Past Masters Fifty Three
Author: Various
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Another batch of short stories from newspaper and magazine sources that are in the Life + 70 public domain. I included the Willa Cather story, undoubtedly antholgised somewhere, for no other reason than my older sister's middle name is Willa, and was named after Ms Cather. There is a mixture of humour, horror, crime, and literary stories, including a story about the end of all human life, narrated by someone who is dead... 1: The Vampire Maid / Hume Nisbet 2: Devil Fish / Louis Becke 3: George, The Docker / Louis Becke 4. The Affair of the Shuteye Medium / H Bedford-Jones 5: Grear's Dam / Morl

PAST MASTERS

FIFTY-THREE

December 2021

Part 3

Produced by Terry Walker

("Pulpmeister")

Contents

1: The Vampire Maid / Hume Nisbet

2: Devil Fish / Louis Becke

3: George, The Docker / Louis Becke

4. The Affair of the Shuteye Medium / H Bedford-Jones

5: Grear's Dam / Morley Roberts

6: The Ugly Bronze and the Beautiful Wife / Anonymous

7: Cleverly Caught / John Arthur Berry

8: Four Friends and Death / C. St. John Sprigg

9: A Stranger in Arcady / J S Fletcher

10: The End of All / Nym Crinkle

11: The Best Bet / Alfred Richard Wetjen

12: Very Still Waters / F A M Webster

13: Floating Bones / F A M Webster

14: The Nomad / Robert Hichens

15: Double Birthday / Willa Cather

16: The Horror Horn / E. F. Benson

17: The Door / Henry S Whitehead

18: The Legacy Hounds / Hulbert Footner

Cumulative Index #31-53

_______________________

1: The Vampire Maid

Hume Nisbet

1849–1923

Stories Weird and Wonderful, 1900

IT WAS THE EXACT kind of abode that I had been looking after for weeks, for I was in that condition of mind when absolute renunciation of society was a necessity. I had become diffident of myself, and wearied of my kind. A strange unrest was in my blood; a barren dearth in my brains. Familiar objects and faces had grown distasteful to me. I wanted to be alone. This is the mood which comes upon every sensitive and artistic mind when the possessor has been overworked or living too long in one groove. It is Nature's hint for him to seek pastures new; the sign that a retreat has become needful.

If he does not yield, he breaks down and becomes whimsical and hypochondriacal, as well as hypercritical. It is always a bad sign when a man becomes over-critical and censorious about his own or other people's work, for it means that he is losing the vital portions of work, freshness and enthusiasm.

Before I arrived at the dismal stage of criticism I hastily packed up my knapsack, and taking the train to Westmorland, I began my tramp in search of solitude, bracing air, and romantic surroundings.

Many places I came upon during that early summer wandering that appeared to have almost the required conditions, yet some petty drawback prevented me from deciding. Sometimes it was the scenery that I did not take kindly to. At other places I took sudden antipathies to the landlady or landlord, and felt I would abhor them before a week was spent under their charge. Other places which might have suited me I could not have, as they did not want a lodger. Fate was driving me to this Cottage on the Moor, and no one can resist destiny.

One day I found myself on a wide and pathless moor near the sea. I had slept the night before at a small hamlet, but that was already eight miles in my rear, and since I had turned my back upon it I had not seen any signs of humanity; I was alone with a fair sky above me, a balmy ozone-filled wind blowing over the stony and heather-clad mounds, and nothing to disturb my meditations.

How far the moor stretched I had no knowledge; I only knew that by keeping in a straight line I would come to the ocean cliffs, then perhaps after a time arrive at some fishing village.

I had provisions in my knapsack, and being young did not fear a night under the stars. I was inhaling the delicious summer air and once more getting back the vigour and happiness I had lost; my city-dried brains were again becoming juicy.

Thus hour after hour slid past me, with the paces, until I had covered about fifteen miles since morning, when I saw before me in the distance a solitary stone-built cottage with roughly slated roof. "I'll camp there if possible," I said to myself as I quickened my steps towards it.

To one in search of a quiet, free life, nothing could have possibly been more suitable than this cottage. It stood on the edge of lofty cliffs, with its front door facing the moor and the back-yard wall overlooking the ocean. The sound of the dancing waves struck upon my ears like a lullaby as I drew near; how they would thunder when the autumn gales came on and the seabirds fled shrieking to the shelter of the sedges.

A small garden spread in front, surrounded by a dry-stone wall just high enough for one to lean lazily upon when inclined. This garden was a flame of colour, scarlet predominating, with those other soft shades that cultivated poppies take on in their blooming, for this was all that the garden grew.

As I approached, taking notice of this singular assortment of poppies, and the orderly cleanness of the windows, the front door opened and a woman appeared who impressed me at once favourably as she leisurely came along the pathway to the gate, and drew it back as if to welcome me.

She was of middle age, and when young must have been remarkably good-looking. She was tall and still shapely, with smooth clear skin, regular features and a calm expression that at once gave me a sensation of rest.

To my inquiries she said that she could give me both a sitting and bedroom, and invited me inside to see them. As I looked at her smooth black hair, and cool brown eyes, I felt that I would not be too particular about the accommodation. With such a landlady, I was sure to find what I was after here.

The rooms surpassed my expectation, dainty white curtains and bedding with the perfume of lavender about them, a sitting-room homely yet cosy without being crowded. With a sigh of infinite relief I flung down my knapsack and clinched the bargain.

She was a widow with one daughter, whom I did not see the first day, as she was unwell and confined to her own room, but on the next day she was somewhat better, and then we met.

The fare was simple, yet it suited me exactly for the time, delicious milk and butter with home-made scones, fresh eggs and bacon; after a hearty tea I went early to bed in a condition of perfect content with my quarters.

Yet happy and tired out as I was I had by no means a comfortable night. This I put down to the strange bed. I slept certainly, but my sleep was filled with dreams so that I woke late and unrefreshed; a good walk on the moor, however, restored me, and I returned with a fine appetite for breakfast.

Certain conditions of mind, with aggravating circumstances, are required before even a young man can fall in love at first sight, as Shakespeare has shown in his Romeo and Juliet. In the city, where many fair faces passed me every hour, I had remained like a stoic, yet no sooner did I enter the cottage after that morning walk than I succumbed instantly before the weird charms of my landlady's daughter, Ariadne Brunnell.

She was somewhat better this morning and able to meet me at breakfast, for we had our meals together while I was their lodger. Ariadne was not beautiful in the strictly classical sense, her complexion being too lividly white and her expression too set to be quite pleasant at first sight; yet, as her mother had informed me, she had been ill for some time, which accounted for that defect. Her features were not regular, her hair and eyes seemed too black with that strangely white skin, and her lips too red for any except the decadent harmonies of an Aubrey Beardsley.

Yet my fantastic dreams of the preceding night, with my morning walk, had prepared me to be enthralled by this modern poster-like invalid.

The loneliness of the moor, with the singing of the ocean, had gripped my heart with a wistful longing. The incongruity of those flaunting and evanescent poppy flowers, dashing the giddy tints in the face of that sober heath, touched me with a shiver as I approached the cottage, and lastly that weird embodiment of startling contrasts completed my subjugation.

She rose from her chair as her mother introduced her, and smiled while she held out her hand. I clasped that soft snowflake, and as I did so a faint thrill tingled over me and rested on my heart, stopping for the moment its beating.

This contact seemed also to have affected her as it did me; a clear flush, like a white flame, lighted up her face, so that it glowed as if an alabaster lamp had been lit; her black eyes became softer and more humid as our glances crossed, and her scarlet lips grew moist. She was a living woman now, while before she had seemed half a corpse.

She permitted her white slender hand to remain in mine longer than most people do at an introduction, and then she slowly withdrew it, still regarding me with steadfast eyes for a second or two afterwards.

Fathomless velvety eyes these were, yet before they were shifted from mine they appeared to have absorbed all my willpower and made me her abject slave. They looked like deep dark pools of clear water, yet they filled me with fire and deprived me of strength. I sank into my chair almost as languidly as I had risen from my bed that morning.

Yet I made a good breakfast, and although she hardly tasted anything, this strange girl rose much refreshed and with a slight glow of colour on her cheeks, which improved her so greatly that she appeared younger and almost beautiful.

I had come here seeking solitude, but since I had seen Ariadne it seemed as if I had come for her only. She was not very lively; indeed, thinking back, I cannot recall any spontaneous remark of hers; she answered my questions by monosyllables and left me to lead in words; yet she was insinuating and appeared to lead my thoughts in her direction and speak to me with her eyes. I cannot describe her minutely, I only know that from the first glance and touch she gave me I was bewitched and could think of nothing else.

It was a rapid, distracting, and devouring infatuation that possessed me; all day long I followed her about like a dog, every night I dreamed of that white glowing face, those steadfast black eyes, those moist scarlet lips, and each morning I rose more languid than I had been the day before. Sometimes I dreamt that she was kissing me with those red lips, while I shivered at the contact of her silky black tresses as they covered my throat; sometimes that we were floating in the air, her arms about me and her long hair enveloping us both like an inky cloud, while I lay supine and helpless.

She went with me after breakfast on that first day to the moor, and before we came back I had spoken my love and received her assent. I held her in my arms and had taken her kisses in answer to mine, nor did I think it strange that all this had happened so quickly. She was mine, or rather I was hers, without a pause. I told her it was fate that had sent me to her, for I had no doubts about my love, and she replied that I had restored her to life.

Acting upon Ariadne's advice, and also from a natural shyness, I did not inform her mother how quickly matters had progressed between us, yet although we both acted as circumspectly as possible, I had no doubt Mrs. Brunnell could see how engrossed we were in each other. Lovers are not unlike ostriches in their modes of concealment. I was not afraid of asking Mrs. Brunnell for her daughter, for she already showed her partiality towards me, and had bestowed upon me some confidences regarding her own position in life, and I therefore knew that, so far as social position was concerned, there could be no real objection to our marriage. They lived in this lonely spot for the sake of their health, and kept no servant because they could not get any to take service so far away from other humanity. My coming had been opportune and welcome to both mother and daughter.

For the sake of decorum, however, I resolved to delay my confession for a week or two and trust to some favourable opportunity of doing it discreetly.

Meantime Ariadne and I passed our time in a thoroughly idle and lotus-eating style. Each night I retired to bed meditating starting work next day, each morning I rose languid from those disturbing dreams with no thought for anything outside my love. She grew stronger every day, while I appeared to be taking her place as the invalid, yet I was more frantically in love than ever, and only happy when with her. She was my lone-star, my only joy—my life.

We did not go great distances, for I liked best to lie on the dry heath and watch her glowing face and intense eyes while I listened to the surging of the distant waves. It was love made me lazy, I thought, for unless a man has all he longs for beside him, he is apt to copy the domestic cat and bask in the sunshine.

I had been enchanted quickly. My disenchantment came as rapidly, although it was long before the poison left my blood.

One night, about a couple of weeks after my coming to the cottage, I had returned after a delicious moonlight walk with Ariadne. The night was warm and the moon at the full, therefore I left my bedroom window open to let in what little air there was.

I was more than usually fagged out, so that I had only strength enough to remove my boots and coat before I flung myself wearily on the coverlet and fell almost instantly asleep without tasting the nightcap draught that was constantly placed on the table, and which I had always drained thirstily.

I had a ghastly dream this night. I thought I saw a monster bat, with the face and tresses of Ariadne, fly into the open window and fasten its white teeth and scarlet lips on my arm. I tried to beat the horror away, but could not, for I seemed chained down and thralled also with drowsy delight as the beast sucked my blood with a gruesome rapture.

I looked out dreamily and saw a line of dead bodies of young men lying on the floor, each with a red mark on their arms, on the same part where the vampire was then sucking me, and I remembered having seen and wondered at such a mark on my own arm for the past fortnight. In a flash I understood the reason for my strange weakness, and at the same moment a sudden prick of pain roused me from my dreamy pleasure.

The vampire in her eagerness had bitten a little too deeply that night, unaware that I had not tasted the drugged draught. As I woke I saw her fully revealed by the midnight moon, with her black tresses flowing loosely, and with her red lips glued to my arm. With a shriek of horror I dashed her backwards, getting one last glimpse of her savage eyes, glowing white face and blood-stained red lips; then I rushed out to the night, moved on by my fear and hatred, nor did I pause in my mad flight until I had left miles between me and that accursed Cottage on the Moor.

____________________

2: Devil Fish

Louis Becke

1855-1913

Jerilderie Herald and Urana Advertiser (NSW) 2 July 1909

The newspaper published this story without a title. I made one up.

PACKENHAM, the skipper, and Denison, the supercargo of the Palestine, loathed Saunderson. Saunderson was the junior partner of a firm owning a fleet of South Sea trad ing vessels, of which the Palestine was one, and every two years he was sent round the islands on a tour of inspection of the various trading stations. He always picked upon the Palestine in which to make the cruise, and It was this that made them so hate the man.

Saunderson, in the first place, was aggressively pious, and always brought his harmonium with him, and played it in season and out of season, when the brig was at anchor; at sea he was always too ill. In the second place, none of the traders liked him— because he insisted upon their letting native teachers have whatever goods they wanted at 25 per cent less than the 'lay' natives. Thirdly, he was a fearful bore, a great intermeddler with other people's affairs, and was always getting himself into trouble over his ofllciousness, and then blaming Denison; thought he knew everything under the sun, especially about the native customs and the South Seas generally; believed himself to be a proficient Polynesian linguist, owing to his having made two voyages, each of three months' duration; and was always hinting that super cargoes were not a necessity— in fact, he was, as Denison in his wrath one day told him, 'a confounded, fatuous, muddling fat-head, and a nuisance to have to put up with on a trading vessel.'

Saunderson wanted the firm to sack Denison for this, but the senior partner wouldn' t have it, for Denison was too valuable a man to lose; but the firm wrote him a formal letter, and asked him to apologise to Mr Saunderson in writing. He replied by post and registered the letter.

Dear Sirs,

I am in receipt of yours of even date requesting me to send a written apology to Mr Alexander Saunderson. I beg' respectfully to inform you, in reply thereto, that I will see Mr Alexander Saunderson hanged. before I send him an apology.

Yours obediently,

Thomas Denison,

Supercargo

Brig Palestine.

Then the matter dropped, and Saunderson one day came on board in Sydney to make his third trip, bringing with him his harmonium. He shook hands with Denison, and said he hoped that they would get on better together this time. He was a forgiving sort of idiot, and to show that he bore Denison no ill-will, gave him a book called 'Daily Thoughts for Dally Needs'— eminently suitable for a rum and gin-selling supercargo in the South Sea trade.

The supercargo said he was touched, and would read the book on Sundays.

'And look here, Saunderson,' he added, 'we ought to get on very well together, but you are such a blundering ass, and think you know more than anyone else. Now, I have been 15 years supercargoing all over the Pacific, and you can't teach me my business. And you ought to remember that I saved you from being murdered by Commander Muddle of the Badger, when you let a dynamite cartridge drift alongside his ship, and nearly blew her up. Heavens! I shall never for get the awful bang, and the fearful oaths Muddle used when he knocked you over the wharf into the water. I told you that you would have an accident, but you wouldn't listen to me, as usual, and so nearly sank one of Her Majesty's gun boats. Now didn't you?'

Saunderson's fat face twitched and he shuddered. He could never forget that awful day.

'Then you are always interfering with me and the natives, instead of minding your own business— which is to overhaul the traders' books. You think you can speak Samoan and Tahitian and Fijian, but you only know enough to make a blazing fool of yourself, and say things to the chiefs and their women-folk that are fearfully insulting, and make the women bolt.'

Saunderson protested. He only wanted to be polite, he said.

'Ah, just so, but you do just the other thing, and then the women go and tell the missionaries of the shocking, awful things you say to them. In fact, you have a fearful name in some of the Islands.'

Saunderson looked incredulous, but Denison went on summing up and in a few minutes Saunderson's self-assertion gave way, and he promised to be careful in future.

'Then there is another thing you've done, which is losing the firm a lot of money, and turned the traders against you to a man— and some of 'em are very religious men, although they don't show it.'

Saunderson's dignity was hurt this time—

'I try to save money for the firm, not lose it,' he said, with lofty asperity. 'Please explain.'

'Why, the idiotic rule you have enforced by which all our traders must sell any of their goods to the native teachers at 25 per cent less than to the rest of the people. Now, Saunderson, I known you are a religious man, and would not knowingly lend yourself to anything improper, and although you and I have often quarrelled, I have a p-rpiit respect for you as an endelavoring Christian. You must rescind that rule, which is demoralising to the native teachers in particular and the other natives in general, and has made three of our traders— Maccabe, Oliphant and Black Sam— take to drink, beat their wives and children, and behave scandalously, and if I were you I should feel that I had done a very wicked thing. For every blow those men inflict upon their poor wives, for every time they get drunk, for all the fearful things they see in the horrid visions of delirium tremens, you, Saunderson, are responsible.'

Saunderson opened his mouth in astonishment, and Denison went on.

'You see, native teachers are not saints, though they do their best to look like 'em. Now, this is what has happened since you made your precious rule— any native who wants to buy anything from the trader goes to the native teacher, and gets a written order from him, planks it down, and the poor, struggling trader has to let him have what he wants at 25 per cent of the proper price. See! It's all your doing, Saunderson— it's encouraging dishonesty, lying, drunkenness and general immorality and—'

'I'll stop it,' said Saunderson hastily, and he there and then wrote out 42 notices to 42 individual traders, cancelling the rule whereby the smug native teachers obtained their goods cheaply from the exasperated traders. Denison went on deck and told Packenham of the good work he had done, and Packenham nodded approval as he chewed his cigar.

'I think, Pack,' said the supercargo, 'that we won't have so much trouble with him this time. I have descended to low flattery whilst I was impressing upon him what thundering ass he is. And I've told the steward to watch his chance and smear some butter over the internal and internal anatomy of that cursed harmonium. In two days there will be swarms of cockroaches inside the beastly thing, and in a week it will be done for, and only fit for a packing case.'

SAUNDERSON behaved very well for the next two weeks. He was employed in trying to repair the harmonium, which the cockroaches had devastated; and Denison, to show his sympathy, made phosphorus paste to destroy the vermin, and helped Saunderson to paint the interior of the. instrument with it, well knowing it would never groan but its dismal tunes any more.

Then one day Saunderson borrowed an accordion from a native sailor, and found that it suited his voice 'for sacred music,' and the Palestine became a floating hell of discord— instrumentally and socially, for Denison and Packenham made things unpleasant for the crew, and the mate complained of being deprived of his sleep by Saunderson's 'music' when It was his watch below.

And then Denison and Saunderson again quarrelled, and the former said that if deadly mutiny occurred, it would be caused by Saunderson and his accursed accordion and his harrowing hymns, and that the mate was a dangerous man with lunacy in his family!

Saunderson became his old offensively pompous self again, and inquired if Denison understood their relative positions. Immediately after supper he brought out his accordion and began to sing 'Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,' and Denison left the cabin, went forward, and returned with Jack, the ship's dog, a huge Newfoundland, which always howled so dismally at music of any. kind that Packenham would not allow the native seamen to play upon anything but Jews' harps. Denison tied the dog up beside the open sky light, and in. three minutes Saunderson's vocal and instrumental efforts were drowned in Jack's agonised howls and weird, awful groans.

Then Saunderson stopped and went to bed.

'We have the bulge On him now,' said Denison to the mtfte. 'Whenever he touches that infernal accordion, I'll bring along the other vocalist and tie him up.'

One day the Palestine reached Apiang Island, in the Gilbert group, and on account of it falling a dead calm, anchored off the entrance to the lagoon. Just inside the passage was the American mission ship Morning Star, also at anchor, and with a lot of missionaries and their wives on board. Saunderson at once went off to her, and stayed to dinner with the reverend gentlemen. He returned, babbling about the Morning Star being an ideally 'happy ship'— the captain and officers were so kind and gentle to the crew, etc., etc.

Then he informed Denison, with a triumphant look, that he had bought another harmonium. It was destined for a mission station, but Saunderson had begged so hard to buy it that the boss missionary r»on con fori ocnn^iallv n« tlioro u/orP
several others on board, all intended for various mission houses. So Saunderson said that he would give a dona tion of 25 dollars to the mission fund. It was to be sent on board in the morning. Then he took 125 dollars in gold out of the ship's safe, and went off beamingly to have a little music with his new friends. He was so radiantly happy, and so ready to show that he wanted to be friends again with them, that Packenham and Denison unbent, and all three had drinks together— Saunderson taking ginger ale.

'This is a pretty "do," ' said Denison gloomily to the skipper, after Saunderson had gone.

'But we have the dog,' said Packen ham, thoughtfully, as he pulled his grizzled moustache. Denison brightened up.

About 3 o'clock in the afternoon one of the hands of the Palestine, who was aloft, saw two huge sea-rays cruising about the ship, and the mate and Denison had a tub of whale-line, a harpoon, and lance tumbled into the whaleboat, and, with five native seamen, started off in pursuit.

Now, the gigantic ray of the mid Pacific island is an ugly and dangerous customer to tackle by inexperienced men, for it has a trick of suddenly leaping out of the water and descending upon a boat, like a falling brick wall, destroying the boat and drowning the occupants. Sometimes it does this when a harpoon is in its back and it is enraged; sometirnes it does it out of pure, unadulterated devilry.

It is a monstrous creature, sometimes 20ft. or more in width from wing to wing, and with a bony tail of 10ft in length, armed, at the junction with the hideous body, with a fearful, closely-serrated barb as long as a bayonet. Native canoes always give it a wide berth, but the traders occasionally kill it for the sake of the oil its liver contains. Both the mate and Denison had killed many of these 'devil-fish,' as they are called, and thoroughly understood how to do it.

Ten minutes after leaving, the ship they came within striking distance of one of the monsters, which was cruising to and fro In the passage; and the mate hove his iron into the creature's back. It at once 'sounded' (dived) and made off at a terrific rate seaward, dragging the boat, with oars a-peak, after it. In a few minutes it burst upward again, and then leapt clean out of the water; falling back with a mightly splash, but the whale line had been eased on the moment the great bull-like head appeared, and though the long, snaky tail swept round and round with savage fury it could not tear out the harpoon.

'We've got him now, Meredith,' said Denison, 'but let him have a bit of a run before we give him the lance.'

UNDER the awning spread over the after-deck of the Morning Star, were the missionaries, their wives, the captain, and Saunderson, all deeply Interested in the scene— the boat with oars still a peak, flying over the calm surface of the sea, Denison aft at the steer-oar, and Meredith standing up in the bows, lance in hand.

'Regular whaler style,' remarked the captain of the missionary ship— himself an ex-whaler skipper.

'Oh, but it must be real dangerous,' cried a pretty little lady, 'Is it not, Mr Saunderson?'

Saunderson smiled and shrugged his shoulders, and replied that there was nothing in it. He began to feel annoyed that his new friends were more interested in watching the scene than in him self, and mentally blamed Denison.

'Could you do it?' inquired Mrs Brookes— the pretty lady.

'Oh, yes, I have often killed one of those brutes,' he repied unblushingly, for he really had speared several skate in Loch Ryan. 'If there Is another one about to-morrow I'll show you how I do it.'

Meanwhile the mate and Denison had hauled up the big ray, and given it the coup-de-grace with the lance, and signalled to the Palestine to send a second boat to help to tow It to the brig.

SOON after breakfast on the following morning, Packenham and Denison went on shore to see the local trader. Saunderson remained on board, for he was waiting for the harmonium. The dead calm still prevailed, and the sun shone upon an oily, glassy sea. Meredith, the mate, was leaning over the rail smoking his pipe, when he happened to notice the 'wings' of a devil-fish flapping out of the water, half a cable length away. He pointed them out to Saunderson, and remarked that it was the mate of the one that he and Denison had killed on the preceding day, and that It was seeking its missing, companion. .

'I think I'll go and kill the beast, Mr Meredith,' said Saunderson airily, 'will you mind making ready one ot the boats and putting all the things into it— the harpoons and lances, and all that is wanted. Hurry up, please, as I want to }'?-  be back here in time for my harmonium.'

Meredith stared at him blankly, and then observed that it was a 'cow' devil- fish, bereft of its mate, and very dangerous to tackle. 'But, of course, I'll with you, sir, and instead of putting an iron into her, we'll settle her with the bomb gun.'

Saunderson at once became Alexander Saunderson, Esquire.

'Mr Meredith, prepare , the boat with all the necessaries. I am killing this devil-fish, and I do not require either your services or a bomb gun. Do you understand?'

'Certainly, sir,' and Meredith, with a great, joy in his heart, yelled out to the deck:—

'Hands to man port 'whaler. Line-tub, harpoons, and lances. Look alive!'

In a few minutes' the boat was speeding over the water toward the devil-fisli, Saunderson steering, whilst one of the five natiye seamen bent the line on to the harpoon-pole. Then the man came aft; and Saunderson went for'ard, and picked up the harpoon— a weapon he had never before handled in his life. The five natives, however, did not know this, or they would not have gone with him. They knew that he was a fool but never dreamt how great a one.

As he looked ahead he saw that his harmonium was being lowered into a  boat alongside the missionary ship, and it was followed by six of the missionaries, whom Saunderson had invited to come on board the Palestine; and on the quarter-deck were a number of ladies, among whom he recognised pretty Mrs Brookes. He waved his hand to them, and there was a responding flutter of handkerchiefs. They were all looking at him. It made him feel mighty proud.

On went the boat till within 20 fathoms of the great fish, whose huge, horny back and bull head were showing above water. It was moving very slowly through the glassy water. Saunderson stood erect, disdaining to brace himself against the knee-thwart, leaning back slightly he poised the harpoon.

'Wait a bit, wait a bit,' yelled the steersman, as he swerved the boat's head a little, 'do you want to be killed? Don't heave until you are well abreast of the head. Ah, you big fool!'

Saunderson 'hove' as the man was speaking— hove the harpoon as if he were throwing a cricket ball, and the harpoon, and pole as well, fell flat upon the bull-like head, and rolled off, and the next instant the startled fish swung her fearful tail out of the water, caught Saunderson a blow in the abdominal region, and sent him flying overboard, as if he had been shot out of a catapult.

And then, at the same time, as he splashed into the water, the line began to run out at lightning speed, for the devil-fish had in some way fouled it, and was carrying it away.

The moment the steersman saw Saunderson go overboard, he sprang in after him; and succeeded in getting hold of the man, who was half-full of water. And away went the boat, for when the steersman jumped to save Saunderson, the line in some way slipped off the loggerhead and in two minutes the whole 129 fathoms had whizzed out through the stem notch.

Whilst the rest of the boat's crew were engaged in picking up the bulky figure of the unconscious Saunderson, the devil-fish was making a furious course across the lagoon, every now and then leaping out of the water, and bending herself into weird curves in her frantic efforts to clear herself of the whale-line and the harpoon, which was banging her tail.

No doubt her passions were aroused, and when her great goggle eyes discerned right ahead of her a boatload of people, the creature went for it with righteous indignation and deadly intent. Folding her great bat-like wings under her body, she bumped herself into the shape of an outspread but submerged umbrella, and then, with a torrent of foam pouring from all round her, she leaped into the air, flattened out, and fell with a sickening crash upon the boatload of missionaries and Saunderson's harmonium. Then, still dragging the line, she made off to the sea, feeling she had done her duty and got even with  the people who had killed her husband and insulted herself,

By the time the missionaries and their boat's crew had come to the surface, and the harmonium had gone to the bottom, and whilst the dreadful screams of  the ladies on board the Morning Star were resounding across the lagoon, Saunderson's boat had come to tne rescue, and saved everyone, and the reverend gentlemen— who thought that they had been struck by a thunderbolt— were taken to the missionary ship, and their injuries, which were slight, attended to.

Saunderson couldn't attend the thanksgiving service held on board the mission ship on the following day. He was too miserable with a fractured rib, and did not even show any grief when Denison told him that his harmonium was at the bottom of the lagoon.

'And by rights, Saunderson,' said Denison, kindly but firmly, 'you ought to be there with it. It is certainly true that Providence spares the innocent infant, the drunken man, and the idiot. Now here is your own 'Daily Thoughts for Daily Needs.' Perhaps you'll find something in it to bear you up in your knowledge that by your infernal vanity you nearly caused the deaths of six good, pious clergyman, four A.B.'s, and an officer, and have lost me a whale-line and harpoon, that cost altogether $60— and, I, I must remind you, I am a poor man.'

__________________________

3: George, The Docker

Louis Becke

Colac Herald (Vic) 3 Jan 1908

EVERY THIRD Sunday afternoon for many months George called upon me, a smile upon his sun-tanned face, and his pockets bulging out with large plugs of the best American leaf tobacco, boxes of English wax matches, and four bottles of genuine Dublin stout— all smuggled goods, and always very acceptable to me. I encouraged him for many reasons; one was that I could not smoke the filthy Government-made stuff that French people call tobacco, and for which you pay eighty centimes for two ounces (and English or American tobacco is 15 francs per pound); secondly, he got me the stout for forty centimes the bottle, and my thief of a epicier charged me a franc; thirdly, he was a hard-working docker at the Quai Renault, had a sick wife and three children, and deserved sympathy and encouragement, and I approve of smuggling when I directly benefit by it; fourthly; George, who could speak good English, was always willing and eager to teach me scarifyingly wicked French expressions to be used upon cabmen, hotel touts, and such people.

George was an out-and-out Radical, a follower of M. Combes, and hated the clergy with a holy fervor that occasionally led him into trouble and an interview with a juge de paix.  And then, he had many estimable qualities; he was a good, honest fellow, a patriotic Frenchman, was fairly well educated, had a fat, hearty laugh that did one good to hear, and only got reasonably elevated on fête days, like most of his fellow-workmen.

George Durand had not always been a laborer on the Quai Renault at six francs a day; as he was now, at the age of fifty-two.

One hot Saturday afternoon in August, as I was half-dozing in my study chair and looking' at the shipping in Havre-Roads, I heard George's well-known footsteps, and presently Rosalie, my servant, came upstairs and told mw that M'sieur Durand was in the dining-room; also that M'sieur Duraud was beautifully dressed, and (here she showed her white teeth in a large smile) he  was very merry.

"Ask him to come up," I said.

George came up, beaming with smiles, and just a-little bit "rocky." He was wearing a new tailor-made frock suit, a top hat, and gloves, and carried a cane. I started; then, rising, made a profound bow. He laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, then, as he sat down, became suddenly grave.

" You are alone?" he asked, in French.

"Yes, George," I replied in English, "everyone but Rosalie is out."

"Ah, well; we shall not be disturbed; but let me close the door— that bonne Rosalie is a Bretonne, and may hang about and listen, and then tell her priest what she may hear. I trust no woman, and least of all a woman of Brittany— who is priest-ridden before she is born."

He had come to tell me news, great news.

After four years of waiting the lawsuit had been decided in his favor, and he and his wife and children would now leave the squalid rooms in the Rue Lamy and a go away to his own native place— Sivenay, near St.Nazaire: Ah! he had wonderful luck this week!

On the very day that the good news came from Paris he went as usual to the Quai Renault, and found that that there was no work for him that day. And he had had no breakfast, and there were but ten sous in the house to buy  food for four people.

"Why did you ndot come to us, George ?"

His brawny hand pressed my knee for a moment or two as he turned his face awavy: Then he resumed, speaking half in French, half in English.

Well, he and his comrade. Michel walked about the docks looking for work, and presently saw a crowd gathered about  a small cargo steamer that was going to Cherbourg, and there was much shouting and excitement, and he heard English voices crying-out, "Oh, d—— you for a pack of diots!"

It was a motor-car— a grand, superb motor-car, large luxurious, but heavy— so heavy, that it had stuck in the middle of the gang-boards, which had sagged) into a loop, and were cracking. In a few minutes more the car would have been in the dock.  Everyone was yelling out advice and contrary orders, and one of the Englishmen stamped with rage and cried "Good Lord! there go eight hundred pounds and no one knows what to do!"

Then he (George) suddenly caught sight of a big, half-empty coal barge lying a little distance away, and he and Michel jumped into the dock; swam to the barge, cast off her moorings, and managed to got her under the gang:dy just as it broke, and the car dropped into a barge, almost undamaged.

"Were the Englishmen pleased?" I asked.

George's eyes twinkled, and, leaning back in his clair, he kicked his heels together.

"Monsieur! They give me one note for one hundred francs, and Michel two twenty franc pieces, and shake hands, and, oh! speak very nice to me. They are rich. Father is colonel in Army English, India. Son is captain. Three lady, one old, two young."

"I am glad you have been so lucky, George. I am glad because of your wife. She is a good woman, and has suffered long!"

George bent his head.

"Yes, she is a good woman. I will tell you something presently... Monsieur,  I go home with my hundred francs. I stop not at any café, but  Michel bought half a litre of cognac, and we drank it in an allee off the street, and ate some biscuits. Then, as I came, to the Rue Lamy, I met the postman. He gave me a registered letter. Here, read it. Mon Dieu! It is wonderful! Monsieur Combes is a grand man! Only for him I should now be working on the quai for six francs a day. Read it. My mother willed all this 37,000 francs to the priests— the robbers, the thieves, because I, her only son, was accused of killing one of the money-grubbers. Ah, Combes is a great man! Only for him I should now be as dirty, ill-clad, and downhearted as I was two weeks ago. The priests can no longer rob the people. Combes is sweeping away the fat monks and the nuns, and will spare only the Little Sisters of the Poor. They are good women."

"George," I said with a smile, "the priests seem to have treated you badly. Never mind. Your good star has risen now. So we will have a bottle of Sillery sec, and drink to the health of Monsieur Combes and ourselves, and confusion to the enemies of France."

Opening the Sillery, we repeated the toasts amid more laughter, my collie dog Russ joining in with vociferous barking.

George put his hands in his breast-pocket and brought forth a box of chocolates.

"Voila! bon chien, pour toi!" And he emptied the contents of the box upon the carpet.

Footnote: Émile Combs was the French radical statesman, Prime Minister from 1902-1905 who brought about the legal separation of Church and State in France in 1905.

___________________

4. The Affair of the Shuteye Medium

H Bedford-Jones

1887-1949

Weird Tales, March 1941

IN RECOUNTING the singular affair of the shuteye medium, and my final appearance as a professional corpse, I desire to make it clear that I have no belief in ghosts or in the occult powers of any professional spirit guide. This understood, on with the tale!

Doctor Roesch and I dropped into a thriving western city, got settled comfortably in a small hotel, and ran our usual ad in the local papers:

PERSONAL: It is possible to simulate death, as I can demonstrate to interested parties. Endorsement of medical profession, absolute discretion. All work confidential but must be legal and subject to closest investigation. News Box B543.

Our determination to stick to legal, ethical work was real. We had run close to the edge in the case of the miraculous healer's daughter, and wanted no more of it.

Roesch had developed many improvements in our technique. My peculiar physical attributes, having my heart on the right side in combination with a barrel chest and a very slow pulse, were not enough to trick any careful examiner into thinking me dead; but by a judicious combination of drugs that put me to sleep, Roesch was able to induce all the symptoms of death. The one thing he could not get around was the mirror test for breathing.

However, he could manage this by being in charge of the act himself, as he must be. I would trust no one else to administer the injection that brought me out of the trance.

Our advertisement brought the usual run of answers from curiosity seekers and crooks, which I discarded. Then came one of a different sort. It read:

Gentlemen:

I believe you can fit into my plans, which are entirely legal. In fact, they are philanthropic. You can assist me in saving unfortunate people from the trickery of a scoundrel. If you can convince me that you can do as you boast, and are honest, suppose we get together.

Yours truly,

John McWhirt.

I tossed this letter over to Roesch.

"Sounds interesting, Bronson," he said when he had read it. "But when a Scotchman claims to be a philanthropist, you want to keep your eye peeled!"

"Look him up," I said, "and get him here this afternoon if he's on the level. Tell him our price first."

Our price was high, naturally; I was not risking my life in any piker's game. Roesch disappeared, and did not return until lunch time. When we settled down over our meal, he disgorged his information.

"McWhirt's coming around to look us over, Bronson. Canny is the word for him, too; but he's straight as a string, financially good, and not a local man. He's about fifty and was a manufacturer of chemical goods in Chicago. Now he's retired."

All this whetted my curiosity, for our prospect had done little talking. When McWhirt was brought up to our hotel room an hour later, he was still slow to talk. He was a brisk, red-haired, hard-eyed man, cautious but to my notion extremely honest.

"Gentlemen, prove to me that you can do as you say," he told us. "Then I'll put my cards on the table; not before."

I had no hesitation in trusting him. I gave him ocular evidence of my peculiar physique, then went on to tell exactly how I played the part of a corpse. He shot in shrewd questions; he knew all about drugs.

"Sounds good," he said. "Hm! A bit of atropine, to dry up all secretions and stop saliva or sweating. Yes, antipyrin will cause coldness of skin and finger-tips, and blue lips—yes, yes. But breathing does not stop."

I told him how Roesch managed the mirror test himself, and showed how, by practice, I was able to breathe "via diaphragm" without moving the upper chest, forcing the lungs down instead of up and sideways. He nodded.

"I see. I believe you're honest enough; so here are my cards. Do you gentlemen know what a shuteye medium is?"

We shook our heads, and he went on.

"It's slang for a fake spirit worker who, in one way or another, comes to believe in his own powers. When this belief seizes such a person, he is overcome by remorse for his own rascality. In nearly every instance, he becomes a suicide. Now, here's the advertisement of a local spirit-worker. Look it over."

Unfolding a copy of a local newspaper, he pointed to the grandiloquent advertisement of one Professor St. Edward. The professor ran the usual religious racket, it seemed, thus avoiding all licenses or fees and other legal impedimenta; he was in direct contact with the spirit world, not to mention the Almighty.

"I'll have nothing to do with any such racket," I said. "He's a friend of yours?"

"We have never met, Mr. Bronson," said McWhirt frigidly. "He does not know me; but I know him. For five years I've been on the trail of this crook; and now I've got him."

His cold, implacable manner was impressive. He went on to explain.

It seemed that McWhirt and his wife, years ago, had lost an only child. Mrs. McWhirt had fallen under St. Edward's mystic spell, endeavoring to communicate with her lost child as so many grief-stricken parents do. St. Edward had kidded her along and taken her money in chunks. Then, one day, she learned he was an absolute fraud; the shock killed her.

Ever since, McWhirt had been gunning for the professor, and had now located him, and meant to get him hard.

He knew all about the quarry. St. Edward was doing very well here, pulling off miracles right and left, and had come to believe implicitly in his own occult powers. As McWhirt explained it, this was a psychological phenomenon which frequently affected such fake workers in the spirit world.

St. Edward was actually good, as McWhirt grimly admitted. It seemed that our client, using another name, had joined the "congregation." Now he intended to get into personal contact with the professional and play the part of a sucker with money.

"We'll be bosom friends inside two days," he went on, and prodded his finger at me. "You come along and pretend to fall for his stuff. Roesch, you likewise. The man drinks like a fish. The better class of people here are down on him, and so are the local churches, on account of his travesty of religion; but he's too smart to be touched legally."

"Then what do you intend?" I demanded. He shook his head.

"I don't know yet. I'm building on the vague idea of using your trick death; give me a few days to think it over. I'll pay half now, the other half when you agree to fall in with whatever plan I think up. You'll be worth it, if my hunch is right."

It sounded fair enough and it was fair enough. We agreed, on condition that his plan meet with my approval; and he wrote his check on the spot.

ROESCH and I attended Professor St. Edward's "services" that night. Doc Roesch had dabbled in the fake occult and knew how many of the trick "manifestations" were produced; but we both got the surprise of our lives.

St. Edward was a burly, uneducated, rough and red-faced racketeer with all the big heart of a wall-eyed pike; but he had the gift of the gab, a convincing personality, and the gall of a canal-horse. The way he milked the suckers was a crime. It was pitiful to see what implicit confidence some of those poor men and women had in him, and how he abused it. His seance produced spirits, voices, table-talk or anything else that was wanted.

Yet he had something on the ball, something we could not understand. He was the worst sort of a faker—and he was something more.

His "church" was a small hall, with platform and chairs. After his religious rigmarole ended, the seances took place in a large, bare back room dimly lit by invisible lighting. Any one could see that no apparatus of any kind was used.

"Just the same, he used it," said Roesch. "Illusion's a great thing. But how did he pull all that spirit talking. He got my father, who spoke of things I alone knew; it was no trick. The man never saw or heard of me. He did the same thing with other folks there."

"Illusion's a great thing," I repeated mockingly. "You fell for it."

In my heart, however, I felt this was not the answer.

Roesch, who had a genius for detective work, devoted himself for the next three days to running around town, finding out what he could do about the professor. I took it easy. We both stuck to the nightly seances, and witnessed things past comprehension, mixed up with undiluted fakery. The only explanation was that the professor had a number of stooges planted in his circle; yet the people who got messages or manifestations or even materializations were not, to my way of thinking, stooges. They were too really and profoundly affected.

On the fourth day, McWhirt came to the hotel and we held a conference. I had not asked Roesch about his findings, but now I did so, saying frankly that before going ahead I wanted to know where we stood. I did not intend to victimize any innocent man.

"No danger," said the doctor grimly. "I've uncovered a lot of stuff, although not with legal evidence. St. Edward has swindled no end of people in this town. He pays high police protection and can't be touched ordinarily. His victims are usually women. He owns half a dozen pieces of property taken over from his victims; here's a list of it," and he laid down a typed paper. "Complaints have been made against him and dismissed for lack of evidence. The chief suckers haven't squawked, of course; they never do. At the same time, other folks swear by him. We've seen how he goes after the coin like a bird-dog—yet a lot of people think they get their money's worth."

I nodded and looked at McWhirt, who had a dour gleam in his eye.

"What d'you think of him, Mac?"

"What Roesch has said, is true. My belief is that the man does have some natural talent in the occult direction, and doesn't hesitate to mix it with really raw work, the lowest sort of trickery. He has an avid cupidity for money, and stops at nothing to get it."

I nodded again. "My scruples are removed. Have you got a plan?"

"Yes. First, I have a present for you." McWhirt produced a box which held a small pocket mirror with a glass in each side. "You told me that the only danger to your little trick of simulating death, lay in someone trying the mirror test, which would reveal that you were still breathing. Well, I know a few tricks myself," he added, smiling. "One side of this mirror is treated with a certain acid, the other is natural. Try it."

I did so. The natural side was clouded by my breath; the treated side was not. An exclamation burst from Roesch as he, too, tried it.

"Good lord, Bronson! This answers all our chief and last problem! With this mirror, we're safe, absolutely safe!"

"Right," said McWhirt briskly. "I thought you'd jump at it. By the way, let me make a copy of that property list, will you? Thanks. Well, here's the scheme. All three of us will gang up on the professor. We'll join his classes, we'll become ardent followers of the occult, we'll kick in with money as well to prove our devotion; I'll put up the cash needed."

McWhirt had been busy, it seemed, among reputable citizens and among the churches. There was a growing sentiment that Professor St. Edward was no credit to the city; that he was, in fact, a distinct menace.

Better business organizations would be only too glad to get rid of him, and McWhirt, guided by his insatiable desire for punishment upon this man, was providing the means.

"With your help, I'll bust him higher than Gilroy's kite," he told us. "Lend yourselves to the job for a week or two. When he goes on one of his periodic benders, then I'll strike—"

"Hold on," I broke in. "He can't pull this occult stuff when he drinks."

"You don't know him. He's better than ever at such times! Didn't I tell you he believed in his own powers? It's even more true when he's drinking heavily. Well, the plan is simple. You keel over during one of his seances. You're dead. I'll be running articles in the local papers about the danger of such seances; your death will prove it. Roesch will file a murder charge. The press and pulpits and public organizations will take up the matter and ballyhoo it to the skies— and St. Edward, blast him, will either be run out of town or into jail, or else will skip in a hurry! He'll be ruined for life as a medium; I'll see to that."

We had no objections. We were working in a good cause. But we should have known that McWhirt, being Scotch, had kept a card or two up his sleeve.

As we became more firmly established in the professor's circle, I became more aware of a peculiar thing about his racket. This was the personal angle. All the occult stuff he pulled for anyone else, even for Roesch, impressed me little. It might be real or it might be fake; I could not be certain either way, and cared less.

But he began angling for my sucker money, and I chuckled to myself. He had a queer way of getting to his point; he would announce frequently that names did not matter in spirit-land, but he would describe certain people in the audiences, for whom messages were waiting, or with whom spirits wanted to speak. It cost five dollars or more to get the works later in the seance, depending on how affluent the sucker looked.

SO, two nights in succession, he described me among others. I thought this was all a clever dodge to avoid using names which he could not know, as he did not know mine; but now I am not so sure. While I attended the seances afterward, I did not swallow the bait at first; he got his money in advance, and one had to arrange with him before the call would be answered. Watching others get results which seemed to amaze them, I got curious at last, and one night hunted up the professor before the performance began. He had a strong aroma of bourbon on his breath, but this was not important.

"Twice," I said, after bringing myself to his attention, "you've described me and said someone wanted me. I wonder if it could be my sister Kate?"

I had no such sister, of course. St. Edward rolled his eyes in a wild way he had, and spoke with unction as he saw me taking the bait. Or so I thought.

"Brother, I don't get names, I don't call names," he said. "The spirits don't take much stock in names, far as I can discover. If you want to take a chance during the seance, I'll say you're ready and you can figure results for yourself. My vibrations are strong tonight and it may be an important message. It'll cost you five bucks now, though."

I slipped him the five, and he beamed. He ran through the usual patter, adjourned the "service," and we trooped into the seance room. He was doing a trance act this evening, combined with a crystal. There were a couple of dozen in the room, including Roesch and McWhirt.

Holding hands all around, going through the usual songs and ritual, he stared intently into the crystal ball and then began to twitch. His eyes closed. His voice came in a hoarse straining manner as though he were short of breath.

"A brother is waiting," he said, and described me. "Who wants him? Who wants to speak with him? Come closer, friends, closer! Now I can see you. There are two of you. One is a man with a wart on his left cheek; I see the little finger of his right hand is gone. The other is a boy with red hair and a freckled nose. Step up, young man! Deliver your message through me. I am waiting."

He waited, and I waited, and there was a chill inside me, too. I knew who the man was, all right; the description was exact. And I knew who the boy was. St. Edward began to speak, jerkily.

"I'm your cousin; you remember me," he said, or the boy spirit said. Take your choice. "I was with our folks last night. Your mother was saying they had not heard from you in two months and she's worried. I'm worried too. You are associated in business with a man who has red hair like me, and he is holding out on you. He has no evil intentions, but you are being used by him for his own purposes. I want you to know this for your own good because we were always pals. You are in some kind of danger but I don't know just what it is, so be careful. Good-by, Art, and I'll meet you when you come over—"

The voice faded out. St. Edward went on to play the next sucker; I was through. But the woman next me, a nice motherly old soul who was in the racket for all she was worth, leaned over to me.

"Your hand's sweating," she said. "I bet it was a real message, wasn't it?"

"Sure sounded like it," I replied.

AFTER the show, Roesch and McWhirt and I met in our hotel room.

"Now, gents, pay attention," I said. My nerves were steadied by this time. "My real name, which I'm not using, and which even you, Roesch, don't know, happens to be Art. It's exactly two months since I've written my mother. That boy was the spit and image of a second cousin who died years ago; he and I were intimate friends. And, Mr. McWhirt, you're the only redheaded man I'm in business with. Are you holding out or not?"

McWhirt's blue eyes were bulging. "Lord!" he gasped. "Yes, it's a fact; I am. Nothing that's any of your business, though; I'm putting over a little deal of my own on the side."

"Then forget it," I said. "You're straight. I just wanted to clear up the facts in the case. Now, how the devil did St. Edward know all this stuff? Oh, I forgot! The man he described, with the wart and one finger off, was my uncle John . . . no mistake there. Speak up, Roesch! Did the man read my mind, to know such things?"

Roesch was anxious, McWhirt was mopping his face.

"Might be that," replied the doc "Don't ask me, Bronson!"

"That rascal has something on the ball," said McWhirt earnestly. "I told you he mixes real with false, didn't I?"

"Either," said Roesch, "you've got to accept the occult business in a gulp, or else figure it's some sort of trickery, perhaps telepathy, we don't savvy. One thing is sure, though. Remember the old lady sitting next to you in the seance, Bronson?"

I nodded. He went on quickly.

"I happened to be looking her up today. She's a sucker for sure; alone in the world and was left well off by her husband, but she's turned over most of her money to St. Edward. All she has left is a boarding house, which supports her. He's fixing to get his hands on that, next."

"Then suppose we get busy and stop his game," I said. "The thing got me jittery tonight, I don't mind saying. I'd like to get it done with."

McWhirt was brisk and assured once more. "Suits me," he said. "St. Edward is drinking, which means that for the next week he'll be on one holy binge and pulling no end of his blasted miracles. Let's set the business for Saturday night. Suit you?"

It did. This was Tuesday; we had four days to go. McWhirt meant to get the press and the pulpit stirred up, guaranteeing to have some newspaper men on hand Saturday night, and a local physician to back up the findings of Doc Roesch. It would make a big story in the Sunday papers, and he predicted that by Sunday night the professor would be finished for keeps. We discussed the details, and McWhirt departed.

Roesch gave me a queer look. "Are you in earnest about being jittery?"

"Yes," I said, and told him why. That uncle of mine, with the missing finger and the wart, had been a wanderer all over the world, and had come home to die. With him he had brought all sorts of queer plunder. I had dipped into it, and found some queer herb extract from the Peruvian jungles. Sampling this, I had died, as everyone thought, only to come alive once more when the effect wore off.

"That's what started me on the corpse racket," I concluded. "Analysis of the stuff led to the dosage I now take, on a scientific basis. Thus, my Uncle John was more or less responsible for my career as a professional corpse. You yourself never knew these details; then how could St. Edward have faked his spirit stuff with me? It was telepathy."

"I expect so," he agreed. "He pulled it out of your own mind, eh? Well, I'll now get more personally acquainted with the professor, just so he'll know a doctor is on hand when the break comes Saturday night."

THIS was essential, since Roesch had to handle me and give me the dose that would fetch me around afterward, as well as manage the details with the mortician in charge.

When we showed up next evening at the "church," St. Edward beckoned me into the back room. He had been hitting the bottle, but his potations had not impaired his occult powers.

"Glory be, young man!" said he impressively. "I'm told you had two visitors last night—of course. I know nothing of what transpires while I'm in a state of trance. Did you get your money's worth?"

"Plenty," I said. "One of the visitors gave me a swell message."

"Then you must get the other one," he went on, and I saw his little game. "You can't afford to let the matter drop, when you get such remarkable results! Shall I call your other visitor tonight?"

"No thanks, I'm satisfied," I rejoined. I had no intention of passing the time of day with my Uncle John; he had always been a rough customer. Nor would I hand the professor any more cash. "I'll stick around and make up my mind later. Right now, I want to wait."

"Well, don't pass up a sure thing!" said the professor solemnly.

"I won't," I said. "I want to be sure you're not faking it, to be honest with you."

That hurt him. He put an arm about my shoulder and almost wept with emotion.

"Young man, I used to be a sinful fraud," he said, with a hiccup. "Yes, I confess it; the ways of fraud and evil laid hold upon me and the bond is hard to break. But I have the power, understand? When my vibrations are going good, I can do anything! And some day I'll quit all the faking and stick to honest work, like I am doing with you."

I GOT away from his maundering, whiskey-sodden confidences. McWhirt was right; he believed in himself. He was a shuteye and no mistake, drinking himself into remorse for his rascality but not abandoning it.

And during these next three days, he really went to town. He did things that positively left me aghast, in the spirit line. Whether they were real or fake, I could not tell; as I said before, only the person concerned would know this. It seemed to me that the harder he drank, the more astonishing became his wizardry; and if he could nearly convince me, it may be imagined how his less skeptical devotees fell for his line.

However, there was one thing that argued against his occult power. He never tumbled to the presence of McWhirt, who was using another name, or to my game, or to the danger that threatened him. And if a master of the occult cannot divine his own peril, then what good is his racket?

During the seance that evening, the professor again described my Uncle John. He went into a frenzy; it seemed the spirit was demanding, not asking. I got up and left the seance abruptly. I really thought that St. Edward was just making a determined play for my cash, and it disgusted me.

McWhirt, during these last three days, was rapidly improving his acquaintance with the professor and flashing a good deal of money. He got manifestations every night which must have cost him heavily, and he played the sucker to perfection; but apparently none of the spirits tipped off the professor, for all was lovely.

On Saturday McWhirt lunched with us at the hotel and we checked every detail of the arrangements for the night's job.

"You may think I'm a fool, but I've got a funny feeling about this,'' Roesch said gravely, when he and I were alone again. "No question that the professor deserves all that's coming to him; but I think we've mixed into something deeper than we know."

"Yes, damn it!" I agreed. "Exactly what I feel myself, Doc. A sense of danger, as it were. I'm uneasy. Yet I know it's all imagination. You keep your eye peeled tonight."

"Trust me," he said, and I did.

Knowing to the minute how long my sleeping-potion required to work, I arranged to take it during the preliminary "services" so that it would hit me during the seance following. As evening approached, I grew nervous, which was most unusual for me. With any decent excuse I would have thrown up the job, but we had taken McWhirt's money and could not back out now.

The hall was partly filled when I drifted in. Up on the platform, McWhirt was talking with the professor. They were both pretty jovial, and it was easy to see that St. Edward had been imbibing heavily; his expansive manner told as much.

Roesch was already here. I took a seat directly behind him, so I could get rid of the bottle after swallowing the drug; if it were found on me, I might be thought a suicide. The "services" began, and St. Edward was in fine fettle, roaring and bellowing his alleged religious patter. Some of his talk was directed at me, and I saw that he seemed to have me on his mind.

I furtively uncorked the little bottle, awaited my chance, and swallowed its contents. The die was cast. No way out of it now. I passed the bottle to Roesch, and relaxed.

It was an unusually large circle that trooped into the back room for the seance that evening. A couple of newspaper men were planted in the crowd, and I knew McWhirt had others waiting outside, with police handy. Everybody held hands, and the usual ceremonies of prayer and singing went ahead. I was seated directly opposite the professor.

The invisible lighting was dim, but objects were perfectly clear. St. Edward went into his trance, and about the same time I felt the drug beginning to take effect. Almost at once, the professor let out a yip and, his eyes bulging at me, began to describe me so exactly that eyes were turned upon me from all directions.

"This man," he went on, "has a visitor who insists upon delivering a message. It is a message of vital import, a message of life and death—"

That was all I remembered. They say that I just gasped and keeled over.

Now there was the devil to pay. Roesch was ready; shouting that he was a doctor, he took charge of me. At the same moment, the newspaper boys went to work, and in from the outside came others with the police. Flashlight bulbs exploded. Women shrieked; there was a rush to get away, while St. Edward sat humped over in his chair in a daze.

Thanks to McWhirt's precision and the adroitness of Roesch, who had mapped out every detail, everything went off like clockwork. The police took charge; I was pronounced dead from heart-failure, a police surgeon backing up Roesch in the matter. The professor was hauled off to jail on some trumped-up charge, and McWhirt went along to bail him out—a highly essential part of the scheme.

Since I was a stranger in town and Roesch claimed to be a friend, he was put in charge of the corpse, and the coroner was summoned to hold an inquest immediately. This was done. It was obvious that, startled and perhaps horrified by the words of St. Edward, my heart had given way. Thus, everything was neatly cleared.

A mortician, with whom Roesch had previously made arrangements, was summoned. My body was placed in the coffin he brought, then at the request of Roesch was left here until the morning; a more devoted friend than the doc never lived. He wanted to say some prayers over the corpse before it was moved, he declared.

It went off swimmingly. Everyone skipped out and the doors were shut. Then, just as Roesch was about to administer the injection that would bring me to life again, in walked St. Edward and McWhirt. They had arranged the bail quicker than expected, because there was no question of murder in the case and no real charge to be laid against the professor.

Roesch ducked for cover behind a curtain, and neither of the two men noticed him.

St Edward had a bottle in his pocket, and took a stiff pull at it before looking at the corpse. He was in a tearful, melancholic mood and mighty sorry for himself. McWhirt, said he, was his only friend on God's green footstool.

"Well, you've got plenty of spirit friends," said McWhirt, and encouraged him to take another swig, which he did. "But right now, you're in one hell of a bad spot, professor. The morning papers are going to lam you hard. You're going to need cash, and plenty of it. I hope you're well heeled?"

"No," said St. Edward. "Didn't you supply the five hundred to bail me? I can't get any money this time of night. I haven't much in the bank anyhow. I'll have to raise some on my property. I've got plenty of that."

"You won't have it long," McWhirt told him. "This man will have relatives. Sure as fate, they'll sue you and clap down on everything you own."

This was probable, and the professor sank down on a chair, wagging his head.

"All my own fault," he said mournfully. "It's a punishment brought on me because I misused the power given me! The spirits have done this thing. I had the power, and wasn't satisfied but went farther and faked results—"

"Never mind mourning about it," McWhirt said briskly. "I'll show you how you can get out of this with some cash and save your property to boot, if you'll trust me."

