five of them went down, but as I pulled the trigger for the sixth, it fell on an empty chamber, and the Oriental, a big fellow with forty more pounds of beef and muscle than I carried, closed with me.

LIKE a Chinese wrestler, he made a grab for my hair; as I dodged, he caught me by the back of the head, but I fought my way free. Then, in a twinkling of an eye, the memory of a trick I had seen worked at the gymnasium came to me.

I released the slight hold I had upon him and seized his arms just back of the elbows. Then, as quickly as if I had been struck down from behind, I fell on my back to the floor, thrusting my right foot, at the same moment, into the pit of my opponent's stomach. By exerting all my leg-strength I pulled him off his feet; and then with a strong kick I threw him head on against the wall. Before he could stagger up and clinch, I finished him with an uppercut to the jaw.

Then, winded and exhausted, I staggered to where Masters lay on the floor. To my intense astonishment,—I had not had a chance either to look at him or listen to his cries since I entered the chamber,—he was laughing!

"I guess I didn't make any mistake in relying on you, Bert!" he called. "But for the love of all that's holy, come here and release me!"

I obeyed, looking him over curiously, for he did indeed present a strange spectacle. Bound hand and foot, he also was nearly naked, and on his bare abdomen was inverted what looked like a tin wash-basin. On the top of this a small fire was burning. First I threw this to one side.

"Heavens!" I cried. "What fiendish thing is this?" Three dead rats lay under the basin, on Masters' naked abdomen. I threw them off also, and made all haste to unfasten the cords which bound him.

"It is a fiendish thing!" Masters answered as he arose and stretched his cramped muscles. "Do you know the idea of it?"

I shook my head, and my flesh crept at the thought of what my friend must have endured.

"Shantung torture," he said grimacing. "They keep this form for their very worst and most hated enemies—I was honored. They put the live rats under this basin and start the fire. The idea is to have the rats burrow through—"

"Enough!" I cried, overcome with horror. "But how did you manage to kill the rats? I thought I heard you shrieking as if you were in death-agony!"

"You heard me, all right! That was the only way I could convince my tormentors that they should not finish me immediately. A Chinaman would rather hear his foe scream than save his own life."

AT that moment a contingent of the plain-clothes force burst in upon us. Seeing Masters and myself unharmed, they shouted in triumph.

"We've cleaned them out!" yelled one enthusiast. "Oh, look here!" They dragged in the unconscious Chinaman whom I had knocked out after he had guided me to the chamber. "Charley Sing!"

"Is he dead?" I inquired with a strange sense of detachment from it all.

"No, he'll live to go to the chair!" The others picked up my victim, but Masters stopped them.

"Give me his coat and trousers before you take him away," he requested. "I don't want to go out on the street in this garb."

THE detective who seemed to be the leader did as Masters asked, throwing the garments on the floor and then leaving with the unconscious captive.

"Now tell me, before I burst with curiosity," I urged, "how you managed to kill those rats before they—they burrowed!"

Masters smiled. "Do you remember the awful stench in your studio this morning?"

I admitted that it was fresh in my memory.

"Well, I was mixing collodion—you know, that is an ether-solution that surgeons use with cotton as a covering for small wounds—with asafetida and a certain distillate of Indian hemp that is much like hashish in some of its properties. Look!"

To my astonishment he peeled off what looked a great deal like a square of skin, from his chest and abdomen.

"There's nothing like preparedness," he said, smiling again. "The rats hated to touch it, and when the fire drove them to nibbling it, the poison in it killed them almost immediately!"

__________________

4: The Red Billiard-Ball Mystery

The Green Book Magazine, June 1918

I RARELY invaded Jigger Masters' quarters. The chief reason for this was that my friend had invited me only once. I knew that he disliked company or even casual acquaintances, as a general rule, but because he had taken to dropping into my studio nearly every day, I felt that I could exempt myself from the restrictions to a certain degree.

I went because I really was becoming curious. As I said, Jigger had been dropping in to smoke a stogie with me while I painted. He would drape his long legs over the arms of one of my cane rockers and sit for an hour or so, hardly speaking a word. Usually I was busy, and I think that was why he came, for he seemed to concentrate better with another person in the room, provided that other person also was intent upon some task.

There is an urge to adventure in me, though, which lets me work only a certain period of days. Then I must go out and walk the sidewalks looking for diversion, even if it is but a mild flirtation with a little Italian girl at one of the fish-carts of Hester Street. I make romance out of little, and people pictures I am going to paint with the personalities I rub elbows with on these rambles, and so I am tolerant of my weakness.

The adventures I had enjoyed in Masters' company, however, had made these genre incidents tame in comparison. Just as long as Masters visited my studio regularly, I knew that there was nothing in the wind. But the moment I missed him, my imagination got busy, and I could see him gallivanting off on the most lurid cases, leaving me to bite the ends of my brushes in unsatiated excitement. I just had to visit him to ease my own mind.

I found him hunched over his hideous teakwood desk, with his bony elbows jammed down upon a chart of some kind. His person was in as bad disarray as his desk. The latter had a multitude of small reference-books piled about, some opened to a place, some opened and turned over, while others were just sprawled among the ash-trays, looking as if they had just fallen from the top of the unsteady heap at one corner.

Masters himself was clad in an atrocious flesh-colored fuzzy bathrobe, under which he wore the sloppy semi-attire often affected by bachelors during the hours they do not expect visitors. His wild shock of black hair was uncombed, and it had become so snarled that a pencil, poked into it, stood at an acute angle upward near his left ear.

"Glad to see you, Bert," he rumbled in a far-away tone, reaching up an aimless hand to mine without lifting his eyes. "Just the man I wanted to see! Sit down!" He leaned over and pulled up a straight-backed chair near to his own swivel seat. I obeyed silently, for I knew from the blankness of his expression that he had been intent upon some problem when I interrupted.

"There isn't any game of billiards that you play with just one ball, is there?" he queried, abandoning his concentration suddenly and wheeling about to face me.

I shook my head slowly, trying hard to think of the different pastimes I had played and seen on the green cloth. "No, I don't believe so," I answered. "The nearest to that I can name is golf- pool; that takes a cue-ball and one object-ball."

"No, this is played on a regulation billiard table. Say, Bert, if you saw a man with a cue and just one red ball, shooting earnestly away at the cushions with that one red ball, stopping his shots, trying them over, and sometimes helping them along when they do not go exactly as he desires—"

"I'd say he was practicing the use of English, or testing the cushions or just plain nutty," I broke in.

Masters nodded almost imperceptibly, but his wide mouth curved in a smile. "And if you saw him doing that same thing day after day? And if he never seemed to have any difficulty getting a 'gallery' to watch him? And if sometimes one of the 'gallery' stepped up and did the same thing for a few minutes?"

That surely was a puzzler. I hesitated. "Well, Jigger," I replied, "if I saw that myself, or some one else asked me that, I should simply recommend the services of an alienist for the crowd. However, I know that you think there must be something more back of it than just foolishness. What's the idea, anyway?"

Masters shrugged his hunched shoulders and then straightened slowly in his chair. "Well," he began quizzically, "are you looking for another chance at being knocked over the head?"

"You bet!" I don't know what it is about the man, but whenever I am in Masters' company, I would contract to attempt most anything. He inspires rashness, but confidence at the same time.

"Not cured, eh?" He smiled. "Well, that's just what this case is, a prime chance to get knocked over the head. There were many pleasant possibilities in the Tong case which you helped me on last, and this is at least as dangerous. If the Chinks had done for us, at least they would have thrown our bodies out in an alley somewhere; we would have been picked up and given decent burial. Here—well, it might be an old cistern or sewer, or most anything."

"What they do with me after I'm dead doesn't concern me!" I said shortly. "What we can do to them first is more to the point."

"Good old Bert!" exclaimed Masters. He pointed out of the window to the sidewalk below. "There comes a chap who can tell us a great deal about this case—more, possibly, than he will tell, though I don't know about that."

I followed his finger just in time to see a fat, squattily built man walk hurriedly to the doorway below.

"Giordini is his name," announced Masters as we were waiting for the elevator to bring him up. "He's a fruit-merchant—not a peddler, but a wholesale fruit-dealer. Basil Bennett sent him to me."

The visitor's appearance, even more than Masters' warnings, brought home to me the fact that the case was serious. The Italian appeared nearly numb with apprehension; yet he seemed sustained somehow by a desperate courage that was far from the blind rage I half expected to see in his face. He was built with unnecessary strength, a mission style of man whose very muscles hampered their own accomplishment. Jet-black hair, smoothed with some oil and parted so precisely that the white scalp showed through in startling comparison, emphasized the pallor of his countenance. The full lips were firm, however, and the black eyes did not waver, although they glanced questioningly from one to the other of us.

"Mr. J.M.? Which of you is he?" he asked without the trace of a Latin accent.

Masters bowed. "This is my friend and collaborator Mr. Hoffman," he said, indicating me. Giordini acknowledged the introduction with a curt nod.

"I know a little already of your case, Mr. Giordini," Masters continued, "and I have persuaded Mr. Hoffman to assist me in the investigation." I flushed a trifle at the implied compliment, but if I had been inclined to become egotistic, the doubtful glance of the Italian would have finished that.

"With you it has been a simple case of attempted blackmail, has it not?" inquired Masters.

"Yes, blackmail with a threat of my life attached," responded Giordini quietly. "Twenty thousand dollars is their price."

"And you take them seriously?"

I thought for an instant that the Italian was not going to answer at all, for Masters' half-bantering tone met a very frigid reception.

"I have good reason to know!" our visitor retorted finally, in a tone of restrained exasperation. "Do you remember Kalipoulos, the Greek?" Seeing Masters' nod of assent, Giordini continued: "He paid these men five thousand dollars first, then ten thousand the second time; the third time they asked for twenty thousand. He refused. They killed him with a bomb inside ten days!

"With me they have not been so gradual. Foolishly enough, I paid their first demand, five thousand dollars. Life is sweet—I have no other excuse. Now they ask twenty thousand. If I pay, it will then be fifty thousand, and finally they will kill me anyway. I shall go no further. I know they will get me, for I have seen six men refuse to obey; not one of the six is alive!"

"Is the band a part of the Black Hand organization?"

Giordini shook his head slowly. "No," he said.

"How do you know?" Masters' question was sharp, incisive.

The Italian sat motionless for fully ten seconds before answering. "I—I suppose there is no logical reason why I should not tell all I know," he admitted finally. "No secret is as dear as life. I know that this is not Black Hand work, because there is not, strictly speaking, any such thing a Black Hand in this country. Murderers and robbers sometimes use the signature to throw off the police, but there is no real Black Hand like in Sicily and Sardinia."

"Do you know that for over a year you have been watched as a suspect in the matter of this organization?"

The black eyebrows shot up, and Giordini licked his lips before answering. "Indeed!" he managed to articulate. He recovered composure speedily, though, and the ghost of a grim smile curved the corners of his mouth. "You learned very little, didn't you?" he asked.

Masters disregarded the question. "You are not on trial. Mr. Giordini. In fact, we are trying to save your life, and I think we can do it if you will be entirely frank with us."

Giordini nodded. "I am foolish," he said. "Once I was implicated in a criminal act with that same crowd, and I have tried to conceal it even when I knew the police knew it. I called for the money the first time from Kalipoulos; I could not help myself. Any Italian in the city would have done the same thing, for to disobey an order sent in one certain way means death—and quickly, too! I was ordered to do what I said. I was to pay the money over to a man I met in front of a certain café. I did just as I was told, and that is all I know."

"All but one thing," amended Masters. "How did you know that the order came from these men, and what do they call themselves?"

Giordini shrugged one shoulder. "I know no name," he said. "All I know is that when a man comes with a message, and that man carries in his coat pocket a red billiard-ball—well, he may be bluffing, but it is not worth while trying to find out!"

"A red billiard-ball!" exclaimed Masters, and his eyes met mine. "So that's the way they let themselves be known! Just one more thing, Mr. Giordini. Do these men always use bombs in killing their victims?"

"So far as I know. You see, a bomb is easily hidden in the clothes; it is a sure way, if you are experienced in throwing it, and it can be used in so many different ways."

"Yes, indeed, many different ways," agreed Masters. The queer dullness was creeping into his eyes. "I guess that will be all, Mr. Giordini," he said. "For the present, though, I guess you'd better keep away from your store.

"Give him a key to your studio, Bert," he commanded. "Stay up there until you hear from us."

I obeyed, and gave Giordini instructions as to how to enter the place from the rear. The Italian bowed to us both, and departed.

INSTANTLY Masters sprang to his feet. "Well, let's see how good a pool-room bum you can make yourself in five minutes!" he commanded. He threw open the door of a capacious closet at one corner of the room. Clothes of all descriptions hung therein. I selected a ragged old soft shirt and a suit of black serge which rain and years of wear had spotted with all the hues of the spectrum. Masters donned corduroy trousers and a flannel shirt, tying a bandanna about his neck. He slipped two revolvers into the pockets of his trousers and gave a pair of the weapons to me.

"I don't think we'll need them just yet," he said grimly, "but they'll be useful before this is over."

I clasped the butts fondly. "Well, bring on the targets; I'm ready!" I answered.

Masters opened the door without a word. I followed him down into the street. "Bennett has been watching this place for months now," he went on after we had walked ten minutes in silence. "If it were merely a case of getting a few of the murderers, he could have landed them at any time—at least he could have had a dozen or so suspects; but there is a brain at the head of all this, a man really worth capturing. He knows enough of the superstitious fears of the illiterate to give them an organization bound together by secrecy and a symbol. What the red ball means I confess I don't know yet."

We had come to the edge of the great Italian district. I knew it fairly well from my many rambles in search of material, but Masters confused my sense of direction by his many turnings up streets and alleys. Our steps slowed, and Masters assumed a swaggering slouch which I endeavored to imitate.

We turned in at a pitch-dark doorway in a ramshackle building which housed, on the ground floor, a saloon. Worn stairs led upward to a landing where a sickly gas-jet gave a weak, one-sided flame.

There was another door with the inscription: Pool, 21/2c a Cue. We entered. Eight or nine youths were sitting about, smoking and talking, but no one was using a table. The conversation ceased as if it had been gagged, and all of the men turned their eyes upon us.

Masters swaggered over to a table, pulled a cue from the rack and called for a set of balls in good street-Arab Italian. The man at the counter was in no hurry to give them to us; I felt his eyes burning into me. I knew that Masters, in spite of his blue eyes, might easily pass for an Italian, but I didn't look the part at all.

Finally we got our balls, however, and started playing a banging game of straight-rail billiards. Masters did not attempt to make many points, and I took his lead, purposely missing many easy shots—for the purpose of prolonging the game, I imagined.

AFTER fifteen minutes or so, the men seated about the other side of the room resumed their conversation, this time in subdued tones. They seemed to have lost interest in us, for now and then they glanced at the doorway. Masters was leading in points, thirty-five to thirty-three, when a new development occurred. A well-dressed Italian entered.

He scrutinized us carefully, and though I saw this out of the corner of my eye, I did not dare to look straight at him. I guess he sized us up as harmless, however, for he sidled over to the waiting group and sat down. Another consultation concerning us evidently took place, for there was some whispering, but Jigger and I kept methodically on with our game. Jigger won, and then we started another.

About this time I got a good look at the newcomer. He was rather tall for an Italian, and dressed in a velours hat and a fur-collared overcoat. His nose was hooked, and above it a stubby black mustache occupied his whole upper lip.

He arose finally, and walked to the billiard-table nearest the crowd. Then he took out of his pocket a red billiard-ball! This so excited me that I miscued my next shot completely, but Jigger went on methodically. He did not seem to be watching, but I saw the queer faraway expression coming into his eyes as the man with the hooked nose threw the red ball about the table. The latter did not use a cue, but simply slammed the ball against the cushions, caught it, and threw it again, time after time.

"Make a long run now!" Jigger whispered to me as I stepped up for my turn. I did my best, but that run of thirty-one was an example of the worst cheating I ever did; four times I missed by a narrow margin but went right on as if each miss had been a carom.

The thirty-one put me out, and Jigger, with a curse, threw down his cue upon the table. He "crabbed" volubly about the luck which had won the game for me, and as we went up to pay the check, I saw that he really was excited, though not over the billiards.

THE moment we emerged on the street, Jigger turned sharply to one side. "Do two things just as quick as you can!" he rasped. "Call Basil Bennett and have him send a squad just as quick as he can. I can't tell him just where, but tell him to find me somewhere in the Italian district. Then take a taxi and go to Giordini. Get him to give you five thousand dollars, or some sum like that. Give him a receipt for it, and tell him he can have it back. No, wait a minute! I'd better do that. I'll have Bennett find you. You watch for this hook-nosed chap. When he comes out, follow him, and don't get caught! If you wait around on the street beside the house he goes into, Bennett will take charge."

"But the crowd up there?" I cried. "What will they be doing?"

"You just leave them to me!" retorted Masters. "You watch old hook nose!" With that he was off, striding at a rapid rate.

DESPITE the adventure involved, I had no real hankering for the assignment, for it seemed as if I were more or less out of it. The real action would come when the pool-room gang was corralled; I felt sure of it.