He went on to explain, while St. Edward finished off the bottle and listened. He had a couple of thousand cash with him. He would buy, on the spot, all the professor's property. He had deeds all made out and ready, it seemed, pre-dated a day. Thus, if and when the pinch came, the relatives of this dead man would find nothing to grab.

To the professor, it looked wonderful, a real miracle, and he said so tearfully. To Roesch, who was listening, it was a dead-give-away on McWhirt's canny scheme. He was getting all the revenge he wanted, and he was also getting some chunks of valuable property for a trifle in cash. Except for the liquor and his remorse, St. Edward would never have agreed to such a thing, naturally; but now remorse had him by the throat, stifling his reason.

"I'll do it," he sobbed out, wringing his hands. "You're my only friend. I'll sign anything, anything!"

And he did it. But McWhirt was not finished.

"Did you ever know a woman by the name of McWhirt, in Chicago?" he asked.

St. Edward looked up, wildly. "Eh? Yes, yes. Where did you hear of her?"

"Why, tonight! When you were in your trance, she spoke. She said she was an old client of yours, and you had tricked her and caused her death—"

THE professor nearly went out of his head at this, talking about the spirits and his lost power, and so forth. McWhirt stuck in his barb more deeply.

"If you've got the power," said he, "why don't you bring this dead man to life?"

"I could do it in a minute," mourned the professor, staring at the corpse and the coffin. "I could do it, sure; but now the spirits have turned against me. It's a punishment for what I've done—"

"Well, try it and see," said McWhirt, getting out one of his trick mirrors. "The man's dead— this mirror will prove it. You call on the spirits; if you've really got any power or if you ever had any, you can put breath in his body."

St. Edward groaned, but rose and stood over the coffin. McWhirt tried the trick side of the mirror, showing that I was really dead, as the glass remained blank.

The professor went into his act, and really meant what he said according to Roesch. He was groaning and heaving and sobbing out his remorse, praying to the spirits to give him one more chance; it must have been a ghastly and sickening performance. Presently McWhirt held the real side of the mirror to my nostrils.

"Look!" he cried.

In his excitement, the professor nearly shook me out of the coffin. Sure enough, the glass showed that I was breathing!

"You've brought him to life!" exclaimed McWhirt, straightening up. "But maybe the spirits only wanted to show what you might have done— here, try it again. You try it."

St. Edward took the mirror, as McWhirt put it into his hand, and held it before my nostrils. A deep groan burst from him; there was no breath on the glass.

"Dead, dead!" he cried, and dropped the mirror. "A judgment on me, sure enough!"

"I guess so," agreed McWhirt. "If you had never done any trickery, this wouldn't have happened. If you hadn't caused the death of that woman, in Chicago—"

"Oh, my lord!" groaned the professor. "You're right, you're right! To think how I've misused my powers, and what I might have done—"

They went away together.

Doc Roesch, who had heard every word, slipped in beside me with his hypodermic ready. He gave me the injection that would fetch me around, and waited for it to work. When I came to myself, he pressed my arm hard.

"Easy, now! Stay right where you are. Everything all right?"

"Sure," I rejoined. It was exactly like waking from slumber, for me.

"Then don't move," he said. "I've arranged with the mortician that I'll close the coffin here; he won't object or investigate. But I'll have to get the weights that will replace your body, so lie still. If anyone shows up, play possum. I'll be back in ten minutes. Our grips have already gone to the station."

"Okay," I said, and he went out of the place.

I closed my eyes drowsily and relaxed. Something flicked across my face; opening my eyes, I looked up and saw a man standing beside me.

It was my Uncle John.

Say, if you like, that it was some hallucination resulting from the drugs; yet such a thing had never happened before. I woke clear-headed and alert. My mind was clear as a bell at this instant. He was there, scowling down at me, dressed as he had been in life.

"Art, you're a fool," he said.

I lay speechless; a chill panic had seized me. I could not move a muscle.

"I've been trying night after night to reach and warn you," he went on slowly. I knew him, I knew his voice. I could hear the ticking of the big clock on the wall. "You refused to accept the message. Tonight your medium had a strong control. He has given me strength to appear to you. Art, do you realize the power of thought?"

I mumbled something, I know not what.

"A thought, a word, is creation," he went on. "Keep any thought before you strongly enough and it becomes reality. Every thought or word is an energy for good or bad. Speech clothes thoughts, and speech creates thought in others. There is no chance; there are no accidents to human beings. What you do today has to do with what you did yesterday. Even the suicide is not aberrate; he is fulfilling in one blinding instant the destined accumulation of countless years of accretion. So with you, in thought, word and deed. You have been playing with dreadful forces, building up for yourself a karma that now threatens you."

"Karma?" I repeated blankly.

"Karma is a force, exerted by anyone who does any action; it may be good or bad. It is a result, not a cause. Thus far you have committed no great wrongs, but this is the end. If you once more repeat this trick, let me warn you solemnly that you will not waken from your imitation death; it will be real."

"Are you real?" I blurted out, staring at him. He smiled.

"As real as your cousin, who spoke to you the other night. As real as the sunlight, as the soul itself, as the terrific peril which menaces you; as real as the Ancient Law which binds us all! Ask your friend the name of the woman who spoke with him last night, the woman who wore a cluster of golden flowers at her throat and a rose in her hair; ask him what she said to him, and tell him she was as real as I am. That is all."

Shivering, I closed my eyes and lay immobile. When I looked up again, the room was empty. Roesch came in a moment later.

I tried to tell myself it was nerves. Roesch had occupied our double room at the hotel each night; there had been no woman at all. When he helped me out of the coffin I went to the nearest chair and collapsed on it, waiting until he stuffed the flour-sacks into place and was screwing down the coffin lid.

"Roesch, tell me something," I said. He looked up and grinned.

"Everything's okay, Bronson. You're taking the two-thirty train; wait for me at Centerville. I'll be along tomorrow with the coffin, for burial there."

"Hold on," I said. "Do you know of any woman wearing a cluster of golden flowers at her throat, and a rose in her hair?"

Doc Roesch is about as hard-boiled as the average physician, but as he straightened up and looked at me, he went white as death.

"Good God!" he breathed. "How do you know that? I dreamed of her last night. I dreamed that she was warning me to get out of this business and never do it again."

"Who was she?" I muttered.

"My mother. She always wore that old brooch at her throat— she loved flowers—"

Laugh if you like; call me a fool if you like; explain it if you can! But, when Roesch had put me aboard the two-thirty train for Centerville, we had made a solemn compact. Our partnership was ended. This stunt would never again be pulled off.

Centerville was only fifty miles north. I got there, secured hotel rooms, and tumbled into bed. The drug dosage always made me feel drowsy and bad for a day or so, and I did not waken until late afternoon.

Then I got a morning paper and looked it over. But I did not read the story of my own death, at once; something else caught and held my attention— a boxed, flash item on the front page. "Mystic Kills Self," it was headed. And then I remembered what McWhirt had told us about the inevitable suicide of a shuteye medium... and I knew with what savage cunning he had played for his revenge to the uttermost.

For, last night, St. Edward had gone home and put a bullet through his brain. That was his end. And it was the end of my career as a professional corpse, also.

_______________

5: Grear's Dam

Morley Roberts

1857-1942

In Bianca's Caprice, 1904

THERE WAS dust everywhere; it was a red-hot world of dust. It lay upon the roads where the labouring wheel tracks marked them out; but the whole long plain was dust as well. Neither grass nor any green thing showed, and dead, dry salt-bush, eaten by the sheep till it looked like broken peasticks, was dust colour to the dancing horizon of that world of thirst. For seven months and a week, by Wilson's almanac, there had been no rain, and what dew had fallen the hot air drank when the fierce sun rose. And now not even the little fenced garden at Warribah showed any sign of verdure. Water was precious, and each day the north wind drank the water-holes drier and drier yet.

But, though the world of desolate Warribah was brown, in the roots of grass and the mere sticks of salt-bush was sufficient nourishment to keep life in the sheep who moved across the burnt paddocks of the station; what they needed, and what they began to suffer for was water, and the cloudless sky, luminous and terrible, bent over their world and breathed fire upon them. The wind out of the Austral tropics was as fierce as a blowpipe flame, or so it seemed. Hope and prosperity melted under it, and the home at Warribah dissolved.

"I shall go mad," said Wilson. And having said it, he sent his wife away to the south. He could not keep a cheerful face before her; it was easier to lie upon paper, easier to drift into silence that was not disturbed by her tears. He was a lonely man again, as lonely as when he had first fought with the bush, and conquered a space for himself where no water ran.

And now the conquered territory that he had hoped to keep for the uses of civilisation called in the sun and the north wind, and there was a great fight in progress between man and nature. As he walked over what he had won, or as he galloped, the caked and cracked earth fell into powder, and rose choking and impalpable, as fine as flour. The gaunt, spare box trees of the plains were powdered with its red-white film; their dry verdure was obscured. The dust was mud upon his lips, mud upon his cheeks as he sweated ice, to think the day was coming when there could be no hope for him and no help.

"How long now?" he asked himself.

And all about the plains rose columns of dust as the uneasy, fretful sheep, to whom his men doled water, moved up the wind seeking more.

"After ten years— this," said Wilson, and he laughed. But those who heard him laugh shivered, and contracted their brows. For he was a hard worker, and had slaved for this— for bankruptcy, a sky of brass.

"The boss is crazy," said the men at the hut.

An immense, intolerable sense of pity for the sheep possessed him. He had no children, and the land he held had been as a child to him. Now the plains he had delighted in were become ingrate. They refused him help. The sheep were his children and his delight. He knew thousands of them by sight, for he had the shepherd's eye. There was a character about the Warribah sheep that he had bestowed by his care and by his choice. He had fenced them in against straying; had chased the cowardly dingo and had slain him; he had rejoiced in the grass and the whitening cotton-bush, and the succulence of thick-fleshed salt-bush. How often he had ridden out and watched the sheep graze; it was a happy world when the rains in their due season ceased, and the time for shearing came. It was a riotous pleasure to hear the click of the shears. How the white inner fleece gleamed and fell over, and parted and showed its woven beauty! The movements of the shearers, and the sound of them, and the sound of the pent or loosened sheep wove itself into a kind of fabric; in the loom of time and the due sweet season pleasure grew, and success, and the joy of well-doing.

And now there was death in the air and in the north wind. And behind it ruin. There his ten thousand children would perish off the face of the inexorable earth and be no more than white bones lying heaped against a northern fence where no water was. He laughed a thin, crackling laugh, and walked to and fro in front of his lonely house.

"The boss is crazy," his men had said. Now in the hot and idle noon they sat in the southward shadow of the crackling hut and watched him. The old cook, a blear-eyed outcast thrown up by the seas upon the coast of Australia, broke suddenly into a drivelling yarn.

"I knew it worse nor this— hell's flames never beat it, on the Bogan that year—"

He mumbled on.

"So they died, and the horses, too. Oh, it was cruel, cruel. And Webber cut his throat from ear to ear, cut his crazy 'ead 'arf off."

"What of your paddock, Jim?" asked Hill, the old hand of Warribah. The young boundary rider spat drily.

"The jumbucks is suckin' mud. The water stinks of yolk. You can smell it a mile off. Ter-morrer I'll have to fetch 'em in."

The black and red ants ran riot in the hut and outside of it. The insect world flourished and abounded. But for all their bronze there was a pallid look about the men. Nature was no friend of theirs; they looked out on fire and blinding light.

"I never knowed it worse."

But old Blear Eyes had.

"So he blew his brains out."

"Oh, dry up," said Hill, but the cook murmured of ancient disasters on the Darling and the Macquarie.

"Did you die of thirst, you old croaker, and jump up to choke us?"

And still Wilson wandered to and fro in the sunlight, though the sky was inexorable.

"He'll be shakin' his fist at it yet," said the cook, "and when a man does that he never comes to no good. It's all up with them as shakes a fist at 'eaven. I've seen it myself. Now it was in '79 that Jones of Quandong Flats went mad. He shook 'is fist at the sky. I seen him, and the next morning 'e was ravin' 'orrid, as though the 'orrors of drink was on 'im. And well I knowed 'em then."

The boss came towards them through the hot sand, and he leant in the shade against the pole on which the men's saddles hung. The men looked downcast and half-ashamed. Sydney Jim lost all his flashness and moved uneasily. And the old cook shambled into his kitchen and fell to work upon his bread.

"There's little water in the Ten-Mile Tank, Jim?"

"They was suckin' mud this morning, sir," said Jim.

Wilson tugged at his grizzled beard and pulled his sunburnt hat over his eyes.

"We should have put down wells," said Hill.

Wilson broke into sudden blasphemy, and checked it with a kind of gasp, as though he felt that madness lay just beyond the limits of his self-control.

"So we should," he said; "so we should."

And he walked away.

"You took that cursin' very quiet," said Jim. And there was something in Hill's eye that made him flinch.

"Oh, well," he said apologetically, and Hill glared at him. The heat was in more than one.

"My son," said Hill, "I've half a mind—"

And then he rose and followed Wilson. He caught him up and talked hard till Wilson shook his head and went inside and slammed the door.

"He should make it up with Grear, and if Grear let him down on to the river he might save some."

For Warribah was in the back-blocks, and Grear held all the river frontage for twenty miles.

"But they hate each other, and Wilson ain't the man to crawl," said Hill. "He's a good sort. I'll go myself."

He went back to the hut and, taking his saddle and bridle, walked to the horse paddock, which seemed as barren as a stockyard. He caught his horse, that was standing at the gate and looking wistfully towards the stable as if he knew that good feed was there.

"Come," said Hill, and he rode south through the pine scrub towards Grear's. He came to the station as the sun went down, and when he asked for the boss Grear came out.

"Oh you!" he said roughly. "And what d'ye want?"

He was a long, thin man with a cold eye and thin lips, and as he looked at him Hill felt that it was a foolish errand he had come on. The man was worse than he had imagined. It seemed that Wilson was right. To ask Grear for anything was to invite insult. And though Hill had come twenty miles to ask he turned away.

"I haven't seen you for nigh on a year," said he, "and now I've seen you, why, I shan't weep if I never see you again."

He got upon his horse solemnly and turned away, leaving Grear with an open mouth.

"I was a fool to come," said Hill, as he ploughed his way among the sandhills. "He used to reckon that all the back-blocks was his, and Wilson took 'em up. Grear don't forgive."

The night had come upon the land, but there was no remission of the hot north wind. The heated earth radiated heat still, while in the clear obscure of the heavens the stars glittered like sharp points of steel. They stabbed Hill's very heart as he rode and looked into the rainless depths of heaven. For the sky was no overarching dome at that season. It was an awful emptiness without form; it was space itself, unmitigated and terrible, and heaven's lamps were near and far and farther still, while black, starless spaces showed like unfathomable patches in a silent sea.

"Good God!" said Hill, and fear got hold of him suddenly. He roused his horse to a canter for the sake of the noise of the motion. The sky appalled him, and a peculiar sense of reversion took him. He was hung over depths, and seemed to cling to the suspended earth.

"I'm crazy myself," said Hill, with a quiver in his voice. And his very voice broke the silence like a pistol shot. It made him start until he heard a sheep's faint baa in the distance. And then a mopoke called its mate in the trees by an old dry creek. Hill pulled up.

"But it ain't a creek after all," he said to himself. "It's a Billabong, but it's twenty years since water came out of the Lachlan so far as Warribah, and Grear put a dam there fifteen years ago. Ah! if the river only rose up, and came down roarin'. But it won't; it won't."

As he dreamed of the river, now like a low water-hole with never a current in it, Wilson, at home, lay in an uneasy sleep. He, too, dreamed, and dreamed of rain, and he woke himself shouting, "Rain!" and in his confusion called "Mary" to his wife five hundred miles away.

"Oh God! I dreamt it again," he said. "I dreamed of rain in our old place east, and the river came down with thunder and floods, and the land grew green in an hour— green, green!"

He fell asleep again, and when he woke at dawn he was oddly cheerful. Perhaps the rest from anxiety in that happy dream had taken part of the strain from his weary mind.

"I do feel as if it had rained somewhere," he said; "and if the weather only breaks anywhere we may have it here."

"Don't you think it cooler?" he said to Hill next morning. But the sky was brass and the sun white hot.

That evening a man riding through to Conoble from Condobolin told him that he had heard it had rained east of Forbes. And another man who camped at the Ten-Mile Clump said he knew there had been a great thunderstorm to the east.

"I dreamed it, so I did!" cried Wilson; "and the Lachlan's coming down."

His jaw fell even as he spoke. What use was the Lachlan to him out in the beyond, when Grear's lay between? He had no river frontage. Grear had it all.

In such a country, in spite of its apparent desolation, news travels fast. They heard that the Lachlan, so quiet at Condobolin, was running hard at Forbes. It was out in the flats, where the felled trees marked the old mining camp. There had been a storm, a great cloudburst, in its head waters, and the river grew alive. Wilson saddled up and rode thirty miles to see it, and came to the gum-lined ditch just in time to hear the stream awake. It stirred before his eyes, it became turbid, grew grey, bubbled, moved and ran, with sticks and leaves and branches on its full tide.

And still the sky overhead was fire, and the sun a flame. Wilson cursed it, and prayed to the beautiful grey water. Why should not rain come there? And soon. But as he rode back he came to sheep of his that stood against a fence, and pressed on it, as though water was beyond it. Pity stirred him; he drove them through a gate, and let them suck his last low tank.

That night Wilson came to the men's hut under its pines in the sand dune, and called to Hill.

"Hill, I want to speak to you," he said, and presently his man came out into the night. The stars were brilliant. Jupiter was like a little moon, and cast faint shadows.

"There'll be no rain here," said Wilson. "Were you sleeping? I can't sleep! Do you hear?"

He waved his hand around the barren horizon.

"I hear," said Hill.

He heard the sheep.

"You say that old Billabong once came down to Warribah?" asked Wilson.

Hill nodded.

"So they say. But Grear's dam would stop it."

"He's no right to have it there," said Wilson, savagely. "Look, Hill, I can't sleep. I'll ride out to the dam."

"I'll come with you," said Hill.

"You're a good sort, Jack," cried the boss. And they rode together through the wonderful night, that was so terrible to them, with its hot, dry air out of the oven of the north.

When they came at last to the long, low dam they tied their horses to saplings, and sat down. Wilson spoke after a quarter of an hour's silence.

"It would be hard to lose it after these years," he said. "And here's Grear's dam with a fence atop of it. He's a hard one, Jack!"

"Ay," said Hill, "he's hard."

And Wilson, who had not really slept for days, lay down upon the earth and dozed, while the star shadows of the gaunt thin boxes moved a foot. In the hollow of the Billabong some dry reeds, like a cane-brake, rustled faintly in the air. The leaves of the trees crackled, and underneath these sharper sounds was the hum of the insect world. Far away, on every side, the sheep called uneasily for water. What had seemed silence grew into a very chorus, organic with the earth. The horses champed their bits and pawed the dusty soil; and once one whinnied, and was answered by a far-off call from Grear's.

"I wonder what the river's like," thought Hill. He pulled out his pipe and lighted it. The flare of the match extinguished the starlight for a moment, and then the darkness melted once more, and he saw each separate tree, each leaf, each reed.

"I wonder."

For if the river was in high flood, and over the banks, the Billabong must be full at Grear's. And suddenly he heard a sound that he knew well. He laid his hand upon Wilson's shoulder.

"D'ye hear it, sir? What is it?"

But both knew. Grear's sheep were moving from east and west towards water.

"The blackfellows were right," said Wilson. "The Billabong is coming down."

The horses trampled uneasily, and seemed aware of a change. Perhaps they too smelt the grey flood as it crawled. And all the air seemed full of whispers, loud and louder yet. For even the thinned bush is alive, and holds carnival at midnight and beyond it. A snake crawled by them on the dam, and suddenly being aware of nigh enemies, it slipped away hastily, and hid in the hollow trunk of a fallen dwarf box. The sheep on Warribah grew more uneasy; he heard a distant baa, and then a nearer cry, and a plaintive chorus came down the dry, hot wind.

"I can't listen to 'em," said Wilson. "It makes me mad."

He rested his head upon his knees, and kept his hands to his ears. But suddenly he rose up.

"If the water comes we'll cut the dam, Hill."

"I would," said Hill.

"Go back and fetch Jim, and bring shovels," said Wilson. "I'll cut it. If the water comes, I've a right to it."

And Hill rode homeward fast. And as he rode the boss sat still upon the dam, and looked upon the faintly outlined hollow of the ancient waterway. And again he dozed, and did not see that round the far bend of the hollow came a sneaking, quiet band of grey water, like a crawling snake. But as he slept the night chorus increased, and away to the south the full sheep baa'ed with content. The Warribah sheep heard and knew, and moved south through the night: and suddenly ten thousand broke into a gallop, and stayed in a heap against the fence that topped the dam. Their voices agonised; they woke Wilson suddenly, and he reached out his hand and touched water.

And he heard horses galloping. This was Hill returning.

"Thank God!" said Wilson, and he prayed to Heaven with sudden thankfulness.

But then he started, for the horses came from the south. They came from Grear's, and he knew what that meant.

"I'll do it if I have to kill him," said Wilson. For behind him the painful chorus of the sheep was deafening. He saw them packed against the bulging wires. His heart bled for them, his children.

And then three horses burst through the thin bush.

"Oh, we're in time," said Grear. "I thought as much, but we're in time. Who's that?"

"Wilson of Warribah," said Wilson. "Grear, you will let the water through."

And Grear laughed.

"To you that sneaked in and took up my back-lots? Oh, it's likely, likely!"

"But the sheep are dying, Grear."

"Mine ain't," said Grear. "Get over the fence and off my land. I'll not have you here."

And Wilson burst into a passionate appeal that was almost a scream.

"Look here, man, if you are a man. I'll give you ten per cent of 'em to cut the dam. They're dying. Oh, my God! hear 'em, Grear; hear 'em! And I've bred 'em. I watched 'em grow. Oh, Grear, I'll give you half!"

And Grear swore horribly.

"I'll see them die, and see you get out. I don't want you here."

And now in the noise the sheep made it was difficult to hear a man speak. But the water grew up silently, and spread out, filling the hollow—a grateful and splendid sheet.

"'Tain't all yours," screamed Wilson. "The dam's not legal. You've no right to rob me and my sheep."

"Then go to law, you dog, and have it proved," said Grear. And as he spoke Hill came galloping, and with him Jim and two other men. And they carried shovels.

"Look," said Wilson. "We're five to you three, you and your men. I mean to have the water."

"Never!" cried Grear, and getting off his horse he walked up the dam to where Wilson stood.

"Get over the fence," he said.

And Wilson leant against the fence and the sheep behind him. He dabbled with his hand in their wool. Their hot breath fanned him.

"Don't, Grear, don't," he pleaded. "What would you think if I did the same to you?"

"You can't," said Grear, and he laughed. "I've the river at my back."

And Hill with a spade in his hand pressed through the sheep, until he came to Wilson. He touched the boss's shoulder, and Wilson calmed as he took the spade.

"You don't mean that they're to die, Grear, do you?" he asked, with a catch in his voice.

"What's that to me?"

"It's much to me," said Wilson. "Oh, Grear, I'd rather be hanged than let it be."

"Would you? Then be hanged, you rat!" said Grear.

And Wilson lifted the spade, and split Grear's head with it, and the man fell back into the water, and dyed it with his blood. But he was dead before he touched the silver grey stream that had slain him.

And Wilson fell to work digging.

"Good God!" said Hill, and the dead squatter's men cried out.

"Dig, dig," said Wilson. "Dig! Grear's got his water. I'll have mine."

When the sun rose his sheep were content.

"Now we'll see what the law says," cried Wilson. And he rode south to find the law.

______________________

6: The Ugly Bronze and the Beautiful Wife

Anonymous

Sunshine Advocate 21 Jan 1938

HERBERT JOSKINS glanced round over his shoulder apprenhensively. The figure of his wife was framed the doorway. She was young, had vivacity, charm, beauty; youthful maturity that could be surprising, even to Herbert Joskins; and her eyes, in unguarded moments, could be caught in a calculating hardness.

At the moment, however, there was nothing but amazement in them, as she stared at her husband, who knelt on the floor clasping in both hands a little bronze statuette which he had been regarding with fascinating triumph. He rose hastily to his feet, growing very red, and dusted his knees.

"Why, Herbert!" she exclaimed. "Whatever are you doing?"

He looked down in confusion at the statuette. "Just― just going to put this away, my dear," he mumbled.

She became suddenly languid, and strolled into the room. "Let's see it." She took it from his limp fingers, and held it up to the light.

"Ugh! Not very pretty, is it?" She was about to hand it back to him when a shrewd look came into her eyes.

"Is it worth a lot?" she asked.

"No― oh, no," he told her, too hastily. "I don't suppose you'd get ten pounds for it anywhere. Just something I picked up in a pile of junk. It's not really worth keeping."

She hodded, judicially. "Oh, well. Stow it away somewhere. I wondered what you were up to. Come and talk to me."

He hurriedly disposed of the statuette in a cupboard crammed with such things, odds and ends of a collector's discoveries, some worthless, some really valuable. He cast only one disturbed glance towards the safe, wishing he could bestow his latest find there. But it would not do to arouse his wife's suspicions.

In he cosy lounge, she patted the sofa inivitingly, and he sank down beside her. Miriam was the crown of his collection, the finest of all his discoveries. He had married her just recently, in the full knowledge that it was not himself but his wealth that enslaved her.

There had been opposition to wear down― young Tony Hammond, attractive, optimistic, penniless. Tony was in love with Miriam― desperately. Miriam believed she was in love with him. But you can not live on air, and so Tony had been dismissed, and Miriam became Mrs Joskins. Of course, she still saw Tony occasionally. There was no use imagining that she did not. But she would play the game― if only because she had a head on her shoulders, and knew what was what much too well to do anything foolish. So now he forgot the little bronze statuette, and thought only of Miriam; but, very much later, in his own bedroom, the thing returned to claim his last wakeful moments.

He chuckled a little, congratulating himself. Miriam had not suspected. He had put her off rather cleverly. Not worth ten pounds! Why, the thing was invaluable. And not only that. It would mean not ten pounds, but ten years, to its possessor if it ever came to light. He sweated a little now and then when he thought of that. But he would curse himself for a faint-hearted fool, and give himself up to gloating contemplation of his victory. The fact that he had to keep it to himself did not lessen his pleasure; he had always been secretive, and did not need to share his possessions in order to enjoy them.

He indulged in very little social life, content to have Miriam to himself― and that was one of the reasons why he treated her with such double-edged generosity. She had only to ask for a thing, and it was hers; but he gave her no allowance to speak of, and she practically never had any money in her possession. What did she need with money? He ran accounts everywhere. And he was determined that none of his money should find its way into that Tony Hammond's empty pockets.

Ever since he had begun to collect these bronzes, he had coveted this particular statuette. It was not, as his wife remarked, pretty. In fact it 'was horrible― a leering sinister figure, a perversion of ineffable beauty. It exerted a curious, breathless fascination upon him. He had known that he must have it. But its owner would not sell― and had told him, quite strictly that it was left in his will to the nation. But Herbert Joskins had never yet known defeat. He had risen from nothing to become a millionire at fifty. That had not been accomplished by weakness, or without ruthlessness. Yet he had never once broken the letter of the law. He was too wily for that...

Until this deal of the statuette. Sometimes, in saner moments, he found himself wishing that he had overcome his desire for it. He might even, wiser counsel whispered return it, anonymously, and be done with it. But he had paid good money for it― seven thousand pounds, in fact― and he knew that he could never part with it for a less sum.

It had come to him by devious ways. A man had approached him, secretly, had led the conversation round, had come out, at long last, with his news. The statuette was available. It was for sale. He was asked to make an offer. Of course he knew that it must have been stolen, although not a word of the theft had leaked into the newspapers.

Joskins had hesitated for a long time. He knew the danger. But at last he was satisfied. Whoever had stolen it had done the job thoroughly, had left no clues behind him. It was quite safe. It would never be traced now.

As drowsiness overcame him he thought of Miriam again, with enchantment, with immense satisfaction, and saw again, for a last glimmering moment, the little hideously lovely statuette.

It seized upon him the moment he awoke. He felt exhilarated, thrilled and victorious. Then he remembered the programme for the day, and his spirits were dashed. Paris! Important convention there, and also to be present to bid for some objets d'art he had had his eye on for some time.

Miriam was very sweet to him. She was sorry she could not go with him; but she would write every day and he must write to her. Otherwise she'd never know a moment's happiness.

He went off in a glow of enchantment. It was not until he was in the air, and feeling a trifle seedy― there was a stiffish breeze, and air traved always always made him feel uncomfortable― that little insinuating thoughts troubled him.

Tony Hammond. Miriam still saw the fellow now and again. And with himself away, safely abroad, what if― she had seemed very solicitous― too solicitous. Write every day! So that she could be certain of his movements...

He shook himself impatiently. Rubbish― Miriam was not like that. Quite rightly he blamed his air-sickness. Daily he received a long letter from Miriam, and nightly he replied by air mail, at equal length. She was to enjoy herself, not worry about him. She assured him that she did worry, and begged that he would come home soon.

He came home. Miriam was not in― a servant gave him her message. She had had to go out of town the day before. She had left a letter. He was almost relieved; for all the way home he had been tortured, in growing degree, by the thought of that priceless bronze lying still in an ordinary cupboard with an ordinary lock. And, of course, there could be no insurance.

He made straight for his den, which was cluttered with his things, unlocked the cupboard, swung the door open― and stared. The statuette was gone. He dashed to his writing desk. A letter was propped up against the chromium calendar stand. He tore it open.

Dear Herbert, he read,

I am sorry I cannot be here when you get home. Tony Hammond has just got a splendid job, in Shanghai, and is sailing tomorrow. I'm going down to see him off.

You know he is terribly in love with me. I used to be with him― perhaps I still am― but I shan't do anything silly; although he has tried to persuade me to. As he is very hard up, and had to have money for clothes and things, I wanted to help.

I couldn't give him any cash. You know you never give me any. So I felt I had better sell something, and, as you didn't seem too keen on that hideous bronze statuette, I thought you wouldn't mind if I took it to a dealer. Fancy, he got terribly excited when he saw it, offered me a hundred pounds straight away, and made me give my name and address, and so on. I gave the hundred to Tony. Hope you'll understand.

I'll try to get home in time for dinner to-morrow night.

MIRIAM.

Joskins staggered to a chair, the letter clutched in a shaking hand. Then suddenly the telephone bell rang. For a long moment he resisted it then he lifted the hand microphone to his ear.

"Mr Joskins? This is Chief Inspector Christie, of New Scotland Yard. I'd be very glad, Mr Joskins, if you would see me if I call this evening. You will? Thank you."

Joskins laid down the telephone and stared.

__________________

7: Cleverly Caught

John Arthur Berry

Chambers magazine, 1898

I could find out nothing about John Arthur Berry

AMONG the saloon passengers of the Illimani, ere she was a fortnight out, little Miss Agnew had become quite a pet.

"She was such a dear— so natural, so really chic!" said the ladies; while the men enjoyed to the full her utter or assumed lack of conventionality.

She was a fresh-colored girl of about 15, handsome enough after a robust, dairy-maid fashion, with full red lips, white teeth, and black eyes, under a shock of curly hair, that shrank from no man's gaze. Miss Agnew had come on board at the very last moment, with an uncle and aunt to see her off; also a note from the owners, commending her to the captain's care.

Popularly it was known that she was a rich squatter's daughter, returning home after a long visit to England. Her sole occupation of one of the best berths in the ship, as well as the possession of plenty of spare cash, gave some reason to the rumor of wealth. It was also whispered that she had been expelled from more than one fashionable school. But nobody seemed to think much the worse of her for that.

This trip the Illimani happened to have a rather aristocratic passenger list for Australia. There were an incoming governor and his countess; another couple of stray peers and peeresses; a rich baronet and his wife; and several gentlemen, middle-aged and elderly, making the round-voyage for their health's sake— that is, the sake of a long and uninterrupted steady drinking. And with these, at times, nothing loth, "Dolly," as she was called, would smoke the cigarette and toss a glass of champagne, being looked upon with a lenient eye by her female friends, not only on the plea of her being an "Australian tomboy," but for the sake of the little scandalous tit-bits site was able to retail to them afterwards in the privacy of their cabins.

At Naples, among others, there came on board for the second saloon a young Frenchman, apparently pretty ill with asthma; so much so, indeed, that he seemed able to do nothing else but lie in his deck chair all day long, covered up with rugs. Quite a curiosity, too, was this deck chair, massive but light, folding up into a compact compass, curiously carved, and made of neither cane nor canvas, but of stout olive wood, with big, bulging arms and a thick, curved back. And Monsieur Deschamps seemed to set great store by it, for always, when the day was over, and he walked feebly to his berth, the quartermaster carefully folded up the chair and carried it to its owner.

At first people laughed. But cranks and eccentrics are so plentiful on such ships as the lllimani that far more outré things ceased to attract attention, and Deschamps and his chair soon became part and parcel of the daily and weekly monotony.

Curiously enough, among all the passengers, there was no one with a sufficient knowledge of French to interpret between the sick passenger and the Illiinani's doctor, or the stewards, or anybody. And this was awkward, for Monsieur Deschamps was unable to speak a word of any language but his own. This matter presently coming to Dolly's ears, she volunteered to "have a go."

"I was," she said, "a couple of years at school at Rouen, and if I can't patter their lingo, I reckon I'm due for the leatheriest medal on board this canoe." So, tripping across the bridge that separated the two classes, Dolly went up to the invalid and began— much to everybody's admiration— to discourse with eloquent volubility and gesture.

Listening a minute, the Frenchman appearing to recognise the real thing at last, sat up and waved his hands and shrugged his shoulders, and with a delight and gratification beautiful to witness. And after this, nearly every day, Dolly went along and cheered the poor fellow up, interpreting his symptoms to the doctor and his wants to the stewards.

In most ocean liners there is posted up somewhere a notice advising passengers to deposit their valuables with the purser for safety during the voyage a small percentage being charged for the accommodation. Many people object to paying this; others are too lazy to go to any trouble; others too careless. So that, very often until something is missing, the caution is a dead letter.

It was so on the lllimani. But one morning Dolly, returning from her usual visit to her French friend, found the saloon a scene of the utmost confusion— ladies running about with empty jewel cases, stewards protesting, purser threatening, and the cliief stewardess in hysterics. The Countess of Trebibond had lost a diamond necklace and a set of priceless pearls; Lady Trotter de Globe was minus her family jewels, sapphires, opals, and diamonds valued at £3000; the Honorable Mrs Monopole's diamond earrings (they were fashionable then) tiara, and necklet, were gone.

In fact, it appears that nearly everything worth having was gone. There were a lot of paste and Palais Royal imitations— beautifully done— but all such had been rejected with the nice appreciation of an expert, or at least an intimate. And, to complete matters, nothing was forced— every lock intact and the keys in their owners' pockets.

The excitement and commotion were intense. The captain alone kept calm; and when the male relatives of the victims talked about suing the company, he suavely drew their attention to the notice afore-mentioned. Dolly was demurely sad, and condoled, even wept, with her aristocratic friends. Her own things, a set of pearls and a few diamond ornaments, she explained, had been in the purser's big safe from the commencement of the voyage. Her uncle had insisted on it.

But who was the thief? Public opinion pointed to some one among the stewards. And the first thing done was to ransack the "glory-hole," as their quarters were called. Nothing was found. Then "search law" was proclaimed throughout the ship, much to the indignation of the second and third classes.

It took some considerable time to overhaul the effects of nearly 400 people. Nor was it a pleasant matter, as the purser, the chief steward, and their assistants discovered. Not a trace of the lost jewellery was to be found.

But the captain grew anxious. He had been quite certain that the things would be found. Although he was not liable, the ship's reputation would be ruined so far as carrying passengers was concerned. And this was a serious consideration. Still, what more could he do?

Then suddenly he remembered that Watson was waiting at Colombo to go on with him to Melbourne. If anybody could help it was Watson! Wherefore those who troubled about the daily runs, noticed that the Illimani was being driven at almost top speed across the Arabian sea. In these days she was a decidedly uncomfortable ship within— suspicion writ large on every face of all her great company, each one doubtful of his neighbor, and all secretly watching, and so it seemed, thinking about the reward offered by the victims and the executive of the Illimani— £500— contributed to by captain and ship's boy alike, and very willingly. Dolly Agnew gave £30 to the fund; and her friend, Monsieur Deschamps, when made aware of what was going on, insisted on putting down his name for £5. But nothing came of it.

At Colombo— reached after a record run— there was indignation when it was found that the captain had stopped all shore-going, and also barred the usual crowd of dealers, jugglers, etc., from coming near the ship. Only one passenger came on board at Colombo— an old, gray-haired, gray-bearded man who walked with a stoop, and peered dimly at people through tinted spectacles. He was accepted as a tea-planter, an old friend of the captain's going to Australia on business.

Speaking little himself, Mr Johnson was, nevertheless, a perfect godsend to the ship at large; and into his ears was dinned by the passengers again and again the story of their losses and wrongs.

"Well," asked the skipper, a few days later as Mr Johnson strolled into the former's state-room, "any news yet?"

"Not much," was the reply; "only that you've got at least one artist on board— one of the most skilful cracksmen in London— which is saying a good deal."

"Which is he?" asked the captain. "Some fellow in the steerage, I suppose?"

"Not much," replied the other, laughing. "The only wonder is that he is not in the saloon here. It's the fellow in the Second who gammons sick, and sits in the big chair all day."

"Ha, ha!" laughed the captain, "you're out of it this time, old man. That poor chap's a Frenchman— can't speak a word of anything else!"

"Is that so?" replied the other calmly. "Well, in any case, he's the man who can tell you where the stolen stuff is."

"Nonsense," said the captain. " He's never been for'ard the whole passage. Why, If it hadn't been for Miss Agnew talking to him, he'd have had to stay dumb altogether."

"Fine-looking, fresk-complexioned, rather Jewessy, curly-haired girl, lots of side and sauce— No. 27, port side?"

"Right," replied the skipper. " Australian native. She's in my charge. Knows her way about, though, too well to want any looking after."

"H'm!" grunted his companion, lighting a fresh cigar. "You told me, I think, that you had searched the ship?"

"Every corner and every soul on board," replied the captain, proudly.

"Tchk, tchk," said the other, between tongue and teetli. "What a pity! Tony Jenkins is a genius, though! A commoner would have chucked the things overboard. Not Tony; he's too much of an artist to stand any waste of that sort Yes, I should say there was a chance. When you first broached the matter I thought it was only a bit of amateur aristocratic kleptomania. I see now that it's thorough business— business sweet and hot; a well-considered, long-thought-of, cleverly put-up job. Thank your stars, my boy, that I happened to be where I was, or you'd have lost your billet to a certainty!"

"Well, Watson— yes, of course, Johnson," said the captain, changing color as he thought of the fix he was in, and saw no way out of, "there's the reward, you know. And—"

"Don't want a penny," replied the detective. "This is purely a little private affair between ourselves. I'm on official business, and shouldn't have meddled but for old acquaintance's sake. You did me a good turn once. I'll return it now— if I can."

Next morning Mr Johnson managed, casually, to have a talk with Dolly, who came up to where he sat in the sun, looking very old and feeble, to ask his opinion on the quality of the saloon tea, which, she averred, "wasn't fit for pigs to drink." Later, she confided to her friends that he wasn't a bad old josser, and that she rather thought he'd been a gay sort of a chappie in his day; while, on his part, Mr Johnson, removing the powerful magnifying glasses he had worn throughout the interview, smiled in his beard, and muttered, "The scar's there all right, but fainter than when I saw it last. Clever! Clever's no name for it! No use looking through their berths, I suppose. However, I may as well have a try. I'll bet the stuff's neither there nor on their persons. If not, where then? A sum in induction, a la Sherlock Holmes!"

And "Mr Johnson," generally supposed to be the cleverest and keenest of all Scotland Yard, puckered his brows over the problem. During dinner he managed to slip into, and with practised hands ransack, Dolly's berth. But he found nothing at all incriminating in the single-cabin trunk, unless a bottle of hair depilatory and another of dye could be deemed so. The clothing was all of good make and quality, and as the intruder noted the carefully-worked initials, "D.A.," on everything, he shook his head doubtfully. Under the circumstances a mistake was a very serious matter. And the Illimani was rapidly ncaring tlie Australian coast. If he was to make a coup, he had no time to lose.

Monsieur Deschamps occupied a deck chair aft: and while its occupant was at luncheon in the second saloon on the following day Sir Johnson made as free with his belongings as he had done with Dolly's. And with a. little more success. In the pockets of a pair of old trousers he found a tiny key, with only one ward, at the sight of which his eyes glistened.

"M-m," he muttered, as he slopped out on to the empty deck, "the rest of the bunch are overboard. I suppose. Overlooked this one, evidently. Didn't think Tony was so careless. But what's he done with the stuff? Sent it after the keys? No, I can't believe that, after going to so much trouble."

One morning, listlessly observing the little procession emerging from the invalid Frenchman's cabin, as usual-first, Monsieur Deschamps, walking very slowly, and holding on tight to things in his path; then the quartermaster. laden with chair and rugs, mounting up to the second promenade deck— an idea flashed across the watching detective's brain, and ere night he managed to have a chat with the quartermaster.

"Yes, sir," said the latter, in answer to a question, "poor chap, 'e thinks a lot o' that chair. I've got to put it in his berth every night, so keerful as if it was made o' glass. You see, it ain't no common chair, that one."

"Well, I'm ready," said Johnson to the captain shortly after this. "You've been very good, and haven't bothered me much. Now, I want your help. You must get the doctor to send for the Frenchman to the dispensary on some pretence or other. Then Miss Agnew must be called to interpret. Presently we two will drop in, and then— well, if I'm right, you'll see some fun. If I'm not, there'll be wigs on the green. But I can't put it off any longer, although not as sure as I'd like to be. Once we get to Albany, the fat's in the fire; for I cannot wait to shadow people, nor can you very well prevent the Westralian passengers from landing."

As the captain and Mr Johnson strolled into the dispensary that evening, Monsieur Deschamps was speaking.

"Mais oui, Monsieur le docteur." said he, "je crois bieu que, depuis que j'ai pris voire derniere mixture, je me fals plus de saute."

"He says," translated Dolly. "that since he took that last medicine he feels much better."

"Hello, Tony, old man," suddenly exclaimed the detective, who had been standing in one corner of the rather dim room. "I'm sorry to hear of your— your being so ill. How do you like the sea?"

"Mr Watson!" shouted the sham Frenchman, as he stared from the clean-shaved, hawk-eyed, massive-jawed man before him, to the grey wig, beard and spectacles on the deck.

"And how's my little friend, the Kid?" continued Watson, stepping to the door and noting, with a breath of relief, the color fade out of Dolly's cheeks and the familiar, hunted look he knew so well steal over both their faces.

"No, you don't!" he continued, suddenly whiping out a revolver and presenting it at Tony, whose hand was quietly stealing around to his hip pocket. The other laughed carelessly, and, taking a cigar out of his case, lit it: while Watson, turning to the astonished skipper and doctor, said: "Allow me, gentlemen, to present to you Mr Anthony Green, alias Jenkins, alias Deschamps, and a dozen others; and Master William Dawson, better known as the Kid, the Dinah, Young Dutch, &c., the former gentleman the leading artist of his profession, the latter the best female impersonator of the day. Now, Tony, where's the swag?"

"Curse you, Watson!" replied the elder of the pair calmly,. but with au ugly look iu his shifty gray eyes. "Find it, if you can! I won't help you!"

"Same here!" exclaimed the ci-devant Dolly, with a laugh. "And if any of those old cats in the saloon make a row, Tony, I'll tell some funny little stories I've picked up among 'em that will make 'em glad to leave Australia by the next mail boat.

"Good boy," said Tony approvingly. "Kept eyes and ears open, eh?"

"You bet!" replied the lad, defiantly sitting back, crossing his legs, and puffing away at a cigarette; regarded by the poor captain with a fascinated stare of amazement.

"Well, Jenkins, come now— the swag!" exclaimed Watson impatiently.

"Find it," replied the othei; laconically. "All right," said Watson, playing his doubtful trump.

"Captain, will you kindly have Monsieur Deschamps' s chair brought in here?"

"The devil!" shouted Jenkins. "Never mind troubling. How did you find it out? All right; I pass. Watson, you've spoiled one of the best things of the century. Well, I suppose we can go now. I don't fancy anybody will bother either of us, from what the Kid's told me off and on," and he chuckled. "I suppose," he went on, "that we may as well keep up the fiction till we get to Albany, eh, Watson? But think of all my time and trouble and ingenuity wasted. Think of that lovely chair and its secret hiding places. Hang it! I could almost cry over the thing, Watson."

"Or shoot me," replied the latter, laughing grimly, as he replaced his disguise.

"Well, yes, at the moment," admitted the other. "But it's all over now. I never bother about spilt milk. You know that, Watson. All the sparklers shall be back before eight bells tonight, parole d'honneur. Doctor, I feel so much better that I don't think I'll require any more medicine. Miss Agnew, I know I can trust you to smooth matters over with our aristocratic friends la bas. Have you finished with us, Watson?"

"Provisionally," replied the detective. "I don't suppose the Captain here wants more fuss made over the matter than can be helped. And the doctor will keep silent for the ship's sake. I'm of Miss Agnew's opinion that the ladies for'ard will he only too pleased to get their jewellery back again. Of course, if we had long to wait it would be different. But we shall be at Albany tomorrow; and that young scamp's presence among them won't matter much for one night more."

"Look here, Watson," put in "the Kid," "if you're not civil I'll tell tales before I go yet."

"But," stammered the captain, speaking for the first time. "I say Watson, where's our guarantee? Of course you may trust Mr— um— Jenkins— er— Green, there, and— this er— young man, or girl, or whatever it is, and take their words. But I'd like something―"

"That's all right." interrupted Watson, cheerfully. "I know my mark. I'd trust Tony up to any sum, once he's given his word. Believe me, it will be all serene. And neither of them will blab. They've been fairly beaten for once at least."

"Thank you, Mr Watson, for your good opinion of me," said Tony, pausing at the door and bowing politely. "You will see, I hope, that it is deserved. Au revoir!"

And sure enough, some time and somehow, before next morning, each of the despoiled ones found her property returned intact. Explanations, of course, were demanded; but all at once the thirst for them dropped; and "Dolly" laughed mockingly at the glances of fear and abhorrence darted at her by whilom friends and confidantes. On all sides it was agreed "that for the sake of the ship and the captain" the affair should be hushed up. It was difficult; but Watson, with the aid of a stowaway, who was working his passage as deputy assistant fourteenth steward, and for a consideration acted as scapegrace, managed it.

"Keep the chair, Watson," said Monsieur Deschamps as he went over the side at Albany. "It will remind you of the prettiest bit of work you ever did."

___________________

8: Four Friends and Death

C. St. John Sprigg

1907-1937

Australian Women's Weekly 20 April 1935

THE SMALL yacht floated motionless, mirrored in the calm waters of Vigo Harbor. Her split headsail, tattered pennant, and stove-in dinghy were mute evidence of the storms that had battered the ketch in the Bay of Biscay, three days out from Falmouth.

In the saloon the four amateur yachtsmen were celebrating their successful completion of the trip by a glass each of excellent cognac, which washed down a meal of tinned salmon, tinned peaches, and coffee extract prepared by Dr. Garrett, a well-meaning but indifferent cook.

"Cheerio!" said Dr. Garrett, lifting his glass. "Cheerio!" answered Hopkins, Leathart and Pickering.

Pickering's greeting seemed particularly hearty, yet immediately after drinking the brandy he gave a moan, flung out his arms, and fell prone.

There was a sudden silence in the cabin. Leathart's rubicund face turned pale; he touched Pickering's livid features with a trembling hand, then helplessly loosened his collar.

Hopkins' eyes gleamed behind their pebble glasses, but he made no move. Garrett, with the expert indifference of the medical man, stepped forward, grasped the fallen man's wrist a moment, and then rolled back his eyelid.

"Dead," he pronounced solemnly, straightening himself.

"Good heavens!" stammered Leathart incredulously. "What, why— Has he had a heart attack? Pickering dead! I can't somehow—"

His voice trailed off into silence as he stared at the limp form of that prosperous banker, their host; a moment ago apparently in the prime of life and now stricken down as if by a physical blow.

Leathart was going to say, "I can't somehow cotton on to it..." but there was no evading the ghastly reality, the deadness of that inert mass, which had a moment before been living flesh, joking and laughing.

Hopkins still said nothing. His eyes moved from Leathart to Dr. Garrett who was busy about the body. Now he was prising open the mouth....

Even at a death, Leathart couldn't help thinking, Hopkins is the same Hopkins; the famous novelist, the remorseless psychological observer, noting, watching, and never showing his hand.

His personality had grated a little on Leathart when they had first met; it was alien to the breezy openness of the Yorkshire Turf commission agent; but they had been brought together by a common love of the sea, and in the ten years that followed Leathart had grown to respect Hopkins' qualities. A good man in an emergency!

Dr. Garrett now  stood up, and covered the face of the dead man with his handkerchief. He wiped his hands slowly on a table napkin, gazing into space, his saturnine face expressionless, and said:

"No, it's not a heart attack. He's been poisoned."

"Poisoned, Garrett ?" exclaimed Leathart. "Oh, come! It's impossible!"

"Poisoned!" repeated Hopkins; saying it slowly; almost as if (Leathart thought) he was savouring the phrase on his tongue. But that must be imagination. Just Hopkins' manner. For Pickering had been his friend....

"Hydrocyanic acid," said Garrett, still gazing away from them. "Prussic acid, as the layman calls it. No post-mortem is necessary; it's the most easily detected of poisons.

"I can smell it on his lips and see its traces on his face." He lifted up the glass of brandy. "And here is the way it was given him."

The full horror of this now struck Leathart. He found himself unable to do more than bleat a few inarticulate sounds.

"Well," said Dr. Garrett, with a trace of impatience, "what are we going to do about it?"

"Yes, what are we going to do about it?" repeated Hopkins, looking at Leathart queerly, almost as if he were amused by this appalling tragedy. But this again could only be Leathart's imagination.

Another long silence followed. The wind had risen and a gentle breeze lapped the ripples softly against the hull; somewhere abeam a siren hooted, as a ship manoeuvred in mid-harbor.

After the buffeting of the Bay, the tension of the incessant pitching and rolling and rattle of the rigging, the scene was a peaceful one ; and the faces of the three living men in the cabin might have been those of men calmly resting after a strenuous voyage.

But actually, behind each expression-less face, the thoughts were racing; and it was perhaps natural that Hopkins' mind, used to reflection on complex trains of events, should come to a decision first.

"It would be foolish," he said quietly, peering for a moment at the dead form, then, his eyes flickering away, at Leathart, "it would be foolish to deny the obvious implications of this distressing event.

"Poor Pickering has either killed himself or been poisoned. I think we must all agree that it is highly unlikely that he killed himself. No one could be more cheery than Pickering has been during the last two or three days.

"In any event it is inconceivable that a man, however depressed, would kill himself, without a word, in the presence of three guests. Therefore he has been poisoned.

"Poisoned," repeated Hopkins, his gaze moving to Garrett, "by one of us."

Leathart gave a gasp, or it may have been a sigh; but said nothing. Garrett nodded gravely

"I am afraid you're right, Hopkins. So here we are, moored in the middle of Vigo Harbor, and one of us a murderer."

HIS lean, delicate fingers played thoughtfully with an extinguished cigar stub in front of him. "It's not as if we were three casual acquaintances. We've known each other now for ten years, and we've been shipmates together twenty or thirty times.

"We all know what that means: it means we know each other's characters as intimately as it is possible for men to know them. The best and the worst of them."

"By God, you're right!" exclaimed Leathart gruffly. "And, say what you like, I simply can't believe one of us poisoned Pickering!" In spite of himself, his eyes rested again on the dead man with horror.

"None the less," Hopkins reminded him coldly, "one of us did."

"Yes, one of us did," went on Garrett. "We don't know why. Now Pickering was also a friend. We haven't known him as we've known each other, but we've run into him off and on.

"We've chartered his yacht once or twice; and, now, here we are on it; and he's dead, murdered by one of us.

"Sooner or later we've got to turn the thing over to the police. I don't know anything about Spanish police procedure, but even if it's as fair as the English—which I doubt— there's the language, which we don't know; that alone will make things infernally unpleasant.

"We three have pulled through plenty of emergencies alone, and it seems to me that we ought to see if we can't get on top of this one."

"What exactly are you suggesting?" said Hopkins with a trace of irritation.

"I'm suggesting that we hold a little court of inquiry of our own before we turn the matter over to the police."

"And give sentence?" asked the novelist sardonically.

"We may or may not do that," answered Garrett slowly. "Before we decide we must hear what the law calls the mitigating circumstances. After all, we're friends..."

"I see. In other words, let the murderer spill the beans, and if he's got a good excuse we might help him to escape?"

"And why not?" asked Garrett defensively. "I may be wrong, but it does seem to me that there are circumstances in which murder might be excusable."

"You're right," boomed Leathart, so unexpectedly that the others jumped. "Blackmail, for instance!"

"Blackmail, Leathart?" queried Hopkins, a surprised note in his voice. "And what," he went on suavely, "makes you think our dear friend Pickering was a blackmailer?"

There was no answer.

"Supposing that after due consideration this court does not find the circumstances justify a recommendation to mercy?"

"Then," said Garrett soberly, "I should like to offer to any friend of mine, however guilty, the decent way out."

"I see. Leave him alone with a revolver, eh?"

"Well, have you any suggestion to make?" countered Garrett. The tension of the atmosphere had frayed his temper a little.

"I have none. I thoroughly agree with you."

"Yes, and I, too," said Leathart.

"Carried, then!" exclaimed Hopkins. "It seems to me that our brains will work a little more clearly without the fourth member of the party."

Leathart shuddered, and it was Hopkins and Garrett between them who carried the limp form into the fore-cabin and laid it on one of the bunks.

"The police will complain of our moving the body," Hopkins reminded his assistant.

"They will have worse than this to complain of before the day's over," replied Garrett grimly.

Silence fell again. Silence utter and unbroken. Each man was weighing the others up to assess which was the more likely murderer.

Or, rather, two of the three were. The murderer could have no doubt, no scruple, no care but the nerve-stretched eagerness to obliterate all traces of guilt from his face.

The most impartial observer might have hesitated long before he could suggest, from a mere scrutiny or even a deep knowledge of their characters, which man was the most likely.

Could one suspect Leathart, for in-stance— that genial, kindly Yorkshire-man, an impulsive forty-year-old child? Here, one would have said, was a transparent nature. All his failings were on the surface. His easily roused temper so soon over. His schoolboyish greed, which had earned the nickname of the Glutton— greed only in matters of food and drink; in money none was more generous. How could such a man poison, out of long premeditation, in cold blood?

And yet... One didn't succeed in the world of racing without a fund of native shrewdness. Even the geniality might be all facade. Leathart was, after all, a man of strong emotions. His entanglements with women were notorious. Perhaps...

But then there was Hopkins, with his slow saurian gaze, his complete lack of sentimentality. Wouldn't such a man poison efficiently and ruthlessly?

And yet... Hopkins, by temperament and trade, was a watcher, not a doer. It contented him to stand outside life, peering and prying, and never so much as wetting the soles of his feet in the mud.

It was hard to imagine such a man indulging in the crudity of murder, harder still because he seemed a man capable perhaps of friendship—a thin, attenuated affection—but of nothing so robust as either love or hatred.

What of Garrett—a man to whom the getting of poisons would be easy--efficient, calm, never losing his head? And yet... a doctor, trained to save life, must have a powerful motive to destroy it. What motive could Garrett, in particular, have—he, a successful specialist and famous for his philanthropic activities?

The silence had endured for several minutes now. Outside in the harbor there was the sudden scream of a speed-boat, the wail of its exhaust tearing the silence like a piece of linen.

Leathart jumped. "For God's sake, let's do something!" he cried. "What's the good of sitting here like a lot of waxworks not daring to look each other in the eyes?"

His voice was almost hysterical, and Hopkins' eyebrows rose at the tone. "A sound suggestion," he said. "I propose that first of all we find the poison. It must have been in a tube or phial, or something."

Leathart interrupted him, his voice strained. "Look here, isn't the first question to find out how the poison .got into the brandy? The four drinks came from one bottle and we've all had ours without ill effects."

"You are doubtless referring," said Garrett, coldly, "to the unfortunate fact that it was I who poured out the brandy and passed the glasses round."

"I just asked," said Leathart stubbornly, not meeting his eyes, "how the poison got in the brandy."

"And I can answer that," replied Hopkins. Four eyes focused on him instantly. "You will remember that, after the brandy was poured out, but before we had drunk it, a four-masted Finnish barque came past us to star-board, reaching out of the harbor.

"Naturally, being what we are, we all jumped up and glued our noses to the portholes for several minutes till she'd passed. During that time, any one of us could have poisoned any glass."

Hopkins' eyes met Leathart's, and a faint, almost imperceptible sigh escaped from between Garrett's lips.

"Right! That clears that up," said Leathart briskly. "What were you saying when I interrupted you?"

"Merely that the phial must be somewhere in the cabin."

"If I had been murdering anyone," interjected Garrett, "I should chuck the bottle or what-not overboard."

"You would have been unable to do so without leaving the saloon," Hopkins reminded him, "because the port-holes are still screwed up."

"Well," retorted Garrett, "I think it's a silly idea. If the murderer has any cunning he'd plant the phial on an innocent party. So, if we do find it, it will only be misleading. I vote we get on to something more tangible."

"I think you are wrong to be so emphatic," commented Hopkins with the utmost gentleness. His pebble glasses were fixed on the doctor's face, and there was a difficult pause.

"Are you suggesting I'm the murderer, then?" shouted Garrett, suddenly flushing and half-rising from his seat.

"Come, come!" said Hopkins, his lips twitching. "Let us remember we are friends and keep our tempers. What's a murder between friends?"

"Come to that," answered Garrett more calmly, sinking down into his chair again, "you seem to be taking it remarkably calmly!"

"I am. To be perfectly frank, I was not at all fond of Pickering. You knew him as a rich and respectable banker. I— with my usual flair for finding out the worst sides of people― happen to know that his bank is a very shady affair, and his past career shadier still. Mr. Pickering has put over some pretty raw deals in his time on friends of mine."

"In that case, why accept his hospitality?"

"Firstly, because I like this yacht― one of the finest hulls that ever came off Champney's drawing-board. And secondly—"

"Secondly?"

"I find Pickering a most interesting character study... Any more questions? No? Then I suggest the court votes on my proposal. That we now search this cabin to find one missing poison phial, tube, or container."

"Waste of time." grunted Garrett.

"I think we should do it, old chap," said Leathart.

Hopkins got up. "Carried!"

The saloon had many cupboards and lockers, as all well-designed cabins have. Certain of them were for articles used in common— crockery, glasses, cards, books, and so forth.

But at the beginning of the trip two lockers had been offered to each man (and the keys given to him), to stow such private articles as he had—a practice which may sound unfriendly to the uninitiated, but which is carried out by all discreet yachtsmen, for it saves a great deal of argument.

When each man had given up his keys, and the lockers had been searched, an empty phial, smelling strongly of hydrocyanic acid, was found in Dr. Garrett's drawer.

More damning still, they found a receipt from a chemist, screwed up in the sheet of brown paper in which the phial had evidently been wrapped: "½ oz. hydrocyanic acid."

"Good heavens! You, Garrett!" exclaimed Leathart, with surprising scorn. "No wonder you were so much against the search!"

Garrett had turned pale. "This is absurd!" he exclaimed. "I know nothing about this!"

Leathart laughed scornfully. "Oh, come, I say! Know nothing about it? In your locked drawer? It's as plain as the nose on my face.

"You doped the glass before we sat down to dinner, put away the phial and locked the drawer, and then poured the brandy into glasses one of which was already charged with poison!"

"It's a lie!" said Garrett furiously.

"Perhaps the Spanish police may have different views!"

"Now, now, Leathart," said Hopkins, reprovingly. "Don't start talking about the Spanish police. Let's hear the mitigating circumstances. If there are any."

"Rot!" said Leathart, angrily. "There's nothing here but a cold-blooded premeditated murder."

Hopkins peered shrewdly at the flushed face of the Yorkshireman. "You seem very indignant about it, Leathart! Amazing display of indignation! After all, we don't know yet (a) if Garrett really did poison Pickering, or (b) if he did, why? He may have had some perfectly good reason —eh, Garrett?"

Garrett glared at him furiously. "All I know is that one of you two is the dirtiest skunk unhanged."

"I feared," said Hopkins, with a sigh, "that we should never be able to discuss this murder without animosity creeping in. However, let us see where we are.

"The poison has been discovered in Garrett's locked drawer. A bad mark against him.

"In defence I should be inclined to urge that no murderer would stow the bottle in his own locker; surely he'd prefer to throw it down anywhere rather than there—particularly as suspicion would be bound to fall on Garrett first through having poured out the brandy."

"That's all very well for a clever devil like yourself, Hopkins," broke in Leathart; "but I'm a plain man, and that argument seems just silly. At that rate the more evidence you discover against him, the less guilty he is."

"Well, I won't insist on the point. I prefer to leave that kind of argument to my learned and subtle confreres, the writers of detective novels. We will just keep it at the back of our minds. Now, Garrett, have you any contribution to make?"

Garrett stared at them both defiantly.

"No. I prefer to watch you. Being innocent, you see, I happen to know one of you is the murderer, and sooner or later he'll give himself away."

"A very proper sentiment," murmured Hopkins. "Our next task, therefore, is to find some motive. Blackmail has been suggested by Leathart—"

"I didn't actually suggest it," interrupted Leathart, uneasily.

"I apologise. You are right; you did not suggest it in this case. You merely mentioned it as a justifiable motive for a murder." Leathart wriggled, but said nothing.

After a keen look at him, Hopkins continued: "The murdered man (whom, by the way, I consider perfectly capable of blackmail, with his bland smile and his mean mind)— the murdered man, as the crime stories always call the violently deceased, probably had some documents with which to blackmail— letters and so forth We had better search his person and his locker."

"Right," said Leathart, jumping up, "I'll look through his clothes."

"One moment," remarked Hopkins, suddenly shooting out a long arm and laying it on Leathart's shoulder. "One moment. We had better go together. And perhaps Garrett had better come too. He might— he just possibly might —try to make a bolt for it."

They returned with a handful of papers and a wallet. Hopkins read through them. Both watched him with fascinated attention. He made a little noise as if of satisfaction, looked up, and said:

"Well, Leathart, what would you say to this? A letter written to Pickering, in Garrett's own handwriting. And marked 'Confidential.' "

Garrett started as his eyes fell on the document, and he swore. Without looking up, Hopkins read the letter out:

My dear Pickering,—I should be infernally grateful if you could give me another thirty days' grace on that promissory note. I've just had a reminder from Leathart about the heavy bill I ran up with him on last month's racing, and I hardly know where to turn for ready cash. I'm safe enough— you know that half a dozen operations will cover the amount— but I happen to be in a temporary corner.

Yours ever, J. GARRETT.

Leathart gave a slow murmur of astonishment. "So that was it! But why, Garrett, why― Man alive, my reminder to you was a joke! If I'd known you were in any real difficulty, so far from running up any bill I'd have lent you all you wanted!"

Hopkins was watching Leathart's face with an unblinking stare. "But Garrett didn't know that, eh? And so, when Pickering refused to renew the note, Garrett killed him to gain time."

Garrett jumped to his feet. Every vestige of self-control had left him. Shaking with anger, he leaned towards Hopkins, his face a few inches from the other man's, and almost spat into his face.

"You rat! You Judas! So this is the little plot you've prepared, sitting there like a spider! God, what a fool I was ever to trust you, you heartless, soulless, gutless devil!

"You killed Pickering. You knew he had that letter on him; he showed it to you, I expect! You hid the poison bottle in my drawer!

"Pickering never refused to renew my promissory note. He told me before we started on this trip not to worry about the note. We were too good friends for him to do anything to embarrass me, he said.

"You told us yourself you hated him. You poisoned him, and wove your slimy little plot, like one of your slimy little stories!"

Hopkins gazed quietly back into the convulsed features of his friend. He seemed to note every line of fury as if he were examining an interesting old picture.

"I understand your fury, Garrett," he said. "I was afraid that once we started murdering each other our happy, our almost ideal friendship would be broken up.

"Believe me, however, I bear you no ill-will." He turned. "Well, Leathart, what do you say?"

"Guilty as blazes!"

"And do you think the circumstances mitigating? Money affairs are very worrying, you know! Almost the most worrying in the world."

"Look out!" shouted Leathart; and Hopkins leaped sideways. Wild with fury, Garrett had sprung at him.

Leathart seized Garrett by the elbows. In the huge Yorkshireman's hands he was like a child, and he was flung sullenly back in his chair.

"Very crude!" remarked Hopkins.

"So, Leathart, you consider there are no mitigating circumstances?"

"None!"

"What shall we do, then?"

"Hand him over to the Spanish police."

Hopkins' eyebrows  rose. "Come, come. An old shipmate of ours! Surely we'll offer him a gentleman's way out?"

"No," rumbled Leathart, suddenly. "I wouldn't give him even that, the skunk!"

"I see. Well, well!"

"And what about you, eh, you slimy devil?" said Garrett. "What's your opinion? You lead others on, but you take darn good care never to give away anything yourself!"

"My opinion? Ah, yes, my opinion." Hopkins had been smiling, but now the smile vanished; and, behind his thick glasses, he darted at Leathart a glance of piercing malignancy, of utter and biting contempt.

"My opinion, Leathart, is that you're the meanest skunk it has ever been my lot to meet. I thought I was a judge of human character. I turn out to have been a child, a baby.

"You are a murderer, Leathart. Don't look surprised. I repeat, you are a murderer. You murdered Pickering. You had provocation, no doubt. I don't complain of that.

"But not only are you  a murderer; you deliberately attempt to fasten on your best friend the guilt of that murder. You had no pity, you pressed for the last ounce of punishment. You won't even permit him to blow his brains out.

"You! Our inoffensive, childish, sporting glutton! Faugh!"

"I kill Pickering?" exclaimed Leathart at last. "You must be crazy! Why should I want to?"

"I have met you once or twice at Pickering's house," said Hopkins slowly. "I'm an observant devil, you know.

"Mrs. Pickering is a very beautiful woman, isn't she? And ill-treated by her husband, eh? And ready to tell anyone so? And her husband's jealous of your heart-to-heart talks with her, lunches in town, and so forth? Isn't that so?"

"You're mad!" said Leathart, emphatically. "It's true that I felt sorry for Mrs. Pickering. If you like, I'm in love with her. I don't mind admitting it.

"But, as for murdering him! Con-found it, you can't accuse me of murder just because of an admiration for a man's wife!"

"Oh, no," said Hopkins; "I happen to have more substantial grounds. I knew you had murdered Pickering the moment he fell dead."

Leathart laughed  aloud, scornfully. "Oh, and whence this certainty?"

"Well, when we were watching that barque go by, I happened to see the cabin behind me reflected on the port-hole glass. I told you I was an observant devil, didn't I?

"And I saw you replacing Pickering's glass, with a guilty air, one eye on our backs to make sure we didn't see you. I wondered what the devil you were playing at... Until Pickering fell down dead."

"You swine!" exclaimed Garrett, glaring at Leathart. "You of all people!"

Leathart had flushed; but he seemed strangely unconcerned as he answered, "Yes, I killed Pickering."

"You confess?"

"No. Oh, no! For I am not guilty. I killed Pickering. And yet Garrett is the murderer. And yet Pickering died by accident."

"Is this madness, Garrett?" asked Hopkins. "Or is he putting it on?"

"No, I'm not mad," replied Leathart. "I feel peculiarly sane. I know exactly what happened. I knew from the moment you found that letter in Pickering's pocket.

"Garrett tried to poison me— me, his best friend— because of a paltry gambling debt. Do you wonder I wanted to see him handed over to the police?

"But then Fate, or Chance, stepped in. For, when your backs were turned, I did a childish thing. Garrett had poured out for Pickering a much larger portion of brandy than for me.

"Half in genuine greed— you know my weakness for cognac— and half in joke, I swapped glasses. When we had drunk I was going to tell you all that I'd swiped the best share after all. What a joke! What a devil of a joke!"

"Did you give Pickering a larger portion, Garrett?"

"I did," admitted Garrett. "As host. But we've only Leathart's word that he swapped them."

"No," said Hopkins. "I told you I'm an observant devil... and as we lifted our glasses for the toast, I remember thinking: trust old Leathart to get the fullest glass!"

"You're both lying!" exclaimed Garrett furiously.

"No," answered Leathart, firmly and quietly. "I am not lying."

A shaft of sunlight lit the troubled faces of the three friends.

Or, rather, former friends. For now they were divided by abysses of hatred, crime, and a sudden welling up of unbelievable possibilities from their hidden hearts.

And then suddenly Hopkins burst out laughing. A hard, dry, cold laugh so that at first they thought he had gone mad. Both the listeners felt their flesh creep.

"For God's sake, what is it, Hopkins?" cried Leathart.

"What fools we've been! What utter fools!" And now they saw that he was waving the crumpled chemist's bill. "Look at the date on that! See? July 13!

"All July 13 we three were at Aintree races, 200 miles from this shop. The poor fool! He left this vital clue! Didn't notice it, I expect, when he tore off the brown paper wrapping."

"But what do you mean?"

"Pickering killed himself!" shouted Hopkins joyously. "He was hoist with his own petard, with a vengeance! He tried to poison Leathart out of jealousy, and he had everything prepared to throw the blame on Garrett, so as to cover his tracks. After doping the  brandy, he dropped the bottle in the drawer and locked it with a private key — for, as owner, he would have second keys of all lockers. Meanwhile, he had Garrett's letter, which he would produce at the right moment to prove that Garrett owed Leathart money, and so supply a motive.

"He must have been hatching the scheme months before. Perhaps as soon as he got Garrett's letter he saw how it could be used. He must have invited us to go on this trip for that very purpose— you remember we were all a bit surprised by the invitation.

"And he must have been waiting for the first meal that would give him an opportunity for his diabolical scheme; but, thanks to the weather, it wasn't until we beat into Vigo Harbor this afternoon that we sat down together.

"Then he dropped the poison in Leathart's glass; and our dear old Glutton, with his immortal idiocy, swapped the glasses and made the devil drink his own medicine."

Hopkins' words died away. Leathart gave a strangled groan of relief. Then there was silence for a few moments.

When the wake of another passing ship rocked the yacht, when once again the shaft of sunlight came groping in, it lit the contented faces of three friends and glittered on their upraised glasses, toasting a friendship that had struck dirty weather and come near being cast away, but, at the last moment, had managed to claw off the rocks and make harbor.

___________________

9: A Stranger in Arcady

J S Fletcher

1863-1935

Nash's Magazine, April 1910

WHERE THE ANIMAL which subsequently became so famous in the village to whose sober quietude it brought an unexpected breath of romance first came from no one ever knew. Its coming was as mysterious as the falling of rain or growing of corn in the night; it must, indeed, have arrived in the night, for it was certainly a part and parcel of Little St. Peter's when Little St. Peter's awoke one morning.  Those early birds who were out and about before the gossamers on the hedgerows had felt the first kiss of the autumn sun were aware of the presence of a remarkably lean pig, who was exploring the one street of the village with inquisitive nose, questioning eyes, and flapping ears.  It went from one side of the street to another, and it was obviously on the look-out for whatever might come in its way in the shape of food. There was an oak near the entrance to the churchyard; the stranger paused beneath it as long as there was an acorn to be found amongst the fallen leaves.  Farther along, there was a crab-apple-tree in the parson's hedge, the fruit of which was too bitter for even the most hardened boy of the village; it stopped there to devour the fallen sournesses which lay in the shining grass.  But always it was going on, searching and inquiring, and its eyes grew hungrier as its swinging gait increased in speed. And coming at last to a gap in the fence of Widow Grooby's garden, it made its way through and set to work on the lone woman's potatoes.

It was an hour later that the marauder was driven out of this harbour of refuge, bearing upon its lean body the marks of the switch with which Widow Grooby had chased it forth, but within its ribs the comfortable consciousness of a hearty meal.  When it had uttered its final protest against the switch, it went along the street again, furtive and friendless, but this time with the more leisurely pace of the thing that has breakfasted.  Widow Grooby gazed after it with an irate countenance.

"I could like to know whose gre't hungry beast that there is!" she remarked to a neighbour who had been attracted to her cottage door by the pig's lamentations as he quitted the scene of his misdeeds.  "It's been all over my garden and etten half-a-row o' my best potatoes, drat it.  And it couldn't have done that, Julia Green, if your Johnny hadn't made that gap in my fence when I ran him out t'other night for being at my winter apples, no it couldn't!  I think your William might ha' mended that gap before now— that's what I think."

"Our William's summat else to do than mend gaps," said Mrs. Green sullenly. "And the gap were there before our Johnny came through it. And it's none our pig anyway, for ours is in its sty at this here present moment, a-eating its breakfast, so there!"

The styless and proper-breakfastless pig, unconscious of this discussion and of its possibilities of development into a good, old-fashioned, neighbourly quarrel, went farther along the village street, still prospecting.  There were people about now, men and women, and the door of the Fox-and-Fiddle had been thrown open, and one or two habitués stood within the sanded hall, taking their accustomed morning glass. The pig passed by, and as he passed turned an inquisitive nose towards the scent of stale ale and tobacco.  He went forward, and as he went, one man put his head out of the door after him.

"Whose pig's that there?" he said, scratching his ear.  "I don't rek'lect seein' that pig before, nowhere."

Another man, standing at the bar, strode to the door and looked forth at the stranger.  He was a curious-looking individual, very porcine of appearance, very red and greasy of face and hand, and as bald as man could be.  He wore a blue linen apron over his clothes, and from his side a formidable steel dangled from a leather belt.  He was, in short, the butcher and pig-killer of the village, and had a professional interest in pigs of all classes.  And he surveyed the wandering pig with a keen eye, shook his head, and went back to his ale.  He knew every pig in Little St. Peter's— this was a stray-away from somewhere else.

"That's none of ours," he said, with a sniff of disdain.  "Jack Longbottom's pig's the only one in Peter's that's in a badly way, and it's a stone heavier nor what that pig is."

"It'll be a poorish pig, then!" remarked the other man.  "But Jack were never much of a hand at pig-feeding."

The ownerless pig continued his explorations. He went up a by-lane or two, looked in at the gates of a farmstead here and a farmstead there, but always returned to the street unsatisfied.  He managed to get a light lunch off a bowl of potato peelings which a woman threw into the road as he passed, but he was still hungry, and had visions of a trough, liberally furnished with pig-meal.  And at noon, being famished, and remembering the gap in Widow Grooby's garden fence, he went recklessly back to it, and finding that William Green had not yet repaired it, pushed his way through and once more entered on work of a destructive nature.

This time Widow Grooby on discovering him made no personal effort to dislodge the intruder.  She was doing a day's starching and ironing, being by profession a laundrywoman, and she and her assistant, a young woman from a few doors away, were as throng, said Mrs. Grooby, as Throp's wife, and were not to be interrupted by anything or anybody.

"Blest if that there dratted pig isn't in my garden agen!" exclaimed Widow Grooby. "That's the second time this morning, and now it's at them carrots.  Howsumever, it's not a woman's place to take up stray cattle— Martha Jane, slip round to James Burton's, the pinder's, and tell him there's a strange pig on my premises, and I'll thank him to come and take it out at once and put it in the pinfold, which is its lawful place.  Them as it belongs to can come and pay for it— and then I'll talk to 'em about paying me for the damage it's done."

The pinder, interrupted at his dinner, came slowly and unwillingly to perform his duty. It was no easy thing to drive a stray pig into the village pound; stray horses, donkeys, and cattle were not so difficult to manage, but a pig was a different thing.

"Whose pig is it?" he inquired surlily, as he followed Martha Jane and munched his last mouthfuls.  "If it be that rampagious rorp-scorp o' Green's, why don't they fetch it out theirselves?"

"Then it isn't," answered Martha Jane. "It's an animal as comes from nowhere, and you've to put it in the pinfold this minute, Mrs. Grooby says."

"Aw, indeed!" remarked the pinder.  "An' I wonder how she'd like breaking off her dinner to put pigs in pound.  Howsumever—"

There were boys and girls coming from school just then, and Mr. Burton enlisted their services in driving the stray pig out of the widow's garden and conducting it to the place of incarceration.  Pig-like, as soon as it began to be chivied it showed a powerful inclination to go anywhere but where it was wanted to go. In a few moments the quiet street was riotous with noise and commotion.

The pinfold lay in the shadow of the old lych-gate which gave admittance to the churchyard, the spreading yew-trees, and the ancient church itself.  Like all the rest of the things about it, it was grey and time-worn, and redolent of a long-dead past.  A square enclosure of grey, lichen-covered walls, against one of which stood the village stocks, against another the mounting-steps from which many a fine old squire and sprightly damsel had taken saddle to ride homeward after church, its interior, now rarely used, was a mass of docks and nettles; its door was green and mouldy, and would scarce have withstood a couple of sturdy kicks from a stout ass.  When that door was opened, however, for the reception of captives, most of them backed away.

The pig proved himself as unwilling to enter the pound as any of his many predecessors. He looked in, saw the uninviting gloom, the nettles, the docks, the absence of anything amongst which he could root, and he turned and made valiant efforts to escape his captors.  He doubled this way and that; he struggled out of corners; he tried to wriggle through the lych-gate.  The pinder, remembering his interrupted dinner, shouted; the boys yelled; the girls screamed.  But the stray pig, dodging hither and thither, still eluded their attempts to impound him, though he now screamed a little and was getting short of breath.  Suddenly he collapsed against the churchyard wall, as if wearied out.

It was at this moment that Miss Lavinia Dorney, who occupied the pretty house and garden close to the church, came down to the foot of her lawn, attracted by the unwonted commotion, and beheld the exhausted pig and his tormentors.  Miss Lavinia was a spinster lady of fine presence, very noble and dignified in manner, who was noted for her shawls and her caps, both of which she wore with distinction. She looked very imposing as she stood there, half-concealed by the shining holly-hedge whose neatly clipped edges fitted in so well with the elegance of their surroundings, and Burton touched his cap, the boys pulled their forelocks, and the girls curtsied.

"Dear me!" exclaimed Miss Lavinia, lifting a pair of elegantly-mounted pince-nez to the bridge of her aristocratic nose.  "Dear me, what a noise!  Oh, that's you, James Burton, isn't it?  And what is all this commotion about?"

"We want to get that there pig into the pinfold, mum," answered the pinder, wiping his forehead.  "But it's the contrariest beast ever I see!  It's eaten up nearly all Mistress Grooby's kitchen garden."

Miss Lavinia looked more closely and saw the fugitive.

"Dear me!" she said.  "It must be hungry, Burton.  Whose animal is it?"

"Dunno, mum," answered the pinder, in a tone that suggested an utter lack of interest in the subject.  "But it's none a Little Peter's pig— it's too thin, there's naught but skin and bone on it.  It's my opinion, mum, it would eat anything, that pig would, if it had the chance."

"And who is going to feed it in the pound?" asked Miss Lavinia.

Burton shook his head.  He was much more concerned about feeding himself than about feeding the pig.

"Dunno, mum," he replied.  "It's none of my business.  And nobody might never come for that there pig, and it's naught but skin and bone as it is."

"The poor animal needs food and rest," said Miss Lavinia with decision. She turned and called across her lawn.  "Mitchell—come here," she commanded.

A man who was obviously a gardener approached, looking his curiosity. Miss Lavinia indicated the group in the road below the holly-hedge.

"Mitchell," she said, "isn't there a piggery in the stable-yard?"

Mitchell, coachman, gardener, general factotum in Miss Lavinia's small establishment, gathered an idea of what his mistress meant and almost gasped.  A pig in his scrupulously kept preserves!

"Well, ma'am," he said, rubbing his chin, "there is certainly a sty, ma'am.  But it's never been used since we came here, ma'am."

"Then we will use it now, Mitchell," said Miss Lavinia.  "There is a poor animal which needs rest and refreshment.  Burton and the bigger boys will help you to drive it in, and Burton may have a pint of ale, and the boys some apples.  See that the pig has straw, or hay, or whatever is proper, Mitchell, and feed it well.  Now, all you smaller children, run home to your dinners."

No one ever dreamed of questioning any order which Miss Lavinia Dorney issued, and the stray pig was ere long safely housed in a sty which had certainly never been used before.

"Nice new job for you, Mitchell!" said Burton, over a jug of ale in the kitchen.  "And if you want a word of advice, keep the beast fastened in—he's a good 'un for gardens."

"You don't know what direction he came from?" asked Mitchell, anxiously.

"Not I!" answered the pinder.  "What for?"

"Nothing," said Mitchell.  "At least, if you did, I'd send my son on the road, making inquiries about him.  He must belong to somebody, and I don't want no pigs in my stableyard.  And you know what the missis is?— if she takes a fancy to anything, well—"

Mitchell ended with an expressive grimace, and Burton nodded his head sympathetically. Then he remembered his dinner and hurried off, and the gardener, who had not kept pigs for many years, begged another jug of ale from the cook in order to help him to remember what the staple sustenance of those animals really was.  As he consumed it his ideas on the subject became more and more generous, and when Miss Lavinia Dorney went into the stable-yard after luncheon to see how her latest protégé was getting on she found the new-comer living and housed in a style which he himself may have dreamed of, but certainly never expected twohours previously.

"I'm glad to see you have made the poor thing so comfortable, Mitchell," said Miss Lavinia.  "Of course, you understand what pigs require?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am!" replied Mitchell.  "What a fine pig like that wants is plenty of good wheat straw to lie in, and the best pig-meal—that's crushed peas and beans and maize and such-like, ma'am—and boiled potatoes, and they're none the worse for a nice hot mash now and again. They're very nice eaters, is pigs, ma'am, as well as uncommon hearty."

"Don't you think this is a very thin pig, Mitchell?" asked the mistress.

"Yes, ma'am, he's uncommon thin," replied Mitchell.  "I should say, ma'am, that that there pig had known what it was to feel hungry."

"Poor thing!" said Miss Lavinia.  "Well, see that he has all he can eat, Mitchell.  Of course, I must advertise for his owner— you're sure he doesn't belong to any one in the village?"

"I'm certain he doesn't, ma'am!" replied Mitchell.  "There isn't another pig in Little St. Peter's as thin as what he is.  Nor in Great St. Peter's, neither, ma'am," he added as by an afterthought.

"Well, as his former owner, or owners, seems to have neglected him," said Miss Lavinia with severe firmness, "I shall feed him well before advertising that he is found.  So see to it, Mitchell.  And by the bye, Mitchell, don't you think he is very dirty?"

Mitchell eyed the pig over.  His glance was expressive.

"I think he must have been sleeping out, ma'am," he replied.  "When an animal's homeless it gets neglected shocking."

"Couldn't you wash him, Mitchell?" suggested Miss Lavinia.  "I'm sure it would do him good."

Mitchell stroked his chin.

"Well, ma'am," he said, "I never heard of a pig being washed unless it was for show or after it had been killed, ma'am, but I dare say I could, ma'am.  As soon as I've an hour to spare, ma'am," he continued, "I'll get my son to help me, and we'll have some hot water and turn the biggest hosepipe on him in the little yard— I'll get it off him, ma'am!"

Miss Lavinia cordially approved this proposition and went away, and Mitchell remarked to himself that no man ever knew what a day might not bring forth, and went to smoke in the loneliest part of the garden. Later in the afternoon he and his son performed the pig's ablutions, and the junior Mitchell, remarking that it was no use doing things by halves, got a stout scrubbing-brush from the scullery and so successfully polished the animal that he looked as if he had just been killed and scalded.  Miss Lavinia, going to see him next morning on her usual round of the stables and poultry-yard, was delighted with his changed appearance, and praised her gardener unreservedly.

Mitchell, however, was not so much enamoured of his new occupation as he professed to be in his mistress's presence.  For one thing, he was just then very busy in the garden; for another, the pig began to make more and more calls upon his time.  It speedily developed, or, rather, made manifest, a most extraordinary appetite, and by some almost malevolent prescience discovered that it had only to call loudly for anything that it wanted to have its desires immediately satisfied.  No one who had chanced to see its entry into Little St. Peter's would have recognized it at the end of a fortnight.  Its ribs were no longer visible; it was beginning to get a certain breadth across its back; its twinkling eyes were disappearing in its cheeks.  The weekly bill for its board and lodging amounted to a considerable figure in shillings, but Miss Lavinia neither questioned nor grumbled at it.  She was delighted with the pig's progress, and she believed it had come to recognize her.  There was distinct regret in her voice when one morning she remarked—

"Now that the animal is so much better after its wanderings, Mitchell, I think we must advertise for its owner.  He will no doubt be glad to have his property restored to him.  I will write out the advertisement to-day, and send it to the newspaper."

Mitchell stroked his chin.  He had different ideas— of his own.

"I don't think there's need to do that, ma'am," he said.  "I've been making an inquiry about that pig, and I rather fancy I know who it is as he belongs lawful to.  If you'll leave it to me, ma'am, I think I can find out for certain, without advertising of him."

"Very good, Mitchell," agreed Miss Lavinia.  Then she added, half-wistfully, "I hope his owner will be glad to have him back."

"I don't think there's much doubt about that, ma'am," said Mitchell, glancing at the pig, who at that moment was stuffing himself out with his third breakfast.  "I should think anybody 'ud be glad to see a pig like that come home looking as well as what he does."

"And so beautifully clean, Mitchell, thanks to you," said Miss Lavinia.

Mitchell replied modestly that he had done his best, and when his mistress had gone into the house he slapped the pig's back just to show that he had better thoughts of it than formerly.

"Blest if I don't make something out of you yet, my fine fellow!" he said.

That evening, after he had had his supper, Mitchell put on his second-best suit and went to call on a small farmer who lived up a lonely lane about three miles off.  He spent a very pleasant hour or two with the farmer and came away full of that peaceful happiness which always waits on those who do good actions and engineer well-laid schemes to success.

"It'll benefit him and it'll benefit me," he mused, as he went homeward, smoking a two-penny cigar which the small farmer had pressed upon him in the fulness of his gratitude.  "And if that isn't as things ought to be, well, then I'm a Dutchman!"

Next day, as Miss Lavinia sat in her morning-room, going through the weekly accounts, the parlour-maid announced the arrival of a person who said he had come about the pig. Miss Lavinia looked dubiously at the spotlessness of the linen carpet-cover, and asked the parlour-maid if the person's boots seemed clean.  As it happened to be a bright frosty morning the parlour-maid considered the person suitable for admittance and brought him in—a shifty-eyed man with a shock of red hair who ducked and scraped at Miss Lavinia as if he experienced a strange joy in meeting her.

"So you have come about the pig which I found!" said Miss Lavinia pleasantly.  "You must have been very sorry to lose it."

The caller elevated his eyes to the ceiling, examined it carefully, and then contemplated the inside of his old hat.

"I were sorry, mum," he said.  "It were a vallyble animal, that there, mum— it's a well-bred 'un."

"But it was so thin and— and dirty, when it came to me," said Miss Lavinia with emphasis. "Painfully thin, and so very, very dirty.  My gardener was obliged to wash it with hot water."

The man scratched his head, and then shook it.

"Ah, I dessay, mum!" he said.  "Of course, when a pig strays away from its proper home it's like a man as goes on the tramp— it don't give no right attention to itself.  Now, when I had it, ah!— well, it were a picture, and no mistake."

"You shall see it now," said Miss Lavinia, who felt the caller's last words to contain something of a challenge.  "You will see we have not neglected it while it has been here."

She led the way out to the stable-yard or to the sty, where the pampered pig was revelling in the best wheat straw and enjoying a leisurely breakfast—even Miss Lavinia had noticed that now that it was certain of its meals, and as many of them as it desired, it ate them with a lordly unconcern.  It looked up—the man with the red hair looked down.  And he suddenly started with surprise and breathed out a sharp whistle.

"Yes, mum!" he said with conviction. "That's my pig— I know it as well as I know my own wife."

"Then, of course, you must have it," said Miss Lavinia.  There was a touch of regret in her voice— the pig had already become a feature of the stable-yard, and she believed that he knew his benefactress.  "I suppose," she continued, "that you have many pigs?"

"A goodish few on 'em, mum," replied the man.

"Would you— I thought, perhaps, that as you have others, and this one seems to have settled down here, you might be inclined to— in fact, to sell him to me?" said Miss Lavinia hurriedly.

The red-haired person once more scratched his head.

"Well, of course, mum, pigs is for selling purposes," he said.  "But that there pig, he's an uncommon fine breed.  What would you be for giving for him, mum, just as he stands?"

At this moment the pig, full of food and entirely happy, gave several grunts of satisfaction and begun to rub its snout against the door of the sty.  Miss Lavinia made up her mind.

"Would you consider ten pounds a suitable sum?" she asked timidly.

The red-haired man turned his head away as if to consider this proposal in private. When he faced round again his face was very solemn.

"Well, of course, mum," he said, "of course, as I said, he's a vallyble animal is that there, but as you've fed him since he were found and have a liking to him—well, we'll say ten pounds, mum, and there it is!"

"Then if you will come into the house I will give you the money," said Miss Lavinia. "And you may rest assured we shall treat the pig well."

"I'm sure of that, mum," said the seller. "And very pretty eating you'll find him when his time comes."

Then he got his money, and drank a jug of ale, and went away, rejoicing greatly, and on his way home he met Mitchell, who had been to the market-town in the light cart, and who pulled up by the road-side at sight of him.

The red-haired man winked knowingly at the gardener.

"Well?" said Mitchell.

"All right," answered the other.  He winked again.

Mitchell began to look uneasy.

"Where's the pig?" he asked.

"Where I found it," answered the red-haired man.  "In the sty."

"Why didn't you bring it away?" asked Mitchell.  "You said you would."

The red-haired man again winked and smiled widely.

"I've sold it," he said.  "Sold it to your missis.  For ten pounds."

He slapped his pocket and Mitchell heard the sovereigns jingle.  He almost fell out of his seat.

"Sold it!— to our missis!— for ten pounds!" he exclaimed.  "You— why, it weren't yours to sell!"

"Weren't it?" said the red-haired man. "Well, there you're wrong, Mestur Mitchell, 'cause it were.  I knew it as soon as I set eyes on it, 'cause it had a mark in its left ear that I gave it myself.  And as your missis had taken a fancy to it and bid me ten pound for it, why, of course, I took her at her word.  Howsumever," he concluded, putting his hand in his pocket, "as you put me on to the matter, I'll none be unneighbourly, and I'll do the handsome by you."

Therewith he laid half-a-crown on the splashboard of the light cart, winked again, and with a cheery farewell strode away, leaving the disgusted gardener staring at the scant reward of his schemings.

________________

10: The End Of All

Nym Crinkle

A. C. Wheeler (1835-1903)

Eleven Possible Cases, 1891

THE DIFFICULTY that I experience in complying with your request, dear spirit, springs from the terrestrial limitations of thought and expression, from which, as you may well know, I have not been long enough with you to free myself.

I shall, however, give you a plain narrative of the events attending the extinction of life on our planet, asking you only to remember that I am doing it just as I would have done it, were it possible, for a fellow human being while on earth, using the phraseology and the terrestrial time divisions with which I am most familiar.

The circumstance which at our last intercourse I was trying to explain to you was simply this: In the early summer of the year 1892 a sudden interruption of navigation occurred on the Pacific coast, which, curiously enough, attracted very little attention outside of scientific circles. I was living at the house of my wealthy friend, Judge Brisbane, in Gramercy Park. To tell you the truth, I was in love with his beautiful daughter, of whom I shall have to speak more fully to you, for she was intimately associated with me in the appalling scenes which you desire me to describe.

I was sitting in the Judge’s library on the night of June 25. His daughter was present, and I had been conversing with her in an undertone while the Judge read the evening papers. He suddenly laid down the paper, took off his spectacles, and, turning round in his chair, said to me: “Did you see the brief dispatch in the morning papers two days ago from San Francisco, saying that all the eastern-bound vessels were overdue on that coast?”

I replied at once that I had not noticed it.

“It is astonishing,” he said, “that in our present system of journalism the most important events connected with the welfare of mankind receive the slightest attention from the newspapers, and the trivialities of life are most voluminously treated. A movement in the iron trade that affects millions of homes gets a brief paragraph in small type, and the quarrel of a ballet girl with her paramour receives illuminated attention down whole columns. Here is something taking place in the Pacific Ocean of surpassing interest to the race, and nobody pays the slightest attention to it except, perhaps, the consignees and shipping clerks.”

“What is it?” we both asked, with the languid interest that young people, having an overmastering personal affair on hand, would be apt to take in matters of national or universal importance.

The Judge got up, and going to a side table, where he kept his papers piled in chronological order, pulled out a recent issue of a morning journal, and after looking it over searchingly a moment, said:

“Here. I should think you would notice such a paragraph as this.” Then he read, as I recollect, a telegraphic dispatch to this effect:

“San Francisco, June 23.—Considerable anxiety is felt here in commercial circles by the non-arrival of any eastward-bound vessels for a week. The steamship Cathay of the Occidental Line is overdue four days. An unusual easterly wind has been blowing for twenty-four hours. Weather mild.

“That dispatch, you will perceive,” said the Judge, “was sent two days ago. Now here, on the 25th, I read in the evening paper another dispatch from San Francisco, hidden away at the bottom of a column of commercial news. Listen to this:

“San Francisco, June 25.— The entire suspension of travel from the West continues to excite the gravest apprehensions. Nothing but coastwise vessels have come in during the past eight days. The U. S. cruiser Mobile left Honolulu three weeks ago for this coast. There is no official intimation of a storm in the Chinese seas.”

The Judge laid the paper down, and regarded us both a moment in silence, as if expecting to hear some remark that indicated our suddenly awakened curiosity.

I don’t think we responded with any adequate interest to the occasion. Miss Brisbane did, indeed, stare at her father in her dreamy, abstracted way a moment, and then got up, and, going to the open window, began to arrange the curtains, as if relinquishing whatever problem there was to the superior acumen of the masculine mind.

I think I said that it looked as if there had been a cyclone somewhere, and if there had we should in all probability get the accounts of it soon enough.

“But, young man,” replied the Judge, with his majesterial emphasis, “cyclones do not extend from the fiftieth degree of north latitude to the fortieth degree of south latitude, and vessels are due at San Francisco from Melbourne and Japan.”

“What, then, other than a storm at sea could have caused a detention of all these vessels?” I asked, and I must have unwittingly betrayed in the tone of my voice, or the expression of my face, that considerate superciliousness with which youth regards the serious notions of mature philosophers, for the Judge, putting his gold spectacles upon his nose, and regarding me over the top of them a moment, said rather severely:

“Other than the known and regular phenomena of this planet do not interest young men. If I could answer your question there would be no special interest in the matter.”

I mention these trivial incidents because, insignificant as they may seem, they were the first ripples of that disaster which was soon enough to overwhelm us all, and to show you what were the only premonitions the world had of the events which were to follow.

On June 26, the subject did not occur to me. A hundred other things of far more immediate consequence to me occupied my attention. A young man who is preparing to get married is not apt to take somber views of anything. Nor is he very apt to allow the contumacy of age in his prospective father-in-law to aggravate him. It was a pardonable freak, I thought, in a man who had retired in most respects from the active world, to dogmatize a little about that world now that he judged it through his favorite evening paper. When, therefore, on the night of the 26th, while at the tea-table, the Judge broke out again about the meteorological wave on the Pacific coast, his daughter Kate and I exchanged a rapid but furtive glance which said, in the perfect understanding of lovers, “There comes the old gentleman’s new hobby again, and we can well afford to treat it leniently.”

The Judge had the damp evening paper in his hand, and he disregarded the steaming cup of tea which his daughter had poured for him.

“Well,” he said, with a toss of self-satisfied import. “Now the newspapers are waking up to the significance of the California news.” He then read from the paper, as nearly as I can recollect, something like the following:

San Francisco, June 26.—There is an intense and growing anxiety on this coast with respect to the non-appearance of any eastward-bound vessels. The breeze from the east continues, and is unprecedented.

“Now, I should like to know,” said the Judge, as he laid down the paper and took up his tea-cup, “why a breeze from the east in California should be unprecedented.”

“Because,” I ventured to remark, “it usually blows from the sea at this season.”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed the Judge with vigor. “A variation for a few days in wind or weather is a common occurrence everywhere. Fancy a message sent all over the world from the West Indies that the trade winds were six days late, or a telegram from Minnesota that the winter frosts had been interfered with for a week by pleasant sunshine. No, sir. The event of importance to the Californian at this moment is the mysterious something that has happened out at sea, and there is no excuse for his associating a summer breeze from the east with it, except that there is something peculiar about that breeze that associates it in the mind with the predominant mystery.”

I smiled. “You will pardon me, Judge, but it seems to me,” I said, “that you are trying to invest the whole affair with an occult significance that is subjective. I suppose that in a few hours the matter will be explained and forgotten.”

In a moment we were in one of those foolish little wrangles in which, so far as argument is concerned, the younger man is at a great disadvantage, when the elder, however unreasonable his claims, enforces them with the advantage of age and position. I remember that the desire to convince Kate on the one hand that I was free from what I conceived to be her father’s unreasonableness, and sustain my independence of views on the other hand, led me to say much more than was polite, for I exasperated the old gentleman, and with a curt and not altogether complimentary remark he got up and left the room.

The moment he was gone I turned to the daughter and laughingly said: “Well, my dear, I am afraid I have offended your father without intending it, but you at least understand me, and are free from his superstition.”

To my surprise she regarded me with a serious air, and replied: “I do not know what you mean by superstition. My father believes that something has happened, and I feel that he is right.”

“You do not mean to tell me,” I said, “that you believe anything has happened that can concern us?”

She made no reply. I looked at her with some astonishment, and wondered if I had offended her by opposing her father’s childish views.

“Perhaps,” I persisted, “you, too, think I am stupidly unreasonable because I will not consent to be dishonestly chimerical.”

I well remember the look of sad reproach with which she silently regarded me, and I well remember, too, the thought that came into my mind. I said to myself: “This is the same obduracy that her father has shown. Odd it is that I never noticed the trait in her before.” Then I added, with an equal obduracy that I was not conscious of:

“Perhaps you, too, have discovered some peculiarity of good sense in me that is offensive, and you are afraid that something will happen if we—”

Here she interrupted me in her quiet, resolute, and reproachful way.

“Something has happened,” she said.

I was amazed. If I had suddenly discovered that the woman I loved was unfaithful to me it could not have produced, in my frame of mind at that moment, a greater shock. It seemed to me then that the wooing of months, the confidence and affection of a year, were to be sacrificed in a moment of infatuated stubbornness. The very thought was so unnatural that it produced a revulsion in my own feelings.

“My darling,” I said, as I went toward her impulsively, “we are playing the unworthy part of fools. Nothing can ever happen that will make us love each other less, or prevent you from being my wife.”

I put my arm around her in the old familiar way. She was passive and irresponsive. She stood there, limply holding the curtain, with one white arm upraised, her beautiful head bent over and her eyes cast down so that I could not look into her face. This stony obduracy was so new and unlike her that I withdrew my arm and stepped back a little to regard her with astonishment, not unmingled with pique. At that moment she lifted her head slowly, and as she looked at me with a dreamy and far-away pathos I saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

“It seems to me,” she said, with a voice that sounded as if it was addressed to an invisible phantom way beyond me. “It seems to me that I shall never be your wife!”

I must have stared at her several seconds in silence. Then I said:

“You are ill. You are not yourself. When you have recovered your normal condition I will come back.”

I snatched a kiss from her lips, that were strangely cold, and rushed from the house.

It was not till the next morning, when I woke up after a short and disturbed sleep, that my mind reverted to the cause of all this purely sentimental disagreement, and I felt a strong desire to have events prove that the Judge was slightly monomaniacal, and that I was right. I went to Riccadonnas’ for my breakfast and got all the morning papers, as usual, but this time with a distinct confidence that the news would be the best vindication of my good sense, and that I should yet have a good laugh at the Judge.

I opened the paper as I sipped my coffee, and the first thing my eyes fell on were the headlines of a dispatch from St. Louis. I read them with an inexplicable sense of something sinking in me. As I recall them they ran as follows:

“Strange news from the West. All communication west of Salt Lake City ceases. Meteorological puzzle. What is the matter with the wires?”

Then followed the dispatch, which I have not forgotten:

St. Louis, June 26, 8 P. M.—A dispatch received here from Yuma on the Texas Pacific announces that no eastern-bound train has come in since morning, and all attempts to open communication by telegraph with points west of that place have failed. It is the opinion of railroad men that a great storm is raging in California. Weather here pleasant, with a steady, dry wind from the east blowing.

Immediately following this was another news item which I can quote from memory:

Denver, June 26, 9 P. M.—Intelligence from Cheyenne is to the effect that railway travel and telegraphic communication west of Pocatello on the Union Pacific and Ogden and on the Central Pacific have been interrupted by a storm. The telegraph wires are believed to be in good condition, but up to nine o’clock there has been no return current.

I read these paragraphs over three or four times. Ordinarily I should have passed them by and given my attention to other and more congenial news. But now a dull fear that events were conspiring to widen the breach between myself and the Brisbanes focussed my interest on them. There was that easterly wind blowing again; was I, too, growing superstitious? I turned over all the papers. The news was the same in all, but there was not an editorial paragraph of comment in any of the sheets, which, indeed, teamed with all the details of active commercial, political, and social life.

I went down town after eating my breakfast and found that the intelligence had not awakened any public attention that was observable. The two or three persons to whom I spoke with regard to it treated it as one of the passing sensations of the hour that would be explained sooner or later. It was not till the evening papers of the 27th came out that the matter began to be discussed. The dispatches in these papers were of a nature to arouse widespread anxiety. It was very obvious from their construction and import that the feeling west of the Mississippi was more intense than had up to this time been suspected. The columns of the papers were filled with brief but rather startling telegrams from various points. Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Chicago sent anxious sentences which had a thrill of trepidation in their broken phrases. And it was easy to see that this feeling of deep concern increased with each dispatch from a point further west.

Telegrams sent to St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul represented the condition of anxiety in Ogden and Pocatello to be bordering on excitement. Fears were entertained, the dispatches said, of a “meteorological cataclysm,” and thousands who had friends either on the coast or in transit were besieging the telegraph offices in vain.

The hurried comments of the evening papers on the news were singularly unsatisfactory and non-committal.

“The unprecedented storm that is now raging on the Pacific slope,” I read, “and which has temporarily cut off communications with the far West, will by its magnitude fill the country with the most serious apprehensions.”

“The earliest news from California, which shall give us the details of the storm,” said another paper, “will be looked for with eagerness, and will be promptly and fully furnished to our readers.”

As curious as anybody could be to know what kind of a storm it was that had stopped railroad travel from Idaho to Mexico, and remarking with surprise that the Signal Office utterly refused to recognize a great storm anywhere, I dismissed the subject from my mind with the reflection that there would in all probability be explanatory news in the morning, and resolved to make my usual visit to the Brisbane family.

To my surprise, Kate received me cordially, and with no other allusion to the unpleasantness of the night before than a demure remark that she was afraid she had offended me.

“Let us not refer to it at all,” I said, “and thus avoid making idiots of ourselves.”

“I am glad you came to-night,” she remarked, after a moment’s silence, “for I wanted to tell you of the change we are going to make.”

A little pang darted through me. It was said so seriously.

“What is it, my dear,” I asked, trying to be as affectionate as if the conditions had not changed.

“My father and I have determined to go to Europe.”

“To Europe!” I repeated, aghast. “You surely do not mean it?”

“Yes,” resolutely. “He wanted to consult you about it, but was afraid you would disagree with his plans.”

“And when did he make up his mind to take this sudden move?”

“This morning.”

“And you intend to go with him?”

“Yes, and I was going to ask you to go, too.”

“When do you propose to go?”

“Immediately.”

It was evident to my mind now that this old man was a panic-stricken monomaniac, and had infected his daughter with his fears.

“Kate,” I said, as I took her by her hands and pulled her to the sofa beside me, “you are running away from something; it is not from me, is it?”

“I want you to go with us,” she answered.

“But you knew when you asked me that I could not go so suddenly. You expected me to refuse.”

“No,” she said, “I expect you to consent.”

“Be careful. In a moment of bravado I may take you at your word, at any cost!”

She caught hold of me. “Do,” she said, tremulously, and I felt a little shiver in her hand. “Do, do.”

“I would rather go with you than lose you,” I said at a hazard, “and if you are determined to go, I believe I will accompany you if your father will consent.”

“We are determined,” she calmly replied.

“But I must put my affairs in order,” I suggested.

“How many hours will it take you?”

“Hours?” I repeated. “You would not like to start to-night, surely?”

“Yes,” she answered, “I would gladly start to-night.”

My patience was giving way very fast at this imperturbable obduracy. “Perhaps,” I said, “you will give me some adequate reason for a haste that I cannot comprehend.”

She did not answer. She was listening, with her head averted, and she held up her hand for me to listen also, as if that were her answer. Then there came through the open window the hoarse cry of a distant newsboy who was bellowing an “extra.”

There was something weird in her attitude and action, connecting, as they did, her motives with that discordant, ominous cry.

“It’s an extra,” I said, as unconcernedly as possible. “I’ll get a copy. There may be some good news for you,” and I made a move toward the window.

“Don’t,” she said, quietly. “We were talking about going to Europe. Pa is not familiar with the business of securing passages, and you are. You could relieve him of a great deal of worry, and if you would go with us—”

“Kate,” I said, “do you want me to go?”

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “I do not want to leave you here.”

“Then,” I said, “I will go. I will see your father in the morning and tell him that I will attend to the whole business of securing passages. I will set about arranging my affairs at once.”

She then let me plague her a little about her timidity, and after a half hour of playful badinage on my part I came away, with a parting promise on my lips to lose no delay in making the arrangements for our departure.

Such, however, was not my intention. I felt sure that the Judge and his daughter would change their minds if I could only manage to delay matters a few days. To go running off to Europe at a moment’s notice would be utter folly for me.

As I left the house I heard the voices of the newsboys in various keys still calling the extras. I bought a paper and read it under the gaslight of the church on Twentieth Street. “Display” headlines announced, “As Silent as the Grave; Nothing Heard from the Pacific. Great Excitement in Chicago and St. Louis.” I must have stood there ten minutes poring over the strange news. An expedition in a special train had been sent west from Yuma that day, with railroad men and doctors. It had left at 3 P. M. The train reached Mesquite in less than an hour, and word was sent back from that station, “All right here; track clear; will reach the springs at 9 P. M.” A dispatch from Yuma sent at 10 o’clock and received at St. Louis said, “Nothing further heard from the special.” News from Chicago, where the excitement appeared to be momentarily growing, reflected intelligence from Denver, St. Paul, and Kansas City, and it was vain to ignore the fact that the entire West was in an alarming condition of anxiety. A special train was fitting out at Cheyenne under Government orders to start in the morning with a corps of Signal Service men, army officers, and electricians. It was to go provided with every scientific appliance, and to carry an insulated cable to be paid out from the car. The accounts said that the people were all on the streets in Cheyenne, and an enormous mob surrounded the station where the preparations were making.

For the first time I felt, as I threw the paper away, what I can only call a sense of misgiving. As I walked up the deserted avenue this feeling grew upon me, and when I reached Twenty-third Street, on my way to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a sudden and entirely new reflection made me stop unconsciously as I turned it over in my mind. “If this strange news has affected Judge Brisbane and his daughter so seriously, why may it not be affecting millions of other people similarly? If there is at this moment a panic in the West, how long will it take the reflex wave to reach New York?”

The next morning events, or at least the publication of them, had reached that condition which arrests public attention everywhere. The news from the West swamped all else in the morning journals. The editors, by their work, now acknowledged that the mysterious silence on the Pacific Slope was by far the most important subject for consideration before the world. The moment I glanced at the sheets I saw that there was but one theme in the journalistic mind.

Two days had passed, and the silence was unbroken. Never before in the history of the world had the absence of news become such important news. Public attention was now mainly centered on the attempt to get a train of observation through from Cheyenne.

There was a hopeful spirit to most of the accounts, as if it was believed that science would unravel the mystery. But there was nothing from any quarter of the globe that as yet afforded the feeblest gleam of comfort. The Government train was to start early on this, the morning of the 28th, and the papers were only able to furnish details of the preparation and reports of the public excitement in Cheyenne and Denver. The officers on the train were to send dispatches from every station west of Pocatello. They were sagacious, experienced men, and the expedition was under the direction of the well-known engineer, General Albert Carrall.

I felt as I read the accounts that these men would probably clear up the mystery, and I resolved to delay engaging the passages on the ocean steamer until the next day. So I wrote a carefully worded note to Judge Brisbane, informing him that I would attend to the matter immediately. Had I then had the slightest knowledge of the cumulative rapidity with which a panic moves I would not have taken this risk. But my whole object was to gain time, with the hope that something would occur to change the minds of my two timid friends.

On the night of the 28th I avoided the Brisbane establishment, although my desire drew me in that direction. I resolved to wait until the morrow, and if nothing happened to change the determination of the Judge to go to Europe, to then make my arrangements to go with him and Kate. That night there was a visible change in the metropolis. The theaters were deserted, men and women were congregated at the corners and were walking in the roadways—a sure indication in a great city of some popular disturbance. The bulletins and news centers were crowded, and the mystery of the great silence was being discussed by everybody. One thing struck everybody with a vague terror, and it was the accounts of the strange wind that was now blowing at Cheyenne and Denver. One special correspondent at Cheyenne said “that it seemed to him that the atmosphere of the earth, influenced by some incomprehensible suction, was all rushing to an unseen vortex. It was not in any sense a disturbance of the atmosphere that we usually call a wind, but a steady, silent draught. And the spectacle of trees bent over and held all day by the pressure, but unfluttered and unrelieved by fluctuant variations, filled them with wonder and dread.”

I got up early on the morning of the 29th, for I had slept lightly and fitfully. To my surprise I found that almost everybody else was up. It made me realize, as I had not done before, the feverish tension of public expectation. The news, if news it can be called, was startling. Let me try and repeat it to you just as it was presented to my sense. The special train, upon which the eyes of the whole country were fixed, had been heard from. It had gone west from Cheyenne and passed through Pocatello without interruption. Then followed the dispatches received from it at Cheyenne as it passed the stations beyond Pocatello. They were in this order and to this effect:

Michano, 10 A. M.— All right. Instruments working well. Track clear. Inhabitants appear to be moving east. No intelligence of a definite character obtained. Shoshone 108 miles west. Expect to make it in four hours.

Bannock, 2:30 P. M.— Conditions unchanged. Passed moving settlers all the way. They are going east with chattels. Wind from the east has the pressure without the violence of a gale. Party in good spirits.

Sunshine, 3:15.— Vast herds of wild cattle now impeding progress. Wind increasing. Road otherwise clear.

American Falls, 4:40.— Signs of the exodus decreasing. Country strewn with household goods. Reports here that all the teams that went out on the roads west have not returned. Expect to hear something definite from Minidoka.

Minidoka, 6:10.— Electrical and barometrical indications unchanged. Signs of life disappearing. Party in excellent spirits, and eager to reach the facts.

The next dispatch was from Cheyenne, and was sent at eight o’clock. It simply said, “Nothing further heard from Government party. Wire in good order.”

Then followed two telegrams of gruesome brevity and significance:

Pocatello, 9 P. M.—Nothing here.

Cheyenne, 10 P. M.—Nothing has come over the special wire up to this hour. Microphonic tests at Pocatello indicate that the train is still moving. Electrical tests indicate that the current is unbroken.

Finally there was a special message from the New York Star’s correspondent at Cheyenne, dated 11 P. M. It was about to this effect:

The current on the Government wire was broken at 10:40. Delicate tests show that the wire is now grounded. The dire conclusion of experts here is that the train ran from some point west of Minidoka from about 6:15 to 10:40 without human control, and then met with an accident. At the rate at which it was moving the train must have reached Shoshone. Terrible excitement here.

My keen sense detected in the newspaper itself certain infallible little signs that the news had disturbed the precision and routine of the office. Lines of type were in the wrong place, and typographical errors made it difficult to get the exact sense. Dispatch after dispatch, all bearing the same import of panic, was huddled into the column. From St. Louis the announcement was:

An unprecedented excitement here over the news from Cheyenne. The authorities appear to have lost their heads, and are unable to preserve order. Eastward-bound trains are carrying away people at a mob rate. We are in the midst of chaos.

From Chicago the intelligence was similarly appalling. “A panic prevails here,” said the dispatch. “Impelled by a senseless apprehension of disaster, people have lost their reason. The Mayor has just issued a call upon the best citizens to assist him in preserving order.”

It required no news expert to see that all the issues of life were temporarily suspended by the tremendous and growing interest in this stupendous mystery. Channels of news worn smooth by the placid streams of everyday platitudes began to show the roll of this new freshet. A dispatch from Washington was unintentionally significant. It read like this: “The only explanation forwarded by Colonel Sandford of the abandonment of the Pike’s Peak signal station by himself and party is that of a coward. He says the wind pressure indicated that the place would speedily become untenable.”