As time went on I grew nervous. The well-dressed Italian had not appeared, and I felt that I was becoming quite an object of interest, sauntering up and down a sidewalk crammed with foreigners. I purchased a bag of pistachio nuts and ate these.

Twenty minutes more passed before my quarry appeared. Then he strode down into the street, seemingly in a great hurry. He made his way up the sidewalk, looking to neither the right nor the left. I had to hurry also in order to keep him in sight, for he dodged in and out among the other pedestrians and up alleys and byways that reeked of Ghetto filth.

Suddenly he jumped into a doorway, and I stopped, at a loss whether to follow him or just to watch the house as Jigger had told me. The latter course did not seem extremely profitable, for the house was a wooden tenement, probably honeycombed with corridors leading to entrances far beyond my sight.

The matter was decided for me, however. Before even I had time to turn around, two men hit me from behind and threw rather than pushed me through the same doorway that Hook-nose had used. Something heavy descended on my head, and then ensued a period of semi-consciousness in which I felt dimly that I was being carried up a long flight of stairs.

I do not believe it could have been more than five or ten minutes before I opened my eyes, but when I did, I found myself in a different world, a world that no one could dream existed from the unpromising exterior of the tenement. Rich rugs covered polished hardwood floors: divans of wicker held velours pillows which I envied; and there were soft floor- and table-lamps of the same shade of old rose as the rugs and the velours. Tobacco- smoke, rich as incense and too pungent for the eyes, filled the air.

My first distinct sensation was of this smarting. I opened my eyes, to look squarely into the face of the hook-nosed chap I had followed. The moment he saw I was awake, he gave a sharp order in Italian, and two men lifted me, propping me against the door. They crossed my wrists, binding them together with oiled rope, and fastening the knot to a bracket on the door which seemed set for just such a purpose.

All was quick and businesslike. When the two had finished, they departed immediately, leaving me to face my quarry, who now had become my captor.

"Well, what did you want of me?" Hook-nose seated himself on the edge of a divan near to me as he spoke. His voice was not unpleasant, but it rang with a steely quality that I did not like just then.

I was too slow in answering to suit him. "Answer!" he growled abruptly, frowning. "Who was with you, and what did you want?"

"I was alone," I said, uncomfortably conscious that it would be hard to lie convincingly to this man. "I am a painter, Albert Hoffman by name, with a studio—"

"Never mind that!" my auditor exclaimed. "I just want to know before I kill you, why you followed me."

"But I am trying to tell you," I persisted. "I was walking along the street looking for a male model, when I saw you disappear into that pool-room. I waited for you and then followed you, but you went so fast that I—"

"Lies! All lies!" Hook-nose interrupted, motioning me to stop. "You were up in that pool-room when I got there! I saw you. What were you doing there?"

I was silent, for when it comes to inventing a plausible story under pressure, I am worse than useless.

Hook-nose drew his revolver. "I shall probably kill you anyway," he said indifferently, "but if in five minutes you have not made up your mind to tell me all about that tall companion of yours—well, you'll not have to think any longer." He took out a thick-cased gold watch and snapped it open.

FOR the first minute I strained vainly at my wrist bonds. The oiled rope was sound, however, and I could not make it give half an inch.

"One minute!" announced Hook-nose.

A sudden idea came to me. My legs were not tied. During the time I had spent in Paris I had picked up a little of savate, and had learned not to despise the shoe as a weapon in rough-and-tumble fighting. I measured the distance away Hook-nose's face was as he looked at his watch, and then strained at my bonds to see if I could gain a little in a horizontal direction. To my dismay I saw that my enemy was just too far away! If I tried I should certainly miss him, and then all would be over.

Seconds were precious. I could not seem to think. In despair I allowed myself to sink forward, bowing my head and bending my knees. It was a poor imitation of a fainting-spell, but it had just the result I desired. Hook-nose saw me wavering, and leaned forward about five inches to see better whether or not I was shamming. That very instant I raised my foot in a swift upward kick. My shoe-toe caught Hook-nose an inch or so back of the point of the jaw, and the bones crunched like sticks of rotten wood. He dropped back in a lump upon the divan, and I knew he never would trouble me again.

That was but half the problem, however. I still was tied tightly, and at least two more of the gang were near at hand, probably in the next room. How could I release myself?

After ten minutes of struggling I found the solution. The tips of the fingers of my right hand would just reach the opening of my left hip pocket. This was the pocket in which I usually carried my matches and my handkerchief. The handkerchief, of course, was useless—but the matches!

Madly I pulled and worked at the lining of the pocket with my finger-tips, and at last I grasped the box of safety matches! Cold sweat started on my forehead once, for I nearly dropped the box, trying to open it. I succeeded, however, and lighted a match. It then was but the work of a few moments to burn through the rope which held me.

I jumped to the side of Hook-nose and searched him rapidly. An automatic was my reward. And I found it not an instant too soon, either, for while I still was stooping over, the door, burst open and two of the chaps I had seen in the pool-room rushed at me.

I wheeled and let the first one have it from the automatic, but he hit me head on nevertheless, falling to the floor, but at the same time covering up the revolver until the second had grappled with me.

He pushed me back over the body of Hook-nose until in desperation I gave way completely, rolling to the floor. He came with me, but before he could seize my trigger-hand again, I had finished him.

Not knowing whether or not more were coming, I leaped up and latched the door. Then I listened, but there was not a sound in the whole building, so far as I could tell.

I walked to a telephone and called up the station. "Can you get hold of Basil Bennett right away?" I demanded. "This is J.M. talking!" I was in no mood to quibble about exact truths just then.

"Yes!" came the excited answer. "He's been looking for you for half an hour. Where are you?"

"I—I—" I stopped; for the first time I realized that I had not the faintest idea where to tell Bennett to come. "I don't— Oh, yes!" I shouted "Tell him to come to telephone number 48920-J. He'll know where that is!"

Then came a terrible period of waiting, not over ten minutes, I suppose, but intolerable to me because I got to thinking of what had happened to Jigger Masters in the intervening time. He had had a harder assignment even than mine—at least I know he thought so when he sent me after Hook-nose.

I passed a few minutes looking over the men I had overcome. I had little or no sympathy for them; if I had not got them, they would have killed me. However, one of my last assailants was not dead, the chap who had been first in the rush through the door. He was moaning in pain, so I did what little I could to stanch the blood which was pouring from his wound and make him easy. The bullet had plowed through his chest, and I knew he had not long to live—so I did not make any attempt to bring him to consciousness.

At that moment I heard a familiar whistle outside, and glancing from the window, I saw the flash of blue uniforms. At the same time came the tramp of heavy feet in the corridor outside.

"This way, Bennett!" I yelled, throwing open the door.

A squad of policemen entered. I pointed out the bodies of the three men to a sergeant, and then ran out to loot for Chief Bennett himself. I found him just entering the house.

"Jigger Masters?" I said, my lips barely moving.

"Why, no! Isn't he here? I thought that the phone-call—"

I WAITED to hear no more. I raced back to the room in which I had left the squad of twenty, and then without even waiting for Bennett's permission, I ordered them all to follow me. "J.M. is in trouble!" I cried. "Come with me!"

A dozen or so of them really did come, and the whole squad of us set forth on a dog-trot. The events of the past half-hour had so fogged my brain that I was by no means sure of my whereabouts. I dodged up alleys and down streets, the police at my heels, seeking always for some familiar landmark to guide me back to the pool-room.

Through sheer luck, I guess, more than sense, I headed straight for it. Without wasting a second in reconnoitering, I sent two of the police to the back of the building, bade two remain in front and led the rest up the narrow flight of stairs, past the one-sided gas-jet.

When we walked into the pool-room, a strange sight met my eyes. Huddled about the same billiard-table was most of the group I had seen there previously. The part that made my hair stand right straight on end was the fact that in the center, watched by a score of hostile eyes, Jigger Masters was performing with a red billiard-ball!

The police all drew their weapons, and a resounding order to surrender was bellowed forth; but the gang had other ideas. Masters alone raised his hands and retreated to the wall. Every other man dodged for the shelter of a pool- or billiard-table, and then ensued one of the nastiest fights I ever took part in.

I got two of the men before my automatic refused to work, and then, just as I was trying hastily to reload, a stray bullet nipped me just above the knee.

It was all over a second or two later, however. The police had only two live captives, and both of these were wounded. Three policemen lay on the floor, while several others nursed slight wounds like my own. I joined Jigger Masters, who had sat down grimly and disgustedly in one of the wall chairs.

"Well, you got here just about in time again, Bert," he said in greeting. "It would have served me jolly well right if you'd never come, though. I've messed up this case worse than Bennett himself could have done!"

"Why, what's wrong?" I asked innocently. "Haven't you got the whole bunch here?"

"Here!" he echoed ironically. "Yes, I feel very happy about that! Any hick policeman could have done that much any time within the last six months! The chap I was after, though, was that bird with the hooked nose, Costello! That was the first time I ever saw him here; usually he sends a messenger instead of coming himself. And now!" His deep voice held worlds of self- condemnation.

I could not keep the secret any longer; so I related my part of the action, even to the fight in the tenement. When I told him that Costello was dead, he rose up solemnly and took off his hat. "Bert," he said, "you're a gem! You have saved me from— Oh, thunder, I wish I knew some way so that you would get all the credit for this, old man!"

"Never mind that!" I said brusquely, for if there is anything in the world I would hate to be, it is a newspaper hero. "Just find me a bandage to put on this little cut of mine, and then tell me all about your part of it."

Masters did so, cutting up a handkerchief and tying it about the tear. Then he helped me down to a taxi.

On the way back to his apartment I had time to question him.

"Oh, my part was easy," he said. "I foozled it badly, though. I intended that Basil Bennett should find you and surround the house or tenement that was used for headquarters for the gang; and then about the time that part of it was concluded, I would have the rest of the gang walk right into the trap. Bennett tried to carry out his part, but was prevented by your disappearance. I intended to get Giordini to carry up a sum of money to that gang in the poolroom—"

"Why, for heaven's sake?" I queried, for this part I had been supposed to perform at first had seemed cryptic to me.

"So that I could make a clean roundup of the whole gang at once," replied Masters. "At least, that was my idea. I thought that if the money was paid to those men, they would go in a body to Costello, in order each to get his share. It didn't work, though, because Giordini absolutely refused to take the chance involved."

"Tell me what all that red-ball foolishness was about, then," I interrupted. "What were you doing when I found you—I mean when the police broke in?"

"I was just telling them a few lies," responded my friend sheepishly. "I was telling them, by means of the red ball, that Giordini had paid in his twenty thousand, and that if everybody wanted his share, he should go right up and see Costello."

"Telling them by means of the red ball?" I echoed.

"Oh, yes! I forgot that you didn't know. All that shooting at the cushions, and throwing the ball about, was a cipher! The men were talking by means of a cushion alphabet!"

I waited in wonderment, for it was far from clear to me yet.

"You see," continued Masters, "while you were beating me at billiards, I figured out the cipher. Giordini's statement that all messages were accompanied by a red billiard-ball gave me the clue. I thought immediately of a message when I saw them throwing it about. I managed to solve it while you were making your phony run of thirty-one points.

"It really was simple—or I guess it became simple after a little practice. The left-side cushion was numbered one, the far end-rail two and the right-side cushion three, while the near end-rail counted four. The letters of the alphabet were numbered from one to twenty-six. All you had to do was to add the numbers of the cushions hit in any one shot, take that letter and then continue shooting till you had finished the message."

"Good land!" I exclaimed. "That sounds intricate to me!"

"It is, when you try it," Masters admitted. "I would have been successful except I made too many mistakes. I was too confident; those chaps—probably because of years doing it—reeled off the shots so easily that I thought I could do it right away. Well, I guess it was lucky you came over to my apartment this morning, Bert! I wouldn't have lasted more than ten minutes longer!"

______________________________

5: The Miltonvale Nemesis

The Green Book Magazine, July 1918

IT started three months ago. Five weeks ago Basil Bennett, Dr. Morgan Lasher—he is health commissioner—and J. Kerrett O'Sann, the general manager of the Miltonvale Steel Company, called for Masters. I went with him, for it sounded interesting. Jigger Masters was still at it last week, but I had given up all hope, and returned to my studio, knowing that if any real developments occurred, Masters would be only too glad to let me in.

I would never be admitting any part in the affair at all if I had not seen the horrifying conclusion—but that is not this part of the story. The first interview Masters and I had with O'Sann was, as I have said, in the company of Dr. Lasher and the Chief of Police. It had been Bennett who had insisted upon my friend. O'Sann naturally knew nothing of him, and Dr. Lasher, a flashy, self-sufficient bureaucrat in his own small way, had been irritated beyond measure at the summoning of a mere detective to wrestle with what he termed “a problem in the physician's province.” We met in one of Bennett's private offices.

The three were waiting for us. Basil Bennett, whom we knew of old, was heavily quiet as usual. One capable fist, loosely clenched, lay upon a file of papers before him. He bowed impressively without rising when we entered.

When he introduced us to O'Sann, the latter got up and proffered his hand. Following Masters, I had an instant's glimpse of two searching, deep-set eyes, as cold in color as the Miltonvale steel itself, yet not unkindly—just appraising, always judging and appraising men. Lasher did not rise, but nodded his acknowledgments jerkily.

Bennett plunged directly into the matter.

"This is a queer one, 'J.M.,'—;" he began, addressing Masters by the initials he always used. Bennett glanced apologetically toward the uncompromising face of Dr. Lasher. "The Doctor, here, thinks it isn't in your field."

"I should say not," affirmed Lasher snappily. I watched his face as he uttered these words, and the curling of his thin upper lip reminded me strongly of the face of a snarling, snippy fox terrier who is jealous of attention shown another dog.

"But as I said, it's a queer one!" repeated Bennett with emphasis, ignoring Lasher now. "Mr. O'Sann has agreed to have you look into the matter for him, and I think it would be a mighty good hunch. If you think we are making a bugaboo out of a series of unfortunate coincidences, why—"

Masters had been sitting with arms folded, his lank body erect in the straight-backed chair. "Tell me all about it," he suggested, drawing his chair nearer Bennett's desk. The latter nodded to O'Sann.

THE eyes had taken on a faint trace of amusement while watching Lasher, but now they narrowed and became cold again. "As Chief Bennett says, this may be nothing but misfortune," said O'Sann, and I was surprised mightily to hear the pleasant, musical inflection of his voice, "but here are the facts as we know them: The general offices of the Miltonvale Steel Company, as you doubtless know, occupy the first three floors of the Hercules Building. Over three hundred male employees, and at least as many girls, are to be found in these offices."

"I know the general plan of the offices," remarked Masters quietly.

O'Sann nodded quick approval. "I shall not dwell upon that phase, then," he said. "I do not know whether you have noticed anything in the papers recently—" It was the efficient office-manager talking, striving to eliminate all familiar detail.

"I believe I noticed, a few weeks ago, that your employees were having trouble with their eyes, and that Dr. Coulton, the optical and lighting specialist, had been called in to attempt a readjustment of the artificial lighting. Was that it?" Masters had fallen into a tone of voice similar, oddly enough, to that of O'Sann. It was queer indeed to be able to find any similarity, for Masters usually rumbled and growled as he talked, while O'Sann was an expert at soothing the nerves. I guessed the reason: Masters had found a man who knew how to help and not be in the way, and Masters was trying to lead him on.

"Part of it only!" O'Sann flashed a quizzical glance across at Dr. Lasher, who at that moment was examining disgustedly the tip of his patent-leather shoe. "I don't want you to think that—" He broke off suddenly, evidently considering his half-phrased sentence a waste of time. "The size of it is that we have lost irrevocably sixteen of our most dependable employees through a mysterious affliction— I hesitate to call it an illness, yet that is probably what it is; and now, just within the past three days, four more have dropped out! Many more are showing signs of uneasiness for a still different reason—they think that the building is unhealthy. I wouldn't be afraid to predict a general exodus if this thing keeps up another week or two."

"What is the ailment—eye-trouble?" queried Masters.

"Yes, and more than that! These men who have dropped out have gone blind, most of them, and over half have had strokes of paralysis! Two have died, and one is now at a private asylum, pronounced incurably insane!"

O'Sann told the terrible news quietly, but when he finished speaking, there was not a sound of any kind in the room for a full minute, except a light scraping of Lasher's shoes on the floor.

"That is almost unbelievable!" answered Masters at last. "You say that twenty in all—"

The immense seriousness of the condition had gripped him, and I saw the last trace of careless ease vanish from his attitude.

"Twenty!" confirmed O'Sann. "There may be more to-day. Wait!" He reached over, seized Bennett's desk-phone and secured a connection with his office.

"One more!" he said grimly. "A department-head by the name of Matthews—handles the requisitions—is unable to work. His wife sent word that his eyes have gone bad, and that he has a chilling of his limbs which hints strongly at paralysis, considering—"

"I have no desire for particulars," broke in Masters, nodding recognition of the symptoms stated; "but would you mind telling us whether the Miltonvale Company is—is supplying the United States Government under any war-contracts?"