I turned over the sheet in which these disheartening facts were presented and looked at the editorial page. There was a double-leaded leader, evidently written late at night, and its conclusions were more gruesome than the facts, for while the facts could be interpreted in various ways according to the reader’s condition of mind, there was no mistaking the official tone of the editor whose business it was to weigh and estimate the public value of news. It seemed to me that this umpire to whom we instinctively looked for opinions had thrown up the sponge, so to speak. Let me recall his words as they were impressed upon me that morning:

That a grave crisis has arrived in the conditions of life on this planet, it would be folly and is impossible any longer to deny. It is not our province nor is it within our power to offer any solution of the stupendous mystery that is now enveloping a part of our continent. It is only imperative upon us, as brave agents in the dispensing of truth, to say, with all the candor that we can summon, that the effort of the Government to open communication with the vast region west of what must now be known as the Meridian of Silence has dismally failed, and it is the conviction of the maturest judgment, based upon all the facts of the attempt that are obtainable, that it failed because the explorers themselves ceased to exist when they had passed a certain pretty well-defined line which we now know extends north and south from Helena in Montana to Yuma on the borders of Mexico.

I found myself standing by my breakfast table reading this. I had risen unconsciously. My breakfast was unheeded. An ungovernable impulse to go anywhere seized me. To sit still with this crushing uncertainty was impossible. I found myself in a coupé. Where I got it I do not distinctly remember. But I do remember that it was by means of an extraordinary offer to the driver, who, like all his fellows, was dashing through the streets at a headlong pace. And I also have a very clear recollection of the strange nervous effect produced upon me by seeing the people along the curbs on Broadway watching the flying vehicles with a mute terror, as if the very recklessness of the drivers afforded them a palpable distraction from the unintelligible weight of their own fears. I speedily noticed that the stream of humanity on the streets was tending down town, and almost immediately I understood that it was heading, like myself, for the news centers. I could get no farther than Chambers Street, owing to the block of people and vehicles, and the driver rudely refused to take the risk of a jam. I looked at the City Hall clock. It was only eight. My heart was beating rapidly, and I knew enough of the effect of emotion on the cardiac system to understand that it was caused by suspense. A thousand new terrors were in the air of which the experience and the sagacity of man were ignorant. I forced my way with the greatest difficulty across the park, which was full of restless but strangely mute people, and got near enough to the newspaper bulletins to read the painted lines. They were feverishly indicative of the cross currents of excitement in the country, and were in short, decisive sentences like this: “The President asked to appoint a day of humiliation and prayer immediately. The Governor of Colorado, crazed by the excitement, commits suicide. Mob rule in Chicago. Rioting in Denver. Breakdown of the Alton & Chicago road. Unparalleled scenes at El Paso. Fanaticism in New Orleans. The Christian pastors of this city will meet at Cooper Union at ten o’clock, irrespective of sect. Panic in Milwaukee.”

Held by a numbing sort of fascination, I read these sentences over and over. Across Printing House Square, on another bulletin, in big black letters I saw the line, “It baffles the world. Has annihilation set in!” There was something weird in the use of the pronoun IT. It seemed to be man’s last effort in language to express a mystery that was specific and yet incomprehensible, and I found that by the common consent of ignorance men were referring to the phenomenon as IT. I looked at the strained, anxious faces of the mob, and a great fear fell upon me. With it came an awful reproach. I would go instantly and redeem my word to Kate by securing passages to Europe. I had to fight my way by inches out of the stolid and frightened crowd to the steamship office on lower Broadway, and there I found another jam. The street was full of private carriages, and it was impossible to get anywhere near the entrance to the office. I saw a policeman who was on the outside of the press, and who was walking up and down in a restless and unofficial manner. “What is the matter here?” I asked him. He looked me all over, as if he suspected that I had fallen out of the clouds. Then he said: “Tryin’ to get tickets for Europe! Where d’ you come frum?” and then, after a restless turn or two he added as he passed me, “But it ain’t no use, ‘cause there ain’t steamships enough in the world!”

Then it was, I think, that the whole terrible truth first lit my consciousness like the sudden upflaring of a bale fire. The inhabitants were fleeing from the country. They were all affected as had been the Brisbanes. I was the only dolt and idiot and liar who had no instincts of danger, and who had failed to rescue the woman I loved when she had appealed to me.

Then I plunged wildly out into the street with a feeling of desperation and that sinking of the spirits that comes only in the worst crises and when one begins to comprehend how helpless man is. I saw that in the brief time that had elapsed a change had taken place in the aspect of the crowds. When I got to Broadway again it was with the utmost difficulty that I could make my way at all against the surging mass of people that seemed momentarily to swell. It was utterly unlike any crowd in numbers and disposition that I had ever encountered. It was made up of all classes. It had lost that American characteristic of good-humor, which had been swallowed up in a dire personal and selfish instinct of self-preservation. It was animated by a vague terror, and disregarded every consideration but that of personal safety. A horrible conviction seized me that the ordinary restraints of society were breaking down, and that speedily panic would mount to chaos. I saw that this dread was adding to the terror of everybody, aside from the fear of IT. Like an assemblage in a burning building, the fear of each other was more subtile and operative than the fear of the elements. By indefatigable labor I got off the main thoroughfare and reached Hudson Street, and here in the crowd I learned the latest news and discovered the cause of the rapidly increasing excitement. I had run against an intimate friend and associate, by accident. His first words were, as he wiped the perspiration out of his eyes, “Well, this is awful, eh?”

“What’s the news?” I asked.

“The latest is that The Death Line has moved. The Thurbers have a private wire, and I just heard that Denver is cut off now! It looks as if it was every man for himself.”

So terrible was this announcement, and so engrossed was I with the despairing thoughts that it gave rise to, that I took little heed of what was going on about me until I reached Canal Street. The one dull conviction that it was useless to fight against now was that annihilation had set in; that some destroying wave had started out to encircle the globe and that the race was doomed. Something, God alone knew what, had happened to our planet, and humanity was to be swept away in one of those cataclysms with which soulless Nature prepares for a new order of existence.

I was rudely awakened from this reverie of wretchedness by the crowd which surged against me with a blind, unvindictive violence. My one desire was to get uptown to the woman I loved and had neglected, and I saw that every minute was adding to the difficulty.

How I reached the Brevoort House I do not know. But there I found a number of citizens who had not utterly lost their heads, and who had come together for counsel. There was a private wire in the house, and they were receiving intelligence from several central points in the city. The looks of these men, who were huddled into the parlor, were enough to dismay the most resolute observer. Their pale faces and painfully set mouths indicated the sense of an awful crisis which wisdom did not know how to meet or avoid. A well-known citizen read the dispatches to them as they were received, and torn as I was by impatience, my curiosity held me there to hear. It was now about half-past eleven in the morning. The rapidity with which events had moved since I got up was made startlingly apparent by the information here furnished. The authorities, together with a number of influential citizens, had come together as if by a common instinct at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The Mayor, the Police and Fire Commissioners, several wealthy bankers, and a number of prominent clergymen were holding some kind of council and sending out appeals for co-operation and addresses to the public, which latter were entirely unheeded. As I forced myself into the room I saw and heard a venerable and majestic gentleman, evidently a clergyman, addressing those present in an impassioned manner. There were tears in his eyes and an awful sadness in his voice. “Men and brethren,” he said, “it is appointed unto all men once to die. If it be appointed unto us who remain to die together, let us die like Christians who still retain our faith in eternal justice and eternal mercy, and not like wild beasts that devour each other.”

A report came that the fatal east wind was blowing. And at this there was a general movement of those present, as if the time were too short to waste in longer listening. I came up Lafayette Place to Astor Place with the intention of reaching Fourth Avenue. Both spaces were choked with people, and on Eighth Street I saw a woman on the steps of a private residence, wildly calling on the mob, which paid no attention to her, to repent, for the day of judgment was at hand. Her white hair was blown over her face and her arms were frantically gesticulating. Into the great hall of the Cooper Union a mass of religious people had flocked, and a number of speakers were making addresses and offering up prayers. When I passed the woman who was exhorting the crowd I had noticed the manner in which her hair, which was of soft, flossy white, streamed out straight in front of her, but it did not occur to me until I reached the square in front of the Cooper Union that this was caused by the peculiar and ominous draft of wind from the east of which I had heard so much, for it was there that I saw a crowd pointing up to the roof of the vast building known as the Bible House, which appeared to be covered with people. Some of them were holding flags and drapery, and the material floated out westward without any of the undulating motion which always marks a flag in a disturbed current. These extemporized pennants stood out as if they were starched. I could see that this sign produced a dumb sort of terror in the crowd. It seemed to me then that all emotion of which I was capable was centered in the one desire to get to the woman I loved and die with her. A crushing and at the same time an animating remorse, as if somehow I had been responsible for her death at least, in disregarding her warnings, and somehow doubly guilty in mistrusting her motives, unmanned me and inflamed me. It was with something of the same disregard of everybody but oneself that I had seen in others that I fought my way to Twenty-first Street. What brutalities I committed need not be recounted. That hour remains with me an acute and jangled memory of frenzy. I reached the steps of Judge Brisbane’s house torn and bleeding. The terrible scenes were in my eyes, and the dreadful, monotonous tumult of human desperation— that vast sigh of doomed humanity, pierced here and there by the wails and shrieks of despair and the cries of innocence for help, was in my ears. The celerity with which it had all come on left no chance for cool reason. An invisible phantom was at the heels of the community and we were part of a mighty stampede. After fumbling for an instant at the bell and pushing back several ghastly creatures who were on the steps, I must have applied my shoulder to the door and pushed it in. Some one appeared to be resisting on the other side, but it gave way and I half fell into Judge Brisbane’s vestibule. An instant later we were looking into each other’s faces, I, bloody and soiled and ragged and wild with the frenzy of fear and impatience; he, pale as death, but resolute, and holding an enormous bar over me.

“Quick!” he said. “Help me fasten this door!”

That sudden call of duty struck something habitual in me, and, without knowing exactly what I was doing, I found myself assisting him in barricading the door. The endeavor somewhat changed the current of my thoughts from the danger that was unseen to the danger that was storming under our windows. I must have muttered some kind of excuse for my conduct to the Judge, for he said: “No time for apologies or recriminations now. The house is full of my neighbors, who have come here for protection. Go upstairs and look after the women. The best and only thing we can do is to preserve a quiet place to die in, and not be trampled to pieces. Are you armed?”

I dashed up the broad staircase, and found the upper rooms occupied by women, some of whom, in morning attire hastily thrown on, were sitting around with their heads in their hands, while others were huddled at the windows, staring with strained looks of terror at the crowds on the street. Walking up and down the room, wringing his hands, a middle-aged man was giving expression to the most terrible irony and cowardice, without reference to his listeners.

I ran my eye over the huddled groups of frightened women. The one I sought was not there. I flew through the groaning figures on the stairway up to her chamber. I knocked loudly, and called her by name passionately. Then I listened. I heard nothing but the dull sounds of the human tumult that came through the open casement, and the sighing tones of the telegraph wires as the steady draft from the east swept through them. I shook the door, and abjured her to come to me. Then in my madness I burst it in. She was on her knees at the bed, with her hands on her ears, and her head buried in the bedclothes. I fell down on my knees beside her, and put my arm around her.

“Kate,” I said, “we will die together. Look up. Love at least is eternal.” She was cold. I caught her head between my hands, and turned her beautiful face toward me. My God, she was dead! Dead, with her staring eyes full of terror, and her beautiful mouth set in hard and ghastly lines. Then it was that I felt rise up within me for the first time the rebellious bitterness of the natural man. Need I tell you that at such moments man is little better than an animal, save in his free agency that enables him to defy? I passed hours there— moaning, cursing, bewailing. When at last the force of the paroxysm had expended itself, I shook my fist in the face of heaven, with the obduracy of Pagan Greek, and said: “Come on now, you envious Fates, and do your worst speedily, or I will be too quick for you!”

Judge Brisbane found me there, raving.

“Do you know?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “and I am grateful. She is spared much that we must endure.”

“And so,” I said, “life, love, and the vaunted future of the race end in mockery.”

“It seems so,” he replied. “But we cannot be sure. Come with me.”

We ascended to the roof. The spectacle that greeted us was indescribable. The tops of all the houses were black with people, who were staring mutely and with childish terror into the West. The steady, subdued organ tone of the rushing atmosphere could now be heard above all else. We stood there in silence a few moments, and then I said, “It’s terrible. What do you suppose is taking place?”

“I suppose,” replied the Judge, “that we are losing our atmosphere. Reeling it off, so to speak, slowly, as we revolve. Our planet has entered some portion of the ethereal space where the conditions are sucking us dry of oxygen. As it recedes from the earth the water disappears, and we shall be left to revolve like the moon, without air and without liquid, and consequently without life.”

He said this meditatively, less as if he were answering my question than if he were formulating his own fears.

“Then,” I remarked, “if this takes place gradually, the millions have got to struggle and writhe and fight together in suffocation. We can at least blow our brains out and cheat such a fate.”

“I should hate,” said the Judge, “to think that the man who was to marry Kate had not the bravery to face his destiny.”

That was all that was said. We came down, and some ripples of intelligence reached us during the afternoon from one or two persons who made their way into the house. We learned that in the frenzy of fear the populace were committing the most extraordinary excesses. The shore line of the Atlantic was crowded with people, many of whom plunged into the ocean in the vain attempt to get away. The scenes in the city were too revolting to narrate, for a large class of the community, released from all restraint of moral and civil law, were bent on securing all the lawless pleasures that force could command, during the few hours that was left to them. And the line was steadily coming East. Chicago was cut off at twelve o’clock. And at four intelligence had ceased coming from Buffalo. At this time the sound of the winds was like the roar of the sea. I had torn myself away from the window where I had been staring at the now packed and struggling masses of people, and had locked myself in the room with the dead body of Kate. There was a vial of opium on her table that had been used for neuralgia; I swallowed it, and sat down by the bedside. I know not how long I remained there. But a loud report, as of a discharged cannon, roused me. I remember staggering and panting in the dark, with a semi-consciousness that the end had come, and I now know that report was occasioned by the bursting of the drums of my ears.

I remember nothing more. I have given you a plain statement of my experiences in that crisis, and I dare say they are uneventful enough by the side of the experiences of millions.

_________________

11: The Best Bet

Alfred Richard Wetjen

1900-1948

World's News (Sydney) 20 April 1940

MR. LEATHAM, mate and part owner of the auxiliary schooner Alfred, leaned back against the poop rail and let his cold blue eyes flicker from Mr. Fosters smiling face to the bright steel of the revolver that rested in Mr. Foster's lap. The schooner's lone passenger was reclining in a deck chair, one leg idly swinging over the other, and he kept up an easy tapping on his knee with the gun's muzzle.

"So you think I poisoned Captain Saunders," he said pleasantly. "Well, that's unfortunate. Not that it matters very much what you think, Leatham. You see, this is the only gun left on board. I pitched the others overside last night. And the medicine chest is locked in the ship's safe. If anything else enters your mind the kanakas have their instructions. You may remember I agreed to supply and pay the crew for this trip."

"I remember," said the mate grimly. "I thought it was queer at the time, but Saunders was always out to save every penny. His one fault."

"His undoing," Mr. Foster agreed. "I've studied the departed captain, for some time. His queer ideas about banks made this business inevitable, if not for me then for someone else. But particularly for me. I know he carried his money in the ship's safe, and I know he sold forty-six pearls in Broome last month for somewhere around seven thousand pounds. I found quite a bit more than that in the safe."

"I don't doubt it" said the mate coldly. "I always told Saunders he was a fool packing his money around the islands like that. But where do I come in?"

Mr. Foster smiled and adjusted his thick-lensed spectacles.

"Oh, you're quite safe, Leatham. You see, I'm not much of a navigator and I have to take this ship to Mexico. A little coast city where I know people. I sell her there. I've studied Captain Saunders' signature quite a bit so there should be no trouble about the papers, even for my friends; And I might say I bear a very passable resemblance to the late captain."

"Take off the glasses and shave that beard and you'd pass," the mate agreed. He reached slowly to his hip pocket, produced a plug of tobacco and bit off a chunk. "I take it," he said, spitting over the rail, "that you knock me on the head just before we reach Mexico.'

"Not if you behave." Mr. Foster lied amiably. "I might set you adrift in the gig and give you a fighting chance. But in the meantime remember that I'm Captain Saunders. Forever more Captain Saunders. So now you can bury the late lamented, and I will enter it in the log with regrets that our lone passenger, Mr. Foster, died unexpectedly. After that you may set the course for Mexico."

Mr. Leatham rubbed a hand over his eyes as if he were weary.

"I've sailed with Saunders six years," he muttered. "He was a good man. Tough, if you like, but good."

"That's curious, coming from you," drawled the other. "Why, you fought like a couple of mad dogs most of the time; swearing at each other. Arguing. I more than once expected to have the business of disposing of the captain taken out of my hands."

The mate stared at him, and then laughed a little.

"Some men have a queer way of showing friendship," he said. "That was ours."

Mr. Foster shrugged and got up, yawning.

"Well, it doesn't matter. Lay the course for Mexico."

"We'll have to make Suva first then. We haven't the stores to make a long run."

"Not Suva," snapped Mr. Foster sharply. "I might pass as Saunders in some parts, but not in Suva, where he was well known, and you've got a slew of friends as well. Think up another, Leatham. How about some island off the beaten track where we can water and slock up?"

"Very well," said the mate quietly. "I'll figure something out."

He looked round for a moment, figuring the chances of a sudden rush. Five of the eight kanakas were midships patching a whaleboat damaged by a heavy sea two days before. A sixth was at the wheel, a seventh in the galley. The eighth kanaka stood leaning on the main cabin skylight, chewing betel-nut. fingering the haft of a sheath knife with his laughing, insolent eyes passing from one white man to the other. No, there was no chance. Mr. Leatham went for'ard to obtain canvas for Captain Saunders' burial, and the kanaka watching him followed at a nod from Mr. Foster.

"This," said the mate shortly, "seems to be the best bet."

He drew a circle round a tiny speck on the chart, and Mr. Foster, the image of Captain Saunders now his glasses and beard were gone, and his hair brushed differently, leaned over and read, "Snake Island."

"That's a long way off our course," he observed. "What about Tench or Sorrel Islands?"

Leatham looked at him-andt then spat at the sand-filled, box against the bulkhead.

"You couldn't buy stores at Tench or Sorrell." he said coldly. "Not enough anyway. They're only small trading posts. Of course you can make Apia..."

"No, no," said Mr. Foster irritably. "I said something off the beaten track. But there must be places nearer than Snake Island."

The mate shrugged.

"Well, you figure one. You want a place where you can stock up sufficient for a run to Mexico. You want a place off the beaten track. I'm telling you Snake Island."

"You seem pretty damned insistent about Snake Island," snapped the other suspiciously. "Has the Alfred ever been there?"

"No," said the mate deliberately, "the Alfred has never been there."

Mr. Foster cursed, jerked the Pacific Pilot from the shelf and looked up Snake Island. "Coral atoll," he mumbled, running a stubby forefinger across the page. "Small native village... trading store... considerable pearling concessions..."

He closed the book with a snap. "All right," he said. "It looks lonesome enough. Well head for there."

Mr. Leatham's lips twitched in a thin smile as he laid off the course and then went on deck to set the Alfred on it.

IT WAS LATE evening many days later when the schooner raised Snake Island, a long, low shadow against the stars, glowing hot in the tropic night. There being no wind to speak of, the Alfred chugged along on her auxiliary and under bare poles, until a fixed white light on the starboard bow showed her the entrance to the lagoon.

"We'll be there in about an hour," Leatham ventured, biting at his plug.

He spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Mr. Foster grunted and did not reply. The mate gave him a quick look and went on.

"There's a lot of wild tales running about Snake Island," he said absently. "Dan Dackerty owns most of the pearling concessions. Runs a fleet of luggers through the surrounding waters. He had bad luck last year though. Some damned ship named the Aerbed runs in one night, holds up Dackerty's schooner and lifts all his take. And then this Aerbed slides out again and is never heard of from that day to this. But if Dackerty ever lays eyes on her you can Dei ne u siarc shooting. He's a hard man and no one's ever raided him before and got away with it."

"Oh, shut up!" Mr. Foster snarled.

"You get on my nerves wim your damned mumbling."

He went below for another drink, his sixth or seventh within an hour. He felt unaccountably nervous for some reason. Possibly because this was his first test as Captain Saunders. But there could be no danger. The Alfred was a stranger to the atoll, and the long odds were that Saunders was too. He took another drink and went back on deck. The fixed white light was sliding past close abeam, and now there were other lights, the riding lights of the pearling luggers in the lagoon. The engine of the Alfred set up a sharp staccato as the shore palms and low and low hills sent back echoes. Leatham stopped the engine and called for'ard for the kanakas to let go the anchor The schooner brought up, swinging quietly, and a call came across the water.

"Ahoy, there!"

"Hello!" answered Leatham. His voice was hoarse and seemed cracked, Mr. Foster pulled himself together and adjusted his captain's cap.

"What ship?" asked the voice, and the creak of oars followed.

Leatham laughed.

"You guess, Dackerty!"

Mr. Foster whipped about and reached for his hip!

"Why, damn you! What do you mean by that? You told me..."

An irritated curse came from the darkness. Leatham ducked and moved aside. The beam of a powerful torch swept up, rested a moment on the name on the schooner's counter, and then the cursing became furious. The torch lifted to Mr. Foster standing frozen by the poop rail.

"You're the man, by God! Last year... You've got a nerve coming back. Too much nerve."

Mr. Foster dragged his revolver clear. He was in a panic and he did not understand. A gun stabbed orange flames three times then and Mr. Foster buckled, fell and rolled over.

Dan Dackerty's whaleboat slid alongside and the big pearler heaved aboard with more oaths. Leatham stopped for a moment by the body of Mr. Foster, smiled icily, and then went forward to make his peace. Mr. Foster would never know that for the second time in the Alfred's career four little dabs of paint on her counter had altered her name to the Aerbed. And it was extremely regrettable that he had looked so much like Captain Saunders.

____________________

12: Very Still Waters

F A M Webster

1886-1949

World's News (Sydney) 27 April 1940

"OH! What a dirty little boy!"

Sandy Fenton turned from the congenial task of constructing a dam of clay across the brook which flowed through the home paddock at Malakindu and ultimately irrigated the shamba garden.

"Vos you speaking to me?" the child queried, with a polite smile.

"You should say 'Vere you speaking to me?' " said the sour-faced spinster, whose stern features were set in a mask of disapproval.

"I fink," volunteered Sandy, "you must be my Aunt 'Scilla, vot Mummy said vos coming to stay. Have you brought your bruver, Mr. Carry B. Dis, wiv you? Daddy says you are bofe dangerous."

"Faugh! I'll talk to your father, young man. Come out of that muddy water at once," snapped Miss Priscilla Hunt.

"But I'm 'lowed to be here, Aunt 'Scilla," Sandy protested.

"Do as you are told, child."

The order, barked harshly, brought an indignant "Baa!" from Old Bill, the tame sheep, who had been watching the construction of the dam through the rails of the fence that surrounded the home paddock.

Old Bill seemed to realise that his little master was in trouble of some kind, but he was powerless to do more than utter a bleating protest. The bars, however, had not been made that could keep in Claude Eustace, the great grey gander, who was the fattier of the breed of English geese which Paul Fenton had introduced into East Africa.

Miss Hunt, annoyed by what she regarded as little Sandy's naughty and disrespectful obstinacy, went gingerly down the bank, stretched out a bony hand and gripped the small boy firmly by the collar of his wet, khaki bush blouse.

Sandy, unused to such summary treatment, let out a bellow of indignation which might well have awakened the Seven Sleepers. That cry of protest was answered by a harsh, honking call from the far end of the paddock, where Claude and Enid, his mate, had been dozing contentedly in the shade of a giant mahogany tree.

The great grey gander took off with a scuttering run, circled in air to gain altitude, and then came racing down wind with the speed and fury of a fighting plane.

Sandy saw his friend hurtling to the rescue and smiled secretly. Old Bill, never sure of what antics that idiot Claude Eustace would be up to next, retired discreetly to the sanctuary of his own shed.

Miss Hunt alone was serenely unconscious of the approach of the avenger. Sandy, walkingly docilely at the side of his aunt, who held his small, grubby hand in a firm grip, continued to smile. Bill, peeping out of his shed, would have smiled, also, had the facility for facial expression been granted to sheep.

Claude, not a dozen yards away, gave vent to a harsh triumphant cry and Miss Hunt, catching sight of the big, grey bird, held up her parasol to ward him off. The fragile affair was swept from her hand by the beat of his powerful wings, her sun-helmet followed suit and it was only by diving into a tangle of exceedingly thorny bushes that she succeeded in saving her face from the beak and claws of the angry bird.

Sandy, who had succeeded so far in suppressing his very natural inclination to shriek with laughter, moved quickly away, for the sight of his hectoring great aunt crawling on her hands and knees into the undergrowth in a most undignified manner must, he felt, destroy his last vestige of polite gravity.

A noment later the child was hopping from foot to foot and hooting with mirth, for Claude had landed, had inspected as much of Miss Hunt's anatomy as was still visible and, after a chattering, scolding expression of warning, had administered a jab with his sharp beak which was instantly answered with a shriek of pained surprise.

Claude, still chattering and scolding, cocked his head on one side the better to study the khaki-clad curve before him. The object was moving slowly; Claude got in another jab, the object disappeared as Miss Hunt dived forward and tne Dranches held apart by the passage of her body sprang together whipping Claude Eustace sharply over the head.

The pain maddened him and he dashed into the undergrowth like a young tornado. That bush might well have been tenanted by a hundred evil spirits to judge by the sounds that emerged from it, for Claude Eustace was screaming with rage and Priscilla Hunt vas shrieking for help.

Sandy, running as fast as his fat little legs would take him, reached the other side of the thicket just in time to witness the reappearance of his greataunt. That lady did not wait to collect her nephew, but, kilting up her skirt, set off for the shelter of the bungalow at an amazing pace. Claude, however, was determined not to lose ms victim, who, he believed, was evilly disposed towards his beloved little master.

But, fast as Miss Hart scuttled along, the grey gander travelled faster and was seen hastening her progress with a succession of savage digs, each of which was received with an agonised

Ouch!" or a louder shriek of dismay. It was the arrival of Paul Pentcsi, accompanied by his wife. Jessica, that put a period to the painful farce.

After Jessica had led her aunt away to the bungalow and Kathuka and Hamesi, two of Paul's natives, had removed Claude Eustace to the home paddock, Fenton turned to his son.

"Well, you young rip, and what have you been up to?" he demanded,

"Please, Farver, I was making a pool for Claude and Enid to swim, like you said I might, ven Auntie 'Scilla said I was a dirty little boy and pulled me up ve bank I fink C'aude saw her and vat made him angry."

"Hum! Well, we've got a nice mantelpiece!"

"Vot for, Farver?"

"For your mother's Aunt 'Scilla to have breakfast off, son," grinned Paul Fenton.

Unfortunately, Sandy had a long memory. That night, after the small boy had said his prayers and was safely tucked up in bed, he began to wonder if it had not been rather unkind of him to laugh at poor Great-Aunt 'Scilla. Next morning, he got up earlier than usual, and the family, coming to breakfast, found three places laid at the table and one on the wide mantel-shelf.

"What on earth has your native servant been thinking about, Jessica?" Miss Hunt demanded pompously.

"I done vat for you, Aunt 'Scilla," volunteered Sandy, pointing proudly to the mantelpiece. "I fink Daddy fought you might be more comfortable standing up."

A horrified silence fell upon Sandy's parents, but was broken devastatingly by Miss Hunt, from whom Jessica had considerable expectations.

"Paul, how dare you!" she exploded. "It is monstrously indelicate to put such ideas into the child's head. You have had that wretched gander's neck wrung, of course?"

Jessica dropped her hand on to Sandy's shoulder just in time to prevent his voicing his feelings.

"Well, not exactly, Aunt Priscilla," Paul Fenton temporised. "You see, Claude Eustace is a pretty valuable stock bird, but I'll promise that he shall not molest you again."

Miss Hunt settled herself comfortably at table in anticipation of a good solid breakfast. A moment later she sprang to her feet and bolted to the far side of the room, as Claude Eustace, quacking solemnly, pushed his lean, grey head round the door-post. At the sight of his enemy, he gave vent fo a harsh, triumphant honk!

Fortunately, two of the house boys secured the grey gander before he could enter the bungalow and transferred him screaming and struggling to the home paddock.

"After breakfast, I'll fix him myself," promised Paul.

Sandy accompanied his father to the home paddock, where Kathuda and Hamesi Ali quickly finished the damming of the brook to provide Claude Eustace with a grand pool in which to disport himself. The nesting hut in which Enid was sitting was moved bodily to the new enclosure, which was then roofed over with wire netting.

Claude loved the swimming pool, but, otherwise hated his new quarters, since the enforced confinement prevented him from taking his accustomed flights at night and morning.

Paul knew these things and sympathised with the old bird but, on the other hand, it was necessary to placate Aunt Priscilla, since his wife Jessica was heiress to the sharp-bongued old woman.

Claude and Sandy did not see eye to eye with Paul Fenton in this matter and whenever Miss Hunt came near the home paddock, where Sandy spent most of his time consoling his pet, the little boy would scowl glumly, while the grey gander hissed and screamed with rage.

No one knew how long Aunt Priscilla proposed prolonging her stay at Malakindu but, as things turned out, it proved fortunate that she had not taken herself off in high dudgeon after being attacked by Claude Eustace.

Jessica Fenton, like most people who live in East Africa, had had her vitality lowered by repeated attacks of malaria and, not unnaturally, fell victim to a bad bout of Blackwater fever in due course.

Now, Blackwater is always dangerous and not infrequently fatal. The doctor, however, who travelled more than a hundred miles to see the patient, assured Paul Fenton that his wife was in capable hands, since Aunt Priscilla had served as a V.A.D. during the Great War and was an extremely efficient nurse.

Paul and Sandy went about white-faced silent in those days, for the wings of the Dark Angel seemed to shadow the bungalow. It is to their credit that they bore patiently the overbearing arrogance of the masterful old woman who saw fit to assume the entire management of Paul Fenton's household.

Trouble came, however, when the weather broke and the autumn rains arrived. A few days previously Enid hatched off her latest clutch of goslings and Sandy, aided and abetted by his father, spent every moment of the day at the small brookside enclosure to the home paddock.

Miss Hunt considered that her greatnephew should be at his lessons, not wasting time over heathen creatures. She resented his invariable lateness for meals and the grubby state in which he came to them, and would have meted out condign punishment had not Paul put his foot down.

A heritage, Paul felt, could be secured at too great a price. Jessica was, now, out of danger to all intents and purposes and, anyway, he was not going to allow Sandy to be made unhappy and his spirit broken, perhaps.

The coming of the rains, however, took Paul to a very distant part of the huge shamba (farm), where a landslide had damaged crops and threatened destruction to valuable stock.

Sandy, frantically anxious for the safety of his beloved geese penned into that tiny enclosure on the edge of the babbling brook which would soon become a raging torrent, stole quietly away to the home paddock after his father had departed.

That day he did not go back to the bungalow for dinner, but worked manfully with his little hands trying vainly to pull down the dam, against which the waters were rising and threatening to flood out Enid's hut. Claude, from time to time, encouraged his little master with raucous cries. Sandy would have enlisted the help of the natives, but for the fact that all the shambaboys had gone with his father to repair the damage done by the landslide.

Towards sunset Aunt Priscilla came to the home paddock completely clad in sou'-wester, oilskins and gum-boots. Sandy did not at all like the look of the pliant cane she carried in her hand and Claude Eustace fairly chattered with rage when he caught sight of her.

That was the first time in his life that Sandy had been beaten and, to add to his unhappiness, he was sent supperless to bed.

His father was still away, and Jessica did not discover what had happened to her little son until she asked why he had not come to bid her goodnight as usual.

Aunt Priscilla explained the situation in her most unpleasant prunes and prisms manner and saw fit to add a lecture on the upbringing of children. Then the floodgates burst and Jessica, weak though she was, spoke her mind.

"Very well," snapped Miss Priscilla Hunt, "you can look after yourself, you ungrateful girl. I shall go to bed and to-morrow I shall leave this impossibly conducted establishment."

Jessica lay back on her "pillows, crying with vexation. She longed to go to little Sandy and to comfort him, but found herself too weak to get out of bed unaided. Meanwhile, the brook running through the home paddock had been steadily rising, and Paul Fenton and his natives were battling their way homewards against the fury of the lashing rain. The howling wind had torn Miss Hunt's bedroom window from its fastenings and had extinguished the lamp.

For awhile after leaving Jessica the old woman sat in the dining-room, her hands folded in her lap and on her features the satisfied expression of some pious Abigail, who has spoken her mind and is content to sit, smugly satisfied, among the wreckage she has made.

Presently there came a lull in the storm. The wind, which had shrieked so furiously, dropped to an eerie wailing and the rain, that had beaten against the windows like inachine-gun bullets, seemed to tap insistently with light, ghostly fingers.

Priscilla Hunt rose, smoothed down her skirt precisely and sailed serenely towards her room. An impatient "Tcha!" broke from her lips as she stared into semi-darkness. Then her blood seemed to freeze. There was a persistent hissing and long snaky, dimly seen objects rose up at her from every part of the room.

Clinging to the door-post she screamed and screamed. Paul, approaching the bungalow, caught the sound and spurred his jaded horse to a final effort. He flung himself from the saddle and dashed Into the bungalow, an electric torch in one hand, a revolver ready in the other But helpless laughter overtook him as the bright beam stabbed into the darkness of Aunt Priscilla's room.

Claude Eustace and Enid shared the old maid's bed, and a dozen dripping, wet goslings were perched on chairs, boxes and piles of underclothing.

"The dam must have burst and these devils have swum down the stream! Well, they say that still waters run deep—" gasped Paul between gusts of uncontrollable laughter.

"I shall leave in the morning," snapped Miss Hunt.

"I'm sorry about that," grinned Paul Fenton, "for you will have to sleep on the sofa to-night, Aunt Priscilla, and it's most infernally hard."

__________________

13: Floating Bones

F A M Webster

World's News (Sydney) 11 May 1940

JIM CHALMERS waited, tense and expectant. Kathuka had said that there was a pride of lions in the forests, but the biggest beast, to judge by his pugs, had left his companions and his tracks had led the hunters, who had been out since sun-up, in a wide half-circle which had brought them back to the vicinity of the big-game hunter's own camp.

Jim had despatched a porter to his wife, asking her to enforce silence upon the Safari servants. Now he waited at thef edge of the bush from which echoed alarming shouts, the thunder of drums and the sound of stones being rattled in tin cans as a young army of native beaters moved slowly forward, driving old Simba, the king of beasts, relentlessly before them through the thick undergrowth.

Behind Jim and a little to the right crouched Kipkirin, the gun-bearer, his master's second rifle ready to pass forward upon the instant. Other natives, trembling with scarcely suppressed excitement, waited further in the rear; over all brooded the strange hush of the sultry African noontide.

Suddenly Kipkirin snapped his fingers, but a long moment passed before Chalmers's eyes, grown blurred by intent staring, picked out the black points of a big mane in contrast with the dead-grey hue of dense vegetation. But once having picked up those black points it was surprising, even to an experienced hunter like Jim, how quickly the details of the huge head of a really big lion seemed to take shape, feature by feature, against the neutral-tinted background of bush, with which the general golden color of the animal blended so perfectly.

"Piga, bwana, piga! (Shoot, master, shoot!)" came from Kipkirin's scarcely moving lips in a barely audible whisper, and Chalmers, having now identified the quarry, raised his heavy sporting rifle with what seemed like painfully slow deliberation until the gold bead of the fore-sight covered that portion of the lion's head in which he thought a bullet might usefully be placed.

Relentlessly thumb and forefinger closed with increasing pressure upon the trigger, but even as the crash of the report shattered the silence, the lion moved. The beast was wounded, but it did not charge at once. The great golden head, made enormous in appearance by the mane, rose majestically above the bush. Jim found himself staring into round eyes that blazed with anger and noted, subconsciously, the small, black-tipped ears laid back and the great fangs in the snarling red mouth.

Kipkirin, admirably cool, despite the thrill of the situation, pushed the second rifle into his master's right hand, and took and reloaded the weapon that had been fired.

Jim's second shot checked the lion in mid-spring, for the force of the impact of a bullet fired from a modern, high-velocity rifle is simply tremendous, but that shot did not give the animal its quietus, although it raked his body lengthwise and partly paralysed his hindquarters.

That did not mean that old Simba was by any means done with, and would wait pathetically, as other and lesser beasts will do, for the hunter to finish him off. Far from it. The lion, in fact, came on, squirming with his body as best he could, dragging himself forward with the help of his powerful forelegs, roaring, snarling, pausing to tear at the ground with his teeth as he fought against Nature to get at the hated human being who had laid him low.

Jim would have finished the business with a merciful shot, but a badly made cartridge had jammed in the chamber of his rifle and Kipkirin was having trouble with the breech actum of the other weapon.

There was, however, no particularly grave element of danger until Jim Chalmers's little daughter, Mirrabelle, attracted by the shouts and the firing, came running from the camp and planted herself midway between the wounded lion and her now thoroughly alarmed father.

Her position was such, that even when his rifle was ready, Jim could not fire at the lion without the almost certain chance of hitting his own daughter. In vain he shouted to her to get out of the way. Mirrabelle seemed to be obsessed by the great pity she felt for the sorely wounded creature.

"Oh, you naughty daddy." she cried, with a reproachful glance flung over her shoulder at her agonised parent. And well might Jim Chalmers experience the very acme of anguished anticipation, for every instant the snarling Bon was dragging itself nearer to the fearless child. The man, moreover, realised that by no possible chance could he either fire or reach his little one in time to save her from the fangs and claws of the animal whose state had aroused her baby pity.

The shadow of impending tragedy had fallen suddenly upon what, up to that moment, had been a plain, straightforward hunting incident.

Nearer and nearer 'writhed the lion, and still the child -did not give ground, while the spectators stared in frightful fascination. Then in the last split second which divided eternity from life, a strange figure appeared at the edge of the bush from which the lion had emerged and Karamanga, the witch doctor, went leaping io the rescue.

Brave to a fault, the native was only just in time, for as he swept Mirrabelle into the crook of one arm and flung himself sideways, the lion, rearing up its body with a tremendous effort, sent in a smashing blow of a taloned forepaw, which would have beaten the child flat to the earth.

Then Jim's rifle spoke and pandemonium broke loose as the; natives saw the lion sag sideways with a bullet in its brain.

Reaction from acute anxiety made Chalmers feel physically sick for a moment, and his one immediate desire was to bundle Mirrabelle into his arms and take her back to her mother in the camp. Despite the beauty of the big brute's pelt, he would be quite content to leave his porters to skin that lion anyway they liked.

As yet, however, no one had given a thought to commencing skinning operations, since every single native present and a number of others who had appeared from the camp were already taking part in the traditional lion-dance with the greatest zest. Mirrabelle was inside the ring of prancing, shouting and singing natives and still quite close to the corpse of old Simba.

Suddenly, Karamanga's harsh voice cut like a whip-lash across the turmoil.

"Nutaki miupa-mogolcao!" (I want the floating-bone!) he cried.

The dance stopped abruptly and his fellow-natives stood staring at Karamanga with an air of puzzled questioning. Why had he cried out like that so sharply, they wondered, for was not he the most important medicine man in all those parts, and, by virtue of his status, entitled to receive that particularly lucky charm, which the white hunter so seldom secures, the floating-bone that is to be found in front of a lion's shoulder blade.

This being so, why had Karamanga cried out his order so sharply?

While the dancers still stood hesitating, the witch doctor strode through the ranks, and Jim took the opportunity of following him. But when the white hunter would have picked up his little daughter, the witch doctor denied him with a gesture as peremptory as the words he had previously spoken.

Karamanga produced a skinning knife from his loin-cloth, made an incision in the lion's shoulder and drew apart the cleanly-cut edges of the pelt.  Bloody fat dripped from his fingers as he withdrew them from the wound and dropped to his knees in front of Mirrabelle.

Jim had heard of, but never witnessed, the ceremony which he believed was about to be enacted. It never occurred to him to interfere, for he had lived long enough in Africa to have learned that spells pronounced by a genuine witch doctor have a way of proving amazingly potent, while neither the curses they pronounce nor the protections they occasionally give can be lightly ignored.

And so Jim watched curiously while Karamanga anointed Mirrabelle's breast and brow with the gory mess, as he muttered:

"May the Great Muungu make you brave and cunning like my lord, the lion, little maid."

It was not until two days later that Karamanga presented himself at the Chalmers's encampment and asked to be allowed to see Mirrabelle. Mrs. Chalmers demurred at first, but was finally persuaded by the wisdom of her husband.

From a pouch he carried, Karamanga produced a native necklace from which was suspended the tiniest, most perfectly embroidered leather satchel. When the witch doctor had slipped the necklace over Mirrabelle's head, he turned to her father.

"Bwana," said he, "I have wrought spells with many wonderful incantations before I placed my lord the lion's lucky bone within the little mfuko that has been made for it. I have produced a great protection," he added proudly, "and so long as the little maid wears that talisman, she may walk unharmed with my lord, the lion, and do what she will with all his kind."

Jim thanked Karamanga courteously for his good will, but was too wise to offer him any reward, even for his initial service in saving Mirrabelle's life. He believed, moreover, that the protection would prove true in its fulfilment, for never before had he known any native, least of all a witch doctor, to surrender one of the almost sacrfed flbating-bones to a white person.

Many a time, in fact, when some beast he had shot was being skinned, he had given orders that the lucky bones were to be brought to him, but, although he had watched the skinning process with the utmost vigilance upon each such occasion, the natives had always succeeded in appropriating those small bones without his beihg able to detect either the theft or the thief.

Mrs. Chalmers, upon the other hand, was disposed to treat the whole business as mere native mumbo-jiimbo, but even she was forced to reconsider her opinion as the years went by and Mirrabeile, growing up in wildest Africa, walked unharmed through many perils and, not infrequently, encountered lions in the way when she was utterly defenceless find yet passed by them, totally unscathed.

Mirrabelle, for her part, oftfen hunted with her father, but nothing would induce her ever to shoot at a lion dr lioness, and even when the fattiily madfe one of their rare visits to Nairobi, and she wore evening dress for a dance or dinner party, the girl would not discard her native necklace with its tiny pouch containing the lucky lion's bone, in favor of more fashionable adornments.

When her parents died during an epedemic of influenza, she went home to England. She did not, however, hit it off with the narrow-minded old maid, her father's aunt, who was her only living relative. And since she was one and  twenty years of age and a peculiarly independent young person, Mirrabelle left the home of her great aunt and set forth to seek her own living. She discovered that it was far harder to secure employment than she could have believed possible, for she had had none other than African experience of life, and had seen that girls arriving in East Africa from England in search of posts do not have very far to look before they are suited.

In truth the dice were loaded against Mirrabelle from the first; she had courage and common sense in plenty, but the assets of an open air life led in uncivilised Africa, are not as valuable as the School Certificate and a secretarial training in England.

London frightened her at first; the never ceasing noise, endless movement and teeming millions of people, all rubbing shoulders in the streets, but all leading essentially private lives, were factors which produced a kind of claustrophobia that finally drove her out of town.

That in her desperation, Mirrabelle, like a wild thing, should seek open country, was perfectly natural and equally fortunate, for by both birth and upbringing, she was a child of the wilderness, and in the English country areas alone, was likely to find anyone with a use for her peculiar talents.

Through the Labor Exchange at Easthampton, she obtained a post as nursery governess, but though the vicar's children adored her and their parents had no fault to find with her personality, it did not take them long to discover that the children, already, possessed a good deal more scholastic knowledge than their governess.

After that first appointment, Mirrabelle became in turn shop assistant, milkmaid, land girl and finally general help on a chicken farm. The owner of the chicken farm, however, went bankrupt ahd then Mirrabelle discovered that she was really up against it. Her wages had not been paid for weeks, the financial ruin of the chicken farmer was complete and she left his premises without a single penny in her pocket.

That night it seemed as though she would be faced with the choice of entering a work house, or going to bed supperless under some hedgerow or haystack. As luck would have it, however, she took a road which led her presently to a brightly lit field in which a huge tent had been pitched.

She knew, of course, that it was a circus, and would have loved dearly to witness the performance, but what chance hdd a penniless beggar-girl of gratifying such an absurd wish?

With head drooping she turned away, almost resigned at last to go to the work house. Then suddenly her heart seemed to miss a beat, while memories ahd a mixture of the most strange emotions flooded through her being. Prom somewhere among those tents there had echded the peculiar, coughing grunt she had heard so often in Africa, when some old lion had thus signified his intention of setting out upon his nightly prowl in search of food.

That sound was all Africa to Mirrabelle; it stood for all she had loved and lost and everything in life that she had cherished. Slowly, as though drawn by some invisible magnet, she made her way to the tents and when asked by a big blowsy woman what she was snooping round for, answered softly that she wanted to look at the lions. She had to admit, however, that she had no money wherewith to pay for the privilege of gratifying her wish.

And then it all came out, for Mrs. Simmons, whose husband owned the circus, was a kindly old soul, to whom Mirrabelle found it a great relief to confide her troubles.

As the outcome of that conversation, Mrs. Simmons provided supper and that night Mirrabelle slept in one of the caravans with two other girls. When the circus moved on next day, she went with it and thereafter managed to earn her keep, at first by selling programmes, but later, for she was of an ambitious nature, she learned various acrobatic stunts and even little tricks on horseback, while she was building up a little shooting act of her own, to offer to Joe Simmons when it should be fully rehearsed.

Taking things on the whole it was a happy life, but, of course, there was bound to be a fly of some sort in the amber. Minnie Hales, alias La Belle Equestrienne, took a violent dislike to Mirrabelle from the very start. The girl's attempts to emulate her own feats of bare-back riding annoyed the circus star, but the real secret of Minnie's hatred lay in the fact that Dick Gaunt, the famous Demon of the Air trapeze artist, soon began to offer to the young girl those attentions which he had previously paid only to Minnie Hales.

One afternoon, when the circus was completely deserted, it came to a showdown. The whole troupe had gone down to the sea to bathe, taking the elephants and horses with them. Mrs. Simmons, who had a headache, was asleep in her caravan where Mirrabelle had sat until the old woman who had befriended her had fallen asleep.

Mirrabelle was sad, for only that morning Joe Simmons had seen the little shooting act she had for so long been rehearsing privately, and had told her, kindly, but candidly, that it might be all right as a music hall turn, but was no good as a circus spectacle.

And so, she supposed, she would just have to make the best of life selling programmes until she could, by practice, become as good an equestrienne as Minnie Hales.

Without conscious thought, she had turned her footsteps towards the menagerie and, again, some invisible magnet seemed to be drawing her for, often, when she was tired or troubled, she would stand for a long time gazing at the five big lions, the sight and smell of which brought back so poignantly happy memories of childhood, spent in her beloved Africa.

That afternoon all the lions seemed to be asleep in their inner cage, and it looked as though Constanides, the Greek trainer, had closed the dividing door.

Mirrabelle was about to turn away, disappointed, when a shrill, unpleasant voice questioned her querulously.

"Here, what's all this I hear about you offering the boss a new act?"

Mirrabelle turned to confront Minnie Hales, whose eyes were blazing with an almost insane fury.

"Come on, you've got to tell me," she threatened.

"I— it was only a sort of fancy shooting stunt," stammered Mirrabelle.

"Sez you," sneered Minnie, "more likely it's a riding act, think I don't know that you're after my job?"

"If you don't believe me," Mirrabelle blazed back, "you can ask Dick Gaunt, he's watched me practising."

"Yes, and that's another thing," stormed the circus woman, "you keep away from Dick Gaunt. He was my beau before ever you came along."

"Oh, leave me alone," cried Mirrabelle, and gave Minnie a push. Unfortunately Minnie tripped over a rope and fell flat on her back. As she lay there she used frightful words and dragging up her skirt snatched a stiletto from the garter above her knee.

Mirrabelle read murder in the half-mad woman's eyes, sprang up the steps and slipped into the empty cage banging behind her the door that could not again be opened until Constanides should return with the keys.

Minnie, screaming abuse at her rival, seized the bars and shook them furiously. Suddenly she stopped shouting and stood for a moment quite still. Then peal upon peal of hysterical laughter burst from her lips as she pointed past Mirrabelle with a hand that trembled.

The girl turned and a gasp broke from her lips. The dividing door was opening slowly. Prince, the largest and most uncertain tempered of Constanides's five famous lions, was coming into the outer cage. The four others followed, and even Minnie Hales fell silent and experienced a sensation of pity as the great brutes stood blinking sleepily at the intruder.

When Prince, with a slow, rumbling growl, stole a sly step nearer, all Minnie's hate evaporated and turning she ran in search of help.

Mirrabelle, whose heart felt like a lump of ice in her bosom, remembered that Constanides had once said that half the secret of taming lions was always to adopt an aggressive policy. Somehow she beat down the fear that was almost making her swoon.

"Back, Prince!" she ordered sharply, and followed him step by step as he gave way before her, snarling horribly.

The other lions seemed disinclined to interfere, but Mirrabelle, holding the will of the mighty Prince in subjection by the power of her eyes, which never left his, finally penned him into a corner.

A strange sense of mastery, of magnificent power, stole into her blood, and as the circus people led by Minnie and Constanides came swarming into the menagerie, she seized Prince by the mane and made that huge lion walk with her to the front of the cage. Her left hand rested upon the little amulet given to her by Karamanga, the witch doctor, so many years ago.

Mirrabelle Chalmers had found her job in life, for Constanides took her into partnership; but he knew, from the first, that she was going to be a greater trainer of lions than the world had ever known before.

__________________

14: The Nomad

Robert Hichens

1864-1950

The London Magazine, October 1907

THE FATE of Madame Lemaire had certainly not been an ordinary one. She was French, of Marseilles, as you could tell by her accent, especially when she said "C'est bien!" and had been an extremely coquettish and lively girl, with a strong will of her own and a passionate love of pleasure and of town life. From her talk when she was seventeen, you would have gathered that if she ever moved from Marseilles it would be to go to Paris. Nothing else would be good enough for her. She felt herself born to play a part in some great city.

And yet, at the age of forty, here she was in the desert of Sahara, keeping an auberge at El-Kelf under the salt mountain! She sometimes wondered how it had ever come about, when she crossed the court of the inn, round which mules of customers were tethered in open sheds, or when she served the rough Algerian wine to farmers from the Tell, or to some dusty commercial traveller from Batna, in the arbour trellised with vines that fronted the desert.

Marie Lemaire, who had been Marie Bretelle, at El-Kelf! Marie Lemaire in the desert of Sahara attending upon God knows whom: Algerians, Spahis, camel-drivers, gazelle-hunters! No; it was too much!

But if you have a "kink" in you, to what may you not come? Marie Bretelle's "kink" had been an idiotic softness for handsome faces.

She wanted to shine in the world, to cut a dash, to go to Paris; or, if that were impossible, to stay in Marseilles married to some rich city man, and to give parties, and to get gowns from Madame Vannier, of the Rue de Cliche, and hats from Trebichot, of the Rue des Colonies, and to attend the theatres, and to be stared at and pointed out on the race-course, and— and, in fact, to be the belle of Marseilles. And here she was at El-Kelf and all because of that "kink" in her nature!

Lemaire had had a handsome face and been a fine man, stalwart, bold, muscular, determined. He did not belong to Marseilles, but had come there to give an acrobatic show in a music-hall; and there Marie Bretelle had seen him, dressed in silver-spangled tights, and doing marvellous feats on three parallel bars. His bare arms had lumps on them like balls of iron, his fair moustaches were trained into points, his bold eyes were lit with a fire to fascinate women; and— well, Marie Bretelle ran away with him and became Madame Lemaire. And so she came to Algiers, where Lemaire had an accident while giving his performance. And that was the beginning of the Odyssey which had ended at El-Kelf.

"Fool— fool— fool!"

Often she said that to herself, as she went about the inn doing her duties with grains of sand in her hair.

"Fool— fool— fool!"

The word was taken by the wind of the waste and carried away to the desert.

After his accident Lemaire lost his engagements. Then he lost his looks. He put on flesh. He ceased to train his moustaches into points. The great muscles got soft, were covered with flabby fat. Finally he took to drink. And so they drifted.

To earn some money he became many things— guide, concierge, tout for "La Belle Fatma." He had impossible professions in Algiers. And Marie? Well, it were best not to scrutinise her life too closely under the burning sun of Africa. Whatever it was, it was not very successful; and they drifted from Algiers. Where did they go? Where had they not been in this fiery land? Oran on the Moroccan border had seen them, and the mosques of Kairouan, windy Tunis, and rock-bound Constantine, laughing Bougie in its wall by the water, Fort National in the Grande Kabyle. They had been everywhere. And at last some wind of the desert had blown them, like poor grains of desert sand, from the bending palms of Biskra to the mud walls of El-Kelf.

And here— Gold help them!— for ten years they had been keeping the inn, "Au Retour du Desert."

For ten, long, dry years, and such an inn! Why, at Marseilles they would have called it— well, one cannot tell what they would have called it on the Cannebiere! But they would have found a name for it, that is certain.

It stood alone, this inn, quite alone in the desert, which at El-Kelf circles a small oasis in which there is hidden among fair-sized palms a meagre Arab village. Why the inn should have been built outside of the oasis, away from the village, I cannot tell you. But so it is. It seems to be disdainful of the earth houses of the Arabs, to be determined to have nothing to do with them. And yet there is little reason in its disdain.

For it, too, is built on sun-dried earth for the most part, and has only the ground floor possessed by most of them. It stands facing flat but not illimitable desert. The road that passes before it winds away to land where there is water; and from the trellised arbour, but far off, one can see in the sunshine the sharp, shrill green of crops, grown by the Spahis whose tented camp lies to the right of the caravan track that leads over the Col de Sfa to Biskra.

Far, far along that road one can see from the inn, till its whiteness is as the whiteness of a thread, and any figures travelling upon it are less than little dolls, and even a caravan is but a moving dimness shrouded in a dimness of dust. But towards evening, when the strange clearness of Africa becomes almost terribly acute, every speck upon the thread has a meaning to attract the eye, and set the mind at work asking:

"What is this that is coming upon the road? Who is this that travels? Is it a mounted man on his thin horse, with his matchlock pointing to the sky? Or is it a woman hunched upon a trotting donkey? Or a Nomad on his camel? Or is it only some poor desert man, half naked in his rags, who tramps on his bare brown feet along sun-baked track, his hood drawn above his eyes, his knotted club in his hand?"

After ten years Madame Lemaire still asked herself such questions in the arbour of the inn, when business was slack, when her husband was away, or was lying half drunk upon the bed after an extra dose of absinthe, and the one-eyed Arab servant, Hadj, was squatting on his haunches in a corner smoking keef.

Not that the answer mattered at all to her. She expected nothing of the road that led from the desert. But her mind, stagnant though it had become in the solitude of Africa, had to do something to occupy itself. And so she often stared across the plain, with an aimless "Je me demande" trembling upon her lips, and a hard expression of inquiry in her dark brown eyes, whose lids were seamed with tiny wrinkles. Perhaps you will wonder why Madame Lemaire, having once had a passionate love for pleasure and a strong will of her own, had consented to remain for ten years in the solitude of El-Kelf, drudging in a miserable auberge, to which few people, and those but poor ones, ever came.

Circumstances and Robert Lemaire had been too much for her. Both had been cruel. She was something of a slave to both. Lemaire was an utter failure, but there lurked within him still, under the waves of absinthe, traces of the dominating power which had long ago made him a success.

Madame Lemaire had worshipped him once, had adored his strength and beauty. They were gone now. He was a wreck. But he was a wreck with fierceness in it. And command with him had become a habit. And Africa bids one accept. And so Madame Lemaire had stayed for ten long years drudging at the inn beside the salt mountain, and staring down the long white road for the something strange and interesting from the desert that never, never came.

And still Lemaire drank absinthe, and cursed and drowsed. For ten long years! And still Hadj squatted upon his haunches and drugged himself with keef. And still Madame Lemaire stood under the trellised vine, with the sand-grains in her hair, and gazed and gazed over the plain.

And when a black speck appeared far off upon the whiteness of the track, she watched it till her eyes ached, demanding who, or what, it was— whether a Spahi on horseback, a woman on her donkey, a Nomad on his camel, or some dark and half-naked pedestrian of the sands, that travelled through the sunset glory towards the lonely inn.

Although Robert Lemaire was a wreck he was not an old man in years, only forty-five, and the fine and tonic air of the Sahara preserved from complete destruction. Shaggy and unkept he was, with a heavy bulk of chest and shoulders, a large, pale face, and the angry and distressed eyes of the absinthe slave. His hands trembled habitually, and on his bad days fluttered like leaves. But there was still some force in his prematurely aged body, still some will in his mind. He was a wreck, but he was the wreck of one who had been really a man and accustomed to dominate women. And this he did not forget.

One evening— it was in May, and the long heats of the desert had already set in— Lemaire was away from the auberge, shooting near the salt mountain with an acquaintance, a colonist who had a small farm not far from Biskra, and who had come to spend the night at El-Kelf. This man had a history. He had once been a hotel-keeper, and had reason to suspect a guest in his hotel of having guilty intercourse with his wife.

One night, having discovered beyond possibility of doubt that his suspicions were well founded, he waited till the hotel was closed, then made his way to his guest's room, and put three bullets into him as he lay asleep in his bed. For this murder, or act of justice, he got only ten months' imprisonment. But his business as a hotel-keeper was ruined. So now he was a small farmer. He was also, perhaps, the only real friend Lemaire had in Africa, and he came occasionally to spend a night at the Retour du Desert.

Upon this evening of May, Madame Lemaire was alone in the inn with the one-eyed servant Hadj preparing supper for the two sportsmen. The flies buzzed about under the dusty leaves of the vine, which were unstirred by any breeze. The crystals upon the flanks of the salt mountain glittered in the sun that was still fiery, though not far from its declining.

Upon the dry, earthen walls of the inn and over the stones of the court round which it was built, the lizards crept, or rested with eager, glancing patience, as if alert for further movement, but waiting for a signal. A mule or two stamped in the long stable that was open to the court, and a skeleton of a white Kabyle dog slunk to and fro searching for scraps with his lips curled back from his pointed teeth.

And Madame Lemaire went slowly about her work with the sand-grains in her hair, and the flies buzzing around her.

Nothing had happened. Nothing ever did happen at El-Kelf. But for some mysterious reason Madame Lemaire suddenly felt to-day that her existence in the desert had become insupportable. It may have been that Africa, gradually draining away the Frenchwoman's vitality, had on this day removed the last little drop of the force that had, till now, enabled her to face her life, however dully, however wearily.

It may have been that there was some peculiar and unusual heaviness in the air that was generally of a feathery lightness. Or the reason may have been mental, and Africa may have drawn from this victim's nature, on this particular day, a grain, small as a grain of sand, of will-power that was absolutely necessary for the keeping of the woman's stamina upon its feet.

However it was, she felt that she collapsed. She did not cry. She did not curse. She did not faint, or lie down and stare with desperate eyes at the vacant dying day. She did not neglect her domestic duties, and was even now tearing, with a flat key, the cover from some tinned veal and ham for the evening's supper. But something within her had abruptly raised its voice. She seemed to hear it saying: "I can't bear any more!" and to know that it spoke the truth. No longer could she bear it: the African sun on the brown-earth walls, the settling of the sand-grains in her hair, the movement of the flies about her face, wrinkled prematurely by the perpetual dry heat and by the desert winds; the brazen sky above her, the iron land beneath, the silence— like the silence that was before creation, or the monotonous sounds that broke it; the mule's stamp on the stones, the barking of the guard-dogs upon the palm roofs of the distant houses in the village, the sneering laugh of the jackals by night, that whining song of Hadj, as he wagged his shaven head over the pipe-bowl into which he pressed the keef that was bringing him to madness.

She could not bear it any more.

The look in her face scarcely altered. The corners of her mouth, long since grown grim, did not droop any more than usual. Her thin, hard hands were steady as they did their dreary work. But the woman who had resisted somehow during ten terrible years of incomparable monotony suddenly died within Marie Lemaire, and the girl of Marseilles, Marie Bretelle, shrieked out in the middle-aged, haggard body.

"This fate was not meant for me. I cannot bear it any more."

Presently the tin which had held the veal and ham was empty, save for some bits of opaque jelly that still clung round its edges; and Madame Lemaire went over to the dimly burning charcoal with a dirty old pan in her hand.

Marie Bretelle was still shrieking out, but Madame Lemaire must get ready the supper for her absinthe-soaked husband, and his friend the murderer from Alfa.

The sportsmen were late in returning, and Madame Lemaire's task was finished before they came. She had nothing more to do, and she came out to the arbour that looked upon the road. Here there was an old table stained with the lees of wine. About it stood three or four rickety chairs. Madame Lemaire sat down— dropped down, rather— on one of these, laid her arms upon the table, and gazed down the empty road.

"Mon Dieu!" she said to herself. "Mon Dieu!" She beat one hand on the table and said it aloud.

"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!"

She stared up at the vine. The leaves were sandy, and she saw insects running over them. She watched them. What were they doing? What purpose could they have? What purpose could anything have?

Always the hand tapped, tapped upon the table.

And Marseilles! It was still there by the sea, crowded, gay with life. This was the time when the life began to grow turbulent. The cascades were roaring under the lifted gardens, where the beasts roamed in their cages. The awnings were out over the cafés in that city of cafés. She could almost see the coloured edges of stuff fluttering in the wind that came from the arbour and from the Château d'If. There was a sound of hammering along the sea. They were putting up the bathing sheds for the season. It would be good to go into the sea. It would cool one.

A beetle dropped from the vine on to the table, close to the beating hand. Madame Lemaire started violently. She got up, and went to stand in the entrance of the arbour. Marseilles was gone now. Africa was there.

For ten years she had been looking down the road. She looked down it once more.

It was the wonderful evening hour when Africa seems to lift itself toward the light, reluctant to be given to the darkness. Very far one could see, and with an almost supernatural distinctness. Yet Madame Lemaire strained her eyes, as people do at dusk when they strive to pierce a veil of gathering darkness.

What was coming along the road?

Her gaze travelled onwards over the hard and barren plain till it reached the green crops, on and on past the tents of the Spahis' encampment, near which rose a trail of smoke into the lucent air; farther still, farther and farther, until the whiteness narrowed towards the mountains, and at last was lost to sight.

And this evening, perhaps because she longed so much for something, for anything, there was nothing on the road. It was a white emptiness under the setting sun.

Then the woman felt frantic, and she beat her hands together, and she cried aloud:

"If the Devil himself would only come along the road and ask me to go from this cursed hole of a place, I'd go with him! I'd go! I'd go!"

She repeated it shrilly, making wild gestures with her hands towards the desert. Her face was twisted awry. She looked just then like a desperate hag of a woman.

But it was the girl of Marseilles who was crying out in her. It was Marie Bretelle who was demanding the joys she had flung away in her youth for the sake of a handsome face.

"I'd go! I'd go!"

The shrill cry went up to the setting sun. But no one answered, and nothing darkened the arid whiteness of the road that wound across the plain and passed before the inn-door.

ii

NIGHT had fallen when the two sportsmen rode in on mules, tired and hungry. Hadj came from his keef to take the beasts, Madame Lemaire from her kitchen to ask if there were any birds for her to cook. Her husband gave her a string of them, and she turned away from him without a word, and went back into the house.

There was nothing odd in this, but something in his wife's face, seen only for a moment in the darkness of the court, had startled Lemaire, and he looked after her as if he were inclined to call her back; then said to his companion, Jacques Bouvier:

"Did you see Marie?"

"Yes. She looks as if she had just stumbled over a jackal," and he laughed.

Lemaire stood for a minute where he was. Then he shouted to Hadj:

"Hadj! A— Hadj!"

The one-eyed keef-smoker came.

"Who has been here to-day?"

"No one. A few have passed the door, but no one has entered."

"Good business!" said Bouvier, shrugging his shoulders.

"Business!" exclaimed Lemaire, with an oath. "It's a fine business we do here. Another ten years, and we shan't have put by ten sous."

"Perhaps that is why madame has such a face to-night!"

"We'll see at supper. Now for an absinthe!"

The two men walked stiffly into the inn, put their guns in a corner, went into the arbour that fronted the desert, and sat down by the table.

"Marie!" bawled Lemaire.

He struck his flabby fist down upon the wood.

"Marie, the absinthe!"

Madame Lemaire heard the hoarse shout in the kitchen, and her face went awry again:

"I'd go! I'd go!"

She hissed it under her breath.

"Sacré nom de Dieu! Marie!"

"V'là!"

"The devil! What a voice!" said Bouvier in the arbour.

Lemaire was half turned in his chair. His hands were slightly shaking, and his large white face, with its angry and distressed eyes, looked startled.

"Who was that?" he said, moving in his chair as if he were going to get up.

"Who? Your wife!"

"No, it wasn't!"

"Well, then—"

At this moment there was a clink and a rattle, and Madame Lemaire came slowly out from the inn, carrying a tray with an absinthe bottle, a bottle of water, and two thick glasses with china saucers. She set it down between the two men. Her husband stared at her like one who stares suspiciously at a stranger.

"Was that you who called out?" he asked.

"Of course! Who else should it be? Who ever comes here?"

"Madame is a bit sick of El-Kelf," said Bouvier. "That's what is the matter."

Madame Lemaire compressed her lips tightly and said nothing.

Her husband looked more suspicious.

"Why should she be sick of it? She's done very well with it for ten years," he said roughly.

Madame Lemaire turned away and left the arbour. She was wearing slippers without heels, and went softly.

The two men sat in silence, looking at each other. A breath of wind, the first that had come that day, stole from the desert and rustled the leaves of the vine above their heads. Lemaire stretched out his trembling hand to the absinthe bottle.

"For God's sake let's have a drink!" he said. "There's something about my wife that's given my blood a turn."

"Beat her!" said Bouvier, pushing forward his glass. "If you don't beat them be sure they'll betray you."

His wife's treachery had set him against all women. Lemaire growled something inarticulate. He was thinking of the days in Algiers, of their strange and often disgraceful existence there. Bouvier knew nothing of that.

"Come on!" he said.

And he lifted his glass of absinthe to his lips.

At supper that night Lemaire perpetually watched his wife. She seemed to be just as usual. For years there had been a sort of sickly weariness upon her face. It was there now. For years there had been a dull sound in her voice. He heard it to-night. For years she had had a poor appetite. She ate little at supper, had her habitual manner of swallowing almost with difficulty. Surely she was just as usual.

And yet she was not— she was not!

After supper the two men returned to the arbour to smoke and drink, and Madame Lemaire remained in the kitchen to clear away and wash up.

"Isn't there something the matter with my wife?" asked Lemaire, lighting a thin, black cigar, and settling his loose, bulky body in the small chair, with his fat legs stretched out, and one foot crossed over the other. "Or is it that I'm out of sorts to-night? It seems to me as if she were strange."

Bouvier was a small, pinched man, with a narrow face, evenly red in colour, large ears that stood out from his closely shaven head, and hot-looking, prominent brown eyes.

"Perhaps she's taken with some Arab," he said.

"P'f! She's dropped all that nonsense. The devil! A woman of forty's an old woman in Africa."

Bouvier spat.

"Isn't she?"

"Oh, don't ask me about women. Young or old, they're always calling the Devil to their elbow."

"What for?"

"To put them up to wickedness. Perhaps your wife's been calling him to-night. You look behind her presently, and you may catch a sight of him. He's always about where women are."

"Ha, ha, ha!"

Lemaire laughed mirthlessly.

"D'you think he'd show himself to me?"

He emptied his glass. Bouvier suddenly looked terrible— looked like the man who had put three bullets into his sleeping guest.

"How did I know?" he said.

He leaned across the table towards Lemaire.

"How did I know?" he repeated in a low voice.

"What— when your wife—"

"Yes. They didn't let me see anything. They were too sharp. No; it was one night I saw him, with his mouth at her ear, coming in behind her through the door like a shadow. There!"

He sat back with his hands on his knees. Lemaire stared at him again.

Again the wind rustled furtively through the diseased vine-leaves of the arbour.

"It was then that I got out my revolver and charged it," continued Bouvier, in a less mysterious voice, as of one returned to practical life. "For I knew she'd been up to some villainy. Pass the bottle!"...

"Pass the bottle!... Why don't you pass the bottle?"

"Pardon!"

Lemaire pushed the bottle over to his friend.

"What's the matter with you to-night?"

"Nothing. You mean to say ... why d'you talk such nonsense? D'you think I'm a fool to be taken in by rubbish like that?"

"Well, then, why did you sit just as if you'd seen him?"

"I'm a bit tired to-night, that's what it is. We went a long way. The wine'll pull me together."

He poured out another glass.

"You don't mean to say," he continued, "you believe in the Devil?"

"Don't you?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Why not! Why should I? Nobody does— me, I mean. That sort of thing is all very well for women."

Bouvier said nothing, but sat with his arms on the table, staring out towards the desert. He looked at the empty road just in front of him, let his eyes travel along until it disappeared into the night.

"I say, that sort of thing is all very well for women," repeated Lemaire.

"I hear you."

"But I want to know whether you don't think the same."

"As you?"

"Yes; to be sure."

"I might have done once."

"But you don't now?"

"There's a devil in the desert; that's certain."

"Why?"

"Because I tell you he came out of the desert to turn my wife wrong."

"Then you weren't joking?"

"Not I. It's as true as that I went and charged my revolver, because I saw what I told you. Here's Madame coming out to join us."

Lemaire shifted heavily and abruptly in his chair.

"Hallo!" he said, in a brutal tone of voice. "What's up with you to-night?"

As he spoke he stared hard at his wife's shoulder, just by her ear.

"Nothing. What are you looking at? There isn't—"

She put up her hand quickly to her shoulder and felt over her dress.

"Ugh!" She shook herself. "I thought you'd seen a scorpion on me."

Bouvier, whose red face seemed to be deepening in colour under the influence of the red Algerian wine, burst out laughing.

"It wasn't a scorpion he was looking for," he exclaimed. His thin body shook with mirth till his chair creaked under him.

"It wasn't a scorpion," he repeated.

"What was it, then?" said Madame Lemaire.

She looked from one man to the other— from the one who was strange in his laughter, to the other who was even stranger in his gravity.

"What have you been saying about me?" she said, with a flare-up of suspicion.

"Well," said Bouvier, recovering himself a little, "if you must know, we were talking about the Devil."

The woman stared and gave the table a shake. Some of her husband's wine was spilled over it.

"The Devil take you!" he bawled with sudden fury.

"I only wish he would!"

The two men jumped back as if a viper of the sands had suddenly reared up its thin head between them.

"I only wish he would!"

It was Marie Bretelle who had spoken, the girl of Marseilles, who still lived in the body of Marie Lemaire. But it was Marie Lemaire from whom the two men shrank away— Marie Lemaire changed, startling, terrible, her haggard face furious with expression, her thin hands clutching at the edge of the table, from which the wine-bottle had fallen, to be smashed at their feet.

For a moment there was a dead silence succeeding that second shrill cry. Then Lemaire scrambled up heavily from his chair.

"What do you mean?" he stammered. "What do you mean?"

And then she told him, like a fury, and with the words which had surely been accumulating in her mind, like water behind a dam, for ten years. She told him what she had wanted, and what she had had. And when at last she had finished telling him, she stood for a minute, making mouths at him in silence, as if she still had something to say, some final word of summing up.

"Stop that!"

It was Lemaire who spoke; and as he spoke he thrust out one of his white, shaking hands to cover that nightmare mouth. But she beat his hand down, and screamed, with the gesture.

"And if the Devil himself would come along the road to fetch me from this cursed place, I'd go with him! D'you hear? I'd go with him! I'd go with him!"

When the scream died away, one-eyed Hadj was standing at the entrance to the arbour. Madame Lemaire felt that he was there, turned round, and saw him.

"I'd go with him if he was an Arab," she said, but almost muttering now, for her voice had suddenly failed her, though her passion was still red-hot. "Even the Arabs— they're better than you, absinthe-soaked, do-nothing Roumis, who sit and drink, drink—"

Her voice cracked, went into a whisper, disappeared. She thrust out her hand, swept the glasses off the table to follow the bottle, turned, and went out of the arbour softly on her slippered feet.

And one-eyed Hadj stood there laughing, for he understood French very well, although he was half mad with keef.

"She'd go with an Arab!" he repeated. "She'd go with an Arab!" And then he saw his master.

The two Frenchmen sat staring at one another across the empty table under the shivering vine-leaves, which were now stirred continually by the wind of night. Lemaire's large face had gone a dusky grey. About his eyes there was a tinge of something that was almost lead colour. His loose mouth had dropped, and the lower lip disclosed his decayed teeth. His hands, laid upon the table as if for support, shook and jumped, were never still even for a second.

Bouvier was almost purple. Veins stood out about his forehead. The blood had gone to his ears and to his eyes. Now he leaned across to Lemaire.

"Beat her!" he said. "Beat her for that! Hadj heard her. If you don't beat her, the Arabs—"

But before he had finished the sentence Lemaire had got up, with a wild gesture of his shaking hand, and gone unsteadily into the house.

That night Madame Lemaire suffered at the hands of her husband, while Bouvier and Hadj listened in the darkness of the court.

iii

IT WAS DRAWING towards evening on the following day, and Madame Lemaire was quite alone in the inn. Hadj had gone to the village for some more keef, and Lemaire and Bouvier had set out together in the morning for Batna.

So she was quite alone. Her face was bruised and discoloured near the right eye. Her head ached. She felt immensely listless. To-day there was no activity in her misery. It seemed a slow-witted, lethargic thing, undeserving even of respect.

There were no customers. There was nothing to do, absolutely nothing. She went heavily into the arbour, and sank down upon a chair. At first she sat upright. But presently she spread her arms out upon the table, and laid her discoloured face on them, and remained so for a long time.

Any traveller, passing by on the road from the desert, would have thought that she was asleep. But she was not asleep. Nor had she slept all night. It is not easy to sleep after such punishment as she had received.

And no traveller passed by.

The flies, finding that the woman kept quite still, settled upon her face, her hair, her hands, cleaned themselves, stretched their legs and wings, went to and fro busily upon her. She never moved to drive them away.

She was not thinking just then. She was only feeling— feeling how she was alone, feeling that this enormous sun-dried land was about her, stretching away to right and left of her, behind her and before, feeling that in all this enormous, sun-dried land there was nobody who wanted her, nobody thinking of her, nobody coming towards her to take her away into a different life, into a life that she could bear.

All this she was dully feeling.

Perfectly still were the diseased vine-leaves above her head, motionless as she was. On them the insects went to and fro, actively leading their mysterious lives, as the flies went to and fro on her.

For a long time she remained thus. All the white road was empty before her as far as eye could see. No trail of smoke went up by the growing crops beside the distant tents of the Spahis. It seemed as if man had abandoned Africa, leaving only one of God's creatures there, this woman who leaned across the discoloured table with her bruised face hidden on her arms.

The hour before sunset approached, the miraculous hour of the day, when Africa seems to lift itself towards the light that will soon desert it, as if it could not bear to let the glory go, as if it would not consent to be hidden in the night. Upon the salt mountain the crystals glittered.

The details of the land began to live as they had not lived all day. The wonderful clearness came, in which all things seem filled with supernatural meaning. And, even in the dullness of her misery, habit took hold of Madame Lemaire.

She lifted her head from her arms, and she stared down the long white road. Her gaze travelled. It started from the patch of glaring white before the arbour, and it went away like one who goes to a tryst. It went down the road, and on, and on. It reached the green of the crops. It passed the Spahis' tents. It moved towards the distant mountains that hid the plains and the palms of Biskra.

The flies buzzed into the air.

Madame Lemaire had got up from her seat. With her hands laid flat upon the table she stared at the thread of white that was the limit of her vision. Then she lifted her hands and curved them, and put them above her eyes to form a shade. And then she moved and came out to the entrance of the arbour.

She had seen a black speck upon the road.

There was dust around it. As so often before she asked herself the question: "Who is it coming towards the inn from the desert?" But to-day she asked herself the question as she had never asked it before, with a sort of violence, with a passionate eagerness, with a leaping expectation. And she stepped right out into the road, as if she would go and meet the traveller, would hasten with stretched-out hands as to some welcome friend.

The sun dropped its burning rays upon her hair, and she realised her folly, took her hands from her eyes, and laughed to herself. Then she went back to the arbour and stood by the table waiting. Slowly— very slowly it seemed to Madame Lemaire— the black speck grew larger on the white. But there was very much dust to-day, and always the misty cloud was round it, stirred up by— was it a camel's padding feet, or the hoofs of a horse, or— ? She could not tell yet, but soon she would be able to tell.

Now it was approaching the watered land, was not far from the Spahis' tents. And a great fear came upon her that it might turn aside to them, that it might be perhaps a Spahi riding home from his patrol of the desert. She felt that she could not bear to be alone any longer; that if she could not see and speak to someone before sunset she must go mad.

The traveller passed before the Spahis' camp without turning aside; and now the dust was less, and Madame Lemaire could see that it was a Nomad mounted on a camel.

With a smothered exclamation she hurried into the inn. A sudden resolve possessed her. She would prepare a couscous. And then, if the Nomad desired to pass on without entering the inn, she would detain him.

She would offer him a couscous for nothing, only she must have company. Whoever the stranger was, however poor, however filthy, ragged, hideous, or even terrible, he must stay a while at the inn, distract her thoughts for an instant.

Without that she would go mad.

Quickly she began her preparations. There was time. He could not be here for twenty minutes yet, and the meal for a couscous was all ready. She had only to—

She moved frantically about the kitchen.

Twenty minutes later she heard the peevish roar of a camel from the road, and ran out to meet the Nomad, carrying the couscous. As she came into the arbour she noticed that it was already dark outside.

The night had fallen suddenly.

THAT NIGHT, as Lemaire and Bouvier were nearing the inn, riding slowly upon their mules, they heard before them in the darkness the angry snarling of a camel.

Almost immediately it died away.

"Madame has company," said Bouvier. "There's a customer at the Retour du Desert."

"Some damned Arab!" said Lemaire. "Come for a coffee or a couscous. Much good that'll do us!"

They rode on in silence. When they reached the inn, the road before it was empty.

"Mai foi," said Bouvier. "Nobody here! The camel was getting up, then, and Madame is alone again."

"Marie!" called Lemaire. "Marie! The absinthe!"

There was no reply.

"Marie! Nom d'un chien! Marie! The absinthe! Marie!"

He let his heavy body down from the mule.

"Where the devil is she? Marie! Marie!"

He went into the arbour, stumbled over something, and uttered a curse.

In reply to it there was a shrill and prolonged howl from the court.

"What is it? What's the dog up to?" said Bouvier, whipping out his revolver and following Lemaire. "The table knocked over! What's up? D'you think there's anything wrong?"

The Kabyle dog howled again, slunk into the arbour from the court, and pressed itself against Lemaire's legs. He gave it a kick in the ribs that sent it yelping into the night.

"Marie! Marie!"

There was the anger of alarm in his voice now; but no one answered his call.

Walking furtively, the two men passed through the doorway into the kitchen. Lemaire struck a match, lit a candle, took it in his hand, and they searched the inn, and the court, then returned to the arbour. In the arbour, close to the overturned table, they found a broken bowl, with a couscous scattered over the earth beside it. Several vine-leaves were trodden into the ground near by.

"Someone's been here," said Lemaire, staring at Bouvier in the candlelight, which flickered in his angry and distressed eyes. "Someone's been. She was bringing him a couscous. See here!"

He pointed with his foot.

Bouvier laughed uneasily.

"Perhaps," he said— "perhaps it was the Devil come for her. You remember! She said last night, if he came, she'd go with him."

The candle dropped from Lemaire's shaking hand.

"Damn you! Why d'you talk like that?" he exclaimed furiously. "She must be somewhere about. Let's have an absinthe. Perhaps she's gone to the village."

They had an absinthe and searched once more.

Presently Hadj, who was half mad with keef, joined them. The rumour of what was going forward had got about in the village; and other Arabs glided noiselessly through the night to share in the absinthe and the quest, for that night Lemaire forgot to lock up the bottle.

BUT THE hostess of the inn at El-Kelf has not been seen again.

________________

15: Double Birthday

Willa Cather

1873-1947

The Forum, Feb 1929

EVEN IN American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the times— there are still survivals of a past more loosely woven, there are disconcerting beginnings of a future yet unforeseen.

Coming out of the gray stone Court House in Pittsburgh on a dark November afternoon, Judge Hammersley encountered one of these men whom one does not readily place, whom one is, indeed, a little embarrassed to meet, because they have not got on as they should. The Judge saw him mounting the steps outside, leaning against the wind, holding his soft felt hat on with his hand, his head thrust forward—  hurrying with a light, quick step, and so intent upon his own purposes that the Judge could have gone out by a side door and avoided the meeting. But that was against his principles.

"Good day, Albert," he muttered, seeming to feel, himself, all the embarrassment of the encounter, for the other snatched off his hat with a smile of very evident pleasure, and something like pride. His gesture bared an attractive head— small, well-set, definite and smooth, one of those heads that look as if they had been turned out of some hard, rich wood by a workman deft: with the lathe. His smooth-shaven face was dark— a warm coffee color— and his hazel eyes were warm and lively.

He was not young, but his features had a kind of quick-silver mobility.

His manner toward the stiff, frowning Judge was respectful and admiring— not in the least self-conscious.

The Judge inquired after his health and that of his uncle.

"Uncle Albert is splendidly preserved for his age. Frail, and can't stand any strain, but perfectly all right if he keeps to his routine. He's going to have a birthday soon. He will be eighty on the first day of December, and I shall be fifty-five on the same day. I was named after him because I was born on his twenty-fifth birthday."

"Umph." The Judge glanced from left to right as if this announcement were in bad taste, but he put a good face on it and said with a kind of testy heartiness, "That will be an— occasion. I'd like to remember it in some way. Is there anything your uncle would like, any—  recognition?" He stammered and coughed.

Young Albert Engelhardt, as he was called, laughed apologetically, but with confidence. "I think there is, Judge Hammersley. Indeed, I'd thought of coming to you to ask a favor. I am going to have a little supper for him, and you know he likes good wine. In these dirty boot-legging times, it's hard to get."

"Certainly, certainly." The Judge spoke up quickly and for the first time looked Albert squarely in the eye. "Don't give him any of that bootleg stuff. I can find something in my cellar. Come out to-morrow night after eight, with a gripsack of some sort. Very glad to help you out, Albert. Glad the old fellow holds up so well. Thank'ee, Albert," as Engelhardt swung the heavy door open and held it for him to pass.

Judge Hammersley's car was waiting for him, and on the ride home to Squirrel Hill he thought with vexation about the Engelhardts. He was really a sympathetic man, and though so stern of manner, he had deep affections; was fiercely loyal to old friends, old families, and old ideals.

He didn't think highly of what is called success in the world to-day, but such as it was he wanted his friends to have it, and was vexed with them when they missed it. He was vexed with Albert for unblushingly, almost proudly, declaring that he was fifty-five years old, when he had nothing whatever to show for it. He was the last of the Engelhardt boys, and they had none of them had anything to show. They all died much worse off in the world than they began. They began with a flourishing glass factory up the river, a comfortable fortune, a fine old house on the park in Allegheny, a good standing in the community; and it was all gone, melted away.

Old August Engelhardt was a thrifty, energetic man, though pig-headed— Judge Hammersley's friend and one of his first clients. August's five sons had sold the factory and wasted the money in fantastic individual enterprises, lost the big house, and now they were all dead except Albert. They ought all to be alive, with estates and factories and families. To be sure, they had that queer German streak in them; but so had old August, and it hadn't prevented his amounting to something.

Their bringing-up was wrong; August had too free a hand, he was too proud of his five handsome boys, and too conceited. Too much tennis, Rhine wine punch, music, and silliness. They were always running over to New York, like this Albert. Somebody, when asked what in the world young Albert had ever done with his inheritance, had laughingly replied that he had spent it on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Judge Hammersley didn't see how Albert could hold his head up. He had some small job in the County Clerk's office, was dependent upon it, had nothing else but the poor little house on the South Side where he lived with his old uncle. The county took care of him for the sake of his father, who had been a gallant officer in the Civil War, and afterward a public-spirited citizen and a generous employer of labor. But as Judge Hammersley had bitterly remarked to Judge Merriman when Albert's name happened to come up, "If it weren't for his father's old friends seeing that he got something, that fellow wouldn't be able to make a living." Next to a charge of dishonesty, this was the worst that could be said of any man.

Judge Hammersley's house out on Squirrel Hill sat under a grove of very old oak trees. He lived alone, with his daughter, Margaret Parmenter, who was a widow. She had a great many engagements, but she usually managed to dine at home with her father, and that was about as much society as he cared for. His house was comfortable in an old-fashioned way, well appointed— especially the library, the room in which he lived when he was not in bed or at the Court House. To-night, when he came down to dinner, Mrs. Parmenter was already at the table, dressed for an evening party. She was tall, handsome, with a fine, easy carriage, and her face was both hard and sympathetic, like her father's.

She had not, however, his stiffness of manner, that contraction of the muscles which was his unconscious protest at any irregularity in the machinery of life. She accepted blunders and accidents smoothly if not indifferently.

As the old colored man pulled back the Judge's chair for him, he glanced at his daughter from under his eyebrows.

"I saw that son of old Gus Engelhardt's this afternoon," he said in an angry, challenging tone.

As a young girl his daughter had used to take up the challenge and hotly defend the person who had displeased or disappointed her father.

But as she grew older she was conscious of that same feeling in herself when people fell short of what she expected; and she understood now that when her father spoke as if he were savagely attacking someone, it merely meant that he was disappointed or sorry for them; he never spoke thus of persons for whom he had no feeling. So she said calmly:

"Oh, did you really? I haven't seen him for years, not since the war.

How was he looking? Shabby?"

"Not so shabby as he ought to. That fellow's likely to be in want one of these days."

"I'm afraid so," Mrs. Parmenter sighed. "But I believe he would be rather plucky about it."

The Judge shrugged. "He's coming out here to-morrow night, on some business for his uncle."

"Then I'll have a chance to see for myself. He must look much older.

I can't imagine his ever looking really old and settled, though."

"See that you don't ask him to stay. I don't want the fellow hanging around. He'll transact his business and get it over. He had the face to admit to me that he'll be fifty-five years old on the first of December.

He's giving some sort of birthday party for old Albert, a-hem." The Judge coughed formally but was unable to check a smile; his lips sarcastic, but his eyes full of sly humor.

"Can he be as old as that? Yes, I suppose so. When we were both at Mrs. Sterrett's, in Rome, I was fifteen, and he must have been about thirty."

Her father coughed. "He'd better have been in Homestead!"

Mrs. Parmenter looked up; that was rather commonplace, for her father. "Oh, I don't know. Albert would never have been much use in Homestead, and he was very useful to Mrs. Sterrett in Rome."

"What did she want the fellow hanging round for? All the men of her family amounted to something."

"To too much! There must be some butterflies if one is going to give house parties, and the Sterretts and Dents were all heavyweights. He was in Rome a long while; three years, I think. He had a gorgeous time.

Anyway, he learned to speak Italian very well, and that helps him out now, doesn't it? You still send for him at the Court House when you need an interpreter?"

"That's not often. He picks up a few dollars. Nice business for his father's son."

After dinner the Judge retired to his library, where the gas fire was lit, and his book at hand, with a paper-knife inserted to mark the place where he had left off reading last night at exactly ten-thirty. On his way he went to the front door, opened it, turned on the porch light, and looked at the thermometer, making an entry in a little notebook. In a few moments his daughter, in an evening cloak, stopped at the library door to wish him good night and went down the hall. He listened for the closing of the front door; it was a reassuring sound to him. He liked the feeling of an orderly house, empty for himself and his books all evening. He was deeply read in divinity, philosophy, and in the early history of North America.

Ii

WHILE JUDGE Hammersley was settling down to his book, Albert Engelhardt was sitting at home in a garnet velvet smoking-jacket, at an upright piano, playing Schumann's Kreisleriana for his old uncle. They lived, certainly, in a queer part of the city, on one of the dingy streets that run uphill off noisy Carson Street, in a little two-story brick house, a workingman's house, that Albert's father had taken over long ago in satisfaction of a bad debt. When his father had acquired this building, it was a mere nothing— the Engelhardts were then living in their big, many-gabled, so-German house on the Park, in Allegheny; and they owned many other buildings, besides the glass factory up the river. After the father's death, when the sons converted houses and lands into cash, this forgotten little house on the South Side had somehow never been sold or mortgaged. A day came when Albert, the last surviving son, found this piece of property the only thing he owned in the world besides his personal effects. His uncle, having had a crushing disappointment, wanted at that time to retire from the practice of medicine, so Albert settled in the South Side house and took his uncle with him.

He had not gone there in any mood of despair. His impoverishment had come about gradually, and before he took possession of these quarters he had been living in a boarding house; the change seemed going up instead of going down in the world. He was delighted to have a home again, to unpack his own furniture and his books and pictures— the most valuable in the world to him, because they were full of his own history and that of his family, were like part of his own personality.

All the years and the youth which had slipped away from him still clung to these things.

At his piano, under his Degas drawing in black and red— three ballet girls at the bar— or seated at his beautiful inlaid writing table, he was still the elegant young man who sat there long ago. His rugs were fine ones, his collection of books was large and very personal. It was full of works which, though so recent, were already immensely far away and diminished. The glad, rebellious excitement they had once caused in the world he could recapture only in memory. Their power to seduce and stimulate the young, the living, was utterly gone. There was a complete file of the Yellow Book, for instance; who could extract sweet poison from those volumes now? A portfolio of the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley— decadent, had they been called? A slender, padded volume— the complete works of a great new poet, Ernest Dowson. Oscar Wilde, whose wickedness was now so outdone that he looked like the poor old hat of some Victorian belle, wired and feathered and garlanded and faded.

Albert and his uncle occupied only the upper floor of their house.

The ground floor was let to an old German glass engraver who had once been a workman in August Engelhardt's factory. His wife was a good cook, and every night sent their dinner up hot on the dumb-waiter. The house opened directly upon the street, and to reach Albert's apartment one went down a narrow paved alley at the side of the building and mounted an outside flight of wooden stairs at the back. They had only four rooms— two bedrooms, a snug sitting room in which they dined, and a small kitchen where Albert got breakfast every morning. After he had gone to work, Mrs. Rudder came up from downstairs to wash the dishes and do the cleaning, and to cheer up old Doctor Engelhardt.

At dinner this evening Albert had told his uncle about meeting Judge Hammersley, and of his particular inquiries after his health. The old man was very proud and received this intelligence as his due, but could not conceal a certain gratification.

"The daughter, she still lives with him? A damned fine-looking woman!" he muttered between his teeth. Uncle Albert, a bachelor, had been a professed connoisseur of ladies in his day.

Immediately after dinner, unless he were going somewhere, Albert always played for his uncle for an hour. He played extremely well. Doctor Albert sat by the fire smoking his cigar. While he listened, the look of wisdom and professional authority faded, and many changes went over his face, as if he were playing a little drama to himself; moods of scorn and contempt, of rakish vanity, sentimental melancholy . . . and something remote and lonely. The Doctor had always flattered himself that he resembled a satyr, because the tops of his ears were slightly pointed; and he used to hint to his nephews that his large pendulous nose was the index of an excessively amorous disposition. His mouth was full of long, yellowish teeth, all crowded irregularly, which he snapped and ground together when he uttered denunciations of modern art or the Eighteenth Amendment. He wore his mustache short and twisted up at the corners. His thick gray hair was cut close and upright, in the bristling French fashion. His hands were small and fastidious, high-knuckled, quite elegant in shape.

Across the doctor's throat ran a long, jagged scar. He used to mutter to his young nephews that it had been justly inflicted by an outraged husband— a pistol shot in the dark. But his brother August always said that he had been cut by glass, when, wandering about in the garden one night after drinking too much punch, he had fallen into the cold-frames.

After playing Schumann for some time, Albert, without stopping, went into Stravinsky.

Doctor Engelhardt by the gas fire stirred uneasily, turned his important head toward his nephew, and snapped his teeth. "Br-r-r, that stuff!

Poverty of imagination, poverty of musical invention; fin-de-siecler Albert laughed. "I thought you were asleep. Why will you use that phrase? It shows your vintage. Like this any better?" He began the second act of Pelleas et Milisande.

The Doctor nodded. "Yes, that is better, though I'm not fooled by it." He wrinkled his nose as if he were smelling out something, and squinted with superior discernment. "To this canaille that is all very new; but to me it goes back to Bach."

"Yes, if you like."

Albert, like Judge Hammersley, was jealous of his solitude— liked a few hours with his books. It was time for Uncle Doctor to be turning in. He ended the music by playing half a dozen old German songs which the old fellow always wanted but never asked for. The Doctor's chin sank into his shirt front. His face took on a look of deep, resigned sadness; his features, losing their conscious importance, seemed to shrink a good deal. His nephew knew that this was the mood in which he would most patiently turn to rest and darkness. Doctor Engelhardt had had a heavy loss late in life. Indeed, he had suffered the same loss twice.

As Albert left the piano, the Doctor rose and walked a little stiffly across the room. At the door of his chamber he paused, brought his hand up in a kind of military salute and gravely bowed, so low that one saw only the square up-standing gray brush on the top of his head and the long pear-shaped nose. After this he closed the door behind him.

Albert sat down to his book. Very soon he heard the bath water running.

Having taken his bath, the Doctor would get into bed immediately to avoid catching cold. Luckily, he usually slept well. Perhaps he dreamed of that unfortunate young singer whom he sometimes called, to his nephew and himself, "the lost Lenore."

iii

LONG YEARS ago, when the Engelhardt boys were still living in the old house in Allegheny with their mother, after their fathers death, Doctor Engelhardt was practising medicine, and had an office on the Park, five minutes' walk from his sister-in-law. He usually lunched with the family, after his morning office hours were over. They always had a good cook, and the Allegheny market was one of the best in the world. Mrs.

Engelhardt went to market every morning of her life; such vegetables and poultry, such cheeses and sausages and smoked and pickled fish as one could buy there! Soon after she had made her rounds, boys in white aprons would come running across the Park with her purchases. Every one knew the Engelhardt house, built of many-colored bricks, with gables and turrets, and on the west a large stained-glass window representing a scene on the Grand Canal in Venice, the Church of Santa Maria della Salute in the background, in the foreground a gondola with a slender gondolier. People said August and Mrs. Engelhardt should be solidly seated in the prow to make the picture complete.

Doctor Engelhardt's especial interest was the throat, preferably the singing throat. He had studied every scrap of manuscript that Manuel Garcia had left behind him, every reported conversation with him. He had doctored many singers, and imagined he had saved many voices.

Pittsburgh air is not good for the throat, and traveling artists often had need of medical assistance. Conductors of orchestras and singing societies recommended Doctor Engelhardt because he was very lax about collecting fees from professionals, especially if they sent him a photograph floridly inscribed. He had been a medical student in New York while Patti was still singing; his biography fell into chapters of great voices as a turfman's falls into chapters of fast horses. This passion for the voice had given him the feeling of distinction, of being unique in his profession, which had made him all his life a well-satisfied and happy man, and had left him a poor one.

One morning when the Doctor was taking his customary walk about the Park before office hours, he stopped in front of the Allegheny High School building because he heard singing— a chorus of young voices.

It was June, and the chapel windows were open. The Doctor listened for a few moments, then tilted his head on one side and laid his forefinger on his pear-shaped nose with an anxious, inquiring squint. Among the voices he certainly heard one Voice. The final bang of the piano was followed by laughter and buzzing. A boy ran down the steps. The Doctor stopped him and learned that this was a rehearsal for Class Day exercises. Just then the piano began again, and in a moment he heard the same voice, alone:

"Still wie die Nacht, tief wie das Meer"

No, he was not mistaken; a full, rich soprano voice, so easy, so sure; a golden warmth, even in the high notes. Before the second verse was over he went softly into the building, into the chapel, and for the first time laid eyes on Marguerite Thiesinger. He saw a sturdy, blooming German girl standing beside the piano; good-natured, one knew at a glance, glowing with health. She looked like a big peony just burst into bloom and full of sunshine— sunshine in her auburn hair, in her rather small hazel eyes. When she finished the song, she began waltzing on the platform with one of the boys.

Doctor Albert waited by the door, and accosted her as she came out carrying her coat and schoolbooks. He introduced himself and asked her if she would go over to Mrs. Engelhardt's for lunch and sing for him.

Oh, yes! she knew one of the Engelhardt boys, and she'd always wanted to see that beautiful window from the inside.

She went over at noon and sang for them before lunch, and the family took stock of her. She spoke a very ordinary German and her English was still worse; her people were very ordinary. Her flat, slangy speech was somehow not vulgar because it was naive— she knew no other way. The boys were delighted with her because she was jolly and interested in everything. She told them about the glorious good times she had going to dances in suburban Turner halls, and to picnics in the damp, smoke-smeared woods up the Allegheny. The boys roared with laughter at the unpromising places she mentioned. But she had the warm bubble in her blood that makes everything fair; even being a junior in the Allegheny High School was "glorious," she told them!

She came to lunch with them again and again, because she liked the boys, and she thought the house magnificent. The Doctor observed her narrowly all the while. Clearly she had no ambition, no purpose; she sang to be agreeable. She was not very intelligent, but she had a kind of personal warmth that, to his way of thinking, was much better than brains. He took her over to his office and poked and pounded her.

When he had finished his examination, he stood before the foolish, happy young thing and inclined his head in his peculiar fashion.

"Miss Thiesinger, I have the honor to announce to you that you are on the threshold of a brilliant, possibly a great career."

She laughed her fresh, ringing laugh. "Aren't you nice, though, to take so much trouble about me!"

The Doctor lifted a forefinger. "But for that you must turn your back on this childishness, these sniveling sapheads you play marbles with.

You must uproot this triviality." He made a gesture as if he were wringing a chickens neck, and Marguerite was thankful she was able to keep back a giggle.

Doctor Engelhardt wanted her to go to New York with him at once, and begin her studies. He was quite ready to finance her. He had made up his mind to stake everything upon this voice.

But not at all. She thought it was lovely of him, but she was very fond of her classmates, and she wanted to graduate with her class next year.

Moreover, she had just been given a choir position in one of the biggest churches in Pittsburgh, though she was still a schoolgirl; she was going to have money and pretty clothes for the first time in her life and wouldn't miss it all for anything.

All through the next school year Doctor Albert went regularly to the church where she sang, watched and cherished her, expostulated and lectured, trying to awaken fierce ambition in his big peony flower. She was very much interested in other things just then, but she was patient with him; accepted his devotion with good nature, respected his wisdom, and bore with his "stagey" manners as she called them. She graduated in June, and immediately after Commencement, when she was not quite nineteen, she eloped with an insurance agent and went to Chicago to live. She wrote Doctor Albert: "I do appreciate all your kindness to me, but I guess I will let my voice rest for the present."

He took it hard. He burned her photographs and the foolish little scrawls she had written to thank him for presents. His life would have been dull and empty if he hadn't had so many reproaches to heap upon her in his solitude. How often and how bitterly he arraigned her for the betrayal of so beautiful a gift. Where did she keep it hidden now, that jewel, in the sordid life she had chosen?

Three years after her elopement, suddenly, without warning, Marguerite Thiesinger walked into his office on Arch Street one morning and told him she had come back to study! Her husband's "affairs were involved"; he was now quite willing that she should make as much as possible of her voice— and out of it.

"My voice is better than it was," she said, looking at him out of her rather small eyes— greenish yellow, with a glint of gold in them. He believed her. He suddenly realized how uncommonly truthful she had always been. Rather stupid, unimaginative, but carried joyously along on a flood of warm vitality, and truthful to a degree he had hardly known in any woman or in any man. And now she was a woman.

He took her over to his sister-in-law's. Albert, who chanced to be at home, was sent to the piano. She was not mistaken. The Doctor kept averting his head to conceal his delight, to conceal, once or twice, a tear

— the moisture that excitement and pleasure brought to his eyes. The voice, after all, he told himself, is a physical thing. She had been growing and ripening like fruit in the sun, and the voice with the body. Doctor Engelhardt stepped softly out of the music room into the conservatory and addressed a potted palm, his lips curling back from his teeth: "So we get that out of you, Monsieur le commis voyageur, and now we throw you away like a squeezed lemon "

When he returned to his singer, she addressed him very earnestly from under her spring hat covered with lilacs: "Before my marriage, Doctor Engelhardt, you offered to take me to New York to a teacher, and lend me money to start on. If you still feel like doing it, I'm sure I could repay you before very long. I'll follow your instructions. What was it you used to tell me I must have— application and ambition?"

He glared at her; "Take note, Gretchen, that I change the prescription.

There is something vulgar about ambition. Now we will play for higher stakes; for ambition read aspiration!" His index finger shot upward.

In New York he had no trouble in awakening the interest of his friends and acquaintances. Within a week he had got his protégée to a very fine artist, just then retiring from the Opera, a woman who had been a pupil of Pauline Garcia Viardot. In short, Doctor Engelhardt had realized the dream of a lifetime: he had discovered a glorious voice, backed by a rich vitality. Within a year Marguerite had one of the best church positions in New York; she insisted upon repaying her benefactor before she went abroad to complete her studies. Doctor Engelhardt went often to New York to counsel and advise, to gloat over his treasure.

He often shivered as he crossed the Jersey ferry; he was afraid of Fate.

He would tell over her assets on his fingers to reassure himself. You might have seen a small, self-important man of about fifty, standing by the rail of the ferry boat, his head impressively inclined as if he were addressing an amphitheatre full of students, gravely counting upon his fingers.

But Fate struck, and from the quarter least under suspicion— through that blooming, rounded, generously molded young body, from that abundant, glowing health which the Doctor proudly called peasant vigor. Marguerite's success had brought to his office many mothers of singing daughters. He was not insensible to the compliment, but he usually dismissed them by dusting his fingers delicately in the air and growling; "Yes, she can sing a little, she has a voice; aber kleine, kleine." He exulted in the opulence of his cabbage rose. To his nephews he used to match her possibilities with the singers of that period. Emma Eames he called die Puritan, Geraldine Ferrar la voix blanche, another was trop raffinee.

Marguerite had been in New York two years, her path one of uninterrupted progress, when she wrote the Doctor about a swelling of some sort; the surgeons wanted to operate. Doctor Albert took the next train for New York. An operation revealed that things were very bad indeed; a malignant growth, so far advanced that the knife could not check it. Her mother and grandmother had died of the same disease.

Poor Marguerite lived a year in a hospital for incurables. Every weekend when Doctor Albert went over to see her he found great changes— it was rapid and terrible. That winter and spring he lived like a man lost in a dark morass, the Slave in the Dismal Swamp. He suffered more than his Gretchen, for she was singularly calm and hopeful to the very end, never doubting that she would get well.

The last time he saw her she had given up. But she was noble and sweet in mood, and so piteously apologetic for disappointing him— like a child who has broken something precious and is sorry. She was wasted, indeed, until she was scarcely larger than a child, her beautiful hair cut short, her hands like shadows, but still a stain of color in her cheeks.

"I'm so sorry I didn't do as you wanted instead of running off with Phil," she said. "I see now how little he cared about me— and you've just done everything. If I had my twenty-six years to live over, I'd live them very differently."

Doctor Albert dropped her hand and walked to the window, the tears running down his face. " Pourquoi, pourquoi?" he muttered, staring blindly at that brutal square of glass. When he could control himself and came back to the chair at her bedside, she put her poor little sheared head out on his knee and lay smiling and breathing softly.

"I expect you don't believe in the hereafter," she murmured. "Scientific people hardly ever do. But if there is one, I'll not forget you. I'll love to remember you."

When the nurse came to give her her hypodermic, Doctor Albert went out into Central Park and wandered about without knowing where or why, until he smelled something sweet which suddenly stopped his breath, and he sat down under a flowering linden tree.

He dropped his face in his hands and cried like a woman. Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness— why must they go out of the summer world into darkness? Warum, warum? He thought he had already suffered all that man could, but never had it come down on him like this.

He sat on that bench like a drunken man or like a dying man, muttering Heine's words, "God is a grimmer humorist than I. Nobody but God could have perpetrated anything so cruel." She was ashamed, he remembered it afresh and struck his bony head with his clenched fist— ashamed at having been used like this; she was apologetic for the power, whatever it was, that had tricked her. "Yes, by God, she apologized for God!"

The tortured man looked up through the linden branches at the blue arch that never answers. As he looked, his face relaxed, his breathing grew regular. His eyes were caught by puffy white clouds like the cherub-heads in Raphael's pictures, and something within him seemed to rise and travel with those clouds. The moment had come when he could bear no more. . . . When he went back to the hospital that evening, he learned that she had died very quietly between eleven and twelve, the hour when he was sitting on the bench in the park.

Uncle Doctor now sometimes spoke to Albert out of a long silence:

"Anyway, I died for her; that was given to me. She never knew a death-struggle— she went to sleep. That struggle took place in my body. Her dissolution occurred within me."

iv

OLD DOCTOR Engelhardt walked abroad very little now. Sometimes on a fine Sunday, his nephew would put him aboard a street car that climbs the hills beyond Mount Oliver and take him to visit an old German graveyard and a monastery. Every afternoon, in good weather, he walked along the pavement which ran past the front door, as far as the first corner, where he bought his paper and cigarettes. If Elsa, the pretty little granddaughter of his housekeeper, ran out to join him and see him over the crossings, he would go a little farther. In the morning, while Mrs. Rudder did the sweeping and dusting, the Doctor took the air on an upstairs back porch, overhanging the court.

The court was bricked, and had an old-fashioned cistern and hydrant, and three ailanthus trees— the last growing things left to the Engelhardts, whose flowering shrubs and greenhouses had once been so well known in Allegheny. In these trees, which he called les Chinoises, the Doctor took a great interest. The clothes line ran about their trunks in a triangle, and on Mondays he looked down upon the washing. He was too near-sighted to be distressed by the sooty flakes descending from neighboring chimneys upon the white sheets. He enjoyed the dull green leaves of his Chinoises in summer, scarcely moving on breathless, sticky nights, when the moon came up red over roofs and smoke-stacks.

In autumn he watched the yellow fronds drop down upon the brick pavement like great ferns. Now, when his birthday was approaching, the trees were bare; and he thought he liked them best so, especially when all the knotty, curly twigs were outlined by a scurf of snow.

As he sat there, wrapped up in rugs, a stiff felt hat on his head— he would never hear to a cap— and woolen gloves on his hands, Elsa, the granddaughter, would bring her cross-stitch and chatter to him. Of late she had been sewing on her trousseau, and that amused the Doctor highly— though it meant she would soon go to live in lower Allegheny, and he would lose her. Her young man, Carl Abberbock, had now a half-interest in a butcher stall in the Allegheny market, and was in a hurry to marry.

When Mrs. Rudder had quite finished her work and made the place neat, she would come and lift the rug from his knees and say, "Time to go in, Herr Doctor."

v

THE NEXT evening after dinner Albert left the house with a suitcase, the bag that used to make so many trips to New York in the opera season.

He stopped downstairs to ask Elsa to carry her sewing up and sit with his uncle for a while, then he took the street car across the Twenty-second Street Bridge by the blazing steel mills. As he waited on Soho Hill to catch a Fifth Avenue car, the heavy, frosty air suddenly began to descend in snow flakes. He wished he had worn his old overcoat; didn't like to get this one wet. He had to consider such things now. He was hesitating about a taxi when his car came, bound for the East End.

He got off at the foot of one of the streets running up Squirrel Hill, and slowly mounted. Everything was white with the softly-falling snow.

Albert knew all the places; old school friends lived in many of them.

Big, turreted stone houses, set in ample grounds with fine trees and shrubbery and driveways. He stepped aside now and then to avoid a car, rolling from the gravel drives on to the stone-block pavement. If the occupants had recognized Albert, they would have felt sorry for him. But he did not feel sorry for himself. He looked up at the lighted windows, the red gleam on the snowy rhododendron bushes, and shrugged. His old schoolfellows went to New York now as often as he had done in his youth; but they went to consult doctors, to put children in school, or to pay the bills of incorrigible sons.

He thought he had had the best of it; he had gone a-Maying while it was May. This solid comfort, this iron-bound security, didn't appeal to him much. These massive houses, after all, held nothing but the heavy domestic routine; all the frictions and jealousies and discontents of family life. Albert felt light and free, going up the hill in his thin overcoat. He believed he had had a more interesting life than most of his friends who owned real estate. He could still amuse himself, and he had lived to the full all the revolutions in art and music that his period covered. He wouldn't at this moment exchange his life and his memories— his memories of his teacher, Rafael Joseffy, for instance— for any one of these massive houses and the life of the man who paid the upkeep. If Mephistopheles were to emerge from the rhododendrons and stand behind his shoulder with such an offer, he wouldn't hesitate. Money? Oh, yes, he would like to have some, but not what went with it.

He turned in under Judge Hammersley's fine oak trees. A car was waiting in the driveway, near the steps by which he mounted to the door. The colored man admitted him, and just as he entered the hall Mrs. Parmenter came down the stairs.

"Ah, it's you, Albert! Father said you were coming in this evening, and I've kept the car waiting, to have a glimpse of you."

Albert had dropped his hat and bag, and stood holding her hand with the special grace and appreciation she remembered in him.

"What a pleasure to see you!" he exclaimed, and she knew from his eyes it was. "It doesn't happen often, but it's always such a surprise and pleasure." He held her hand as if he wanted to keep her there. "It's a long while since the Villa Scipione, isn't it?"

They stood for a moment in the shrouded hall light. Mrs. Parmenter was looking very handsome, and Albert was thinking that she had all her father's authority, with much more sweep and freedom. She was impulsive and careless, where he was strong and shrinking— a powerful man terribly afraid of little annoyances. His daughter, Albert believed, was not afraid of anything. She had proved more than once that if you aren't afraid of gossip, it is harmless. She did as she pleased. People took it. Even Parmenter had taken it, and he was rather a stiff sort.

Mrs. Parmenter laughed at his allusion to their summer at Mrs. Sterrett's, in Rome, and gave him her coat to hold.

"You remember, Albert, how you and I used to get up early on fete days, and go down to the garden gate to see the young king come riding in from the country at the head of the horse guards? How the sun flashed on his helmet! Heavens, I saw him last summer! So grizzled and battered."

"And we were always going to run away to Russia together, and now there is no Russia. Everything has changed but you, Mrs. Parmenter."

"Wish I could think so. But you don't know any Mrs. Parmenter. I'm Marjorie, please. How often I think of those gay afternoons I had with you and your brothers in the garden behind your old Allegheny house.

There's such a lot I want to talk to you about. And this birthday—
when is it? May I send your uncle some flowers? I always remember his goodness to poor Marguerite Thiesinger. He never got over that, did he?

But I'm late, and father is waiting. Good night, you'll have a message from me."

Albert bent and kissed her hand in the old-fashioned way, keeping it a moment and breathing in softly the fragrance of her clothes, her furs, her person, the fragrance of that other world to which he had once belonged and out of which he had slipped so gradually that he scarcely realized it, unless suddenly brought face to face with something in it that was charming. Releasing her, he caught up his hat and opened the door to follow her, but she pushed him back with her arm and smiled over her shoulder. "No, no, father is waiting for you in the library. Good night."

Judge Hammersley stood in the doorway, fingering a bunch of keys and blinking with impatience to render his service and have done with it. The library opened directly into the hall; he couldn't help overhearing his daughter, and he disliked her free and unreproachful tone with this man who was young when he should be old, single when he should be married, and penniless when he should be well fixed.

Later, as Albert came down the hill with two bottles of the Judge's best champagne in his bag, he was thinking that the greatest disadvantage of being poor and dropping out of the world was that he didn't meet attractive women any more. The men he could do without, Heaven knew! But the women, the ones like Marjorie Hammersley, were always grouped where the big fires burned— money and success and big houses and fast boats and French cars; it was natural.

Mrs. Parmenter, as she drove off, resolved that she would see more of Albert and his uncle— wondered why she had let an old friendship lapse for so long. When she was a little girl, she used often to spend a week with her aunt in Allegheny. She was fond of the aunt, but not of her cousins, and she used to escape whenever she could to the Engelhardts' garden only a few doors away. No grass in that garden— in Allegheny grass was always dirty— but glittering gravel, and lilac hedges beautiful in spring, and barberry hedges red in the fall, and flowers and bird cages and striped awnings, boys lying about in tennis clothes, making mint juleps before lunch, having coffee under the sycamore trees after dinner. The Engelhardt boys were different, like people in a book or a play. All the young men in her set were scornful of girls until they wanted one; then they grabbed her rather brutally, and it was over.

She had felt that the Engelhardt boys admired her without in the least wanting to grab her, that they enjoyed her aesthetically, so to speak, and it pleased her to be liked in that way.

vi

ON THE afternoon of the first of December, Albert left his desk in the County Clerk's office at four o'clock, feeling very much as he used to when school was dismissed in the middle of the afternoon just before the Christmas holidays. It was his uncle's birthday that was in his mind; his own, of course, gave him no particular pleasure. If one stopped to think of that, there was a shiver waiting round the corner. He walked over the Smithfield Street Bridge. A thick brown fog made everything dark, and there was a feeling of snow in the air. The lights along the sheer cliffs of Mount Washington, high above the river, were already lighted. When Albert was a boy, those cliffs, with the row of lights far up against the sky, always made him think of some far-away, cloud-set city in Asia; the forbidden city, he used to call it. Well, that was a long time ago; a lot of water had run under this bridge since then, and kingdoms and empires had fallen. Meanwhile, Uncle Doctor was still hanging on, and things were not so bad with them as they might be. Better not reflect too much. He hopped on board a street car, and old women with market baskets shifted to make room for him.

When he reached home, the table was already set in the living room.

Beautiful table linen had been one of his mother's extravagances (he had boxes of it, meant to give some to Elsa on her marriage), and Mrs.