O'Sann bowed somberly. "It must be considered confidential, gentlemen, but we are devoting nearly all our resources at present to making plates for the steel cargo-carriers. But," he added quickly, "in taking such a contract we were most careful! Only a small minority of employees know what the plates are for—of course, I suppose a good many can guess, but we combed through the record of every man on our pay-rolls before the work was started and have employed plain-clothes men in the guise of workers to keep strict watch over all the employees who have been taken on since the declaration of war."

Masters' expression was a curious combination of polite, absent-minded agreement—the sort of acquiescence I knew meant nothing more nor less than pigeonholing the matter—with the familiar blurry, dull look which implied concentration.

Lasher rose to his feet disdainfully. "When you get over this nonsense of looking for a criminal, I shall be glad to cooperate again. It's nothing but a series of unfortunate coincidences." He took up his coat, hat and stick and left abruptly.

"Do you think so?" asked Bennett as he saw a grim smile cross Masters' face.

Masters turned slowly to Bennett. "Well, I take it so seriously," he said with quiet emphasis, "that I am going to put a revolver in each of my coat pockets, and then apply for that vacant job in the requisition department."

THE upshot of the interview was that Masters did go to work for the Miltonvale Company. He took the desk of the unfortunate who had dropped out the day Masters was called. Because I was used to the swift methods that always had distinguished Masters in previous cases, I asked for and secured a place as ledger-clerk a few desks from my friend. Before I went to college, I had done routine work of a similar character, and so my position was not embarrassing. Masters made little pretense of really filling his job, but there was not much need; several capable subordinates shouldered the burden. The first day Masters spent most of his time familiarizing himself with the building. After the offices had cleared in the evening, Masters and O'Sann seated themselves at the former's desk. "Any more to-day?" asked Masters. I lingered near by.

O'Sann shook his head. "No. Any developments?"

Masters threw open a drawer and pulled out a roll of tracing paper. "Here," he said, indicating the drawings done in pencil on the three sheets he separated, "are the floor- and desk-plans of the Miltonvale offices. I have marked in red ink the position of the desk of each man who has been smitten by this malady."

O'Sann bent down, carefully examining the ink-checks. "I can't quite see any connection," he said slowly, as if reluctant to admit stupidity.

Masters shook his head somberly. "There is no apparent connection," he answered. "I had hoped to find that this terrible attack had been directed against some single department, or some coterie of men, but that is not the case. See here,"—and his finger ran to one of the red marks of the third-floor plan: "This chap is a fifteen-dollar clerk. The red check farther on here is one of your consulting engineers."

"Loren Hammer—six thousand a year," supplemented O'Sann tersely. He rose to his feet, anxious for a chance at action.

"The lad worked on cost-accounting; the engineer had a semi- private office and was one of your bigger men. Surely these two could not have incurred the enmity of the same person! Look here and here!" Masters touched other checks lightly. "Here is a responsible employee, getting a good salary."

"Brooks—hundred a week," assented O'Sann expectantly.

"And here is an office-boy!" Masters stopped, and I noticed that a far-away, dull expression crept for an instant into his blue eyes. This meant concentrated thought.

"Yes—what do you make of it?" O'Sann's voice was still quiet, but a little of the pleasantness had vanished. As he stood there, bent forward a little over the chart, I shivered at the thought of how fatally he would strike, once he had located the criminal. His eyes were thin slits of metal in the electric light, and though I watched him a full minute, I did not see him blink.

"Mr. O'Sann!" Masters drew a deep breath and faced the business man squarely. "You are an intelligent man, and I can afford to be perfectly frank with you. Your company is face to face with either a condition of affairs that will kill you all in the course of time, or else with a criminal genius who has this same object! I can say truly that this is the first time in my career that I have spent ten hours on a case without being able to state positively whether or not it is a criminal I am seeking."

O'Sann waited, his lips compressed. I saw that he was disappointed but still very much game.

"I can make you a promise," continued Masters, his voice dropping to a deep growl of determination; "and that is that I shall make you, sooner or later, a complete report, covering every phase of the situation, but I cannot promise how long it will take!"

"Heavens!" cried O'Sann. "How long?"

"A week, a month… I cannot promise," returned Masters grimly.

"But we'll all be dead!"

"I shall do my work as quickly as possible."

"But is there no way to find out now? Why, at the rate my men are dropping out—" O'Sann's lips clipped shut. "We must do something immediately!" he announced. "You say that you are not sure that we are searching for a criminal. Very well; then it must be a condition. We move our offices tomorrow!"

Masters shook his head. "No," he said, "that would be of little use. I have not told you positively that this is the work of a man or band of men, but personally I have not the slightest doubt—"

"You just said—" began O'Sann doubtfully.

"That I cannot state positively that this is a criminal's work. That is true, but by to-morrow morning I shall be able to tell you. There is just one possibility in the realm of science."

"What is that?" O'Sann asked breathlessly.

"Radium! We must find out whether there is or has been any of that valuable element in the building. Do you know of any?"

O'Sann made a curt gesture of negation. "No, this company doesn't use it, to the best of my knowledge. How can you make sure?"

"Electric brush," answered Masters laconically. "I'll get one to-night, and we'll go over everything on these three floors. If there's radium here, it will glow in the dark. If we find any, your condition will be in hand, and I imagine a solution of the whole problem will develop easily. If not—well, we will have to catch our criminal!"

THAT night I stayed through the tedious work. Beginning with the top floor, Masters went over every desk, every file, every nook and corner of the building. Except for one trifling discovery,—O'Sann and I both catalogued it as trifling at the time,—the brush was a complete failure. One of the iron lockers in the men's dressing-room on the second floor seemed to give out just the slightest, most evanescent of rays. This was so faint that none of us could be sure, and as the locker belonged to a steady, unimaginative subordinate who had been with the company many years, and who was not on the sick list, we did not feel called upon to make any arrest. Besides, the locker was entirely empty; the emanation, if such it was, came from the tiny shelf at the top.

"It's a criminal!" decided Masters at last. "And now," he said, turning to O'Sann, "I'll tell you how to keep your business going without any more casualties, until it's all over!

"Simply watch the men. When you see that one or another is getting genuinely scared, and ready to throw up his place, go to him, tell him to send in a report the next morning that he is too sick to come to work, and then put him to work in another office somewhere downtown. Gradually you will transfer a goodly portion of your force in this way, and also you will accomplish more than that, if I am not mistaken. The man who is killing off your employees will know that he is not responsible for the new sick ones; so he will be puzzled, stop and let the other fellow—as he will think—finish the job. I'll wager that if you do this, you won't have any more real casualties!"

The latter part of the program made good, at any rate. One more chap, a timekeeper on the third floor, succumbed on the second day following, but he was the last of the real fatalities—even of the real seizures. O'Sann evidently followed Masters' recommendation to the letter, for each day several employees failed to appear at their desk, and though nothing official was said, each empty chair aroused indignant and apprehensive discussion throughout the offices.

DURING the second week, a portrait sitting which I could not afford to refuse came my way. Reluctantly I deserted Masters and my clerk's job. I made my friend promise, though, that when the final show-down came, he would call on me.

I saw him often. He flitted in and out of the studio at all hours of the night, stopping sometimes to work an hour or two at my desk in the alcove—his own apartments, at the time, were in the hands of the decorators—and on other occasions just picking up a book or paper he had left, and hurrying out again without speaking. His skin grew paler, and his deep eyes shrank farther and farther into their sockets. I knew that he was not sleeping.

"You are ruining your health, Jigger!" I remonstrated one morning when I awoke at five to see him still sitting before my green-shaded light, his long chin resting in the palm of one hand, and an expression of the deepest dejection on his haggard countenance.

He whirled about with a queer, deep-throated cry. "Awake? Oh, don't mind me. I'm getting nervous, I guess." He took three strides toward me and then stopped. "They've started again!" he announced hoarsely, leaning forward toward my cot.

I sat up suddenly. "The strokes?" I queried, a chill tingling down my spine.

Jigger nodded, and I saw his white, irregular teeth strike together. "Yes, curse it!" he answered savagely. "Bert, I'm up against it! O'Sann is crazy. He thinks me a fool. His men are disorganized, and the whole company is going to pot, and—and I can't help it!" The last was the first and only time in my life I ever heard Masters' tone admit complete defeat, and it filled me with horror. I got out of bed and walked to him. Throwing my arm about him, I led him to the cot and forced him to lie down.

"Now, for three hours," I said, simulating a calmness I did not feel, "you close your eyes and lie right there! Sleep, if you can; think about a flock of sheep falling over a precipice, if you can't. Anyway, don't open your eyes! There'll be time enough to tackle this again in the morning!"

Masters did not obey. He lay with his tired eyes staring up at me for five minutes, without speaking. "Do you know who the fiends killed to-day?" he asked finally, his voice quiet again and weak.

"No, but let's not talk about it."

"Harvey Ainsworth!" went on my friend, as if he had not heard. "Poor old Harvey! He leaves a wife and two babies!"

I WAS stricken dumb, for I knew and loved Ainsworth. He was the only mutual acquaintance Masters and I possessed outside those we had made in the course of his work. He had been a man whom everyone liked, never brilliant even at his best, but always likable, capable and generous of heart. He had helped me once when I was in a bad scrape during college days, and Masters' news burst a floodgate of resentment within me that the impersonal horror of the other calamities had not moved.

"When closing-time came, he didn't leave his desk," continued Masters, his voice reaching the monotonous level of real grief. "I found him. He was cold, but still breathing. I had him taken to the hospital, but it was too late. Oh, Lord! I am a brainless idiot!"

"Haven't you some possible solution?" I asked bitterly, and hated myself the second I had uttered the sentence. Masters raised his head with a groan.

"You too!" he said. "Yes, I have!" The latter was almost a defiance, and a little of my friend's ordinary fire returned. "It can be only one thing, as I have told O'Sann, and that one thing is radium!"

"But how—" I began.

"Yes, there's the rub!" he retorted bitterly. "How and why! It's my job to find out, and for the first time in my life, Bert, I am afraid! I have analyzed and combed the situation from end to end, and it must be radium. That is the only method by which rays can be directed against the human body and accomplish what these rays are accomplishing."

"Just what is that?" I asked. Masters had never explained, and to me radium represented scientific magic and nothing more.

This aroused him a little more, and he raised himself to his elbow. "I can quote Professor Pierre Curie," he began. "That scientist, who discovered the element in uraninite, says that a single gram of the substance, if properly placed and used upon each person individually, would kill or render hopelessly paralytic every soul in the city of Paris! That means that nearly two million—"

"Wait!" I said sharply. "How would you have to place a gram of radium in order to bring about this effect?"

"In close proximity to the person under treatment."

An idea had stirred in my mind, and although I was sure Masters had gone over the ground already, something impelled me to continue. "Well, where have you looked for it?"

"Everywhere!" Masters' gesture was eloquent, but I was not yet quite ready to surrender.

"Well, just where?" I insisted.

"Oh, in the desks of the victims, in the walls, in the electric lights, in the paper-cutters on the desks, in the inkwells—oh, every possible-place in an office."

"Did you,"—I thrilled so at my own question, now that Masters practically had confessed that he had not covered the point,—"did you think to examine the clothes of each victim?"

For a full minute Masters was silent. I knew that the shaft had penetrated, for the queer dullness that I often had observed on previous occasions now had full control of his eyes. "No-o…. I have not thought to do so. Bert! Except for the impossibility of carrying sufficient radium around on one's person without burning the skin visibly, I'd think you had it…. Well, we shall see!" He leaped from the bed.

"Take it easy!" I cautioned. "It is just a quarter of seven, and the Miltonvale offices aren't open until eight-thirty. Let's have some breakfast."

Even with all the delays I could invent, we were among the first to arrive. Just as we had doffed our wraps, O'Sann marched past us, not speaking. After him came the mincing Doctor Lasher, with a complacent smirk on his oily face. He nodded, as much as to say: "Well, you see, Mr. Know-All, I'm called in again, after all!"

Masters made no sign. He drew me into a corner of the locker- room and there watched the incoming employees, the while feigning to be upbraiding me for leaving my place. Suddenly he stopped. Into the dressing-room shambled a familiar figure. It was the tall, stooping figure of the office-boy of the requisition department, but how different from the smart-Alecky lad, always alert and whistling even in the office, whom we knew! This specimen dragged each foot as if every step were taken in cooling glue. The freckles seemed strangely faded, and a pallor most unhealthy had replaced them.

MASTERS gave a queer little sound in his cavernous throat and seized the lad by the arm. "Come in here, Pinto," he said. "I want to see you!" Despite the boy's weak protest against the hurry, my friend literally dragged him into O'Sann's office, where the latter and Lasher were busily engaged in conversation.

"Some more clues?" inquired O'Sann sarcastically, flashing one glance at Masters.

"Yes," answered my friend shortly.

"Well, take them along with you," retorted O'Sann, motioning toward the door with his thumb. "I'm busy.""Well, take them along with you," retorted O'Sann, motioning toward the door with his thumb. "I'm busy."

"Hang your business!" said Masters coolly, and turned to the sick boy. "Strip, Pinto!" he commanded.

"Oh, I say!" protested Lasher.

Masters reached down suddenly, pushing Lasher's chair away from the desk, almost overturning the smug physician. From beneath the desk came our old friend the electric brush.

"Still playing with that?" asked O'Sann impatiently, but Masters paid no heed. As quickly as he could attach the brush to a light-socket, he began upon the articles of apparel which Pinto had shed.

Shirt, trousers and shoes yielded no clue, and Masters was next to frantic when the union suit, garters, socks and necktie in turn passed under the brush and each was discarded in turn.

"Don't you think you've been at that monkey-business long enough?" asked Lasher ironically. "A couple of huskies like yourself could make honest dollars digging ditches—"

"Masters," I burst out, "try the brush on his hat!" The idea had flashed across me, and simultaneously I saw that if the radium were to be concealed anywhere, it must be near the head of the victim.

Without a word Masters jumped for the lad's soft felt hat, which we had somehow overlooked before. Kneeling, he ran the brush over it, quickly yet thoroughly. Then, holding it down in the shadow of the desk as he had the other pieces of clothing, he looked carefully.

That instant I saw the muscles of his arms stiffen at the shoulders. "Pull down the shade," he commanded, and impelled as much by the strangled tone as by the order, O'Sann obeyed.

From the semi-dark came a deep cry of triumph! Masters leaped to his feet, holding the hat. The felt crept and glowed with a queer, crawling flame which encircled the base of the crown almost as a living reptile coiled above the brim!

"The radium!" fairly shrieked Masters. Like one suddenly gone insane, he ran to the window and threw up the shade. Then, first extracting the lead foil he had carried in his pocket from the first, he spread it on the table and carefully turned down the hatband from which the emanations seemed to come.

Out of this hiding-place dropped—what was certainly the last thing I had expected to see—a plain piece of copper wire, approximately one foot in length!

For a second Masters seemed dazed; then he ran down the shade again and used the brush on the bit of wire. It glowed and crawled under the ionizing influence, in the same way that the hat itself had done.

"Great Scott!" exclaimed O'Sann in a low tone.

MASTERS straightened suddenly, and I saw that his lean jaw was set peculiarly. I knew he was thinking fast. "Yes, we have him now—I think. O'Sann," he demanded, "where do you keep your hat?"

"Mine? Why, there, on a hook behind that door," answered O'Sann, pointing out a small vault at the end of the office, which was used for stationery-storage and as a wash-room.

Masters strode quickly across the intervening space, jerked open the door and seized a green velours hat hanging there. "You were in line, all right!" he commented grimly, tossing out another length of wire that had been concealed under the band.

O'Sann was game. He smiled the bitter smile of a strong man who sees retribution within his grasp. "Probably lucky for me I don't wear the same hat every day!" he commented.

Masters nodded sharply. "That's just what I was going to ask," he said. "Have you a brown felt?"

"Yes. I wear that and a derby alternately with different suits of clothes."

"Well, then, I can tell you the name of the man we are after!" I saw Masters' fingers twitching as he said this, and except for the hatred I myself bore the man who had finished poor Harvey Ainsworth, I might have pitied the criminal, for I knew that my friend now would be mercilessly vindictive.

"Who?" cried O'Sann, Lasher and myself all in one breath.

Masters turned aside for one moment. "We won't need you, Dr. Lasher, I believe," he said quietly. "You can take care of poor Pinto." With a wave of his hand he motioned to the naked office- boy, who had collapsed, pale and shivering, in a heap in the corner.

As the crushed health commissioner was helping the boy to don his clothes, Masters leaned over to O'Sann. "Call up your home," he said. "Ask some one there to look under the sweat-bands of your derby and brown felt."

O'Sann nodded and pulled out his extension phone. "Madge," he said softly when he had connection with his house, "bring my black derby and my brown felt hat to the phone-table." He directed the girl then how to proceed.

"A wire in the brown felt, but none in the derby," he announced, holding his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone.

Masters smiled triumphantly. "Tell her to put it back in the hat and hang the hat up!" he commanded.