Rudder laundered it with pious care. She had put out the best silver. He had forgotten to order flowers, but the old woman had brought up one of her blooming geraniums for a centerpiece. Uncle Albert was dozing by the fire in his old smoking jacket, a volume of Schiller on his knees.

"I'll put the studs in your shirt for you. Time to dress, Uncle Doctor."

The old man blinked and smiled drolly. "So? Die claw-hammer?"

"Of course die claw-hammer! Elsa is going to a masquerade with Carl, and they are coming up to see us before they go. I promised her you would dress."

"Albert," the Doctor called him back, beckoned with a mysterious smile; "where did you get that wine now?"

"Oh, you found it when she put it on ice, did you? That's Judge Hammersley's, the best he had. He insisted on sending it to you, with his compliments and good wishes."

Uncle Albert rose and drew up his shoulders somewhat pompously.

"From my own kind I still command recognition." Then dropping into homely vulgarity he added, with a sidelong squint at his nephew, "By God, some of that will feel good, running down the gullet."

"You'll have all you want for once. It's a great occasion. Did you shave carefully? I'll take my bath, and then you must be ready for me."

In half an hour Albert came out in his dress clothes and found his uncle still reading his favorite poet. "The trousers are too big," the Doctor complained. "Why not die claw-hammer and my old trousers? Elsa wouldn't notice."

"Oh, yes, she would! She's seen these every day for five years. Quick change!"

Doctor Engelhardt submitted, and when he was dressed, surveyed himself in his mirror with satisfaction, though he slyly slipped a cotton handkerchief into his pocket instead of the linen one Albert had laid out. When they came back to the sitting room, Mrs. Rudder had been up again and had put on the wine glasses. There was still half an hour before dinner, and Albert sat down to play for his uncle. He was beginning to feel that it was all much ado about nothing, after all.

A gentle tap at the door, and Elsa came in with her young man. She was dressed as a Polish maiden, and Carl Abberbock was in a Highlander's kilt.

"Congratulations on your birthday, Herr Doctor, and I've brought you some flowers." She wait to his chair and bent down to be kissed, putting a bunch of violets in his hand.

The Doctor rose and stood looking down at the violets. "Hey, you take me for a Bonapartist? What is Mussolini's flower, Albert? Advise your friends in Rome that a Supreme Dictator should always have a flower." He turned the young girl around in the light and teased her about her thin arms— such an old joke, but she laughed for him.

"But that's the style now, Herr Doctor. Everybody wants to be as thin as possible."

"Bah, there are no stales in such things! A man will always want something to take hold of till Hell freezes over! Is dat so, Carl?"

Carl, a very broad-faced, smiling young man with outstanding ears, was suddenly frightened into silence by the entrance of a fine lady, and made for the door to get his knotty knees into the shadow. Elsa, too, caught her breath and shrank away.

Without knocking, Mrs Parmenter, her arms full of roses, appeared in the doorway, and just behind her was her chauffeur, carrying a package. "Put it down there and wait for me," she said to him, then swept into the room and lightly embraced Doctor Engelhardt without waiting to drop the flowers or take off her furs. "I wanted to congratulate you in person. They told me below that you were receiving. Please take these flowers, Albert. I want a moment's chat with Doctor Engelhardt."

The Doctor stood with singular gravity, like some one in a play, the violets still in his hand. "To what," he muttered with his best bow, "to what am I indebted for such distinguished consideration?"

"To your own distinction, my dear sir— always one of the most distinguished men I ever knew."

The Doctor, to whom flattery was thrice dearer than to ordinary men, flushed deeply. But he was not so exalted that he did not notice his little friend of many lonely hours slipping out of the entry-way— the bare-kneed Highland chief had already got down the wooden stairs. "Elsa," he called commandingly, "come here and kiss me good night." He pulled her forward. "This is Elsa Rudder, Mrs. Parmenter, and my very particular friend. You should have seen her beautiful hair before she cut it off." Elsa reddened and glanced up to see whether the lady understood. Uncle Doctor kissed her on the forehead and ran his hand over her shingled head. "Nineteen years," he said softly. "If the next nineteen are as happy, we won't bother about the rest. Behuf dich, Gott!"

"Thank you, Uncle Doctor. Good night."

After she fluttered out, he turned to Mrs. Parmenter. "That little girl,"  he said impressively, "is the rose in winter. She is my heir. Everything I have, I leave to her."

"Everything but my birthday present, please! You must drink that. I've brought you a bottle of champagne."

Both Alberts began to laugh. "But your father has already given us two!"

Mrs. Parmenter looked from one to the other.  "My father? Well, that is a compliment! It's unheard of. Of course, he and I have different lockers. We could never agree when to open them. I don't think he's opened his since the Chief Justice dined with him. Now I must leave you. Be as jolly as the night is long; with three bottles you ought to do very well! The good woman downstairs said your dinner would be served in half an hour." I

Both men started toward her. "Don't go. Please, please, stay and dine with us! It's the one thing we needed." Albert began to entreat her in Italian, a language his uncle did not understand. He confessed that he had been freezing up for the last hour, couldn't go on with it alone.

"One can't do such things without a woman— a beautiful woman."

"Thank you, Albert. But I've a dinner engagement; I ought to be at the far end of Ellsworth Avenue this minute."

"But this is once in a lifetime— for him! Still, if your friends are waiting for you, you can't. Certainly not." He took up her coat and held it for her. But how the light had gone out of his face; he looked so different, so worn, as he stood holding her coat at just the right height.

She slipped her arms into it, then pulled them out. "I can't, but I just will! Let me write a note, please. I'll send Henry on with it and tell them I'll drop in after dinner." Albert pressed her hand gratefully and took her to his desk. "Oh, Albert, your Italian writing table, and all the lovely things on it, just as it stood in your room at the Villa Scipione! You used to let me write letters at it. You had the nicest way with young girls. If I had a daughter, I'd want you to do it all over again."

She scratched a note, and Albert put a third place at the table. He noticed Uncle Doctor slip away, and come back with his necktie set straight, attended by a wave of eau de cologne. While he was lighting the candles and bringing in the wine cooler, Mrs. Parmenter sat down beside the Doctor, accepted one of his cigarettes, and began to talk to him simply and naturally about Marguerite Theisinger. Nothing could have been more tactful, Albert knew; nothing could give the old man more pleasure on his birthday. Albert himself couldn't do it any more; he had worn out his power of going over that sad story. He tried to make up for it by playing the songs she had sung.

"Albert," said Mrs. Parmenter when they sat down to dinner, "this is the only spot I know in the world that is before-the-war. You've got a period shut up in here; the last ten years of one century, and the first ten of another. Sitting here, I don't believe in aeroplanes, or jazz, or Cubists.

My father is nearly as old as Doctor Engelhardt, and we never buy anything new; yet we haven't kept it out. How do you manage?"

Albert smiled a little ruefully. "I suppose its because we never have any young people about. They bring it in."

"Elsa," murmured the Doctor. "But I see; she is only a child."

"I'm sorry for the young people now," Mrs. Parmenter went on.

"They seem to me coarse and bitter. There's nothing wonderful left for them, poor things; the war destroyed it all. Where could any girl find such a place to escape to as your mother's house, full of chests of linen like this? All houses now are like hotels; nothing left to cherish. Your house was wonderful! And what music we used to have. Do you remember the time you took me to hear Joseffy play the second Brahms, with Gericke? It was the last time I ever heard him. What did happen to him, Albert? Went to pieces in some way, didn't he?"

Albert sighed and shook his head; wine was apt to plunge him into pleasant, poetic melancholy. "I don't know if any one knows. I stayed in Rome too long to know, myself. Before I went abroad, I'd been taking lessons with him right along— I saw no change in him, though he gave fewer and fewer concerts. When I got back, I wrote him the day I landed in New York— he was living up the Hudson then. I got a reply from his house-keeper, saying that he was not giving lessons, was ill and was seeing nobody. I went out to his place at once. I wasn't asked to come into the house. I was told to wait in the garden. I waited a long while. At last he came out, wearing white clothes, as he often did, a panama hat, carrying a little cane. He shook hands with me, asked me about Mrs. Sterrett— but he was another man, that's all. He was gone; he wasn't there. I was talking to his picture."

"Drugs!" muttered the Doctor out of one corner of his mouth.

"Nonsense!" Albert shrugged in derision. "Or if he did, that was secondary; a result, not a cause. He'd seen the other side of things; he'd let go. Something had happened in his brain that was not paresis."

Mrs. Parmenter leaned forward. "Did he look the same? Surely, he had the handsomest head in the world. Remember his forehead? Was he gray? His hair was a reddish chestnut, as I remember."

"A little gray; not much. There was no change in his face, except his eyes. The bright spark had gone out, and his body had a sort of trailing languor when he moved."

"Would he give you a lesson?"

"No. Said he wasn't giving any. Said he was sorry, but he wasn't seeing people at all any more. I remember he sat making patterns in the gravel with his cane. He frowned and said he simply couldn't see people; said the human face had become hateful to him— and the human voice! 'I am sorry,' he said, 'but that is the truth.' I looked at his left hand, lying on his knee. I wonder, Marjorie, that I had the strength to get up and go away. I felt as if everything had been drawn out of me. He got up and took my hand. I understood that I must leave. In desperation I asked him whether music didn't mean anything to him still. 'Music,' he said slowly, with just a ghost of his old smile, 'yes— some music.' He went back into the house. Those were the last words I ever heard him speak."

"Oh, dear! And he had everything that is beautiful— and the name of an angel! But we're making the Doctor melancholy. Open another bottle, Albert— father did very well by you. We've not drunk a single toast. Many returns, we take for granted. Why not each drink a toast of our own, to something we care for." She glanced at Doctor Engelhardt, who lifted the bunch of violets by his plate and smelled them absently.

"Now, Doctor Engelhardt, a toast!"

The Doctor put down his flowers, delicately took up his glass and held it directly in front of him; everything he did with his hands was deft and sure. A beautiful, a wonderful look came over his face as she watched him.

"I drink," he said slowly, "to a memory; to the lost Lenore."

"And I," said young Albert softly, "to my youth, to my beautiful youth!"

Tears flashed into Mrs. Parmenter's eyes. "Ah," she thought, "that's what liking people amounts to; it's liking their silliness and absurdities.

That's what it really is."

"And I," she said aloud, "will drink to the future; to our renewed friendship, and many dinners together. I like you two better than anyone I know."

When Albert came back from seeing Mrs. Parmenter down to her car, he found his uncle standing by the fire, his elbow on the mantel, thoughtfully rolling a cigarette. "Albert," he said in a deeply confidential tone, "good wine, good music, beautiful women; that is all there is worth turning over the hand for."

Albert began to laugh. The old man wasn't often banal. "Why, Uncle, you and Martin Luther—"

The Doctor lifted a hand imperiously to stop him, and flushed darkly.

He evidently hadn't been aware that he was quoting— it came from the heart. "Martin Luther," he snapped, "was a vulgarian of the first water; cabbage soup!" He paused a moment to light his cigarette. "But don't fool yourself; one like her always knows when a man has had success with women!"

Albert poured a last glass from the bottle and sipped it critically.

"Well, you had success to-night, certainly. I could see that Marjorie was impressed. She's coming to take you for a ride to-morrow, after your nap, so you must be ready."

The Doctor passed his flexible, nervous hand lightly over the thick bristles of his French hair-cut. " Even in our ashes," he muttered haughtily.

__________________

16: The Horror Horn

E. F. Benson

1867-1940

Hutchinson’s Magazine Sept 1922

FOR THE PAST ten days Alhubel had basked in the radiant midwinter weather proper to its eminence of over six thousand feet. From rising to setting the sun (so surprising to those who have hitherto associated it with a pale, tepid plate indistinctly shining through the murky air of England) had blazed its way across the sparkling blue, and every night the serene and windless frost had made the stars sparkle like illuminated diamond dust. Sufficient snow had fallen before Christmas to content the skiers, and the big rink, sprinkled every evening, had given the skaters each morning a fresh surface on which to perform their slippery antics. Bridge and dancing served to while away the greater part of the night, and to me, now for the first time tasting the joys of a winter in the Engadine, it seemed that a new heaven and a new earth had been lighted, warmed, and refrigerated for the special benefit of those who like myself had been wise enough to save up their days of holiday for the winter.

But a break came in these ideal conditions: one afternoon the sun grew vapour-veiled and up the valley from the northwest a wind frozen with miles of travel over icebound hill-sides began scouting through the calm halls of the heavens. Soon it grew dusted with snow, first in small flakes driven almost horizontally before its congealing breath and then in larger tufts as of swansdown. And though all day for a fortnight before the fate of nations and life and death had seemed to me of far less importance than to get certain tracings of the skate-blades on the ice of proper shape and size, it now seemed that the one paramount consideration was to hurry back to the hotel for shelter: it was wiser to leave rocking-turns alone than to be frozen in their quest.

I had come out here with my cousin, Professor Ingram, the celebrated physiologist and Alpine climber. During the serenity of the last fortnight he had made a couple of notable winter ascents, but this morning his weather-wisdom
had mistrusted the signs of the heavens, and instead of attempting the ascent of the Piz Passug he had waited to see whether his misgivings justified themselves. So there he sat now in the hall of the admirable hotel with his feet on the hot-water pipes and the latest delivery of the English post in his hands. This contained a pamphlet concerning the result of the Mount Everest expedition of which he had just finished the perusal when I entered.

“A very interesting report,” he said, passing it to me, “and they certainly deserve to succeed next year. But who can tell what that final six thousand feet may entail? Six thousand feet more when you have already accomplished twenty-three thousand does not seem much, but at present no one knows whether the human frame can stand exertion at such a height. It may affect not the lungs and heart only, but possibly the brain. Delirious hallucinations may occur. In fact, if I did not know better, I should have said the one such hallucination had occurred to the climbers already.”

“And what was that?” I asked.

“You will find that they thought they came across the tracks of some naked human foot at a great altitude. That looks at first sight like an hallucination. What more natural than that a brain excited and exhilarated by the extreme height should have interpreted certain marks in the snow as the footprints of a human being? Every bodily organ at these altitudes is exerting itself to the utmost to do its work, and the brain seizes on those marks in the snow and says, ‘Yes, I’m all right, I’m doing my job, and I perceive marks in the snow which I affirm are human footprints.’ You know, even at this altitude, how restless and eager the brain is, how vividly, as you told me, you dream at night. Multiply that stimulus and that consequent eagerness and restlessness by three, and how natural that the brain should harbour illusions! What after all is the delirium which often accompanies high fever but the effort of the brain to do its work under the pressure of feverish conditions? It is so eager to continue perceiving that it perceives things which have no existence!

“And yet you don’t think that these naked human footprints were illusions,” said I. “You told me you would have thought so, if you had not known better.”

He shifted in his chair and looked out of the window a moment. The air was thick now with the density of the big snowflakes that were driven along by the squealing north-west gale.

“Quite so,” he said. “In all probability the human footprints were real human footprints. I expect that they were the footprints, anyhow, of a being more nearly a man than anything else. My reason for saying so is that I know such beings exist. I have even seen quite near at hand—and I assure you I did not wish to be nearer in spite of my intense curiosity—the creature, shall we say, which would make such footprints. And if the snow was not so dense, I could show you the place where I saw him.”

He pointed straight out of the window, where across the valley lies the huge tower of the Ungeheuerhorn with the carved pinnacle of rock at the top like some gigantic rhinoceros-horn. On one side only, as I knew, was the mountain practicable, and that for none but the finest climbers; on the other three a succession of ledges and precipices rendered it unscalable. Two thousand feet of sheer rock form the tower; below are five hundred feet of fallen boulders, up to the edge of which grow dense woods of larch and pine.

“Upon the Ungeheuerhorn?” I asked.

“Yes. Up till twenty years ago it had never been ascended, and I, like several others, spent a lot of time in trying to find a route up it. My guide and I sometimes spent three nights together at the hut beside the Blumen glacier, prowling round it, and it was by luck really that we found the route, for the mountain looks even more impracticable from the far side than it does from this. But one day we found a long, transverse fissure in the side which led to a negotiable ledge; then there came a slanting ice couloir which you could not see till you got to the foot of it. However, I need not go into that.”

The big room where we sat was filling up with cheerful groups driven indoors by this sudden gale and snowfall, and the cackle of merry tongues grew loud. The band, too, that invariable appanage of tea-time at Swiss resorts, had begun to tune up for the usual potpourri from the works of Puccini. Next moment the sugary, sentimental melodies began.

“Strange contrast!” said Ingram. “Here are we sitting warm and cozy, our ears pleasantly tickled with these little baby tunes and outside is the great storm growing more violent every moment, and swirling round the austere cliffs of the Ungeheuerhorn: the Horror-horn, as indeed it was to me.”

“I want to hear all about it,” I said. “Every detail: make a short story long, if it’s short. I want to know why it’s your Horror-horn?”

“Well, Chanton and I (he was my guide) used to spend days prowling about the cliffs, making a little progress on one side and then being stopped, and gaining perhaps five hundred feet on another side and then being confronted by some insuperable obstacle, till the day when by luck we found the route. Chanton never liked the job, for some reason that I could not fathom. It was not because of the difficulty or danger of the climbing, for he was the most fearless man I have ever met when dealing with rocks and ice, but he was always insistent that we should get off the mountain and back to the Blumen hut before sunset. He was scarcely easy even when we had got back to shelter and locked and barred the door, and I well remember one night when, as we ate our supper, we heard some animal, a wolf probably, howling somewhere out in the night. A positive panic seized him, and I don’t think he closed his eyes till morning. It struck me then that there might be some grisly legend about the mountain, connected possibly with its name, and next day I asked him why the peak was called the Horror-horn. He put the question off at first, and said that, like the Schreckhorn, its name was due to its precipices and falling stones; but when I pressed him further he acknowledged that there was a legend about it, which his father had told him. There were creatures, so it was supposed, that lived in its caves, things human in shape, and covered, except for the face and hands, with long black hair. They were dwarfs in size, four feet high or thereabouts, but of prodigious strength and agility, remnants of some wild primeval race. It seemed that they were still in an upward stage of evolution, or so I guessed, for the story ran that sometimes girls had been carried off by them, not as prey, and not for any such fate as for those captured by cannibals, but to be bred from. Young men also had been raped by them, to be mated with the females of their tribe. All this looked as if the creatures, as I said, were tending towards humanity. But naturally I did not believe a word of it, as applied to the conditions of the present day. Centuries ago, conceivably, there may have been such beings, and, with the extraordinary tenacity of tradition, the news of this had been handed down and was still current round the hearths of the peasants. As for their numbers, Chanton told me that three had been once seen together by a man who owing to his swiftness on skis had escaped to tell the tale. This man, he averred, was no other than his grandfather, who had been benighted one winter evening as he passed through the dense woods below the Ungeheuerhorn, and Chariton supposed that they had been driven down to these lower altitudes in search of food during severe winter weather, for otherwise the recorded sights of them had always taken place among the rocks of the peak itself. They had pursued his grandfather, then a young man, at an extraordinarily swift canter, running sometimes upright as men run, sometimes on all-fours in the manner of beasts, and their howls were just such as that we had heard that night in the Blumen hut. Such at any rate was the story Chanton told me, and, like you, I regarded it as the very moonshine of superstition. But the very next day I had reason to reconsider my judgment about it.

“It was on that day that after a week of exploration we hit on the only route at present known to the top of our peak. We started as soon as there was light enough to climb by, for, as you may guess, on very difficult rocks it is impossible to climb by lantern or moonlight. We hit on the long fissure I have spoken of, we explored the ledge which from below seemed to end in nothingness, and with an hour’s step-cutting ascended the couloir which led upwards from it. From there onwards it was a rock-climb, certainly of considerable difficulty, but with no heart-breaking discoveries ahead, and it was about nine in the morning that we stood on the top. We did not wait there long, for that side of the mountain is raked by falling stones loosened, when
the sun grows hot, from the ice that holds them, and we made haste to pass the ledge where the falls are most frequent. After that there was the long fissure to descend, a matter of no great difficulty, and we were at the end of our work by midday, both of us, as you may imagine, in the state of the highest elation.

“A long and tiresome scramble among the huge boulders at the foot of the cliff then lay before us. Here the hillside is very porous and great caves extend far into the mountain. We had unroped at the base of the fissure, and were picking our way as seemed good to either of us among these fallen rocks, many of them bigger than an ordinary house, when, on coming round the corner of one of these, I saw that which made it clear that the stories Chanton had told me were no figment of traditional superstition.

“Not twenty yards in front of me lay one of the beings of which he had spoken. There it sprawled naked and basking on its back with face turned up to the sun, which its narrow eyes regarded unwinking. In form it was completely human, but the growth of hair that covered limbs and trunk alike almost completely hid the sun-tanned skin beneath. But its face, save for the down on its cheeks and chin, was hairless, and I looked on a countenance the sensual and malevolent bestiality of which froze me with horror. Had the creature been an animal, one would have felt scarcely a shudder at the gross animalism of it; the horror lay in the fact that it was a man. There lay by it a couple of gnawed bones, and, its meal finished, it was lazily licking its protuberant lips, from which came a purring murmur of content. With one hand it scratched the thick hair on its belly, in the other it held one of these bones, which presently split in half beneath the pressure of its finger and thumb. But my horror was not based on the information of what happened to those men whom these creatures caught, it was due only to my proximity to a thing so human and so infernal. The peak, of which the ascent had a moment ago filled us with such elated satisfaction, became to me an Ungeheuerhorn indeed, for it was the home of beings more awful than the delirium of nightmare could ever have conceived.

“Chanton was a dozen paces behind me, and with a backward wave of my hand I caused him to halt. Then withdrawing myself with infinite precaution, so as not to attract the gaze of that basking creature, I slipped back round the rock, whispered to him what I had seen, and with blanched faces we made a long detour, peering round every corner, and crouching low, not knowing but that at any step we might come upon another of these beings, or that from the mouth of one of these caves in the mountain-side there might not appear another of those hairless and dreadful faces, with perhaps this time the breasts and insignia of womanhood. That would have been the worst of all.

“Luck favoured us, for we made our way among the boulders and shifting stones, the rattle of which might at any moment have betrayed us, without a repetition of my experience, and once among the trees we ran as if the Furies themselves were in pursuit. Well now did I understand, though I dare say I cannot convey, the qualms of Chanton’s mind when he spoke to me of these creatures. Their very humanity was what made them so terrible, the fact that they were of the same race as ourselves, but of a type so abysmally degraded that the most brutal and inhuman of men would have seemed angelic in comparison.”

The music of the small band was over before he had finished the narrative, and the chattering groups round the tea-table had dispersed. He paused a moment.

“There was a horror of the spirit,” he said, “which I experienced then, from which, I verily believe, I have never entirely recovered. I saw then how terrible a living thing could be, and how terrible, in consequence, was life itself. In us all I suppose lurks some inherited germ of that ineffable bestiality, and who knows whether, sterile as it has apparently become in the course of centuries, it might not fructify again. When I saw that creature sun itself, I looked into the abyss out of which we have crawled. And these creatures are trying to crawl out of it now, if they exist any longer. Certainly for the last twenty years there has been no record of their being seen, until we come to this story of the footprint seen by the climbers on Everest. If that is authentic, if the party did not mistake the footprint of some bear, or what not, for a human tread, it seems as if still this bestranded remnant of mankind is in existence.”

Now, Ingram had told his story well; but sitting in this warm and civilised room, the horror which he had clearly felt had not communicated itself to me in any very vivid manner. Intellectually, I agreed, I could appreciate his horror, but certainly my spirit felt no shudder of interior comprehension.

“But it is odd,” I said, “that your keen interest in physiology did not disperse your qualms. You were looking, so I take it, at some form of man more remote probably than the earliest human remains. Did not something inside you say, ‘This is of absorbing significance’?”

He shook his head.

“No: I only wanted to get away,” said he. “It was not, as I have told you, the terror of what, according to Chanton’s story, might await us if we were captured; it was sheer horror at the creature itself. I quaked at it.”

THE SNOWSTORM and the gale increased in violence that night, and I slept uneasily, plucked again and again from slumber by the fierce battling of the wind that shook my windows as if with an imperious demand for admittance. It came in billowy gusts, with strange noises intermingled with it as for a moment it abated, with flutings and moanings that rose to shrieks as the fury of it returned. These noises, no doubt, mingled themselves with my drowsed and sleepy consciousness, and once I tore myself out of a nightmare, imagining that the creatures of the Horrorhorn had gained footing on my balcony and were rattling at the window-bolts. But before morning the gale had died away, and I awoke to see the snow falling dense and fast in a windless air. For three days it continued, without intermission, and with its cessation there came a frost such as I have never felt before. Fifty degrees were registered one night, and more the next, and what the cold must have been on the cliffs of the Ungeheuerhorn I cannot imagine. Sufficient, so I thought, to have made an end altogether of its secret inhabitants: my cousin, on that day twenty years ago, had missed an opportunity for study which would probably never fall again either to him or another.

I received one morning a letter from a friend saying that he had arrived at the neighbouring winter resort of St. Luigi, and proposing that I should come over for a morning’s skating and lunch afterwards. The place was not more than a couple of miles off, if one took the path over the low, pine-dad foothills above which lay the steep woods below the first rocky slopes of the Ungeheuerhorn; and accordingly, with a knapsack containing skates on my back, I went on skis over the wooded slopes and down by an easy descent again on to St. Luigi. The day was overcast, clouds entirely obscured the higher peaks though the sun was visible, pale and unluminous, through the mists. But as the morning went on, it gained the upper hand, and I slid down into St. Luigi beneath a sparkling firmament. We skated and lunched, and then, since it looked as if thick weather was coming up again, I set out early, about three o’clock, for my return journey.

Hardly had I got into the woods when the clouds gathered thick above, and streamers and skeins of them began to descend among the pines through which my path threaded its way. In ten minutes more their opacity had so increased that I could hardly see a couple of yards in front of me. Very soon I became aware that I must have got off the path, for snow-cowled shrubs lay directly in my way, and, casting back to find it again, I got altogether confused as to direction. But, though progress was difficult, I knew I had only to keep on the ascent, and presently I should come to the brow of these low foothills, and descend into the open valley where Alhubel stood. So on I went, stumbling and sliding over obstacles, and unable, owing to the thickness of the snow, to take off my skis, for I should have sunk over the knees at each step. Still the ascent continued, and looking at my watch I saw that I had already been near an hour on my way from St. Luigi, a period more than sufficient to complete my whole journey. But still I stuck to my idea that though I had certainly strayed far from my proper route a few minutes more must surely see me over the top of die upward way, and I should find the ground declining into the next valley. About now, too, I noticed that the mists were growing suffused with rose-colour, and, though the inference was that it must be close on sunset, there was consolation in the fact that they were there and might lift at any moment and disclose to me my whereabouts. But the fact that night would soon be on me made it needful to bar my mind against that despair of loneliness which so eats out the heart of a man who is lost in woods or on mountain-side, that, though still there is plenty of vigour in his limbs, his nervous force is sapped, and he can do no more than lie down and abandon himself to whatever fate may await him.... And then I heard that which made the thought of loneliness seem bliss indeed, for there was a worse fate than loneliness. What I heard resembled the howl of a wolf, and it came from not far in front of me where the ridge—was it a ridge?—rose still higher in a vestment of pines.

From behind me came a sudden puff of wind, which shook the frozen snow from the drooping pine-branches, and swept away the mists as a broom sweeps the dust from the floor. Radiant above me were the unclouded skies, already charged with the red of the sunset, and in front I saw that I had come to the very edge of the wood through which I had wandered so long. But it was no valley into which I had penetrated, for there right ahead of me rose the steep slope of boulders and rocks soaring upwards to the foot of the Ungeheuerhorn. What, then, was that cry of a wolf which had made my heart stand still? I saw.

Not twenty yards from me was a fallen tree, and leaning against the trunk of it was one of the denizens of the Horror-horn, and it was a woman. She was enveloped in a thick growth of hair grey and tufted, and from her head it streamed down over her shoulders and her bosom, from which hung withered and pendulous breasts. And looking on her face I comprehended not with my mind alone, but with a shudder of my spirit, what Ingram had felt. Never had nightmare fashioned so terrible a countenance; the beauty of sun and stars and of the beasts of the field and the kindly race of men could not atone for so hellish an incarnation of the spirit of life. A fathomless bestiality modelled the slavering mouth and the narrow eyes; I looked into the abyss itself and knew that out of that abyss on the edge of which I leaned the generations of men had climbed. What if that ledge crumbled in front of me and pitched me headlong into its nethermost depths?...

In one hand she held by the horns a chamois that kicked and struggled. A blow from its hindleg caught her withered thigh, and with a grunt of anger she seized the leg in her other hand, and, as a man may pull from its sheath a stem of meadow grass, she plucked it off the body, leaving the torn skin hanging round the gaping wound. Then putting the red, bleeding member to her mouth she sucked at it as a child sucks a stick of sweetmeat. Through flesh and gristle her short, brown teeth penetrated, and she licked her lips with a sound of purring. Then dropping the leg by her side, she looked again at the body of the prey now quivering in its death convulsion, and with finger and thumb gouged out one of its eyes. She snapped her teeth on it, and it cracked like a soft-shelled nut.

It must have been but a few seconds that I stood watching her, in some indescribable catalepsy of terror, while through my brain there pealed the panic-command of my mind to my stricken limbs, “Begone, begone, while there is time.” Then, recovering the power of my joints and muscles, I tried to slip behind a tree and hide myself from this apparition, but the woman—shall I say?—must have caught my stir of movement, for she raised her eyes from her living feast and saw me. She craned forward her neck, she dropped her prey, and half rising began to move towards me. As she did this, she opened her mouth and gave forth a howl such as I had heard a moment before. It was answered by another, but faintly and distantly.

Sliding and slipping, with the toes of my skis tripping in the obstacles below the snow, I plunged forward down the hill between the pine-trunks. The low sun already sinking behind some rampart of mountain in the west reddened the snow and the pines with its ultimate rays. My knapsack with the skates in it swung to and fro on my back, one ski-stick had already been twitched out of my hand by a fallen branch of pine, but not a second’s pause could I allow myself to recover it. I gave no glance behind, and I knew not at what pace my pursuer was on my track, or indeed whether any pursued at all, for my whole mind and energy, now working at full power again under the stress of my panic, were devoted to getting away down the hill and out of the wood as swiftly as my limbs could bear me. For a little while I heard nothing but the hissing snow of my headlong passage, and the rustle of the covered undergrowth beneath my feet, and then, from close at hand behind me, once more the wolf-howl sounded and I heard the plunging of footsteps other than my own.

The strap of my knapsack had shifted, and as my skates swung to and fro on my back it chafed and pressed on my throat, hindering free passage of air, of which, God knew, my labouring lungs were in dire need, and without pausing I slipped it free from my neck, and held it in the hand from which my ski-stick had been jerked. I seemed to go a little more easily for this adjustment, and now, not so far distant I could see below me the path from which I had strayed. If only I could reach that, the smoother going would surely enable me to out-distance my pursuer, who even on the rougher ground was but slowly overhauling me, and at the sight of that riband stretching unimpeded downhill, a ray of hope pierced the black panic of my soul. With that came the desire, keen and insistent, to see who or what it was that was on my tracks, and I spared a backward glance. It was she, the hag whom I had seen at her gruesome meal; her long grey hair flew out behind her, her mouth chattered and gibbered, her fingers made grabbing movements, as if already they closed on me.

But the path was now at hand, and the nearness of it I suppose made me incautious. A hump of snow-covered bush lay in my path, and, thinking I could jump over it, I tripped and fell, smothering myself in snow. I heard a maniac noise, half scream, half laugh, from close behind, and before I could recover myself the grabbing fingers were at my neck, as if a steel vise had closed there. But my right hand in which I held my knapsack of skates was free, and with a blind back-handed movement I whirled it behind me at full length of its strap, and knew that my desperate blow had found its billet somewhere. Even before I could look round I felt the grip on my neck relax, and something subsided into the very bush which had entangled me. I recovered my feet and turned. There she lay, twitching and quivering. The heel of one of my skates piercing the thin alpaca of the knapsack had hit her full on the temple, from which the blood was pouring, but a hundred yards away I could see another such figure coming downwards on my tracks, leaping and bounding. At that panic arose again within me, and I sped off down the white smooth path that led to the lights of the village already beckoning. Never once did I pause in my headlong going: there was no safety until I was back among the haunts of men. I flung myself against the door of the hotel, and screamed for admittance, though I had but to turn the handle and enter; and once more as when Ingram had told his tale, there was the sound of the band, and the chatter of voices, and there, too, was he himself, who looked up and then rose swiftly to his feet as I made my clattering entrance.

“I have seen them too,” I cried. “Look at my knapsack. Is there not blood on it? It is the blood of one of them, a woman, a hag, who tore off the leg of a chamois as I looked, and pursued me through the accursed wood. I—”

Whether it was I who spun round, or the room which seemed to spin round me, I knew not, but I heard myself falling, collapsed on the floor, and the next time that I was conscious at all I was in bed. There was Ingram there, who told me that I was quite safe, and another man, a stranger, who pricked my arm with the nozzle of a syringe, and reassured me. ...

A day or two later I gave a coherent account of my adventure, and three or four men, armed with guns, went over my traces. They found the bush in which I had stumbled, with a pool of blood which had soaked into the snow, and still following my ski-tracks, they came on the body of a chamois, from which had been torn one of its hind legs and one eye-socket was empty. That is all the corroboration of my story that I can give the reader, and for myself I imagine that the creature which pursued me was either not killed by my blow or that her fellows removed her body....

Anyhow, it is open to the incredulous to prowl about the caves of the Ungeheuerhorn, and see if anything occurs that may convince them.

________________

17: The Door

Henry S Whitehead

1882-1932

Weird Tales Nov 1924

THOSE in the motor-car hardly felt the slight, though sickening, impact. It was rather, indeed, because of the instinct for something gone wrong, than because of conviction that he had struck anything more important than a roll of tangled burlap from some passing moving-van, that the driver brought his heavy car to a stop with a grinding of brakes strenuously applied, and went back to see what he had struck.

He had turned the comer almost incidentally; but when he alighted and went back, when the thin gleam of his flashlight revealed to him the heap of huddled pulp which lay there, the driver realized in the throes of a hideous nausea what it was his heavy machine had spurned and crushed....

ROGER PHILLIPS, intent upon the first really decent act of his whole life, hardly noticed what was forward. He had been crossing the street. He continued to be intent on his own concerns. Interrupted only by a kind of cold shudder to which he gave only passing thought as if with the very outer edge of his mind, he did not stop, but crossed the sidewalk, looking up as he had done many times before to reassure himself that the lights were out in the living-room of the apartment up there on the third floor of the apartment house.

They were out, as he had confidently anticipated, and, reassured, he quickly mounted the steps to the front entrance. Some one came out, hurriedly, and passed him as he entered, the rush taking him by surprize. He turned his head as quickly as he could, to avoid recognition. It was old Mr. Osier, his father's neighbor, who had rushed out. The elderly man was in his shirt sleeves, and appeared greatly agitated, so much so that young Phillips was certain he had not been recognized, had hardly even been noticed. He breathed an audible sigh of relief. He did not want old Osier to mention this chance meeting to his father the next time he should see him, and he knew Osier to be garrulous.

The young man mounted lightly and hurriedly the two flights of steps that led to the door of his father's apartment. He thrust his key into the patent lode of the apartment door confidently, almost without thought— a mechanical motion. As mechanically, he turned the key to the right. It was an old key, and it fitted the keyhole easily. He knew that his father and mother were at the symphony concert. They had not missed one for years during the season for symphony concerts, and this was their regular night. He had chosen this night for that reason. He knew the colored maid was out, too. He had seen her, not five minutes earlier, getting on a car for Boston. "The coast," as he phrased the thought to himself, somewhat melodramatically, "was clear!" He was certain of security from interruption. Only let him get safely into the apartment, do what he had to do, and as quietly and unobtrusively depart, and he would be satisfied, quite satisfied.

But the lock offered unexpected resistance. It was inexplicable, irritating. His over-tensed nerves revolted abruptly at this check. The key had slipped into the slot, as always, without difficulty— but it would not turn! Furiously he twisted it this way and that. At last he removed it and stared at it curiously. There was nothing amiss with the key. Could his father have had the lock changed?

Anger and quick shame smote him, suddenly. He looked closely at the lock. No, it was unchanged. There were the numberless tiny scratch-marks of innumerable insertions. It was the same.

Gingerly, carefully, he inserted the key again. He turned it to the right. Of course it turned to the right; he remembered that clearly. He had so turned it countless times.

It would not move. He put out all his puny strength, and still it would not turn. Hot exasperation shook him.

As he swore under his breath in his irritation at this bar to the fulfilment of his purpose, he became for the first time conscious of a rising commotion in the street below, and he paused, irresolutely, and listened, his nerves suddenly strung taut. Many voices seemed to be mingled in the excited hum that came to his ears. Bits of phrases, even, could be distinguished. Something had happened down there, it seemed. As he listened, the commotion of spoken sound resolved itself into a tone which, upon his subconscious effort to analyze it, seemed to express horror and commiseration, with an overtone of fear. The fear communicated itself to him. He shook, as the voice of the growing throng came up to him in sickening waves of apprehension.

What if this should mean an interruption? Impatiently wrenching himself away from his preoccupation and back to his more immediate concern with the door, he thrust the key into the lock a third time, this time aggressively, violently. Again he tried to snap the lock. Again it resisted him, unaccountably, devilishly, as it seemed to him.

Then, in his pause of desperation, he thought he heard his own name spoken. He could feel his face go white, the roots of his hair prickle. He listened, intently, crouching cat-like on the empty landing before the door of his father's apartment, and as he listened, every nerve intent, he heard the entrance-door below flung open, and the corporate voice of the throng outside, hitherto muffled and faint, came to him suddenly in a wave of sound, jumbled and obscure as a whole, but with certain strident voices strangely clear and distinct.

A shuffle of heavy feet came to his ears, as if several persons were entering the lower hallway, their footsteps falling heavily on the tiled flooring. They would be coming upstairs!

He shrank back against the door— that devilish door! If only he could get it open!

Something like this, he told himself, in a wave of self-pity that swept him— something like this, unexpected, unforeseen, unreasonable— something like this was always happening to him!

That door! It was an epitome of his futile, worthless life. That had happened to him, just the same kind of thing, a month ago when he had been turned out of his home. The events of the intervening weeks rushed, galloping, through his overtensed mind. And now, as ever since that debacle, there was present with him a kind of unforgettable vision of his mother— his poor mother, her face covered with the tears which she made no effort to wipe away— his poor mother, looking at him, stricken, through those tears which blurred her face; and there was his father, the kindly face set now in a stern mask, pale and with deep lines— his father telling him that this was the end. There would be no public prosecution. Was he not their son? But he must go! His home would be no longer his home.

He recalled the dazed days that followed; the mechanical activities of his daily employment; his search, half-hearted, for a furnished room. He recalled, shuddering, the several times when, moved by the mechanism of long-established usage, he had nearly taken an Allston car for "home", which was to be no longer his home....

He had not sent back the key. He could not tell why he had kept it. He had forgotten to hand it back to his father when he had left, and his father, doubtless unthinkingly, had not suggested its return. That was why he still had it, and here he stood, now, on the very threshold of that place which had been "home" to him for so many years, about to make the restitution that would do something to remove the saddest of all the blots on his conscience—and he could not get in!

The men, talking with hushed voices, had reached the first landing. Young Phillips, caught by a sudden gust of abject terror, shrank against the stubborn door, the door which unaccountably he could not open. Then, his mind readjusting itself, he remembered that he had no reason for concealment, for fear. Even though he might be seen here, even though these people should be coming all the way up the stairs, it could not matter. Let him be seen; what of it? He was supposed to live here, of course. It was only a short time since he had actually ceased to live here, and his father had said nothing. No public charge had been made against him. How one's conscience could make one a coward!

Under the invigorating stress of this reaction, he straightened himself, stood up boldly. Realizing that it might appear odd for him to be discovered standing here aimlessly on the landing, he started to go downstairs. But by now the narrow staircase was completely blocked by the ascending group. He stopped, half-way from that flight. The men were carrying something, something heavy, and of considerable bulk, it would seem. He could not see clearly in that dim light just what it was. He stopped, half-way down, but none of the men carrying the awkward bundle, covered with what looked like an automobile curtain, looked up, or appeared to notice him. Neither did the straggling group of men, and a woman or two, who were following them.

Fascinated, he gazed at what they were carrying. As they approached and took the turn in the stairs, so that the electric light on the upper landing shone more directly upon it, he looked closer. It was the body of a man! It hung, limp and ungainly, in their somewhat awkward grasp as they shouldered up toward him. Something about it seemed vaguely familiar, the details presenting themselves to his fascinated gaze in rapid succession: the trouser-ends, the shoes....

The men turned the last comer in the winding stairway and came into full view. As they turned the corner, the leather curtain slipped and the face of the dead man was for a moment exposed to view. Roger Phillips looked at it, fascinated, horrified. Then one of the men, halting for an instant, drew the corner of the curtain over the face again, and he could no longer see it. The head rolled. The broken body had been grievously crushed.

Roger Phillips, utterly distraught, cowered, a limp heap, against the unyielding door of his father's apartment. He had looked for one horrific instant into his own distorted, dead face!

THE MEN, breathing hard, reached the landing. One of them, gingerly shifting his portion of the burden upon the shoulder of another, stepped forward to ring the bell of the Phillips apartment. No one answered the ring, and the man rang again, impatiently, insistently. The bell trilled inside the empty apartment. The men stood, silently, shifting uneasily from one foot to another. Behind them, a thin mutter came from the waiting stragglers who had followed them, moved by an inordinate curiosity.

"Here's a key sticking in the door," said the man who had rung the bell. "Guess we'd be all right if we opened the door and took the young fellow in. There doesn't seem to be any one home."

A murmur of assent came from the other men.

He turned the key to the left, then to the right, and the door opened. They carried the broken body inside and carefully laid it out on the sofa in the living-room.

_________________

18: The Legacy Hounds

Hulbert Footner

1879-1944

The Argosy All-Story Weekly, 18 Sep 1926

i

OUR VISITOR was a dignified little old gentleman in an old-fashioned Prince Albert and round white cuffs which came down partly over his hands. The quaint cuffs somehow stamped him as a prosperous country lawyer and such he proved to be: Mr. D. J. Riordan, Stanfield, Connecticut. "Village lawyer" was the phrase he used, deprecatingly, to describe himself.

"But you would hardly call Stanfield a village," said Mme Storey.

"It was a village when I started to practise there," he said. "And I am afraid we old-timers like the self-dependent village that it was better than the great and wealthy suburb it has become."

"What can I do for you?" asked Mme Storey, smiling. I could see that she liked the quaint little gentleman.

"Well, in order not to waste your time unnecessarily," he replied, "I will ask you at once, plainly: would you be attracted by a fee of five hundred dollars (it is all I am empowered to offer) for a service which will require three hours of your time some afternoon; with the promise of an additional five hundred in the event that you are successful in the undertaking I am to suggest to you?"

"The fee is sufficient," said Mme Storey, "provided the undertaking is one which I am qualified to carry out."

"Oh, eminently, eminently," he said. "My friends and I have heard you described as a practical psychologist, specializing in the feminine. That is precisely what we require."

"Is it a crime which has been committed?" asked my mistress.

"No, Madame. It is a measure designed to forestall a crime."

"So much the better," said Mme Storey. "Proceed." Helping herself to a cigarette, she prepared to listen.

"We have in Stanfield," he began, "a conspicuous local character called Mrs. Genevieve Brager— perhaps you are familiar with the name?"

"Vaguely," said Mme Storey, "but I cannot remember in what connection."

"Doubtless you have heard of Hyman Brager, her husband, a wealthy manufacturer of enamelled ware. He created the enamelled-ware trust, and died a few years ago, leaving his widow upward of ten million dollars without check or hindrance."

"Ah," said Mme Storey. "A nice little sum."

"Mrs. Brager is sixty-seven years old," the lawyer went on. "She is childless; indeed, she has not a relative in the world. Moreover, she is a woman so flighty and ill-advised that she has never succeeded in making any friends in Stanfield, though she has lived there for over thirty years."

"I begin to picture the situation," said Mme Storey. "The legacy hounds have tracked her down."

"Exactly, Madame. An admirable phrase! These persons, both men and women, are of the most sinister types. God knows where she picks them up!"

"Oh, they pick her up," put in my mistress.

"It has become a public scandal. Brager's Asylum is the phrase coined by my townspeople to describe the establishment."

"Then they live in her house?"

"Yes, Madame, a swarm of them. Mrs. Brager is of a miserly character and keeps them all on short commons. She retains a hold on them by scattering promises of legacies. She plays them off one against the other. She is continually making new wills. You can readily conceive what hideous passions this must set loose. We feel certain that it must end in an appalling tragedy."

"Which would sully the fair name of Stanfield," put in Mme Storey.

"Exactly, Madame. For a long time the situation has troubled me vaguely, but it was not my province to interfere. It was nobody's business to interfere. There is no question of having the woman declared incompetent, even if it was anybody's interest to do so, because her wits are as sharp as yours or mine. She handles her great fortune skilfully; and since she spends nothing it increases by leaps and bounds."

"What finally led you to act?" inquired my mistress.

"Three days ago Mrs. Brager sent for me (she employs every lawyer in Stanfield by turn) and required me to make a will leaving everything she possessed to one of her hangers-on, a scoundrel who has the impudence to call himself 'the Honourable' Shep Chew."

"A proved scoundrel or only a suspected one?"

"Proved, Madame. I have learned that he has served a term in prison in Ohio for malfeasance in some minor political office: under sheriff, I fancy."

"Hence the 'honourable,'" said my mistress drily.

"His scoundrelly character is written in his face," Mr. Riordan went on. "I am convinced that he does not intend Mrs. Brager shall live to make another will."

"Hm!" said Mme Storey; "a highly explosive situation. But what can I do?"

"I drew up the will," said Mr. Riordan, "since nothing would have been gained by my refusal to do so. I then consulted with Thomas A. Braithwaite, the president of our Chamber of Commerce, who called in Mr. Eckford, president of the First National Bank, Mrs. W. Atlee Bryan, president of the Woman's Club, and one or two others of our leading people; and a committee was formed to deal with the situation."

"Who suggested coming to me?"

The little old gentleman's eyes gleamed behind his glasses. "I did, Madame. I have long followed your career. I have made a study of your cases: the Ashcomb Poor case, the Teresa de Guion case; the strange murder of Mrs. Norbert Starr. And, if I may be permitted to say so, it is a great occasion for me thus to come face to face with you at last."

He bowed with no little impressiveness. Mme Storey, smiling, bowed in return.

"Nor were you by any means unknown to the other members of the committee," he went on. "When I mentioned your name they jumped at it. 'Madame Storey! Ah, if she will only help us!' they cried. They subscribed the sum I have named, on the spot, and pledged themselves to double it if you were successful."

"What do they want me to do?"

"Persuade Mrs. Brager to create a living trust, so that, although she will continue to enjoy her income, the control of her vast principal will pass out of her hands."

"Hm!" said my mistress, "this is no small order."

"With your extraordinary insight into feminine psychology, you are the one person for the job!" cried Mr. Riordan enthusiastically. "She is a timorous old woman— work upon her fears. And inordinately vain. Persuade her to leave her millions to found a great philanthropic institution. By announcing her intention in advance she can enjoy all the glory during her lifetime."

"What sort of institution?"

"Anything, anything she likes. My committee, in order to prove to you their disinterestedness, do not even stipulate that it shall be built in Stanfield—though of course it would be a fine thing for the town."

"Oh, it might as well be Stanfield as any place else," said Mme Storey.

"Then you will help us?"

"One moment. How could I be introduced to Mrs. Brager in a natural-seeming manner?"

"Oh, that will offer no difficulties, Madame. Mrs. Brager is always trying to get decent people to come to her parties."

"Ah, poor soul!" murmured my mistress.

"And if the great Madame Storey deigned to honour her house—"

"No!" interrupted my mistress quickly, "that would be fatal. I should be introduced under a pseudonym."

"Of course, if you thought best. Then you will...?"

"I will," said Mme Storey.

"Thank heaven!" cried the little lawyer.

"I assume that Chew knows about the will in his favour," said Mme Storey.

"Yes, Madame. Mrs. Brager gave him a copy."

"Then we should act at once."

"I am asked to a tea at Mrs. Brager's house to-morrow afternoon," said Mr. Riordan, with a rueful smile. "If you and your secretary could be at my office at four we might go together."

"Expect us at three-thirty," said Mme Storey. "And have your committee on hand in your office so that I may have a few words with them before we start for Mrs. Brager's."

"Yes, Madame."

ii

WE MOTORED up to Stanfield on the following afternoon. It took a little longer so, but the quiet of our own car permitted us to do some work on another case. In Mr. Riordan's respectable office we found the committee waiting, all obviously impressed by the prospect of meeting the great Madame Storey face to face. The male members had brought their wives. My mistress plainly told these eminent ladies and gentlemen of Stanfield that if they had shown more neighbourliness to the lonely old widow they might have handled this case without outside assistance. They all pledged themselves thereafter to act exactly as she enjoined. With Mr. Riordan, we then proceeded to Mrs. Brager's.

I was keenly interested in this case. The vastness of the sum involved arrested the imagination. Moreover, it was much more agreeable to be working to prevent a crime than to solve a crime already committed. But I must say there was nothing about the house to suggest ten millions. It looked more like a second-rate boarding house than the home of a woman rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It was on the Boston Post Road, just outside of town. Picture a big square wooden house with a cupola in the style of the 1870's, standing in full view of the street. The house was sadly in need of paint, the wooden fence was broken in several places, the evergreen trees were decayed and dying, and patches of naked earth showed amid the neglected grass. To come upon such a place in fashionable Stanfield, where everything was trimmed, cut, and rolled to a finish, was like finding a leering old tramp at a garden party.

The inside of the house was in keeping. You know the plan of such houses: a wide and lofty hall running through the centre, with two drawing rooms on one side, dining room, pantry, and kitchen on the other. The hall was cluttered with the stuff that was considered stylish thirty-five years ago: hall rack, "cosy-corner," statuettes and jardinières. I suppose all this had been expensive in the beginning, but it had never been in good taste and was now shabby and dilapidated to a degree. The air contrived to be both stuffy and chilly. I noticed that the only means of heating the house was an old-fashioned hot-air furnace. From the amount of heat issuing through the register, it must have been kept on short rations of coal. How strange that an old woman as rich as Mrs. Brager should not even permit herself the creature comforts!

A maid, neat enough, and polite, admitted us and, indicating that we were to enter the drawing room on our left, disappeared at the rear. From the drawing room came a thin babble of talk. I shall never forget my first glimpse of that room. It was like an ugly old picture; like a second-hand salesroom. The two rooms together, I suppose, were nearly sixty feet long, yet they were so filled with stuff it was difficult to make one's way. There were fancy chairs and useless tables; what-nots, tabourets, stools, screens, ottomans, and big pictures on easels; and everything was encumbered with "drapes."

At the front of the room with her back to the windows sat a caricature of an old woman with carmined cheeks; and ranged at each side of her were half a dozen of as scoundrelly looking "guests" as I ever expect to see, all dressed up, drinking tea, and going through the motions of fashionable conversation. While the tongues of the six dripped honey, their eyes were fixed on the wasted little woman with an expression which I can only describe as murderous; and in her eyes, while she twittered and simpered, dwelt a look of plain terror. I thought to myself we had not come any too soon.

Can you conceive the effect of my mistress's entrance into that room? The beautiful and serene figure seemed to emphasize the second-rateness of it all. The six guests, as one, recognized an enemy in her and turned looks of fear and hostility in her direction. Their thought was— one could read it clearly: If such a one as this enters the chase, where will we be? Mrs. Brager herself looked at Mme Storey in a strained and confused way. It is likely that the old woman's sight was failing and she was too vain to admit it. Mr. Riordan hastened forward. He said:

"Allow me to introduce Mrs. Pomeroy and Miss Hastings, whom I telephoned you I should bring this afternoon. They have long wished to make your acquaintance."

The old woman put her head on one side and simpered. "Pleased to meet you.... Pleased to meet you," she quavered, extending to each of us, in turn, a claw of a hand covered with glittering old-fashioned rings. "You will find my house very out of date, I am afraid. We are plain people. Sit down, ladies. Signor Oneto, the bell, please. We will have fresh tea."

False teeth, dyed brown hair, rouged cheeks, and those killing airs and graces. And all the time the faded old eyes looking at you so wistfully. One felt ashamed for her, and deeply sorry, as for a silly posturing child. She was wearing a very smart blue silk costume which hung strangely on her wasted frame; around her shoulders she had a little scalloped crocheted shawl of gray wool, which went better with the furnishings of the room. She was continually fidgeting with her draperies, putting her handkerchief to her nose, twisting her rings, or shoving the heavy bracelets up her skinny arms; and the simpering smile came and went without any meaning.

Whenever she simpered, a reflection of the same simper promptly appeared in the six hard faces that surrounded her; whenever she spoke, the six voices murmured in agreement. Four women and two men: an incredible exhibition. They had placed their chairs as close as they could get to Mrs. Brager, and all held themselves as if brooding solicitously over her. The two women who had succeeded in getting places on either side of her were continually arranging the little shawl, patting her hand, and so on. When she dropped one of the rings the two men scrambled for it, all but bumping their heads together. Yet none of the six pairs of eyes ever lost what I called their murderous look. It was clear, too, that they hated each other poisonously. Oh, it was a sweet household.

Fresh tea was brought by the maid. Mrs. Brager was obviously too shaky to manipulate the tea things, and it was poured by a fat blonde woman in a scanty pink slip, who had ex-manicure and beauty culturist written all over her. One expected her to address Mrs. Brager as "Dearie," and one was not disappointed. She handed us our cups with an expression in her glassy blue eyes that said she hoped it might poison us. And such a to-do about sugar and cream! For all her fatness she had a face that, as Mme Storey said later, you could have broken rocks on.

Mrs. Brager introduced her to us. "My dear friend, Madame Rose La France, ladies."

It was a full-blown rose, indeed!

"Mr. Chew, will you pass the cake... The Honourable Shep Chew, ladies."

I looked at him with strong curiosity. He was a big man dressed in a braided cutaway and striped trousers. The fashionable garments accorded ill with his coarse face. In his youth he may have been handsome, but it could not have done him much good, for nobody would ever have trusted those false and greedy black eyes. Now his features had taken on the flabby smoothness of the glib hypocrite. His loose, thick lips emitted a stream of sticky platitudes in a gobbling sort of voice; but his eyes always gave him away. He permitted himself a proprietary air in Mrs. Brager's drawing room which was no doubt due to his knowledge of the latest will.

"Charmed, ladies, charmed. It gives me the greatest pleasure to welcome you to our little circle here. Mrs. Brager does not care for general society but prefers to gather a few choice spirits around her in her own home...." Gobble, gobble, gobble.

"Oh, Mr. Chew, how can you!" protested Mrs. Brager, simpering. "An old woman like me is not interesting."

All six raised a chorus of indignant denials. "Old!... You!... Oh, Mrs. Brager, how can you! ... Nobody would ever think of you as being old!... You're the youngest among us!" etc., etc.

When the chorus had died down the younger man, who had left the circle for the moment to get a cigarette, added in a languorous drawl: "You are not old, Genevieve."

The poor old soul gave him a killing glance. "Perhaps not to you, Raymondo."

He was of the type which nowadays is variously termed cake eater, lounge lizard, sheik. You can picture the slick black hair, the incipient side whiskers encroaching on his cheeks, the big, shallow black eyes. Though handsome in its way, he had, I think, the worst face of any there: slinking, mean, and cruel. But not so dangerous, perhaps, as the Honourable Chew's, because it was weak.

"Signor Oneto and I are engaged," added Mrs. Brager, for our benefit, with her silly, tragic simper.

You would have thought that even a lounge lizard must have blushed thus to have his shame exposed before a beautiful woman like my mistress; but not a bit of it; with perfect effrontery Oneto continued to grin at the old woman in the same cruel, die-away fashion. It was like a comic opera or a nightmare, whichever you prefer.

I have forgotten the names of the other three women present. It doesn't signify, since they played no part in the tragic events which followed. They were all Stanfield wives in shoddy finery, a type which is common in every fashionable suburb; desperate hangers-on who will go to tea with anybody who does not expect to be asked in return.

In the beginning Mme Storey and I had seated ourselves opposite the semicircle formed by Mrs. Brager and her admirers. This did not suit the old lady, and after a while she bounced the woman on either side of her and established us in their places. Thereafter she addressed her conversation to us, while the others darted little looks of suspicion and hostility in our direction and stretched their ears to hear what was said. Mme Storey, with her kind smile, and a word or two, friendly without being fulsome, had already established herself in the old lady's good graces.

She asked with a curious eagerness: "Do you live in Stanfield, my dear?"

"No," said Mme Storey, "but I have many friends here."

"Whom do you know in Stanfield?" asked Mrs. Brager breathlessly.