"You have worn the derby most of the time since a week ago Tuesday, haven't you?" he questioned, his tone taking for granted an affirmative answer.

"Yes."

"Lucky for you that you did! On Tuesday I saw one of your trusted department-heads monkeying with that brown felt hat. If you had only possessed that one, you probably now would be in the hospital."

"Who?" asked O'Sann grimly. I saw his hand slide into the top desk-drawer and emerge with a heavy revolver.

"Just a minute!" cautioned Masters. "We might as well get him with the goods if we can. Here, this chair will do." He pulled over the armchair in which Lasher had been sitting. "Have you a few straps?"

O'Sann yanked out a bottom drawer. "No," he said; "but here is a hundred feet of muskellunge trolling-line. It will hold fifty pounds."

"Fine!" answered my friend, seizing the spool. "Now you may call in—Eldredge Simms!"

O'Sann's eyes opened wide at this, but he said nothing. I saw him press the general-office buzzer three times.

"The assistant manager!" I muttered, awed.

"Yes!" gritted Masters. "You will help me, Hoffman, in arranging the entertainment."

I knew well what this meant, and rose to receive our man as he knocked. The moment he crossed the threshold, Masters and I grappled with him. I clasped his legs at the ankles, while Masters pinned his arms to his sides. Simms was a large man but not physically strong, and we had little difficulty.

"Take the cord, O'Sann, and fasten his wrists," directed Masters. O'Sann did so as coolly as if he were tying a bundle. "Now his ankles!" And Masters turned a savage glare on our captive.

"This is strange treatment to give to a—friend and—and subordinate!" protested Simms, breathing heavily.

"Consider yourself under arrest for murder!" retorted O'Sann shortly. Masters deprived the prisoner of all chance for further parley by dumping him unceremoniously on his face on the floor; then he went carefully through his pockets.

"See!" he exclaimed a second later, holding up a circular bit of lead foil which he extracted from a side coat pocket.

The three of us then lifted Simms to a sitting position in the chair we had prepared. Masters tied him securely to the arms. Then he took up the green velours hat from the desk and silently showed the prisoner the single copper wire under the band. Then, with no comment, my friend gingerly undid the lead-foil package, dropping four of the deadly wires to his knee. These he pushed under the hatband just as the other wire was placed.

"It's lucky you have a small head, Simms!" he gritted, jamming the hat well down over the captive's forehead.

"Wh-what are you doing this for?" Simms faltered, and I laughed inwardly to hear the tone of dismay in his voice.

"Just to give you a chance to confess," replied Masters, cool again. "We will have no difficulty sending you to the chair, but you'll go all the quicker if we get your written confession. Besides, your 'friend' here, Mr. O'Sann, is naturally a trifle curious to know just why you should want to kill him and all the other employees of this firm, and how you chanced on such devilish means."

"I didn't—" began Simms in a wailing, tremulous voice, but I saw him glance fairly into the remorseless face of O'Sann, and he stopped, the blue eyes widening with terror under the green hat-brim.

"I shall take down your confession whenever you are ready!" announced O'Sann coldly, uncapping his fountain pen.

"Of course there is no real reason why you mould confess," continued Masters ironically. "Since you are innocent, you have not the faintest idea in the world what those copper wires are doing under your hatband!" He turned to us. "Am I right, gentlemen, in saying that we will wait right here until Mr. Simms is ready to give us his story?"

"If it takes six weeks!" returned O'Sann quietly, and I nodded.

"Of course if you do know what those wires will do to your brain, perhaps you would prefer—"

"You would starve me to death?" exclaimed Simms, interrupting Masters.

"Oh, no! We will feed you, all right, just as long as you are able to eat."

A LONG silence followed, during which interval I studied the face of our prisoner. It had been pale, but now it was growing greenish-gray with horror. Strangely enough, with the certainty of doom from one source or another staring him in the face, Simms seemed calmer. As the moments ticked themselves away in silence, I saw white beads of perspiration gather on the bridge of his nose, and his complexion lost the last vestige of normal color it possessed; yet his mouth, which had possessed a peculiar slackness about the lips, now was shaping itself into a firmer line. As I watched, fascinated, a gleam of defiance crept into the pale blue eyes, hardening them into a cold hate of which, a moment before, I would have deemed Simms incapable.

"Well," he remarked a moment later in what was admirably near a casual tone, "I've failed, and you've got me. Take off the hat, now, won't you?"

"Why did you do it, Simms?" grated O'Sann through clenched teeth. I saw that the self-contained manager was having a difficult time bridling his anger and horror.

"Why?" Simms laughed shortly and savagely. "Deutschland über Alles! Versteh'n Sie?" His teeth met in a metallic click, and he threw back his head.

O'Sann's jaw dropped. "A spy!" he ejaculated in a low tone.

"Yes—a spy, if you like! Now will you take off the hat?"

"Just a moment!" Masters interposed. "Fix up that confession, and let him sign it."

"Now, just tell us one more thing," continued Masters when this was done. "How did you come to know about the radio-active properties of charged wires?"

"How?" The prisoner's face wreathed in a contemptuous smile. "Before I came here, I was superintendent of Elektrische Fabriken at—" He stopped and scowled. "Go to the devil!" he concluded with a snarl. "For you I shall remain Eldredge Simms!"

"Well, I think that is sufficient," remarked Masters, taking off the deadly hat and placing it far away upon the top of O'Sann's desk. "You may call Bennett now."

Five minutes later Basil Bennett himself arrived with a squad of policemen. They regarded Simms much as if he had been some horribly poisonous reptile. Masters sketched the story to Bennett, and gave over the signed confession to his keeping.

When the police had left, O'Sann arose. "I do not understand it all, and scarcely expect to understand, Mr. Masters," he said humbly, facing my friend. "But I certainly owe you the most abject of apologies. I am sorry for all the idiocies I have been thinking and saying about you and your work, and pray believe that I consider myself a fool."

Masters silently held out his hand. "I don't blame you in the least," he answered. "I deserved all your thoughts. To Hoffman, here, goes all the credit."

"Nonsense!" I cut in, blushing absurdly. "Cut out the bouquets, and tell us about that wire."

O'Sann nodded, and sat down at his desk. While Masters talked, I saw him writing something on a bit of paper.

"You will remember," began Masters, "that I insisted from the first that the agency which was causing all this paralysis, insanity and death must be radium. Well, it was!

"I am sure," continued Masters, "that if Simms' home be examined, there will be found a queer sort of laboratory. You see, it is a scientific fact—one that I had forgotten, by the way, until I saw the rays emanating from that wire—that if a charge of five hundred or more volts of electricity—negative electricity—is allowed to pass constantly through a wire for a year or more, the wire gathers up radioactive properties from the atmosphere.

"These properties, of course, do not mean that much radium is present; and that, probably, is why I never thought to look for a wire. I was seeking an elusive gram or more of radium all the time.

"Simms doubtless has had several hundred of these wires charging all the time. As soon as one got strong enough, he simply clipped it off, brought it down here in lead foil and inserted it in the sweat-band of the first hat he came across in the locker-room. He did not pick and choose much. Doubtless he intended to kill every employee who came to work here, if necessary.

"The use of the wire puzzled me completely,—it was really devilishly clever!—because the rays worked over weeks instead of hours as I supposed, and left no burns on the outside. Each victim wore his hat several hours each day for weeks, and then the rays acted on the cortex of the cerebrum, causing a lesion, paralysis, insanity or death. Oh, I don't know but that I regret our civilization! I should like to kill that man by slow torture." Masters emphasized his words by a blow of the fist on O'Sann's desk.

The latter arose. "Well, the law will take care of him," he said, extending a blue slip of paper to both Masters and myself. "Your salaries," he said awkwardly, "as employees in the requisition-department!"

I looked down at mine, and my gaze blurred. I saw a two, then a five, then— "Twenty-five thousand dollars!" I gasped, pushing the check back toward his hand. "No, I—that's about one hundred times too much!"

O'Sann smiled. "The sincere thanks of all the Miltonvale owners and employees go with it," he said. "It's not overtime. Now run along, both of you, and get some sleep. I'm going to tell the boys in the office."

________________________

6: The Giant Footprints

The Green Book Magazine, August 1918

I HAD finished painting the Illman group, and I was itching for excitement and change, but even I did not suspect that Jigger Masters would have so much of it ready and waiting for me. It was my third visit to his apartments—and it came near being my last.

"Come in! Hold your hands above your head! Walk slowly, or I'll empty this automatic into you!"

This was my greeting. Masters sounded determined and gruff; so I chose to obey. Pushing the door wide open with the toe of my shoe, I crossed the threshold in the desired attitude, albeit grinning disrespectfully into the mouths of two very capable pistols.

"Don't let one of your fingers twitch!" I cautioned.

"Fool!" exploded Masters, putting down the weapons and rising awkwardly from his defensive position behind the desk. "From now on, when you break in on me, either knock or whistle! I'm shooting first and asking questions afterward nowadays!" He yanked out his swivel-chair and spread his lean anatomy over the seat and arms, jerking his thumb in the direction of the only other chair he possessed, a sway-backed contraption of wood and wicker.

"May I take them down now?" I queried in mock trepidation, seating myself gingerly. I was inclined to make light of the heroics in spite of my knowledge of my friend's constitutional seriousness.

"Yes," acceded Masters gruffly. "You'll need them if you stay."

Crash!

The pane of glass in front of me splintered to bits as a heavy, round object caromed from my chest to my knees. Involuntarily I seized it, and my eyes popped nearly from their sockets. It was a hand-grenade with the smoking fuse burned nearly to powder! With a convulsive movement I hurled the thing back through the window. From the street below following a terrific concussion that smashed in the rest of the glass of the window.

As I jumped to the jagged opening, I had a momentary glimpse of a struggling horse in the midst of a black, round cloud of smoke. At that second Masters dragged me back.

"There may be more coming," he said in a calm tone.

I faced the window hurriedly. "Nice quiet little nest you have here! What is it all about, anyway?"

He pressed one of the automatics into my hand and wheeled about. "Time enough to explain later! Come on!" To my surprise, for I had not suspected the existence of any other doors than the one through which I had come,—he pushed aside the tawdry gilt mirror which hung on the east wall, revealing a spiral staircase, black and musty-smelling.

After feeling my way down at his heels for what seemed an interminable distance, I heard him fumbling with a lock. Then came a click, a creak, and I saw a narrow aperture of light below, and Masters' eager face in silhouette.

"If you see anyone with immense feet, cover him!" he admonished. I had a queer, shivery thrill at this, but as he stepped out into the court and closed the iron door, I had no time for questions. Masters swung out immediately toward the street, with me on his heels.

A crowd had gathered already, and was packed four or five deep around some object on the pavement. After a minute's elbowing, Masters and I got close enough to see that it was a horse, lying huddled on the asphalt. Apparently the bomb I had thrown had exploded directly beneath its feet, for the animal was horribly distorted and mangled. Its owner, a Greek fruit-peddler, had been so overcome by the catastrophe that he was unable even to loosen the traces, but sat on the pavement, alternately bemoaning his loss and cursing in his native tongue.

After a quick survey of the crowd, which seemed to be the ordinary riffraff that always gathers about a street-accident, I saw Masters motion to me. I followed him to the outside of the circle, where he stopped a moment to jot a memorandum in his notebook.

"That was meant for us," he whispered. "I'll send the poor devil a check to cover the loss of his horse; guess I owe that much of a votive offering to my god of luck. Say!"

He stopped dead in his tracks and faced me, a frown of beginning exasperation wrinkling the folds of loose skin on his forehead. Gripping me by the arm, he led me back slowly toward the apartment-building we just had quitted. "I—I must confess, Hoffman," he said at length, "that I was a trifle rattled. Did you, by any chance, notice that bomb particularly before it left your hands?"

I smiled wryly. "Yes, I saw that it was lighted. That was all. Then I think that I must have started to pray."

"But did you notice anything else?" persisted Masters. "I couldn't swear to it now, but it seems to me that there was a piece of string—"

"White string, about a foot long!" I interrupted. "Yes, I remember it now."

Masters nodded shortly, and the corners of his wide mouth drew down a fraction of an inch. I knew the expression; it was his way of expressing disgust. In a weaker man the same feeling would have called forth curses.

WITHOUT further parley he turned in at the door of the apartment-building adjoining ours, and after ringing the bell held a short conversation with the janitor, and entered.

Three flights of stairs led us to the top floor, and there we found a ladder. This was built against the wall and reached to the ceiling. Above it was a trapdoor leading to the gravel roof. Without a word Masters climbed, threw open the trap and jumped out.

I followed in time to hear him utter an exclamation of satisfaction. "See this, Bert!" he cried, picking up a long bamboo fishpole from the gravel. Three feet of white string still dangled from the end.

"This is the way he sent us our little present. He tied it to the pole, lighted the fuse and then swung it out across the space between the apartments. When he thought the fuse was about gone, he oscillated the pole. The weight of the bomb threw it through the window-glass and at the same time broke the cord.

I shuddered at the remembrance of the missile landing in my lap. "He didn't miss his calculations by very much!"

"No," answered Masters abstractedly, "not very far, but a miss is—"

He did not finish. I saw him take a hand-lens from his hip pocket and bend down to the gravel. Without speaking, he examined the surface of the roof for nearly ten minutes. Finally, as he had worked his way nearly to the edge of the roof, I heard him chuckle.

"Yes, it's the same one," he muttered half to himself. "See here, Bert: you won't believe it, but I've got his footprint! Look through this glass!"

As I followed directions, he pointed with his index finger at a slight breaking of the surface where a bit of sand mingled with the gravel. As I squinted through the lens, his finger traced a line that led far backward.

"Not all that!" I exclaimed, remembering with a nervous thrill that Masters had spoken of immense feet. "All that!" he answered emphatically. "That's the size of the fellow's foot, whether you choose to believe it or not!"

"But that is nearly two feet!" I gasped. "No living person wears shoes that size."

Masters smiled mysteriously. "No, even I will admit that! Although this medium does not show it well, the person who threw that bomb was without shoes; the print is made by a bare foot, sixteen or seventeen inches long!"

In spite of my knowledge of Masters' lack of exaggeration, I scarcely could repress my incredulity.

"Did you read anything of the Stanwood murder?" he inquired tartly.

I shook my head, glad of the slight shift of topic. "When I am painting, Jigger, I read nothing but the editorials and the sporting-page. Regular news gets me too excited. I must have missed it—the Stanhope affair, I mean."

"Stanwood," corrected Masters. He turned to the trapdoor. "I'll tell you all about it on the train, if you care to come along. I'm going to the suburbs for a short trip."

"Count me in!" I cried cheerfully. The prospect of more real excitement was entirely too much for my prudence.

AN hour later, as we pulled out of the station, Masters drew a clipping from his pocket. "This will give you the fully decorated facts," he remarked, handing it to me.

I unfolded the sheet, and a scarehead story I had skipped in the daily paper met my eye.

GHASTLY MURDER AT ASBURNHAM

MILLIONAIRE STANWOOD FOUND

WITH HEAD NEARLY SEVERED

SUSPECT GIANT NEGRO

A barefooted fiend, wielding a razor-edged knife, last night committed one of the most brutal murders on record in New York State. Lester Maxwell Stanwood, the millionaire broker and clubman, was the victim.

According to the stories told by the servants at Cheshire Hills, the Stanwood country estate where Stanwood was staying preparatory to leaving for his summer outing with his wife and family in the Berkshires, Stanwood had seemed uneasy and irritable at the dinner table on the evening preceding the crime. He had instructed Segrue, the gardener, to fasten the huge iron gates and to loose his two huge mastiffs, Justinian and Theodora. He had spent an hour after dinner directing the packing of his trunks, and then had retired to his study and closed the door. He had appeared twice after that before the servants retired, once to ask Merkel, the house man, if anyone had attempted to see him, and the second time to make sure that his orders in regard to the gates and the dogs had been followed. Then he had gone back to his room, and nothing further had been heard from his part of the house.

In the morning Merkel attempted to waken Stanwood at nine o'clock, but found the room empty and the bed undisturbed. Alarmed, he had made directly for the study, where he found Stanwood slouched on the floor in a pool of his own blood, and with his head partially detached from his body by some edged instrument.

Merkel had aroused the household by his terrified screams, and then had fled, carrying his tale of horror to the Asburnham police station. A detail was sent out immediately to the scene of the crime, and a posse organized to search the surrounding woods for the murderer, for suicide was plainly out of the question.

Sergeant Hadley, in charge at Asburnham, visited the Stanwood home with Becker, a plain-clothes man. The first and most important clue they discovered was a set of footprints leading from the pool of blood directly across the rugs and bare floor to the doorway. The peculiar and immensely important fact about these footprints is that they were made by an abnormal foot—sixteen inches long from heel to big toe, and shaped more like the hand of a gigantic simian than like an Aryan foot. Becker pronounced it immediately the foot of a giant negro.

"That's far enough," broke in Masters, seeing that I had read the essentials. "The rest of it is mere imagination."

"That is horrible, grotesque!" I exclaimed, handing back the clipping. "There isn't any creature living to-day which possesses a foot sixteen inches long, is there?"

Masters smiled enigmatically. "I told Hadley that, but both he and Becker swear by all that is holy that we are looking for a giant."

"Well, it's spooky enough to give me the creeps!"

"Yes," said Masters slowly, "it does seem that way. The footprints were there all right, and plain enough—too plain!"

"What do you mean by that?"

Masters shook his head. "It looks like a signature, Bert! If I hadn't seen the print in the gravel back there in the city, I wouldn't believe anyone had such feet. I'd call it either a deliberate blind or else the seal of a revenge."

"Had Stanwood any enemies?"

"Yes, one at least. His name is Parker; he lived on a farm back about three miles from Asburnham, but he disappeared a day or two before the murder occurred. He seemed to have had mysterious monthly conferences with Stanwood at which they often quarreled violently."

"Fairly obvious, then, I should say."

Masters looked as nearly uncomfortable as lay within the realm of possibility for him. "Ye-e-s, it does," he admitted. "In the ordinary course of things Parker will, of course, be apprehended. He then will tell some wild story to account for his flight—"

"Or confess to the murder," I interrupted.

"No, he won't!" said Masters gravely but decidedly. "I'll admit to you, Bert, that I have led Becker, Hadley and the constables of a half-dozen towns to believe that I want Parker for Stanwood's killing, but I haven't the slightest idea in the world that Parker is guilty! I want to have him safely lodged in jail almost entirely for his own sake!"

"Then you're afraid this demon is after him too?"

"I have every reason to suspect that is the case. Parker may be safe where he is hiding, but I'd much rather have him locked up in the Tombs. I don't exaggerate, Bert, when I say that this criminal—or 'S' as I know him—is one of the most diabolical plotters it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I think he has just cause for revenge against both Stanwood and Parker, and the experiences I have had with him thus far lead me to believe that he has an extraordinary ability."

"How did you hear of him first?"

Masters smiled. "I invented a fairy tale. You see, when I got to Asburnham, Mrs. Stanwood and her two daughters had arrived. She is a fussy, society-loving old lady, and the girls are just as finicky. They were properly horrified at what had occurred, of course, but were not at all enthusiastic about an inquest and an investigation of the case. They professed themselves willing to have the police take charge, but were going to bar me from the premises. I pointed out to the chilly Mrs. Stanwood the one strange fact about the whole thing—namely, that through it all the two huge mastiffs had roamed at large on the fenced-in grounds, and that no one could have entered or left without first silencing the dogs or being attacked. I showed her that the dogs were unharmed; the servants testified that the animals had made no noise; and I hinted darkly that the murderer must therefore have remained inside the house. Rot, of course, but you should have seen those women depart! They scarcely were willing to wait for their hats!"

"I can't quite see—" I began.

"How this has to do with the mysterious 'S'?" Masters smiled. "The only thing I could get out of Mrs. Stanwood that seemed to pertain in any way to the murder was the fact that she had known her husband just twenty-three years, that he had come to New York from the West, and that she knew nothing about his life previous to that time. This made me slightly curious, and when I had a chance, I made for his study.

"There wasn't a thing there, however. It seemed that Stanwood's life began—so far as the records were concerned—at the time of his marriage. I found jottings of all kinds, mostly of financial deals, but nothing that I could fasten upon as furnishing any motive for murder.

"I didn't note it particularly then,— I'll tell you now to simplify matters,—but the name of this man Parker occurred nine times in the records, which I have little doubt were incomplete, at that.

"But my prize find was not in the study. I rooted around in every part of the house, and at last I located a small wall-safe in the attic. I asked the servants about it, but they knew nothing; so I used oxyacetylene on it. This was all it contained:"

Masters drew from his breast pocket a small, battered notebook that once had been covered in bright red leather but now was shabby, stained and peeled from long and rough usage. Wondering just what the contents would reveal, I opened it. Page after page of the first part had been written with a soft pencil; time and rubbing had made it absolutely indecipherable. Even after I reached the fresher pages, I could make out little, however. "Left Hon. May 16th with S. and P." was the first entry that seemed at all intelligible. Then came masses of figures that resembled vaguely the entries in a ship's log, though done roughly and evidently by an amateur.

"We're coming to Asburnham," broke in Masters. "I'll simplify it for you. Over here a few pages 'P' becomes Parker. 'S' never has his name spelled out. They refer to 'Oysters' five or six times. 'Arrived K' appears with a date that I can't make out. And over here at the back is an interesting entry, 'Left in sloop with P. S emptied revolvers but no damage.'

"As far as I can figure," continued Masters, speaking rapidly, "they were engaged in some queer enterprise off Oahu or Hawaii in the Hawaiian Islands somewhere. It sounds like pearl-fishing, only I never heard of any pearls coming from there. At any rate, they made money somehow, and then sailed off, leaving 'S' and the others behind. That part seems clear enough. There are a lot of other entries that I don't understand, however. They run like this, 'Four Kanakas,' and then 'Suspect B. He looks funny,' and then 'The whole bunch. Me for the States.'—"

"Sounds like a conspiracy," I ventured.

Masters shook his head. "There are just two men alive who can tell us about it, and they are Parker and 'S.' If I'm not mistaken, we won't have to wait many hours out here before we get hold of one or both of them."

"Are we going to Cheshire Hills?" I queried, rising as the train slowed down.

"Just for a moment. We'll get one of the Stanwoods' cars and go out toward Parker's house."

AN unpleasant surprise was in store for us at Cheshire Hills, however. What must have been a beautiful country house was now ablaze from basement to garret.

Masters gave one low cry of surprise, but instead of making for the little crowd who were vainly trying to subdue the flames, he caught my arm and made me run with him to the garage.

"He thought to destroy all the evidence!" Masters growled. "He beat us here. There, take the big car! It's a Peugeot."

I swung open the huge doors. A whirl of the starter, and the magnificent motor responded. Masters swung himself into the seat beside me as the car bounded forth on the gravel roadway.

"First turn to the right!" snapped Masters. "Then keep on as far as the Pontypridd Pike. Hang the speed-limits!"

It was my very first attempt at driving a car with four speeds; my little four-cylinder runabout could do only a chaste thirty-five miles an hour, but I knew the gear-shifting and the general details, and the magnificent machine under me almost ran itself. We reached thirty-five in the course of two hundred yards, and it did not impress me at all in the excitement of the moment.

"Let her out!" commanded Masters tersely, gripping the fore door and the back of the seat and leaning forward.

I complied, stepping on the gas until the smooth, silent motor in front of us transformed itself into a rushing tornado of Herculean endeavor. A bicyclist far ahead heard the cannonade of our approach and backed his flimsy machine far into the grassy ditch at the side of the road. In a sort of exalted bravado I jammed my left foot on the cut-out as we swirled by, and the answering super-salvo thrilled me to the very bone.

"Seventy-eight—eighty!" yelled Masters, almost in my ear. "Slow down now: First crossroad to the right!"

Reluctantly I removed my foot from the accelerator, and the big racer quieted down to a more ordinary rate of speed. The pike showed up before us a white lime-streak in the midst of fields of green, with a sparse line of poplars following its length into the distance.

"Now don't go over forty!" commanded my companion as we turned the corner. "I want to see the landscape."

He did not seem to be interested in the landscape, however, as we rushed along at the stipulated speed, but kept his gaze fastened on the roadway ahead.

"He may have escaped—I was slow," muttered Masters aloud to himself. I did not answer, but smiled grimly at the thought of our mad rush across fields and fences and the subsequent ride at race-track speed. If that were what he termed slow!

"That's where Parker lived until a month ago," commented Masters, indicating in a general way a cluster of cottages that stood near a heavy wood by the side of the pike. He has disappeared com— My God! It was Parker!" he exclaimed suddenly. "See that car?"

Far forward on the road I saw a small automobile drawn up at the side of the wood, and I slowed as we approached. Masters had drawn his revolvers and opened the fore door, ready to make a running attack. The car proved, however, to be empty.

"Stay here!" he commanded. "If he tries to get to the flivver, shoot—and shoot straight!" With that, Masters sprang from the running-board, climbed the fence and made off through the woods toward the cluster of cottages we had seen.

I felt distinct misgivings, in view of the threat that our quarry had made on Masters' life; yet I could do nothing but obey. Sliding out of my seat, I drew my revolvers and waited, facing the fence over which Masters had disappeared.

TEN passed before Masters reappeared; I had begun to get very uneasy. Finally he came to the fence, however, and beckoned to me. I saw that his face was set and grave.

"Another murder!" he announced when I joined him. "I am going back and run over the ground a little more thoroughly. We have plenty time to get our man now."

"But isn't he after you too?" I queried anxiously, after we had passed into the wood and were threading our way through the thick brush.

"No, I don't think so!" he responded slowly. "I think his work is done, and I don't believe he will seek me out any further."

We came suddenly upon the scene of the tragedy. In a tiny glade carpeted with luxuriant grass upon which the sunlight fell checkered from the foliage overhead, lay what had once been a man. He lay crumpled up in a hideous heap on the grass, and simply saturated in his own blood. I made as if to straighten him, for I was curious to see his features, but Masters stopped me.

"It's just the same as the other," he said. "Only this time the murderer took the head off completely!" He pointed to the shrubbery a few paces beyond. There on the broken shaft of a sapling was transfixed a hideous, severed human head, smeared with the stains of fresh blood!

I started back with a gasp of horror, for though in my adventures with Masters we had encountered many repellent sights, nothing quite so grotesque, horrible and disgusting had occurred.

"Why, the face is smiling!" I cried, overcome for the moment.

Masters made some inarticulate comment and knelt beside the body.

"Here's 'Exhibit B,'" he said, indicating a bare spot near the pool of blood.

I pulled myself together and knelt down to look. As I followed Masters' pointing finger, I felt the icy chill of fear course down my spine! I veritably believe that my hair came as near to standing on end as lies within the possibilities. Printed plainly in red on the brown of the earth was the spoor of a gigantic human foot!

"It's nearly two feet long!" I cried aghast, feeling in my veins the curdling that the sanest man feels when he rubs elbows with unexplained horror. "Surely no man alive has feet like that!"

"No, you are right!" responded Masters slowly and gravely. "And look here again!"

This time he lifted the decapitated body and showed me the neck. "This has been done by some instrument that we never have run across before," he said, pointing to the ridges in the tissues. "The head was not struck off with a knife or hatchet, for the ridges run in concentric circles around the neck!"

"A strangler!" I cried, thinking of the bands of East Indian thugs that I had read of in my boyhood days.

"Something like that," agreed Masters, "—only it looks as if the cord used was really edged steel wire. I think he used it looped like a lariat, threw it over the head of his unsuspecting victim and then proceeded in the double process of choking him and sawing off his head."

A premonitory faintness seized me; so I turned abruptly. "Who—who is the murdered man? Do you know?" I asked.

"Yes, I thought of course you knew. It's Parker."

"Parker! Then he would have been better off in jail, after all!" I flashed back one last glance at the grim scene as we started through the brush. "How did this murderer ever find out that you were after him?" I asked.

Masters smiled oddly. "I think now that the story I told Mrs. Stanwood must have had more truth in it than I imagined! I can see no other way to it than that 'S' was in the house at the time I got the notebook. He probably thought discretion the better part of valor, with others in the house, and so followed me and the notebook."

NOTHING more was said as we traversed the last rod of brush. I kept a wary eye upon the thickets as we passed through, more than half expecting an assailant at any moment. It was not until we came to the road and the little car again, however, that I made any discovery, and that was unexpected. Just as I was going to take my seat at the wheel of the Peugeot, I chanced to glance at the road, near the deserted machine.

"Jigger!" I broke in sharply. "Look here!" I took his arm and led him a few yards down the road to a point where the white dust lay thick on the macadam road. I pointed out to him a strange hole, about one foot in length, scratched in the dust and macadam at right angles to the road itself. Two feet in front of this a firm, staggered track began which several times in the first twenty yards became double.

"He left in a motorcycle!" I said, a little pride unconsciously creeping into my voice at my discovery. "Carried in the back of his automobile, probably."

Masters gave a low whistle. "Bert," he said, "this is an amateur criminal we are after, but he could give pointers to the best of them!"

"Shall we follow?" I queried, excited.

"Yes!" answered Masters abruptly. "There are several crossroads to watch," he said, running up to the car. "Our only clue now is the track of his new tires. I'll ride on the bumper!"

Thus we started out, with Masters holding his place by clasping the lamp-brackets, and leaning forward the better to watch the flying macadam. I drove slowly at first, and then as realization dawned upon me that our quarry could not possibly carry his cycle up the high embankments that rose on either side. I let out the Peugeot. Masters must have suffered terribly from the speed and his cramped position, but he gave no sign.

As the first cross-pike came into view, Masters held up his hand. I understood, and throttled down the car to eight miles an hour. Masters jumped to the ground and hastily examined the crossing. I heard him give a yell of exultation, and stopped.

"Down this road!" yelled Masters, and I backed and turned around. As I threw in the clutch again, he jumped into the seat beside me.

"I'm on familiar ground now," he said. "Selkirk is the first town—fourteen miles. Drive like the devil!"

AS we sped onward I reviewed the probabilities. Masters evidently did not expect the murderer to turn again. We would doubtless find him stopping at Selkirk. It was long past lunch- time, and we might easily find him at the hotel.

Twenty minutes later we swung into the main street of the little town and made for the hotel. Just as we did so, a figure jumped from the piazza, mounted a red motorcycle in the street and was away like a flash.

"There! There!" cried Masters, but I needed no stimulus other than the sight of that red flash. The fever of the manhunt was thrumming through my arteries, and our giant machine never felt the spur of a more enthusiastic driver.

Selkirk gaped vacantly as we swept through at sixty miles an hour, but fast as we were going, the red streak before us was traveling still faster.

"Let her out! Let her out!" cried Masters, almost beside himself.

I gritted my teeth, clung to the wheel with all my strength, and gave her the last ounce of gas and the last notch of spark. I had no eyes for the speedometer; all I could see was the winding ribbon of road that seemed to be shot under us as from a casting reel, and the red clot far in front. The fenders began to rattle with the terrible strain, but slowly I saw the red dot coming close, closer.

It all happened in an instant. With a rush we caught up to the cycle. A goggled face turned toward us; a gauntleted hand was raised; and a bullet nicked the glass wind-shield before us. Perhaps it was the speed that had gone to my brain, or perhaps the closeness of the shot had something to do with it, but something snapped inside of me, and like the driver of an ancient Juggernaut I turned in the big Peugeot and smashed into the speeding motorcycle from behind.

Metal ripped. I had a vision from the corner of my eye of a body hurtling through the air, and then I had my own hands full stopping the big car. We careened into the ditch, which luckily was shallow and grass-grown at that point. We bounded against a low fence of crossed timbers, but at that point I swerved the wheels toward the road again, and by sheer luck we managed to make it safely. Fifty yards farther on I brought the car to a stop, and Masters, revolver drawn, stepped unsteadily out.

An hundred yards back we found him—I almost said it. The collision and the force of his own speed had hurled him clear of the timber fence and far out into the plowed field. He was unconscious but still breathing when we got there.

Masters, to my surprise, held me back when I went to touch the huddled form, and handed me a pair of rough gloves.

"Put these on first!" he commanded, and though such action seemed incomprehensible to me, I obeyed.

"You'll see why!" was Masters' terse comment.

And I did! To my dying day I shall never forget the horrible sight that greeted my eyes when we straightened out the victim of my driving! The man, unconscious yet, seemed broken to a pulp. Both arms were smashed so badly that the bones were protruding through the skin, and one leg was doubled up under him.

Beside him on the ground lay two huge affairs, grotesquely resembling bare human feet, yet made to slip over shoes like a pair of rubbers. They were fashioned from solid rubber.

"The sixteen-inch feet!" I cried.

"Yes, and that's not all," said Masters, moving one of the inert arms with his toe. I looked and saw that the arms both ended at the wrists! To one was attached a clever mechanical hand, while the other ended in a strong, three-pronged hook.

His face was ghastly white, except for a purplish discoloration around the corners of the mouth and the eyelids, but the neck was tightly bandaged.

Masters bent over and thrust his hand into the side pocket of our victim's jacket. He drew it forth slowly and impressively, holding a thin steel wire about five feet in length. It was looped just as Masters had predicted, and was evidently the instrument that had caused the death of Stanwood and Parker.

"Well, you got me, didn't you. Mr. Sleuth-hound?" Masters and I jumped as if we had been detected in some illegal act. The cold black eyes were not opened widely, but there was not the slightest pretense of unconsciousness.

MASTERS' hand went for his revolver, and at that a flicker of a smile played over the hideous features of the man on the ground.

"Afraid of me even when my back is broken, eh? Well, I don't know as I blame you. I pretty near got you once."

"Yes, that bomb!" Masters smiled grimly.

"But I don't care now," continued the man more weakly. "I did my job up just as I wanted to do, and it had to be either you or some other cop." I saw Masters wince at the unwelcome appellation.

"I suppose you want my story before I cash in?" The two of us nodded, for there seemed not the slightest doubt that the man was passing quickly.