"Well, there are the Braithwaites, the Eckfords, the Bryans," said my mistress carelessly; "the Van Loars, the Teagues, the Dilwyns..."

These were the most prominent families of the place. I silently commended my clever mistress's line of attack.

"Oh!" gasped Mrs. Brager. "Do you really know all these people?"

"Why, yes," said Mme Storey casually; "don't you?"

"Oh, of course, of course," she said hurriedly, "but we do not exactly visit. I go out so little."

"I am sure they would all like to know you better," said Mme Storey. "I have heard them speak about you so nicely."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Brager excitedly, "do you think— do you really think... how is one to make the first move? After all these years I couldn't be the first to call— and they couldn't be the first. Oh, dear!"

"But a woman in your position," said Mme Storey, "why not write to these ladies and ask them to come see you?"

"Oh, I wouldn't have the face! What! Mrs. Bryan!... Do you think it would be proper?"

"Certainly! Everybody knows Mrs. Brager."

"Oh! Oh!" she gasped in a perfect flutter. "Do you think they'd come?"

"I am sure of it."

"I'll do it! I'll do it!" She broke off and looked around the circle. "Er— perhaps—"

Mme Storey whispered: "Yes, I think perhaps it would be better to have them here by themselves the first time."

"And will you come that day?" asked Mrs. Brager like a little girl. "I shall be so nervous."

"I should love to," said my mistress.

After this, of course, Mme Storey was first and the rest nowhere. Mrs. Brager patted my mistress's hand, saying:

"Do throw off your wraps, dearie, or you won't feel the good of them when you go outside."

"Thanks," said Mme Storey drily, "but I think I had better keep my coat around me."

"Oh, do you find it cold in this room?" said Mrs. Brager with a horrified look. She glanced around the circle for confirmation, and instantly the chorus was raised.

"Oh, no, Mrs. Brager.... It is just right for me!... Most pleasant, I say.... Indeed, I am if anything too warm.... If there is anything I detest it is these overheated rooms!" And so on. Every face among them was pinched with cold.

Mme Storey was not to be shouted down by this crew. When she could make herself heard, she said with a good-humoured smile: "I am afraid I am spoiled. I do like to have it warm indoors."

Mrs. Brager looked at me. "And you, dearie?"

"It is a little cold," I said.

A visible struggle took place in the old woman's face between avarice and the desire to stand well with my mistress. The better feeling prevailed, but not easily. "Oh, dear!" she said despairingly. "Mr. Chew, please touch the bell."

The maid was instructed to ask Mrs. Marlin to step in. The person who came in response to this summons, and whom I took to be the housekeeper, astonished me, she was so different from the other inmates of that weird household. A handsome young woman of thirty, say, with a businesslike, self-controlled air. She was very neatly and trimly dressed, and everything about her bespoke character, resolution, and decency. In fact, she seemed to bring a ray of clean sunlight into the slightly foetid atmosphere. I took to her instantly, and so, as I learned later, did my mistress.

"Mrs. Marlin," said Mrs. Brager in her affected way, "could we have a little more heat, if you please?"

In the housekeeper's quick glance at her mistress there was a hint of amused surprise. "Why, certainly, Mrs. Brager. The fire box is only half full." She turned to leave immediately.

"Just a little more heat," said Mrs. Brager anxiously. "A shovelful of coal."

Mrs. Marlin, with a bow of acquiescence, continued toward the door; but the struggle was still going on in the old lady. "How is the coal holding out?" she asked.

"I will order more to-morrow," said the housekeeper quietly.

At that the ruling passion had its way. "Nothing of the sort!" cried Mrs. Brager in the querulous voice of the very old. "You must make what we bought this month last out, do you hear? I won't have any more coal ordered! They are all robbers. I won't submit to it!"

Mrs. Marlin, bowing again, went on out without speaking. What a difficult role was hers, I thought. She carried it off with dignity. Mrs. Brager turned her pathetic, faded old eyes on us, still mumbling her grievance as if scarcely aware of what she was saying.

"Robbers— swindlers— all of them! I've already ordered two tons this month. Soon be in the poorhouse if I didn't make a stand...."

She did not lack for sympathy from her faithful chorus. "It's simply scandalous, the prices they charge!... I'm sure I don't know what we're coming to! Where is it going to end?... My husband says..."

Mme La France said with a hateful glitter in the glassy blue eyes: "It is Mrs. Marlin's fault. She shows no management."

The Honourable Chew affected to be good-humoured about it, but the thick lips curled in an ugly sneer. "That young person thinks to put us all in our places, I fancy."

"I don't see how you can be willing to put up with her, Genevieve," drawled Oneto. "I would undertake to furnish you with a better person to-morrow."

No doubt! No doubt! I was glad to see that the old lady did not rise to this suggestion. I felt that Mrs. Marlin was honoured by the hatred of such people.

Mme Storey sought to pour oil on the troubled waters by saying, as one might to a child: "What a pretty dress, Mrs. Brager!"

Instantly the old lady was all smiles and simpers again. "Oh, do you think so, dearie? I've got a much prettier one upstairs. I'm afraid it is a weakness of mine!"

"I'd like to see it," said my mistress. "I love pretty clothes."

"Then come right up to my room," she said, rising at once. "And you too, dearie," she added in my direction. "We'll be back in a minute," she said to the others generally.

I had been wondering how Mme Storey was going to accomplish the feat of separating her from her parasites, and here it was done as easily as turning over in bed. You can imagine the sort of looks that followed us out of the room. I was sorry for Mr. Riordan, left amid that crew.

iii

THE BETTER we became acquainted with that household, the odder it appeared. On the second floor, as in all houses of this type, there were four big square bedrooms, one in each corner, and a fifth room between the two front rooms and over the entrance hall. It was into this middle room that Mrs. Brager led us. There was much less of a clutter in it; things were arranged in better taste. It was used as both sitting room and bedroom, one guessed. We found Mrs. Marlin sitting by the window sewing. She looked up pleasantly, but did not speak.

"This is Mrs. Marlin's room," said Mrs. Brager. "I have to go through it to reach my room."

I wondered why this should be.

"What a nice room!" remarked Mme Storey, who wished, I could see, to draw the housekeeper into the talk.

Mrs. Marlin coloured with pleasure. The young woman was positively beautiful when she allowed her feelings to break through her self-controlled mask. "Mrs. Brager is good enough to let me fix it the way I like," she said.

"Hmph! Pish! Modern notions!" grumbled the old woman.

Reaching the door in the right-hand side of the room, Mrs. Brager, to my astonishment, produced a key on the end of a long chain and inserted it. The door was fitted with a Yale lock. It admitted us to one of the big corner bedrooms where, as in the rest of the house, we were back in the era of 1890. You know the sort of thing: lace bedspreads and pillow shams; lambrequins, splash cloths, and a crowd of ornaments on the mantel.

Mrs. Brager herself seemed to feel that some explanation of her peculiar sleeping arrangements was necessary, for she said: "I am timid about sleeping; that's why I keep a spring lock on my door. Nobody has a key to it but Mrs. Marlin and me. The door from my room directly into the hall has been screwed up. I sleep easier knowing that nobody can get to me except through Mrs. Marlin's room, and she a light sleeper."

Before closing the door behind her, Mme Storey said to Mrs. Marlin: "Mrs. Brager is going to show us her pretty dresses. Won't you come in too?"

The young woman put down her sewing with a smile and followed us.

In the big corner room Mme Storey seated herself in a broken-springed "easy" chair before the empty fireplace, and I in a plain chair opposite her. It was even colder in here than downstairs, and my mistress presently rose and sidled over in front of the wall register to get the benefit of what little heat was coming through it. Meanwhile Mrs. Brager was bringing out her dresses. It was not sufficient to show them to us: the ridiculous old woman, with the assistance of Mrs. Marlin, must needs struggle in and out of each dress in turn and parade up and down in it with all the affectations of a mannequin. An absurd and piteous spectacle.

And how strange it was to observe the relations between mistress and housekeeper. Though Mrs. Brager had just given us the best proof possible of her trust in the younger woman, it appeared that she could not get along without continually abusing her. Nothing that Mrs. Marlin did succeeded in pleasing her. As Mme Storey pointed out to me later, this is characteristic of the very old. It is those closest to them who have to bear the burden of their infirmities.

While my mistress and I sat there making believe to talk to each other, we would hear from the back of the room: "That piece fastens in front, stoopid! Oh, your fingers are all thumbs! Now look at it! look at it! When you are through with me I look like a perfect frump! I declare you do it on purpose to plague me! There is no bearing with you. You want to wear me down, don't you. You will be glad when I'm gone. Well, I warn you, miss, I warn you as I've warned you a hundred times before, you'd better take care of me if you know what's good for you, for you won't profit one cent by my death! Not one cent!"

This was very embarrassing for strangers to have to listen to. That admirable young woman neither put on the air of a Christian martyr nor answered back. She took it all in a matter-of-fact way, as if she was thoroughly used to it. Only once, when Mrs. Brager was looking elsewhere, did she permit herself to exchange a deprecating glance of amusement with us.

"Please hold your arm up while I fasten this. There's a little too much fullness here. I will take it in after you take the dress off."

"Don't you dare to touch it! With your bungling fingers you would ruin my frock."

"Very well, Mrs. Brager."

"Besides, I like it better as it is. It makes me look plumper. And with this new tonic I am taking, I am already beginning to fill out."

"You would do better to leave the tonics alone," murmured Mrs. Marlin.

"Hold your tongue, miss! What do you know?"

When the dresses had all been tried on and duly admired, Mrs. Marlin quietly disappeared. From the grateful heat which presently came stealing around us, I guessed that she had gone downstairs to stoke up in spite of her mistress. Mrs. Brager was for returning downstairs, but Mme Storey settled herself in the broken-springed chair.

"Now we can have a good talk!" she said. "Do you mind if I smoke? I'm a slave to the weed."

"By all means," said Mrs. Brager, "I am not puritanical, I hope."

"Perhaps you will join me," said Mme Storey, offering her case.

"I don't mind if I do," said Mrs. Brager, helping herself with a simper. It was a treat to see the rakish way in which she held it and puffed smoke toward the ceiling. But after a puff or two I noticed she allowed it to go out.

"It's such a relief to get away from men for a while," said Mme Storey.

"Didn't you like Raymondo and Mr. Chew?" asked Mrs. Brager coyly.

"Well, frankly, no," said my mistress. "They are not nice enough for you, dear Mrs. Brager."

The old lady looked surprised at this line of attack; but she was pleased.

"You are not serious, of course, in intending to marry Oneto?" said Mme Storey.

"Oh, not serious," said Mrs. Brager, simpering; "but I hate to send the poor boy about his business, he is so devoted to me! Isn't he just too sweet?"

"Oh, quite!" said Mme Storey drily. "As for Mr. Chew, his manners are pleasant, but the look in his eyes makes me shiver."

"Me, too," said Mrs. Brager unexpectedly. She shivered when she said it. Here was the truth popping out, in spite of every affectation. My mistress has the faculty of bringing it out.

"But I understand from Mr. Riordan..." she said in assumed surprise.

"I know," said Mrs. Brager, rapidly nodding her head; "the will; I only did that to placate Mr. Chew. I was afraid not to do it. I can always make another will."

"But, my dear Mrs. Brager, consider what a frightful temptation you are putting in the way of a penniless man! After all, human nature is human nature, and terrible things happen."

The old lady seemed about to cry like a child, then. "I know," she wailed, all but wringing her hands. "But what was I to do? I can't get rid of him!"

"You can easily remove temptation out of his way," said Mme Storey, "and out of the way of others like him."

"How?"

"By putting the principal of your fortune out of your own control— I think they call it creating a living trust— and letting everybody know what you have done."

"Then they would all leave me!" cried the old woman piteously. "I am old. I must have friends around me."

"Make yourself real friends."

"I don't know how!"

Mme Storey considered. "You ought to take a more prominent part in Stanfield affairs," she said. "To a woman of your position it is really a duty."

"They don't want me," said the old woman querulously.

Mme Storey ignored this. "Why don't you found a great institution at your death," she said, gesticulating with her cigarette, "that would make your name remembered in Stanfield as long as the town exists?"

"Charity doesn't make friends for you."

"Not in the ordinary sense, but it brings charitably minded people around you. You would naturally appoint the best people as the trustees of your fund." My mistress slyly named the magic names again. "Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Eckford, Mrs. Bryan, Mr. Teague, Mrs. Van Loar. They would be proud and happy to serve on such a board. It would bring them into the closest association with you."

"I couldn't give away my money while I was living!" cried the old woman passionately. "I couldn't! I couldn't!"

It was useless to combat blind avarice like this, and Mme Storey made no attempt to do so. "Of course not," she said easily. "You create the living trust which is to be devoted to this purpose after you are gone. But in the meantime you have to plan out all the details, to make sure that the thing shall be done as you wish. You could have all the fun of that while you are alive."

Mrs. Brager began to nibble. "Nobody takes care of old ladies who lose their money," she said. "If I did anything it would be a home for aged gentlewomen."

"Splendid!" cried Mme Storey. "Can't you see the beautiful big home where they may enjoy every comfort, standing in the midst of its lovely grounds?"

"Could I change the trustees if I wanted?" demanded Mrs. Brager.

"Why, certainly!"

"So that if anybody did not accept the trust in a proper spirit I could replace them with others?"

My mistress's eyes twinkled, but she answered gravely: "A very wise provision."

That marked the turning point. Mrs. Brager still raised a hundred objections, but in reality the idea had won her. As she became eager, my mistress cunningly appeared to be holding her back, and thus increased her eagerness. Finally, Mrs. Brager declared that she would give Mr. Riordan his instructions to draw up the necessary papers that very afternoon. As a matter of fact, anybody could persuade that old lady to make a will, but this time, I was hoping, she would get one that would stick. I was sent down to the drawing room to fetch him. The summons to the lawyer threw the Honourable Chew et al. into a visible panic, as you may suppose.

While Mr. Riordan explained the nature of a living trust to Mrs. Brager, I remained in the adjoining room talking to Mrs. Marlin. "How do you stand it here?" I said.

She laughed good-naturedly. "You haven't heard the half of it! I go through a regular circus once a month to get the money to pay the household bills. But it isn't as bad as it seems. Mrs. Brager and I understand each other. I don't let her get under my skin. I should be sorry to lose the place."

There are some people you do not waste time in making friends with. Mrs. Marlin let down the bars of her reserve completely. I learned that she was a widow with three small children to support. They lived with her sister near by and came to see her every day at the noon recess. She confessed that she wished to marry again. Her fiancé was a brilliant young chemist called Dr. Sanford Brill. She seemed to think that I ought to have heard about him, but I had not, of course. Unfortunately, he was poor, and their marriage was likely to be long delayed. Mrs. Marlin had some hopes of interesting Mrs. Brager in Dr. Brill's discoveries. The old lady had promised to receive him on the following day.

Meanwhile, in the next room everything was proceeding smoothly. Mr. Riordan was instructed to draw up the agreement creating the trust, also a new will to carry out its provisions, and to bring them to be signed at four the next day. Like a child, when Mrs. Brager got started, there was no stopping her. She wanted the news given to the papers that night. Mme Storey was dead against it. "Nothing should be published until the papers are actually signed," she said. Mrs. Brager pished and pshawed impatiently.

Before we got out of the house, she sent after Mr. Riordan again. We waited for him in the lower hall in no little anxiety. There was no knowing where you had that old lady. But he rejoined us with an undisturbed face. Mme Storey looked her question.

"A codicil to be added to the will," he said. "I am pledged to secrecy."

"But it does not invalidate the whole scheme?"

"Oh, no," he answered, smiling; "it reveals a kindness of heart you would not suspect in the old curmudgeon."

It was close on seven o'clock. By the time we got back to New York it was far too late for me to think of getting supper at my boarding house, and my mistress, with her customary kindness, took me to dinner with her at one of the fashionable new restaurants on Park Avenue. While we were discussing the excellent potage St. Germain, a boy walked through the room paging:

"Mrs. Pomeroy— Miss Hastings— Mrs. Pomeroy— Miss Hastings."

Conceive of our astonishment. The names under which we had been introduced at Mrs. Brager's! Who could have known that we were in this restaurant? For a moment we looked at each other blankly; then the obvious explanation suggested itself.

"Somebody followed us here from Stanfield," said Mme Storey, "and then went somewhere near by to call us up."

We went to the telephone. Mme Storey made me answer it first. I heard a gruff, common man's voice saying: "Who is this?"

"Miss Hastings," I replied.

"Well, Mrs. Pomeroy's the one I want. Is she there?"

"Yes."

"Let her come to the 'phone."

I stood by the open door of the booth while my mistress talked. I could not hear what he said, but I witnessed her comedy. She was making her voice sound terrified. "Why— what do you mean!... How dare you! ... Who are you, anyway?... Mrs. Brager is nothing to me.... Just a friendly call..." And so on.

Coming out of the booth she said scornfully: "Clumsy work, Bella. The gentleman called up to say if we wanted to know what was good for us we'd stay away from Mrs. Brager."

"What an extraordinary growling voice!" I said. "It didn't suggest the voice of either of the men we saw there."

"It wouldn't," said Mme Storey. "Come on, let's finish our dinner."

iv

NOTWITHSTANDING Mme Storey's advice, Mrs. Brager herself called up the Stanfield newspapers that night and announced her intention of founding the Brager Home for Aged Gentlewomen. The news created a sensation locally when the papers came out next morning.

Shortly before we were to close the office that day, Mr. Riordan called up from Stanfield in distress. When he took the papers to Mrs. Brager to be signed she had refused to see him. Evidently the gang had been at her. He had succeeded in getting her to promise him an appointment at eleven the following day; and he wanted to know if Mme Storey would accompany him to her house. My mistress good-humouredly consented. We were very busy at the time, but this case had intrigued her interest.

So for the second time we motored up to Stanfield, taking our work with us. It was a clear and frosty day in February. We picked up Mr. Riordan at his office and went on. No suspicion of what lay before us troubled our minds, I remember. We anticipated merely a repetition of the scene of two days before. Mme Storey had no doubt of her ability to bring the weak-minded old woman around again. Mr. Riordan had the papers in his pocket, and we hoped to get them signed for good and all before leaving the house.

The maid informed us that Mrs. Brager was not up yet. We asked for Mrs. Marlin, who presently came hurrying to us in the drawing room. For Mme Storey and me she had a delightful friendly smile, very different from the guarded look that she customarily wore on her face in that house. She was apologetic.

"Mrs. Brager awoke at seven," she said, "and claimed to be feeling unwell. She said she would remain in bed this morning and Mr. Riordan would have to come another day. It was only an excuse to get out of seeing him, of course. What could I do?"

"Well, here I am," said Mme Storey, smiling. "I've come all the way from New York. She can't in common decency refuse to see me."

"I'll fix it," said Mrs. Marlin, and scampered away up the stairs.

We did not bother to sit down in the chilly room, but stood waiting near the open door, laughing among ourselves at the absurd old woman's childish pretexts. I heard Mrs. Marlin open her door; she left it standing open. I heard her knock on the second door, then she unlocked it. A moment later her shriek rang through the house.

The sound froze us where we stood. It had the dreadful staccato quality of shock. A brief cry, followed by silence. Mme Storey ran for the stairs and sprang up like a man, two steps at a time. Riordan and I followed more clumsily. We burst through Mrs. Marlin's room. Just inside of Mrs. Brager's room we found Mrs. Marlin clinging to the door handle, her face ashy, her eyes witless from shock. She pointed to Mrs. Brager's bed.

"Dead— dead..." she whispered.

A look was enough. The old woman lay in her immense, ugly wooden bedstead, her eyes closed, a half smile on her face, like one in a happy sleep. But her flesh had taken on a yellowish waxen consistency, and her face bore an expression of awful dignity such as had never visited it in life. Oh, there was no mistaking it! Mme Storey glided to the bed and touched the hand that lay outside the spread—it no longer looked withered. "Cold," she murmured, and automatically glanced at her wrist watch. "Eleven-five."

There was no sign of any disturbance: the whole house was in order; and for a moment I hoped that the old woman had died from natural causes and that we were to be spared a hideous sensation. But my mistress, with a quick glance around, pointed without speaking to two brass cages which hung one in each of the front windows. Apparently they were empty; but as I approached, I saw in each a tiny yellow form lying on its back with piteous claws in the air. This discovery was unspeakably horrible. It sickened me worse than the dead human figure on the bed.

"Mrs. Marlin," said Mme Storey crisply, "telephone for the doctor."

The young housekeeper, though very pale, had by this time recovered her self-command. It was the shock that had unnerved her. She whispered imploringly: "Do not let them come in here!" And ran downstairs.

We knew to whom she referred.

"Mr. Riordan," Mme Storey went on, "you had better take my car and go for the police. We don't want to telephone that call."

The good little man was aghast at the prospect. "Must we— must we?" he stammered.

"Instantly," said Mme Storey.

He went heavily out.

My mistress placed me at the door while she conducted one of her characteristic searches of the room and the adjoining room. It is wonderful to watch her at such moments: like a divine hound, all her senses are brought into action, guided by her beautiful intelligence. Eyes, nose, and finger tips all take part. She moves with incredible swiftness, leaving everything exactly as it was, making no sound. After five minutes I am sure she could have written a book about what she discovered in those rooms, had she cared to. She did not confide her findings to me.

"You had better close the door between and stand outside of it," she said. "Let no one enter." She then departed to conduct her lightning search through the rest of the house before she might be interrupted.

Meanwhile the maidservant and the fat cook had come to the outer door of Mrs. Marlin's room, where they stood gasping and carrying on as such people always do. They appeared to be enjoying their own horror. I heard the front door close, and somebody came up the stairs. It was Oneto. Seeing the servants in the doorway, he broke through them into the room.

"What's the matter?" he demanded.

"Mrs. Brager is dead," I said.

He was young and had not yet acquired full control over his features. An ugly triumphant grin overspread his face. "Are you sure? Are you sure?" he eagerly demanded.

Disgusted, I refused to answer.

"Let me in there!" he cried.

"You can't go in there."

He ran to the door and violently rattled it. "I will go in! Nobody has a better right."

"Well, I haven't the key," I said.

Mme La France was the next to appear. I suppose she came from out-of-doors too, since she was wearing hat and cape. Her unwholesome flesh turned mottled in her excitement; her hard eyes bored into me. I have never seen such baleful eyes. They were at once bright and thick looking, if you get what I mean: like a blue glaze on cheap china.

"Who found her?" she said thickly.

"Mrs. Marlin," I said.

She laughed hatefully. The whole atmosphere was charged with hate and suspicion. Oneto and the La France woman measured each other up and down with ugly sneers.

"Aah, you cur!" the woman said suddenly.

He retorted with an unprintable epithet. "You'll soon find out where you get off!" he added.

"Is that so? Is that so?" she retorted. "You wait!"

Suddenly, as if seized by a common impulse, they turned and shouldered each other out of the room. Oneto, being the more active, gained the stairs first and ran down, with the woman following heavily. I couldn't guess what they were up to.

The next thing I remember, Mrs. Marlin was bringing the doctor in. He was a grave, decent, middle-aged man, that I was glad to see. She opened the door of Mrs. Brager's room for him to enter, while she hung back to whisper to me:

"Your friend says please telephone for Crider and Stephens to come at once. They are to apply at the back door."

Crider and Stephens, as you know, were two of four best operatives. I went down to do Mme Storey's bidding. The telephone was under the stairs. Oneto was using it, while Mme La France waited, biting her fingers in impatience. As well as I could make out, each was calling up a lawyer. They hung about to learn what I wanted with the 'phone, but I contrived to speak so that they could not hear. Stephens was keeping the office during our absence; and he knew how to get in touch with Crider.

Oneto and the woman followed me back to Mrs. Marlin's room. Mme Storey was there, having completed her survey of the house. The servants had returned to the kitchen. My mistress, who had put on a silly-seeming air, immediately sidled over to the two behind me and said, goggling with affected horror:

"Oh, isn't it terrible?"

They looked at her suspiciously, not knowing how to take this.

The doctor (his name was Patten) came out of the further room, followed by Mrs. Marlin. The young woman had regained complete control of herself. Her face was a dead-white mask. Dr. Patten said gravely:

"Mrs. Brager is dead of suffocation. She has been asphyxiated."

Mme Storey uttered an affected little scream of horror. "Oh, how awful!"

I was watching the remaining two persons in the room. Oneto turned very pale and then flushed deeply. He quickly lowered his eyes, but the whole air of the man proclaimed that he was swelling with a secret joy. Mme La France was not giving so much away. Her face still showed that mottled look under the make-up, and she was breathing hard; but her blue eyes remained staring defiantly ahead of her, impervious as earthenware. I could not understand it. Suppose Mrs. Brager had been murdered, they could not have done it together, since they hated each other so intensely. And apparently neither of them was going to profit by it anyway.

"Oh, Doctor, oh, Doctor, how can that be?" gabbled Mme Storey— my mistress is most dangerous when she is playing the part of the foolish, pretty woman. "When we went in there awhile ago the air was perfectly good. There was no smell."

"I cannot explain that, Madame," said Dr. Patten. "It is a matter for the police."

v

MR. RIORDAN presently returned with two policemen, who took up their watch within Mrs. Brager's room. It appeared that nothing could be done without the Public Prosecutor; and as this official was absent in a near-by village, we had to wait until he could motor back. Our friend Mr. Riordan was somewhat disconcerted by the role that he found Mme Storey had assumed. Fearful, perhaps, of betraying his uneasiness, he waited downstairs.

Mrs. Marlin's room, while smaller than the corner chambers, was nevertheless of a good size for a bedroom: say, fifteen by twenty. Opposite the door from the hall was a triple window which must have been immediately above the front door of the house. There was another door corresponding to the door into Mrs. Brager's room, but this was closed up. Mme La France's room lay on that side. The two men occupied the rear chambers on this floor.

As I have said before, Mrs. Marlin had arranged her room as a bed-sitting-room. As you entered from the hall, the narrow bed was on your left, a couch on your right. At the front there was a bureau on one side, a writing desk on the other, and in the centre of the free space a table which bore a china tea service on a tray, together with a little brass kettle suspended over a spirit lamp. Two or three comfortable chairs completed the furnishings. On the walls hung many photographs of Mrs. Marlin's children at different ages, and of an intelligent-looking man with the eyes of a dreamer, whom I supposed to be her fiancé, Dr. Brill. The entire drama was played out in that room with the different characters continually coming and going. At a moment when we were unobserved, Mme Storey instructed me to remain there and to take particular care that nobody tampered with the brass kettle or tried to remove it.

Oneto and Mme La France, having been away to remove their outer things, returned to the door of the death chamber, whence nothing could budge them. Mme Storey curried favour first with one, then the other, and by degrees got herself accepted by both as a harmless sort of fool. Her method was to talk a great deal and apparently never to listen. It is surprising what a lot she can pick up that way. I could overhear but little of their low-voiced talk.

Then the lawyers came, the woman's first. He was fetched up to the room where we all were, a lanky young man with a prominent Adam's apple, who seemed to be well-nigh overwhelmed by the magnitude of the situation. His name was Mr. Deisel.

"Have you got the will?" barked Mme La France.

He nodded, swallowing hard.

"Read it to these people."

He drew the document from his pocket. It was contained on a single sheet of foolscap. He read it tremulously. In effect it constituted "my dear friend Mme Rose La France" the sole benefactor. The woman, unable to contain her feelings any longer, broke out into a vulgar, shrewish cry of triumph.

"Now! Now, who is the mistress here?"

Oneto had listened to the reading, posing with one hand on his hip and a hateful, conceited smile on his face. "And the date?" he drawled.

The lawyer named a day in November.

"I see," said Oneto, grinning still, "a Thanksgiving present!"

Mme Storey immediately went up to the woman with fulsome congratulations and side glances of contempt for Oneto. The two women drew aside toward the window, Mme La France flushed with triumph, confiding eagerly in my mistress. I could not hear what she said.

Oneto's lawyer, Mr. Paulson, was an older man and more urbane than Deisel; his present errand was clearly not to his taste. He remonstrated quietly with his client, but in vain. He too was forced to take a will from his pocket and read it aloud to us. In phraseology it was similar to the first, but in this case the beneficiary was "my dear fiancé Raymondo Oneto." Mme La France was left a legacy.

"And the date?" drawled Oneto with his hateful smile.

"December twenty-fourth."

"Mine was a Christmas present, you see."

A shocking change had taken place in Mme La France. Her face seemed to have turned black, and the blue eyes protruded. She gasped for breath, one hand clutching her fat throat. At last a vitriolic stream of abuse issued from her lips, directed at Oneto. She brought up the very dregs of foul speech. I can convey no idea of it. The burden of it was: "You killed her! You killed her!"

To which Oneto retorted: "Why me any more than you? You thought you were the heir."

All this in the very antechamber of death, remember. It was a disgusting exhibition.

Rage overcame the woman. She staggered and fell into a chair, half fainting. One could imagine the hell of disappointment in her breast. Mrs. Marlin, with a cold air of disgust, fetched her a glass of water. Presently she got to her feet and made her way slowly out of the room, supporting herself from object to object. The rest of us looked on the ground, shamed by the scene.

Curiosity soon brought her back again, looking like a wreck of her former self. Her face was strangely streaked and discoloured, her hair disordered, her dress awry. I saw then that she must be nearer sixty years old than the forty I had supposed.

Meanwhile, Mme Storey, unabashed, was making up to Oneto with alluring smiles and much play of her fine eyes, and the young man quickly fell for it. It was the first time a woman like that had ever come his way. Mme Storey's actions seemed perfectly natural to these people, since it was exactly the way they would have comported themselves under the same circumstances. They whispered together, while the La France woman watched them with a sick sneer.

A car drove up outside, and the Hon. Shep Chew came hastening upstairs. Evidently he had learned the news outside; he was prepared for the scene which met his eyes. There was nothing crude here: he was perfectly master of himself and of the situation; full of pious expressions of grief, and displaying courtesy toward all. But how those greedy black eyes glittered! Throwing his hat and coat on the bed, he immediately undertook to tell us all in the nicest way where to get off at. He reminded me of a high-priced undertaker.

He tackled Mme Storey first. "My dear Mrs. Pomeroy, what a dreadful thing has happened! It was so good of you to come and see us again, but under the circumstances I am sure you will..."

His object was to get her out of the house, but she displayed a bland obtuseness. "I'm waiting to hear what the Prosecutor says," she answered with a silly smile.

He had to give her up. He then tried to waft us all out of the room with motions of his outspread arms. "Let us wait down in the drawing room," he said unctuously; "it will be more seemly."

"Who the hell do you think you are, giving me orders?" said Oneto.

Mr. Chew looked inexpressibly grieved. "I speak in the name of the common affection that we all bore to the dear one who has left us," he said gently.

"Speak in the name of what you please," said Oneto. "I stay here."

Without another word Mr. Chew walked out of the room. Oneto swaggered and plumed himself but was perhaps not quite so confident as he wished to appear. Mme Storey soothed his vanity. He whispered to her. And then Mr. Chew returned, dragging a very reluctant Mr. Riordan after him.

"Mr. Riordan," he said impressively, "be good enough to explain to this young man what relation I stand in to the late Mrs. Brager."

Mr. Riordan scowled, removed his glasses and violently polished them. I doubt if in his whole career he had ever had a client that he liked less than his present one. He said huffily: "All I know is that at Mrs. Brager's request I drew up a will for her which is now in my office safe. After making a number of unimportant bequests, she named Mr. Chew as her principal beneficiary."

"What was the date?" cried several voices at once.

"February ninth; eight days ago."

A fleering laugh broke from Mme La France. Having nothing more to lose herself, she was delighted to be a witness of Oneto's discomfiture. That young man's voice scaled up like a woman's.

"It's a lie!" he cried. "I'll believe it when I see it and not before. Mrs. Brager and I were engaged to be married. We made an agreement."

The woman redoubled her laughter.

Mr. Chew held up his hand in pious horror. "Pray, dear Madame La France, not here! not here! Think of the respect that is due to the dead!"

"Judas!" she hissed at him.

Oneto's face was working like that of a child who is about to burst into tears. "You damned mealy-mouthed hypocrite!" he cried. "I see it all now! You read the papers yesterday morning, didn't you? You didn't intend that she should make another will which would throw yours into the discard! You are the murderer!"

For an instant the smug mask dropped from Chew's face. "You read the papers yourself, I believe," he snarled.

By this time the rest of us were so fed up with sensations that this had little effect. We were only disgusted. I wondered what Mme Storey made out of all these recriminations. For myself the fog only became thicker and thicker. It was clear that all three of them had had the will to kill the unfortunate old woman; but which had succeeded? And how?

The scene was interrupted by the entrance of a new character, who came pushing in, followed by three satellites. The room was already too crowded without them. Mr. Riordan introduced the newcomer.

"Mr. Walter Dockra, the Public Prosecutor."

He was a young man for the job; good-looking and very smartly turned out. He had a clever, forceful face, but, it seemed to me, was a little puffed up by the sense of his own importance. As a matter of fact, the enormous publicity that he foresaw in connection with this case completely turned his head. The very likable young man began to behave as you will see, like a second-rate actor in the part of district attorney. The three men he brought with him were typical small-town sleuths. Need I say more?

Fully aware of the value of a good entrance, he came to an abrupt stop in the centre of the room and looked at each one of us in turn with his compelling eye— hoping to see us quail, I suppose. When he came to Mme Storey he met with a check. She had attached herself to the Honourable Chew now. Mr. Dockra knew her at once and changed colour.

"Madame Storey!" he said, amazed. "Madame Rosika Storey! This is indeed unexpected!" There was a curious conflict of feelings in his face: admiration, respect, and a deep chagrin. He saw his precious publicity threatened by a figure which dwarfed his own.

The speaking of that famous name produced an electrical effect in the room. Every pair of eyes was turned on my mistress in wide astonishment. In especial, Rose La France, Oneto, and Mr. Chew looked at her in horror. One could see them casting frantically back in their minds to see if they had made any dangerous admissions to this terrible woman.

It must have annoyed Mme Storey thus to have her hand forced; but she took it in good part. "Very much at your service," she said, bowing to the prosecutor.

vi

I NEED not go into the first stages of Mr. Dockra's investigation, since nothing was brought out but what you already know. He asked the obvious questions to which he received the obvious replies. I may say that during this period Crider and Stephens, our two operatives, arrived from town, and were immediately dispatched by Mme Storey on different errands. I did not then know the nature of their errands. The prosecutor and his men had made a search of the two rooms. Mr. Dockra himself had examined the brass kettle with the greatest care. He put it down without comment, but I was aware thereafter that he was watching it as carefully as I was.

Half an hour later found five of us in Mrs. Marlin's room; to wit, Mrs. Marlin, Mme Storey, Mr. Dockra, one of the detectives who was acting as clerk to the prosecutor, and myself, who was taking notes for Mme Storey. I am sure that Mr. Dockra was none too pleased to have us present; it made him nervous to have Mme Storey sitting by, quietly watching; but he could not very well dismiss the famous psychologist. The others had been banished to the drawing room downstairs, where they sat, one may suppose, each in company with his secret thoughts. A policeman guarded the door of the room. The reporters were herded in another room.

It was Mrs. Marlin's turn to be interrogated. She sat at the foot of the bed facing the windows, her hands loosely clasped in her lap, pale and entirely composed. There was a curious look of indifference in her beautiful face, a remote look. One might have said that she secretly scorned us all. Mr. Dockra paced back and forth across the room, shooting out most of his questions sideways. Mme Storey lounged in an easy chair with her long legs crossed, taking everything in without appearing to.

"It is only fair to warn you," said Mr. Dockra, "that anything you say here may be used against you later."

My mistress sent me a glance of humorous despair. Oh, these clever men who will take the obvious view of a case and ignore the inner truth! Pride themselves on logic and refuse to listen to the still small voice of intuition. My mistress and I are continually up against that sort of thing, and will always be, I suppose. I think Mr. Dockra caught her look at me and was annoyed by it.

"I have nothing to conceal," said Mrs. Marlin proudly.

"How long have you been working for Mrs. Brager?"

"Three years."

"Was she a good mistress to you?"

"She paid me good wages."

"That is not what I mean. Was she kind to you?"

The hint of a smile flitted across Mrs. Marlin's face. "She meant to be."

"Be good enough to give me plain answers," he said in an annoyed way. "Is it not true that you were continually quarrelling with her?" (You will perceive by this that the Honourable Chew had had the prosecutor's ear.)

"Quarrelling, no!" said Mrs. Marlin. "She was always scolding me, if that is what you mean. It was just her way. It meant nothing."

"Just her way?" sneered Mr. Dockra. "Do you mean to say she scolded all the inmates of the household: Mr. Chew, Madame La France, Mr. Oneto?"

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Marlin simply. "She was afraid of them."

He smiled in a superior way, and I saw a spark of annoyance appear in Mme Storey's eyes.

"Sound psychology, Mr. Dockra," she murmured.

He bowed in a manner that suggested she was entirely mistaken, but he was too much of a gentleman to question a beautiful lady's statement.

"What did she scold you about?" he next asked.

"Everything," said Mrs. Marlin. "The principal trouble was over the bills. Mrs. Brager always refused to make me a regular allowance to run the house on; consequently, at the end of the month there was a row over almost every item of every bill."

"Were the bills excessive?"

Again the slight smile in Mrs. Marlin's face. "I was required to keep the expenses within three hundred dollars a month. You would hardly call that excessive at the present prices of everything."

"Had Mrs. Brager ever discovered any irregularities in the bills?"

"No."

"Then what was the trouble about?"

"It was Mrs. Brager's peculiarity that she could not pay out a dollar without agonizing over it."

"You are accusing your mistress of being miserly."

"Surely that is notorious," said Mrs. Marlin quietly.

"Then how did you succeed in getting good wages out of her?"

"I made myself indispensable to her," said the young woman proudly. "Before I came she had had twelve housekeepers in a year."

"And having made yourself indispensable, you brow-beat her into paying you good wages."

"That is not a question but a statement of your own," said Mrs. Marlin quietly. "It calls for no answer from me."

Mme Storey lowered her eyes to hide the glint of amusement. She loves to see a woman score off a cock-sure man, and so do I.

"Hm!" said Mr. Dockra. "Now, let us take up the question of these peculiar sleeping arrangements. How long is it since Mrs. Brager had the door from her room into the hall fastened up and a Yale lock put on this door?"

"About two years."

"Did the suggestion come from her or from you?"

"From her. I opposed it as long as I could. The arrangement destroyed what privacy I had in my own room."

"You and she had the only keys to that lock?"

"Yes."

"Your key has never been out of your possession?"

"Never. I pledged myself not to let it leave my person. Mrs. Brager gave me this thin chain from which I wear it suspended. She kept hers on a similar chain, which is still around her neck."

"But the spring lock could be caught back, of course. Was that ever done?"

"Never."

"I understand that you were the last person to see Mrs. Brager alive. Please describe the circumstances."

"At seven o'clock this morning I carried a cup of tea and a biscuit in to her, according to custom. She would not allow the maid to enter her room at that hour. She told me she felt unwell and would not get up until lunch time."

"What was the nature of her indisposition?"

"I did not inquire."

"Why didn't you?"

"From the way she spoke, I gathered that it was merely an excuse to avoid seeing Mr. Riordan, with whom she had an appointment at eleven."

"As far as you could see she was quite well, then."

"Quite well."

"You noticed nothing unusual about her, about the room."

"Nothing."

"Were the birds singing?"

"No. The sun was not up."

"Hm! Then what did you do?"

"I dressed and went down to breakfast. Afterward I swept and dusted the drawing room, according to custom. At quarter to nine I went down town to do my marketing."

"What shops did you visit?"

Mrs. Marvin, with her faint smile, named them.

"What time did you get back?"

"A few minutes after ten."

"Did you come up to this room?"

"Yes, for a moment."

"Did you open that door?"

"No."

"Will you swear that you did not open that door?"

"Yes, when the proper time comes."

"Why didn't you open it?"

"There was no occasion to."

"Did you hear anything from that room?"

"No."

"Weren't the birds usually singing?"

Mrs. Marlin shrugged with a touch of impatience, "Oh, sometimes birds sing and sometimes they don't."

Mr. Dockra then took her over the scene of the discovery of the body, which I have already described to you. Nothing of moment was brought out.

"Had the lock been tampered with?" he asked.

"No."

"Did you notice a peculiar smell in the room?"

"No."

"Were the windows open?"

"No. Closed and locked. It was Mrs. Brager's custom."

"If the windows had been closed all night, did not the room have a close smell?"

"Not perceptibly. It is a very large room."

"Don't you see how damaging your own answers are to yourself?" said Mr. Dockra. "According to you Mrs. Brager was alive and well at seven o'clock and dead at eleven. And nobody but yourself could have got into the room in the meantime."

"Why should I have killed her?" asked Mrs. Marlin quietly. "I had everything to lose and nothing to gain by her death."

"We can see that now," said Mr. Dockra, "but you may have had expectations of something different."

"Mrs. Brager was continually telling me that I need expect nothing at her death."

Mr. Dockra permitted himself an incredulous smile.

"Madame Storey heard her," said Mrs. Marlin.

"Did you?" he asked of my mistress in surprise.

"Yes. Two days ago, on my first visit to Mrs. Brager, I heard her use these words to Mrs. Marlin: 'I warn you, miss; I warn you as I've warned you a hundred times before; you'd better take care of me if you know what's good for you, for you won't profit one cent by my death. Not one cent!'"

Mr. Dockra coughed in a disconcerted fashion. "Hm!— Ha!"

For fifteen minutes longer he kept after Mrs. Marlin, leading over the same ground, without succeeding in tripping her. She answered apparently without even stopping to think. Her indifferent air was exasperating to her questioner. I need not repeat all this, since nothing new was brought out.

The prosecutor was interrupted by another of his men, who whispered a communication in his ear.

"What! another lawyer?" said Dockra. "Well, bring him in."

A young man with a keen and resolute face entered briskly. He and Mr. Dockra were acquainted; rivals possibly. They exchanged curt nods.

"Well, Blick?" asked the prosecutor.

The newcomer wasted no time in beating around the bush. "I have a will," he said crisply, "drawn up by me at the request of Mrs. Brager and signed by her. Her instructions were that any time I should hear of her death I was instantly to proceed to her house and take charge."

"What is the date of this will?" asked Mr. Dockra.

"February tenth— one week ago."

"Ha!" cried Mr. Dockra; "let us hope that this is really the last one!" He held out his hand for it.

An uncomfortable premonition of the truth came to me. I waited on tenterhooks.

As Mr. Dockra read, his face became suffused with gratification. "Ha!" he cried again, in quite a different tone. "Just what I expected. Listen!" He read a single sentence: "'All the rest and residue of my estate I hereby devise and bequeath to my loyal friend and servant Mrs. Clare Marlin.'"

Mrs. Marlin leaped up with a cry of the purest surprise. "Oh! I never knew!"

Mr. Dockra smiled. I groaned inwardly. Not that I doubted the poor girl; the production of this latest will did not really alter the status of the case; but I foresaw what capital the logical male mind would make of it.

"Under what circumstances was this will made?" Mr. Dockra asked.

"Six times during the past two years," Mr. Blick answered, "Mrs. Brager has come to my office and instructed me to draw up a will of this nature, each time with a new date."

"When was the last time?" asked Mme Storey.

"Just before Christmas, Madame."

"And the time before that?"

"Somewhere around Thanksgiving."

"Then it is clear she always intended Mrs. Marlin should inherit," said my mistress. "The other wills were merely blinds."

"Quite so," said Mr. Dockra.

"I never knew!" cried Mrs. Marlin, like one stunned with surprise. The dawning gladness in her face was eloquent of the truth of her words; but that logical man refused to see it.

"Who came with Mrs. Brager to your office?" he asked.

"She was alone," replied Mr. Blick. "She always came alone."

"She pledged you to secrecy?"

"She did. She said nobody was to know about this will but herself, myself, and the beneficiary."

"The beneficiary, eh? Well, there you are!" cried Mr. Dockra, spreading out his hands.

"She never told me!" cried Mrs. Marlin.

"I am sorry, my dear Mrs. Marlin," said Mr. Dockra, delighted at having seemed to prove Mme Storey wrong, "but circumstances are against you. I shall have to detain you in custody for the present. You may wait in one of the rooms upstairs, where you will not be the subject of vulgar curiosity."

The poor girl, still dazed, was led away by a policeman. She glanced imploringly at Mme Storey and at me. We smiled at her encouragingly; it was all we could do.

When the door was opened the Hon. Shep Chew was to be seen hovering outside. He had evidently witnessed the coming of the new lawyer and was visibly tortured with anxiety to know what it portended. He stuck his head into the room.

"Can I be of any help?" he asked insinuatingly.

Mr. Dockra ignored him; to give him credit, he had no use for the slimy hypocrite. It was my mistress who, with her most winning smile, invited him in.

"Another will has turned up," she said, "post-dating yours. It leaves practically everything to Mrs. Marlin."

You should have seen his face!

"Unfortunately," Mme Storey went on, "there are some very unpleasant circumstances— very unpleasant circumstances..."

A crazy hope sprang up in his eyes. Naturally, if Mrs. Marlin could be proved to be guilty of the death of Mrs. Brager, her will would be set aside and his be good. "Of course," he said eagerly, "none of the rest of us ever doubted who did it!"

"But how?" murmured Mme Storey as if more to herself than to him.

"Haven't you brought out the facts about clarium gas?" he asked.

"What is that?" asked the prosecutor sharply.

"Dr. Sanford Brill's discovery. He has produced a gas which is instantly fatal to all breathing creatures. They wanted Mrs. Brager to finance him. He came here only yesterday, and gave her a demonstration. She turned him down."

"Ha!" cried Mr. Dockra. "Let this Dr. Brill be brought here immediately," he said to his clerk. "And if he is giving demonstrations of his gas, let him be prepared to give me a demonstration."

vii

DR. BRILL was that unusual type, the stalwart young scientist, a man of intellect and muscle. I could readily understand how Mrs. Marlin had fallen in love with him. He had a handsome head, covered with tousled, shining black hair, and deep, brooding gray eyes. His look was at once open, thoughtful, and manly. What was more, the carelessness of his dress suggested that he needed a woman to look after his clothes and to see that he was properly fed. He had not the least notion of how attractive he was.

Such a man, buried in his laboratory, would be the last to hear a piece of news. He was shocked beyond measure to hear of Mrs. Brager's death, and demanded to be allowed to see Mrs. Marlin. When this was refused him, when he understood that Mrs. Marlin was suspected of having had a hand in it, his amazement turned to anger, and I thought we were going to have a fight on our hands.

"What nonsense!" he cried. "How could she have done such a thing?"

"By means of clarium gas," suggested Mr. Dockra, watching him.

All the anger suddenly went out of Dr. Brill. He paled and his eyes widened; he became very quiet. The prosecutor, of course, did not fail to mark these evidences of an inward dismay. A man like Dockra, I may say, the clever, ambitious opportunist, was perfectly incapable of understanding one of Dr. Brill's type; consequently, he disliked him at sight, though he was careful to preserve the outward forms of courtesy.

We had Dr. Brill into Mrs. Marlin's room, and the investigation proceeded.

"Please tell me about this clarium gas," said Mr. Dockra.

"It is a discovery of mine," said Dr. Brill, "a gas lighter than hydrogen, lighter than helium, and which may be produced at a fraction of the price of helium."

"Poisonous, is it not?"

"Yes. That's the trouble with it."

Mr. Dockra stared. "What's it to be used for, then?"

Dr. Brill looked at him as much as to say: "What a foolish question." "It solves the problem of the navigation of the air by heavier than air vessels," he went on, as one might explain to a child. "By the use of clarium airships may be made much smaller, hence more manageable, and the cost brought within the limits of commercial possibilities."

"Where did the name come from?"

"I called it after Mrs. Marlin, whose name is Clare."

"You are engaged to marry Mrs. Marlin?"

"Yes."

"Why have you and she not got married before this?... I hope you will pardon these personal questions, Doctor. In my position I have no choice but to ask them."

"I have no objections to answering any proper question," said Dr. Brill simply. "We have not got married because we could not afford to."

"Then clarium has not paid?"

"I have not tried to realize on it as yet. I do not consider that my work is complete. Though I have tried to keep it as much of a secret as possible, such things will leak out; and I may say that I have been approached by an agent of the government with a handsome offer for the formula, besides a very good contract to take charge of the manufacture. But I declined the offer."

"Why?" asked Mr. Dockra in astonishment.

"Because of the poisonous nature of the gas."

"Oh, you are afraid that it would kill everybody who handled it."

"Not at all. Safeguards could easily be provided against that. I manufacture it and experiment with it without the slightest danger. What I fear is that, in case of any trouble, the government would turn it to the uses of chemical warfare. By increasing its density, a simple matter to a chemist, it could be made frightfully destructive. I could not take the responsibility."

"What are you going to do, then?"

"I shall not let the formula out of my hands until I have succeeded in making the gas harmless. It may be done. But it will take time."

"Meanwhile you need money," suggested Mr. Dockra bluntly.

"I do," returned Dr. Brill, with his admirable simplicity.

"Mrs. Marlin tried to interest Mrs. Brager in the discovery."

"She did."

"Please describe what happened when you gave your demonstration in this house yesterday."

"It was a very simple demonstration," said Dr. Brill. "That was all I was permitted. It was held in the double rooms downstairs. Besides Mrs. Brager, Madame La France, Mr. Chew and Mr. Oneto were present. And Mrs. Marlin, of course."

"Had you ever met these people before?"

"Never. But Mrs. Marlin had talked to me about them."

"What do you mean by saying you were only permitted a very simple demonstration?"

"The whole atmosphere was antagonistic. Of course, I had expected it would be. Mrs. Marlin had warned me that nobody yet had ever succeeded in getting Mrs. Brager to put up money for anything. So it was just a forlorn hope. Still, I might have succeeded in interesting the old lady if it had not been for her hangers-on. They acted as if I was threatening their interests."

"Well, describe the experiments."

"I had brought with me three little tanks containing respectively hydrogen, helium, and clarium; and a handful of rubber skins, such as are used for children's balloons. I blew up a red skin with my breath, a green skin with hydrogen, a yellow skin with helium, and a purple skin with clarium."

"Suppose the purple balloon had burst?"

"It would have done no harm— such a small quantity of the gas, unless it had burst directly in my face. And I took care of that. Clarium rises very quickly."

"Go on."

"The red balloon fell to the ground, of course; the other three rose. I then demonstrated, by using small boxes of matches as units, how much more weight the purple balloon would support than either of the others."

"I suppose many questions were asked you."

"Oh, innumerable questions," answered Dr. Brill ruefully. "Most of them quite beside the point."

"And then?"

"Mr. Chew said: 'But how do we know that this is clarium, this helium, this hydrogen?'"

"A natural question?"

"Oh, quite. I would not have expected Mrs. Brager to put up her money without engaging some qualified person to check up my claims. But Chew's tone suggested that I was trying to cheat her, and she believed it. And—well, that was all. I was given no opportunity to prove my claims."

"It was a bitter disappointment?" suggested Mr. Dockra.

"I can hardly say that," answered Dr. Brill composedly, "since I had expected nothing else."

"I suppose you and Mrs. Marlin often talk about clarium?"

"It is often mentioned between us, naturally. We do not discuss it because my thoughts on the subject are of a highly technical nature that she could not follow."

"But she is fully informed as to the properties of clarium?"

"In a general way, yes."

"Dr. Brill, are you prepared to give me a demonstration of clarium?"

"I am." The doctor opened his satchel and showed us a small tank. "I have brought the same container that I used yesterday." He then produced a small pasteboard box and opened it. "I have also several ounces of the powder of clarium."

"Be careful! Be careful!" cried the prosecutor sharply.

"In powder form it is entirely harmless," said Dr. Brill with a smile. To prove it, he put the powder to his nose and smelled of it. Little prickles ran up and down my spine.

"How is the gas produced?" asked Mr. Dockra, still fearful of the stuff.

"By heating the powder in a retort."

Mr. Dockra sent outside the room, and one of his men came in carrying a cage with a canary in it. I do not know whether they had found it in the house, or had sent out for it. I foresaw what was coming, and shivered.

"What I want," said Mr. Dockra, "is a demonstration of the effect of clarium gas on a breathing organism, such as this bird."

"Nothing easier," said Dr. Brill, rising.

"Not here!" said Mr. Dockra.

"There is no danger," said the chemist. "An infinitesimal amount will be sufficient. If the cage is placed up high the gas will lose itself under the ceiling. A few minutes after its release it becomes innocuous. All I require is a piece of impervious material such as rubberized cloth."

One of the detectives handed him a raincoat.

"You have not given Dr. Brill the customary warning," remarked Mme Storey.

Mr. Dockra looked annoyed. "You understand that the result of this experiment may be used against you later."

"Nothing is to be gained by refusing to make it," said Dr. Brill simply.

Mrs. Marlin's writing desk had a high back, with pigeonholes, etc., and shelves for books above that. Such an article used to be called an escritoire when I was a child. Removing the books from the top shelf Dr. Brill placed the cage upon it, and covered it carefully with the raincoat. I had a final glimpse of the tiny bird hopping from perch to perch in wild affright. The doctor then ran a rubber tube from the cock of the gas container into the cage under the covering, and sat down. Mr. Dockra made believe to have business out in the hall at that moment. I was nervous myself; but as my mistress remained sitting quietly in her chair I had to do likewise.

Dr. Brill turned the cock of the gas tank. There was a tiny hiss, and he shut it off again. He looked around him, saw Mr. Dockra's walking stick, where he had laid it on the bed; lifted the raincoat off the cage with the stick; carried the coat to the door, gave it a shake, and handed it back to the man who had lent it to him. The little bird lay dead on the floor of the cage.

Mr. Dockra called for Dr. Patten. When the physician entered, the prosecutor said to him significantly:

"You know what you have to do."

Dr. Patten carried the cage with the dead bird in it into Mrs. Brager's room and closed the door behind him. There was a long wait. Dr. Brill sat throughout without moving, his head lowered, lost in thought. Mr. Dockra whispered with two of his men. Mme Storey left the room.

Dr. Patten returned, and made a whispered communication to the prosecutor. "You can testify to that?" asked Mr. Dockra. Dr. Patten nodded.

My mistress returned in time for Mr. Dockra's announcement. "Dr. Patten has established the fact that the two birds in Mrs. Brager's room met their deaths in the same manner as the bird you have just seen killed by Dr. Brill. There are certain peculiarities in the effects upon the respiratory organs. It follows therefore that Mrs. Brager was killed by inhaling clarium gas."

viii

DR. BRILL was still under examination. "Can anybody have stolen the formula for making clarium gas?" asked Mr. Dockra.

He shook his head. "It has never been written down. It is all in here," he tapped his forehead.

"When you were in this house yesterday, did you leave any of the gas or the powder here?"

"No."

"Could it have been abstracted from among your things without your knowledge?"

"No."

"Have you at any time ever allowed any of the gas or the powder out of your possession?"

This was evidently the question that Dr. Brill dreaded. He became very pale. "Yes," he murmured low.

"Ha!" cried Mr. Dockra. "Under what circumstances, please?"

Dr. Brill hesitated painfully. "What I am about to say has an ugly look," he said slowly: "but there could not be anything in it; there could not!"

We pricked up our ears at this.

"Never mind about the look of it. Say it."

"Yesterday, shortly after I had returned to my laboratory from this house," Dr. Brill continued, "I was called to the telephone. A man who said he was the Honourable Shep Chew was on the wire. He told me that Mrs. Brager had changed her mind in respect to clarium gas; that if I was willing to fulfil the condition she laid down, she would advance the money I required. The condition was that I mail to Mrs. Marlin sufficient of the powder to experiment with; Mrs. Marlin was to carry it to a firm of independent chemists, and if their findings agreed with my claims the money would be placed at my disposal."

"Well, what did you do?"

"I immediately did up three ounces of the powder in a tin box and put it in the mail."

Mr. Dockra's lip curled incredulously. I confess that the story sounds far-fetched when I repeat it; but no observant person who watched the simplicity with which it was told could very well have disbelieved it.

"Did you recognize Mr. Chew's voice?" asked Mr. Dockra.

"I cannot say that I did," said Dr. Brill with his dogged honesty.

"You had heard him speaking an hour before."

"I know; but his voice had not impressed me."

"Did it not seem strange to you that Mrs. Marlin herself had not called you up?"

"Mr. Chew had appeared to be Mrs. Brager's principal mouthpiece."

"And you did not question this telephone call at all?"

"No, I was too happy about it," said Dr. Brill simply. "When a thing that you wish for so much comes about, you do not naturally question it."

"It appears not," said Mr. Dockra sarcastically.

"May I ask a question?" put in Mme Storey.

Mr. Dockra bowed to her gallantly.

"Was it not strange that Mrs. Marlin should not call you up afterward about such an important thing, such a fortunate thing?" she asked.

"I have an aversion to talking on the telephone," said Dr. Brill.

"Is that generally known?"