"My name's Shackleford—Shackleford of Tía Juana, Mexico. That was where I was born and raised…. Oh, but I'll get on; you don't care about that part. You're interested in my arms and feet, and in Stanwood and Parker, eh?

"Well, I don't care much how you play it up now, 'cause I'm going, but those weren't murders. That was justice—slow and insufficient justice, too!

"There were three of us, Stanwood, Parker and myself—that was long before Stanwood was the respected gent that lived at Cheshire Hills. We were all 'fore the mast on the tramp steamer Alexandria—a South Sea bummer. At Honolulu we all deserted.

"We had gotten hold of a Kanaka who told us some yarns about the enormous pearls we could get up near one of the smaller islands—Kauai, it was. It sounded good to us; so the three of us took advantage of the disturbed state of affairs in Honolulu—one of the tin-pan kings was just then getting deposed—and stole a small boat from the harbor, and with our friend—Bhalanoku was his name—made for Kauai. Well, we got a few pearls, just diving for them ourselves, but they were enough to make us want more. We fitted up an expedition with the money we got from them, and went back.

"Thirty-two days we worked the second time, and I guess in that time we cleaned up the whole bed. Anyway, we weren't finding any more oysters. We were ready to go back—for more than one reason: We had found out in the meantime that Bhalanoku was losing his hair and his finger-nails! You know what that means in the tropics.

"A kind of terror hit the whole bunch of us, for when leprosy gets into a camp of Chinks and Kanakas, it ain't long before all of 'em have it.

"Well, to cut it short, Stanwood and Parker beat it that night, with all the pearls, leaving me and Bhalanoku and all the others to rot there on Kauai! You see what it did to me!" Shackleford smiled grimly, and his eyes fell on his wrists.

"It was three months before I could get away from the island, and in that time I got it too. The crew we had brought with us were for killing Bhalanoku and myself, but I reasoned with them, showing them how we could make it share and share alike if we could find some more pearls. Well, we found a few more, and then we walked the shore-line until we came to Lamai, a little settlement on the west coast.

"There I left the rest of them and took a fishing schooner for Hawaii.

"I couldn't trace Stanwood and Parker, but I knew that they'd get to the States as quickly as they could; so I traded in some of my pearls for money for transportation, and came on myself."

HE smiled in ghastly fashion. "My one wish in the world since that time has been to find Stanwood and Parker: If I'd known how to go about it, I'd have given them the leprosy too, but I saw I couldn't do that; so I laid my plans differently. It's meant over twenty years of searching, but eight weeks ago I located them. You know the rest, I guess." His voice sank lower.

"But why did you go through all the nonsense about the huge feet?" asked Masters.

"Two reasons," came the terse answer. "Back at Kauai I used them to scare the natives with when they threatened insubordination. I knew I could scare the hick police with them. Then, I can walk better in them now," he added dryly. "You see, I don't own toes any more, and the long things keep me from stumbling. If I'd had sense enough to kill you when you were at that Stanwood place, I'd be free now. But why should I want to be free, anyway?" The voice sank lower with weakness.

"You pretty nearly did for us," vouchsafed Masters. "My friend here caught your bomb and threw it out the window just before—"

"I wish it had gone off!" snarled Shackleford with sudden venom; but then his voice trailed off in a weak cry. "There is a flask of whisky in my hip pocket—if it isn't broken. Would you—"

"Just a second!" interrupted Masters. "There are a few things I want to know first. What were Parker's relations with Stanwood, and how did you get past the dogs that night at Cheshire Hills?"

Shackleford sneered weakly. "Oh, Parker spent the gold he got for his share, while Stanwood made himself rich by good investments. I guess Parker bled him, though. The dogs? Even the young lions Stanwood kept on his place couldn't stomach me. They met me at the gate, and I thought I'd have to poison them, but they only smelled at me and backed away. They had sense. Now please, may I have the whisky?"

"How did Stanwood know you were coming?" continued Masters with apparent callousness.

"I wrote him!" gritted the prostrate victim through clenched teeth. "Please, won't you let me have the whisky?"

I waited to hear no more, for in spite of myself I pitied this horrible wreck, and wished to do as much as I could in easing his last moments. As I fished in his pocket, I thought Masters made a motion as if to stop me, but I pretended not to notice.

I uncorked the flask and held it to his lips. He drank the draught greedily; a shudder shook his mangled body, and he lay still.

"What the deuce!" I cried. "It killed him!"

Masters seized the flask. "I suspected something of the kind," he said, holding the flask gingerly to his nose, "but I couldn't see that it made much difference now. Cyanide in the whisky!"

"But if—if he were dying?" I protested. "Why should he commit suicide?"

Masters shrugged his shoulders. "There are many strong men," he remarked, "who would rather finish it than drag through unnecessary pain. It's just as well. He had played his string to a finish."

_______________________

7: The Specter At Macey's

The Green Book Magazine, September 1918

A GHOST at large in Montclair, New Jersey? As soon a matinée of the Folies Bergères in Old Trinity! I never would have believed it for an instant if it hadn't been for Lew Macey.

It did not require a clairvoyant to see that Macey believed it, though. Ordinarily he is a prematurely settled sort of chap, bald at thirty, wearing thick double lenses, getting his lightest recreation out of reading The New Republic, and all that. Just the type of build you'd expect to find in an anchor man in the city bowling league, but refined by education and thought instead of coarsened by beer and exercise.

I liked Macey but usually avoided him, because when I came down to the Century Club I was in search of diversion, not arguments, and my opinions always clashed head-on with his. To see him sitting alone and drinking, though! It was enough to arrest my attention, for to my positive knowledge Lew always had been a quiet but stanch advocate of prohibition.

"Brooding over the Russian collapse?" I questioned, stopping beside his table. It would not have surprised me greatly if he had answered in the affirmative, so seriously does he take all affairs of government and world-import, but he shook his head, motioning with a shaky forefinger at the chair opposite.

"Sit down!" he croaked hoarsely, and astounded at what I perceived from a closer inspection of his face, I obeyed. The calm, heavy expression of judicial gravity had vanished as completely from his face as if it had never been his. Instead, pallor of skin and a widened, strained expression of the blue eyes akin to chronic terror had replaced it.

"I have had to come to it lately, Hoffman," he muttered, indicating the decanter of Scotch at his elbow. "Nerve gone. Can't stand it!"

"Why on earth, man?" I exclaimed. "Are you taking the war—"

"The war?" he interrupted vaguely. "No, not that. Wife's down at Asheville now with Lenore, my daughter. Complete nervous breakdown, both of them. I stayed. Now it's got me!"

"What?" I did not smile, though I had a premonition of something far less terrible than Macey considered it.

"Say, Hoffman!" Macey gained better command of himself for an instant. "Want to buy my place in Montclair? You know it—same estate I had when you were out a year ago Thanksgiving. Cost over a hundred thousand. I'll sell it to you just as it stands now, furnished and all, for fifty thousand!"

EXCEPT for his strange proposition, Macey seemed a trifle saner, and I stared at him. The place would bring much more than fifty thousand even under the hammer, and I knew it. He was gazing at me steadily now, and I thought a glint of hope had crept into his eyes, shielded as they were behind the lenses.

"What is the proposition. Lew?" I asked, trying not to seem in the least excited. "Why don't you want it?"

"Ghosts!" he retorted tersely, clenching one of his heavy fists. "Too many tenants now!"

Macey was sincere in his offer and belief, and I knew it; yet I laughed heartily. It seemed too absurd that the calm, heavy scholar, used to analyzing national symptoms as a physician diagnoses illness from seemingly unrelated signs, should bow to superstition.

"Oh, nonsense, old man!" I concluded. "You've been reading too much."

"Think I'm crazy?"

"No, of course not. Your nerves have become ragged, likely."

"Then how about the rest of us?" Macey leaned forward on the table, grasping his short glass. "Grant that I have imagined all that I have heard. My wife and daughter have been scared out of their wits! They are down recuperating now, as I told you."

I smiled tolerantly. "You probably did the scaring yourself," I suggested, thinking that such might well be the case, as Macey certainly looked the part of temporary insanity.

He shook his head. "No sir, Hoffman. You have no conception of what it means to be converted to a belief in spirits. You know I did not use to take any stock in such things? Yes! Now I do. I cannot reconstruct my scheme of things to jibe with it, either! It is terrible—no, horrible is the word!"

"Have you actually seen any of the—er—tenants?"

"No." Macey seemed reluctant to make the admission. "Ethel has, though. And my dog Pete!"

"You say your dog has seen ghosts?" I asked incredulously.

Macey bowed somberly. "Pete is as crazy as the rest of us. When the noises start, he runs up and down the house with his hair standing up in a ruff around his neck and along the ridge of his back. Now and then he stops and howls at something in the empty room from which the noise is coming! If it were a person, he would bark. No, he howls like a wolf!"

A premonitory shiver of delight tingled its way down my spine. I have a curiously perverse nature; I would sooner credit the evidence of an intelligent dog in certain kinds of cases than I would that of any human being. Macey's problem became real to me the moment the dog entered, and I rose quickly to my feet.

"How much nerve have you left, Lew?" I queried, bending over. He shrugged his heavy shoulders.

"Well, listen to me! I don't want to buy your house. It's too much for my income, yet, and besides, I couldn't ask my patrons to come out as far as Montclair for sittings. I will do something about it, though, if you are willing to make a certain promise."

Macey looked up doubtfully at me over his glasses.

"I have a friend upstairs—I think he's playing billiards now—who will go out with me. The three of us will lay that ghost and have a bully time doing it! Only—I must ask that you do not seem too curious about my friend. He may not tell his name, and if so, you must not ask. You must never refer to him in any way afterward."

Macey nodded dully. "As you say, Hoffman," he replied.

JIGGER MASTERS was crouched morosely on one of the players' chairs when I found him. His opponent, Archie Spalding, was busily engaged in clicking off a continuous chain of points, nursing the object-balls in one corner of the billiard-table.

"This is a beastly game, Bert," growled Masters as I approached. "You have to sit down too long between shots. How many is that now, Spalding?"

"Forty-six," answered the other without looking up.

"How many points are you playing? How soon will you be through?" I asked.

"Two hundred points," returned Masters gloomily. "Spalding's out now. I got just fifty-four. The man's a darned professional!"

"Well, I'm glad the game's over!" I whispered. "Come with me; I think I can show you one in which you won't have to sit down so long between shots!"

Masters' heavy eyebrows lifted quickly at this, and the expression of ennui and disgust vanished. The man had been without a case for several weeks, and I knew how the inaction palled.

"Call it enough. Archie!" he said quickly, replacing his cue in the rack and following me out into the hall.

"I hope you have unearthed something, Bert," he said. "I'm not made to be a club idler." His deep voice rang with unfeigned anticipation.

"Just a ghost-hunt!" I replied. "Do you know Lew Macey?"

"Macey? No, I don't think I have met him. You see, I come down here only about three times a year."

"Well, so much the better," I replied, leading the way to the buffet where Macey still sat staring at his empty glass and the full decanter as if meditating a decisive onslaught.

Jigger Masters held my attention during the moments of introduction, not so much by the fact that he easily transmuted the initials by which I made him known to Macey into his real name, as by the dynamic contrast he offered to the heavy chap at the table.

"Jeffrey Masters," he volunteered suavely, extending one of his long arms clear across the table and gripping the back of Macey's hand—which still clasped the whisky glass loosely. "Known to my clients usually as 'Jigger'—broker, in a small way, you know." He pulled up two chairs from one of the adjoining tables and seated himself at Macey's right hand. I took the place opposite.

MACEY smiled in an embarrassed fashion. "Oh," he muttered, without emphasis, "thought you might be—er—" He stopped. I knew that he meant to say "detective," but Masters broke in.

"I have been in the business so short a time that few know of me as a broker. But let's not drag business into this. Hoffman mentioned something about a delightful mystery—" He glanced questioningly at me.

"Delightful?" echoed Macey, frowning in puzzled irritation.

"I haven't told the story yet." I hastened to say, and then as I saw this placated Macey. I went on to sketch the few details I knew, dwelling particularly on the fact that Macey's dog also had been troubled by the manifestations. "I know the animal," I concluded, "and he's a mighty intelligent dog. Half bull and half collie, isn't he, Lew?"

Macey nodded acquiescence. "Yes. Good watchdog. Crazy, though—just as crazy as the rest of us."

Masters spread his long hands flat on the table, palms down. "Well, Mr. Macey," he began. "Hoffman and I are just hungering for a chance at being entertained by a real spook. Do you think that if we went out to Montclair this evening with you we could be satisfied?"

Macey's mouth twitched, I think with anger. "Yes!" he answered gruffly. "I won't answer for what happens to you, though!"

Masters observed the danger-signals this time. "All right, Mr. Macey," he said. "Now, would it tire you to tell us a little of what we have to expect?"

Macey nodded. Pouring himself a drink, he started to lift it to his lips. "Oh, beg pardon!" he said. "Have some?" Masters and I declined silently, and waited until Macey recovered his voice after the searing draught.

"It's a nightmare—just that," began Macey, coughing a little from the unaccustomed liquor. "Week after we moved in, wife and I heard funny sounds—low moans, like patients in a coma, tearing of paper. Was some kind of a fool story of how an Italian who was killed while house was being built cursed it and said he'd haunt it forever. Didn't believe that kind of stuff—then.

"Daughter came home from Radcliffe. She heard all the noises too. Nothing wrong about her then, either—sensible girl. All the young men who called on her tried to solve the mystery. I tried. Had some of the floors taken up—one of the walls too. Nothing there. No hiding-place for a mouse!"

"And still the noises kept on?" Masters' tone was incredulous.

Macey bowed. "Yes, all the time at night. Not very often in the day. Different noises, different places each time! Shrieks—growls—rattling of chains—blood!"

"Blood?" Masters half rose from his chair in surprise, and my own mouth framed an exclamation.

"Yes, big splotches of it," assented Macey. Then he shuddered at the remembrance. "Oh, it's horrible! It's unreal!"

"No," contradicted Masters. "Not unreal if you actually saw blood. Very serious, though."

"It was right in the middle of the dining-room table," went on Macey, disregarding the implied doubt in Masters' words. "A pool of it on the glass top that dripped and splattered down all over the rug! Martha and Lenore found it. They're down at Asheville."

"But didn't you call in the police, man?" I cried.

"Police?" echoed Macey dully. "Oh, yes. Had them in several times. Found nothing. Nothing came of it except that they suspect me of killing some one. They've followed me. See that chap?" Macey motioned at an inconspicuous idler who was seated at a distance.

Masters chuckled. "Bixby Pickering!" he muttered.

"A club-member?" I asked.

"Lord, no!"

"He's been following me," insisted Macey. "Don't care a hang, but he has."

"He has no right here, then!" I replied firmly. "Let's have him put out. Who is he?"

"Just a simple, earnest soul from the Jersey sticks," laughed Masters. "Don't bother; he'll doubtless follow us out."

AND he did. When Masters, Macey and I took a cab to the tube, Bixby taxied after us. He boarded the same train for Montclair, and even stalked fifty feet in our rear up the staid and respectable streets of the suburb. This was too much for Masters' sense of humor. Taking a letter from his pocket, he handed it to me.

"Tear it up in small pieces and throw it on the sidewalk!" he commanded. "Wait until you get under that next light, so that friend sleuth can't miss seeing it."

I did so, but was unprepared for Masters' next move. He cursed me just loud enough to be heard by Bixby, and then scattered the papers with his foot.

"There! I guess that will give us a few moments," Masters whispered as he joined us. A hundred feet in our rear a dark figure darted out and swooped upon the fragments.

Lew Macey's home looked the part of a haunted house that night. Set back on a hill that was crowned by a grove of oaks, the white stone shone in spectral contrast to the black windows. The many lights Macey had placed in his parklike grounds were unlighted, but a three-quarters moon made other illumination unnecessary.

I am willing to admit, however, that as we reached the deepest shade of the trees I would have been glad of a friendly searchlight. In view of what Macey had been telling us, the white stone castle before us seemed somehow coldly sinister. Without effort of the imagination I could see faces peering out of the jet-black leaded panes.

That second the three of us stopped, frozen. From high up somewhere in the building before us a wail sounded faintly. This rose higher and higher, muffled by the building itself yet thoroughly audible to us outside, until it reached its climax in a raucous shriek of agony! The sound was not unlike the effort of a savage learning to play on a muted cornet; yet it possessed that intangible timbre of a human voice.

"Good Lord!" whispered Masters. "We're too late! That's murder!" He pulled a revolver from his pocket and started forward, but Macey, trembling so he could scarcely stand, detained him.

"There's nobody there," he said between teeth that chattered audibly. "Same every night. The Italian—" He stopped, for from within the house came a throbbing moan painfully distinct in the stillness. It was the cry of some huge, inarticulate animal in distress.

"For heaven's sake, Jigger," I cried, unable to repress the growing horror within me, "let's finish it!" I would gladly have turned and run in the opposite direction, for though I had discounted Macey's tale heavily, the actuality was overpowering. I jumped at every moving shadow in the grove.

Masters nodded jerkily, and the two of us linked arms with Macey and ran up the concrete walk to the front piazza. Macey drew out his key, but his fingers trembled so violently that he failed in fitting it to the lock. Masters, unable to stand the fumbling, opened the door himself.

WITH a nervous bark of gladness a dog flung himself out of the dark hall at Macey. I nearly toppled back over the banister at the apparition, but recovered in time to steady Macey and greet Pete, with whom I had previously been stanch friends.

"Why did you leave him here alone?" I asked reproachfully, for the dog was extravagant in his delight at company.

"Don't know. Just forgot, I guess." Macey stumbled in after Masters, and I followed. Masters and Macey made it their immediate business to snap on every available electric light.

The interior of the house showed marks of the confusion and haste with which Mrs. Macey, her daughter and the maids had left. Directly from the entryway, where we deposited our wraps, we entered the broad living-room. This ran the full width of the house, and ordinarily was kept in a condition of munificent orderliness. Now it was changed. The Oriental rugs were thrown up, pulled aside and rumpled. A piano-bench in the bay-window was overturned. One curtain-rod had slipped from its holder, allowing the lacy folds to hang askew. Altogether it looked as though the ghosts had been busy in Macey's absence.

"Where's the dining-room?" asked Masters immediately.

"Back here, behind the library and den—right through this hall," answered Macey, leading the way.

Masters stopped in the doorway with Macey and me at his side. "Why, you've taken the rug out and cleaned the table!" Masters exclaimed in a disappointed tone.

"Yes," answered Macey. "The police had charge of it for two weeks, and then I didn't think there could be any reason for preserving the horrible mess. I had the rug taken away to be cleaned."

Masters made no comment at this, but turned away. For the next hour he and I explored all the rooms of the house, the attic and the basement. Masters called upon me to hold one end of his tape- measure continually, as he figured room-lengths in respect to walls, partitions and floors. He made dozens of entries in his notebook, but I saw a gradual set expression of disappointment coming on his angular features.

"Wish the ghosts would start something now we're here!" he muttered finally. "So far as I can tell, there isn't any room for a person or animal—"

Clank! Clank! Clank!

THE sentence died in Masters' throat, for from upstairs and somewhere back in the house came the unmistakable noise of a heavy chain rattling!

"There it is! There!" shrilled Lew Macey, starting up from the chair he was occupying in the living-room.

"Come on, Bert!" exclaimed Masters from between clenched teeth. He drew his revolver and ran up the front stairway three steps at a time. I was on his heels.

Before we reached the landing, all was quiet above, but we hurried to the point from which the noise had seemed to come. Pete, the dog, was there, standing in the middle of the upstairs hall, whimpering. His hair stood up all along his back just as Macey had said.

We rushed from one room to another, looking in every conceivable place, but in vain. Pete caught the spirit finally, and while we were poking around in clothes-presses and under beds, he was eager to help.

Lew Macey said nothing now, but he followed us around. The chap was terror-stricken and fearful of being left alone.

"Nothing up here," said Masters briefly, when we had poked in the last corner for the third time.

"Listen!" I cried, but my warning was unnecessary. Masters stopped in the act of pulling a handkerchief from his hip pocket. A buzzing, humming sound came from the attic above us. It was insistent, beelike.

"Just like a bumblebee caught under a glass!" I whispered. Masters nodded without speaking, and I saw a blank look steal into his blue eyes that gave me a sudden flutter of hope. This meant concentrated thought on Masters' part. Ergo he had some new idea!

"Shall we go up—" I began, but at that moment a blood- curdling shriek of terrific pain smote us like a blow. It was the death-wail we had heard before! It came in full agonized volume from the dining-room downstairs! Like madmen we sped down the steps again and burst into the dining-room.

I think that it was not until Lew Macey fainted at my side that the full meaning of the scene before me came to my mind. The six-foot glass top of the dining-room table was one huge pool of blood! The crimson liquid was spattered over everything, and was dripping down in several streams to the floor! Not a soul was in sight!

I took half a step forward and then stopped, conscious of a giddy sensation. "I—I guess I believe in ghosts!" I managed to mutter finally.

MASTERS, who had stepped past, flashed back an inscrutable glance in which I was almost certain I detected a trace of amusement. I could not be sure, though, and I had seen and heard enough for the time being, anyway. Lifting up Lew Macey by the shoulders, I dragged him into the living-room and laid him on the mulberry davenport. Then I obtained a glass of water and sprinkled his face.

When he came to consciousness, he begged me not to leave him, and though I knew that Masters at last had something tangible to work upon, I was willing to rest for a few moments myself.

The only interruption that occurred during the next half-hour was when Masters asked the whereabouts of a ladder. Macey was able to tell this without leaving his couch; so we stayed. Most of the time I had my hand in the side pocket of my jacket, where I carry my revolver, for it would not have surprised me greatly to have had one of the nerve-jarring manifestations start right in the same room.

I knew that Masters would call me the moment he had need of my services, and guessed that in the meantime he would prefer not to be troubled by Macey. So when he quietly stepped out the front door a short time later without asking my company, I made no move to follow.

Less than ten minutes later he was back, his eyes shining with triumph. "Come on!" he cried. "I've got the ghost!"

Macey jumped to his feet and stared about in bewildered fashion. "Got him? Caught him?" he asked.

"No, not yet. I'll probably need the help of you both. But come on!"

I needed no second invitation, and Lew Macey came along, muttering his disbelief, but nevertheless curious.

Masters led us out the front way, but turned immediately toward the back. On past the garage we tiptoed, finding no difficulty in picking a path in the moonlight. Beyond the garage the oak grove began. Straight into its blackest shadow Masters led. I was infinitely relieved when he clicked on his flash.

"HANDS up!" The gruff command cracked out of the darkness. Masters coolly circled his flash-lamp to the side, disclosing a half-dozen policemen standing with leveled revolvers. We all obeyed, albeit Masters carried the flash up with him and used it on the officers.

"Bixby again!" Masters exclaimed disgustedly as the latter approached from behind the blue cordon.

"Yes, and we've got you this time! Look at him!" Bixby Pickering seized the flash and turned its baleful eye on Masters.

I was forced to admit that Masters appeared desperate enough for anything. He was literally drenched in blood! I had not noted this feature previously, but beginning at the top of his right shoulder and continuing to the bottom of his right trouser-leg was a red smear, not yet dry.

"You're just in time, Bixby!" said Masters, regaining his composure.

"You bet I am, you murderer!" growled the other.

"Come here!" Masters' tone was commanding. Bixby gloweringly obeyed. "Fish in my left trousers pocket," continued Masters. "Take out what you find and look at it!" Bixby did so. The find seemed to be a disk of flat metal. As the detective looked at it, his eyes bulged.

"You?" he cried.

"Of course!" said Masters. "Now if you'll bring your herd along here, I'll show you something interesting!" Bixby made a muttered explanation to the policemen, and then all followed Masters. The latter was advancing more carefully now.

He stopped and beckoned, and all of us crowded close.

"Come out of there before I blow you out of the ground!" he yelled suddenly, to my complete mystification.

THERE ensued a three-second wait in which I am sure all of us mentally questioned Masters' sanity. Calling down at the solid ground in a suburban estate is not usually a profitable pursuit.

Imagine our surprise! A faint crack of light showed in the turf at our feet! Instantly Masters bent down and pulled at the crack, throwing up what seemed to be an oblong mat of grass turf!

Below it, framed in the light from a strong electric lamp beneath, a man stood blinking up at us. He was clutching the topmost rung of a ladder which led down into the light.

"Take him, boys!" cried Masters, and the police needed no further directions. They had been cheated out of one quarry, and intended to make sure of this one.

"Put 'cuffs on him and then bring him down here!" directed Masters, and reluctantly Bixby obeyed.

While this maneuver was taking place, Masters, Macey and I climbed down the ladder.

A marvelous cave or dugout greeted our eyes! A table, chairs, a cot with bedding and a book-rack filled with novels and periodicals were ranged against the clay walls. The board floor was partly covered with a grass rug. The affair which caught my eye instantly, however, was a contrivance next the cot, which resembled queerly the keyboard of a church organ! It had two banks of keys, and a row of what looked to be stops.

"Here's where your ghost really walks. Macey," said Masters, pointing at the odd appliance. "This is part of an electrical system that is hooked up to all parts of your house. When the occupant of this cave wants a ghost to shriek, he presses one of these keys."

"Well, how do you like the layout?"

We looked up to see the owner descending the ladder, grinning over his shoulder, while Bixby crouched above, watching his every move.

"Fine!" said Masters cordially. "Think it out yourself?"

"Ye-ah! That is, not the machine. That's part of a 'unit orchestra.' The idea's mine, though. Thomas Seppel's Ghost Company, at your service!"

"I'll trouble you to take off these bracelets," continued Seppel genially. "The game's up, I know, but you can't get me for anything. I'm a practical joker, I am!"

"Make 'em sell out cheap, eh?" Masters was apparently deeply struck with the humorous possibilities of the idea.

"You bet!" chuckled Seppel. "Scare 'em till they want to get rid of the property. Then buy it dirt cheap and sell it again. Nothing illegal in it, either."

"Oh, so you built it in the first place?"

"Sure! How d'you suppose I got the wires in? I build a house about every ten or eleven months. Make about fifteen thousand a year beside my—hm!—salary as ghost, so I can afford to laugh at the loss of this."

Masters snapped around quickly. "Yes, and you can keep on laughing for about ten years, Mr. Seppel!" he announced. "Take him away, Bixby, and hold him for charges."

DESPITE the joker's protestations, he was led away. For my part I think he was lucky, since Lew Macey at that moment was meditating nothing less than homicide.

Macey cooled down somewhat as Masters started speaking. "I didn't tumble in the least when I heard those first shrieks," he said. "I thought there was some one hiding in the walls, or upstairs somewhere. That buzzing first gave me an inkling. It sounded so much like an instrument invented once by a certain Robert Hope-Jones—he was the chap who first perfected the 'unit orchestra.'

"The blood in the dining-room clinched it, though. For a few minutes it scattered my theories galley west, I'll admit, for it seemed a far cry between a 'unit orchestra' and a smudge of blood. When I came to examine the blood, though, I found out several interesting things. First, it was not human blood at all. It wasn't even normal blood from any animal! It had corpuscles, all right, but not a bit of fibrin or platelets in it! In other words, it wouldn't clot at all! It had evidently been run through a centrifuge to remove these clotting elements."

"But why, for goodness sake?" I cried.

"I was just coming to that. Blood that has been treated like this can be kept for some time in a container without losing its liquid form. On a chance I tried the ceiling above the dining- room table. There were four of these cups of blood up there, hidden by the filigree work. Two were empty and two full. The first full one I opened spilled all over me. They were operated by an electric current from here. When Seppel pressed a key, one cup would empty blood all over and then close up again."

"But—but how did he get the shrieks and the clanking of chains?" asked Macey slowly, passing his hand across his forehead vaguely.

"Well, I've worked too fast to be able to describe it all to you. Trace it out at your leisure. It's my guess that many of the beams used in the construction of your house are hollow. Some of them are attached to bellows, and act like organ-pipes when one of these keys is pressed—all electrically driven, you understand."

"And can't I—can't I do something to make him suffer for this?" queried Macey miserably. "Think of my wife and daughter!"

Masters raised his clenched fist. "You bet we'll do something, Macey!" he said solemnly. "We'll have him up at Sing Sing cracking rock until he's a ghost himself!"

_________________________

8: The Affair At Steffen Shoals

The Green Book Magazine, October 1918

THE bell rang insistently. Knowing that Central would have me fully awake in five minutes anyway, I rose and yanked down the receiver, prepared to bite the head off the individual who had nerve enough to rout me out at three in the morning.

"Bert?" The quick question forestalled the savage growl I was summoning as I leaned over the transmitter. I straightened instantly from my belligerent slouch, for it was the one voice in the world I most wanted to hear.

"Jigger!" I exclaimed, as wide awake suddenly as if it had been noon. "Where are you? Where have you been? I'd given you up for dead two months ago!" This was literally the truth, for Masters had been out of town nearly four months, and because I knew his sledge-hammer methods in dealing with his quarries and the risks he delighted in taking, I had pictured him lying somewhere in the mud of the East River, or hacked to pieces by some of the alien criminals he sought.

"Not yet, Hoffman!" he chuckled. "Can't answer your questions over the wire, though. Are you very busy?"

"Lord no!" If I had been painting the Queen of England at the moment, I would have answered in the same way. As it was, I had two portrait appointments for the following week, but I knew these could be postponed.

"Same old Bert!" he laughed. "Well, meet me at the 5:32 Grand Central."

"This morning?"

"Yes. Oh, and bring your golf sticks, if you can find them. We may be able to get in eighteen holes. I'm anxious for a game."

"All right." I knew that Masters was chaffing, for he scarcely knew a driver from a sammy iron, but behind the lightest of his jests there lay always a serious side. "Any—other weapons?" I asked, thinking of the two automatics that had lain unused in my bureau drawer for so long.

"Of course," he replied. "That's always understood." As he dropped the receiver. I sprang to my feet, thrilling with delight at the prospect of action. I needed it badly, for my work had fallen off in quality of late. The impetus and inspiration of an adventure with Masters was just what I wanted.

I GATHERED a few pieces of clean linen, in case I should be away longer than the day, and crammed them into my leather bag. I started to put the automatics on top, but changed my mind. Masters' affairs often developed with such startling suddenness that it was unwise not to be fully prepared. I placed one in the pocket of my jacket and the other on my right hip. My breakfast was a hurried affair, not because there was any particular reason for rush but because I was burning with impatience. As a result I got to Grand Central nearly a half-hour early.

I was lighting my second Panetella when I spied Masters. He was approaching briskly from the subway stairs, dressed as I had never seen him before. His angular frame was revealed more than usual by a back-fitted tweed coat, and the material advertised by garish checks the fact that the new American dyes were not yet complete successes. The soft collar of his shirt, though pinned together carefully over the tie, left his bony neck unprotected. Always previously he had worn the highest linen procurable. Completely engulfing his mat of black hair was a checked cap, pulled down too far toward his ears. I thought he seemed a little paler and thinner than on the last occasion I had accompanied him—the time we chased the family ghost for Lew Macey.

"Jigger!" I cried, seizing his hand warmly. He did not speak for a second, but I saw the curious expression creep into his blue eyes that was his nearest approach to sentiment.

"I'm glad to see you, old man!" he answered, a moment later, crushing my fingers. "Thought I never was going to get back to New York."

"So did I! Well, what's the assignment that gets us up before the roosters this morning?" And this was all the spoken greeting between us. I think that it would have been the same had Masters been away for ten years instead of a few months; each of us knew exactly what the other thought and felt, yet both were unable to phrase our genuine gladness.

Masters purchased our tickets, signifying by a gesture that he would tell me the story as soon as possible. When he came back, we made for the smoker, and took the seat farthest forward. The train had just been made up, so we were the first in the car.

"It has been a tangled skein, Bert," began Masters, when we had arranged our baggage, "the hardest case to get at I've ever tackled. I have one end of the thread in hand now, and because I know how you delight in being on hand at the finish, I've asked you out with me.

"Over fourteen weeks ago I was called to Washington. I couldn't tell you, for I was asked to keep my own counsel strictly. It seems that for some months they have been cognizant of certain information leaks. News reached the Germans before our own troops in France knew it."

"You mean that there were spies in our own departments?"

"Yes, were and are!" he nodded emphatically. "That's nothing unusual, of course. Every nation has to contend with that problem. The feature about it that caused me to be called in was that such a quick and comprehensive chain for the revealing of ordnance and construction secrets had been established that the Germans actually were using our newest war weapons against us about as quickly as we could bring them into play ourselves.

"One of the most striking examples of this was the chloropicrin-phosgene gas mine. This was an American invention, but the Germans knew all about it and brought it up on the Toul front only ten days after we used it first. Since it takes at least a month to make one of these terrible agents of destruction, you can see readily how soon the Germans must have heard of it."

"I should think we would begin to investigate!" I replied. "What was this gas-mine apparatus?"

"A huge tank-bomb arrangement for use underground," replied Masters. "I won't trouble you with a description of it except to say that it was placed in territory about to be evacuated. When the enemy occupied the position it was exploded. First it gave off terrific clouds of chloropicrin gas: this is an agent that makes every soldier sicker than he was his first trip on the ocean. Naturally every man takes off his gas mask when he gets sick—chloropicrin gets through the mask—and that leaves him an easy mark for the phosgene. The latter gas comes from the mine five minutes after the chloropicrin. Since the inhalation of a microscopic quantity of phosgene is immediately fatal, taking off the masks at this time allows the phosgene to get in its deadly work. Most of the victims of chloropicrin are too sick to care, anyway."

I shuddered. "Ghastly thing, isn't it?" I said.

"Yes." Masters shrugged his shoulders. "They have found, though, that the only way to fight the Huns successfully is to beat them to it. Because the Germans are learning our secrets as fast as we can invent new machines and methods, though, is exactly the reason you and I are here."

"Where are we bound for this morning?"

"Jaques Corners, Rhode Island," answered Masters promptly.