"Mrs. Marlin knows it. We never talk over the telephone.... I sent her a note and enclosed it between the tin box and the paper wrapping."

"That is against the postal regulations," said Mme Storey, smiling.

"Well, I couldn't find an envelope."

"At what hour did this conversation take place?" asked Mr. Dockra.

"My laboratory is in Fordham. I reached there at six o'clock. It would be about ten minutes later."

Mr. Chew was called into the room.

"Mr. Chew," said Mr. Dockra, "Dr. Brill states that he was called up at his laboratory at six ten last evening by a man who gave your name."

"It's a lie!" cried Mr. Chew excitedly. "I never called him up in my life. At ten minutes past six, you say? At ten minutes past six I was talking to a friend in the lobby of the Stanfield Arms. I can prove it! What does he say that I said to him?"

Mr. Dockra motioned to him to be silent. "Now, Dr. Brill," he said to the other, "you have heard his voice again. Was that the voice that spoke to you over the telephone last evening?"

"I don't think so," said Dr. Brill heavily. "It was a sort of growling voice."

I glanced at Mme Storey in astonishment. Was it the growling voice we knew? Her face gave nothing away.

Mr. Chew, much against his will, was dismissed from the room, and the maidservant Maud Pickens was brought in. The girl was paralyzed with fright, and it was with the greatest difficulty that we could get anything out of her. However, we finally established that: she had taken the mail in at a few minutes before nine; she had laid it on the hall table; she remembered seeing the little package addressed to Mrs. Marlin; Mrs. Marlin had already gone to market when the mail came; she thought that Mr. Chew, Mr. Oneto, and Mme La France had all come out into the hall to see what was in the mail; Mrs. Marlin had returned from market at five minutes past ten; she had come into the kitchen; she had a number of packages; the witness could not state if she then had the little package that had come in the mail.

Afterward Mr. Chew, Mme La France, and Oneto each stated in turn that they had seen the little package when it arrived, and that it was still lying on the hall table when they had gone out.

"Well, my case is beginning to shape up," remarked Mr. Dockra, glancing at my mistress as much as to say: "We won't need you in this."

"I congratulate you," said Mme Storey dryly.

After the last three had testified, Mr. Dockra allowed them to remain in the room. He was not averse to making a grand-stand play, as you have seen, and he thus made sure of his gallery. During all this Dr. Brill had remained sitting at the foot of the bed in an attitude of the deepest sadness, arms folded, chin sunk on his breast. I have never seen a man sit so still under stress of emotion.

"Now, Dr. Brill," said Mr. Dockra briskly.

The young chemist raised his pale, drawn face. He foresaw, of course, that worse was coming.

"You have stated," the prosecutor went on, "that you were in need of money. Within the past few days, has not that need become acute?"

Dr. Brill did not answer immediately.

"Is it not a fact that you have been given notice to quit your laboratory unless you can pay the arrears of rent?"

"Yes."

"May I ask a question?" put in Mme Storey.

Mr. Dockra was none too well pleased to be interrupted; however, he bowed.

"You spoke of answering many questions yesterday," said Mme Storey, "when you were demonstrating clarium. Did you describe to the company how to produce the gas from the powder?"

"Yes, Madame."

"Well, who asked you that question?"

One could feel the suspense tighten in the breast of every hearer. Unfortunately Dr. Brill made the worst possible witness for himself. He spread out his hands helplessly.

"I cannot tell you, Madame. It is possible that I volunteered the information without being asked."

"But everybody in the room heard you describe how to do it?"

"Yes, Madame."

Mme Storey bowed to Mr. Dockra; and he proceeded, after letting his eyes travel around the circle to make sure that he had our attention.

"Dr. Brill, have you ever discussed with Mrs. Marlin the possibility of using a makeshift retort for releasing the gas?"

"I cannot recollect doing so."

"Be careful what you say, sir!"

Dr. Brill looked at him suddenly and full. "I am always careful what I say, sir."

Mr. Dockra wagged an inquisitorial forefinger at him. "Have you ever discussed the possibility of using a common kettle for the purpose?" This was where the prosecutor sprung his great surprise. "Such a kettle as this, for instance?" He snatched up the brass kettle from its stand and handed it to the doctor.

It was not a complete surprise to me, because Mme Storey had warned me about that kettle. But it made me anxious, to see the prosecutor thus stealing our thunder. I stole a glance at Mme Storey. She was calm.

Dr. Brill turned the kettle over in his hands unsuspectingly. "Certainly we have never discussed this," he said.

"Examine it closely!" said the prosecutor raspingly.

Dr. Brill removed the cover and looked inside. Suddenly his eyes became intent. He carried the kettle hastily to his nose and sniffed it. Turning it upside down, he examined the bottom. A startling change came over his face; his eyes bolted; I saw the fine drops of sweat spring out on his forehead.

"Well, sir, what do you find?" barked the prosecutor.

The tortured man moistened his pale lips. "Nothing," he stammered.

Mr. Dockra pressed him mercilessly. "Do you not find that clarium powder has lately been burned in that kettle? It has not even been washed out! A fatal error, but perhaps there was no time!"

"I refuse to answer," muttered Dr. Brill.

"You have already answered me sufficiently for the present," said Mr. Dockra, with a satisfied smile. "Later you will have to answer."

Dr. Brill suddenly rose. "Let me see Clare," he said hoarsely, "here, before you all. Then I will answer you!"

"Oh, very well," said Mr. Dockra, not at all displeased by the suggestion. He expected further disclosures. One of the detectives was sent upstairs to fetch Mrs. Marlin.

I dreaded what was coming. I never doubted the innocence of that little woman; but I was terrified at the strength of the case which the wily prosecutor had built up against her. I could see no loophole of escape. When all that was presented to a jury, how could they do otherwise than convict? I looked at my mistress. How I longed to have her uncover her guns! But she gave no sign. From her I looked at that precious trio: Chew, La France, and Oneto; each of their faces bore a similar ratlike look of mean exultation. They were delighted to see Mrs. Marlin, as they would have said, getting hers.

She was brought in with her head up. She went straight to Dr. Brill, who took both her hands in his. They were oblivious to everybody else in the room.

"Oh, Clare!... Oh, Clare...!" he murmured brokenly.

"Hush, San," she whispered. "Everything will be all right."

He schooled his feelings. "Answer me one question," he said simply. "Have you used that kettle for any purpose this morning?"

"No."

"Look at me, Clare."

She lifted her clear eyes to his, and his glance plumbed the depths of her soul. A great breath of relief escaped him. "Thank God!" he cried, and lifted her hands to his lips. Such a natural and beautiful gesture.

"Now, Mr. Prosecutor," he said, turning around, "I'm ready to answer your question. Somebody has, as we chemists say, cooked clarium powder in that kettle."

Mr. Dockra had watched the little scene with a sneer. "Thank you, Dr. Brill," he said sarcastically. "That about completes my case. I believe you have been an involuntary accessory, but the degree of your responsibility will have to be established by a jury. I shall have to order both you and Mrs. Marlin taken into custody."

Dr. Brill looked at him as an angry mastiff might look at a terrier; his arm went around Mrs. Marlin instinctively. She drooped pitifully within it.

"Oh, my children!" she murmured.

Mr. Dockra had gone on to my mistress. Scaling the dizzy heights of gratified vanity, he murmured with affected gallantry: "Madame Storey, I cannot tell you what a privilege it has been to have you present at this inquiry. Stanfield is honoured that one whose time is so valuable should have given..."

"Oh, I can give a couple of hours more to it," drawled Mme Storey. "Let's get to the bottom of it while we're about it."

He dropped her hand as if it had been red hot. "My case is complete," he said, staring.

"Oh, absolutely," said Mme Storey dryly; "except in one particular."

"What is that?"

"Mrs. Marlin could not possibly have killed Mrs. Brager."

If you could have seen the beautiful hope and joy break in the faces of those lovers. And how they hung, waiting for her next words.

"I should be glad to have you explain yourself," said Mr. Dockra stiffly.

"It has been established that Mrs. Marlin left the house at quarter before nine," said Mme Storey, "and returned at five minutes past ten. Allowing her only fifteen minutes to make her preparations, she could not have committed the deed before ten-twenty. At eleven five, when I touched the body, it was cold."

The young prosecutor was brought down from his dizzy height. Before his men, too. He rubbed his lip to hide his bitter chagrin. Mme Storey's simple demonstration was unanswerable. As for me, I could have cheered. Ah! my wonderful mistress, she has never yet failed the cause of the angels.

Finally Mr. Dockra said sulkily: "Perhaps you will tell us who it was then."

"That I propose to find out before anybody leaves this room," said Mme Storey significantly.

ix

AFTER the scene I have just described Mme Storey took charge of the proceedings. Mr. Dockra never ventured to oppose her. One could not help but feel a little sorry for the deflated young prosecutor. He was not a bad fellow at heart; but he had been carrying too much pressure. Imagine the small-town attorney thinking he could show Mme Storey a thing or two! She softened the blow as much as she could by making believe to consult him at every point, etc. Everybody remained in the room, and my mistress turned from one to another as questions occurred to her. It was much simpler.

"Mrs. Marlin," she said, "when you went out, was it your custom to lock your door?"

"No, Madame, it never occurred to me to do so. In fact, I had no key to the lock."

"Thank you." My mistress picked up the fateful kettle and tapped it reflectively with her finger nail. "Dr. Brill," she said, handing it over, "look at this again, please. It is a cheap kettle, you see, the metal is very thin. If this kettle, not having any water in it, were suspended over a flame, how long would it be before the metal fused?"

"It would depend upon the flame, Madame."

"I am referring to the flame of the alcohol lamp that goes with it."

Dr. Brill lighted the little lamp and put it out again. "Between six and eight minutes, Madame. The bottom of the kettle is badly discoloured and warped. Another minute and it would have burned out."

"Thank you. How long would you have to cook the clarium powder before it began to give off its gas?"

"No time at all. As soon as the heat penetrated it the gas would be released."

"I see. When the gas is released, how long a time must pass before it becomes innocuous?"

"Fifteen minutes, Madame."

Mme Storey turned to Mr. Dockra. "An elementary sum in arithmetic," she remarked. "If Mrs. Marlin carried the kettle into that room and lighted it, unless she went back in eight minutes to put out the flame, the bottom of the kettle would burn out. Yet it has not burned out, you see. On the other hand, if she went back inside of fifteen minutes, the fumes would kill her too. It won't work out."

The young man's face became longer and longer, seeing his case crumble to the ground. "According to that, nobody could have done it, then," he said sullenly.

"But somebody did do it," said Mme Storey, "for Mrs. Brager lies dead in there."

"How did they get the gas in there, then?" said Mr. Dockra. "Mrs. Brager didn't come out of the room, because the birds are dead in there with her."

"Through the hot-air flue from the furnace," said Mme Storey softly.

A little sound of astonishment went around the circle of listeners. The prosecutor gaped at my mistress. We all did.

She turned to Mme La France without pausing. "Will you please give an account of your movements this morning?"

"Certainly, Madame." The fat woman had by now succeeded in concealing the rage that gnawed her vitals. During one of her absences from the room she had fixed her hair and repaired her make-up. She faced Mme Storey with a hard smile. "After breakfast I sat in the dining room reading the paper," she began.

"Waiting for the mail?" put in Mme Storey pleasantly.

"We all were. When it came we went out into the hall to see what there was. I seen the little package addressed to Mrs. Marlin—"

"You have already testified as to that. Was there anything for you?"

"No, Madame. Afterwards I went upstairs and put on my things, and left the house. I went down to Ye Gilded Lily Shoppe— that's a beauty parlour in the town— where I had an appointment for a head shampoo."

"At what hour was your appointment?"

"Ten o'clock."

"That leaves a whole hour to be accounted for."

"Well, I didn't hurry none. I took my time about getting my things on. I suppose it would be about nine twenty when I left the house."

"But it only takes ten minutes to go downtown on the car. Less than that by taxi."

"I walked, Madame. I am reducing."

"Oh, I see. Did you leave the house before or after the gentlemen?"

"I can't say. I didn't see them when I went out."

"Then nobody saw you leave the house?"

"Nobody that I know about."

"Did you meet anybody you knew on the way downtown?"

"No, Madame."

"I suppose you are known at the beauty parlour?"

"Oh, yes, Madame, they all know me there."

"What time did you leave there?"

"Eleven. And come right home by car. You was already here then."

"You were wearing a cape when I saw you. Is that your custom?"

"No, Madame. Only when I'm walking. It gives me more freedom, like."

"That is all, thank you," said Mme Storey. "Now, Mr. Oneto."

The young man faced her with a look at once nervous and sulky. His eyes quailed; he passed his handkerchief over his face. This looked hopeful.

"You, too, were waiting in the dining room after breakfast?" suggested my mistress with an ironical air.

"Yes."

"Reading the paper?"

"No, she had it."

"What were you doing?"

"Nothing."

"Waiting for the mail?"

"Oh, I don't look for much in the mail. I'm no hand to write letters."

"But you went out in the hall when it came?"

"Yes."

"Get anything?"

"No."

"Then what did you do?"

"My hat and coat were downstairs. I took them and went out. Mr. Chew saw me go."

"Where did you go?"

The young man scowled even more blackly, and his eyes darted from side to side like something trapped. "Went to see a friend," he muttered.

"Who?"

He hesitated. "I won't say," he muttered.

"Hm!" said Mme Storey. "You understand what that implies."

"Aah, what difference does it make?" he burst out. "Chew saw me go out right after the mail came; and you all saw me come in again after eleven o'clock. It couldn't have been me."

"How do we know that you didn't come back in between?" suggested Mme Storey quietly.

"I didn't have a latchkey."

"It would have been a simple matter to leave the door on the latch."

"Well, I didn't," he muttered.

"There is a door opening from the side yard directly onto the cellar stairs," Mme Storey went on. "It has not been used in many years; not since the house was last painted, in fact. But this morning it was opened, and somebody entered that way, after having put down a board over the soft earth outside to avoid leaving a footprint."

Oneto stared at her. "Well, it wasn't me," he said sullenly, "and you can't hang it on me."

"You will be under suspicion until you can account for your movements."

"Aah, I went to see a lady friend," he said with a hang-dog air. "It wouldn't do any good for me to give her name, because she'd deny I was there if you asked her."

"Why should she deny it?"

"Because her husband don't know me."

A smile travelled around the circle at this answer. But Oneto had no intention of being funny; he was sweating. To my disappointment, Mme Storey let him go for the moment.

"Mr. Chew," she said.

There was no hesitancy about this witness. He was too eager to testify, too full of virtuous protestations. "After the mail came I went back into the dining room to look at the paper," he said. "Nobody gets a chance at it when Mme La France is around. I didn't see Oneto leave the house. He may have done so, but he can't prove it by me, because I wasn't taking any notice of him. I didn't read the paper long— only the headlines. The dining room door was closed to keep in the heat, and I didn't see Mme La France go out. Maybe she did. My hat and coat were up in my room, and after a few minutes I got them and went out."

"Where did you go?"

"Well, you'll think it's funny, Madame Storey, but I got on a car and went down to a sort of little club that I know of called the Acme Social Club, and played pool with some men there. I assure you it's not my custom. But this morning I was to talk over some business matters with Mrs. Brager, and when the housekeeper told us at breakfast that she was indisposed it left me at a loose end, so to speak, and I—"

"Quite so," said Mme Storey, cutting him short. "With whom did you play pool?"

"Well, there was quite a crowd: a fellow they call Fred, and a fellow they call Spike, and Dan— you see I don't know them outside the club, and I'm not sure about their last names; Dan's last name is Potter, I think."

"But they could be found at the club?"

"Certainly, Madame Storey."

"At what time did you enter the club?"

"I couldn't tell you exactly. It would be about twenty-five past nine."

"Mr. Chew, can you produce a witness who will swear that he saw you enter the club before half-past nine?"

A panicky look came into the greedy, darting black eyes. "How do I know if I can?" he gobbled. "There was a crowd there; fellows always coming and going. I don't know if anybody noticed me particularly coming in or could tell the time to a minute." He darted off on a new tack. "Nobody who ever saw me and Mrs. Brager together would ever suspect me of meaning harm to her!" he cried with tears in his voice. "Why, we were like brother and sister together, like mother and son; a hundred times she has termed me her son."

Those of us who knew the old lady and her pretensions to youthfulness smiled at this.

"Why, when a fellow come into the club and said that a rumour was going around town that Mrs. Brager was dead, I almost dropped where I stood. Ask any of them how I took it! My friend! My benefactor! I rushed out of the place and jumped in a taxi and came right here. I am still so overcome by this shocking event, I scarcely know what I'm saying!"

My mistress was bored by these protestations. "I noticed, when you came in, that you were wearing your overcoat across your shoulders," she said. "Why was that?"

"It is just a way I have got into," he said.

"Madame La France," said my mistress, "have you seen Mr. Chew wearing his overcoat in that manner?"

"No," was the blunt answer.

"That's a lie!" cried Mr. Chew excitedly. "That woman has it in for me. She—"

"Oh, please!" said Mme Storey, holding up her hand. "No recriminations. That is all, thank you, Mr. Chew."

Things began to happen then.

x

A BATTERED figure appeared in the doorway. It was Crider, the best man we have; one of his eyes was puffed up and beginning to blacken; his cheek was cut; his collar was torn open. I gasped at the sight; but my imperturbable mistress never batted an eye.

"Did you get your man?" she asked coolly.

"Yes, Madame," he said grimly.

"Good!"

The room had become so crowded we could scarcely breathe. Mme Storey suggested that it be partly cleared; and the flock of lawyers was requested to wait in the hall. Mr. Dockra also sent his men outside, except the one who was taking notes. The door had to be left open for air; and during the subsequent proceedings there was a whole bouquet of heads there, peering and listening. Even for those who remained in the room there were not seats enough, though some sat on the bed and some on the couch. I doubt if any of those who stood ever became conscious of weariness, for minute by minute the tension increased, as one might slowly screw the strings of an instrument higher and higher. It became almost unbearable.

Crider was looking at Mme Storey for further instructions. "Speak out," she said; "the Public Prosecutor is waiting to hear what you have to say."

"From the cook downstairs," Crider began, "I got a tip that the man you sent me after would be going to St. Agnes' school after leaving here. He visits the school four times a day. I followed by the route he would naturally take. According to your instructions, I searched all places that would likely suggest themselves as hiding places for a small object he might want to dispose of. I found that my route carried me across the Stanfield River, and I realized, of course, that that would be the place, if any. It is a small tidal stream, and at the time I crossed the bridge was just a narrow creek flowing out between mud flats. I did not feel that I ought to take the time myself, so I hired some boys to drag the water under the bridge, and I went on.

"From having to stop so many times, I found the man gone when I got to the school. But they had his address, and I went there. It was a lodging house in a poor quarter. I found him at home. He had just got there. He refused to come back with me. In fact, I had considerable trouble with him. He was a heavier man than me. But I managed to hold him until the people in the house, who were scared by the racket, sent out for a policeman. I told the officer who I was and took the liberty of adding that the Public Prosecutor wanted the man at Mrs. Brager's house, and the officer took him in charge for me. I searched his room but did not find any of the things you told me to look for. I followed behind to make sure he did not throw anything away in the street.

"When we approached the bridge, I saw that the boys had found something, so I let the officer and his man walk on ahead. The boys gave me this, which they had found in the water. The man does not know that we have it. He is down in the kitchen under guard."

Crider handed Mme Storey a crumpled piece of tin. It had the look of a small box which had been squeezed flat so that it would sink when thrown into the water. Mme Storey, pulling the sides apart, examined it all over, while everybody in the room waited in a breathless silence.

"Dr. Brill," she said at last, "do you smoke Demiopolis cigarettes?"

"Why, yes, Madame," he said, astonished.

"Do you buy them in boxes of one hundred?"

"Yes, Madame."

"Did you use one of the empty boxes to mail the clarium powder to Mrs. Marlin?"

"Yes, Madame," he said, with rising excitement.

"This will be it, then, I fancy," she drawled. "You had better take charge of it, Mr. Dockra." She handed it over. "You will find the name of the maker stamped in the tin."

A little sound of wonder travelled around the room.

Amid an electrical silence, the mysterious man in the case was led into the room and told to sit down in the chair at the foot of the bed. I shivered with repulsion at the sight of the murderer, as I then supposed him to be. He looked like a murderer, which murderers seldom do: a Hercules of a man, now somewhat gone to fat, with a ridged, bony head and completely brutalized features. The sort of man whose only retort is a guffaw of coarse laughter. His little swimming pig eyes held no expression whatever. The coarse and dirty clothes betrayed his occupation. He wore no overcoat.

"What is your name?" asked Mme Storey mildly.

"Henry Hafner," he growled.

Instantly Dr. Brill cried out: "That is the voice I heard over the telephone!"

It was on my tongue's tip to echo him. I too recognized that growling voice! But Mme Storey has taught me to restrain my impulses at such moments. I could see that she was annoyed by Dr. Brill's cry. She looked at Mr. Dockra meaningly. He said:

"There must be no interruptions, or we will have to clear the room."

In order to lull his suspicions, my mistress was adopting a painstakingly friendly attitude toward the brute. "Married, single, or widowed?" she asked.

"Single, 'm."

"Age?"

"Fifty-one."

"I shouldn't have thought it," said Mme Storey politely. "How long have you lived in Stanfield?"

"Eight months, 'm."

"Then you're not well known here?"

"No, 'm. I keeps myself to myself."

"What is your occupation?"

"Sort of odd jobs, 'm. In the winter I tends furnaces. Summers I gardens and mows lawn.... Can I make a statement?" he asked.

"I'd be glad to hear it," said Mme Storey.

"Well? 'm," he began with an aggrieved air, "when this guy here"— a jerk of the dirty thumb in Crider's direction— "come to my room and says, 'Come with me,' I says, 'What t' hell,' I says, 'a man's got his rights. A man's house is his castle,' I says, 'who are you to come buttin' in here?' He says: 'I'm Madame Storey's man,' or some such name. Well, I don't know who Madame Storey is, and I tell him so. 'Show me your badge,' I says. And he ain't got no badge. 'Nothin' doin',' I says, 'get the hell out of here.' Then he tried to drag me, and I pasted him one and we mixed it up, sort of, till the cop come. The guy tells the cop the Public Prosecutor wants me. He didn't tell me that. Soon as he says Public Prosecutor, I goes with him like a lamb. I just want you to get me right, lady: I don't set up to resist no lawful authority."

"That's all right," said Mme Storey; "your resistance to my agent will not be counted against you. Let us get on. I understand that you attend to the furnace in this house?"

"Yes, 'm."

"How long have you been working here?"

"Since the fire was lighted last fall."

"Who got you the job?"

"I got it by astin' at t' kitchen door."

"What time do you come here every day?"

"A little before seven in the morning, and again between nine and ten at night. At this house they won't give no key, so I has to wait for the cook to let me in mornings."

"Then you enter by the kitchen?"

"Yes, 'm."

"Why don't you use the door direct from the yard into the cellar?"

"Is there a door from the yard?" he said with a cunning look. "Oh, sure, I mind seein' that door on the cellar stairs. But that there door has been bolted up since before my time. I suppose the missus wants the kitchen help to keep tab on all who comes and goes in the cellar."

"You came back a second time this morning, didn't you?" said Mme Storey carelessly.

The little eyes darted an uneasy look in her face; but he answered readily: "Yes, 'm."

"What for?"

"Well, you see, 'm, the first time I come the fire was so near out I couldn't fill her up. I just had to put a little on and wait for it to catch good. So I told Mis' Morris, that's the cook here, that I'd be back."

"What time did you come back?"

"Some'eres about nine."

"Where had you been in the meantime?"

He named three houses that he had visited.

"But it wouldn't take you two hours to fix three furnaces."

"No, 'm, I was waitin' round to give the fire time to burn up good."

"It wouldn't take two hours for the fire to come up."

"Not if the dampers was opened right, 'm. But they won't let me do that here. Burn too much coal. They buy it every month, and I gotta make two ton last out. They ought to burn four."

"I want to fix the exact time of your return, if I can," said Mme Storey. "Did you meet the letter carrier making his first round?"

"Not that I rec'lect."

"Are you sure?"

It evidently occurred to Hafner that the letter carrier might have been questioned. "Sure, that's right, I met him," he said. "I just forgot for the moment. Fella name of Smitty. Me and him's well acquainted."

"Had he been to this house, or was he on the way here?"

"He'd been."

"Had you been waiting for him?" asked Mme Storey slyly.

But she didn't catch him. "Why should I?" he asked with an innocent air.

"I don't know," said Mme Storey, just as innocent. "What did you do when you came back?"

From this point on he weighed every word of his answers. As you have perceived, he was by no means as stupid as he looked. That debased exterior concealed a world of low cunning. He made a good witness for himself.

"I went down cellar."

"Did you find anything out of the way there?"

"No, 'm, nothin' out of the way. The fire was still sulkin'. I opened all the drafts and went up to the kitchen while she burned up."

"Right away?"

"No, 'm. I can't say as it was right away. I fooled around a bit, watching her— drawing out a clinker or two. Then I went up."

"What did you do in the kitchen?"

"I sat down and talked to cook and the girl."

"Oh, you sat down and talked. What about?"

"'Deed, I can't tell you that, 'm. Nothin' particular. Just talkin' like." Then, reflecting, no doubt, that the cook was at hand to corroborate this part, he added: "But I remember one thing."

"What was that?"

"While I was sittin' there cook wanted to send the girl down cellar for potatoes and I stopped her."

"Why?"

"Because of the coal gas. The furnace was givin' out gas somepin' fierce. I had opened everything up to drawr it off, and I opened the cellar window, too. I told the girl she better wait awhile."

"But you just told me you'd been fooling around down there."

"Oh, I'm used to the gas. Don't notice it a-tall."

"Did the furnace often give off gas?"

"Yes'm. Plumb wore out that furnace was. Weren't no use to complain. Wild horses wouldn't have drug the price of a new furnace out of the old missus."

"Then you went down cellar again?"

"Yes, 'm, I went down again."

"Closing the cellar door after you."

"That was along of the gas."

"Oh, I see. Did the girl go down with you?"

"No, 'm. She didn't come down till I hollered up that the gas was out."

"How was the fire then?"

"Not so good. I fooled around awhile yet, waitin' for it, then I couldn't wait no longer, so I fixed it up the best I could and left."

"Did the girl get her potatoes?"

"Oh, yes, 'm, she got her potatoes all right."

At this point the questioning was interrupted by the entrance of Stephens, the second operative, who had come out from town with Crider. He stood just within the door, waiting to catch his mistress's eye.

"Well, that's fine!" Mme Storey said to Hafner; "just excuse me a minute while I speak to this gentleman."

Stephens handed her a slip of paper on which was a written memorandum. After reading it Mme Storey folded it and kept it in her palm during what followed. I guessed by that that it was something of first-rate importance. Hafner's little eyes watched her with an agonized curiosity. He would have given something to know what was written on that paper. Mme Storey then whispered further instructions close in Stephens's ear, and he left the room again.

xi

UP TO this moment Mme Storey had shepherded Hafner along so gently that he thought he was picking his own way. He was cunning, but not cunning enough. He thought he was getting along fine; but I, who knew Mme Storey so well, could see that by the apparently plausible answers she was drawing out of him she was making him weave the rope that would later hang him.

I say hang him, but of course I could see by this time that he could not be the principal in this affair. He had no access to the upper part of the house; and he had nothing to gain directly by the death of Mrs. Brager. He was a tool in the hands of one of the three interested persons. I glanced at that precious trio where they sat in a row on the couch near the door: La France, Oneto, Chew. Each face showed the same wary mask, each was awaiting Hafner's answers with the same secret tenseness. Were they all in it? I wondered.

Mme Storey now changed her tactics. With an unexpectedness that caused the witness visibly to jump she said: "Hafner, for what reason did you follow my car back to New York night before last?"

He made his eyes as big as possible with astonishment. "I never followed you, lady," he said in an aggrieved voice. "I never seen you before I come into this room."

"I saw you." (This was not so, of course.)

"Maybe you did, but I wasn't follerin' you.... What kind of a car was I in?"

My mistress bit her lips to control a smile. Brute though the man was, his readiness of wit pleased her. "Never mind that," she said. "You followed me and my secretary to the Restaurant Lafitte on Park Avenue. You then went to a pay station near by and called me up."

"You're mistaken, lady. If somebody called you up, it wasn't me."

"You should butter your voice before you call up folks on the 'phone," remarked Mme Storey dryly. "...Who pointed me out to you and told you to follow me?"

"Nobody, 'm, because I didn't foller you. I ain't been to New York since Christmas."

"Well, let's get back to the cellar," said Mme Storey. "You say the second time you went down you didn't see anything out of the way."

"No, 'm. Nothin' out of the way."

"Well, that's funny," said Mme Storey carelessly, "because when I went down I immediately noticed that the tops of all the hot-air pipes leading out of the furnace had been dusted off."

Hafner's eyes flickered with fear; but he answered without hesitating: "You don't say. Must 'a' been done after I come up, for that would be a thing I'd notice. Everything down cellar was covered with dust."

"Yes. Seems funny anybody would go to the trouble of dusting off all those old pipes."

"You're right, lady." She had him sweating now; but his answers still came out pat. He started to pull a handkerchief out of his back pocket and then shoved it back again.

Mme Storey's voice rang out: "Give me that handkerchief!"

Jumping to his feet with a snarl, he clapped his hand over the spot. But resistance was useless, of course, in that crowd. The handkerchief was taken from him and handed to my mistress. It showed the unmistakable dark brown stains of thick dust. Mme Storey gave it a flirt, and a little cloud of fresh dust flew out of it.

"How did it get so dusty, Hafner?" she asked softly.

His tongue failed him then. "I— I— I—" he stammered— "I used it to dust my room with this morning. I hadn't nothin' else to use."

"Your room must have needed it," remarked Mme Storey, looking at the thick brown accumulations on the handkerchief. "Mr. Dockra," she said, brusquely raising her voice, "I would like to have this man searched."

Hafner crouched; showed his teeth like a trapped animal; glanced desirously toward the door. Useless to think of escape. Mr. Dockra called two of his men in.

Mme Storey said carelessly: "I expect to find on him a pair of pliers, a pair of gloves of some sort, a knife— of course, the knife won't prove anything, because every workman carries a knife. If you can also find some scraps of rubber and wire, it will help prove my case."

While the man was being frisked, she turned indifferently away. One after another the objects she had named were thrown on the table: the pliers; a pair of coarse cotton gloves, new, but stained on the palms with the same brown dust; a penknife; two pieces of rubber which looked as if they might have been cut from an old inner tube. Only the wire was missing.

Mme Storey glanced over these things. "We can do without the wire," she said.

Everybody else in the room looked on open mouthed, like a crowd of yokels at a side show.

"These gloves I think were worn for the first time this morning," said Mme Storey, calling attention to their clean backs. "What did you want gloves for, Hafner?"

"To protect my hands," he muttered.

If you could have seen those dirty, calloused hands! A laugh travelled around the room.

Hafner sat down again, breathing hard; but he was not yet beaten; for when Mme Storey said: "Has there been anything wrong with the heating flue leading to Mrs. Brager's bedroom?" he answered readily:

"Not as I knows of."

"Because the next thing I noticed in the cellar," she went on, "was that that flue had been disconnected and joined up again. There was an edge of bright tin showing at the joining of the old pipe. It was at the point where the horizontal flue from the heating chamber joins the vertical flue which runs up through the walls. There is a sort of square tin box there, which receives the round pipe from the furnace."

My mistress's quiet, matter-of-fact voice was too much for Hafner's nerves. "What's all this about?" he suddenly burst out. "What you gettin' at, anyway? A man's got the right to know what he's suspected of!"

Mme Storey stepped to the door into Mrs. Brager's room. We all held our breath. The key had been left in the lock; she opened the door. "Come here and see," she said quietly to Hafner.

His face turned greenish. Showing all his teeth, he strained away, like an animal on a leash. "I won't!" he cried hoarsely. "None of your tricks! I asked you a plain question— can't you give me a plain answer?"

Mr. Dockra looked at his man. "Make him look in there," he said.

But Mme Storey held up her hand. "It's not necessary," she said. "He knows what's in there." She closed the door.

Hafner dropped into his chair again. You could not help but pity the wretch.

"I disconnected the pipe again," Mme Storey resumed, "and looked inside that square box. That had not been dusted out— a fatal oversight! In the bottom of it was collected the dust of thirty years which had sifted down through the register in Mrs. Brager's room. It was, I suppose, a quarter of an inch thick. And in the dust I found three fresh marks in the shape of a triangle, three marks which correspond to the three legs of the standard which supports this kettle. I was careful not to disturb these marks; they are still there."

She paused to flick the ash off her cigarette, and one could hear a little sigh travel around the room as the pent-up breath was released.

"Hafner," asked Mme Storey, "how do you suppose those marks came there?"

"How do I know?" he said. "I couldn't have come up here to get that kettle."

"How did you know that kettle belonged in this room?" she asked quickly.

"I didn't know it," he retorted. "That was just in the way of speaking."

There was an interruption here. The servant Maud pushed through the crowd at the door to say that Miss Rose Schmalz was wanted on the telephone. Mme Storey looked inquiringly at Mrs. Marlin.

"Never heard of such a person," said the housekeeper.

The maid was instructed to say that there was nobody of that name in the house, and she returned downstairs. At the moment I saw nothing in this incident but what appeared on the surface; but it was to have an important bearing on the result, as you will see.

Mme Storey resumed: "I'll tell you how I have figured out what happened, Hafner. Set me right if I go wrong.... The same person who instructed you to follow me into town two days ago told you to watch this house this morning for the first call of the letter carrier and to come back after he'd gone...."

"It's not so," muttered Hafner. He kept interrupting Mme Storey throughout with denials, but I need not set them all down.

"On your way down cellar, you opened the door into the yard—I could see where the old film of paint on the outside had been freshly broken. You then disconnected the flue leading to Mrs. Brager's room. You wore the gloves to avoid leaving finger prints on the pipes. In working over the pipe you disturbed the dust, therefore you were obliged to dust all the pipes alike. Your companion joined you, entering from the yard, and bringing the little brass kettle and the tin box containing the powder."

Mme Storey held up the two pieces of rubber. One piece, a rough ring, had obviously been cut out of the other. "The ring was for a washer to make the lid of the kettle fit snugly. In this manner." She showed how the rubber ring had been snapped around the lid of the kettle. "After the powder had been emptied into the kettle," she resumed, "the lid was wired down. Here are the marks of the wires on the kettle. The wire itself came from one of the supports of the flues. All this business of making the lid tight was perfectly unnecessary, by the way; for the gas would have puffed right up the flue even if the lid had been off; but you and your friend were not chemists enough to know that.

"You were in momentary fear of being surprised by one of the servants in the kitchen," she went on; "therefore you left your companion to light the flame under the kettle and to blow it out before the bottom of the kettle burned through. You went up into the kitchen and stood guard over the cellar door. When you heard your companion pass out into the yard by the door on the cellar stairs, you returned. You bolted up the door into the yard. You connected up the heating flue again. Your companion had taken the kettle, and you concealed the other evidences of your activities. You then called up to the kitchen that the gas was out.... The gas was out," she gravely concluded, "and so was the spark of life in the old woman who lies in the next room."

Hafner was breaking fast now. "It's not true!" he panted. "I know nothing about it!"

"Then how came you in possession of the tin cigarette box in which the poison was mailed?" asked Mme Storey. "You tossed it into Stanfield River when you crossed the bridge this morning." She held out her hand, and Mr. Dockra passed the box back.

Hafner's nerve went completely. A strangled cry broke from him. He held out his hands toward Mr. Dockra as if inviting the handcuffs. "Take me away!" he bellowed. "Take me away from that woman! Lock me up! Send me to the chair! I don't care what you do to me!... Take me away from her! She's not a natural woman. Nothing can be hid from her!"

It was a horrible and grotesque sight. The sweat was pouring down his face in drops as big as tears; his eyes were devoid of all sense; his brutal mouth was working like an idiot's. I turned away my head from that sight. "Take me away from her!" he kept shrieking.

"One moment," said the prosecutor coldly; "you have not yet told us the name of your companion in the cellar."

"I'll never tell you that!" cried Hafner. "I don't care what you do to me. Send me to the chair! Won't that satisfy you?"

"Oh, I guess we know how to make you tell," said Mr. Dockra grimly.

Mme Storey turned quickly. "Don't do it," she said with a note of compassion in her voice. "It's his last shred of decency. Give him credit for it. I know who his companion was."

"Who?"

Mme Storey pointed to the fat woman sitting on the end of the couch. "There is the real murderer," she said quietly.

"Madame La France!" cried Mr. Dockra.

"If you like," said Mme Storey. "She goes by several names. She is most commonly known as Rose Schmalz. She betrayed herself when I caused that name to be spoken at the door awhile ago." She unfolded the slip of paper that she had kept in her hand all this time. "I had previously been informed that Rose Schmalz and Henry Hafner were married in South Norwalk on October 24th last."

I do not know if the woman had seen this coming. She got to her feet. There was a hard peasant strength in her, and she uttered no sound; her face remained composed. But that ghastly mottled look returned to her skin, and her hand stole to her throat.

"That was how she secured to herself the accomplice she was in need of, by marrying him," Mme Storey went on— there was no compassion in her voice now. "She herself takes marriage lightly. According to the reports of my agent she has been married at least three times before. That was as far as he could go into her past in two hours' telephoning. Her room adjoins this, you remember. It was she who stole out of the house, carrying the kettle under her cape; and stole back with it later, knowing that the men had gone out."

The woman, still without having uttered a sound, suddenly swayed forward, crashed against the bed opposite, and collapsed in a huddle on the floor. A heart attack. How like man and woman, I thought— his frantic self-pitying cries, and her collapse without a sound. That ended the proceedings.

xii

I MUST say that Walter Dockra took his humiliation at the hands of my mistress very handsomely. After the excitement was over he marched up to her like a man saying:

"Madame Storey, that was the finest piece of work I ever saw in my life. I consider it a privilege that I was there to see the whole thing worked out. Allow me to congratulate you and to express my regret that I ventured to differ from you, even for a moment."

"Oh, you give me far too much credit," said my mistress, smiling. "In this case, as it happened, I enjoyed an exceptional advantage through having been introduced to the house before the tragedy occurred. It was what I learned then that gave me my line. It was obvious that the three legacy hounds hated Mrs. Marlin poisonously. When I found the kettle with the remains of the poison in her room, I knew it was a plant."

"Why did they hate her?" he asked.

"Because her decency and good feeling were a perpetual reproach to them."

"Nevertheless, it was a wonderful piece of logical reasoning," he insisted.

My mistress smiled suddenly and merrily. "I'm afraid I don't think as much of logic as you do," she said.

"Why not?"

It would have been useless to try to explain. She just smiled on.

Dockra was a young man, and I think the lesson did him permanent good. I have never seen a trace of bumptiousness in his manner since. He remains our very good friend, and sometimes comes to consult my mistress concerning the knotty points that rise in his practice.

When the Schmalz woman and Hafner came to trial, they had not a leg to stand on. Both pleaded guilty and threw themselves on the mercy of the court. But as it had come out that they had been plotting the old woman's death for months, they did not receive much mercy. There is a prejudice against executing a woman; and as they could not execute the lesser criminal and let her live, both received life sentences.

They had first planned to lead common illuminating gas into the heating flue, but gave it up because the odour would have betrayed them. They next prepared to suffocate her with coal gas from the furnace. By tampering with the rusted smoke flue where it passed through the heating chamber, Hafner had already worked a hole in it. Then, if the smoke flue had been stopped up and all the heating flues shut off in the cellar except the one leading to Mrs. Brager's room, the old woman would certainly have suffocated before morning, and it could have been made to appear an accident. However, before they had time to carry this out, they learned of clarium gas.

As for the Hon. Shep Chew and Raymondo Oneto, they quietly disappeared, and I have never heard of them since. No doubt they have gone sleuthing after other legacies. I understand it is quite a business.

As a result of this case we also added Dr. Brill and Mrs. Marlin to our circle of friends— or Dr. and Mrs. Brill as they now are. Their happiness was beautiful to see. Under the last will signed by Mrs. Brager Mrs. Marlin inherited practically her entire fortune, and it seemed as if nothing could be more just and right. But that ridiculous and high-minded pair were one in refusing to touch the money; and this in spite of the fact that Dr. Brill was actually evicted from his laboratory and Mrs. Marlin had lost her job. The money must be disposed of according to the terms of the last will drawn up by Mrs. Brager's orders, though not yet signed by her, they insisted. In other words, the aged gentlewomen were to benefit. There was a legacy to Mrs. Marlin in this will, but not sufficient to support her.

Well, the trustees accepted the money, but I'm happy to say that their first act was to set aside a trust fund that will relieve Dr. Brill and his wife of the necessity of worrying during the rest of their lives. Perhaps they are happier than if they had the millions. Clarium gas has not yet been rendered harmless, and I do not know if it ever will be; but I do know that the Brills' is one of the most delightful houses that I am privileged to visit. There is nothing like having escaped a hideous danger to give one an edge for joy.

_________________

Index to "Past Masters" stories, by author.

Issues 31-53

I never envisaged this series of original anthologies going into so many issues, and the ever-growing index to all issues was becoming unwieldy.  Accordingly, I have now divided the Index.  This Index commences with Past Masters 31.

The Index to Issues 1 to 30 can be found in Past Masters 30, or as a stand-alone document uploaded to the Kindle and Epub libraries at MobileRead.

The stories are arranged in Alphabetical order of Author's surname, or if the author's name is consistently a pseudonym, that pseudonym (eg "Owen Oliver").  They are then in alphabetical order of title, disregarding "A", "An" and "The".

____________

Cleve F. Adams

Frame For a Lady 38

George Ade

Loafer's Lullaby  49

Hervey Allen

Report to Major Roberts  47

Lewis Allen

Pinched  39

Robert L. Ahern

Murder Needs No Motive  34

Mark Allerton

The Wrong 'Un 44

Frederick Irving Anderson

The Phantom Alibi 50

The Van Duersen Haze 50

Anonymous

By the Tie of a Boot-Lace 52

The Lady Detective's Story 32

The 6.15 'Bus 52

Trivial Evidence 52

The Ugly Bronze and the Beautiful Wife 53

F. Anstey

The Talking Horse  34

Alice and Claude Askew

The Mystery of Chenholt 42

Phyllis in the Wood  40

Stacy Aumonier

Mrs. Huggins's Hun  41

The Perfect Murder  41

Lillian Bamburg

The Missing Pearls  39

Robert Barr

The Doom of London   39

J. M. Barrie

The Inconsiderate Waiter  51

Charles Beadle

The Double Scoop 39

Wolcott LeClear Beard

A Ledge of Safety 33

Frederick R. Bechdolt

The Case of Mimbres  37

Jimmy Riley's "Turn"  42

Louis Becke

Devil Fish 53

George, The Docker 53

Randolph Bedford

Filamena's Hula 39

The Man Who Held the Wires  39

H Bedford-Jones

The Affair of the Shuteye Medium 53

Apache Gold 31

The Arizona Callahan  37

The Blind Farmer and the Strip Dancer 52

Breakfast at the Savoy 49

The Devil's Fire 31

The Devil is Dead 31

The Fog at Fiddler's Green 31

From the Dark 49

The King's Pipe 34

Lady of the Evil Eye 31

Sons of Kalewa 31

Stormalong  48

The Temple of the Ten 48

Wheels of Doom 52

J. J. Bell

Blue Blood, or, The Pride of Lady Ambrosia 44

The Message on the Sun-Dial  42

Stephen Vincent Benét

Silver Jemmy 50

E F Benson

The Bed By The Window  48

The Horror Horn 53

Ralph Wilhelm Bergengren

Mr Chubb's Burglar 44

J. D. Beresford

The Sceptical Poltergeist  45

Leslie Beresford

Eastern Guile 35

John Arthur Berry

Cleverly Caught 53

M. McDonnell Bodkin

The Murder on the Golf Links  41

Charles G. Booth

Not According to Text 44

Christopher B. Booth

The Blue-Black Feet 52

The Double Double Cross 52

In His Brother's Job  40

Jimmy the Lug 42

Mr Clackworthy and the Auto Rim  40

Mr Clackworthy Goes to Jail 40

Mr Clackworthy's Pipe Dream  41

Mr. Clackworthy's Return  41

Mr. Clackworthy Revives a Town 47

The Sealed Envelope 43

The Sparrow  40

Tardy, but on Time (as by John J. Chichester)  41

Twice Drowned 52

B. M. Bower

The Ghost of One Man Coulee 52

Jack Boyle

Ann of Satan-Town  46

George Bronson-Howard

The Steerage Passenger 44

Miles J. Breuer

Millions for Defense  47

The Stone Cat   47

Ellis Parker Butler

An Experiment in Gyro-Hats  37

Beating The Law 43

Eliph' Hewlitt on the Millinery Problem  44

Good Graft 51

Hats and Lilies 37

The Heckby Hill Murder 38

Mr. Marston's Chauffeurette  40

"Pigs is Pigs" 50

Scott Campbell

Rings of Dust 43

Hayden Carruth

Active Colorado Real Estate  46

Casper Carson

Wizard or Crook   48

Egerton Castle

The Baron's Quarry 42

The Closed Door  35

Willa Cather

Double Birthday 53

Robert W Chambers

As You Choose 44

Anna Alice Chapin

By Way of Experience 40

G. K. Chesterton

The White Pillars Murder 41

Richard Washburn Child

The Screen 45

C. Langton Clarke

The Detective for the Defense 33

Sylvanus Cobb Jr

A Footlight Flash 43

Desmond Coke

The Ghost That Failed  46

Richard Connell

The Grim House  41

Dorothea Conyers

Lord Hillayton's Settlement 35

Ted Copp

Blackmail Moll 36

Oswald Crawfurd

Our Mr. Smith  45

Nym Crinkle

The End of All  53

James Oliver Curwood

The Civilizing of Swift Lightning 46

Frederic Van Rensselaer Dey

The Bigelow Murder Mystery  40

Charles Dickens

To be Taken with a Grain of Salt  39

Captain Dingle

Homeward Bound 33

Deferred 33

Jack Donahue

The Last Letters of a Hoofer 49

Dick Donovan

A Dying Confession 49

A Night of Horror  49

George Allan England

Buzzards   38

Drugged  38

George Manville Fenn

Lady Florry's Gems  34

Francis Flagg

The Blue Dimension 33

By the Hands of the Dead 45

The Heads of Apex 33

The Picture 45

The Smell 45

J. S. Fletcher

The Manor House Mystery  41

A Stranger in Arcady 53

Elliott Flower

The Elusive Ten Dollar Bill 36

A Bundle of Banknotes  43

Hulbert Footner

The Legacy Hounds 53

R. E. Francillon

Touch-And-Go With a Great Estate

J. M. Fry

The Ring  38

Jacques Futrelle

Mr. John Smith in Paris  47

Emile Gaboriau

The Little Old Man of Batignolles 34

Charles Garvice

The Two Uncles 44

Théophile Gautier

The Vampire 50

Lady Gilbert

Aurora's Treasure 35

Guy Gilpatric

An Affair of Honour  46

The Crafty Jerko-Slovaks 32

The Ladies of Catsmeat Yard  37

One Good Tern  35

The Hunting of the Haggis 51

Mutiny on the Inchcliffe Castle  49

The Pearl of Panama 42

The Rolling Stone  41

The Toad Men of Tumbaroo  46

Westward, How!  46

The Yogi of West Ninth Street  50

Susan Glaspell

A Jury of Her Peers 44

Evelyn Glover

Blatherwick  52

Winifred Graham

Pan   39

C. J. Hamilton

The Luck of Barney Costello 44

Arthur P Hankins

Eyes of Blue   43

Arthur Sherburne Hardy

Peter  47

Percie W. Hart

Ye Ghoste of ye Olde Bowerie Roade 49

William Fryer Harvey

The Beast with Five Fingers 50

Beatrice Heron-Maxwell

The Dancer's Mascot  35

Lewen Hewitt

Gold-Bricked 42

Robert Hichens

The Nomad 53

Headon Hill

Rogue's Legacy 32

William Crawford Honeyman

The Chinese Chessmen  42

Seward W. Hopkins

Dickerson's Bag of Gold 44

J. L. Hornibrook

Captain Cronhelm's Blunder 35

Oliver Madox Hueffer

Mistrusted Sight 41

S. B. H. Hurst

The Brightest Jewel of Them All  32

Washington Irving

The Story of a Young Robber 47

W. W. Jacobs

In Borrowed Plumes 49

M. R. James

Casting the Runes 50

Burke Jenkins

The Anti-Climax of a Bad Man 44

His Christmas Orchid 44

Twenty-Four Hours Start 44

Wimple's Fog-Piercer 44

Jerome K Jerome

The Dancing Partner 50

The Ghost of the Marchioness of Appleford 50

The Man of Science  43

Marianne Kent

A Black Diamond  35

Otis Adelbert Kline

The Dragoman's Slave Girl 35

Servant of Satan  50

George L. Knapp

The Family Compact  37

Thomas H. Knight

Old City of Jade  36

Alexander Kuprin

Menagerie 45

Henry Lawson

The Loaded Dog 50

Stephen Leacock

Soaked in Seaweed  51

Sheridan Le Fanu

The Dead Sexton  51

Henry Leverage

The Petermen of Providence  46

Alun Lewis

Private Jones 39

Sumner Locke

Ragtime 44

William J Locke

Ladies In Lavender 36

Edwin Truett Long

Dogs of Circe 52

F. G. Loring

The Tomb of Sarah 50

Marie Belloc Lowndes

Popeau Intervenes  41

Maarten Maartens

A Comedy of Crime 47

Ferdinand McMahon

Shingle Short 52

Newton MacTavish

An Unposted Letter 47

William J. Makin

The Jerusalem Express 51

Charles J. Mansford

The Dervish of the Nile Pyramid 34

The Great Dial of the Gold-Finders 33

The Hidden Egyptian Shield  34

The Lost Fetish of Walai 35

The Veiled Idol of Kor 32

The Wizard of Swazi Swamp   37

Florence Marryat

The Box With the Iron Clamps  46

Richard Marsh

The Pipe  48

Mrs. L. T. Meade

Beauty Dear 32

The Yellow Dragon Vases 32

Mrs L. T. Meade and Dr Clifford Halifax, M.D.

The Seventh Step  48

The Strange Case of Captain Gascoigne 31

The Small House on Steven's Heath 33

"To Every one His Own Fear"  34

With the Eternal Fires 32

Abraham Merritt

The Drone  52

Gustav Meyrink

Bal Macabre  45

James M'Govan

The Captain's Chronometer 49

Richard Middleton

The Ghost-Ship  51

Alice Duer Miller

A Lot of Money  46

C S Montanye

Nobody's Business 52

Prey  40

The Strength of the Meek  47

Trapped 43

Jacque Morgan

The lnternational Electro-Galvanic

Undertaking Corporation  48

William Morris

Lindenborg Pool  48

Arthur Morrison

A Lucifo Match 36

William Chambers Morrow

The Monster-Maker 42

Clarence Herbert New

The Attack from Moscow 32

Bill Garford’s Last Play (Culpeper Zandtt) 36

The Boss (Culpeper Zandtt)  37

A Challenge to the Submarine  36

Deep Sea Detective 52

The Island of Heaven and Hell 32

The Man Who Forgot  37

The Mystery at Mulungban  (Culpeper Zandtt)  37

A Night in the Kremlin 34

The Red Raid  51

The Secret of Banda Sea 34

Hume Nisbet

The Demon Spell  51

Romance of a Balloon 51

The Vampire Maid 53

James Jeffreys O'Brien

Queen of the Beggars 44

Owen Oliver

The Cape Conspiracy  35

A Pretty Woman 31

A Rapid Conveyance  36

Success 40

E Phillips Oppenheim

Blackman's Wood 43

Frederick C. Painton

Narcotic Man  36

What! No Imagination? 38

Elia W Peattie

Seaweed  51

Max Pemberton

The Cripple at the Mill  34

Last Across 39

The Lepers Guest   37

G. G. Pendarves

The Black Monk 48

The Eighth Green Man  35

Hugh Pendexter

It Might Have Happened Otherwise  32

Kingbird 33

A New Keeper of the Wampum  39

The Raven Mocker 33

Wolf Medicine 41

Ernest M. Poate

Adjudged Incompetent  43

Changed Caliber 52

Doctor Bentiron's Addict Case 40

An Error in Equation 51

False Teeth 51

Honest John's Millions 42

Plain Soda 40

The Stolen Story 42

The Third Pinprick 42

Three Alike 40

Through the Looking Glass 40

Vials of Wrath 40

Well Done  40

K. & Hesketh Prichard

The Parole of Gevil-Hay  47

Arthur T. Quiller-Couch

The Lady of the Red Admirals 49

Lewis Ramsden

Désirée 32

C. S. Raymond

The Wireless Death 36

Robert Reeves

Alcoholics  Calamitous 39

Bail Bait  39

Dance Macabre 39

Morley Roberts

Grear's Dam 53

The Hut by the Lachlan 44

Morgan Robertson

The Subconscious Finnegan 36

Arthur Somers Roche

The Dayless Diamonds 32

A Flutter in Finance 32

After the Fact 46

"Illimore!" 31

Lady Dick 46

The Premiere Danseuse 32

Riches Can Take Wings  46

Road House 46

The Robbery at the Café Ravasan 31

The Victim of Amnesia 31

William Merriam Rouse

The Nitwit 36

Victor Rowan

Four Wooden Stakes  38

Leroy Scott

The Langdon Mystery  44

Mary Sharon

The Cat of Chiltern Castle  43

George Bernard Shaw

The Miraculous Revenge  43

Perley Poore Sheehan

Dead Men Talk  38

Helen Simpson

A Posteriori   41

George R. Sims

The Mystery of a Midsummer Night  42

Eleanor Smith

Satan’s Circus 52

Olaf Stapledon

A World of Sound 51

Christopher St. John Sprigg

Death at 8.30  42

Four Friends and Death 53

F St Mars

The Green Devil 43

Bram Stoker

The Judge's House 50

Annie S. Swan

The Diplomat  38

Booth Tarkington

The Old Red Barn   49

William Alexander Taylor

Intermere 33

Guy Thorne

Sir Patrick Armagh's Knife  39

E Charles Vivian

The House Among the Pines 44

Locked In 44

Hugh Walpole

The Twisted Inn 42

Harold Ward

The House in the Forest 49

House of the Living Dead 49

Florence Warden

Grimgriffenhoof  39

Cy Warman

"Sycamore": A Ghost Story 44

F A M Webster

According to Law  49

The Double Problem  49

Floating Bones 53

The Owl 45

Towards Morning 33

Very Still Waters 53

Carolyn Wells

The Mystery of the Jade Buddha 40

A Point of Testimony 43

The Stolen Gems 43

H. G. Wells

The Hammerpond Park Burglary  47

Albert Richard Wetjen

The Best Bet 53

Captain Cut-Throat 51

The Madness of Captain Jonas 44

Ethel Lina White

The Scarecrow  42

Henry S. Whitehead

Black Terror 45

Cassius 46

The Door 53

The Fireplace 45

Jumbee 37

The Left Eye 45

Mrs. Lorriquer 45

The Moon-Dial 52

The Napier Limousine 45

The Projection of Armand Dubois 45

The Trap 45

The Tree-Man 45

Raoul Whitfield

The Black Sampan  50

The Caleso Murders 32

China Man 46

Climbing Death  51

Diamonds of Dread  38

Inside Job 36

The Javanese Mask 42

Rivals of the Clouds 31

Shooting Gallery  41

The Siamese Cat 49

Silence House 36

Sinners' Paradise 33

Valentine Williams

The Briar 50

H. C. Witwer

The Barber of Seville, Ill.   46

Not So Big  47

William Tells  47

Leonora Wodehouse

Inquest  42

William Alron Wolff

Bait, Hook and Sinker  34

May Wynne

The Tiara  44

Arthur Leo Zagat

Girl of the Goat-God  43

Her Demon Lover 52

___________

Table of Contents

- 1: The Vampire Maid / Hume Nisbet
- 2: Devil Fish / Louis Becke
- 3: George, The Docker / Louis Becke

- 4. The Affair of the Shuteye Medium / H Bedford-Jones

- 5: Grear's Dam / Morley Roberts

- 6: The Ugly Bronze and the Beautiful Wife / Anonymous

- 7: Cleverly Caught / John Arthur Berry

- 8: Four Friends and Death / C. St. John Sprigg

- 9: A Stranger in Arcady / J S Fletcher
- 10: The End of All / Nym Crinkle
- 11: The Best Bet / Alfred Richard Wetjen
- 12: Very Still Waters / F A M Webster
- 13: Floating Bones / F A M Webster
- 14: The Nomad / Robert Hichens
- 15: Double Birthday / Willa Cather
- 16: The Horror Horn / E. F. Benson
- 17: The Door / Henry S Whitehead
- 18: The Legacy Hounds / Hulbert Footner
- Cumulative Index #31-53