"Sounds rural," I commented. "What are we going to find there?" I noticed that our train had started.

"Well, I am told that the Weekapang Country Club near there has an excellent golf course."

"Oh, don't be tight!" I exclaimed. "What are we after? Where are these outlandish places?"

Masters smiled. "You can find Weekapang on the map, down in the southernmost corner of Rhode Island. The golf course—"

"Oh, hang that! What about Jakeville, or whatever you called it? Jaques Corners, wasn't it?"

Masters' expression became serious. "That is a war town, put up entirely by the Government for the construction of war machines and munitions. I have traced my skein that far, and I have a hint of the next coil of the strand. I think they call the town by that hick name just to avoid suspicion. I have three men in high positions in our war organization who are going to face a firing squad before another month has passed. It is only because I do not care to let the method go undiscovered that I have not had them court-martialed already. They have confederates and some method of conveying news to Germany that is novel, to say the least. In all the time I have watched them not one of the crowd has sent a wireless message, mailed a letter or engaged in intimate conversation with any people outside their own homes. And I have made certain that members of the family have not carried the messages on."

"Then why do you suspect them? They sound blameless."

"Yes, entirely too much so!" Masters' tone was savage. "An innocent man posts a letter now and then. He also gets chummy with other men. These men don't. Besides,—and I'll admit that this feature occurred to me after I had them nailed down,—I have evidence to prove that the specifications of the chloropicrin-phosgene mine passed through these particular hands, not to mention other documents that Hindenburg would pay millions to possess. The last snarl in the thread I am following is a Mr. Mesnil Phillips, a Government inspector of ordnance. I am convinced that through him the news reaches the Germans, though how he does it I cannot pretend to say just yet.

"The manner in which I have pinned down these men has not been spectacular in the least. Only five persons saw the specifications of the gas mine before it was taken to the ordnance factory at Jaques Corners. One of these was the President. Another was the Secretary of War."

"That leaves three possible suspects." I commented.

"Yes," answered Masters in a solemn voice, "and it is a dreadful thing to know that individuals even in these lesser positions of trust can prove traitors."

I moved uneasily. "But are you certain?" I asked. "It seems to me that there ought to be plenty of chance for some mechanic or foreman or some one like that out at the manufacturing plant to send on the news."

Masters shook his head. "No, it's not possible. On the twelfth of November, 1917, the plans of this mine were submitted by one of our greatest military inventors.

"He had worked alone on the project, and is a man who appreciates thoroughly the fact that secrecy is a prime factor in the success of any new machine. On the twenty-seventh of November the approved plans were placed in a time-lock safe at the factory. On the fourth of January of this year the first of the mines arrived at our front in France. On the evening of the thirteenth of January the Germans exploded an identical mine near St. Mihiel. Making every allowance for the transmission of the plans, the lesser time required for transporting from Essen or Brandenburg, the finger points unerringly at the fifteen-day period elapsing before the plans reached the factory."

"Sounds a little shaky!" I remarked dubiously.

"In one case, yes," returned Masters. "I have followed through the gas mine with you because I mentioned it first. The infrangible part of the reasoning rests in the law of averages, however. I have established the same chain in no less than four other important instances. Even at that I never would dare to prefer charges of this sort without having every loophole covered. In the past three months I have directed a body of sixty picked secret-service agents. These have made it their business to know every movement during every second of waking time of all of the individuals who even might have obtained access to the plans at any time, but with negative results. I have data in hand to show what all of these have done every day—with one exception. That exception is Mr. Mesnil Phillips, one of the original three, and concerns his recreation periods."

"Golf, you mean?"

"Yes." Masters' face was drawn and serious. "I know that it is possible for me to make mistakes, Bert, but I have given this case the very best I have, and without hurry. I have eliminated all the factors but one. That one must materialize!" The long fingers of his right hand clenched with unconscious emphasis.

"Have you baited any trap?" I asked.

He nodded slowly. "Yes. That is what makes success just at this time absolutely necessary. A certain construction secret is going through now that a thousand men in Washington would give their lives to prevent the Germans from receiving. Because I have given my solemn promise of its protection, I have prevailed on the Secretary of War to send it by the usual channels!" He regarded me quietly. "It's up to us, Bert," he said in a strained tone.

Our conversation turned to my personal affairs. Rather I should say that Masters directed it thus. Perceiving that he did not care to discuss the case further at the time, I related the work I had accomplished in his absence. After a time I saw an impersonal stare creeping into his eyes, the old symptom of concentration. Since I knew that he was not listening, I picked up a newspaper.

We did not stop in the town of Weekapang, but took the station bus directly to the country club. "I thought you said Jaques Corners," I mentioned, as we were jogging along over the macadam road.

"Yes. There's no station there for passengers, though. See!" And Masters pointed to the north, where I discerned a cloud of smoke over the tree-tops. "That's Jaques Corners," he said.

THE Weekapang Country Club proved to be a frame building set in a small grove of oaks. Toward the ocean the land rolled away as clipped fair green, artistically bunkered and pitted.

While Masters introduced himself to the secretary, I captured a pair of caddies and practiced with my driver. The moment Masters appeared, however, he dismissed the boys, flipping them a quarter each. "We may play this course too irregularly to suit caddies," he said when we were well toward the first hole. "The secretary tells me that our friend, Mr. Mesnil Phillips, is out alone. He is wearing a white felt hat and white flannel trousers, and has no caddie."

"Because this is Thursday we probably won't have any difficulty locating him." I said. "Not many matches play during the week."

Masters scanned the broad expanse of grass. "No one in sight just now," he commented. Removing a small field-glass from the pocket of his coat he swept the circle. At a point southwest from where we stood the binoculars rested.

"Think I see him," he remarked. "He's up beyond, probably playing the second nine."

"What will we do, cut in behind him?" I asked.

"No, not yet. We'll play the second. That doubles parallel to the way he's shooting. All I want to do is to keep him in sight all of the time. When I am playing, you keep your eyes on him." At the moment all I could distinguish was a white speck, far off in the direction Masters indicated, but as we went on, the two courses converged, nearing the ocean. Fifteen minutes later we could follow the man's actions without glasses.

AS he played along, I saw him stop two or three times and study the landscape before him, as if in doubt as to which club to play. Always he dubbed his shots, however, for as he approached the fifteenth green, I saw him use his mashie three times, yet the man did not look like a beginner. He was lean and bronzed from the sun, and he possessed an easy, certain swing that spoke of long practice.

He acted sincerely disgusted after his last mashie shot. Throwing down his club he unbuckled the strap of the pocket on his bag and drew out another ball. Dropping this in the approximate position of his last shot he again faced the green.

He was still angry, apparently, for when he addressed the ball he swung on it with entirely unnecessary strength. The gutta- percha sphere mounted in a perfect arch, soaring high above the flag. It floated far over the rough beyond toward a little clump of oaks, beside which an employee was raking up leaves.

"Fore!" I heard Phillips call sharply. The man in overalls started as the ball narrowly missed his head, impinging among the tree-trunks beyond. Masters got so excited at this that he holed out a putt he never could have made in a conscious moment. As the two of us picked up our balls and scored, we saw the employee gaze about him, and then recover the ball that had so nearly hit him. He did not throw it back as we expected, but dropped it into his pocket. Phillips paid no attention to this, but calmly sought his first ball, and played up to the green.

Though we watched him feverishly as we teed off on the third hole, he never made any sign that he had seen the theft. He holed out and then teed off on the sixteenth, playing directly away from us.

"Didn't care much about eighty-five cents!" I commented, knowing that the incident had some bearing on the case, but willing to let Masters give me the correct version, when it pleased him.

"That ball was worth quite a bit more than that," said my friend, hurrying on. "Yes, I imagine Phillips would have spent a long time looking if he had really lost it." His tone was excitedly triumphant, and I eyed him inquiringly.

HE wasted no time in explanations, however. As soon as we had a bunker between us and the man in overalls, Masters stopped. "You stay right here!" he commanded. "Take a good rest and watch that employee. If he does anything with that ball, you follow the ball. Don't let them know you're watching, either, or it will all be spoiled!"

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"Going in to interrogate the secretary again," he answered shortly, and swung away into his long, graceless stride.

I watched him depart with mixed feelings. I was going to miss luncheon and anticipated a dull, hot time out in the sand-pit, watching our quarry; still, if Masters really was only going to see the club secretary, I was nearer to the action than he would be. I poked my head out beside the bunker, and looked for the man in overalls.

I was just in time. He was making his way down toward the beach, having deserted his rake. In a moment the bank would have shut him off from my view. I seized the ball I had been playing with and hurled it with all my strength toward the clump of trees. It bounced into the rough, and I hurried after it, seizing the first club that came to hand.

Using this as an excuse, I approached the edge of the bank. The man in overalls was looking straight out over the bay, seemingly interested in the white stone lighthouse two miles out to sea. As bad luck would have it I tiptoed that instant upon a dry stick. At the snap which resulted the man in overalls whirled about. I did my best to register absorption in the business of finding my ball, but out of the tail of my eye I saw him glowering at me. A second later he strode up the hill.

"Are you a member of this club?" he demanded, approaching me.

"No, a guest," I replied, assuming as innocent an expression as I could summon.

"Who introduced you?" His tone was curt and aggressive, and his words left me at a total loss. Jigger had not mentioned the member through whom we had obtained the right to play.

"Mr.—er—Smith," I rejoined hesitatingly. "Did you see a ball come over here?" I stamped about in the long grass, hoping to divert his attention.

His expression grew blacker, and I saw him glance hastily over his shoulder. "Mr. Smith died last month!" he growled, and a shiver danced down my spine. Could there be only one Smith in the club?

"Harry Smith is the one I mean," I explained.

"There ain't any Harry Smith!" he retorted. "Now you get out, and get out quick!" He extended a muscled arm in the direction of the gateway, and came toward me.

"Now see here, my man," I began in an attempt to be dictatorial. It did not work, however. He dived for a hold on my collar and made me duck to avoid him. Seeing there was to be no other way out of it I brought my mashie niblick down upon the crown of his head. It was not a hard blow, as I had no intention whatever of killing him, but he sank to the ground without a word. I examined him hastily, but could not tell for certain whether or not I had fractured his skull.

THE far-away throbbing of a marine engine caused me to look up. Midway between the distant lighthouse and the shore a white chip of a motorboat was dancing on the rollers. It was headed in my direction, and as I gazed, the idea flashed through my mind that a connection might exist between my victim and the little craft. I thought immediately of the golf ball, and feverishly explored the pockets of his overalls for this.

The moment I had it in hand, however, I knew that there was something peculiar about it. The sphere was less than one third the normal weight of a ball! I turned it over, examining the surface. Sure enough, a curved line was distinguishable where a flap had been fastened down with rubber adhesive. My penknife soon sliced through this, exposing the hollow core. The interior of the ball was literally stuffed with paper!

I pulled this out and put it in my pocket, and then glanced again at the motorboat. It was approaching steadily, and I knew that in a very few minutes the occupants would be looking for the man in overalls. On impulse I turned again to him. Stripping him of the blue suit I pulled it over my golfing attire, and pulled his battered felt hat over my eyes. Then I went down to the protection of the last clump of bushes near the water's edge, and waited. I had some hope of being shielded sufficiently from the observation of those who would land to allow me to get the drop on them with my revolvers.

As they drew near, however, it became apparent that they did not intend to land at all. Keeping just outside the line of breakers they hummed along parallel to the shore. I got the idea. The golf ball would float! The next second the sphere was flying outward in a long parabola, to fall a few yards in front of the bow of the motorboat. The lone occupant dipped it out of the water deftly, waved his hand and passed on.

JUST as the ball left my hand, I heard a gasp behind me. "My heavens, Bert!" protested the voice of Masters. "You didn't give them that ball after all, did you?" He was looking up at me in genuine consternation, and I noticed that the course employee lay beside him in a crumpled position different from that in which I had left him.

Masters said nothing more for an instant; I saw that he was truly disgusted. "Here," I answered at last, unable to keep the secret longer, "are the papers that were inside the ball!" I held out the crumpled roll.

Masters pounced upon this and examined it hastily. "Bravo, Bert!" he exclaimed. "I had thought you stupid for the moment." A peculiar expression crept into his blue eyes. "Guess I won't have to explain much of this case to you," he commented. "You must have got to the bottom of it pretty well in the ten minutes I was away."

"Well," I said, "you can explain to me what you did when you got back here." And I pointed to the prostrate figure beside us.

"Killed him," rejoined Masters. "I came up just in time to see him creeping up on you with a golf club. I reached him first; that's all.

"You have the chain pretty well in hand now," he went on, changing his tone. "That golf ball goes out to Steffen Shoals lighthouse. What becomes of the message then?"

"I—I suppose they send it to Germany by wireless," I returned doubtfully.

"No. That wouldn't work long. How would you like to see the dénouement and the answer to it all at the same time?"

"Lead on!"

"Well, no hurry," he answered, smiling. "There's nothing doing till evening. I thought, as soon as I saw the way the golf ball was being passed around, that I had come to the last snarl of the chain. We'll go down now and get a boat for Block Island."

"Won't he—the chap in the boat, I mean—find out that the message has been extracted from the ball and come back for it?" I asked as we gained the clubhouse.

Masters nodded sharply. "Correct, Bert!" he said. "I'll get a posse to wait down there for him."

AT seven that evening we boarded a United States torpedo-boat destroyer at Block Island. The speedy vessel moved quietly out into the ocean and was joined by two more of the rakish gray craft. Though dusk was settling on the water, the destroyers showed no lights. At a speed which could not have been more than seven or eight knots an hour the three silent defenders crept toward Steffen Shoals. As they approached, their speed slackened still more, until it seemed that they were scarcely moving. As the tower of the lighthouse became dimly perceptible in the distance. Masters clutched my arm. "We may have to wait awhile," he said in a low tone, "but the show is due to start at any minute!"

Fifteen minutes later it did start. On the side of the lighthouse tower a steady light flashed out. This burned for perhaps ten minutes. Then it began certain gyrations that were both unaccountable and unintelligible to me, whirling about in a semicircle to the right, going back to the horizontal, going to the left twice and then continuing the dizzy whirl until I lost count entirely.

"Semaphore signals!" whispered Masters. The second he spoke three immense searchlights flared from the decks of the destroyers, throwing the ocean at the foot of the lighthouse into a light far brighter than day. Motionless, perhaps six hundred yards in front of us, I saw a grayish shape lying on the water, like an immense elongated whale come to the surface.

"A U-boat!" I cried, as Masters pushed his hand over my mouth. As it proved, there was no necessity for silence. Fifteen three- inch semi-automatic cannon, trained on the marauder, spoke almost in unison. Every second thereafter one or more of the pieces sent a shell into the splendid target.

It lasted only a minute or so, but during that time the gray back of the U-boat was kept well illuminated by the fires of bursting shells as well as by the searchlights. Huge fragments were knocked off before the commander could even think of submerging, and as I watched, deafened but thrilled to the depth of my soul, the sea monster turned on one side and sank.

Masters left me at that moment, and while the vessels were patrolling the circle he was in conference with the captain. The two joined me a half-hour later, and Masters' face was glowing. "It's really a big success, Bert!" he exclaimed. "We got one U- boat, and the captain thinks that more will call around here each day or so. They will trap every one of them!"

"But how about Mr. Mesnil Phillips and the rest of his chain of spies?" I asked.

Masters frowned. "Nobody will ever hear of them again!" he answered shortly.

End

The Later Jigger Masters Stories

The Rose Bath Riddle:  Detective Fiction Weekly,  Sep 9 to Oct 7 1933

The Stuffed Men:  Detective Fiction Weekly, Jan 20 to Feb 3 1934

The Golden Bullet:  Detective Fiction Weekly Feb 10 1934

The Death Messenger: Two-Book Detective Magazine Feb/Mar 1934

A Giant in the Swimming Pool: Detective Fiction Weekly Apr 21 1934

The Strange Scent of Murder:  Detective Fiction Weekly Jun 2 to Jun 30 1934

The Feast of Skeletons:  Detective Fiction Weekly Aug 25 1934

Dungeon of the Sun: Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 22 1934

The Golden Magnet Murders:  Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 8 to Dec 29 1934

Riddle of the Severed Finger: Detective Fiction Weekly Jan 19 1935

Terror Cave:  Detective Fiction Weekly May 25 to Jun 15 1935

The Encyclopedia Murders:  Detective Fiction Weekly May 15 1937

The Marque and Reprisal: Murders Pocket Detective Magazine Aug 1937

Fortunes of the Damned:  Double-Action Detective Oct 1940

The Exploding Men:  True Gangster Stories Jul 1941

The Fatal Furs:  True Gangster Stories Feb 1942

Ghost Hotel:  True Gangster Stories Jun 1942

_________________

Table of Contents

- 1: The October Blight
- 2: The Fiery Meteor
- 3: The Vengeance Of The Wah Fu Tong
- 4: The Red Billiard-Ball Mystery
- 5: The Miltonvale Nemesis
- 6: The Giant Footprints
- 7: The Specter At Macey's
- 8: The Affair At Steffen Shoals